TekWar

by William Shatner

  “Jesus, Warbride ... said Jake.

  “I’m glad to see,” she said with a satisfied smile, “that you’re finally calling me by my right name.”

  29

  THE DAWN WAS GRAY and chill. Beth didn’t say anything as Jake guided the borrowed black skycruiser up above the clearing. When they were hovering over the highest treetops, he punched out a flight pattern for Acapulco.

  “Why so glum?” he asked, relaxing in the pilot seat as the cruiser started cutting through the beginning day. “You miss Ogden Swires?”

  She had been looking straight ahead and continued to do so. “I suppose I ought to apologize for the way I’m feeling,” she said. “Except I can’t control the emotions that’ve been built into me.”

  “Which emotion is producing that scowl?”

  “I’d like to ask you something, Jake.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did you spend the night with that wild woman?”

  “Only part of it.”

  “Well, I suppose that was to be expected, since years ago you and she were—”

  “Whoa—I didn’t spend the time in bed,” Jake told her. “I was getting information.”

  She turned to look at him. “What did you find out?”

  “The crash was faked,” he answered, “with Vargas’ help.”

  She pressed her hands together. “They’re alive?”

  “They should be.”

  “Where—in Acapulco?”

  “We’ll start looking there, since that’s where Sonny Hokori is supposed to be.”

  “Then Hokori is the one behind what’s going on?”

  “He’s behind what happened to your father.”

  She laughed quietly. “To Beth and her father, you mean.”

  Nodding, he said, “Kittridge and Beth were forced down near Warbride’s encampment. Since Hokori’s involved, it’s likely he had them brought to him.”

  “That would be to the Pleasure Dome, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Ever been there?”

  “No, but it was a favorite spot of Bennett Sands, and he talked about it,” she said. “Did Vargas say anything about him?”

  “Only that Sands isn’t tied in.”

  Beth looked out at the Great Forest beneath them. “Why did Vargas confide all this in you? The last time I saw you two together, you weren’t exactly—”

  “Warbride mentioned that you weren’t too happy with what she did—and told her so. I appreciate your support, Beth, but that was risky.”

  “My temper sometimes overcomes my reason. Now tell me about General Vargas and why he decided to confide in you.”

  “I had Warbride along—she did most of the questioning.”

  “Didn’t she know about the skycruiser being forced down?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “She was very convincing,” he said. “After she found out what Vargas had been up to—she killed him.”

  “Jake.” Beth put her hand on his arm. “I thought they were lovers.”

  “They were, sure. But she won’t allow anybody, not even a lover, to make deals she doesn’t know about.”

  “She might have killed you, too.”

  Jake grinned. “No, because she trusts me.”

  “Sometimes I wish ...

  “Wish what?”

  “Oh, it’s only that all of this, people killing each other and trying to kill us—I just wish it were over.”

  “Ought to be fairly soon.”

  “Last night I was thinking about something I did when I was eighteen,” Beth confided. “Everything had been getting too much for me—school, romance and my father. Being a very affluent and fairly spoiled kid, I ran away to the Moon.”

  “That’s impressive. I took off once when I was nine, but I only got as far as the Glendale Sector. How long before they found you?”

  “Almost a week. I’d just been hiding out at a villa my uncle has up there. It’s way out in the Old Settlement area and he rarely visits it himself, but he feels good knowing the place is there should he decide to hop up there for a lunar vacation. It’s all staffed by robots—and some very old and antiquated robots they are.”

  “The place is still there?”

  “Yes. I was even thinking last night that I’d like to head for there again,” she admitted. “Except a couple of things keep me here. I want to find my father and—well, I’d like to stay with you as long as I can.”

  After a few silent seconds Jake said, “I’m glad you didn’t run away.”

  She smiled and leaned back in her seat. “I still remember the keyword for getting into the place and activating my uncle’s villa. It’s eclectic.”

  “Eclectic’s not a very dramatic keyword.”

  “My uncle sees the universe as basically eclectic.” Reaching out, she took hold of Jake’s hand. “I thought for a few minutes there last night, you know, that Warbride had killed you.”

  “So did I.”

  “And for those few minutes I really felt as though I’d lost something important.”

  After a while Jake moved his hand free of hers.

  The Acapulco Ritz had five tapfree vidphones on its mezzanine floor. After Jake and Beth checked into a suite high in Tower 3, he went down to use one of the phones.

  A gold-plated robot with a permanent smile greeted him in three languages and escorted him into a bugproof phoneroom.

  Seated in front of the phonescreen, Jake put through a call to the Cosmos Detective Agency in GLA.

  A lovely crimson-haired young woman appeared on the screen. “Cosmos Detec ... Yikes!”

  “How’s that again?”

  “It is you, isn’t it, Jake?”

  “It is. Are you Marny?”

  She fluffed her hair. “I abandoned my andy look,” the agency receptionist explained. “But the important thing is—we’d heard you’d maybe been bumped off down there in Mexico. Trampled by wild bulls was one rumor, gunned down by a jealous rival of Warbride’s was another.”

  “Some truth in both rumors,” he acknowledged. “But I’m still above the ground. I want to report in, and find out how Gomez is doing.”

  “You can talk to him.”

  “He’s in the office?”

  “Against his medics’ orders. Hobbling around in a most pathetic, but sort of sexy, way.”

  “Put him on, Marny, please.”

  “Surely. And, oh, do you think I look less mechanical this way?”

  “Much less.”

  She smiled, the screen blanked for eight seconds and then Gomez appeared.

  He was seated at a desk with a smudged stretch of afternoon sky showing out the high, thin window behind him. “Amigo,” he said, smiling. “I’m very please to note that you’re not defunct.”

  “Not completely as yet. How are you?”

  “Doing as well as can be expected. A plascast on one’s leg, by the way, brings out the maternal in all sorts and conditions of women,” said his partner. “Where are you?”

  “Acapulco,” answered Jake. “Listen, I’m a little wary about my old contacts down here. Do you have somebody trustworthy you can suggest?”

  “Who you going up against? Sonny Hokori and associates?”

  “For a start, yes.”

  “Be very cautious, amigo,” advised Gomez. “Let’s see—you can try Carmelita Jimenez at the Dalton-Walden American Faxbook Centre. Don’t let her demure demeanor fool you. For general information see Gutierrez at the Club Latino. How are you progressing with the case?”

  “It could be that Kittridge and his daughter are here.”

  “What leads you to that conclusion?”

  Jake, concisely, gave Gomez an account of what he’d been up to since arriving across the border.

  When Jake concluded, Gomez looked up from the notes he’d been taking. “This android rep of Beth Kittridge ... he said.

  “What about her?”

  “You’re holding something back, a
ren’t you? I don’t know, there’s something that comes into your voice when you talk about her.”

  “You and I have been partners too long. It’s tough to hide anything from you,” said Jake. “Well, what seems to be happening—hell, I’m getting fond of Beth.”

  “Except that this isn’t really Beth.”

  “Exactly, yeah. But in a way she is.”

  “I had a crush on a hologram stripper when I was sixteen.”

  “I suppose that’s about what this sounds like.”

  “No, actually it’s a tricky situation, amigo.”

  “What I’m certain of is that I want to find Beth Kittridge alive,” said Jake. “And not only because I was hired to locate her.”

  Gomez, with too much attention to detail, shut his notebook and moved it to the side of his desk. “Listen, Jake, I think I better mention this,” he said. “Kate is trying to get in touch with you. Somehow she’s found out that you’re down there in Mexico, and she says she has to talk to you. That it’s—”

  “Something happened to my son?”

  “I don’t believe so, amigo, but the lady didn’t give me any details. She says it’s urgent.”

  “I better call her.”

  “She informs me she’s not at home and moving about a lot, so she wants to have a number where she can contact you. She’s been calling the office every couple hours since yesterday.”

  “How’d she know I was working for Cosmos?”

  “I’m not sure she did. But she was aware that I am gainfully employed here. Since I am your long-time bosom chum, she assumed I’d know how to reach you.”

  “Okay, you can tell her to call me here at the Acapulco Ritz.”

  “Is that safe to do?”

  “She’s my wife—she used to be my wife. Yeah, you can let her know I’m here.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Keep on recuperating, Sid.”

  “You, too,” said Gomez.

  Stretching away in every direction were the endless rows of tall towers and skyscrapers, each of the multistory plasglass, metal and stone buildings linked with pedramps and walkways at various levels. A thin mist was drifting in from the sea as twilight began to spread across Acapulco. Countless lights, of every color, were coming to life.

  “Looks like a combination of the Borderland and the Selva Grande,” remarked Jake, turning away from the tinted wraparound window of their suite’s living room.

  Beth asked him, “Isn’t it something you’ve been anxious to do?”

  “Talk to Kate, you mean?”

  “I thought that was one of the reasons you took this job, so you’d be able to look her up while you were in Mexico.”

  “Let’s just say,” he said, sitting in a black armchair that faced the black sofa she was occupying, “I have mixed feelings.”

  “Why exactly did you separate?”

  “The State of Southern California arranged that.”

  “She divorced you while you were in the Freezer?”

  “Yeah. That’s a fairly common occurrence with guys who’re in prison,” he said. “Especially when you get sent up to the Freezer. It’s a little closer to being dead, and some wives get very uneasy.”

  “Even so, you didn’t expect a divorce?”

  “Nope.” He leaned back in his big, soft chair, didn’t feel especially comfortable, sat up straight again. “Actually Kate had left me once before, back about six years ago.”

  “Why?”

  He became interested in the palm of his left hand, started rubbing at it with the fingers of his right. “Being a cop’s wife can be rough. I’d been working on an investigation of one of the top suspected Tek distributors in Greater Los Angeles—and, from what Kate told me later, there’d been some threats made against her and Dan.”

  “She didn’t tell you at the time?”

  “She was like that, kept things to herself. She simply decided that it would be better if she went to live in New England with some relatives of hers. She put Dan in a private school, supposedly a very good one, in Boston.”

  “That’s not as bad as going to the Sky Academy.”

  “I’d never wanted to send him away to any school, by himself and away from me. That was mostly because—”

  “You were trying hard not to be like your father.”

  “That was it, yeah. But Dan ended up going through something like that anyway.”

  “What about Kate’s job?”

  “Sands had just opened a branch in Rhode Island and she was able to work there.”

  “That must’ve been about the same time Sands was in New England himself, looking after the plant opening.”

  “The reason Kate left GLA was because of the threats, not because of Sands,” he told Beth. “When people talk about Tek wars, they assume that just means what happens between rival dealers and manufacturers. But almost everybody gets involved, cops included, and sometimes there can be unanticipated casualties.”

  “The investigation you were working on when she left you—is that the one that was dropped?”

  “Yeah, the one that was dropped, the one they said I used my influence to get sidetracked,” Jake answered. “The fact that I had nothing to do with the investigation’s being stopped wasn’t believed by too many people. That’s why I ended up in the Freezer.”

  “Your wife believed in you, though?”

  “She and Dan both. They had come back before that—just a few months before I got arrested.”

  “You were also charged with being a Tek user.”

  Twilight was closing in outside; the room was turning dusky.

  Jake nodded slowly. “That part was true,” he admitted. “Fact is, I started using the stuff the night I came home and found my wife and son had left. I made use of a Brainbox and a Tek chip I was keeping as evidence in another case.”

  “Once in college I tried Tek,” she said, “but I didn’t find it that satisfying.”

  “Maybe it depends on what kind of illusions you use Tek for,” he said. “I just used it to relive the past, and improve it a lot, and to spruce up the present. In my Tek world my father and I got along fine, my mother was still alive, Kate never left me and I wasn’t hooked on Tek.” He stood up. “Time to go look up Gomez’s contacts. If Kate calls—find out where I can reach her.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to come along?”

  “Not on this initial run, no.” Crossing to her, he bent and kissed her on the cheek. “Stay here, Beth, and be watchful.”

  30

  JAKE STRODE A PEDRAMP twenty stories above the ground level. The ramp was wide and had chest-high guard walls of tinted plasglass running along each side. Small globes of colored light dotted the top of each wall at intervals of three feet, red, yellow and blue, continually blinking.

  In the sky high above, a huge skyvan was slowly gliding through the misty twilight. A giant vidscreen was imbedded in its underbelly, showing images of President Romero.

  “Not a fetching woman,” Jake said to himself.

  A group of tourists came spilling out of an indoor park up ahead.

  “Don’t go so close to the edge, Leroy.”

  “It’s perfectly safe, Mom. They got a wall.”

  “Those look awfully flimsy to me.”

  “That’s because you have vertigo.”

  Weaving his way deftly through this newest batch of pedestrians, Jake continued.

  The Dalton-Walden American Faxbook Centre had a blank, off-white front. Beneath its name, which was discreetly lettered in neon next to the door, ran a small line of copy—ALL THE LATEST BESTSELLERS FROM THE UNITED STATES.

  As Jake neared the off-white door, it hissed open. There were six faxbook printers around the circular, blank-walled room. The store’s only customer was seated in front of the small, gray printer nearest the entryway.

  Scowling, he was thrusting his Banx card into the proper slot. He then typed out the title of the book he wanted and eyed the machine warily. He was middle-si
zed and middle-aged, a few pounds overweight and nearly bald.

  “Not available either, sir,” said the voxbox of the printer.

  “It’s a bestseller, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s on sale in America, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This shop allegedly sells copies of American bestsellers. I want it.”

  “This particular bestseller, sir, is unfortunately on the Unacceptable list here in Mexico.”

  “You’re telling me I can’t buy a copy?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “Okay, okay. There’s one more I want.” He tried another title on the keyboard.

  “That one is available.”

  “Good—print me a copy of the damn thing.”

  “You must first, sir, go obtain a permit from the office of the Bishop of Acapulco before you can purchase it.”

  The customer yanked his Banx card free of the faxbook printer, shoved back his chair. “Let me tell you what I think of freedom of the press here in Mexico.”

  “Before you do, sir, allow me to remind you that we have your name and hotel address on record.”

  The man reflected for about five seconds. He slipped his Banx card away, frowned at Jake, stomped out of the bookstore.

  Jake glanced at the desk at the room’s middle. There was no one behind it. He crossed to the only other door and tapped on it.

  “If the printer won’t print it, there’s nothing I can do,” called a woman’s voice from the other side of the door.

  “Carmelita?”

  “Sí.”

  “Jake Cardigan.”

  The door slid open and a plump, dark-haired woman of forty stood smiling out at him. “Gomez phoned me about you.” After shaking hands, she beckoned him to come into the small back room.

  “Exactly how many different books can anybody buy in your store?” he asked, taking one of the two chairs.

  “The list is down to seven. President Romero isn’t especially open-minded.” She sat in the other chair. “This room’s bugproof.”

  Jake rested a hand on his knee. “The Pleasure Dome.”

  “A dangerous place for an American detective.”