Prey
By Harris, Mitch, Shaine, and Shatterclaw. Individual rating:
R.
The day before...
James Harris made his way to the old downtown Chicago, a burned-out district which had been neglected in Genom's plan for rebuilding the city. He'd been there once or twice before, and the entombed 'first city' was the perfect place to find every sort of depravity imaginable.
Perfect place to find some Boomeroids...maybe a few rogue Boomers. Maybe if I kill enough, those suicidal maniacs will finally take notice of me.
He soon saw a large Boomeroid, with more wires coming from its head than there were running through all of the telephone poles in the city. It was attacking a smaller Boomeroid who was clearly losing the fight.
The larger one gripped the small one's arm with both hands and started twisting and pulling, apparently trying to rip the artificial limb off. Harris quickly and silently slipped past the pair, pulling the autoshot gun from his shoulder and aiming it at the larger Boomeroid's back.
It stopped, grunting. "Huuuh? What do you want?"
He fired a single shot into its chest at point blank, not saying a word. The Boomeroid exploded into a white, stringy mess which covered the walls of the alley.
"Th-thank you...how can I repay you?"
Harris impassively looked down at the second Boomeroid. "Information."
"Information? What kind of information?"
He described the woman in the Boomer store, the one that Kohl had let get away. "My friends said I should talk to her. Do you know her?"
"Oh, yeah, Jasmine Rice! Yeah, she's a street doc; if you can find the right parts she'll fix you up...needs all the spares she can get, never turns down a leg or an arm..."
"I see. Thank you."
"Sure... Anything else I can do for you?"
"Not unless you can tell me why she wants all those parts."
"Well, that may cost you more."
"Oh?" He looked over at what was left of the other Boomeroid. "That wasn't enough? You can have what's left of him, then."
"Oh? I see... Sure, that's fine! The parts are for something she just called a 'bird.' Some new kind of Boomer."
"All right. Anything else you can tell me about them?"
"Yeah, I seen them...they look like some kind of big black bird, some of them normal sized, a few really big, and it looks like she just took a real bird and fused it with a Boomer...
"And then there's her boyfriend..."
"Do you know what she was doing with these new Boomers? Or where I can find one?"
"I don't know. She had some in her shop."
"Well...tell me about her boyfriend then."
"He was hosting - taking parts from a Boomer that was still alive - and the ADP got their hands on him. He killed five of theirs with an illegal heat cannon...they done blow him up but good. So she finds a way to get his body back, and she's remaking him, right? She asked me one time if I wanted to be his new eyes. Can you believe that?"
"In this day and age...yes."
The Boomeroid sighed as Harris began moving away. "Yeah, don't it beat all... Well, thanks for the body anyway."
"Thank you for your help."
On the corner stood three blue-green female Boomers and a man so short and fat he could only be human.
"Female companions, only twenty dollars an hour!" A man in a black trenchcoat walked up to the group and handed the man a wad of bills. The fat one counted it, then shoved it into a pocket and the other man took one of the mannequin-like Boomers back the way he came.
Harris watched quietly.
"Finest females around! Safe, clean...you'd never even know they're not human..." Like a carnival barker from the turn of the century - 20th, not 21st - he continued his pitch. A woman in black leather approached the group and haggled with him over the price. Finally she paid him and left.
The fat man looked at the last Boomer. "Stay here. I'm going to get a beer. Don't move, you dumb slut..." He disappeared around the corner.
The female Boomer stood there mindlessly, her head tilting to the side. Harris sighed...this wasn't exactly the sort of Boomer he'd come there to hunt.
Across the street, he saw a familiar face. Rice. She was pushing a shopping cart full of what looked like junk but was probably Boomer parts. She didn't seem to see him.
Pulling out a laser cutter, Rice sliced the Boomer's abdomen open swiftly but carefully. Harris's eyes widened slightly. Here's my next target!
Rice scooped out the Boomer's organs and stuffed them into the cart, then walked away as if nothing had happened. Harris followed quietly. She seemed to be in another world, pausing twice more to harvest Boomers but not showing any emotion or thought. Finally she arrived at a seemingly abandoned warehouse, entering through an old freight door.
Harris slung his shotgun back over his shoulder and replaced it with a silenced SOCOM.
Voices echoed from the walls: "Babe...I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"Shut up already! Not like there's anywhere else to hide..."
Harris looked around, then decided to go up the stairs and listen from a catwalk above. The stairs were metal but he climbed them soundlessly.
"I know you can't see or hear well. That's why I got you these."
From his new vantage point, Harris could see the Frankenboomer from the previous night, as well as another body lying on a slab next to it. There were no 'bird' Boomers in sight, but there were covered tubes and cages which could easily hold one or more of the creatures.
"See, aren't they pretty?" She held up a pair of eyes she'd gouged from the prostitute Boomer's face after removing its internal organs. "A nice, deep green."
She smiled. "Soon we will be together...and we will reshape the world in our own image!"
Rice continued talking, sounding like a bad science fiction movie or a Star Trek plot from the Braga days, when the show had seemingly run out of creative talent. Harris listened with half an ear, more concerned about finding the new Boomers.
A horn honked just outside, and the rumble of an opening freight door filled the warehouse. A black limousine pulled up next to the Frankenboomer's slab, light shining off of the white sheets. Harris crept across the catwalk to get a better view.
Underneath a tarp he saw a half-covered cage. Inside was a raven Boomer which looked just like the mechanical ones used by Crimson and the others.
His eye was drawn away by the movement of a figure emerging from the limousine. It appeared to be a woman, but she was wearing a hooded cloak and he couldn't see her face.
"They found me, and the lab," Rice exploded. "I want more money. You never said anything about this shit!"
"Of course they did." Harris could hear a smile in the cloaked woman's voice. "They always find evil. It's their calling card."
"You said you could keep them off of our backs. What happened to that?"
"I did not count on you taking such great risks."
Harris crept toward the tarps, hoping their argument would draw their attention away from him.
"Are they ready?"
Underneath one tarp was a glass tube with a black, feathered body inside. It was vaguely human, but twisted... Harris listened carefully to the two women, quickly returning to his hiding place after that one brief glance.
"They're ready, but there are still a few glitches in the weapons. And there's no way I can make them just disappear on command!"
"Can they fight?"
"Of course. They've been tested against the battle mover, and they're still in one piece."
"That's not good enough," the cloaked woman snapped. "If you'd stop playing around with your boy toy and work harder we wouldn't have these problems!"
"Hah! If you had given me more protection..."
Harris heard a faint scraping sound coming from further down the catwalk. A purple-grey Boomeroid emerged from the shadows, letting out a low moaning sound. Harris turned toward it, still firmly holding the silenced SOCOM, which he had just gotten that day, and noticing for the first time that it was automatic, with a laser sight built in. He smiled.
The Boomeroid began to open its mouth as it approached. A light glowed within...
Shit! It's got a Boomer mouth gun... Harris fired three rounds into its chest, hoping the gun wouldn't go off.
It did, slicing the far side of the catwalk into two.
"What the..?" Rice looked up just as Harris dove toward a nearby window. More Boomeroids were charging toward him from the stairs and the floor below. Drawing his shotgun, he began to fire and they exploded like overripe fruit.
Watching the stairway out of the corner of his eye, he glanced out the window. It was open, but a long way off the ground... He backed up so that he could easily hit anything coming out of the it as well as the Boomeroids charging up the stairs.
The limousine drove away, with Rice chasing after it. Harris almost laughed, but then felt the floor of the catwalk shake. Three snakelike hands clawed at him from beneath the metal grating, trying to rip it out from under him. He aimed downward, jumping out of the way as he fired.
He managed to hit some of the Boomeroids, but the catwalk was too weak to take the shotgun blasts. Parts of it bent and tore free from the walls. Harris went back to the tarp-covered forms at the other end of the catwalk, then looked down out of the window.
Harris broke the tube containing the bird Boomer, and the Boomeroids running toward him stopped, shocked. The black, feathered lump flopped down onto the floor, covered by a thick, wet goo. It didn't seem to be moving - or even capable of moving...
It was about fifteen feet to the ground. Maybe...
Yes. I can. He grabbed the Boomer and set it on the windowsill, then turned to see what was happening inside the warehouse. Rice had a large laser gun and was wrestling it into position to fire at him. Guess she gave up on the Shadow Lady...
He backed up toward the sill again and fired four shots into the floor. Then he fell through the window, grabbing the bird Boomer and using its wings to slow his fall. It glided, somewhat, but the landing was still rough.
He could hear the laser gun go off, and Rice cursing God and her entire family. He rolled off of the Boomer, groaning, and got to his feet.
I wonder how those last shots went...
He glanced up; there was a Boomeroid body hanging out of the window. Pretty well, I guess.
"Hey there...you want a ride?" He turned. There was a Hispanic woman standing not too far away, her stance unthreatening and a smile upon her face.
He felt around...nothing broken. Lifting his auto shotgun, he looked at the car behind her. It was a Barracuda, probably from sometime in the late 70's.
"Who are you?"
"A friend." Her hair was the oddest damned thing, an auburn shade that couldn't be natural, with a white streak near her face.
He shook his head. "All right." He slung the shotgun over one shoulder and picked up the Boomer. She helped him place it in the backseat.
"I don't think we've met before. My name is Saki."
"I'm Jay." He fell into the backseat with the Boomer, then sat up. "Thanks." His hand was close to his Glock, just in case...
A gunshot sounded out, apparently coming from the direction of the warehouse. "Shit! Drive!"
Saki floored it. The car had to have something incredible under the hood; it was soon doing 175mph into the night. Harris turned to look at the Boomer, then at Saki. She seemed completely in control, almost calm...
"Why are you helping me?"
"Why does anyone do anything?"
He shrugged. "Because they want to... Well, thanks again."
"You're welcome." She smiled. "Who's your friend?"
He pulled out his Glock, aiming it at the Boomer as he looked it over. "Not a friend, but I'll see what's up once I get back..."
"Oh, I see. Where to? Mind if we grab some food first?"
"I'm in a bit of a hurry, here." He began giving her directions to an area close to the Nest, not entirely trusting this odd newcomer.
"I think I can do that."
"All right."
She laughed, turning down an alleyway, and pressed a button on the dashboard. "You know, we could have used you about two years earlier."
Harris, aiming the gun at her behind the seat, looked up in confusion. "Huh? Wait a minute. Who are you?"
"Oh, just one of the birds..."
"And my name?"
"James."
He shook his head. "Okaaay..."
"Of course, I don't really want to say it all."
He turned back to the Boomer lying next to him and aimed at it instead. He had no idea of what it might do... "So how did you find me?"
"I followed you. Thought maybe you could use a friend."
"I see."
"I'm sorry; I didn't know you were going out to hunt."
"I didn't know I was going to be falling out of a building," Harris replied, "So we're even."
"Well, at least you did it with style! But you owe me, now...a dinner out..."
"Of course." He sat back. I wonder what the Suicide Squad are up to...
"Good. Once we get your friend here locked down, maybe we can go find something."
"Oh? What did you have in mind?"
"Hm...I'm in the mood for Thai. Or at least what passes for Thai in this town."
"Ah...how about another night? I would like to resume the hunt...this same time...same day...next week..for you. And perhaps then you could let me drive." He smiled slightly. Pleasant surprise, to find someone who can keep up with me outside of the suits...
"Sure. Same day, same time..." Her voice was all too sweet. "But I drive."
"You drive there, I drive back. Deal?"
"We'll see."
///
Saki sat in her office thinking about the new nestlings. They'd just met with Jinks to prepare for the new mission; James was sullenly silent as usual, Mitch was overenthusiastic as usual, and Shaine...well, was Shaine. She seriously wondered whether the three of them would survive for long.
They needed the new blood - half of the team had been killed in the last sat strike - and their true loyalties could be assertained easily enough. Turning them into Ravens, however...that was the sticking point.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of a phone. "Mr. Erik Kohl to see you, Ms. Veldez."
Kohl, here? "Send him in, please." This could be an incredible opportunity...perhaps I can win Shaine over yet...
"Good morning, Ms. Veldez."
"Herr Kohl...how nice to see you. This is quite unexpected!"
He smiled nervously. "Actually, I was hoping to speak with one of your employees...Sarah Liddell? I'm an old friend of the family. I heard she was just hired here...?"
It was Shaine's cover name. "Miss Liddell is on vacation right now. But of course, if you'd like me to pass on a message to her...?"
"Not a message, really...it's this." He held out a small, journal-like book. "I was hoping to return this to her. Her boyfriend was arrested by the FBI - quite unfortunate - and they seized everything in his apartment. Or nearly everything; a friend of mine managed to appropriate this. It would be rather damaging to her to have something so personal of hers found with the belongings of a suspected hacker."
"The FBI?"
"Yes...the fellow they caught, Stephen Shang, is suspected of being the hacker known as Tsen." He smiled again. "Tsen Shang...character from some old science fiction novels, a spymaster. Not too inventive if you ask me. At any rate, I don't think Sarah would be so foolish as to fall in with someone like that, or to boast about such things in her poetry," he nodded toward the book, "But I'm sure she'd like to have it back."
"I see." Her tone had gone icy. "Thank you."
He swiftly excused himself and left. Saki, stopping only to pick up her katana and some other weaponry, followed him back to his house and slipped inside unnoticed.
Inside, there were a bevy of women, very humanlike Boomers by her estimation - possibly Replicants. The first one she passed was turned away from her, playing a piano and singing, but from what she could tell the woman was truly exquisite as befitted Erik's wealth. Her tumbled curls were chocolate brown, her skin a perfect cream color, and her voice yet a third sort of confection:
"The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree
"Sing all a green willow;
"Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
"Sing willow, willow, willow..."
In the next room were several more, arguing quietly in what sounded like an obscure form of Greek. Replicants. No other kind of Boomer has that sort of mental capacity, or that need for stimulation...Shakespeare, dead languages...I guess Evon Kohl wasn't kidding when he wrote that article.
Saki made her way toward the bedroom, where Erik sat by the foot of the bed. She decided upon a humane kill, swift and clean, Yakuza style. Just before she struck, she noticed a picture on the dresser, not more than three years old, of Erik and a short brunette who looked very much like Shaine. Lowering her katana, she slid the picture out of its frame and stuffed it into her inner suit.
The sound of the frame being taken apart set Erik into motion. He turned to face her, then hesitated for a while, watching her take the picture out. By the time she'd brought her sword up again, he had drawn a gun.
Beretta Viper 14, she catalogued without thinking. Old gun. Hm. She struck it out of his hand easily before he could fire.
He smiled, then laughed.
Saki threw three daggers at him, two at his legs and one at his arm. He let them hit, an odd but triumphant expression lighting up his face. What in hell...
She rushed him, swinging low at the last moment. The katana bit into his knees, winning a stronger reaction. He winced, as if he'd had the wind knocked out of him. He gasped as it cut into one kneecap, but didn't cry out or move.
He still remained relatively calm as she brought the katana back up to slice his head off. It landed on the floor with a thump.
There is something very wrong here. Staring at the body, she could see Boomer parts within. The cross section of spinal cord revealed by her final blow appeared to be a fusion of human and Boomer.
Replicant. Should have known. She scowled and cut the body open from neck to waist, looking for a black box. The corpse was nearly identical to the readings Mitch had gotten off of the Replicants at Rice's shop.
Planting a grenade in the chest and attaching a fine wire to the pin, Saki cursed her luck. If only I'd been able to give Shaine that gift...free her...maybe she would have been able to let go and fly.
Holding on to the pull wire, she went to the window and climbed out. Once she was outside, she pulled the pin and ran.
Another time. He won't get away that easily.
///
As Kathy rushed out of the room, she could see a crowd already assembled near the rubble of the bedroom.
"Hey! Hey, lazy-asses! What are you doing?" She shoved her way past. Not too pretty, but they really ought to be reacting more maturely. Oh, come on, Kathy. These are Reps we're talking about...
"All right, listen up! We've got to get this place in shape before the polizei show up. Where's Shaine?"
"She went out with Erik."
"Damn," Kathy breathed. "Cally and Cullyn, I need you to help with the...the..."
Cullyn nodded. "Yeah."
"The rest of you just look innocent. Bawl your eyes out if you have to. Run. Lock yourself in. Just don't admit to anything."
She barreled into the study. Disks, documents...they went into a false floor beneath the desk. No time to dispose of them properly. She rifled through the desk drawers...one envelope she didn't recognize, but if Erik didn't tell her about it it must not be important. Time to make herself disappear...
And hope that Erik wasn't out there retiring Shaine when the police found him.
///
The trail led further back toward the undeveloped part of the city - that is, the part that Certain Others paid to have left alone. Not too far from Carter's house. The Shaine Replicant's eyes were huge and disbelieving...just like every other time before. She never knew the city hid anything like this.
She looks so much like Kathy...
I remember the first time I brought Kathy out here. Erik's heart ached. This was always so hard.
He leaned over to whisper in her ear: "I love you, Shaine."
"Huh? I love you too!" As if it were too obvious to have to bother to say. She was looking back at him now, and that was dangerous. He put an arm around her and steered her in a new direction.
Moments later her face lit up again. "It's beautiful!" she gasped. The lake lay meters below, completely uninhabited along that particular stretch. Yet another thing Genom paid for. He smiled, drawing his left arm away and replacing it with his right hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him and smiled. A single shot from the miniature EMP gun was all it took - Evon's failsafes at work - and she crumpled to the ground.
Erik placed the gun on top of the body, then took out his cell phone. "I need Kathy out here."
"Um...this isn't a very good time." Callysta sounded even more breathless than usual.
"What kind of not-a-good-time?"
"The kind I don't wanna talk about over the phone? Kathy says don't finish up if you haven't already, and get down here fast."
"It's too late for that, Cally."
"Uh, all right...can you handle things out there by yourself?" Sure, and go down there to face the ADP looking like I've just disposed of a body...
"I'll be back when I can," he said forcefully, and hung up.
///
"Mitch! How ya doing?" Detective Jacob sped toward his partner. "I've got a new case for you, and I think you're really going to like this one."
"Hey, Jacob! ...Oh, really? What is it?"
"Did you hear about the explosion over at the Kohl residence?"
"What's up? The Santina Crime Family up to no good again?"
"Apparently a hit man of some kind went after Herr Kohl, but got a half-Boomer doppelganger instead...sliced it up with a sword of some kind and blew up half the house. Then when we got there, we found Kohl himself out back of the house with a dead Boomer that looks just like his niece.
"He says some woman shot the second Boomer, and we have no evidence to prove him wrong. No weapon anywhere near the crime scene, so it appears as if he couldn't have done it."
A wide smile slowly developed on Mitch's face.
"And wait til you hear the rest... We found some test results in his desk and it turns out that his niece...is not his niece."
"Be careful, Jacob! This Kohl is a slippery one."
"I know. I did some checking up on it before you got here."
"What did you find?"
"The test results pan out. Shaine has several recessive genes that her mother and putative father do not.
"But Erik does."
"Are you saying what I think you're saying?"
Jacob nodded. "She's not a minor anymore, so it doesn't legally matter. Though it does give some extra weight to that missing person report he filed."
"This is quite a family!"
"Tell me about it. So do you want to see the bodies before we talk to him?"
"Do we have anything to hold him on now?"
"No, but he's volunteered to stay until we run out of questions."
"The autopsies alone will take a day."
"Sure, but we can always call him back."
"You hope! Genom lawyers have a way with loopholes." Mitch scowled.
"He said he would, and refused a lawyer. I think that if he does have something to hide, it's buried deep enough that he believes we can't find it. And the Boomer doubles already look bad."
Mitch nodded. "All right. We've got nothing to ask until we have some evidence..."
Lying on two metal slabs in the morgue were a pair of human/Boomer hybrids. One was little more than charred lumps of meat, pieced together into the vague form of a body. The Shaine Replicant's skin was waxen and pale, but there was no apparent sign of any cause of death.
"Both of them appear to be half Boomer, half clone. No one here has seen anything like this before. In fact, under the Boomer Law they would be classified as human despite their origins. The laws on cloning have never been very solid, but I'll bet that a judge would technically rule either of these cases homicide."
"Well...we could at least hold him as an accessory to murder one. What do we have so far?"
"The male Boomer was killed by a sword stroke severing the neck and beheading it. Prior to death, wounds were inflicted to the legs and arms both by the murder weapon and by three daggers found at the scene. After it was beheaded, a grenade was planted in, near, or on the body.
"The second one appears to have been killed by a low-level EMP blast. The weapon may have been small enough to be concealed, but we didn't find anything near the scene. It's possible it could have been tossed into the lake, but to do that the killer would have had to have one amazing throwing arm.
"The only fingerprints on the body were Erik Kohl's, or those of another double, and they were on the shoulder area. As if he had his arm around her. No sign of any physical violence or abuse."
"Can you scan his DNA on either?"
"The Erik Boomer's DNA is identical to his, except for a laboratory watermark stating it originated here in Chicago. The traces from the fingerprints are exactly identical to his."
"We can hold him for the murder of the Shaine Replicant," Mitch mused.
"But we didn't find a weapon. And what was that word you used? Replicant?"
"He's our only suspect and his DNA is on everything."
"He claims to have seen a Hispanic woman with red hair, who shot the copy of Shaine. And not only was there not a weapon, but no discharge or trace signature was found on his hands."
"He has an unregistered Boomer. Two, in fact, and maybe more."
"Both of these were registered with a Genom research division. His own, certainly, but they were registered with Genom."
"Do you trust him?"
"No. But the records match up, and the genetic watermarks in these two are authentic."
"He was the only one around when she died." He frowned. "What type of EMP gun was used? And where?"
"It appears to have been a very low-level burst, aimed at the back of the neck." Jacob lifted the Boomer's head, brushing her hair back, to reveal a slightly scorched area on the back of the neck. "Kohl said that his group had developed a mini-EMP to deal with rogue Boomers of the same type but one of the guns was stolen from their labs last week."
"Someone killed the Replicant...and my money is on Kohl."
"You said it again...what is this word Replicant?"
"A term used by the MIT research group that first designed them." He handed Jacob a copy of the MIT Technical Review from July, 2036. "Page 56."
"Hm." Jacob skimmed the list of contributors. "Evon Kohl...his brother."
"Yeah. What do you think?"
The Boomer turned a page, stared at the technical specifications of the primitive Replicant. "This looks like what he was describing."
"Yeah?"
"It's supposedly such a hot project that only the Chairman of Genom can authorize distribution of information on it. Five labs working on them: here...Tokyo, Japan...Rochester, Michigan...Mainz, Germany...and one of the space stations."
"Mr. Kohl is quite high on Genom's food chain."
Jacob nodded. "He's got friends in at least three of those other four labs... The Rochester one is run by a Hase Kant, who visits him here every once in a while; Mainz is positively crawling with his supporters; and rumor has it he's close with Mason, who is the number two man in Tokyo. Very well connected indeed."
"I want the files on the heads of those labs."
"I'm already on it. I've got files on Kant and the director of her lab, plus the director of his own lab - an Evon Halas - and the other ones are on their way."
Mitch nodded and put on a pair of plastic gloves. The Erik Replicant was a mass of burned flesh, both Boomer and human. From what he could tell, it was very like the Replicants he'd killed in Rice's lab.
He found its black box and carefully removed it, noting that although it was as battered on the outside as was the body itself, the box appeared to be intact. Carrying it over to another table, he connected it to the morgue computer and began downloading its contents.
The unit and manufacturing information corresponded perfectly to what Detective Jacob had told him: it had been built in Chicago and was registered to Genom Chicago RDEC. The sensory records, however, were completely missing. A run of the recovery program turned up very little - test records from the lab - and there did not appear to be any evidence that further records had even existed. Furthermore, there were no signs of tampering...
All right. Either he really knows his stuff, or else he was prepared for this well in advance...either way, it's not looking good.
He then took a laser scalpel and carefully removed the Shaine Replicant's black box. The EMP blast had erased everything, with no hope of recovery, and no other record left but her human brain.
"All right. Let's go talk to Mr. Kohl, but I want a lie detector scan on him."
///
Erik sat calmly while Jacob adjusted the readings on the polygraph. He was actually a bit curious as to what it would be like, having sent his Replicant doubles to deal with previous tests, and noted with some amusement that the device looked somewhat like the Voight-Kampff machine used in Blade Runner.
"Mr. Kohl," Mitch said.
"And you are?"
"Lieutenant Mitch Wolfstone."
Erik nodded in response.
Jacob finished adjusting a control and looked up from the device. "All right, Mitch, we're ready to go."
"What happened to those Boomers, Mr. Kohl?" Mitch looked him directly in the eye.
"I was out in the woods behind the house with the Shaine duplicate - Katerin, we called her - and I really don't know what happened after that." He paused, then signs of anguish began to creep into his expression. "You have no idea...to watch her die..."
He got control of himself again and continued. "The other one...well, I wasn't there. I can only assume that one of my enemies thought he or she had caught up with me."
"All right. What was the Shaine duplicate doing?"
"She wandered off ahead...these experimental Boomers have no attention span at all. She was completely hypnotized by the view."
"Go on."
Erik shook his head. "I've been over this several times now...I'm not sure if I can do it again. She was all I had left of my niece, and to see that..." He stopped himself, then shook his head. "I put too much into her. She was going to be just a safeguard, as my own duplicate was, but when Shaine disappeared I got...attached to her." He winced.
"Your Boomer has a strange burn mark on her neck. How did that happen?"
"She was shot. I saw some sort of blue glow...it looked like a burst from one of the mini-EMP guns the lab uses to put down rogue Replicants. I had to learn to use one, being in charge of the research, but I've never liked them." Give me my Viper 14 any day...
"So you weren't alone."
"No." He stopped again. "Please, Lieutenant..."
"Who else was there?"
His voice was weary. "There was no one on the property but myself, my Boomers, and the woman I described to Lieutenant Jacob."
"Please describe her for me."
"She looked Hispanic, with reddish hair. The light wasn't too good out there; perhaps it was brown. But there was a pale streak..." He brought two fingers up and made a slashing gesture toward his own hair.
Saki! Could she have done this? "Have you ever seen her before?"
"It's possible. She looked a bit familiar, but I don't want to go making false accusations."
There. Half irrelevance and half speculation. Ought to take care of that.
"The Detective mentioned earlier you'd want to know about the Replicants themselves...?"
"Yes. Please."
"They were a pet project of my brother's. Both human and Boomer. Unfortunately that research was cut off prematurely, but five Genom labs are attempting to continue his work." He glared darkly at Mitch. "By the Boomer Law, this was a double homicide..."
"Yes, I know, and we have two suspects."
"Really. Who?"
"Did anyone else see this woman?"
"I don't know."
"The other Boomers at the house didn't see anything," Jacob answered.
"Who are your two suspects, Lieutenant? That list sounds too short to me."
"Come, Mr. Kohl. You were the only one to see the assailant?"
His tone turned hostile. "No friend of mine goes into those woods unless I know it. And no Boomer ever goes there without me. Have you considered that some competitor of mine, at one of the five Replicant research centers, might be behind this?"
"Who would you add to the list?"
"Genom Mainz is controlled by a friend of an old enemy. And Chairman Rosenkreutz favors Ms. Carter over me. But it could be anyone. The five labs are in direct competition, and the Chairman has never tolerated failure."
"Why would he - or the others - risk murder?"
"We are in a race and the winner, I think, will be determined half by luck and half by skill. Someone may have decided to try improving his luck. Beside that, I have made enemies through my other projects. President Steiner of Genom Munich would love to see me dead."
"I'm new to corporate politics, Mr. Kohl...why would they want to see you dead?"
Erik smiled darkly. "This wasn't the first attempt on my life. That's why I created the Replicant of myself."
"Very smart of you, but why?"
He shrugged. "To gain a lead over Genom Chicago in research...to exact revenge for old grievances...
"Fraulein Kant and I embarrassed Steiner ten years ago, for one thing, and I can think of a half dozen other incidents."
"So by killing you they get revenge, and more power."
"Exactly - though I don't know why they would stop at Katerin if they saw me there, too. Perhaps they thought I was another Boomer and she wasn't."
"Why not kill both of you to be sure?"
"We're talking about a global corporation; news can travel slowly. Especially when factions get in the way of business. Perhaps they knew that Shaine was here, but hadn't yet learned of her disappearance."
He shrugged. "Of course, this is all just speculation."
"But they see you and a woman alone, and they kill her? Come, now!"
"But a grieving man will not work as hard as someone who has just received a promotion in the wake of a rival's loss. Think of that.
"Perhaps our assassin had a change of plans..."
Mitch nodded. "I understand."
///
His head still reeling, Mitch left ADP headquarters and went back to the Nest. Harris stood outside, smoking.
"What's eating you, labcoat?"
I can't tell him! Should I tell Crimson? ...Should I tell anyone...?
"Rough day at work," he finally responded, and passed Harris without another word.