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  "Looks to me like they're just pulling parts off some old trashed-out police vehicles." He tilted his head toward the window with its view of the wrecking yard beyond the fence. "What's so top secret about that?"

  "Are you kidding?" Batty emitted a sharp barking laugh. "You know what happens to your appropriations money if the state or the feds find out you're recycling your rolling stock? Shit-they'll cut you off without a dime. Besides . . ." A shrug. "Keep something like this secret, makes it that much easier to keep the other stuff they do here under wraps. Stuff like cramming a nice new set of pumping gear inside you." He jabbed an index finger toward Holden. "You gotta admit, the folks out here have taken good care of you."

  "The people at the hospital -- where I was before -- they were supposed to be taking care of me."

  "That's true." Batty's smile grew wider, wicked with delight. "Like I said, a lot depends upon knowing who your real friends are."

  He mulled that over for a moment. "It was the police department that put me in that ward. When I got shot . . .'

  "Yeah, well, there's police . . . and then there's other police. You gotta cover your action, buddy, all around the table-if you're going to stay in this game."

  Holden narrowed his gaze, studying the figure sitting opposite him. "Maybe so. What I'd like to know is . . . what kind of police have replicants working for them?"

  A shake of the head. "None that I know of. That's not what police do. As a general rule, police are pretty much death on replicants."

  "Then what're you doing here?"

  "Huh?" Batty's smile faded. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Come on." Holden felt a little surge of excitement, a dangerous pulse. "Tell me -- do these people here know that you're a replicant? Or have you pulled it off?"

  "I'm a replicant?" Batty looked genuinely puzzled, eyes widening. Then he started laughing, uproariously this time, face reddening in bright contrast to his spiked crop of white hair, tears wetting the wrinkled corners of his eyelids. "That's good." He could barely get the words out. "That is . . . so good." The prefab walls rattled with his laughter.

  "What's so funny?" All the hilarity was getting on Holden's nerves.

  "That you'd think . . ." Batty pushed himself back in the chair with a hand against his chest, making a visible effort to sober himself up. "Sorry. It's that I just realized what you've been thinking. What must've been going around in your head all along, or at least since I showed up. You think I'm a replicant, right? A Roy Batty replicant." He wiped his eyes with his fingertips. "That's good. That's a really good one."

  "Did you catch any of that action over on Alvarado? Where the blimp went down?"

  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' replicants, 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 nine-millimeter 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 trai
n 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."

  "He was right about that, at least." Batty shook his head in disgust. "That sucker crapped out. Just died. The four-year life span the Tyrell Corporation built into their Nexus-6 models -- that's four years under normal operating conditions. It's like buying a new spinner: you put any stress load on at all and your warranty's invalidated. You got a pile of dead meat on your hands, is what you got." His face set even grimmer. "You know, it's embarrassing to have a shoddy buncha products like that walking around with your face on them."

  "Wait a minute. You're saying there's more than one?"

  "Of course." Batty tilted his head to one side, studying Holden for a moment. "I've noticed this before, that you blade runners just aren't hip to the realities of modern industrial practices. Economics and stuff-I would've thought you'd know this, just to get a handle on what you're doing. The nature of the beast, so to speak.

  "Of course there's more than one Roy Batty replicant. You think the Tyrell Corporation would tool up for a whole production run and then just make a single unit? Christ, they're probably making more of 'em right now. And shipping 'em off-world to the colonies, all packed away in their transport module boxes, like big of Ken dolls or something. I understand it was a pretty popular model-the Roy Batty replicant, I mean. Lot of orders came in for it." His face darkened to a scowl. "Not that you'd know it from the royalty statements that I get from the Tyrell Corporation. I tell you, man. That reserve against returns they hold back . . . it just gripes my ass."

  Holden stayed silent for a moment, trying to get his thoughts started up again. He felt the emptiness of the desert's vast unpeopled spaces, just beyond the building's thin walls. Unfamiliar territory, a long way from the Los Angeles that he was used to moving around in. Same way with the stuff that Batty was telling him. "Let me get this straight. You get royalties?" The only question he could think of to ask. "On what? Your personality or something?"

  "Hell, yes." Spine going rigid, Batty looked offended. "On my personality, my expertise-my experience. Everything I've got up here." He tapped his forehead. "I've got nearly half a century of smarts, what I was born with and what I developed the hard way; I went into this business when I was barely old enough to shave. And I got my ass handed to me, plenty of times, right off the bat. You become a mercenary, a military combat specialist, as young as I did, they're signing you up to be nothing but cannon fodder. You're a minimum-wage corpse, man." He folded his arms across his chest. "Some of these fuckin' replicants think they got it so bad; they ain't seen shit. I did some tours where the survival rate was one in twenty -- Schweinfurt, Provo, Novaya Zemlya. Hell, at Caracas the rate was one in fifty. But I was that one." Setting his hands on his knees, he leaned forward, eyes radiant diamond points. "And you know why?"

  Inside Holden, one of the bio-mechanical heart valves trembled. "Why?"

  The thin edge of Batty's crazy smile appeared. "Because . . . part of my brain's wired in backward. I was born that way. Unique. Way inside." He gestured with a fingertip pressed above his ear, twisting it like a drill bit. "Neural malformation, calcium deposits on both the right and left amygdala. That's the brain structure that creates the emotional response of fear. Usually, people with this condition -- it's pretty rare -- they just don't feel fear. There's no physiological or emotional response. My head's better. The amygdalae are webbed through a whole batch of my major serotonin receptor sites. Situations that scare other people shitless -- I get off on them. I like 'em." The corners of his smile lengthened, his eyes glittering. "Nothing can scare me. The more people try, the worse things get . . . the happier I am."

  "Sounds handy."

  "Yeah, well . . ." Batty shrugged, looking pleased with himself. "It's like with people who don't have pain responses-you know? They 'have to be real careful not to hurt themselves accidentally. There's no feedback for them to adjust their behavior. It took me a long time-most of my life-to develop an intellectual understanding of fear. Just so I could recognize it in other people's faces. And so I wouldn't go waltzing into situations where I'd be sure to get killed. But yeah, it's handy. Makes me a cold motherfucker. Just think what it'd be like if you chicken-hearted blade runners had heads built that way; you could really get some major damage done." His expression turned to pity. "As it is, it's why you guys don't have a chance against the Tyrell Corporation's Nexus-6 models . . . especially the Roy Batty replicant. All the Nexus-6 types have a little bit of this, but that model in particular -- 'cause it's an exact copy of me -- all of the Roy Batty replicants are in serious kick-ass mode. You guys are just lucky if one of them ups and dies on you. That's the only way you'd survive an encounter with a Roy Batty replicant."

  The other's boasting irritated Holden. "That Batty replicant didn't run into me."

  "Just as well, for your sake. You got iced by that Leon Kowalski model, and that thing's a goddamn moron by comparison. If you'd hit on the Roy Batty one, there wouldn't have been enough left of you to stick an artificial heart into."

  "Maybe." Holden kept his own voice level and cold. "I wouldn't mind having the chance at one."

  "You're not likely to get it. The Roy Batty replicant that was running around in L.A. was the only one that ever made it back to Earth. The UN. authorities know what a loose cannon one of them can be-I've worked for U.N. security, so they're hip to what a version of me is like-so they keep them under wraps or way out in the far colonies. How that one got close enough to make a break for Earth . . . that was a screwup. Somebody wasn't paying attention."

  "You're with the U.N.?" He was still trying to piece together what the deal was.

  Batty shook his head. "Not right at the moment. And I never was officially hooked up with them. I was always more of a freelance operative, you might say. Mercenary. That's how I built up my rep. Then I hired on with the Tyrell Corporation-old Eldon Tyrell recruited me himself. That was because he wanted the
best, and he could afford it."

  The picture was starting to get a little clearer. "What did you do for the Tyrell Corporation?"

  "Eh, some troubleshooting, some industrial strong-arm stuff-there were still a couple of other companies turning out replicants back then, and Eldon decided he didn't want the competition anymore. So they got . . . kind of eliminated. One way or another. And then I was on retainer for a coupla years, while they were checking me out in the corporation's labs. Doing the brain-scan thing-that's when they found out about the cross-wired amygdala. That was pretty much the kickoff for the Nexus-6 development program." Batty shrugged. "After the production line started rolling, I moved over to personal bodyguard stuff, covering old man Tyrell's ass."

  He decided to risk a needle probe, just to see how Batty would react. "You must not have been doing a very good job. They told me in the hospital how Tyrell got killed."

  "Not on my watch. I quit months before that went down. Man, I'd decided long before then that I wasn't going to work for those bastards anymore." Batty's face turned dark and brooding, gaze fixed on some inner vision. "I'm telling you-there's some sick people over there. Eldon Tyrell might've been the worst of them, but they're all fuckin' nuts. Some of the things I've seen . . ." He shook his head. "You know, there's a big red button over in the Tyrell Corporation headquarters-the U.N. made 'em put it in when the place was built. Just a little safeguard, in case some of the stuff they were dinking around with ever got out of hand." His voice twisted with bitter loathing. "I'd love to push that red button, and just stand back and watch the whole friggin' place come down. It's be just what those sonsofbitches deserve."

  A few more notes were jotted down on the file Holden had begun assembling inside his skull. Whatever else this Batty might be following through on whoever else's orders he was executing-he had a personal agenda as well.