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, in 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.
Things had changed, though; he wondered if they had changed enough. Maybe he could do it now, despite her mirror resemblance to the dead Rachael. If Ihave to, he decided at last. If that was what Sarah was counting on, his inability to kill anything that looked so much like the woman who had slept in a glass-lidded coffin and who now slept and woke only in the sealed chambers of his remembering, then she might have a surprise coming to her.
They all might. In his hand, when he’d come to, had been the last thing that Marley had given him, the ancient photo that had been hidden inside the lid of the Salander 3 first aid kit. That photograph was now safely tucked inside his jacket. And in another compartment of his memory were Marley’s words, explaining what the photograph showed, what the image meant . . . everything.
As much as the others knew, the strings that Sarah and Urbenton and the ones behind them could pull, there were still some things that they didn’t know.
And that he did.
Deckard laid his fingertips against the lapel of his jacket, feeling underneath the thin, still substance of the photo, warmed by his skin and pulse. He figured the time was coming, and soon enough; at the front of the cockpit, the miniature lunar sphere of the Outer Hollywood station was rapidly approaching. A ripple passed across the stars as the skiff’s drive units modulated down into uncompressed space.
The hissing of snakes was merely the station’s docking gates sealing behind the skiff, followed by the cockpit unlatching. Deckard emerged from the craft into near-total darkness; a few LEDs glimmered on the control panel mounted on a nearby bulkhead, and the skiff’s own running lights sent his blue-edged shadow merging with the empty space.
His footsteps rang against the metal flooring as he headed toward a faintly recalled passageway. No point in trying to conceal his presence or his movement toward the station’s center; they knew he was here. Or not, depending upon whether anyone else was; the last time he’d been at Outer Hollywood, the girdered substructure had vibrated with the activity going on in the various soundstages and studios; the recirculated air had carried the subliminal molecules of the techs’ and extras’ sweat and exhaled breath. This time, as soon as Deckard had stepped down from the skiff, he’d perceived the station as empty and dead, as though abandoned by all the human and close-to-human forms that had been here before.