Free EdgeOfHuman by Unknown Page B

autopilot program shoved the vehicle against the obstruction. The cargo-bay opening stayed where it was, nearly two meters away from the ripped edge of the hospital building.
    Through the echoing clamor of the rifle fire, he could hear the security team shifting position, moving closer into the ward. He took a few steps backward, drawing the hospital bed with him, then bracing his hands against the lowest rail on one side.
    "No . . ." The heart-and-lung patient had seen what the other man was getting ready to do. "You can't . . . im . . . possible . . ."
    "Shut up." He pushed the bed full force, digging in and picking up speed, head lowered bull-like and muscles straining beneath the green scrubs. A second later the rolling bed had hit the rim of the floor-level window frame; momentum tilted the bed over and sent it flying toward the spinner outside, the cargo bay as the exact center of the target. His own momentum and a final diving launch carried him after.
    He landed on the patient, who moaned and tried to push him away with weak, narcotized arms. One of the hospital bed's wheels had caught against the sill of the bay door; the chrome frame and mattress fell outside the spinner, scraping against the hospital exterior as it spiraled down toward the city streets below.
    Bullets hit and bounced inside the bare-ribbed cargo space. Inside the hospital, the security team had come out to the open, sprinting across the ward's broken field, firing as they ran.
    He scrambled off the heart-and-lung patient; still on his knees, he lunged past the cockpit's empty seats and hit the autopilot's override button on the control panel. A slap of his hand against the thrust levers -- the spinner surged forward, a forearm slung around the pilot seat's headrest keeping him from being flung back into the cargo space.
    Through the cockpit's glass curve, he spotted the steel hook of the broken window frame digging farther into the engine's air scoop. Enough to tilt the spinner at a forty-five-degree angle as it fought against the crude grapple. A metal hail hammered small dents into the side panels.
    Over his shoulder he saw the heart-and-lung patient sliding helplessly toward the open bay door. Hanging on to the pilot seat, he reached back and managed to claw a handful of the billowing sheets into his fist. Shock and fear had cut through the patient's anesthetizing drugs; fully conscious, eyes nearly as wide as his gaping mouth, he stared behind and below himself, at the dizzying emptiness of air and the threadlike street rotating hundreds of meters down at the hospital tower's base.
    With the sheet as a taut sling, the other man yanked the heart-and-lung patient up toward himself. With a push of his arm, he managed to get the patient stuffed awkwardly into the other cockpit seat. The gauges and monitor screen on the attaché case strapped to the patient's chest shrieked and danced in alarm.
    A twist of the rudder pulled the spinner free of the window frame strut, the pent-up thrust sending the vehicle arcing toward the cloudless sky. The security team, arrayed in the gap in the hospital's outside wall, continued to fire as they dwindled away, the bullets rattling against the cargo-bay door as it slid shut.
    "Uhh . . ." The heart-and-lung patient was beyond words now. His pale hands fluttered against the attaché case, the pulsing machinery that kept him alive. "Uh . . . uhh . . ."
    "Knock it off." The other man, smile not yet returned to his face, looked over in annoyance at the heart-and-lung patient. His own hands continued punching a flight pattern into the spinner's on-board computer. "You're making me nervous."
    Sun flashed off the spinner's metal, pure white and dazzling, as it sped through and away from the city's upper reaches.

    "That's what they've always said."
    Deckard looked at the lab-coated figure on the other side of the desk. "What's that supposed to mean?"
    "The suh-same old shit." Something almost like pity moved behind the