EdgeOfHuman (32 page)

A moment later Deckard traversed the night sky, the bright pinprick carpet of the city's lights rolling below him. To either side, police spinners shot by on their own errands, either not picking him up on their radars or getting a VIP readout on their computer screens high enough to keep them sailing past.

The city's towers were well behind him. Deckard looked out the side of the spinner's cockpit and down, and saw darkness, more complete than the cloud-mottled sky. The sideways world, with its fallen buildings and edge-tipped empty freeway, seemed to be within the spinner's circle. That made it easier; he still needed some place where he could pull his act together, think everything through-as he'd been doing before Sarah Tyrell had shown up and spirited him away, for no good reason other than to lay the spinner on him. Off in the distance, a red glow shone, a flickering apparition; somewhere else in the zone, a fire apparently had broken out.

Just beyond the knife blade of steel and concrete that ran a diagonal through the sideways world was the familiar aspect of the safe-house apartment's toppled building. He brought the spinner down low, hovering and then descending vertical into the small cleared space beside it. Once he'd gotten out, boots crunching into the cement fragments and bits of rusted metal that constituted the zone's surface layer, he activated all the spinner's security devices, sealing the cockpit down tight. Parts scavengers were always active at this dark hour, along with randomly motivated vandal types; he didn't want to come back out here and find his transportation stripped. He pocketed the small remote that Sarah had given him, and headed into the unlit apartment building.

The safe-house apartment still smelled like death, an odor that connected with receptors off the olfactory net. A reverse seepage into the walls, like electrical service shut off for failure to pay the bill. That was more or less what'd happened to Pris; not even retired, that bad-faith euphemism, but forcibly unplugged. All the batteries removed, or a new one put in the socket above her eyes, a cold shiny one that sucked up pseudo-life rather than bestowing it. That image weighed on Deckard's thoughts; it made him feel as if he'd spent his whole blade runner career as more of a sinister electrician than anything else.

Former
blade runner, he reminded himself as he straightened back up after ducking beneath the apartment's front doorway. That hadn't changed, despite his having been recruited for one more job. He reached behind himself and lifted the door closed. The resistance to becoming a murderer again was even more final than when Bryant had put the pressure on him. Plus there wasn't a big open-ended prospect ahead, of searching and killing and searching and killing, until he'd gone through the whole list of escaped replicants. There was only the one to deal with.
And I already know
, thought Deckard, standing still to let his eyes adjust to the darkness.
Who it is
.

He stepped through the apartment, hand outstretched to find any of the generator-powered lights. That little geek Sebastian and his friends. had moved everything around; Deckard supposed they had as much right to do it as anyone. He halted, as the sound of something beside his own breathing and stumbling progress hit his ears.

"You make this too easy." He recognized the voice-it hadn't been that long ago-but had no chance to reply. Another sound, that of something hard and narrow whipping through the air; he doubled over in pain when the object hit him in the gut. Another poke knocked him off his feet.

The lights came on. He found himself, as he gasped for breath, looking up at Dave Holden, standing above him, the leg from the kitchen table in his hands. "Goddamn it . . ." Deckard managed to squeeze the words out. "What the hell . . . was that for . . ."

"
That
was for jerking me around for so long." Holden put the end of the table leg against Deckard's shoulder, pinning him back down to the wall beneath. "Not just the last time I was out here talking to you, but all the times before as well." He jabbed the table leg harder. "You must've been laughing your ass off, when I walked out of here before."

Getting onto his knees, Deckard knocked the table leg away with the back of his hand. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"Oh? You will." Taking a step backward, Holden called out over his shoulder. "Hey, come on out here. I've had my fun." He brought his smug gaze around to Deckard. "This is going to trip you out, buddy. A real blast from your past."

As he stood up, Deckard could hear someone else emerging from the farther sections of the safe-house apartment. That could be a problem, dealing with two people; he would've been able to take Holden, with or without the table leg between them. His ex-partner looked as frail as he'd had during their last confrontation, with the bio-mechanical heart in his chest audibly clicking and laboring to perform its functions. Whoever it was that'd come out here with Holden, the person had given him a shot of confidence; smiling, Holden threw away his crude but minimally effective weapon.

"Say hello." Holden tilted his head toward the doorway at the other side of the room. "I think you know each other. In a way, at least."

Deckard glanced away from him, in the direction indicated . . .

And felt the world drop out from beneath himself.

"Jesus Christ-" A shock wave of adrenaline pulsed through him, drawing his spine rigid. Deckard's startled brain spun gearless for a moment.

Ducking underneath the side of the door, a dead thing stepped through, finishing the zipping up of his fly. "Visitors always come around, you know, when you're indisposed." Roy Batty straightened up and flashed his manic smile, eyes bright. "Hey, it's good to see you, too."

"No . . ." He took an involuntary step away from the smiling, hands reaching behind himself for balance. "You're dead . . . I
know
it. I saw it happen . . ." An entire memory reel fast-forwarded through his head, a jumble of water sluicing blood over rusted metal, then a scruffy white pigeon, a winged city rat, climbing into the sky from hands that had fallen open and would never close upon anything again. "You're dead, Batty . . .

"Well, yes and no." Batty's image-Deckard wasn't sure yet whether it was real or an hallucination-gave a judicious shrug. "A
copy
of me is dead-hell,
lots
of copies are-but I'm not. The original has proven to be somewhat more durable."

"That's the truth, Deckard," With his hands free of the table leg, Holden had dug into his jacket pocket and come up with the same gun he'd had before. "Or at least I think it is. For the time being. This guy's the templant for all the Roy Batty replicants. Including the one you met up with before."

The explanation made sense, of a sort. Looking closer at the figure standing before him, Deckard could see that the man appeared older than the one that existed in his own memory banks. Both bio- and chronologically older, hands bonier, a little loose flesh around the tendons of his neck, lines that came with the passage of time set into his face. A Batty replicant would never have reached this stage; the built-in limitation of a four-year life span precluded it. Unless-he supposed it was a possibility-something had been done to prolong its existence past that hard cutoff point.

Whether the Roy Batty in the tilted room was human or not-that wasn't something he was worried about now. The shark of again seeing that smiling face had passed. What concerned him was the gun in Holden's hand, and the cooperative air between the two men.

"What's the deal?" He looked from one to the other. "I have a feeling you didn't come out here just to say hello."

"That's the truth as well." Holden kept the gun pointed at him. "We're taking you in, Deckard. We're going to hand you over at the police station downtown."

"On what? Administrative charges?" If these two didn't know about Pris having been human, and his being tagged for her murder, he wasn't going to tell them. He couldn't believe that these two loose cannons were in on the LAPD loop; maybe they could be bluffed. "So I made unauthorized use of a department spinner when I split town-that's not a hanging offense. They can reimburse themselves out of the money I left in the pension plan."

"Can the bullshit." Holden shook his head in evident disgust. "Replicants don't have 401-k's."

"What're you talking about?"

The two men shared glances and a smile between them, then looked back at Deckard.

"You're a replicant. You know it, and now
we
know it. Retirement for you is a whole different sort of thing."

"Actually, Roy, I'm not entirely sure how we should proceed here." With his free hand, Holden scratched his chin. "Why are we bothering to talk with this schmuck? He's a replicant-we've already established that-so why don't we just ice him now? We can drag his dead carcass into the station just as easily. Easier, as a matter of fact."

"Don't be stupid." Batty looked annoyed. "It's not just that he's an escaped replicant here on Earth. He's the only lead we've got on the conspiracy against the blade runner unit. If we snuff him before we can shake him down for what he knows, how're we going to find out who was behind setting you up, and killing Bryant, and all the rest of that stuff?"

"Oh, yeah. Right . . ." Holden appeared confused, his gaze wandering to some abstract point near the apartment's uppermost wall. His face and throat had drained white, as though whatever repair work the doctors might have done on him was now beginning to come apart. "Wait a minute."

"We can't even take him
in
to the station until we find out more shit." Even more insistent, Batty's voice prodded the other. "We have to find out who in the police is tied up in this. Otherwise, we could be walking into there and handing him right over to the people he's been working with. Then they'd ice
our
asses."

"I said,
wait
. . ." With his trembling, upraised hand, Holden tried to ward off the other's arguments.

Deckard looked from one to the other.
Geriatrics
, he realized. Like having been captured by a mobile wing of the nearest old folks' home. "You people are completely screwed up." He took a quick couple of steps and picked up the wooden table leg that Holden had tossed aside. Before the other man could react, he turned around and knocked the gun from his hand. The partial impact was enough to send the enfeebled Holden sprawling.

The other one was faster. He sensed Batty launching himself from across the room; a split second later .a forearm was against his throat and the man's weight on his back. Locked together, they toppled and crashed into the wall beside the door.

A hand brought up by his chin was enough to peel Batty's choke-hold away. The lined visage snarled at Deckard as he got his palms against the other's shoulders and pushed him away. Deckard shook his head. "You're too old for this nonsense." He raised his knee against Batty 's abdomen, prying away the clawing grasp of the withered hands and throwing him on top of Holden's dazed, prostrate form.

"Fuck you-" Batty scrabbled toward the gun a few feet away.

In an instant he'd estimated his chances of reaching the gun before the other man or getting it away from him. Deckard turned and dived for the apartment's entranceway, yanking open the door and tumbling out into the unlit hallway just as a bullet ripped out a section of plaster above him. He got to his feet and ran.

"Shit-" Outside the building, he discovered that the pocket of his long coat had been ripped loose in the struggle with Batty. The remote for the spinner's security devices was gone, probably somewhere back inside the safe-house apartment. He slammed his fist against the curved glass of the cockpit, but nothing happened.

Noises came from the front of the building. He glanced behind himself and saw that both Holden and Batty had emerged. Some kind of scuffle had broken out between the two of them; Deckard could hear them shouting, faces close to each other. As he moved around to the other side of the spinner, he saw Holden grab for the gun in Batty's hand; they wrestled briefly, before a shot snapped through the night air. Holden fell against the side of the building, clutching at the bright smear of blood that had erupted through the torn shoulder of his jacket.

"Deckard! Stop!" He heard Batty shouting as he pushed himself away from the locked spinner, turned, and ran. Another shot kicked up a spray of concrete chips and dust at his feet. "Come back here!"

Your ass
. He kept running, picking his way as quickly as possible across the jagged terrain. Fragments of starlight penetrated the clouds overhead, turning the low jumble of broken shapes to tarnished silver.

Perhaps he was dying. It was hard to tell. Right now, his head felt as though it were about to explode, not with pain, but with the rush of energy that had welled inside him, from the moment he'd stood back up in the safe-house apartment.
That bastard knocked something loose
, thought Holden as he lay against the wall of the deserted apartment building, one hand clutched to his bleeding shoulder. Some governor mechanism for the clattering heart in his chest had gone awry; his pulse seemed to be racing twice as fast as it ever had before.

The wound was more of an annoyance than anything else; Holden managed to get to his feet, swaying a little. But it would serve his ex-partner right if the blow from the table leg and its consequences were what enabled him to catch up and nab Deckard, beat his head a few times against the stony ground before deciding what to do with him next. If his own heart didn't swell up and burst before then, like an overheated engine flying to pieces with its internal violence. Deckard had taken advantage of him during a temporary moment of weakness, when the biomechanical heart and lungs had been chugging through a low point in their cycles; now the sonuvabitch would have to deal with the old Dave Holden. Better than old, he thought grimly.

Bracing himself against the wall for balance, he spotted something on the ground before him; his artificial heart surged when he saw what it was. The gun-he'd gotten it away from Batty, but the other man had twisted it around and squeezed off the single round that had dropped him. Then the sonuvabitch must have been in too much of a hurry, chasing after Deckard, to stop and search around here for it.