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.

“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.