Replicant Night Read Free

problems.
    Holden glanced over at the briefcase. Plain black, a decent grade of leatherette, chrome snaps and bits around the handle. It looked like the exact sort that millions of junior execs carried into office towers every morning, back on Earth. By rights, it shouldn't have been talking at all; that it was doing so indicated the long-standing personal relationship between the two of them.
    "Big, big trouble." The briefcase continued its simple, ominous pronouncements.
    "I know-" Holden reached out to the control panel and dialed the skiff's guidance system toward the silver crescent's intake beam. "I breathe trouble." More than metaphor: the lungs in his chest, and the heart between them, were efficient constructs of Teflon and surgical steel. His original cardiopulmonary system had been blown out his back by an escaped replicant named Leon Kowalski. Back on Earth, back in the L.A. from which he and the briefcase had just flown. That bullet had been a couple of years ago; there had been others before and since then, some of which he'd fired, others that'd been fired at him. The bio-mechanical lungs sucked whiffs of imminent death and left them on his tongue. Tasting like the ashes of the cigarettes the LAPD doctors had made him give up. "Breathe it out, too."
    "You're probably going to die."
    "Coming from you, that's good." Holden knew that the briefcase's voice was the voice of the dead. A dead man speaking. It didn't matter whether that man, when alive, had been human or not. "You'd know, wouldn't you?"
    If the briefcase had had shoulders, it would've shrugged. "Just leveling with you. That's all."
    Holden ignored the last bit. Lights had started flashing on the control panel, indicating that the intake beam had locked onto the skiff. One light, he knew, would stay yellow for a few more seconds; that was the window of opportunity for abandoning the intake approach, for breaking off and turning the little craft around. And heading back to Earth or anywhere else his own death didn't seem quite so probable.
    He kept his hands folded in his lap, watching and waiting until the yellow light disappeared, replaced by the green one right next to it. They were going in.
    The silver crescent loomed bigger and brighter in the skiff's viewscreen. He could make out the segmented panels that formed its curved, double-tapered shape. Croissant , thought Holden. Thinking of French bakery goods, stuff served with real coffee. The same word, actually. He knew his mind was rattling on, filling up the empty corridors inside his head with nonsense. So there wouldn't be room for worrying about the job he'd come all this way to Outer Hollywood to do.
    A delivery job. Once I was a blade runner , he mused; now I'm some sort of errand boy . He didn't mind; he'd kept his gun when he'd quit the police department. That was the main thing: he needed it now more than before.
    The silver crescent grew larger, blocking out the pocked white shape of the real moon. Brown-mottled Earth lay somewhere behind the skiff; Holden didn't sweat the navigational fine points. Those had all been programmed in, along with the other details of the job. He glanced again at the briefcase, which had mercifully fallen silent. The initials on the small brass plaque under the handle read RMD. Not his, but those of the person to whom the briefcase was to be delivered. Then he can deal with it , thought Holden. He wondered if M really was Rick Deckard's middle initial, or whether that was just something that the people who'd put the briefcase together had made up out of thin air.
    Outer Hollywood filled the screen now; the intake beam had brought the skiff around to the landing bays on the curve's fat convex side. There'd been a single bright flash, the viewscreen's pixels max'd out, when the skiff had passed through the focussed reflection from the bank of mirrors that served as the crescent's attached star. Holden had caught a glimpse of the massive struts and triangulated