Bodyguard

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?”

“Nobody’s after me.”

And they call me stupid. I heaved a sigh. “Look, Sasha, somebody’s willing to insure your health to the tune of fifty big ones. That means snatchers or poppers. Which is the more likely? I need to know.”

She shrugged. “Snatchers, I guess. My mother works for the Protech Corporation.”

“The new one? That grew up after the war?”

Sasha nodded.

It made a weird kind of sense. The original Protech Corporation had been the victim of an employee takeover, had allied itself with the unionists, and paid the ultimate price when the Consortium won.

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.