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.