Free Replicant Night by K. W. Jeter

to get yourself and Sarah Tyrell some new identities, then hightail it out to the U.N's far colonies. Out in the stars, Deckard; not in some dumpy Martian transit squat. Then you and Sarah-or were you still calling her Rachael?-then the two of you would be nice and safe. A cozy domestic couple."
    "Believe me-" Deckard could hear the sour weariness in his own voice. "That last bit was never part of the plan."
    "Wouldn't have believed it, if it had been. Nevertheless; the stars. That's where you were supposed to be going. Or already have gone. So what happened?"
    Deckard closed his eyes for a moment, trying to conserve his waning strength. "What happened." He didn't feel like telling his life story to the briefcase. "What happened is why I needed the money in the first place, why I took this joke gig as technical adviser on Urbenton's crappy little video production. The U.N. transit colonies on Mars are a total bottleneck. People on Earth-even the living ones-don't know that. The U.N. keeps a tight lid on information about what's going on there. The emigration program they're so hot on would collapse if it got out that when you leave Earth, you don't go to the stars, you just wind up in some cramped, dingy hovel on Mars, glued to the cable feed or going slowly crazy from stimulus deprivation."
    The briefcase took pains to sound unimpressed. "There's been rumors."
    "None that I'd ever heard. Not that it would've changed my mind. There was no way I was going to stay on Earth."
    "Why?" Genuine puzzlement sounded in Batty's voice. "You can die there as well as anywhere else. Believe me; I'd know."
    Deckard slowly shook his head. "I had other plans. Ones I didn't tell Holden. He didn't need to know."
    "Plans? Like what?"
    Deckard let his eyelids draw down to slits. "You don't need to know, either." Fatigue crept up his knotted spine and down into his limbs, turning them into leaden weights. "But since you asked, that's why I was hustling for the money. To buy our way off Mars."
    "Money's always good," said the briefcase. "It might not be able to do that, though."
    "Worth a shot." Deckard didn't feel like arguing the point. "There haven't been any transports leaving Mars for the far U.N. colonies in the last two or three years. Some kind of problem going on out there. But there's rumors-there's always rumors-of travel starting up again. It'll have to; there's hardly any room left to cram people into at the Martian colonies, and the U.N. still keeps bringing them out from Earth. Something's got to break. And if anybody's leaving, it's going to be me and Sarah Tyrell. That's what the money was going to be for."
    "But there isn't any money, is there? You're kind of screwed on that one, Deckard."
    "I'm screwed." It wasn't an unusual condition for him. "That's the way it goes."
    "Bad luck for you." The voice of Batty, emerging from the briefcase's concealed speaker, held an equally familiar smile. "Good luck for me, though-and the people who sent me out to you. Now you might be a little more receptive to the offer we're going to make you."
    "I don't want to hear it."
    "What? What're you talking about?" Batty's voice went up a notch. "'Don't want to hear it'-listen, Deckard; I didn't get sent all this way just for you to cop an attitude. You can be all burnt out and cynical on your own time, and this isn't it. There's things-important things-that have to be done."
    With his arms still folded on his chest, Deckard opened one eye wider to gaze upon the briefcase beside him. "And that's why you're here? Dave Holden brought you out just so you could tell me about these 'important things'?"
    "That's about the size of it."
    Deckard let the eyelid sink shut, as though of its own weight. "Like I said-I don't want to hear it."
    Silence held in the skiff's cockpit. For a few seconds, Deckard heard only the motion of his own blood sliding through his veins, the tick of random air molecules at his eardrums. Then the cockpit's other inhabitant spoke