K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

I should sit down-he felt as old as Batty looked. Or lie down, take the load off his new heart. The doctor was right; if he wasn't careful, the whole setup could give way, like an overstressed motor. And he couldn't allow that to happen, not until he'd moved his own agenda along. He'd have to husband his strength, calculating all of his resources and endurance, to accomplish what he'd have to do.

He glanced from the corner of his eye at Batty. The other-human or replicant; he still wasn't sure-stood silent. The quiet gave Holden the opportunity to start putting together his list of the people who'd screwed him over.

Bryant was on the list, of course. He nodded slowly, gazing toward the red-shaded sunrise. If nothing else, Batty had convinced him of that part, that the head of the blade runner unit had set him up to get blown away by the replicant Kowalski. Why, he didn't know. All of Batty's big talk of high-level anti-blade runner conspiracies hadn't impressed him.

Cops had simpler ways of determining who to go after. Mainly the application of that ancient maxim, Cui bono? Who'd benefited from his taking a hit?

The answer came with minimal pondering. Deckard… my old pal. That sonuvabitch. Deckard had taken over the assignment, to track down the escaped replicants; that was a nice fat bunch of bonuses for retiring each one. Maybe that whole business of his quitting the department had been a ruse, something cooked up between Deckard and Bryant, to make Holden believe that he finally had a clear field, his old rival in the blade runner unit off the scene. Maybe a little kickback arrangement, Bryant and Deckard splitting the bonuses? That was possible as well. Who knew why people did evil shit? Maybe the tests should be redesigned, that determined who was human or not. None of that empathy nonsense. Instead… Would you have any problem sticking a knife in your friend's back? No? Congratulations — you have all the essential qualities of treachery, ingratitude, and two-facedness that marks a real human being. Collect your ID and ammo discount card at Window Five. That would work.

Holden glanced over again at Batty. He was necessary for the time being; Holden knew he couldn't take care of everything he needed to, not in his present post-op condition. I'll go along with him for now, thought Holden. For as long as I need to.

The other opened his eyes, bringing his sly gaze around. "You've had a busy night." Batty displayed his psychotic smile again. "Haven't you? All the things you've found out…"

Right. He said nothing aloud. He'd already added Batty to the list of things to be taken care of. Whether Batty was human or not-that remained to be seen-he might be the only one who could make that whole pitch about Holden being a replicant. Whether it was true or not, it wasn't a good thing for somebody to be going around talking about.

He'd decided. He smiled back at Batty. If he had to kill the guy to prove that he was human himself… or at least keep everyone thinking he was…

He didn't have a problem with that.

The space behind the police station's walls had narrowed, a gap through which Deckard had barely been able to squeeze himself, the rough concrete surfaces tearing open the front of the stolen uniform. He left a trail of watered blood on one of the massive pilings that had been sunk into the ground to support the weight of the multileveled structure rearing high above him. The dark gap chilled as it sloped farther underground; a draft smelling of stone and smoldering fires rose into his face and was drawn into his lungs with each straining breath.

Suddenly the constricting pressures against his shoulders flared apart, the span widening beyond the reach of his raw-scraped hands. The gravel of broken concrete slipped from under his boots, pitching him forward. The only thing that kept him from falling was an angle of pipe that his flailing grasp found a few inches from his head; his fingers tightened upon it as he heard, past the hammering of his pulse, a few dislodged pebbles clatter upon another level beneath. A low rumble moved through the earth itself.

He knew that his pursuers were still working their way down toward him; their muffled voices leaked through the gap, along with the noises of the equipment, hydraulic jacks and hissing acetylene torches, with which they cut a channel through the station's underpinnings. Only a matter of time until they caught up with him, the rat-like escape he'd made coming to an end in some corner of rock and buried steel girder.

A dim glow rose from the space that had opened below, as the rumbling sound grew louder, taking on an insistent mechanical rhythm. Deckard could see now that he had broken through the roof of an arched tunnel, with a parallel ribbon of iron tracks running its length. Some past seismic event had torqued the police station's foundations enough to pry open the cleft through which he'd squirmed; bricks and ragged chunks of concrete lay scattered across the bed of one of the old railway tunnels that ran beneath the massive structure. The glow, rapidly becoming brighter, came from the engine of the rep train approaching around the tunnel's curve. The hot diesel smell, oily and stinging, struck him full in the face, as though the source of all Santa Ana winds had erupted from the earth's core.

The sounds of his pursuers grew closer, perhaps only a few yards back along the gap through which he'd crawled. Those noises were drowned out by the rep train's noise and clatter, now directly beneath him. He squatted down, then got his legs out past the crumbling edge of the hole into the tunnel roof. He held on for a few seconds longer, until the dark shape of the engine was past; then he dropped, pushing himself away from the edge, diving with outstretched hands.

With a jarring impact, he landed on top of one of the freight cars. He clawed for a hold on the wooden slats; through the gaps between them, he could see faces looking up at him. None of the human-like figures, pressed tight against each other inside the car, raised a voice; their blank gazes regarded him without emotion.

He couldn't hold on. The rattling motion of the train peeled his fingertips, wet with his own blood, away from the slat to which he clung. A hard lurch jolted him loose; in the stink and din, his chest and stomach slipped across the freight car's roof. The rep train took another curve in the tunnel; the swaying motion was enough to throw him over the edge.

One crooked arm caught itself in the angle between a vertical slat and slanting cross-beam. His back and shoulder slammed against the freight car's side, knocking the last of his breath from his aching lungs. The tunnel wall, jagged stone outcroppings and rusting stanchions, screamed a few inches away from his head as he fought with animal desperation to latch his free hand on to any part of the car.

His own weight began dragging his arm from its hold upon the vertical slat. His agonized vision took in the freight car's occupants, their naked forms picked out by the engine light bouncing off the tunnel's arched ceiling. Male and female replicants, packed behind the freight car's sliding door, locked with a single steel bolt.

The other cars behind, stretching into the tunnel's darkness, were the same, filled with the rejects from the Tyrell Corporation's production lines-the replicants whose memory implants hadn't taken, the ones who hadn't passed the mental and physical tests that qualified them to be slaves in the off-world colonies. Their creators routed them through a clearing station administered by the police department, checking them off in numbered lots to make sure all were accounted for prior to disposal. Not retirement-an industrial process, quick asphyxiation and smokestacks belching out the odors of incinerated flesh.

He could no longer tell what things he saw before him, and what fear and exhaustion had pulled from his memory, overlaying the rep train's reality with his own past. A slope-jawed face turned away from him, the male replicant's massive shoulders hunched with a sullen, proverbial resentment; his bare arms glistened with sweat. Kowalski-he could remember the face, or one just like it, another unit of the same model. What had the other Kowalski said to him? A long time ago, in another world, up on the streets of the city far above. Wake up — it's time to die…