He managed one corner of a smile for his old boss. “No choice, huh?”
“No choice.” On the monitor screen, on the other side of the desk, hung the image of Bryant’s own lopsided smile, the video image of his face slowly nodding. “You came around here asking for my help, now you gotta take. It’s out of your hands, pal.” The image drew back, one of its hands reaching for the bottle on the desk in the quarantine chamber. “Besides, even if they can get to me, what the hell do I care. I’m an old man, Deckard. At least I feel like one. Liver probably looks like a wet rag by now, plus I got an ulcer I could put my fist through, do sock puppet shows inside my stomach. if I wanted. I get plugged, so be it.” He poured himself a taller drink than before. “Besides, I do owe it to you.” The image gazed, eyes half-lidded, into the unlit depths of the glass. “You always came through for me, Deckard. Even when I had to lean on you. When I hauled you in here to take care of that last batch of escaped replicants.”
“What?” All the joints of his spine tightened at once, as though the cord running through them had been yanked by an unseen fist. Something’s wrong—the thinking part of his brain raced to catch up with the instinct, the quick sense that had made it possible for him to be a blade runner.
On the monitor screen the image of Bryant didn’t seem to have heard him. The image went on talking, as though Bryant had started to drift into some private reverie.
“I knew that bunch was going to be trouble. Escaped replieants always are, but those Nexus-6 jobs had me sweating . . .”
That’s not Bryant. He knew; he realized that a fake had been switched in on him. The sweat on his arms chilled, beneath the uniform’s black sleeves. His old boss wasn’t in a quarantine chamber somewhere else; the image on the monitor screen was a persynth, a CGI physiognomen, composited from the hundreds of hours of tapes recorded by the office’s watchcams. A real-time response driver, with a branching script protocol, had been spouting the words in Bryant’s data-sampled voice. A trap like this indicated a high-priority resource drain on the department; to get one of these ersatz personas up and running without detectable processor lag required mega-crag paralleled hardware.
One mistake had tripped them up, made it clear to Deckard what the deal was. Bryant wouldn’t have said thathe’d heard the inspector spouting off enough times to be familiar with his crude vocabulary. Especially when he’d been drinking, which had been most of the time; whenever Bryant had started into bad-mouthing replieants, instead of just giving one of his squad necessary tracking info, he’d used the words skin jobs, his favorite ugly phrase.
Whoever had wired up the physiognomen on the monitor screen had forgotten to cut out the PC loop imbedded in the police department’s main computers, the language-scrubbing circuit that kept the LAPD spokesmen from inadvertently broadcasting some of their less attractive publicrelations gaffes. The city’s taxpayers didn’t mind having a kick-ass retro-Gates police force, as long as it talked kinder and gentler.
The whole analysis ran through Deckard’s head in less than a second. They’re trying to pump me, he thought. That was why the trap was being allowed to run on, without him being pounced on immediately—the department authorities who’d set this up hoping to get some kind of info from him while he was liquored up and reminiscing about old times with Bryant’s video simulation, lulled into a false sense of security. They’re watching me right nowwhich meant they may have caught his involuntary reaction, the jerk upward of his head and stiffening of his spine that would signal his perception of something being amiss. Which meant. . . .
His gaze shot to one side. Through the blinds over the office’s windows, he saw that a wide swath of the station’s ground floor had been cleared. A dozen LAPD elites, guns drawn, were running toward him, a few strides and seconds away, “Hey! Where you going?” The synthesized image of Inspector Bryant looked puzzled as Deckard jumped from his chair. “What’s the deal, pal—” Papers scattered in a white flurry as Deckard grabbed the top of the heavy file cabinet and heaved it over onto its side with a crash of splintering wood. Just in time—the first of the squad hit the door with a body-armored shoulder. The impact of the door’s edge against the impromptu barricade knocked the cop back against the others behind him.
Deckard heard the elites’ shouts and curses as he vaulted over the desk, knocking the monitor and its tripod aside. Bryant’s synthesized image disappeared, replaced by a quick burst of static, then a solid glare of light spilling across the floor. In that blue glow, he caught a glimpse of what had happened to the real Bryant: an amorphous island of blood, dried into a dark stain, covered the space behind the desk.
He pushed himself up on hands and knees from the evidence of Bryant’s death, as the windows along the side of the office shattered in fire and bright splinters of glass, the blinds flapping like metal-feathered wings, tearing loose from their mounts as a horizontal rain of bullets scoured the opposite wall. The office’s contents—the row of other cabinets topped with ancient teardrop-bladed fans and routing bins of yellowed papers and dog-eared manila folders, the desk lamp inset with snaps of Bryant’s father’s biggame hunting expeditions exploded into sharp-edged fragments, the smaller pieces twisting in the vortex of the bullet’s overlapping trajectories.
The deafening noise covered his actions. Deckard lifted above his head the overturned chair on which the video tripod had been mounted, and hurled it toward the single unbroken window that looked out to the police station’s cavernous space. The shards of glass sprayed outward, the chair tangling in the cords of the blind, then tearing it loose and trailing the metal slats to the floor. He followed after, keeping low beneath the continuing gunfire, pushing off from the windowsill’s jagged edge. He landed shoulder-first among the bits of glass, then rolling onto his back and drawing the gun from the uniform’s holster with both hands.
“There he is!” one of the cops shouted over the din, pointing. Deckard’s shot caught him in the chest, knocking him back with arms flung wide against the others stationed a couple of yards outside the office’s door. A burst of assault-rifle fire raked the floor as Deckard spun away; he came up with his own gun aimed and another round squeezed off.
He heard the rifle clatter onto the floor, but didn’t stop to look over his shoulder as he scrambled to his feet. The curved-ceiling stairs leading down to the basement levels were a few yards away; bare fluorescent tubes bounced a sickly illumination from the cracked white tiles. He sprinted toward the arched opening.
More shots sounded behind him, but he’d already reached the stairs; he grabbed the rusting metal rail and used it to sling himself hard against the wall. He leaned out far enough to brush his pursuers back with another couple of shots. Then turned and ran, taking the steps three at a time, a barely controlled fall toward the depths beneath the police station.
8 . . . . .
Isidore looked up at the figure standing in the doorway. “Wuh-what is it?”
The security agent from the Tyrell Corporation stepped into Isidore’s office. So big in his grey uniform with the name tag on the breast that he seemed to take up at least half the available space, his buzz-cut head brushing the ceiling. Andersson looked around, as though seeing the clippings and old calendars on the walls for the first time. “Oh . . . nothing too serious.” The agent turned back toward the owner of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital with a dead, unfeeling gaze. “I just needed to speak with you for a little bit. To tell you that there’s going to be some changes made.”