Edge Of Human b-2

by K. W. Jeter

  "You ask a lot of questions." Cool enough to show nothing more than his index finger tightening on the crook of metal; small shiny things clicked ready inside the rifle. "Not a good idea."

  "Peace, brother." Hands went up again, palms exposed, the smile floating between them. "You keep on doing your job, and I'll go do mine." Inside the man's skull, behind the cold eyes, a single unvoiced word: Jerk. A couple meters beyond the guard stood the open frame of a metal detector; he could see that it'd been switched off, probably to keep it from being triggered by the equipment carts that rolled in and out of the unit. It wouldn't have mattered to him if he'd had to step through the thing, still smiling, to find out what he needed to know; the small, efficient gun hidden at the small of his back was sheathed in enough microprocessor-controlled evasion polymers to slip past a goddamn radar station. It was the lazy unprofessionalism that irked him. These putzes were amateurs, all black-leather and chrome-eyed swagger, and sloppy on the details. Typical.

  He reached behind himself and hit the elevator call button. Already there; the doors slid open and he stepped back, hands still up for a joke, the smile still on his face. He gave a little wave through the narrowing slit. "'Bye now."

  Leaning back as the elevator descended, he let the smile creep up into his eyes. Behind them were no words, just a map, the exact layout of the unit, the guards, the machines and doctors, and the man on the hospital bed, who had a hole where his heart and lungs used to be.

  He got off on the next floor down. No guards on this floor; he collected his gear, bigger and more rawly industrial-looking than the hospital's usual chrome equipment carts, from an unused storage closet and wheeled it into the maternity ward. He began unfolding the heavy bracing struts, the pronged steel feet digging into the scuffed rubberoid flooring.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Some kind of nursing supervisor came bustling toward him, waving a clipboard. "You can't put that thing in here! Whatever it is."

  The smiling man turned toward the woman. "Oh, I think I can." Farther along the ward, on all sides, an audience of pregnant women watched the altercation. They all looked huge and imminent, lying on closely spaced beds and gurneys, raising their heads just enough to look over their rounded abdomens to see what the noise was; their passive faces, medicated or endorphined, radiated a Buddhistic calm. "Besides-" His smile grew larger, though less reassuring. "I won't be here long."

  "I'm calling security." The nursing supervisor turned and strode toward the central station.

  "That's not a good idea." He interrupted his setup procedure, reaching behind himself and taking the gun out from beneath the scrub shirt. A click of metal was enough to stop the woman in her tracks, her eyes widening as she looked over her shoulder and saw the small black hole pointed at a spot just below the front edge of her white starched cap. "Why should we bother them?" He backed her up against the counter of the central station, the gun's muzzle then just an inch away from her forehead. With his other hand, he reached past the younger, even more terrified nurse sitting behind the counter, picked the phone up, and yanked its cord free from the wall below. "Since there's really no problem here, anyway. Unless you make one." His smile broadened as he took the gun away from the supervisor's face and used it to point toward the station's other chair. "Have a seat."

  He walked back toward the bulky device squatting in the middle of the maternity ward's floor. The eyes of all the pregnant women had latched on to him; a couple of the less tranquilized had started to weep softly, pulling up the thin sheets of the gurneys and trying to hide behind them. "Ladies… you're beautiful just the way you are." He held the gun by his own head, pointing it toward the speckled acoustic ceiling. "Just stay like this. Real quiet." He turned, sweeping the beam of his smile across them. "And then we'll always have this moment together. Won't we?"

  The mothers-to-be stayed frozen in place, just as he wanted them. He glanced over his shoulder at the women back at the nursing station. "I'm keeping an eye on you, too." With one hand he pulled out the last of the device's struts and jacked it into place. "So just relax. This'll only take a moment."

  In the breast pocket of his green scrub shirt was a remote with two red, unmarked buttons on one side. Taking a pace back, he fished the metal box out. This was serious enough business to erase the smile for a moment. He hit the top button with his thumb.

  A two-second delay gave him enough time to turn his face away, ears shielded with his upraised hands, remote in one and gun in the other. The shock wave from the blast rolled over his back like a heated ocean wave, with enough force to send him stumbling a few steps before he caught his balance.

  The silence that followed was broken by the muffled sobs of the pregnant women sirening into full-out wails. That and the patter of atomized structural material, falling in a rain of white dust and charred metal across his shoulders.

  Already in motion, he ran back to the device he'd wheeled into the ward. The thrust of the shaped explosive charges had dug the bracing struts another inch into the floor. He gazed up at the raw-edged hole that had been ripped through the ceiling above. Its center was filled by the hydraulic ram that had sprung like a jack-in-the-box from the device, the oil-glistening metal shoving aside the scorched, twisted girders.

  Strapped to one side of the device was an attache case of chrome and molded black neoprene. flicking the remote back into his scrub shirt pocket, he pulled the case free and started climbing, the wrist of his gun hand catching the holds riveted to the side of the ram.

  On the floor above, the hospital staff and security guards were still stunned by the blunt prow shape that had erupted in their midst. Jagged metal scraped along his spine as he emerged partway into the smoke and settling dust. A quick look around, with the case pulled through and flopped down onto the hole's buckled perimeter; he saw the heart-and-lung patient right where he'd planned on, the railed bed surrounded by the whispering machines. The monitor screens had flipped, the explosion having sent the beeping lines into sharp-pointed spasms and trilling alarms. Letting go of the case's handle but not the gun, he pushed himself up and onto the edge of the hole

  The doctors and nurses, the ones left standing, had been shoved by the explosion against the walls. At least one had been hit by a bit of flying shrapnel; blood formed a bright net across his face and surgical gown before he collapsed onto his knees. The patient on the bed, at the edge of anesthetized consciousness, stirred feebly inside the web of hoses and tubes.

  "Hey, buddy-" The smile returned to the man's face, his eyes brightening, as he called to the guard dragging himself toward the rifle that had landed a few feet away. The words were enough to stop the guard, his fingertips a fraction of an inch from the butt of the rifle. The hesitation was more than enough; the guard raised his head and the smiling man fired. One shoulder hit the rifle as the bullet's impact tugged the guard by his shattered skull along the floor.

  He could hear the alarms shrieking somewhere else inside the hospital. Time dwindling now — he pulled the remote out of his shirt pocket and hit the second button.

  In the vibrating sunlight outside the ward's high bank of windows, a brighter spark moved, metal struck by fire. As though it were a piece of the sun, fallen into an orbit low among the city's towers. It grew larger, closer, summoned by the tight beam from the remote in the man's hand.

  Which he was done with — he tossed the small metal box aside. He scooped up the attache case by its black molded handle and strode quickly toward the bed.

  "What…" Not even a whisper, not a sigh, but a few molecules of exhaled breath. The heart-and-lung patient's eyelids fluttered open. "What… are you doing…" A red bubble trembled in the cloudy plastic tube inserted in his trachea.

  "Take it easy, pal." The man's hands were flying as he leaned over the bed. Yanking and pulling, tubes and ridged hoses flipped up from the heart-and-lung patient's blood spattered abdomen. "Just lie back and let me do the work." He'd laid the gun down on the nearest equipment cart, scoopin
g up the sharp-edged tools and sterile white tape he'd known he'd find there. "Funny, that's what she said last night. Don't laugh, you'll bust a stitch."

  Pure oxygen hissed as he jerked the largest hose from a Teflon socket at the breastbone's center; a wobbling bag of Ringer's solution burst on the floor like a prankster's water balloon as his elbow knocked over the IV-drip stand. He worked faster, the attache case open on the bed beside the patient. Security alarms shrieked in dissonant chorus outside the ward; he could sense through the floor the tremor of distant running. The quick, faint noise of ammo clips being shoved into place touched his ear; he didn't look up. He'd already measured the exact amount of time he needed. A spear of reflected sunlight hit his face. Glancing up, he saw the spinner, a modified light-cargo model, approaching the window bank. No one in the pilot seat; the program triggered by the push of the remote's button guided the spinner closer, the steel-reinforced nose gleaming a meter away from the glass, then less.

  With a sweep of his forearm, he pushed the disconnected machines away. Another chrome rack toppled, sprawling the loose tubes, spastic octopus. With the roll of surgical tape he spliced the smaller lines from inside the attache case, snugging them tight to the implant connections that studded the patient's torso.

  "Let's go-" He flipped the switch beneath a glass square set in the case's lid; a fiat green line coursed across the monitor. "Son of a bitch. Come on!" Smile into angry scowl; a fist struck the densely packed machinery; a miniature bellows sucked and gasped through a mesh filter, but the green line remained a perfect horizon. Both fists doubled, he struck the man on the bed, hitting the narrow target between the throat and the red-edged tubes hard enough to partway jackknife the man's knees toward his chest.

  "Jesus…" An agonized whisper. One of the heart-and-lung patient's hands came free, from where it had been bound by the wrist to the bed's chrome rail; he feebly tried to fend off his attacker. "Jesus Christ… get away from me…"

  The man above leaned down, sealing his mouth over the other's, a suction tube already prodded into the kiss. A hard exhale, and the patient's chest raised in response. From the attache case came a birdlike chirp, as the monitor's green line jittered, then caught in a two-stroke beat. The artificial pulse slowed, steadied as the man, smiling again, wiped his mouth and adjusted the knob for the adrenaline flow.

  "I hope you're ready to travel-"

  Words barely spoken, when the high bank of windows shattered, sparkling points of glass arcing across the ward. The segmented metal frame bent and twisted, bolts screeching out of the floor and walls as the nose of the freight spinner shoved its way inside the hospital building. The smiling man brushed glitter of broken glass from the heart-and-lung patient's raw, exposed chest; he reached a hand behind and raised the patient up, his other hand looping the surgical tape around, strapping the attache case and its nest of hoses tight against the body.

  "Hold on!" Glass crunched underfoot as he shoved the wheeled bed toward the spinner, now motionless in the gaping architectural wound.

  Rifle fire behind him — he glanced over his shoulder and saw the bright muzzle flashes, the crouching figures of an LAPD security team, more of them darting from the bank of elevators as the doors slid open, the dark-uniformed men running head down and with guns in hand, taking up positions around the ward's narrow entrance. A bullet clanged and ricocheted from one of the bed's curved metal bars; others slammed into the surrounding walls. The ruptured floor, with the entry device's battering ram still rearing up into the space, and the knocked-aside medical equipment formed a partial barricade between the man and the new arrivals on the scene, momentarily shielding him from a direct line of attack.

  He reached to the small of his back for his own gun, found nothing, remembered that he had left it sitting on top of the main respiratory-assist machine, at the edge of the nest of tubes and hoses from which he'd yanked the bed. He could see the gun now, a small black shape on top of shiny chrome. Too far away to reach, especially with a sharp horizontal rain of hollow points lacing the room — he swung back toward the shattered windows, watching across the prostrate form of the heart-and-lung patient as the freight spinner outside rotated, bringing its open cargo-bay door toward the jagged teeth of glass. The glaring sunlight hit his face like a furnace's hot flood.

  One of the spinner's flanged air intakes caught on a bent, broken section of the windows' steel frame. The thrust engines whined higher in pitch, as the autopilot program shoved the vehicle against the obstruction. The cargo-bay opening stayed where it was, nearly two meters away from the ripped edge of the hospital building.

  Through the echoing clamor of the rifle fire, he could hear the security team shifting position, moving closer into the ward. He took a few steps backward, drawing the hospital bed with him, then bracing his hands against the lowest rail on one side.

  "No…" The heart-and-lung patient had seen what the other man was getting ready to do. "You can't… im… possible…"

  "Shut up." He pushed the bed full force, digging in and picking up speed, head lowered bull-like and muscles straining beneath the green scrubs. A second later the rolling bed had hit the rim of the floor-level window frame; momentum tilted the bed over and sent it flying toward the spinner outside, the cargo bay as the exact center of the target. His own momentum and a final diving launch carried him after.

  He landed on the patient, who moaned and tried to push him away with weak, narcotized arms. One of the hospital bed's wheels had caught against the sill of the bay door; the chrome frame and mattress fell outside the spinner, scraping against the hospital exterior as it spiraled down toward the city streets below.

  Bullets hit and bounced inside the bare-ribbed cargo space. Inside the hospital, the security team had come out to the open, sprinting across the ward's broken field, firing as they ran.

  He scrambled off the heart-and-lung patient; still on his knees, he lunged past the cockpit's empty seats and hit the autopilot's override button on the control panel. A slap of his hand against the thrust levers — the spinner surged forward, a forearm slung around the pilot seat's headrest keeping him from being flung back into the cargo space.

  Through the cockpit's glass curve, he spotted the steel hook of the broken window frame digging farther into the engine's air scoop. Enough to tilt the spinner at a forty-five-degree angle as it fought against the crude grapple. A metal hail hammered small dents into the side panels.

  Over his shoulder he saw the heart-and-lung patient sliding helplessly toward the open bay door. Hanging on to the pilot seat, he reached back and managed to claw a handful of the billowing sheets into his fist. Shock and fear had cut through the patient's anesthetizing drugs; fully conscious, eyes nearly as wide as his gaping mouth, he stared behind and below himself, at the dizzying emptiness of air and the threadlike street rotating hundreds of meters down at the hospital tower's base.

  With the sheet as a taut sling, the other man yanked the heart-and-lung patient up toward himself. With a push of his arm, he managed to get the patient stuffed awkwardly into the other cockpit seat. The gauges and monitor screen on the attache case strapped to the patient's chest shrieked and danced in alarm.

  A twist of the rudder pulled the spinner free of the window frame strut, the pent-up thrust sending the vehicle arcing toward the cloudless sky. The security team, arrayed in the gap in the hospital's outside wall, continued to fire as they dwindled away, the bullets rattling against the cargo-bay door as it slid shut.

  "Uhh…" The heart-and-lung patient was beyond words now. His pale hands fluttered against the attache case, the pulsing machinery that kept him alive. "Uh… uhh…"

  "Knock it off." The other man, smile not yet returned to his face, looked over in annoyance at the heart-and-lung patient. His own hands continued punching a flight pattern into the spinner's on-board computer. "You're making me nervous."

  Sun flashed off the spinner's metal, pure white and dazzling, as it sped through and away from the city's upper re
aches.

  "That's what they've always said."

  Deckard looked at the lab-coated figure on the other side of the desk. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "The suh-same old shit." Something almost like pity moved behind the thick lenses of Isidore's glasses. He shook his head in disgust. "Anytime people wuh-want to get themselves off the huh-hook, that's the kuh-kuh-kind of thing they say. 'I was doing my job. They told me to do it.'" His mocking voice didn't stumble. "It was a kruh-creaky old line at Nurembuh-berg."

  "Yeah, well, maybe it was true there, too."

  "Oh, guh-good one, Deckard." The head of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital pressed his hands fiat against the desk, leaning forward with his suddenly sharper gaze. "Great reh-rhetorical tuh-tactic, all right. You can duh-defend yourself and the Third Reich, all at the same tuh-time."

  "Give me a break." His turn to shake his head. "You brought me here for a lecture on ancient history? Forget it. The dead are buried, and the murderers' ashes were dumped at the side of the road."

  "I'm impressed. You nuh-know your stuff."

  "Enough of it." He leaned back in the chair. "So can I go now? Because if you just wanted to take the moral higher ground with me, you didn't have to bother. Like I said, I quit the job."

  "But maybe," said Isidore, "the juh-juh-job didn't quit you."

  He sighed. "Whatever."

  "Because…" The other's voice went lower and softer. "Because you never really fuh-found anything wrong with the blade runner job itself. You just didn't like duh-doing it anymore. Like you said, you got too far out on the Curve."

  The room, Isidore's office, filled with silence; the papers and old calendars on the wall hung motionless in tensed air. Deckard closed his eyes. "It was a job somebody had to do. They were dangerous."