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.”