But another incarnation of the same company had risen from the ashes and was doing rather well. Or so the flaks claimed. Just the kind of situation the snatchers love. Grab the kid, demand proprietary information, and sell it to Protech’s competitors. It’s a great scam, and that’s where bodyguards come in, though most companies have their own.
Still, Protech was on the rise, and overhead would be a problem. It’s hard enough to launch a start-up without funding a top-notch security force at the same time. That would explain why the kid’s mother had hired a company like Seculor. What it didn’t explain was why Seculor had turned to me, but hey, that slipped what was left of my mind. A mind that could remember all sorts of stuff about Protech and forget how to do long division.
“Okay, Sasha. Snatchers it is. Now, why are you here?”
“So you can protect me.”
The kid wanted to piss me off, and it was working. I tried to be patient. “No, Sasha. What brings you to Earth?”
I noticed that her eyes were focused on a spot over my head.
“I go to school here.”
“And?”
“And I got kicked out.”
“Why?”
She shrugged evasively. “Stuff, that’s all. Stuff.”
I let it drop. She didn’t want to tell and it didn’t make a helluva lot of difference anyway. Or so I assumed.
The buzzer buzzed.
I gestured her away from the door, pulled the .38, and looked out through the peephole. A long-haired, zit-faced, scraggly-assed kid was standing there clutching a grease-stained box to his chest. My pizza had arrived.
I opened the door, accepted the box, and gave him some cash. He was so busy staring at my skull that he didn’t bother to count it. I skimmed a buck off the deal just to teach him a lesson.
I closed the door, locked it, and gestured towards the kitchenette. “You hungry? Want some pizza?”
She nodded, stepped over to the sink, and ran some hot water. The dishes made plopping sounds as they went in. Women. Who can figure ’em?
After the dishes had been washed, dried, and dirtied again, we ate. Sasha occupied my single chair while I leaned against the kitchen counter. I noticed she took small bites, chewed with her mouth closed, and took care of her nails. Her mom would approve. I spoke through a mouthful of pizza. “So, how long have you been dirtside?”
“Eight months or so.”
“You like it?”
She gave me a look most people reserve for newly deposited dog squeeze.
“You’ve gotta be kidding. Earth is an overpopulated, poorly run pus ball.”
I shrugged and started on my second piece of pizza. The kid was right. The human race had run out of room. No amount of space habitats, moon cities, or Mars colonies was going to fill the gap. We needed to break free of the solar system, make our way to distant stars, and pollute them for a change. The only problem was that we lacked the means to do so. Conventional drives like the ones that powered existing space ships were too damned slow. No, what we needed was a faster-than-light drive, and there was no sign of one coming along soon. I changed the topic. “So, what’s your favorite subject in school?”
This look was even worse than the last one.
“Look, Mr. Maxon…”
“Max.”
“Alright. Look, Max, I’m not a little girl, so save the ‘what’s your favorite subject’ crap for someone who is.”
“Just trying to be friendly.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Gaberscam.”
She raised her eyebrow. “Gaberscam? What the hell does that mean?”
I winced. Nonsensical words, numbers, and other stuff has a tendency to leak out of my mouth when I least expect it.
“Right. I meant to say ‘right.’“
The kid nodded. “Good.”
I used the dishtowel to wipe my mouth and tossed it towards the corner of the room. The prospect of spending the next couple of months with Sasha seemed a lot less appealing than it had before. I was preparing to tell her that when the cookie cutter blew a hole in my ceiling.
Cookie cutters are shaped like an old-fashioned hoop and filled with powerful explosives. They were designed for room-to-room fighting in modern urboplexes and are capable of cutting a circular hole through two feet of steel-reinforced concrete in less than a second. And, due to the shoddy construction found in most of today’s buildings, this cookie cutter had only twelve inches of material to deal with.
I was turning, and reaching for the .38, when a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound chunk of concrete hit my bed and bounced a couple of times. Dust billowed away from the concrete, electricity crackled as power lines shorted, and a pair of combat boots dropped through the hole.
The gun bucked in my hand as I put two slugs through the space where a body should be. I heard a grunt instead of a scream. The bastard was wearing body armor! Light flashed as a concussion grenade went off, followed by clouds of thick acrid smoke.
I heard a thumping noise, and a man swore.
“Sasha?”
“Head for the door!”
Head for the door? What the hell was she talking about? And who was she to give me orders?
An arm snaked around my neck. I brought the gun up next to my right ear and fired backwards. The assailant fell away. I spun, searched for another target, but couldn’t find one. Dust and smoke drifted around me. Light flashed, the second cookie cutter made a thumping sound, and the smoke swirled downwards like water in a toilet.
A getaway! The bastards had Sasha and were getting away! I wanted to follow, jump through after them, but knew I shouldn’t. The snatchers would have anticipated such a move and made arrangements to counter it. No, Sasha would be better served if I lived to track her down.
The smoke started to clear. The place was a mess. My ceiling and floor boasted a pair of rather large holes. A body lay draped across the chair where Sasha had been sitting. The top part of his head was missing, but the smile was intact. Or was that a grimace? It was hard to tell.
I looked down through the hole in the floor. There was nothing to see outside of some rubble and Sasha’s beret. The snatchers were gone.
I felt stupid. Very, very stupid. The opposition had snatched my client less than an hour after she’d come under my protection, had pulled the job within my own cube, and left me looking like a total jerk. Not the sort of thing to put on your resume.
There was a loud ringing in my right ear, but the left still worked. The siren made a bleating sound. The Zeebs were on their way. They’d ask questions, lots of questions, while time ticked away. Time I could ill afford to lose if I hoped to find my client and get her to Europa.
I opened a wall locker, grabbed my gym bag, and turned it upside down. A pair of blue shorts and a gray sweatshirt tumbled to the floor. I grabbed a change of clothes, and some spare magazines for the .38, and stuffed them inside.
It was a simple matter to throw the gym bag up through the hole in the ceiling, chin myself on a piece of jagged concrete, and crawl out onto the floor.
I stood to see that a middle-aged woman had been tied to her chair. Rope ran around her like in the cartoons. Adhesive tape covered her mouth, and her eyes bulged with pent-up emotion.
I smiled pleasantly, nodded, and grabbed the gym bag. The door opened smoothly, I stepped out into the foot traffic, and headed up-corridor. A contract is a contract. I’d find Sasha or die trying.
3
“We pay cash for used body parts.”
From the sign in front of Arturo’s Pawn Shop, Sub-Level 26, Sea-Tac Residential-Industrial Urboplex
It took the Zeebs about thirty minutes to summon the meat wagon, ask my neighbors stupid questions, and toss my apartment. Then, having assured themselves that I had nothing worth taking, they left a microbot to keep an eye out for me and headed for the nearest doughnut shop.
Had I been one of the wealthier freelancers, or an honest-to-god lifer, things would have been different. That’s
because the Zebras work for a company called Pubcor, which makes most of its money providing security to other corporations. I mean, who would you worry about? The people who pay you millions each year? Or the great unwashed horde who ante up six bucks a month? Right. Me too.
So, having left the lady’s door open so someone would discover her predicament, I joined the crowd on Level 37. It isn’t easy for me to blend into a crowd, but I did the best I could. Membership in the great unwashed horde is based on more than appearance. It’s a matter of attitude. And to have the right attitude, you need to live the kind of hand-to-mouth existence freelancers do.
It wasn’t always that way, I hear. There was a time when companies offered their workers what amounted to lifetime employment. But that ended back around the turn of the century when the last of the communist governments collapsed and capitalism reigned supreme.
After all, why pay employees during periods when you don’t need them, especially when the population continues to increase? And automation drives the total number of jobs downwards? So that’s how nearly everyone wound up as “freelancers,” working when companies wanted them, and waiting when they didn’t.
Knowing that, I imitated the slump-shouldered shuffle of a work-starved freelancer, avoided eye contact with oncoming traffic, and moved at the same pace as the rest of the crowd. Sameness. That’s the key. People who act differently stand out from the crowd and are easy to remember.
The further underground you go, the worse the conditions get. My particular complex includes fifty sub-levels altogether so 37 is pretty bad. God only knows what 45 or 50 is like. I’ve never been there. The corpies who run the place save money by leaving every other lighting fixture empty. The substandard plumbing that the original contractor installed bursts on a regular basis, causing unexpected waterfalls that slide down walls or pour through broken ceiling tiles. Additional cable, not included in the original bid, hangs suspended beneath the overhead. Trash, including used condoms, drug injectors, stripped droids, food cartons, soiled clothing, and other stuff too gross to mention piles up fast. The robo-cleaners come through every night, but by noon the next day everything is just the same.
And the human debris is almost as bad. Addicts of every description laying unconscious in the filth, beggars who sold arms, legs, eyes, and god knows what else for a few credits, and street children, wise beyond their years, selling, stealing, and scamming their way through another day. I hate to say it, but Earth is a toilet world, ready to flush.
My first stop was a hallway hotel where I could rent a seven-by-four-foot sleeping compartment. It cost five bucks for twenty-four hours. I slid inside, checked to make sure that it was reasonably clean, and closed the door behind me. Like most sleep slots, this one boasted graffiti-covered walls, a mattress with a patched cover, and a beat-up vid set.
It took ten minutes to disassemble the .38, wipe it down, install a new barrel, and change the firing pin. Something I could do blindfolded if I had to. The change-out isn’t foolproof, but it does serve to slow the Zeebs down and weakens their case. Assuming they made a case, which was damned unlikely. Snatchers are far from popular, and without a lifer goading them on, the Zebras could give a shit. Still, you need a license to carry heat, and the Zeebs would like nothing more than to jerk my ticket. So why tempt the bastards?
Yeah, I might have turned myself in and claimed self-defense, but that would have consumed one, maybe two days, and lessened my chances of finding Sasha.
I left the bag in the sleeping compartment, dumped the incriminating parts down a recycling chute, and headed for the escalators. People swirled around me, and an interactive wall ad tried to engage me in conversation. It had a high-resolution flat screen with pinpoint sound. The electronic pitchman had black hair combed straight back, a biosculpted face, and fervor-filled eyes. They followed me as I moved.
“Hey, mister! You look like a guy that has jock itch. Let me show you the Elexar 9000 Groin Grooming System and I’ll…”
I never found out what he’d do, because the foot traffic narrowed as we approached the escalator and sucked me along with it. The crowd was typical, low-end day workers mostly, wearing beepers that rarely beeped, hoping for the five or six days’ worth of work necessary to pay that month’s rent. And there were predators too, scammers, zonies, and bangers, all looking for easy prey. And why not? They were self-employed, worked when they felt like it, and didn’t kiss ass.
A banger, big in leather and lace, shifted his hockey stick from one shoulder to the other and moved my way. A buddy followed.
I made eye contact, grinned invitingly, and blew him a kiss. I like to shoot bangers, and it must have showed. He said something to his companion and they turned away.
The crowd poured off the escalator and headed down-corridor. I followed. Tracking someone through a major urboplex isn’t as hard as you might think. Yeah, the halls are packed with people, but the trick is to see through them. Look for the things that stand still. Like the expresso stand that occupies the same spot every day, the kids who throw pennies against the wall, and the blind man who isn’t so blind.
I don’t know why Marvin runs the scam he does, but he’s been at it a long time, and knows Level 39 like the back of his hand. I bought an Americano at the expresso stand and drifted his way. Marvin has black skin, wraparound electro-shades, and hair that looks as if it’s exploding off his head.
“Shoeshine? Shoeshine to help the po’ blind man?”
I stepped onto his stand, sat on the red vinyl seat, and put my boots on a well-worn foot rest. “Poor, my ass. What do you rake in from this racket, anyway? Twenty? Thirty a year?”
Had I been a corpie, just passing through, Marvin would’ve asked me what color my boots were. But I wasn’t, so he let it slide. Carefully manicured hands, stained dark by constant exposure to the polish, slid over my boots. The movement had started as part of the act and evolved into a habit.
“More money than some dumb-assed white-bread shield, that’s for damned sure,” Marvin replied. “Shit, Maxon, they took the bitch right out from under your god-damned nose and left you looking like a chump. My mother could’ve done a better job.”
Mysterious are the ways of a Marvin, so I didn’t bother to ask how he knew about the girl or the fact that I had lost her. “Yes,” I agreed sagely, “your mother could have done a better job, as any mirror will attest.”
Marvin smeared brown polish on my boots and gave a snort of disgust. “Chrome-headed motherfucker.”
“Not so,” I replied solemnly. “It’s true that I have a chrome-plated head…but my relationship with Mom was strictly platonic. Or so I assume.”
Marvin laughed. “So what’s up? You goin’ after her? Or gettin’ ready for a date?”
I sipped my coffee, watched an androgynous hall ho strut by, and looked down at the top of his head. A number of tiny silver bells had been woven into his hair. They tinkled as he moved.
“I’m going after her. Got any idea who they were? Or where they went?”
Marvin grabbed a pair of brushes and buffed my boots. “Shit. If you know who they are…then you know where they went. Everybody knows that.”
Marvin likes to piss me off and knows how to do it. I forced a smile. “Thanks for the insight. Nifwamp iggledo reeko. So who the hell were they?”
Marvin looked up and grinned. “Snatchers.”
I took a deep breath. “I know that. Who did they work for?”
Marvin produced a rag and snapped it across the top surface of my left boot. “Shit. Ain’t my fault if you don’t ask the right questions. They work for a company called Trans-Solar.”
“And how do you know that XXX672TTT?”
“’Cause they wore matching holo-jackets with the name ‘Trans-Solar’ written across the backs. And my name ain’t triple X whatever, turdface.”
“Sorry. They passed your stand?”
“They sure as hell did.”
“And the girl? She was okay?”
&nb
sp; Marvin shrugged. “A bit mussed but otherwise fine.”
“Trans-Solar, huh?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Deederwomp.”
Marvin shook his head sadly. The bells tinkled cheerfully. “Deederwomp to you too, asshole.”
I racked my brain trying to remember if the deader had been wearing a jacket, and if so, whether it said “Trans-Solar” on it. As with so many other things, the information was missing.
Marvin gave the rag one last snap and straightened up. My boots looked better than they had for years. He stuck his hand out. “That’ll be twenty-five bucks. Twenty for the information and five for the shine.”
I stood, slid a greasy twenty-five-dollar bill out of my wallet, and slapped it on his hand. “Thanks for nothing.”
“Screw you.”
We grinned and parted company, Marvin to work his scam and me to find my client. The crowd closed around me like a river around a raindrop. No matter how poor they might be, most of the people around me meant something to somebody. You know, friends, family, people who cared. After all, what good are accomplishments without someone to share them with? And a background to compare them to? But, according to the disk the corpies had given me along with my medical discharge, I had no family, no friends, and, outside of a talent for mayhem, no marketable skills.
So that, plus my tendency to make mistakes in social situations, had relegated me to the status of the eternal outsider. And, while some might envy my so-called freedom, they didn’t sleep alone every night.
But that sounds like whining. Something I detest. Work, that was the answer. The fifty K Seculor had promised me was enough for a down payment on a hole-in-the-wall-café. And, surrounded by my regulars, I’d have someone to shoot the shit with. Pathetic, huh? Well, who said I was anything else?
So, back to business. If Marvin was right, Trans-Solar had put the snatch on Sasha. Now, some other person might have wondered why the snatchers revealed their identities when they didn’t have to, but I didn’t. No, it seemed like an accidental slip-up to me, and I proceeded accordingly.
Bodyguard Page 3