EdgeOfHuman (18 page)

"I didn't appreciate getting jerked around by you. Back when I came to work for you again. What's all this about there being one more escaped replicant on the loose? A sixth one."

Bryant displayed his ugly smile. "Is that what the Tyrell Corporation's got you hunting for?"

"So it's true, then." Deckard leaned forward. "There is another one. And you didn't want me to know about it. What was that all about?"

"Look, uh . . . that's not important." On the monitor screen, Bryant's image shifted uncomfortably. "Like you said, you don't have time for screwing around. Why don't we just say that back then . . . I miscounted, or something. Things didn't work out quite the way I wanted them to."

"All right -- Deckard could hear the tension and anger in his own voice. "Whatever the game was that you were playing, I don't need to hear about it. Right now, I need something from you. You either get me a spinner, fueled and with all clearances, so I can get the hell out of L.A.=

"Can't do it, pal." Bryant's image shook its head. "I can't put in a transport requisition from where I'm sitting."

"Fine. Then you call up the data that you purged out of the files-the stuff about that other escaped replicant. ID scan, name, description, the works."

"That's kinda hard, too. I put all that in a secured file sector. Got some tight locks on it."

"But it's there, right?" Deckard managed to keep his voice low. "So you can get it out.

And that's what I need from you. Give me the data on the sixth replicant, and I'll take care of the rest."

Another shake of the image's head. "Hunting it down won't be a picnic. Not with the whole LAPD on your case."

"Let me worry about that. All I have to do is turn its carcass over to the Tyrell Corporation, and then I'll be long gone. Again. The police won't even see my dust."

"You trust Tyrell?"

"I don't have any choice." He slumped down in the chair, splaying the glossy jackboots out in front of himself. Letting some of the anger drain away-he lifted the shot he'd poured out and finished it off. "They're the only chance I have." In the office's stillness, he heard the faint rumble of the rep train rolling through its dark tunnels beneath the station. The poor bastards aboard it had already found their way out. The noise faded away, like a minor seismic echo. An old, recognizable feeling crawled across his skin, the same one he'd felt whenever he'd been in Bryant's office before, and that sub-audible note had whispered at the edge of his perception. Evoking the same thought as before:
At least I always killed them one at a time
. His only source of moral justification . . .

Deckard shook off the creepy meditation. He didn't have time for that, not now. "So what's going to be? Do I get the info?"

"It'll take a while," said Bryant's image on the monitor screen.

"How long?"

The image shrugged. "Maybe half an hour. Maybe a little less. Especially if we don't have anybody noticing that I'm pulling the file back up. Once I've got it accessed, though, I can send it straight to where you're at right now. So the best thing for you to do . . ." The brown-toothed smile again. "Would be to just hang tight and wait for the pretty pictures to show up on the screen."

Deckard glanced at the office's door. He'd heard footsteps go by, then silence.

The voice from the monitor continued. "Like you said, pal, every cop in the city is walking by your elbow right now. None of them are likely to come waltzing into my office anytime soon. Keep your head down, and you should be able to hang out there until the crowd thins out a bitmaybe when the sun comes up and they all scurry to their little holes. Then you should be able to sneak back out." The image shrugged. "After that, it'll all be up to you. Just like you wanted."

The muscles along Deckard's shoulders eased. He could handle that. He'd gotten in here; he could get out again. And after that? He'd worry about it later.

"All right." He nodded. "The sun comes up, and I'm out of here." He swallowed the remainder in his glass. "You're the one who's going to have to take the heat, though. If it gets found out that you helped me."

"Let me worry about that." Bryant's image sneered. "These pussies in the department have been on my case for years. What're they going to do, fire me? Bring me up on charges? They can't-I'm the only one who'll do this rotten job for them, and they know it. Besides, I've got a file up here-" On the monitor screen the jowly, unshaven image tapped the side of its head. "With a list of where all the bodies are buried. There's a bunch the brass around here wouldn't like to see dug up. If anybody over at Internal Affairs or the police chief's office want to dick around with me, I can guarantee 'em it won't be just my funeral they'll be getting ready for."

The scotch radiated a feeble glow in Deckard's stomach. "It won't be just the department brass you'll have to worry about. Those enemies of mine that you were talking about-they won't be friends of yours."

"Yeah, like I'm so scared, pal. The fact that they were able to get you into hot water doesn't make 'em God. I've been covering my fat white butt for a long time now. Since I'm still alive, you might guess that I've gotten pretty good at it. And you'd be right. Like I said, let me worry about it."

He managed one corner of a smile for his old boss. "No choice, huh?"

"No choice." On the monitor screen, on the other side of the desk, hung the image of Bryant's own lopsided smile, the video image of his face slowly nodding. "You came around here asking for my help, now you gotta take. It's out of your hands, pal." The image drew back, one of its hands reaching for the bottle on the desk in the quarantine chamber. "Besides, even if they can get to me, what the hell do I care. I'm an old man, Deckard. At least I feel like one. Liver probably looks like a wet rag by now, plus I got an ulcer I could put my fist through, do sock puppet shows inside my stomach. if I wanted. I get plugged, so be it." He poured himself a taller drink than before. "Besides, I do owe it to you." The image gazed, eyes half-lidded, into the unlit depths of the glass. "You always came through for me, Deckard. Even when I had to lean on you. When I hauled you in here to take care of that last batch of escaped replieants . . ."

"What?" All the joints of his spine tightened at once, as though the cord running through them had been yanked by an unseen fist.
Something's wrong
-the thinking part of his brain raced to catch up with the instinct, the quick sense that had made it possible for him to be a blade runner.

On the monitor screen the image of Bryant didn't seem to have heard him. The image went on talking, as though Bryant had started to drift into some private reverie.

"I knew that bunch was going to be trouble. Escaped replieants always are, but those Nexus-6 jobs had me sweating . . . "

That's not Bryant
. He knew; he realized that a fake had been switched in on him. The sweat on his arms chilled, beneath the uniform's black sleeves. His old boss wasn't in a quarantine chamber somewhere else; the image on the monitor screen was a persynth, a CGI physiognomen, composited from the hundreds of hours of tapes recorded by the office's watchcams. A real-time response driver, with a branching script protocol, had been spouting the words in Bryant's data-sampled voice. A trap like this indicated a high-priority resource drain on the department; to get one of these ersatz personas up and running without detectable processor lag required mega-crag paralleled hardware.

One mistake had tripped them up, made it clear to Deckard what the deal was.
Bryant wouldn't have said that
-- he'd heard the inspector spouting off enough times to be familiar with his crude vocabulary. Especially when he'd been drinking, which had been most of the time; whenever Bryant had started into bad-mouthing replieants, instead of just giving one of his squad necessary tracking info, he'd used the words
skin jobs
, his favorite ugly phrase. Whoever had wired up the physiognomen on the monitor screen had forgotten to cut out the PC loop imbedded in the police department's main computers, the language-scrubbing circuit that kept the LAPD spokesmen from inadvertently broadcasting some of their less attractive public-relations gaffes. The city's taxpayers didn't mind having a kick-ass retro-Gates police force, as long as it talked kinder and gentler.

The whole analysis ran through Deckard's head in less than a second.
They're trying to pump me
, he thought. That was why the trap was being allowed to run on, without him being pounced on immediately-the department authorities who'd set this up hoping to get some kind of info from him while he was liquored up and reminiscing about old times with Bryant's video simulation, lulled into a false sense of security.
They're watching me right now --
which meant they may have caught his involuntary reaction, the jerk upward of his head and stiffening of his spine that would signal his perception of something being amiss. Which meant . . .

His gaze shot to one side. Through the blinds over the office's windows, he saw that a wide swath of the station's ground floor had been cleared. A dozen LAPD elites, guns drawn, were running toward him, a few strides and seconds away.

"Hey! Where you going?" The synthesized image of Inspector Bryant looked puzzled as Deckard jumped from his chair. "What's the deal, pal-" Papers scattered in a white flurry as Deckard grabbed the top of the heavy file cabinet and heaved it over onto its side with a crash of splintering wood. Just in time-the first of the squad hit the door with a body-armored shoulder. The impact of the door's edge against the impromptu barricade knocked the cop back against the others behind him.

Deckard heard the elites' shouts and curses as he vaulted over the desk, knocking the monitor and its tripod aside. Bryant's synthesized image disappeared, replaced by a quick burst of static, then a solid glare of light spilling across the floor. In that blue glow, he caught a glimpse of what had happened to the real Bryant: an amorphous island of blood, dried into a dark stain, covered the space behind the desk.

He pushed himself up on hands and knees from the evidence of Bryant's death, as the windows along the side of the office shattered in fire and bright splinters of glass, the blinds flapping like metal-feathered wings, tearing loose from their mounts as a horizontal rain of bullets scoured the opposite wall. The office's contents-the row of other cabinets topped with ancient teardrop-bladed fans and routing bins of yellowed papers and dog-eared manila folders, the desk lamp inset with snaps of Bryant's father's biggame hunting expeditions exploded into sharp-edged fragments, the smaller pieces twisting in the vortex of the bullet's overlapping trajectories.

The deafening noise covered his actions. Deckard lifted above his head the overturned chair on which the video tripod had been mounted, and hurled it toward the single unbroken window that looked out to the police station's cavernous space. The shards of glass sprayed outward, the chair tangling in the cords of the blind, then tearing it loose and trailing the metal slats to the floor. He followed after, keeping low beneath the continuing gunfire, pushing off from the windowsill's jagged edge. He landed shoulder-first among the bits of glass, then rolling onto his back and drawing the gun from the uniform's holster with both hands.

"There he is!" one of the cops shouted over the din, pointing. Deckard's shot caught him in the chest, knocking him back with arms flung wide against the others stationed a couple of yards outside the office's door. A burst of assault-rifle fire raked the floor as Deckard spun away; he came up with his own gun aimed and another round squeezed off.

He heard the rifle clatter onto the floor, but didn't stop to look over his shoulder as he scrambled to his feet. The curved-ceiling stairs leading down to the basement levels were a few yards away; bare fluorescent tubes bounced a sickly illumination from the cracked white tiles. He sprinted toward the arched opening.

More shots sounded behind him, but he'd already reached the stairs; he grabbed the rusting metal rail and used it to sling himself hard against the wall. He leaned out far enough to brush his pursuers back with another couple of shots. Then turned and ran, taking the steps three at a time, a barely controlled fall toward the depths beneath the police station.

Isidore looked up at the figure standing in the doorway. "Wuh-what is it?"

The security agent from the Tyrell Corporation stepped into Isidore's office. So big in his grey uniform with the name tag on the breast that he seemed to take up at least half the available space, his buzz-cut head brushing the ceiling. Andersson looked around, as though seeing the clippings and old calendars on the walls for the first time. "Oh . . . nothing too serious." The agent turned back toward the owner of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital with a dead, unfeeling gaze. "I just needed to speak with you for a little bit. To tell you that there's going to be some changes made."

"Ruh-really?" The cat, his favorite, the one without skin or flesh to cover its mechanical bones, slipped in through the open door and jumped up on the desk. "Luh-luh-like what?"

Isidore picked the cat up and held it against his chest. He stroked its steel, furless head and got a deep thrumming purr in response.

"Well, I'm not going to be working around here anymore. I've got other things to do."

"I suh-see." He nodded slowly. "That's yuh-your puhruh-ruh-
pre
rogative. After all, you weren't ever really wuh-working for me. You were always working for her." He watched his hand scratching behind the point where the mechanical cat's ear would have been, if it'd had one. "I guh-guess I'll have to reevaluate the suh-suh-situation, see what the pet hospital really nuh-needs. So I can make other arrangements."

"You don't have to do that." Andersson looked at him with an almost tender regard. "The arrangements have already been made."

"Oh." He knew what that meant. And was confirmed in that knowledge when he watched the other man reach inside the jacket of his dark uniform. He knew what would be in the other's hand even before he saw it. "You know, I thuh-thuh-thought this was going to happen. I was kind of wuh-waiting for it."