“The brutal and completely unnecessary war started when a small group of self-styled ‘freedom fighters’ staged an illegal strike, and sought to impose illegal demands on the corporations and their stockholders.

“Though claiming to represent workers, and pretending to have their interests in mind, the strikers began the systematic destruction of the very facilities that gave them work. And so it was that the corporations formed the Consortium, met force with force, liberated their holdings, and returned honest citizens to their jobs.”

A tidy ending to a war that had destroyed millions of lives, including mine. The rest of the program was a good deal more cheerful. It seemed that Marscorp had gambled everything on a huge city-sized vehicle dubbed Roller Three. The company was proud of the fact that while the processor traveled less than fifty feet a day, it had already consumed more than a thousand square miles of the planet’s surface and crapped enough palletized ingots to turn a small profit. And, given the size of the red planet’s mineral deposits, plus the fact that Roller Four was in the final stages of construction, there was little doubt that even more profits lay up ahead.

A robo-cam swooped over and around the machine while the narrator droned on. The first thing that struck me was the sheer scale of the thing. It was five miles long, three miles wide, and weighed millions of tons. Built like an enormous box, its skin covered by a landing strip, solar arrays, autocranes, and cooling fins, the processor would have resembled a mechanical dung beetle, except that it was generating waste instead of eating it.

Huge tracks, each a quarter of a mile wide, carried the monstrosity forward. Bus-sized boulders exploded as metal-bright treads fell on them. A cloud of fine red dust hung around the machine’s lower parts as steel jaws gouged tons of rock out of the planet’s surface and dropped it onto highway-sized conveyor belts. From there the belts fed the stuff into a nonpressurized hell where heavily armored humans supervised specially designed droids.

But that’s not the sort of thing that flaks are paid to dwell on, so the scene changed and I found myself looking at a spotless cafeteria while a man in a tall white hat bragged about the quality of his food. I lost interest, touched a button, and watched while the screen was retracted into the seat back.

There was very little atmosphere to slow the shuttle down, so it fell like a high-speed elevator. My stomach went with it. It was weird to think that we’d be landing on top of a huge machine. A machine that would continue to function even as we arrived. Powerful engines and a prodigious amount of fuel kept us aloft for the appropriate length of time, but there were no windows, so the teeth-rattling thump and neck-stretching brake job came as a complete surprise. The shuttle coasted for a while and jerked to a stop.

I expected everyone to stand, grab their luggage, and head for the hatch. The newbies looked around and wondered what to do, but the Mars hands stayed where they were. The stew sounded bored. “Please remain in your seats until a pressure tube has been connected to the shuttle’s main hatch and the seat belt light goes off…”

She had more to say, but I tuned it out. I looked at Sasha and found that she was awake. “Welcome to Mars.”

She smiled. “Thanks. Now that we’ve arrived…let’s see how quickly we can leave.”

I nodded. The quicker we reached Europa Station, the quicker people would stop shooting at me, and the quicker I’d be able to collect the fifty thousand. Which reminded me of what I was being paid to do. “They could be waiting for us.”

Her eyes narrowed. “How would they know where to look?”

I knew she was smarter than that, so I assumed it was a rhetorical question. “They would know where we are because A, there is radio communication between Earth and Mars, or B, they came on a faster ship. And what about the captain? She told us to duck. She knew something would happen.”

“Yeah,” she said reluctantly. “It makes sense.”

“Yes, it does,” I agreed. “So here’s the plan. I get off first, trip the ambush, and you slip away.”

Her eyes looked into mine. There was a softness there, mixed with determination, mixed with something else. Her voice was sarcastic.

“Great, just great. You trip the ambush, get yourself killed, and leave me all alone. What the hell kind of bodyguard is that?”

The conflicting signals made me confused. I felt defensive. “Oh, yeah? Well, what would you suggest?”

“That we wait while the others get off, leave together, and slip away.”

It went against my instincts, but I nodded and touched the weapon under my left armpit. It had been loaded aboard ship, and logic dictated that it still was. I wished I could make sure. The shuttle rocked gently as the pressure tube made contact with the hull. The hatch opened, air hissed as pressures equalized, and the seat belt light went out. A newbie forgot to compensate, jumped to his feet, and hit the overhead. The resulting thud could be heard all over the ship. The Mars hands laughed, shook their heads in disgust, and stood with exaggerated slowness.

Sasha and I stayed in our seats until most of the passengers had left, stood, and eased our way forward. The last thing we wanted to do was follow the newbie’s example. The stew with the purple hair and matching day-glo nails looked at my head, nodded politely, and let us pass. Was she more interested than she should be? Or was she attracted to my size, skull plate, and rugged good looks?

My heart beat faster as we walked down the pressure tube towards the terminal beyond. It might have been comical if it wasn’t so frightening. There were thirty or forty people in the waiting area. The moment we stepped out of the pressure tube, three or four of them pointed in our direction and shouted, “There they are!”

The only thing that saved us was the fact that neither group had expected the other to be there. Weapons appeared, darts flew, and people screamed. Innocent bystanders, of which there were damned few, slid-scurried out of the way as the rest of us took cover behind the chrome-and-black-vinyl furniture. I placed my body in front of Sasha’s, but she moved around me. A woman popped up, tried to get a bead on us, and did a slow-motion tumble as Sasha shot her in the chest. I made a note to keep my movements slow and precise.

Alarms went off as a dart whirred by my ear. It came from behind! I turned, saw the stewardess with the purple hair fire again, and felt something graze my arm. I put two darts through her throat. Blood pumped, day-glo nails clutched at her neck, and she slow-fell backwards.

The voice came over the PA system. “THROW YOUR WEAPONS ON THE FLOOR AND PLACE YOUR HANDS ON THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD!”

We never got a chance to obey, because a volley of sleep-gas canisters tumbled end over end into the waiting area and went off with a sibilant hiss. I had just started to react when the darkness rolled me under.