TekWar

by William Shatner

  “Is Sonny Hokori there now?”

  “Sí,” replied Carmelita. “He’s been back nearly two weeks.”

  “He has living quarters inside?”

  “He does, very lavish ones.”

  “What about Professor Kittridge and his daughter—are they inside the Pleasure Dome?”

  “Gomez asked me that. But I don’t know,” she said. “I can, very discreetly, try to find out.”

  “If they are, I have to get inside.”

  “More importantly, you have to get out again.”

  “Right. Bringing them with me.”

  Carmelita laughed. “You’ve got even more self-confidence than that bastard Gomez.”

  “Can it be done?”

  “I’ll need at least a day to find out. Do you have that much time, Jake?”

  “Maybe, but not much more,” he answered. “Is Bennett Sands in Acapulco?”

  “He arrived shortly after Sonny Hokori.”

  “Are the two of them tied together?”

  “A safe bet, though I have no proof.”

  “Can you get any?”

  “Not in a day, not if I’m going to arrange sneaking you in and out of the Dome.”

  Jake got up. “Can I contact you anyplace besides here?”

  “It’s safer to let me do the contacting,” she told him. “Gomez got himself hurt—is it serious? He wouldn’t tell me.”

  “A broken leg.”

  “That won’t bother him much.”

  “It won’t,” agreed Jake and took his leave.

  There she was, up ahead in the mist, a faint sad smile touching her pretty face. And for a moment Jake lost four years.

  But as he moved across the wide pedramp to the shadowy doorway where she stood waiting, he returned to the present. He saw that she was thinner, and the weary look he’d noticed on the vidphone call still haunted her face. And there was something different about her, reflecting all the things that had happened to her that had nothing to do with him.

  Very quietly Jake said, “This is a surprise, Kate.”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  He halted two feet from her, not reaching out to touch her. “Is it Dan—is he all right?”

  “Yes, he’s fine.” Very cautiously she took hold of his arm. “There’s a little hologram park near here. We can talk there. I don’t have much time, Jake.”

  Walking at his former wife’s side, he asked, “Where’s Dan, with you or—”

  “Dan is fine, really. He’s going to a private school in Mexico City. This has nothing to do with him.”

  Kate glanced around nervously while Jake paid the sombreroed robot at the gateway of the indoor park.

  “How’d you get to Acapulco so fast, Kate? Gomez couldn’t have told you where I was more than a few—”

  “I was already here.” She hurried along a grassy path that wound its way through a believable stretch of dense jungle. “You have to listen to me—I only have a few minutes.”

  “Have you been sick?”

  She touched at her short hair. “I’ve lost some weight, that’s all,” she said, stopping at a wrought-iron bench and sitting. “And, hell—I’m almost five years older than I was when you saw me last. You look great, by the way.”

  “Sure.” He sat on the bench, not too close to her. “Okay, tell me what’s going on, Kate.”

  “Listen—you must get out of Acapulco. You and that girl. Right now, Jake—right away.”

  Bright jungle birds seemed to be flying up above the projected branches of the tall trees.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t have all the details, which is maybe just as well. I do know they mean to kill you.”

  “Who’s doing the job?”

  She brushed at her auburn hair again. “Some people—some dangerous people who work for Sonny Hokori.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter! I just know. Trust me, Jake, and get the hell out of town, get back to GLA fast as you can.”

  “It does matter how you found out, Kate.” He took hold of her hand, and there was no affection in his touch. “Did you overhear a conversation at a party? Catch a mention on the news—what?”

  She sighed. “Still a cop, no matter what they did to you,” she said, pulling her hand free. “Keep hitting at the suspect, badger the truth out no matter what the—”

  “Who’s planning to kill me—and how do you know it, Kate?”

  “Damn it—you must know I’m involved with Bennett again.”

  “Again?”

  “You knew about the other time, didn’t you?” she said. “In Greater Los Angeles, while we were still married and I was working for him. It was right before your ... trouble.”

  “My trouble ... yeah,” he said slowly. “And what did Bennett Sands have to do with my trouble?”

  Kate inhaled sharply. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m ... Yes, I’m certain of that.”

  “But now—here and now—Sands is in cahoots with Hokori, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he seems to be,” she answered, her voice low. “But, Jake, honestly, I only found out about it just recently. Believe me.”

  “Back then, during our happy married days—back when I was supposed to be aware that you were sleeping with him—did you ever happen to confide in Sands about the cases I was working on, about whom I was investigating?”

  “I may have. We talked about all sorts of things, because Bennett always had time to listen to me. You were such a bright cop—one of the best in GLA they said. So I figured, really, Jake, you’d be able to figure out who your wife was fooling around with.”

  Jake sat back on the bench, looking up at the trees. “Tek,” he said finally.

  “What?”

  “Everything is just Tek, just illusions. I always thought that you—hell, never mind.”

  “I overheard Bennett talking to some of Sonny Hokori’s people,” she said, standing. “They knew you’d be coming here to Acapulco and they want you dead. Get away—please!”

  He stood up. “What about the Kittridges?”

  “I don’t know anything about them,” she swore. “I just couldn’t let anyone kill you.”

  “Nope—you couldn’t do that.”

  “I have to go.” She turned and walked away from him.

  Jake made no attempt to follow her.

  31

  THE MIST HAD GROWN thick and it was pressing against the windows of the living room of their suite. The night city looked fragmented. Parts of it were blurred, parts lost completely in the gray fog. High on the side of a government tower across the way, a two-story vidnews screen seemed to be floating. Silent images of the funeral of a public official showed on the huge screen. A black skyhearse circling a sun-bright slanting hillside cemetery, six ebony robots carrying a black coffin, a gaunt old woman, sobbing, being supported and comforted by a gleaming silvery priestbot.

  Jake turned away from the misty view. “No, not exactly,” he said in answer to a question Beth had asked him nearly a minute earlier. “I was angry mostly. Sad, too.”

  “But not happy, not glad to see Kate again?” Beth was sitting on the shadowy side of the room, surrounded by darkness.

  “I guess that in the time since I left the Freezer,” he said, “I’ve changed some. I’m finally starting to wake up.”

  “Everything she told you, Jake, may be the absolute truth.”

  “Sure, I don’t doubt Sands is a partner of Sonny Hokori’s. Nor that they’re all anxious to kill me.”

  “I meant the part about your wife’s not knowing whether Bennett—”

  “Former wife,” he corrected.

  “Not knowing if Sands was involved in framing you four years back.”

  “I’m betting he was.”

  “Even if that’s so, it doesn’t mean Kate had anything to do with setting you up. She may just have told him more than she should have about the Tek cases you were working on.”

  “Just bedside conversation,
huh?”

  “What bothers you most, Jake—that she slept with him or that she told him about your police work?”

  He looked again out at the night. The funeral was over, replaced by a parade along a rain-swept street in Mexico City. “Both,” he replied. “No, wait. What really unsettles me is the way Kate talked about our marriage. There was such a bitterness in her voice, such ... Hell, none of this has anything to do with the job at hand.”

  “From what you said earlier—you’re pretty certain Hokori has my father at the Pleasure Dome,” Beth said from the shadows.

  “I figured that as a strong possibility, even before I talked to Carmelita.”

  “If you confirm it—then why not contact your agency for some assistance?”

  Jake grinned at her. “Have them send two or three husky bodyguards?”

  “A half dozen or so first-rate operatives to assist you in raiding the Dome. Going up against Hokori and his bunch all by yourself, which is what you sound like you’re planning to do, is a shade on the dumb side, Jake.”

  “Waiting around until Cosmos ships me a crew would—”

  The vidphone buzzed.

  Jake crossed over and answered it. “Yeah?”

  Carmen Jimenez was on the screen. “Señor Cardigan, please.”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m calling from the Dalton-Walden shop, Señor Cardigan,” the plump woman said in a businesslike way. “The book you ordered this afternoon has just come off the printer. I know you’re most anxious to read it, so if you’d like to drop in at the shop I’ll keep open until you arrive.”

  “Yes. That’s very nice of you. Fifteen minutes.” He hung up.

  “Meaning she’s got some information for you?”

  “Yeah,” said Jake, “so I’ll head for—”

  “We’ll head for the store.”

  “I’d rather you—”

  “No, I’ll feel better if I tag along.” Beth stood, still in the shadows. “It’s only a short way—we can use the pedramps.”

  After a few seconds he said, “Sure, come along.”

  The heavy night fog came swirling over the plasglass safety walls, spilling down onto the ribbed surface of the pedramp, tangling with legs and feet. The lights along the tops of the chest-high walls made small, fuzzy splotches of blinking light in the thick gray mist.

  Beth had an arm linked with his. “I think we’re passing,” she informed him.

  “Hum?”

  “I was saying that I believe we’re being accepted by all of these milling pedestrians as just another tourist couple.”

  “Father and daughter on vacation?”

  Laughing, Beth said, “More likely newlyweds on their honeymoon.”

  Jake grinned. “Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention a minute ago.”

  “Brooding, were you?”

  “In a way,” he admitted, moving closer to her to avoid a wobbling group of American skysailors who’d just come charging, most of them laughing and shouting, out of a mechanical cantina. “I was thinking about Kate, wondering why I never tumbled to what was going on. A wife having an affair with her boss is a pretty frequent thing, a domestic-life cliché, yet I missed almost every damn clue.”

  “You can’t always be a cop or a detective in your own home.”

  “That’s sure what Kate feels I was. Actually, though, I was as dense as—”

  “It’s very tough, isn’t it, for you to admit you’re not perfect?”

  Six school kids, escorted by a robot nanny whose solid gunmetal legs were pumping hard to keep up with her charges, came running by from the opposite direction.

  “Sure, I can accept not being perfect. But behaving like a love-struck teenager with Kate is harder to accommodate.”

  “Sometime,” she said, her hold on his arm tightening, “we’ll have to compare notes on our fathers—and the effect they’ve had on our lives.”

  “My impression is that you and the professor have an ideal—”

  “Not quite, Jake. In some ways he’s as tough and unbending as I imagine your military dad was,” she said. “And I’m not always sure lately that—well, that he’s being truthful and straightforward with me.

  “Because of the trip to Mexico?”

  “What’s really exasperating is the fact that my memory cuts off several days before the actual trip,” she said. “I’ve had the feeling, for the past day or more, that I was on the brink of finding out something—something important.”

  “Such as the fact that your father and Sands had made some sort of deal that you weren’t in on?”

  “That’s yes, one possibility,” admitted Beth with an affirmative nod. “We learned from Warbride—you did actually—that there never was actually any crash. It was faked. I’m wondering, really, if my father might have known in advance.”

  “That would mean he was definitely planning to sell out to Sonny Hokori,” said Jake. “But you should’ve gotten some hint of that.”

  “Perhaps I did. Especially during those final days that are missing from my memory.”

  “Still and all, Beth, it might be better to assume that he ... Jake stopped talking, stopped walking.

  About a hundred yards ahead of them a tall, slim boy of about fourteen was standing near a restbench and looking anxiously their way. He had hair just a few shades darker than Jake’s, a grin that was a younger and much less cynical version of Jake’s.

  Beth saw that Jake was staring at the boy. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s got to be him—it’s Dan.” He waved, laughing, hand high in the foggy air.

  The boy’s grin widened as he returned the wave. He started pushing his way through the people on the pedramp.

  “Wait, Jake,” cautioned Beth, eyes narrowing. She caught hold of his arm.

  “It’s my son, Beth.” Jerking free of her, he started running.

  The boy was running, too, dodging through the crowd. “Dad!”

  “No, don’t.” Sprinting, Beth caught up with Jake. She gave him a sudden, rough shove.

  He stumbled to his left, fell to one knee. A fat tourist decked with cameras tripped over him and they became entangled.

  Beth kept running. It was she who met the boy.

  He tried to avoid her, his face growing dark with anger.

  But she threw both arms tight around him. They went staggering against the nearest plasglass wall.

  The wall cracked; a whole jagged section broke free under their combined weight.

  An old man screamed and brought both gnarled hands up to mask his weathered face; a young skysailor cried out and made a grab for Beth and the boy she was hugging. He missed, catching only air.

  Beth and the boy went falling over the edge of the ramp. Locked together, they plummeted down through the swirling gray fog, falling toward the thousands of blurred lights far below.

  Jake had gotten to his feet, gone stumbling and shoving to the gap torn in the guardwall.

  “Why, Beth?” he muttered.

  Then came the explosion, while the two of them were still dropping.

  A great harsh flowering of intense red and yellow flame that ripped through the fog. Snarls of harsh black smoke spilling across the gray night.

  The remains of the two of them went flying and spinning, scattered forever. Twists of metal and plastic, shards of glass, unraveling ribbons of bright-colored wire.

  All the fragments and tatters drifted down and away and were swallowed by the fog. Silence seemed to spread across the ramp; for a moment there didn’t seem to be a sound in the entire city.

  “He wasn’t Dan, he was a kamikaze android sent to kill me,” Jake said to himself. “Beth sensed that.”

  Staring down and down at nothing, he started to cry.

  32

  AFTER A WHILE JAKE wandered down to the ground level of Acapulco. He thought at first that he wasn’t looking for anything at all, and then for a while he thought he was hunting for Tek.

  Because once he got hold of a Brain
box and hooked himself up to it, he could relive the past few hours. On the second go-round, though, Beth wouldn’t die.

  And maybe the kamikaze android would actually be Dan. His son would’ve run away from his private school up in Mexico City to be here with Jake.

  There wouldn’t be anyplace for Kate in the Tek fantasy Jake was going to have.

  “Help me buy a leg, señor.” A one-legged beggar was perched on a crate that had once, according to the legend on its side, held WELFARE FOOD/COURTESY SANDS INDUSTRIES.

  “How much do you still need?”

  “Only thirteen hundred dollars American.” Jake gave him a $10 note. “How long have you been collecting for it?”

  “It will be, señor, seven years this next Christmas. Gracias for your small contribution.”

  “Denada.”

  Jake turned onto a narrow, ground-level street that smelled richly of neglected garbage.

  “I got what you want, señor.”

  “Which is?”

  The robot was covered with rainbow designs that had been painted on his dented gunmetal body with thick glopaint. “I got ladies, señor. Young ones, even a few mature ones,” explained the mechanical man.

  “Where can I get some Tek?”

  “Aw, señor,” said the robot pimp disdainfully. “I’m not selling illusions and escapes from reality here. Don’t let my format fool you. No, I manage only live talent. Real mujeres, not fantasy ones.”

  Shaking his head, Jake moved along.

  But in front of a burned-out cantina he halted. “If it’s obvious to a robot pimp,” he said to himself, “it ought to be obvious to me. Yeah, I don’t think after all I want to escape from reality just yet. There are a few things to take care of first.”

  He started back for the upper levels of the city.

  Kate, as always, slept naked. She awakened when the overhead lights in the big bedroom blossomed. She sat up in the wide oval bed and stared at him, making no effort to pull up the sheet.

  Jake gave a negative shake of his head as she started to speak. He drew a wooden chair over close beside the opposite side of the bed, picked up the snub-nosed lazgun off the night table and then seated himself in the chair.

  With the barrel of the gun he reached out to nudge the still sleeping Bennett Sands in the ribs.