“No,” admitted Marley. “But I knew Sebastian had this. It’s a pretty important little item, even if it doesn’t look it. So it’s worth keeping track of. If Sebastian had it, and now you do, chances are good that you got it from him.
Logical, huh? And I’m right, aren’t I?”
A nod from Deckard. “So what’s so important about it?”
“Well, why don’t we take a look?” Marley gave a playful wink. “Shouldn’t be too hard for a couple of geniuses like us to figure out. Let’s see With his thumb, he pried open the lid; rust in the hinge joint creaked as the flat metal was prodded back by one fingertip. “Not too promising, if you’re looking for the secrets of the universe.” He glanced up at Deckard. “Old bandages and dried-up disinfectant.” The fingertip now pushed around the box’s antique-looking contents. “How about these aspirin?” When he pried the lid off one of the tiny bottles, the decayed vinegar smell wafted through the booth.
“Hm, I think the expiration date might’ve gone by already—”
“Cut the crap.” Deckard scowled in irritation. “Get on with it.”
Marley ignored him, continuing with the routine. “Not much else in here.
Hardly seems worth the trouble, does it? You’d have to wonder why anybody would make a fuss over something like this.”
“I know what that is.” At the back of the booth, the Rachael child had pushed herself forward, hands flat on the table so she could see better. “There were things like that where I came from. Like that box and all that stuff in it.”
“Of course there were.” Marley turned his smile toward the girl. “You’re absolutely right, sweetheart.” He glanced over at Deckard. “She knows what the score is—or at least part of it. Because this is a standard-issue item, something that was stocked in all transports going outside Earth orbit. No big deal, just your basic little kit for small emergencies, incidents you didn’t need to bother going to the infirmary for. There were probably dozens just like this aboard the Salander 3. But this particular one it’s very special.
Not because of the bandages and the dead aspirin. But something else.”
“It’s all old.” The Rachael child’s brow creased as she studied the box in Marley’s hands. “The ones we had, they were new. I mean, they weren’t all beat up like that one.”
“Sure—” Marley nodded. “That’s because those other first aid kits were still there with you, where there wasn’t any time. This one fell out-well, it was taken out. Somebody carried it out of the Salander 3. Because they had found out how important it was. So it’s been out here, in real time. And that’s where things get old and beat-up. Like this.” He turned back toward Deckard.
“You don’t know yet what I’m talking about. But you will.”
“I don’t know if I want to.”
“You don’t have a choice, Deckard. Not anymore. Not that you ever did.” Marley set the first aid kit down on the table. “If it’s not the contents-all this old crap—then maybe it’s the box itself. Think that could be?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “See the inside of the lid here? What’s it look like to you?”
“Paper.” Mottled and browned by the same passing of time that had marked the small box’s exterior; Deckard didn’t see anything remarkable in the thin lining. “That’s all. Probably it was some instructions, or a list of supplies.” The paper was blank, whatever words that had been on it long since faded. “Standard issue, like you said.”
“Wrong on that one, pal.” Marley watched as one of his fingernails picked at the edge of the paper. “What was standard on these kits was to have the contents list printed right on the metal. See? Like that.” One corner had been peeled away enough to reveal the black lettering beneath. “So somebody must’ve stuck this in here. For a reason.” He grasped the wrinkled paper between thumb and forefinger and tore it away. “Which you shall see.”
Something else was behind the paper, a rectangle just as thin but stiffer.
Marley pulled it from the hiding place and looked at it for a few seconds before handing it across the table.
A photograph. Deckard held it by the edge, looking into the frozen section of the past that had been caught there.
He was still looking at it and listening to Marley explain what it meant, what it showed-listening and understanding at last-when the first bullet hit.
For a moment, Deckard thought it was something from the video monitor, something that was happening to that other Deckard, the actor playing him in the reenacted past. The noise of the shot was so loud that it pulled his gaze away from the ancient, long-hidden photograph and toward the monitor. That Deckard, with his long coat but without his face, was backed up against a motorized urban trash-retrieval unit; the gun was a gleam of black metal spinning away, knocked out of his hand by the taller figure looming above him . . .
A quick scream of fright from the Rachael child, and he realized that the shot had been in this world and not in the one held by the monitor. The bullet had torn into the fiberboard ceiling above the booth, gouging out a ragged trench from which a loop of electrical conduit dangled like a silvery intestine.
The second bullet took out the video monitor a few feet away, sending bright specks of glass across the floor and the table, as though that other Deckard and his small world had been further reduced to their component atoms, a furious energy propelling them from one reality to a larger one.
Deckard’s hand, guided by its own instincts, was already pulling the gun from his jacket as his gaze snapped toward the doorway. Black-uniformed figures stood between the bar’s darkness and the light outside, their weapons raised and aimed straight toward him.
She saw everything that happened.
They had told Sarah to stay back, out of danger; they would take care of the situation. Right now, she didn’t have to do anything except watch.
“These guys are professionals,” said Urbenton, standing beside her on the street outside the bar. The area hadn’t been cordoned off-no need; the operation wouldn’t take more than a few minutes—so a small crowd from the emigrant colony’s surrounding alleys and warrens had formed, attracted by the audible stimulus of the gunshots and raised voices. “I wanted to use some of my video crew—I figured they’re good enough at faking this kind of thing, they should be able to pull something off in reality, with real guns and stuff. But I got overruled on that account. So we got the heavy hitters on our side.”
A glance over her shoulder, and she saw a few more of the uniformed men keeping the gawkers back with well-directed blows of their rifle butts. She looked back toward the doorway of the seedy bar, where all the rest of the U.N-provided storm troopers had blitzed a few seconds ago. “I’m going in there,” she said, walking without haste toward the scene.
“Hey!” The short, round video director grabbed at her arm, trying to pull her back. “You can’t do that—”
She shook Urbenton off and kept walking.
The predictions had been right; the extraction procedure was happening so fast that Sarah managed to see only the last bit of action. She had no qualms about being around the U.N.’s elite squad members; they reminded her, in their wordless, cold-eyed efficiency, of some of the men who had worked for her when she took over the Tyrell Corporation.
They set about their jobs, and did them, and then melted back into the shadows, minus whichever of their number had crossed over and become corpses.
Standing in the bar’s doorway, looking down the short flight of steps that led in, Sarah could see overturned tables and chairs, the few unnecessary figures of the other patrons shoved up and huddling against the walls, the ceiling-mounted video screens either smashed or still displaying the end sequence of Deckard’s reenacted travails in Los Angeles. And at the far end of the space, the targets, the whole reason for her bargain with Urbenton and his backers.
A last flurry, which she was able to witness over the dark-uniformed shoulders. Deckard, sitting at one side of a booth, had pulled a gun out of his
jacket, the same weapon he had taken from her back at the hovel. Before he could level it and fire, the other man—she had been told he would be there, and for whom he was working-reached over and wrested the gun away from Deckard. The other man had a more urgent agenda, one that he had a chance of accomplishing; he emptied the gun’s clip into the briefcase lying on the table. At that close range, the elongated bursts from the gun’s muzzle touched the briefcase’s imitation leather like quick tongues of fire; the heavy slugs ripped the briefcase into tattered shreds, suspended for a moment in the air beyond the table’s edges. A cry, not of pain but furious rage, sounded from the fragments before they fell in twisting, charred scraps across the glass-littered floor.
That was all that the man sitting across from Deckard accomplished. The U.N. troopers had their orders; the man was driven backward by the assault rifles’ bullets, his chest shattered to the spine. Deckard had scrambled from the booth, reaching to grab the barrel of the nearest gun. The trooper expertly turned the rifle around, catching Deckard across the angle of the jaw, the hard blow sending him sprawling and unconscious. Another storm trooper reached into the booth and grasped the wrist of the little girl cowering there, then yanked her out into the open.
The operation was over, silence filling the debris-strewn bar. “Let’s go,” said Urbenton, taking Sarah by the elbow and drawing her back from the doorway. “Nothing else is going to happen here.” The troopers behind them swung their rifles, clearing a path to the ground vehicle that would take them out to the emigrant colony’s landing field.
“You should have killed him,” Sarah said when she and the video director were back aboard the shadow corporation’s yacht. She had kept her silence until then. “When you had the chance.”
“But that wasn’t the deal we made.” Urbenton glanced up at her, then returned to fussing with the intercom buttons on the lounge’s desk. “You accepted my help-all the assistance we needed to pull this off—but you knew there were conditions attached. You should just be grateful that the authorities owed me a favor for going along with them on that video they just broadcast here.”
She sat back in the wing chair, her favorite one. “You sound like you’re not even interested in having Deckard killed.”
“I’m not, particularly. I just think it’ll make a great tape when it happens. A really neat show, even better than this last one I did.” His broad fingertip jabbed at another button. “And I just want to rev up the image, that’s all. The right set, the right feel it’ll be wonderful.” Another voice spoke up, unprompted by any of Urbenton’s poking at the intercom controls.
When it finished and clicked off, he turned toward Sarah. “That’s it,” he announced. “They’ve got the little girl aboard. We’re ready to go.”
Finally, she thought. She could feel it deep inside herself, the end time coming at last. She didn’t care if Urbenton and all the rest of them went on acting and talking as if they could also perceive her hallucinations; it didn’t matter.
She didn’t even care which L.A. they were heading toward. Just as long as she knew that-soon enough—Deckard would be there as well.
He took the gun with him even though he knew that Marley had fired off every round that had been loaded inside it. The weapon might still come in handy, despite feeling so much lighter.
“You’re back here?” The man on the other side of the counter sneered at Deckard. “I thought you didn’t care for our services. Figured we’d pretty much lost you as a customer.”
Deckard didn’t feel like getting into another argument with the man; the last one, when he’d brought the skiff back to the rental yard upon his return from the Outer Hollywood station, had been pointless enough. He dug into his pocket and brought out all the cash he had, a hot sweaty clump of scrip, and dumped it on the counter. “Just give me the same one I had before,” he said. “If it’s fueled up and ready to go.”
Leaning his weight against the counter’s front, Deckard didn’t bother watching as the other man sorted through the bills. He felt tired and bruised, the physical aftermath of the attack on the bar where he’d been sitting and listening to the late Marley.
The front of his jacket was still spotted with Marley’s blood, memorial evidence of the assault rifle bullets that had poured into the booth. I got off light, thought Deckard as he looked down at himself. His jaw ached from the rifle butt blow he’d taken from the U.N. storm trooper; when he’d come to on the floor of the bar, it’d taken a few minutes for a spell of blurred double vision to clear, at least enough for him to stumble out onto the emigrant colony’s streets.
“You’re short,” announced the man behind the rental yard’s counter. He stirred the bills about with his greasy forefinger. “There’s not enough here for the deposit.”
Deckard brought himself up from his bleak thoughts and levelled his gaze at the man. “Then I’ll take it on credit.”
The man’s laugh barked out. “We don’t do that.”
Wearily, Deckard sighed and reached inside his jacket. “Yes, you do.” He placed the cold muzzle end of the gun against the man’s forehead.
A few minutes later, as the skiff was passing through the orbits of Phobos and Deimos—the rental yard man had told him to just keep the little craft, to not even bother returning—Deckard pressed his aching body back into the cockpit seat and assessed his situation. There’s a limit to what you can do with an empty gun, he told himself. Especially since, where he was going, they would likely know that it was empty, that he was essentially unarmed. In some ways, it didn’t even matter; he wasn’t sure why he was going at all.
Just to get killed—that was the likeliest answer to come to him. Could there be a better reason? Before he had lost consciousness, lying on the floor of the bar, Deckard had caught a glimpse of the figure standing in the doorway, past the U.N. storm troopers taking care of business. Even without that sighting, he would have known that Sarah Tyrell was the prime motivator of all that happened. A dramatic touch, typical of her; she might have arranged for the lighting to be as perfect as that, spilling past her into the bar’s darkness, silhouetting her like some shadowed angel, merciless and unavoidable.
One other glimpse, sighted as he had rolled onto his back, the last of his awareness pouring out through the hole that the rifle butt blow had knocked in his world—he had even reached up, a futile hand swamped by the black wave engulfing him. Reached up to stop the men pulling the Rachael child out of the booth, taking her away .
That was all he had seen. The memory of it rushed through his aching skull as soon as he had been able to lift his head from the bar’s floor. Deckard had brushed bits of glass from his face as he’d worked himself into a sitting position and looked around the empty space. He’d been alone, patrons and bartender having wisely fled. The presence of the dead had been with him, both in Marley’s corpse, slumped across the blood-mired table, and the briefcase, torn to mute fragments. Deckard had prodded the largest remaining piece, a corner with one lid-hinge still attached, and had gotten no response. Whatever part of Roy Batty, the human original, had been imbedded in the briefcase was gone now, dispersed to atoms as cold and fine as the white powder scattered irretrievably from the empty Sebastian packet. The walls of the bar had seemed to recede as Deckard had dropped the dead rubbish from his hands, as though the dimly lit space had grown as hollow as the one inside his chest.
Before he had gotten to his feet, balancing himself with one hand against the booth’s table, he had found one other thing in the wreckage. Obviously left for him, placed right at his fingertips—Deckard had reached down and picked up the white rectangle of a business card, flipping it over to see the words SPEED DEATH PRODUCTIONS and Urbenton’s name below that.
Fm doing just what they want me to, thought Deckard as he gazed out the skiff’s cockpit at the stars wheeling by. The gears meshing around him were pushed by both the living and the dead, with no great distinction made between those categories. Even the dead Marley had conspired, i
n his way, to limit all possibilities for action to one inevitable line. Quick thinking on Marley’s part: when the U.N. storm troopers had burst into the bar, he had used the gun to eliminate the briefcase itself, and thus any chance of Deckard’s accomplishing the job he’d accepted. There’d be no carrying of Batty and whatever other information had been encoded into the box—Isidore’s list of disguised replicants or memetic bomb; no telling now—to the insurgents in the outer colonies. Before he’d died, Marley might have had the comfort of knowing that his own job, the one of stopping Deckard’s delivery of the briefcase, had been pulled off.
Which left the teeth of the other gears. Sarah Tyrell and Urbenton, and the forces aligned with them, had correctly read Deckard’s mind, had predicted what he would do when he regained consciousness and found both the Rachael child missing and the simple card indicating where she had gone. Urbenton’s card; the only address on it was a contact point in care of the studios at the Outer Hollywood station. That was Urbenton’s world, the one in which he comfortably operated. That was the destination to which Deckard had programmed the skiff, as inevitably as the tape unrolling on some distant video monitor.
They knew he would come there, gun loaded or not, whether his chances of survival were at zero or any point above. Not just for the little girl, the child named Rachael, but for Sarah as well. Wherever she went, he would have to go there, inevitably. Her destiny had become so intertwined with his that there was no escaping. I should’ve killed her when I had the chance—Deckard gazed out of the cockpit without even seeing the stars. Too late for regrets now; he had waited too long, his hand stayed by memory of another woman’s face, the one he had loved, identical in every aspect to Sarah. The great plan that he’d had, that he’d conceived all the way back on Earth so long ago, had been the excuse for not putting the muzzle of a gun against her temple and pulling the trigger. Deckard knew that now. I should’ve killed her, but I couldn’t have.
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