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lenses above him. But his sight had gone unfocussed and dark, and his flesh was too numb and cold to get any kinetic feedback. Not that he could move, or even want to; that was all past him now.
    But not for the briefcase. Wiseass -a last thought flickered through the darkening chambers of Holden's brain.
    That was the joke, the final one. The delivery he'd come here to make ...
    It would have to find its own way now.

    They heard the shot, followed by another one. Deckard turned away from the video director as the two hard-edged sounds, spaced only a couple of seconds apart, rolled through the orbital station's canned atmosphere. They came from close by-he could tell just from the way the shock waves sifted dust from the pipes and walkways above the room's open ceiling.
    "What the-" The ample flesh of Urbenton's face quivered as though the noises had come from his being slapped. "There's not supposed to be any taping going on down here. Not now-"
    "It's not taping," said Deckard grimly. "It's happening." The last low-pitched echoes had faded away. He left Urbenton standing in the middle of the room as he pulled open the door and strode out into the hallway beyond.
    Urbenton followed him; he could hear the director's trotting footsteps and wheezing breath. Deckard paid no attention as Urbenton called in a panicky voice for him to stop and tell him what was going on.
    Other voices came from behind one of the doors. Deckard recognized the first one that spoke.
    "Was that okay?" It was the voice of another Leon Kowalski replicant. He didn't sound happy. "Was that what was supposed to happen?"
    "You did just fine." The thin door barely muffled someone else's reply. "Don't worry about it-"
    The voice was interrupted by Deckard's shoving the door open. Two faces, a taller man's and a second Kowalski replicant's, looked around at him. Deckard's gaze took them in, as well as the evidence of what had happened in the room. It was laid out as a small video set, with lights and cameras, all switched off, angling in from above.
    One side of the set was in apparent ruin. Past a table and chair, marked TYRELL CORP across its high back, the room's far wall was torn open. An identical chair lay toppled over in the wreckage, a body with shattered chest sprawled out from it. Blood pooled out from beneath the corpse.
    Deckard walked past the others and stood looking down at the figure, its arms splayed wide, half-lidded gaze turned blindly toward the empty spaces above. The oddly peaceful expression on his old partner's face was the only thing he didn't recognize. The gaping chest wound extruded broken bits of machinery, fragments of the artificial organs that had wound up being implanted in him some time after he'd first been blown away by Leon Kowalski-another one of the exact same Nexus-6 replicant model. From the looks of Holden, this replicant had completed the job its brother had begun. Irrevocably-there wasn't enough left to bring back from the dead, let alone from any penultimate state of minimal pulse and brain functioning.
    The video's script had called for a scene where Dave Holden's first encounter with Leon Kowalski, at the Tyrell Corporation's headquarters back in Earth's L.A., would be reenacted. Whether that scene had already been taped or was going to be taped later in the production, Deckard didn't know-and didn't care. Even before he'd arrived at the Outer Hollywood station, all he'd been concerned about was getting paid for this technical adviser gig and getting back to his unfinished business in the U.N. emigrant colony on Mars.
    But Urbenton had told him nothing about Holden's being brought up here as well. Which meant that the video director had been concealing that bit of the production plans-Why? Deckard wondered-or else it'd never been part of the plans at all. If that were true, then Holden had come to the orbital station on his own . . . or somebody else had sent him.
    So maybe , thought Deckard, it wasn't an act when