It was about then that I caught up with the rear guard, a scrawny little weasel with the rather appropriate call sign of “Snotface.” He motioned me forward, and I had just pulled up alongside him when the fecal matter hit the fan.

The scrappers seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. They poured out of the shadows, dropped from overhead accessways, and popped out of doorways like so many jack-in-the-boxes. And every friggin’ one of them had a little kid strapped across their chests, leaving their hands free to do other things. Like blow our heads off.

The kids screamed, the scrappers opened fire, and Snotface took one through his open mouth. I sensed more people fall and heard Norris give the only order she could. “Ignore the kids! Shoot the bastards!”

She was right, I knew that, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. The rest of the shooters opened fire while I stood there with a gun in my hand, unable to pull the trigger. The children came apart like so many cheap dolls as a hail of bullets hit them and were stopped by the body armor between them and the scrappers.

That’s when I saw her. A little girl with straight black hair, doll-fine features, and a thumb in her mouth. She didn’t scream, struggle against the straps that held her in place, or do any of the other things you would have expected. She just hung there, watching the destruction, waiting to die.

Something primal worked its way up through my throat and came screaming out my mouth. I felt the slugs hit my body armor as I made my way forward. A smaller man might have stumbled, might have fallen, but my size worked in my favor. The bullets hit and I kept coming.

I saw the scrapper had long greasy locks, bad teeth, and a two-day growth of beard. He grinned, knowing that I couldn’t shoot without hitting the girl, tilted his gun up towards my highly reflective head, and started to squeeze the trigger.

I guess I’ll never know why the little girl took her thumb out of her mouth and grabbed his hand, but I’m real glad that she did, because it gave me sufficient time to cross the intervening space, grab the bastard’s head and spin it halfway around.

The move was all strength and no science, but it worked anyway. Bones crunched, the scrapper’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he slumped towards the deck. I grabbed and held him long enough to free the girl. She looked into my eyes, smiled approvingly, and pointed towards my skull plate. “Shiny!”

I smiled in return. “Very shiny. Do you like it?”

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.

“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.”