Took a while for Deckard to respond to the question, the hard voice right beside him. He leaned back against the wall of the elevator as it crept toward the base of the building. “A little bit.”
“I got called in, all the way over from Slauson. Another ten minutes and I would’ve been off-shift, and the dispatchers could’ve radioed to the moon for my ass.” The cop spoke with no inflection, all traces of emotion drained from the process of communicating.
“Yeah, they like jerking you around.” Deckard kept his own voice at that dead, menacing tone, the words coming out with that slow, reptilian ease they all cultivated. He knew that for his apparent age there should be more stripes on this uniform’s sleeve. A fierce Darwinian attitude operated among the department’s rank-and-file; they ate their own weaker members, to keep themselves lean and mean. Surviving some of the shit that happened down in the locker rooms was the hardest part of the job. If he was going to pull off penetrating the LAPD’s central station, he’d have to give off the same ugly gamma rays that these guys did.
He risked a glance up to the level indicator above the elevator’s doors. There was another twenty floors to go. He’d managed to flag a lift from a county jail spinner, the big grey bus with the barred windows, that’d been returning to the police department’s Kwik-Justice Kourts for another load of plea-bargained felons. His disguise, the patrol uniform he’d stripped off the cop he’d left in the alley, seemed to sail right past the pilot and the guard. The card and pass code had gotten him from the landing deck and into the building. A spark of hope had ignited inside his chest that he’d be able to get into the station, past all the other cops crawling all over it. And get to Bryant.
That was the only plan he had. And the only hope. Of getting out of L.A. alive and getting back to Rachael, asleep in her black coffin. Guarded by owls and all the little nocturnal forest creatures, like an old fairy tale.
God knew that Bryant owed him a favor—or more accurately, a whole string of them, from all the times he’d carried the bucket for Bryant, the blade runner unit, and the whole LAPD by extension. He’d pulled everybody’s cojones off the chopping block on more occasions than he could count.
On some invisible clock, the hands pointed to payback time for all that loyalty he’d shown Bryant. He just hoped that the police inspector could read it as well. All he needed was information; that didn’t seem like much.
“If you asked me . . .” A voice broke into Deckard’s thoughts. “I’d say we should kill them all.”
Then who would sort them out? he wondered. He didn’t know. He glanced over at the cop beside him in the elevator. For a few moments he’d gotten lost in his worried plotting. Not a good thing he knew he’d have to stay hyperalert if he was going to get in and out of this building.
The cop had relaxed, a bit of the anal-retentive steel going out of his spine; he rested his shoulder blades against the wall of the small space. Without taking off his glasses, he wearily rubbed his forehead with one black-gloved hand. A long shift, maybe a back-to-back.
Calculating his overtime pay and brooding about whether it was worth the burnout.
Deckard almost felt sorry for the guy. At least with promoting to the blade runner unit, you got to set your own hours. This poor bastard wouldn’t stand any chance of getting off patrol, if it got logged into his package, his personnel file, that he’d let a wanted man ride all the way down with him to the station’s ground floor.
“Kill all who?” asked Deckard.
“Eh, those goddamn rep-symps.” The cop’s face set into a scowl. “They’re so fond of friggin’ replieants, then we should treat ’em the same way.” He lifted his hand, stuck out his index finger to make a gun, then curled it into the invisible trigger. “Bam. Instant retirement.”
The term rep-symp was a new one to Deckard. Replicant sympathizer?-that seemed the likeliest. Some new development, while he’d been gone from L.A.?
The cop was waiting for him to say something, to make conversation. “Yeah—” He nodded. “Crazy bastards.”
“Crazy’s not the word for it.” The cop’s mouth twisted with loathing. “Traitorous is more like it. They got their own species they belong to. If they don’t like being human, they shouldn’t wait for somebody like us to come around and solve their problems for them. They got guns-shit, they got heavy artillery. Let ’em all suck off some ninemillimeter rounds; then they won’t be human anymore. They’ll be hamburger.”
Deckard kept his face stone, his eyes the only thing moving as he glanced up again at the level indicator. Only a few more floors to go—the elevator had started to slow, braking to its coming halt.
“Some of those things those rep-symps say . . .” The cop standing beside him had gone into a bitter monologue, the looped tape in his head running off its spool. “Where do they come up with that stuff? You heard what that one jerk was spouting off about, before he got plugged. What a load of crap.”
The elevator came to a thumping stop, the doors sliding back.
“Take it easy.” The cop pushed himself away from the back of the elevator. He didn’t look back as he walked out onto the ground floor of the LAPD’s central station.
Deckard gazed past the metal-framed opening in front of him and across the vaulted spaces beyond. The icy blue glow of the building’s exterior security lights traced shadows through the towering windows, inscribing a crosshatch of lines along the arches’ overhead crescents. At this level of the ancient train station onto which the police department’s headquarters had been grafted, the air-conditioning was all retro-fit and inadequate. The spaces near the ornate ceiling shimmered with bottled-up heat; a fine mist hung below that, composed of equal parts cop sweat and the more rancid tang of perp fear.
He turned his head, scanning.
The station’s ground floor was packed with cops, more than he ever remembered seeing here before. The black uniforms, the jackboots and peaked caps, gleamed like oiled chains. It took him a while to realize what was going on. He’d never been in the station, not since he’d worn a uniform, during shift change. Blade runners kept their appointments at the dead hours between.
He also knew, as he stood in the elevator’s open booth of light, that every face out there, wearing silver over its eyes or not, would turn his way if he didn’t move his ass. Even through the miasma locked in here, they’d smell their quarry, frozen in the dazzle of the cops’ sight lines.
He stepped out of the elevator, pushing his way through the crowd. His black leather shoulders shoved against the others, his face the same hard mask as theirs.
Holden gazed hard at the creature sitting opposite him. Inside, confidence slightly shaken, he couldn’t get a readout on this Roy Batty. Whatever his sixth sense whispered, his honed blade runner instinct, it was all fuzzy and indistinct. At the same time, he knew from experience that these escapees from the off-world colonies survived—or tried to-by playing mind games.
“You’re going to tell me you’re not a replicant?”
“Something like that.” Batty wasn’t laughing anymore. “You’ve got it backward, fellow. When I told you I was Roy Batty, I didn’t mean some creepy low-watt version of me. I meant me, period. I’m the real Roy Batty. The human one. I’m the . . . what’s it called . . . the template—”
“Templant,” corrected Holden. This was a possibility that hadn’t even occurred to him.
“That’s the technical term.”
“Yes . . . that’s it. I’m the templant for that Roy Batty replicant that you and your buddies, you hotshot blade runners, were assigned to retire.”
“That one . . .” Holden’s voice went soft, meditative. “Bryant told me that one was dead.”