Sweat beaded the pilot’s forehead. She was very young and wore little more than shorts, a tank top, and her lieutenant’s bar. She had great nipples and I had watched them as she conned the boat through ten thousand miles of asteroid-strewn blackness. She bit her lower lip and whispered a mantra of her own making: “Holy mother full of grace, help me make it through this place, Holy mother full of grace…”
I grew tired of it after the first thousand times or so, but pilots are a weird bunch, and it’s best to let their idiosyncrasies go. There were three ships in all. I had the point position, Lieutenant Daw was number two, and our CO Major Charles Wamba rode drag.
It was a bad mission, the kind recon always gets, full of floating variables, insurmountable obstacles, and ugly ways to die. But that’s what the Mishimuto Corporation paid us to do, to kill as many of these nasty-assed tool heads as possible, and make it back if we could. But this was different, a little something thought up by the oxymorons in military intelligence, and intended to bag information instead of bodies.
My briefing had been provided by a man who turned into a woman with no face. She explained that Mishimuto owned stock in a small start-up company, that the employees of said company had gone over to the strikers, and might have taken proprietary information with them. And that’s where we came in. Our team was supposed to sneak up on the miscreants, surprise them, and recover the missing data. The only problem was that they had taken refuge in a research station called T-12, right smack dab in the middle of the asteroid belt, and defended by a rather sophisticated automatic weapons system. Not a walk in the park.
My thoughts were interrupted when the pilot screamed, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” and pointed at the screen. Her eyes grew wide with horror and exploded as we hit the asteroid.
I sat up. My body was drenched with sweat, my heart was trying to beat its way out of my chest, and my breath came in short gasping sobs. I have at least one nightmare a night, so I’m fairly used to them. But this dream had a coherency the others lacked, as if memories were trying to put themselves back together and couldn’t quite make it. It took an hour or more to fall asleep. It seemed as if a few minutes had passed when Sasha opened the fresher, used both hands to towel her hair, and kicked my bed. “Up and at ’em, Max. We need to get off this tub.”
I yawned, pulled my clothes on, and followed her to the cafeteria. Breakfast cost a hundred and fifty-two dollars. Each. And it wasn’t all that good. Nor was the company, since Trask sat about fifty feet away. Earth hung behind him like a backdrop, a not so subtle reminder of what he was all about, and an indictment of generations past. He was engaged in earnest conversation with a serious-looking black man, but took a moment to bow sardonically, to which Sasha lifted her coffee cup in reply. Her words belied the smile. “I don’t trust that man. Let’s find some work.”
We had no other choice. Our bankroll was dwindling fast, and Sasha refused to ask her mother for help because to do so would reveal our location to anyone who monitored Earth-Jupiter radio traffic, and that was practically everybody. The fact that I’d have to earn my passage while simultaneously guarding Sasha from the forces of evil didn’t exactly appeal to me, but it was either that or give up any hope of a fifty-thousand-dollar payday.
But wanting work and getting work were two different things. Almost every shipping line large and small had a cubicle-sized business office aboard Staros-3, and none of them were interested in us. What jobs there were went to specialized droids, experienced spacers, or people with the right connections. So we trudged from cubicle to cubicle, waited through what seemed like endless lines, and were refused by men, women, and androids alike.
Oh, we came close once, when the Regis Line offered Sasha a job as a hostess, but there was no slot for me. I actually felt the fifty thousand slip through my fingers, but Sasha shook her head and led me into the hall. Yes, it was strange that she didn’t leave me behind, but I had no reason to question a decision that put money in my pocket, and wasn’t smart enough to think it through.
I did notice one thing, though, and that was the fact that Sasha looked more and more discouraged, as if the weight of the whole world rested directly on her shoulders. With the exception of the kiss, she had never been exactly friendly, but there was an air of desperation about her that I’d never seen before. Not even when we were running from the snatchers and poppers. I tried to talk to her, tried to cheer her up, but it didn’t seem to help. She seldom spoke and became increasingly depressed.
We were exhausted by mid-afternoon. We skipped lunch in an effort to conserve our funds, returned to the cabin, and settled in for a nap. I awoke four hours later to find Sasha gone and a note on her bed. “Max, gone for a walk, back soon, Sasha.”
“Gone for a walk”? Was the girl out of her mind? Yes, of course she was, though the whys and wherefores were a mystery. And I had failed to think of that, just as I had failed to think of so many other things. Visions of Trask and the Trans-Solar goons danced in my head as I splashed water on my face, slipped my arms through the gun harness, and headed for the door. I paused for a moment, performed one of the small rituals that keep me alive, and stepped out into the corridor. Everything looked dark and ominous.
The bulkheads were thick with multi-layered graffiti. They closed in around me and pushed a thousand day-glo images through my eyes. The crowd swirled, became annoyed with my relatively slow pace, and pushed on by. Robo-hawkers, disabled spacers, whores, and itinerant lawyers begged for alms. The smells of sweat, incense, food, smoke, and ozone filled my nostrils and forced me to breathe through my mouth. It was, I decided, even worse than the Sea-Tac Urboplex, and the closest thing to hell I’d ever seen. I watched for Sasha, and did my best to think like a teenaged girl, going where she’d go, doing what she’d do, but it didn’t seem to work. I checked the cafeteria, the retail shops, and the business section, but she was nowhere to be found.
Finally, in an act of what can only be described as desperation, I did what I should have done early on, and stopped at one of the habitat’s public terminals. There, for the absurd fee of twenty dollars, I was allowed to ask about Sasha’s whereabouts. I even remembered to use her alias. The answer came back almost instantly. The voice was synthesized: “Mary Cooper is located in cubicle fourteen of the Staros-3 medical facility. Mary Cooper is…”
I ducked out of the booth, shouldered a dweeb out of the way, and followed the red-cross-shaped pictographs towards medical. Had she been mugged? Raped? Shot? The possibilities were endless, and all of them filled me with fear. Fear, and a sense of shame, since I was her bodyguard and had failed to protect her. Never mind the fact that she should have woken me, should have told me where she was going, it was still my fault. I was a grown-up, and she was a kid, and it was my responsibility to prevent such things.
The shoe was on the other foot now, with the crowd moving more slowly than I liked, which was too bad for them. I’m big, strong, and perfectly capable of taking advantage of that when I want to. Most people scattered, and those who didn’t got shoved. I kind of hoped that some asshole would take offense, would give me an excuse to work off my anger, but no one did. Maybe it was the chrome-plated skull, my size, or the nasty grin. Whatever it was worked and allowed me to reach the medical center in record time.
The receptionist had long orange hair. It had been teased up into a point and allowed to droop like a halfhearted question mark. His smirk told me what he thought about big men with chromed heads.