wafted through the booth.
“Hm, I think the expiration date might’ve gone by already—”
“Cut the crap.” Deckard scowled in irritation. “Get on with it.”
Marley ignored him, continuing with the routine. “Not much else in here.
Hardly seems worth the trouble, does it? You’d have to wonder why anybody would make a fuss over something like this.”
“I know what that is.” At the back of the booth, the Rachael child had pushed herself forward, hands flat on the table so she could see better. “There were things like that where I came from. Like that box and all that stuff in it.”
“Of course there were.” Marley turned his smile toward the girl. “You’re absolutely right, sweetheart.” He glanced over at Deckard. “She knows what the score is—or at least part of it. Because this is a standard-issue item, something that was stocked in all transports going outside Earth orbit. No big deal, just your basic little kit for small emergencies, incidents you didn’t need to bother going to the infirmary for. There were probably dozens just like this aboard the Salander 3. But this particular one it’s very special.
Not because of the bandages and the dead aspirin. But something else.”
“It’s all old.” The Rachael child’s brow creased as she studied the box in Marley’s hands. “The ones we had, they were new. I mean, they weren’t all beat up like that one.”
“Sure—” Marley nodded. “That’s because those other first aid kits were still there with you, where there wasn’t any time. This one fell out-well, it was taken out. Somebody carried it out of the Salander 3. Because they had found out how important it was. So it’s been out here, in real time. And that’s where things get old and beat- up. Like this.” He turned back toward Deckard.
“You don’t know yet what I’m talking about. But you will.”
“I don’t know if I want to.”
“You don’t have a choice, Deckard. Not anymore. Not that you ever did.” Marley set the first aid kit down on the table. “If it’s not the contents-all this old crap—then maybe it’s the box itself. Think that could be?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “See the inside of the lid here? What’s it look like to you?”
“Paper.” Mottled and browned by the same passing of time that had marked the small box’s exterior; Deckard didn’t see anything remarkable in the thin lining. “That’s all. Probably it was some instructions, or a list of supplies.” The paper was blank, whatever words that had been on it long since faded. “Standard issue, like you said.”
“Wrong on that one, pal.” Marley watched as one of his fingernails picked at the edge of the paper. “What was standard on these kits was to have the contents list printed right on the metal. See? Like that.” One corner had been peeled away enough to reveal the black lettering beneath. “So somebody must’ve stuck this in here. For a reason.” He grasped the wrinkled paper between thumb and forefinger and tore it away. “Which you shall see.”
Something else was behind the paper, a rectangle just as thin but stiffer.
Marley pulled it from the hiding place and looked at it for a few seconds before handing it across the table.
A photograph. Deckard held it by the edge, looking into the frozen section of the past that had been caught there.
He was still looking at it and listening to Marley explain what it meant, what it showed-listening and understanding at last-when the first bullet hit.
For a moment, Deckard thought it was something from the video monitor, something that was happening to that other Deckard, the actor playing him in the reenacted past. The noise of the shot was so loud that it pulled his gaze away from the ancient, long-hidden photograph and toward the monitor. That Deckard, with his long coat but without his face, was backed up against a motorized urban trash-retrieval unit; the gun was a gleam of black metal spinning away, knocked out of his hand by the taller figure looming above him . . .
A quick scream of fright from the Rachael child, and he realized that the shot had been in this world and not in the one held by the monitor. The bullet had torn into the fiberboard ceiling above the booth, gouging out a ragged trench from which a loop of electrical conduit dangled like a silvery intestine.
The second bullet took out the video monitor a few feet away, sending bright specks of glass across the floor and the table, as though that other Deckard and his small world had been further reduced to their component atoms, a furious energy propelling them from one reality to a larger one.
Deckard’s hand, guided by its own instincts, was already pulling the gun from his jacket as his gaze snapped toward the doorway. Black-uniformed figures stood between the bar’s darkness and the light outside, their weapons raised and aimed straight toward him.
She saw everything that happened.
They had told Sarah to stay back, out of danger; they would take care of the situation. Right now, she didn’t have to do anything except watch.
“These guys are professionals,” said Urbenton, standing beside her on the street outside the bar. The area hadn’t been cordoned off-no need; the operation wouldn’t take more than a few minutes—so a small crowd from the emigrant colony’s surrounding alleys and warrens had formed, attracted by the audible stimulus of the gunshots and raised voices. “I wanted to use some of my video crew—I figured they’re good enough at faking this kind of thing, they should be able to pull something off in reality, with real guns and stuff. But I got overruled on that account. So we got the heavy hitters on our side.”
A glance over her shoulder, and she saw a few more of the uniformed men keeping the gawkers back with well-directed blows of their rifle butts. She looked back toward the doorway of the seedy bar, where all the rest of the U.N-provided storm troopers had blitzed a few seconds ago. “I’m going in there,” she said, walking without haste toward the scene.
“Hey!” The short, round video director grabbed at her arm, trying to pull her back. “You can’t do that—”
She shook Urbenton off and kept walking.
The predictions had been right; the extraction procedure was happening so fast that Sarah managed to see only the last bit of action. She had no qualms about being around the U.N.’s elite squad members; they reminded her, in their wordless, cold-eyed efficiency, of some of the men who had worked for her when she took over the Tyrell Corporation.
They set about their jobs, and did them, and then melted back into the shadows, minus whichever of their number had crossed over and become corpses.
Standing in the bar’s doorway, looking down the short flight of steps that led in, Sarah could see overturned tables and chairs, the few unnecessary figures of the other patrons shoved up and huddling against the walls, the ceiling-mounted video screens either smashed or still displaying the end sequence of Deckard’s reenacted travails in Los Angeles. And at the far end of the space, the targets, the whole reason for her bargain with Urbenton and his backers.
A last flurry, which she was able to witness over the dark-uniformed shoulders. Deckard, sitting at one side of a booth, had pulled a gun out of his jacket, the same weapon he had taken from her back at the hovel. Before he could level it and fire, the other man—she had been told he would be there, and for whom he was working-reached over and wrested the gun away from Deckard. The other man had a more urgent agenda, one that he had a chance of accomplishing; he emptied the gun’s clip into the briefcase lying on the table. At that close range, the elongated bursts from the gun’s muzzle touched the briefcase’s imitation leather like quick tongues of fire; the heavy slugs ripped the briefcase into tattered shreds, suspended for a moment in the air beyond the table’s edges. A cry, not of pain but furious rage, sounded from the fragments before they fell in twisting, charred scraps across the glass- littered floor.
That was all that the man sitting across from Deckard accomplished. The U.N. troopers had their orders; the man was driven backward by the assault rifles’ bullets, his chest shattered to the spine. Deckard had scrambled from the booth, reaching to grab the barrel of the nearest gun. The trooper expertly turned the rifle around, catching Deckard across the angle of the jaw, the hard blow sending him sprawling and unconscious. Another storm trooper reached into the booth and grasped the wrist of the little girl cowering there, then yanked her out into the open.
The operation was over, silence filling the debris-strewn bar. “Let’s go,” said Urbenton, taking Sarah by the elbow and drawing her back from the doorway. “Nothing else is going to happen here.” The troopers behind them
