The little girl nodded, slipped her thumb back into her mouth, and waited for whatever life would bring next. The firefight was over by then. It took the better part of an hour to find the girl’s terrified mother and hand her over.
Norris was super-pissed by the time I got back, and threatened me with all sorts of dire consequences, but so what? It wasn’t like she was my boss or anything, so I kissed up enough to get paid, double-checked to make sure the right amount of money had been dumped into my account, and headed for home. I was tired, and a shower seemed like the best idea I’d ever had.
2
“Death to Droids!”
Graffiti found in the main corridor of Sub-Level 31, Sea-Tac Residential Industrial Urboplex
I live on Sub-Level 38 of the Sea-Tac Residential-Industrial Urboplex. Not a very pleasant place to hang your hat, but a lot less expensive than Level 37.
The door buzzed, and, having just sent out for a pizza, I made the reasonable assumption. But reasonable assumptions are almost always wrong, and this was no exception.
I opened the door and found myself face-to-tentacle with two of the ugliest-looking androids you ever saw. One looked like a recently buried corpse, and the other resembled Hollywood’s idea of what aliens should look like, but probably don’t. A grotesque thing with lots of facial tentacles, pointy teeth, and a bad case of artificial halitosis.
Well, form has a tendency to follow function, and androids look the way they do for a reason. But I missed that. Just like I miss a lot of other things. I was polite. “Yes? May I help you?”
A micro-robotic maggot crawled out of the corpse’s nose, took a look around, and disappeared under his coat collar.
“Are you Max Maxon?” The words came along with the almost overwhelming stench of rotting carrion.
I held my breath and considered the possibilities. A bill collector? No, I had debts alright, plenty of them, but none large enough to rate one droid, much less two.
Old enemies? Possibly, but given how low I’d sunk, why kill me? A real enemy would let me live.
That left clients, a rare and exotic breed that almost never, repeat never, samples life thirty-eight levels underground. Still, there’s a first time for everything. I hadn’t worked for androids before, but what the hell, I’m a liberal kinda guy, so I took the chance.
“Yeah, I’m Maxon. What can I do for you?”
“We work for Seculor Inc.,” tentacle-face said politely.
I swallowed hard. Damn my screwed-up cerebral cortex anyway! Competitors. A category of visitor I hadn’t thought of. And it made sense too, ‘cause Seculor was big, real big, and had a fondness for weird-looking robots. You know, intimidate the opposition first, and if that doesn’t work, blow their brains out. But why waste billable staff time killing something as insignificant as me?
I smiled and allowed my right hand to drift back towards the.38 Super. It’s a custom job with an over-sized safety, polished magazine well, squared-off trigger guard, and a triple-port compensator. There’s nothing like a few rounds through the ol’ CPU to show a droid who’s boss.
“Don’t do it,” corpse-breath said conversationally. “You’ll be dead before you can drag that cannon out of your waistband.”
I should’ve known. Androids, especially those designed for security work, are loaded with fancy detection gear. I let my hand drop.
“So what do you want?”
“Thumb this,” the alien thing said flatly, and handed me the latest in comp cubes. I almost asked why, saw their expressions, and let it slide. Hey, if the droids wanted my signature they could have it. The cube gave slightly under my thumb, chirped its satisfaction, and gave birth to a tiny disk.
“Your copy,” the alien droid said matter-of-factly. He grabbed the cube, popped it into his mouth, and swallowed. God only knows where it went from there.
That was the point at which both droids stepped back, shoved a teenage girl in my direction, and headed down-corridor. People scattered. A zonie looked, dropped his injector, and ran. The girl gave me the look most people do, amazed and somewhat alarmed. There was something else in her expression too. Something that didn’t make sense. Compassion? Pity? Awe? I wasn’t sure.
So the kid scoped me and I scoped her. She stood about five feet tall, had a pretty face, huge brown eyes, and long, well-shaped limbs. She wore a beret, a black body stocking, a vest, a pouch-belt, a leather miniskirt, and high-heeled boots. Her voice was calm and a little sarcastic. She reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t remember who.
“So, are you going to ask me in? Or leave me standing here in the hall?”
Surprised, and a bit taken aback, I gestured for her to enter. She did, gave the room a slow once-over, and wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Have you considered cleaning this dump?”
I looked around. My clothes were where they belonged, tossed in a corner, and the day bed was rumpled, but so what? Most of the empties had made it into the garbage can, and the dishes could wait for a while. I frowned. “And who the hell are you? My mother?”
The kid shook her head sadly, as if she was dealing with a head case, which she definitely was. She pointed at my right hand. “Take a look at the disk.”
I brought my hand up and opened my fist. Light winked off the surface of the disk. I had forgotten it was there.
My all-in-one home computer, communications console, and entertainment complex consists of a secondhand Artel 3000. Its basic claim to fame is low-cost, high-quality 3-D imagery. The basic technology was hijacked from the now defunct Ibo Corporation, which copied it from Toshiba.
How can I remember things like that? And forget the disk in my hand? Beats the hell out of me. Ask the pill pushers. Maybe they know. I inserted the disk and pushed the power button.
Video swirled, locked up, and revealed a middle-aged woman. She looked the way lifers always look. Too old for their bodies and slightly smug. That’s what the guarantee of life-long employment does for you, I guess; it frees you from mundane problems like feeding your face, and lifts you above the common herd. People like me and, judging from the way the girl looked, people like her.
When the woman spoke, her eyelids rose and fell like old-fashioned windowshades, and her words came in bursts, like bullets from a machine gun. “I am Administrator Tella. Seculor Inc. has a temporary personnel shortage. We would appreciate your assistance. Keep Ms. Casad alive, get her to Europa Station, and we will pay you fifty thousand credits. Ms. Casad has some expense money. Use it wisely. Do not request help from our company or staff. Your contract follows.”
Legal jargon flooded the screen and I hit the power switch. The screen snapped to black. Looking back, I realize I should’ve questioned how an outfit like Seculor Inc. could possibly run short of staff, trained or otherwise, and if they did, why they’d hire a scumbag like me, but I was brain-damaged and, more than that, blinded by the prospect of fifty big ones.
Fifty grand was nothing prior to the war, when inflation ran two hundred percent per month, and a can of beer cost a hundred credits. But the Consortium won, the executives collectively known as “The Board” got the lid on, and fifty K means something now.
Like the opportunity to be solvent, or better yet to buy my own hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Yeah, that would be great, leaning on the counter and watching the world go by. Pathetic, you say? Well, you have your ambitions, and I have mine.
So, rather than ask the kind of questions I should have, I turned to the girl and said, “Pleased to meet you, Casad. Is there a first name to go with the last?”
She crossed her arms in front of a nearly nonexistent chest. “Sasha.”
“Sasha Casad. I like it. All right, Sasha, who’s after you, and why?”
