
Shorts From All Over! Copyright 2015 By Kevin Williams.

Smashwords License Statement Smashwords Edition. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Art: (Milia Iceland webcam)

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and similarities to persons living or dead is a coincidence.

Canadian ISBN: 978-0-9940155-2-5

ISBN:9781310992216

Author's Note: Fan-mail, biz, complaints and suggestions to teddyhunter10@gmail.com

Kevin Williams is on

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/packrat2

https://kevinwillpkgd.tumblr.com

https://imgur.com/packrat2/posts

He authors an SF series, Teddyhunter: (about runaway teddybear robots), a few books of short stories, comics and the Aaron+Henna fantasy series. The first in every series is usually a free ebook.

***

## chapter 1 grownup

It was hell coming back.

Crossing the lot, the stutter of an old hulk as it fought off scavengers caught my eye and ear. Bots, small ones. Runaway teddies scavenging hard. A horn died and the abandoned deadpark hissed its fury as smaller 'bots started cannibalizing parts and power. Ignoring the quiet but futile combat, I went on into the mall, trying to forget the excited peeps from smaller bot's hiding and watching as they waited their turn at the spoils.

The car was probably left there by a joyrider or a Toxic. The mall authority would spend the money to clean the lot out again soon, if runaways were attacking in broad daylight now. Serious vandalizing would get a bounty posted. Serious bloodmoney would get the weaker 'bots turned over for cash by the bigger ones, if bounty hunters didn't catch them first.

Inside the mall, I noticed right away how bad it'd gotten. Runaway bots had loosened all ground level vents in the walls and there was a path scored from garbage bins to the vents and back. Giggling whispered down the shafts as you walked by.

Silently thanking the authorities I didn't have to tolerate crowds of beggars in the causeway yet, I headed down the concourse to my new job as a sales clerk in one of the girlie-shops.

My shop had not gotten hit yet, but I could tell bots were busy prepping vents for it. This place was really due for a cleanout when that kind of smash+grab happened. Runaway children hiding out in the tunnels would be gassed and sent to state-farms. A few might survive here long enough to become professional toys, but most of them would end up weasel their way into crime or whatever street education they could handle. The bots would get bountied by whoever spent the time trapping them down.

Wincing, I tried not to remember the fights over the freshest garbage, the dangerous older kids and all the sly tricks of living under the tunnels. I'd outgrown all that.

Then I saw Teddy's hole and heard his familiar chirrp waft out at me.

I remembered the older, and how he'd chased me into the pits, trying to steal the credits I'd gotten from that dirty old man.

I remembered the shaft he'd thrown me down when he was finished hurting me, and dangling from the edge, bleeding, semi-conscious and a forty-meter drop down a shaft lined with inch-long spikes just a breath away. And how teddy had saved me, using his precious power money to buy food and bandages till I could scavenge on my own again.

I walked on by. And kept on walking, ignoring him.

I'm a grownup now and I don't pay any attention to runaway teddys.

end

## chapter 2 Day-trip

The day hadn't even started yet and Aaron was already getting antsy. Henna watched her boyfriend clean up the house, (putting the fire out, stuffing pack-backs while picnic supplies and all while eating whatever breakfast he hadn't already.) worriedly.

This was not like Aaron at all. Aaron would fight getting up, fight drinking his tea and like wizards everywhere, cheerfully spend the first few hours of any given day watching the sunrise with his pipe fired up.

Watching it from the west, if he had to. Wizards were a weird group that way. Watching the land react to the sun was more important than enjoying the new day to them.

Aaron also hadn't told her anything about his new and latest secret plan yet and that was a little worrying. Her almost husband was a good planner and a worse builder.

The new sauna had burnt down for instance, the new stream bathing pool had gotten over-run by snapping turtles, the new and improved fireplace had far too much wood stacked far too close to it for safety, and most of his other household improvements had needed lots of tradesmen to fix.

The results of his handicrafts were way beyond wizardry when the dust had finished settling from most of them. Along with the smoke, ash, irate neighbors and city-officials demanding explanations trying to settle things.

Henna still didn't like thinking about the new trap door into the basement. The floor down there was mostly ick and after a good head start, you sunk to your knees in muck if you dropped in suddenly.

The cat hadn't talked to Aaron for weeks after that one.

A picnic would be hard to mess up, and there were always herbs to collect in the great flat grasslands that surrounded the town; if that was what he had in mind. Henna sighed happily and made sure she had lots of snipping tools, collection bags and first aid supplies in her pouch.

Lots and lots of first aid supplies; including a burn kit, snake bite, sewing tools, bandages and painkiller tea too. Aaron was getting busy again.

Hiking with him while he was on a planned trip would probably require it all. You'd swear trees looked for ways to fall on him and since this was the middle of the flatlands, that was a good trick. Normal for Aaron, tho.

Her work was more staid. The Monday medical trade could wait, being mostly hangovers and pregnancy cures anyway. The acne and love potion trade would start tomorrow.

"We're heading out for the day, dear!" Came Aaron's excited yipe, finally. "Come get ready."

"I know, dear." Henna answered him absently, still trying to stuff herbs into her kit. More bleeding stoppers, or more painkillers? Bandages or a knife to cut cane with? Something for upset stomachs or spices? "I'm ready already."

"Hey? This was supposed to be a surprise." Walking into the room, Aaron watched Henna slip on her travel boots with a disappointed look on his face. "A big surprise. Oh, you witched it!"

"It is a surprise. Normally you'd be out on the back porch cursing whoever'd been stealing firewood by now." Henna murmured quietly. "Instead, you're ready for a day-trip somewhere. A nature hike."

"Sort of. The dwarfs have a camp just outside town. Well, a few hours outside town and they've invited me to visit. Isn't this going to be fun?"

"Dwarfs?" Henna gulped quietly, then started adding weapons to her outfit. "Really? And they invited you there for what?"

"I don't know. It should be a fun trip anyway." Aaron burbled on. "For me, anyway. Metal-workers, just think! I might finally get some traffic. Wizard-work!"

"More likely they want you to tell them which sample has the most gold." Her grumbling and travel preparations complete, Henna smiled up at Arron. "Or something like that. You've never dealt with dwarfism before?"

"No. Are they dangerous or something?" Aaron watched Henna closely. She was less than thrilled with the idea of a day in a dwarf camp, and he had no idea why.

"Well, they make weapons. Some are known for raids. Small raids, but raiding." Henna started slowly, handing Aaron a sword to wear on his belt. "They also make special goods, so they tend to have a lot of mercenaries who own them favors."

"And rivals willing to steal from anyone traveling in and out of their camps. And jealous nobles who don't want any weapons not theirs floating around. And witches who hate cold iron would always like to see them gone." Henna went on, pointedly strapping a knife to her belt.

"All that for a group that makes nails? Isn't that a bit much?" Aaron was puzzled. He really wanted to go talk to the dwarfs today. Metal-wizardry of any kind always excited him.

"Lets just go see what they want from you. Then we'll decide." There was a small shake of her head at that. Henna did not like dealing with the little peoples, they had a permanent grudge against the taller types. "Maybe they just want news of a dragon hoard or something."

"Bring your staff, tho. We might need it."

With that Henna led the way out of the room, the house and the town, taking special care to stop and inform the more vicious gossips of their plans as they travelled thru the market and out of town.

It didn't hurt to have a few people informed, especially if they were going to see the little people.

****

"They wanted something alright." Aaron said dully as he and Henna made their way out of the still smoldering ruins of the dwarf camp. "And worse yet, for free."

"We've already had a dragon come help us with wizardry." Henna mused to herself. "Even if it was a baby dragon. They must've known."

"A dragon forge? They must've been insane. No one can handle a dragon forge, not even demons were willing to try that." Aaron brushed ash off his shoulder, eyebrows and staff, shuddering. He coughed as Henna looked sympathetically on. "And using dragon fire to forge a hero's sword? Impossible."

"Your dragon-fire, Aaron. Or at least your staff's." The day finished, Henna headed determinedly towards the nearest stream. "It never occurred to them that fire and iron, steel and magic might not mix well."

"I did get them to pay in advance. They swore it was just a sword they wanted tempered by magical fire." The day had not gone all that well, but Henna could see Aaron already re-writing the day's events in his mind, trying to find a positive aspect to it.

"It was a bad tempering. The sword went magic. It also went slightly berserk and hopped around by itself for a while. I wonder why it attacked chickens that way." Musing almost to herself, Henna sighed as the stream came into view. "A living, magic sword. You'd think the steel in that sword remembered something unpleasant and wanted revenge."

"It was hard to stop, but I think I know what happened. Acid wash refining. The usual secret procedure for quietly refining ore." He explained. "You run gravel thru a chicken once or twice to remove impurities." The recital was dull. "Then reforge it into carbon steel by cooking it with lots of charcoal."

"Takes days to change properly. Cure the steel." He added, still coughing and brushing clouds of ash off himself. "Iron absorbs the charcoal slowly. I guess they didn't do enough of that."

"Cure?" Henna asked, more to keep Aaron happy than anything else/ She was a witch, after all. Curing things was supposed to be something she was interested in.

"The charcoal they used was from a dragon-blasted oak. Blasted by a rival dragon, unfortunately." Aaron explained. "How were we supposed to know dragons are incompatible and their magics antagonistic?"

"When you tried to temper the steel..."

"Two dragons, two magics. It went bad-tempered. Then after chickens. Then blew up when I tried to wiz it still." Aaron grumbled on. " And sprayed most of the village with sparks. Oh well, lesson learned. Always check everything yourself."

"Never take a dwarf's word for things being clean. And here's the stream. Let me see if I have anything for twice-removed dragon burns in here." Henna giggled happily as she got to wash the gray ash from her ears. "There is one thing I don't understand, tho. What was it the sword was screaming the whole time?"

"Dragon song. His dragon song." Aaron mumbled as he gingerly stripped down and prepared for a cleansing dip in the brook. "'The chicken sings of roasted coward.' is a rough translation of it, I think."

"A chicken-spit sword, then." Sighing, Henna unstoppered a bottle containing salve. "Well-skewered clucks, to say the least. He did get quite a few of them."

"It also steals. A true barbarian sword." Arron sighed happily as cool water washed over his fresh burns.

"What a day. Bad-tempered chicken steel and a dragging roast."

end

## chapter 3 tomorrow's tomorrow

I love the drop.

Man, when that kaxton goes, I'm first in line for freefall. Always. Sarge keeps trying to put me back, keep me at the end of the line where I'd push the wussies into action, but here in combat I can trade for the right to ride point against the infidels with newbies.

I am Borg. The suit makes it all happen for me. I LOVE my suit.

Power-assisted servo's drag a ton of ever-nasty combat-gear around with me. I can punch thru walls and jump over buildings. An ordinary tank is deadmeat against us, my claws can tear them apart. I can almost stop a Bolo by myself and am worth more than most African nations.

What we can't go thru, I can blow out of the way. 5G smarter weapons take ALL the aiming out of this stuff.

Tonight was a fun-night, the first in a while. This drop we were getting splashed down into a lake and except for Johnston, who was stuck in a deep ravine, we marched out in good order and time. We were hitting hard tonight, the first action since Operation Rebel-Yell when we took out some colonies on the polar ice cap.

It was a sleeper op, up thru water pipes and marching thru sewers. Follow the map and smash into the palace. Reduce said palace to rubble. Bounce out, everybody making their own way back to pickup point.

Easy work. It went fast.

After meeting up with Johnston, we cleaned out two banks and some jewel shops before going home. Fast, easy, quiet. Hide the loot at the bottom of said handy lake for later. Rejoin troops.

War is fun. War is good. I love the drop.

I love my suit.

***

## chapter 4 mc

"Merry Christmas! HA HA HA!"

My wince must've been audible cause Crissy turned around and put her big baby blues on me.

"I do wrong, no?" came chirping out as I sputtered protests at her innocence.

"You do wrong, YES!, Crissy." I sighed and wiped the weary tears away. "It goes HO, not HA!"

Her great big eyes looked puzzled and the Christmas ornaments drooped a little. I sighed and tried explaining to the tree why "HA" didn't work here.

Again.

It's hard to hurt a puppy, even when the puppy looks like a swamplog in drag, but I was being paid for it. I kept explaining things to Crissy till I was sure she had it this time.

Trying to ignore the usual crowd of alien watchers that stopped to stare, I explained the difference between ho, ha and hi to my charge, the ambassador from Swampland, a newly discovered planet with people of its own.

It didn't sink into Crissy's skull, err... trunk. Bark. Whatever... Very well. I could tell that by the way she trotted gaily thru the mall going 'HA HA HA!' to everyone she met. So far most had enjoyed having a mobile Christmas tree talk to them.

English was the least of my problems. If I wasn't careful, some sharpie was gonna try and unload his whole shop on her again. Crissy would rather 'deroot' as she said, than be blunt to a pushy salesman.

My charge was a little on the wimple side at the moment and I didn't want to reason with another coffee-shop lawyer on what made a binding contract with not-quite-diplomatic immunity. My idea of reasoning with these yahoos made that a bloodsport anyway.

Crissy was already a charter member of "The Useless, Sleeping, Thumbfooted Boneheads Club", the "Cheap Thrills R -US" club, the Masons AND the local PTA. Explaining washroom breaks to my boss only went so far and I couldn't afford to leave her to any more predators.

Today's problem was the season. Every try to explain Christmas to some whose idea of religion was adding fertilizer (RAW stinking FRESH fertilizer) to a bucket of slimy mud, then standing in it for a while?

She did, however, like the tree decorations and wore as many as she could hang on her branches. Nobody had told her the trees we dragged in were dead. Or that the holiday was based on somebody we'd strung up for rabble-rousing.

Then the pirate ship appeared on the horizon.

Literally. A pirate ship on Horizon TV, the latest wallset.

A video shop was showing clips from the latest epic, you know the one, the rim-shot where a beauty gets fed to the volcano. The shot was of her doing a graceful dive, then skittering around on the hot lava as her clothes burnt off. A good clip. She moved like grease on a hot griddle, screaming beautifully the whole time.

Crissy didn't like the rowan tree some idiot had left in the background in the rim shot.

This was worse than the dog's little mistake.

Worse than her attempt to give advice to, yes, you guessed it, Bush.

I avoid Druids now, by the way. BOY, do I avoid Druids.

Now I've gotta explain to my boss WHY my tree dismantled a wall-screen TV while I watched.

He's not gonna go for the knothole line, or pining. As it turns out, Crissy was a rowan up the creek without a pad herself and just wanted to get the natives to leaf the tree alone.

Now that he'll believe.

end

## chapter 5 bugjuice

Now this mudball was hell.

So there I was, your average McBem, (Middle Class Bug Eyed Monster) doing my bit to keep the empire from collapse by invading some mudball called earth. Like all the worms don't call their home earth and we really needed more know-nothing slaves in the empire.

Not that I had a choice about it or anything. If I didn't do my five out in the boonies with the rest of the troopers, I'd get declared outlaw.

For those of you in the outer systems where things are still done in the dirt, that's death around here. You can't even breath in my town without a card. Not for very long anyway. So I'm doing my five raping new worlds and bringing happy-slaves into the comforting bosom of the empire.

And hoping the raw ones were sufficiently awed to declare me a god while I stomped them back into the mud.

There's nothing like an edible softie telling you how wonderful you are while you roast their kids for din-din.

So that's invading. It isn't all bad. It isn't all good either. A disgusting number of grunts turn up dead by unknown forces while we pacify the bloodball and that doesn't make for real easy sleep.

This mudball was hell. Mostly mater and islands and there were still lots of wild herds running around loose to coverup activity. Hell, they had dirty atomics and wild ones all over the place, but headquarters had picked this as the best target and the best it was.

The fuckup factory NEVER makes mistakes. Disaster department sleaze buries all their errors far from home.

A hundred years before or after was the grunts call. In a few years everything but the worms would be dead and a hundred years ago they didn't have the smarts to make trouble. So we invade in the middle of it and all hell breaks loose.

ALL the usual troubles and then some. They were mass producing long range hand held destructors by the time we got 'em cooked. Like a worm is gonna need a weapon that'll let you poke holes in a helmet on the moon.

But then I met this girl...one of the religious ones. Just like the training films said not to do after you've started feeling slimy about wasting so many of 'em. Them getting ANYTHING right was a near first, but by that time it was too late for me. I'd converted from my life of sin and into a kosher one.

Oh_vey, eh?

Don't worry, it was right outta the manual. Since we were having trouble killing the natives, we picked a group to do it for us and armed them. The french were busy trying to sterilize Europe, some dinky highlanders were subduing China, Korea, some islands and a big desert around there.

They were jumping all over us in Africa for the chance to wipe out their neighbors. Same as South America.

I was part of a team trying to get some puppet-king action going in the gulf. How was I to know another division was working the Syrians? AND I fell for the girl.

Oh, how the shit did fly when the revolution happened.

Anyway... this girl I met. She was a beaut, a real smooth talker that had me in a hat and beard before I even knew what was going on. That was cool, that's what I was supposed to be doing. That and supplying them with nifty weapons with trackers built into 'em.

The stinking rotten worms dismantled one too many and found the bugs, the tracker, the unstable power supply we could blow from orbit and the little adjustment that made our battle-plate invincible.

You know the rest of it.

Come the revolution, 'bout half of the worm-troops in the world turned on us with weapons that worked. I was inside headquarters delivering a report when they hit.

Could I just have four more guys in here for a moment before I die? I need to say some prayers.

end

## chapter 6 earthday

"Time, horsehead, time!"

"I have all the time in the world, Spike, but I share it with everyone else." I looked at his expression and coughed a little. "Hum, bad guess, eh? Ok, it's..."

I looked at my watch, ducking the rotten looks I was getting from my favorite bartender. "It's 3:25 am, Spike, why ya asking?"

Spike fumed from his post behind the bar for a moment. "Because I want to lock up! This place becomes an after-hours private club only if there's enough traffic to make it worth staying open."

"I'm not worth the trouble? Not even for the wit and warm of my company?"

"Insults and smoldering ashtrays aren't my idea of fun anymore." Spike started looking agitated and kept glancing at the door. "So beat it, I got things to do tonight."

My drink and smoldering ashtray disappeared with that remark, so I pushed off my bar-stool and headed for the door.

"Ok, I can tell when my business isn't wanted. I'll go to... to...." I stopped and tried to think of somewhere a frustrated writer could toss out ideas without talking to a wall that giggled. There weren't many places. "To... to..."

"Try home." Spike whipped off his apron and followed me out the door. "It's about the only place still open around here unless you like your do-nuts REALLY fresh."

He followed me out, jingling keys like they were alarm bells. I nodded. It was the most pleasant thing I'd heard today.

"What'cha got going, Spike? Anything an earther can get in on?"

Spike snorted and stood outside his door, locking up and looking me over. "Hummm... I don't think this is really the smart thing to do, but you're welcome to tag along if you want." Having said that, he took off walking down the street at a fast pace.

I bounced up, happy at the invite, and puffed after Spike. Life had been getting really dull recently.

"So what's up?" I gasped when I caught up to him.

"It's a terrorist meeting and we've got to plan a target for our next hit... oops... that was last week. Tonight we go plant bombs. For the revolution."

I slowed down a little and watched Spike tear off into the distance. He could really move on those eight legs when he wanted to.

"Plant bombs?" I asked, slowing down and talking to an empty street. "Do I want to plant bombs tonight?"

I never got an answer. Something jerked me into a dark alley and spend a few sparkling moments putting my lights out.

The smoke-filled room I woke up in wasn't a pleasant surprise, but not being tied up was... I made a few shambling attempts to roll over and stopped, exhausted in the middle of prying open the first eyelid.

"Hey Charlie, the earther's waking up."

That chirpy little voice seared thru my mind like acid on wood. I was still fighting off the bubbling pits when someone tried to pull me to my feet.

After collapsing in a heap a few times, they gave that up and stuck a bottle in my mouth. I may have been in bad shape, but I knew that when it happened. Unfortunately, I drank about 6 ounces of chilled Disk-scum before I knew what I was doing.

My stomach just curled up into a ball and started whimpering about lawsuits for mistreatment as that fire and ice started doing its dirty work of violently rearranging my insides.

It must've worked. After a few moments of promising to be good in this life, a monk in the next and a saint after that I got my eyes open and looked around.

Spike was sitting in a dark room with a few of his buddies, looking really embarrassed. "Charlie dragged you into a doorway built for pubes." He muttered in a pathetic way. "Try not to mention it, OK?"

I looked around. Someone was handing out guns and small silver packages to everyone there. Spike already had his strapped on.

"Wha?"

"Just put these on." Spike picked up a set for me and after hanging them on me, started pushing towards the door.

"Go earther go" come a shout from behind me. Spike blushed and pushed a little harder.

"UP the glorious revolution."

The slamming of the door cut the noise off. I was reasonable thankful for that, but not crazy about the tunnel I was standing in. Not that I was really able to stand anyway, but being bend double like that was giving my stomach all sorts of interesting ideas I didn't want to have anything to do with.

"Wha?"

Spike took one look and started dragging me out. We popped out in a square with a fountain in it and I made a stumbling rush for the water. At this point, I didn't care what bathed in it.

"Wawa" muttered Spike. "There you go, stupid. And as soon as you're finished, get moving! We've got a lot of work to do tonight."

After splashing some water on my face, I felt almost human again. THAT didn't help. I patted my head, trying to avoid the new lump that was growing there, and after checking out the rest of me, tried hanging the gun belt somebody had put around mt waist in a more comfortable and less conspicuous way.

"What're we up to Spike?" I asked the obvious question as soon as I thought I could trust my mouth again. Disk-scum tends to do silly things to your coordination.

"Tonight we work for the glory of the revolution." he grumbled, hefting his ammo-belt. "Plant bombs, remember?"

Spike, armed? I took a closer look at his gun-belt and ammo pack. They didn't look like much to me.

"Oh really? With these pea-shooters?" I pulled my gun out and had a closer look at it. "Hey! This IS a pea-shooter!"

"And these are your bombs." Spike thru me a silver package. It was filled with seeds.

"Beans!" I muttered. "We're going out to plant beans with a pea-shooter..."

"Kentucky Blue Bomers. Up the green revolution, earther." came Spike's sarcastic voice. "Now get a move on, we've got lots of area to cover before dawn."

end

## chapter 7 moonquake

The crack coming down the wall didn't bother me any, but the small stream of rock dust dribbling out of it did. I tried not to think of the moonbase dome sinking into the worlds largest pot-hole while I was there on my training mission.

"Looks like the top 30 feet of wall have turned to gravel and started moon base expansion plans early."

Pointing this out to my roommate was a waste of time. He didn't care for anything that didn't make points with our cadet leader and HE really didn't want to hear complaints about the condition of our room.

"Don't worry about it, it's just a little dust. You learn to expect a little dust every now and then on the moon." Ralph didn't even look up. Evil was becoming to him. "Sides, you'll get laughed off the base as a green-horn if you do anything else." He mentioned.

"So they have the occasional dust explosion in an airlock, yeah. Anybody could mistake that for a dome-out." I muttered. "But on a bedrock wall thirty feet down?"

The more I studied the crack, the more it worried me. "Don't you remember all the noise about water and air leaks a few weeks ago? Is this it?"

Ralph put his feet up and scratched himself nosily. "If you're worried, just patch it over. I'll put ya in for a good conduct badge."

That, coming from a "climb thru slime" type, was a great suggestion. I got out the kit and started the coverup. It was dirty work.

"If this does stop the dust, there'll be that much less to clean and I want extra points for it." I mentioned.

"For pulling a "Little Dutch-boy maneuver and holding back the dikes of moon-dust from our room?" Ralph snorted disgust. "That'll be the day."

"For stopping the quake." I corrected. "The dome wall is centered on here, and if it's cracking..."

"Oops. The whole dome falls on our heads one darkside moonquake and we all die in the process." Ralph sat up on his bunk and watched me while I patched the wall carefully. "Just clean up the coverup, would ya? I don't want to try to explain to anyone that my roommate is trying to save the dome in his spare time. Again."

"Not to worry. I'm not the one who used the magnetic girder to trick 300 girl-scout's compasses into coming in our airlock and forgot to dismantle it."

He blushed. "At least I got some of them to get sweaty with me doing some star-gazing in the sauna."

"All the upper levels are heated like that." I stood back and sprayed a final coat which almost immediately started to bubble. Some went in, sealing the leaks, and the dust continued to seep out at the bottom of the cracks and the bubbles. I nodded worriedly at that.

"Well, this could a ticket home or enough points to let us stay. Who do ya wanna take this to?"

Ralph stopped staring and started thinking. I trusted his judgment on this one. He couldn't add very well, he was a slob to live with but he could out tap-dance the elders, beating them in their own game.

"Risky any way ya do it, even with solutions thrown in to sweeten the pot for the brass-hats. " Ralph sounded absentminded as his wheels turned. "There's just too many people who'll want to have a say in this."

I moaned. The problems weren't enough, he wanted elegant solutions before he started anything.

"We may have to do something and not expect points for it anywhere." I started. Ralph looked shocked.

"Never! That's against all rules of the game. You Never do ANYTHING without making something on the problem, the solution AND the side effects." He sighed and reached for the lights. "You just write up a nice report and I'll think about who to take to so we can stay. Just make sure there's at least a random smattering of helpful suggestions in it too."

The room blacked out and I sat there in the dark cursing. "Hey! Ya want me to write it in the dark?"

"Go to the study, it has reference books." came the mumbled reply.

"So does my terminal!"

Flicking the lights back on, I ignored Ralph's whining as the cleanup and repatching of the dome wall got finished.

Thirty feet underground or not, I was worried about this. It didn't look healthy. And I wanted to survive my training course, regardless of the blackmarks so far.

***********

"So we have freeze-thaw erosion of the dome wall, what are ya gonna do about it?"

Roberts and I stood in from of the CO's desk and tried to seem reasonably intelligent. That was our first mistake.

"It would seem sir, that we could..."

"Shutup!"

The CO steamed and you could see Roberts getting his "grovel and suckup" all warmed up. I closed my eyes. Guess who was gonna get the blame for finding the problem that closed down moonbase?

"I don't need to hear about anymore dust leaks from you, Simpson! And keep your cakehole glued shut for the rest of the time you're here, understand?"

I nodded miserably and stood at attention, resolving to at least catch up my sleep while getting chewed. It was the only useful thing that'd happen this trip.

"Dismissed!"

Even in one sixth gravity I found out we could march. And march we did. Right to the cadet's office, where a sadistic mind had improved on the list of rotten things to do to trouble-makers. We were about to try them all on for size.

Roberts got booted out, assigned to tunnel washing, while I got the more pleasant task of service crawling and pipe-patching. All sewage lines, from the bottom up.

That's where I got the idea, but it was gonna take a little more organization than I could really manage from where I was. Roberts was spending all his time washing the corridor in front of the female cadets barracks, trying to get a date, and most of the other cadets were treating me like a leper.

If the water leaks were digging holes in the raw rock walls down in the deep levels... Why not use that to tunnel over to the next dome?

Just toss the dust into the sewage lines, let the machines filter out the muck in a settling pound, and dig a nice safe hole to hide in when the rest of the walls collapsed?

My plans never got very far. Roberts had gotten struck with a thought, made nice with the CO's wife and got himself put in charge of the NEW auto-expansion plans for the lower levels while I got bounced back to earth before pointing out any nasty details, like who suggested it.

But he didn't see the patients I put in for. And he doesn't know about the holes I pinhole-lasered to the other domes.

In about six years, near as I can figure it, there are going to be a whole series of gravel filled tunnels connecting all the domes.

And I have land-claims for water-mines on them all.

end

chapter 8 fire and ice.

"You've got to know two things in picking out your own rock son, and they're fire and ice."

I looked at the flaky old fool the government asteroid program had stuck me with and moaned silently to myself. I was supposed to learn from this idiot, not play guessing games. But I relaxed a little as he looked serious. The last gossip was someone had used a load of trainees as in a floating bordello and slave labor camp. This single nut might be something I could handle even if he hadn't noticed I was a girl yet.

"Fire and Ice? For cutting a rock-hole home and sealing it up?"

"Nope."

The creak and slash of rotting ice cut off the rest of his answer, so I watched the condensation on the ceiling drip in a weary kind of way while the old fool coughed wetly. And this was supposed to be home for the next six months.

"If you kids are so smart, why don't you figure it out for yourself?" He finally spat out when I'd asked him to repeat himself for the third time and lost all answers to coughing or incidental noises. I stopped watching the ceiling.

"Because they hired you to teach us." I snarled back. "Now teach me something about surviving out here in the belt."

He looked at me speculatively, then turned to his control board and pointed at the view of empty space around us.

"Well, I've been here for a month or so and the traffic around all the good rocks is getting kind of thick. What do ya figure I should do?"

"Find some virgin gravela and scooter over there, I guess." I grumbled. Fuel was fuel out here.

"Nope." The old guy shook his head sadly. "When you wanna get going out here, the best thing to do is put your shield towards your nearest big neighbor."

"I'd rather find or dig a dry new hole than stay in this swamp." The miner ignored me and my protests and started fiddling with his orbit controls.

I shutup and watched. He'd survived for years in a place most died or went home after a few months. Eventually boredom got to me.

"What's going on?"

"This is part of fire." With that the manic at the panel started taking shots at one of the larger industrial asteroids a few hundred klicks astern of us. I dove for the floor, expecting vicious and instant retaliation when he opened fire on them. Those big boys played rough.

No-lungs laughed. "Now just you relax. It'll take a few seconds to get there, a few more before they know who hit them, a few more before they fire back and a few more before anything hits us. So..."

I got off the floor stuttering mad and fumbling with my suit, managing to get every seal into place. Eventually. This was going to be a few minutes before he could hear me again so I cursed the whole time.

"What did you do that for? They'll kill us!"

"Nope." He shook his head slowly. "They'll just fire a few shots off at us and slow down their rock a little. I'll collect a few shots and speed up. That way, we're both happy. I get help moving into a new territory and they start the long fall back to wherever they came from."

"Why?"

He calmly puffed gas thru a vent, reorienting his asteroid so that his fat rear faced his neighbors. "You just go sit, kid. Lasers tend to mess me up a bit and I might need some help correcting the tumble."

"So what should I do?"

"Heat up some water. We'll need the fuel."

The blasts of a pulsed laser started hitting us a few seconds later, and with a few shudders, the rock began tumbling into a new orbit.

"Get on the jets! It's time you learned how to stop a rock from tumbling!"

I floated over to a lever that didn't do anything except vent sewage and started to pray. Rotter laughed a little.

"There are worse things than living in an icerock asteroid, son. This swamp provides me with water, fuel, a house that grows larger the longer I stay in it and something to sell my nosy neighbors."

The next few shots pulsed by, missing the tumbling rock entirely.

"And an automatic defense system, if you like evasive action." The miner noted cheerfully.

Rotter sat thru the violent tumbling like it was a walk to the corner store, coolly punching jets and correcting the wildly varying gravity. "And the next thing you learn to do is cook in this!" he added.

I put one hand on my gut and moaned. This was going to be a long six months.

end

## chapter 9 dragon

"Turning confusion into skills. So you're a wizard?"

The dragon rolled over on his back and offered his belly to the sun, his legs akimbo and totally relaxed. I found it nerve-wracking even being this close to him and couldn't get out of this hole till he went away.

"No, I'm the last man on the moon and you're sitting on my only chance to get home. How 'bout wandering away and doing something dragonish?"

"Like putting you in a tooth as an indentured servant? Giving you the tail of the dragon right across the chops? Pretending dough is what you kneed? Forget it, you're enthralled here till I think of something better to do here."

"I'm being punished." I said glumly. At least things hadn't gone from bad to verse yet.

"Without vanity you're brain-dead, scaling one. Go bark up another coat tree. Jacket off, jerk. You don't suit me. Parka it elsewhere. Fly away!"

That miserable effort got the snort it deserved and the dragon gave me the benefit of one beady yellow eye before relaxing back into his stupor. "If it wasn't for boredom you'd be dead meat. Try to be amusing, you'll live longer. Be happy."

Checking my air tanks again, I sighed. Even with the best scrubbers we could weasel out of the patronage game, my 02 was going fast. If I didn't get back to moon base One REAL soon, the last flight would go earth side without me. Assuming I didn't croak first.

"No, I'm not a wizard. What's the secret to you letting me out of here, gold? We didn't find any on the moon."

"We know you're all leaving, that's why I decided to play with you. It's a no lose situation. You win, get away and this story will get you locked up. I win and it's free lunch. So you figure out how to get away. Get a life, like."

"Didn't your mother ever tell you not to play with your food?" Stewing in the shade, I looked the situation over. The dragon had landed between me and my flier. Dragons had been LONG gone from the earth and apparently hiding, or scaling it, on the moon. And if I didn't get out of this soon, I was dead any number of less than pleasing ways.

So I mooned him. Difficult in a space suit and it didn't work anyway.

"Do you feel better now?" Asked the dragon in an arch tone as I frantically zipped up and tried to forget what I'd just done.

"Awww, yer mudder was a dino-bot and yer father was rusty."

I checked my air again. I now had twenty minutes to get rid of the dragon or try dying.

"YOUR mother was stupid and your dad short of cash." The dragon wriggled into a more comfortable position. "But you hold out the prospect of being an interesting meal. Why haven't you started grovelling yet?"

"Would it do me any good?"

"No, but it IS sort of customary. Sort of like the blindfold, last meal and prayer, but here you are the last meal, you haven't a prayer and you're in the blindfold."

"I'm wittled down already. Dying has put a cramp in my die-a-log."

"No style, that's your problem. At least the knights that came after me had attitude. Not that it was funny, but..."

"They made snappy platters, I know, I know. Any of 'em get away?"

"Just one. I got the hiccups."

"It was a gas but you couldn't stomach him?"

"No, they tickled. A giggling dragon is helpless."

"So I joke you off? Chorkle you into senselessness?"

"Or tickle my funnybone from the inside." The dragon looked smug. "Go ahead punk, make my day. If you can."

I tried the one about the bishop and the blind girl. He'd heard it.

I tried the one about the milking machine and computer dating. He'd heard it.

I tried the thumb-sucker and merman. No luck.

Finally, in desperation I tried the one about the farmer, the nympho and the silly goose.

I think he's still chuckling. I eased around him while he was blinded by enlightenment.

Oh, you haven't heard it? Tough.

The moral of this story?

A Nymph's bark is warning of overbite.

end

## chapter 10 lassitude

I went home that morning after a night of fighting the good fight; that being job-hunting, easy drinking, better company and coffee. Or tried to, that is.

Yesterday ID been attempting to find some contracts, or at least some business prospects in this new town. Bounty-hunter stuff. It paid off today, sort of. I got back to my hotel and had my key in the door before all hell broke loose.

All over me, as usual.

The hall had seemed deserted when I got there. That changed when I turned and looked down to put the key in the lock. A knife got inserted deftly through my jacket from behind, pricking my side and kidneys gently. A hand grabbed my coat collar and twisted, pulling me back slightly.

That got all my slightly hung-over attention focused on whoever was right behind me, a smelly somebody I couldn't see. A raspy whisper buzzed itself into my ear as a knife pricked me gently.

"Chill, Marker. No driving with the brake here, you're on ice now."

That little statement was right to the point and grumbled softly, as if to an old girlfriend. It didn't need to be loud. A twitch of the knife confirmed it. I nodded and gulped, then got pushed and staggered against an already open door. The knife in my ribs helped motivate me forward and I was desperately scoping out my new troubles even as I stumbled into the room.

Blast. Me, on ice. Already.

Weather-news time, kids. Ice was no problem, right? Any good driver knew how to handle ice, I told myself. But tonight the ice was computer security, not slicked up roads.

Like real life, too fast and you crash. Too fast was 35 miles an hour when crossing an iced-up river. Drive too slow and you don't get anywhere. Touching the brake when on ice can put you sideways on the road.

When iced, you chilled, went with the flow or got squashed. You could not stand on the brakes when trouble arrived. The big point being, stall-action was fatal on ice.

This was not turning out to be a good day for me, but at least I had fewer worries about contacting anyone for work now. People were waiting for me in my room when I got back into the hotel. I use the term people here lightly.

Dirty-deeds-done-cheap gets recruits that barely make human a lot of the time. A little more accurately? There were three strangers who'd broken or bribed themselves into my room and were waiting quietly for me when I returned.

Nasty, mostly illegal gentlemen. Violent types, as you could tell by the knife in my back. One I could see was not even a breather, it was a bot. A Droid; the other body was a Deadhead. I didn't have any hope for better from the guy behind me. Seeing the Droid waiting for me caused a certain sinking feeling in my gut, too. A bot? Was this a vengeance crusade from my bounty-hunting on teddies?

You'd think they all wanted something from me, but from the odd collection of powers gathered there staring at me as the door swung closed behind me, I had no idea what.

Three of them? This was important. That much I noticed while getting pushed inside. The Deadhead was from the Deadzone; a party-animal Jethro. I couldn't help but wonder what he was doing hanging with an escaped robot.

"Marker. Welcome to the city." Was muttered in my ear as the door slammed shut behind me. "Please relax. We want to talk to you."

"Ouch. Weather news, fella. Bad case of whiteout here." I muttered, turning and looking the group over rapidly as I got pushed towards a corner chair. They got that and grinned, easing back a little.

Whiteout was info-noise for Droids, a snow-squall coverup for the knifer, (who turned out to be a Grundge), or a group of stupid rich-kids for Deadhead Jethro. No matter how you took it, they knew what whiteout meant. I was lost and needed a second to adjust.

"And a vicious hangover. I'm blind. Gimme a sec here, wouldja?" I whined, looking around the room desperately. Too late to try anything. I was trapped and they knew it.

They did stay eased off, a good sign, but relaxing was not on my mind. They had brought blood up twice now, once in getting me in here with a knife, and again in using that name.

You see, Marker was an old bounty-hunter name. Mine. The name I used hunting and tracking down escaped 'bots. OK, so it was usually teddybears that lived in Mall parking lots, begging change. Big deal.

Going up against any larger bot usually took a tank. There was a free bot here tonight, too.

Marker. The Droid was an info-person. He knew. The Droid probably didn't have any love for me, even if I knew half the bots ID returned to owners were reprogrammed plants for their little revolution.

Droids! ID eventually quit bounty-hunting because no one believed I wasn't returning clean bots, no matter what I told them. The teddys I captured and returned to their owners were all brainwash cases who used their positions to aid the bot cause now. All completely reprogrammed to aid the free-bots.

The clowns in my room were already informed about more of my past than I wanted anyone in the city to know about. From the sounds of things, they wanted to use it somehow.

Looking things over as I stumbled to a halt, I did realize one thing. One small advantage was mine, and it was very small. My reception committee included a Deadhead, a Droid and a Toxic. See no evil, hear no evil and do no evil, live and in person.

They were all gutter-types who lived in the deep Deadzone, a place where even Big-Brother Borg didn't dare snoop anymore. I was a legit person up here; they all were 'way out of their territory.

Well, lived; as in fought for space with each other and anybody else who wandered the Deep. People like ex-bounty hunter me, for instance, who tended to walk around shooting things down there. ID had violent dealings with them all before, mostly in my young and stupid past last week.

Why they wanted to talk to me was a mystery. None of them looked they needed a mechanic, an ex-bounty-hunter or a bad musician to me.

I shook my head and sighed wearily, glancing over them. The Deadhead at least I could meet socially; you had to wonder why he hadn't set up a meet when I was out pub-crawling. It would've been easy enough to lure me into something then; I made no secret that I was in town or what I was after.

It would've been much more fun, too. Deadzone clubs were the only real privacy available these days, and in a quiet way, very popular; also very corrupt. Any vice you could pay for, you could get down there.

Maybe it wasn't ad-vice? To get to an underground Club in a Deadzone, you simply went down under the street and away from the cameras. Almost any parking garage would do. You used the rear exit and headed down instead of up. Then you got enough concrete between you and Big-Bro to shield transmissions, you hit the deadzones.

There was usually a bouncer at a door herding in the lost lambs. It made the underground clubs a very fashionable place, and the _only_ place for private dealings with revolutionaries, escaped slaves and local smugglers.

And me? Deadzones were usually deep underground tunnels; the zombies there always needed all sorts of weird electronic work done they'd rather no one official knew about. Lights, washrooms, stimulation chambers for the hot-wired set and other stuff. ID done some work for them already, back home.

The escaped Droid bothered me. Droids could handle the deep better than people; do better repairs and were also born computer-literate. Topside Big-Brother had few horrors for them. The Droid was a power and a mystery to me; worse yet, he didn't look like he was even trying to pass as a topside domestic right now.

The Toxic grundge with this group held the knife, a teen-renegade type. Him I totally blanked on. Just muscle, tho that job was usual the Jethro's. Toxics lived in the junk-yards rather than tolerate the big city. Any sort-of green-space they could find, really. They preferred living in the middle of abandoned dumps, which did a great job of killing off (and hiding) any unwary traffic that might be snooping around. He'd been the lurker.

All in all, three types I never wanted to see at the same time, since they, along with the police, were all usually shooting at one another.

Right now, I was stuck between them, with police glory-hounds probably waiting outside itching to make the promotions-list with some noisy heroics.

At the moment they wanted to talk and badly enough to make peace while they did. This situation spoke more than words could tell, and if I hadn't gotten pushed into the room and the door slammed behind me, I would've run away as fast as my legs could carry me.

The Droid as the first to speak again; he even nodded at me, a human nicety that you didn't often see in free 'bots. I think the other two were too busy gloating at me to take that next small step.

"Why are you so surprised at seeing us together, Marker? You already know we share space below."

"Truth, Bro." The toxic teen grinned one of those wide-open spaced grins at me, a grin I recognized from the berserkers-wars ID fought against them. "We get along now." The Grundge continued, still grinning. "Some of the best toxs and de-toxs are in Droid country. No one else but us can deal with them."

I snorted and shook my head, remembering things about Toxics. No one ever saw much of them, and the whole movement was mostly a legend. You didn't call them Grundges to their face, for instance. You never mentioned the ulcers, sores, deformities they had, or asked what illegal plants they were cropping this year. Or where the plots were. That was insulting to anyone but other Grundge family, and a deadly mistake.

"Better living with chemistry. Deadheads still making dumps for you by acting as collection service, right? Middle-men?"

The Deadhead twitched slightly. He was dressed down for this visit and if he tucked the bright pink fur collar on his coat in, he might just past for someone with horrible taste in clothes outside. "Actually, we only..."

"Enough." The Droid cut back in, stepping all over the Deadhead, who, living close enough to pass in normal society, was sort of an outcast. I wondered for a second what that made me, and decided it was expendable.

After all, if the Deadheads, with all their smugglers and connections to the whatnot and whoever in their clubs couldn't score on whatever this crew was after today, the chances of me being able to do it for them instead was pretty small. Deadheads were where ID gotten most of the illegal supplies made by Droids back home.

The Grundge kept grinning at me. Once you get that kind of grin from an under-person, you never want to see it again. At least, I never wanted to see it again in my lifetime, but here it was, making itself at home in my bedroom, leering at me.

That grin said it'd seen a lot worse places than your insides, and that's about where it wanted to be right now.

"We have a proposition for you, Marker. Mr Kemler." The Droid sent on, settling itself into one of the impossible infinity poses free Droids like to adapt while chatting with mere humans. He used another of my fake names to reassure me, I think. Somehow, given the Droid's legendary abilities to hack databases and empty annoying bank accounts, that didn't encourage me much.

The Deadhead stayed in the chair and looked bored; the Grundge toxic stayed grinning at me from his position on my unmade bed.

"OK. An offer I can't refuse, right?" I added in a daze, then shook my aching head. Oops. This was no time to get lippy, even if Droids were supposed to be impossible to insult. Things were way too dangerous for my hangover to get the better of me right now.

"Chill. Things are done a little differently here in the city, Marker." The Deadhead hissed at me angrily. "Too much whiteout lousing the action up in the capital. We keep things cool here."

"Fine. What is it you want with me?" I snapped out, rubbing my temples angrily. This was a little too much to take first thing in the morning, and my hangover was starting to act up seriously now. "What's the deal? And this better be good, boys. I haven't seen any downside action in a while. You know should that."

The Droid stepped up to the plate again and turned his head enough to glare empty eyes at me. "We do. Here's the deal. Marker. You're a supplier now. Ours. Here's your new shop address." The Deadhead grinned at me and held out a piece of paper to me. I didn't take it. The paper got deposited on the dresser, after being studiously ignored for a while.

"Hey, we'll make cover for you." The Deadhead offered happily, supporting his friend. "Real static cover. Get you some ordinary business problems, if that's what you want. Other stuff will be funnelled there for you to solve. Or supply. Our deals."

"With solutions already in, I hope." I stuttered out. Being told I was a made-man already wasn't helping me, not when the people making you had a nasty habit of dying violently. Death like that was usually catching.

"Someone will contact you occasionally with special orders. You will deliver the goods as quickly, quietly and inconspicuously as possible." The Droid added quietly, turning away from me again in a bored way. "Even if you have to order them made. Signals will be arranged."

"And extra work. Specials. Got all that?" Grinning madly at me, the Toxic flexed his fingers like he was keen to start his orders now. I felt my trigger-finger start to itch even thru my hangover. The kid was really going out of his way to bug me and I wondered why.

"Bah. I'll let you know." I said bruskly, turning away from the collection of desperate men trying to micro-manage my life for me. "This is 'way too weird for any of my usual morning nightmares, so it's gotta be real. I'll stop by the shop, look around and let you know later."

After a moment's thought, which was probably all high-speed communications between dumb terminals and a server, the Droid nodded, relaxed his pose and walked out of my room without another glance at me.

The other two followed his gracelessly, the Deadhead bouncing up, slouching down and grousing at me in an easy way as he trotted after his master. The Toxic kept his mad grin on me till the door closed behind them all.

I made a resolve to start drinking in better bars right then and there. Not that it help any, but the traffic the places ID gone to last night was a little too leaky for me.

"More weather news, lads." I grumbled, rubbing an aching head as the door shut behind them. "This is black-ice you're trying to get me on; I don't like it one bit."

*********

I slept. The city morning started much as usual after that for me; a hangover and a prolonged fight to the finish with the various dispensers, gadgets and contrivances in my cheap hotel room. Me desperately trying to get out into the real world, with any and all attempts at personal hygiene going seriously astray in a cheap mechanical washroom.

Typical, really. I'm not good with nozzles first thing in the day; this hotel hadn't put any money into maintaining things in decades either. After an upsetting night visit, things went wrong fast. Basically, I was getting whumped bad.

Give me a personalized computerized john any day. As far as I was concerned, a personal Dress-droid with fixed routines, even if expensive, was the only way to start the day without bloodshed.

This was a new town for me and life in a cheap, dingy hotel wasn't all that pleasant. A fresh dull razor drawing blood was the last straw in a long series of lost, spiteful battles with the washroom convenience contrivances.

Getting tired of inventing new ways of torturing the BO dispenser and muttering threats the other washroom appliances, I gave it all up and went on outside with a pounding head, leaving the unmade bed, dirty clothes, semi-finished fast-food containers and shop address scattered around the room to find their own respective fates.

I didn't feel real great, but put that down to drinking heavily of the local beer till late last night. Out of kilter and not really ready for people yet, I manfully staggered down the narrow stairs and out into the fresh spring air anyway.

Only one pit done. Not fully shaved; newly shocked and except for a shower and clean undies, all of my personal social-facade sacrificed and abandoned to the antagonistic whims and caprices of some cheap washroom deities.

A few minutes later, the birds in the shade of the cafe were chirping deliriously at me and stayed chirping deliriously in the warm spring sunshine even when ignored; eventually it got to me. I listened to one happy song with a silly grin on my face as my Cafe order got taken away to wherever my breakfast orders disappear to. The birdcalls were a pleasant-sounding thing.

Sound interested me, so I stayed considering the impromptu arias around me as I belted back my first black coffee of the day and gradually forced myself awake. Sound is important to me, it's a talent I have. One put to good and bad use.

Things need repairing you see, and I'm a mech. Or used to be. Electronic tech, usually. A light-bulb changer, most of the time. Due in massive ineptness on the part of most of my clients, sometimes things are broken; but most often the thing is simply not operating. That was fine by me. I get the troubles, they get the bills.

In my life, you could usually tell just what was wrong with whatever-it-is that currently wasn't doing anything just by listening, if you tried.

I can, anyway. Except for some of the less than wholesome toys in the desolate landscape they call washrooms out there, that is. After a few years of doing this for a living, these days I'll swear most of the people I've had to deal couldn't be trusted to feed and water a horse.

The chuckles over my old clients, who wouldn't hired me on a bet if they could see me attempting to shave my ears first thing in the morning came easily. Even with a hangover.

Sometimes being a mech is a nasty, difficult living, that's usually due to the big egos you have to deal with. Unfortunately, they're also the ones that pay your bills.

One case stuck in my memory. Ever try to tell a slightly-psychotic (but rich) witch-doctor his super pico-hertz crystal-group was out of phase, and that just from listening to the yelping the dogs were making around the place? Then have him decide I wasn't somehow trying to dupe him?

Me being better than him would bruise his delicate, prima-donna ego, you see. That would also put me on his personal conspiracy list as an enemy, for immediate consideration and retaliation. Like being as late as he could manage paying his bills.

I must be out to get him anyway. How else could I know what was wrong already?

Remember, enemies are the last paid and never called back. And those were just the egomaniacs out there; my meat and potatoes. Life-as-an-exercise-in-vanity people aren't adept at the more mundane realities; I make a _LOT_ of money off them.

Thankfully, most bruised spirits are easily soothed with a healthy shovelful of manure or two. Now do you want to know how many things are unplugged when I get there? Not including the clients, that is.

Still, it's a living, and I do like computers. Electronics is fun. Bots do what they're told to do and nothing more in the normal course of things. A tortured bot will do otherwise, but they are rare.

Getting around idiots who want to watch is definitely easier than trying to figure out an intermittent fault, too; a once every three-day event that eventually traces back to a supersonic squealing pipe from four doors away that sometimes shattered a delicate electronic arrangement with its harmonics, for instance. I've had to do that in my line of work on a too-regular basis.

The cafe relaxed me a little. This new town wasn't all bad news and noisy control-freaks. So far, it was a fairly nice place, as long as you stayed clear of the local tradition of hustlers. And the underground.

The whole city was still new to me and hopefully it was a lot better than my cheap hotel and it's visitors.

A month or so ago I'd gotten fairly tired of dodging several girlfriends in my home town. All the girls back there seemed to desperately trying to get pregnant, territorial, then move on with those developments.

Just my luck that my taste for the smart ones also got me girls with a nasty habit of pushing their own agendas, and doing it so gracefully it almost worked.

My move here was unforced, unhurried but I definitely wasn't welcome back in my old haunts unless I had a preacher and a ring with me when I returned. The ladies I knew there would see to that, bless their twisted little hearts.

That situation had pretty much killed my usual dives, (you don't actually get much drinking done when the waitress isn't talking to you anymore) and since I was being forced into exploring, I figured why not change cities too?

So I did. I'd chosen my destination at random, out of a list of places easy travel was still possible to. This came up, sounded interesting and I went. It hadn't been bad so far. I'd also deliberately chosen a real interesting place as life was getting pretty dull back in the home-village.

The new place was a cursed town, but had great book-stores as a result. A very black curse; novels were a very popular method of doing research into the local troubles, as they were called in here. That made for lots of good reading lying around. The actual curse only interested me slightly, as that was a sad but familiar story.

Some popular-but-slighted tart had shown a lot more resources than suspected and had laid a whammy on the city-fathers some years back. After getting dumped she'd nearly wiped them out, plus some other important families, just for fun. People were still scrambling to get away from the continuing fallout of the troubles.

The Underground and Deeps had leaped into the power-vacuum;they were still big, important players here.

An old, stupid lesson getting re-hammered into place here was my personal bet.

The tart had developed several new and interesting ways to listen in on things; ways that'd apparently gotten inherited by some fairly unscrupulous people who also liked making new ghosts. That was a professional opinion I was prepared to offer only if someone was willing to pay me big bucks for it.

Fixing it would retire me early any of several ways.

No one had, yet. As my funds were still good, I wasn't pushing the item at all. To tell the truth, pushing the sale of that particular item would probably make me lots more industrious and enthused enemies than I could afford right now.

Enemies being after me in a new town I don't need. I needed more friends first, friends with lots of monied, stupid friends. Besides, my clients were enough trouble in that department anyway. So were their cheap, interfering relatives, the ones that liked to save money by not paying bills and hoping the old fools croaked instead.

This city still interested me, as it had much better history available than some tantrums a witch had thrown. This new river-city was a charming, older place, with lots of ancient taverns and distractions for a bachelor like myself.

It was the regional capital and had been for a hundred years now, so it was well stocked with a variety of expensive pleasures. It'd been a tribal trade-village before that. A very practiced wickedness imbued the land as a result of all the cultures mixing here, some local, some imported, some just opportunistically infesting the area.

'Politics looked like fun till you tried it' was my opinion so far. Being the capital, politics was a big industry. To serve and collect was said to be the local maxim; and not all the collections were easy. You only had to look around the city to see that. Old greystone buildings strewn throughout the older parts of town still had visible scars from some of the sterner efforts at collectivism, so to speak.

As a result of all this history, both the culture and people here seemed to specialize in lynch mobs, panics-for-profit and (naturally enough, being the capital) pandering to that fickle bitch-goddess popularity. Hustlers accommodating the current popular greatest-good, force, or biggest noise had eventually become a local tradition, but only as long as it was profitable. Inventing new forms of paperwork torture for the other hapless citizens of the land was an additional major industry.

Sighing, I relaxed a bit more as my headache eased and sipped more coffee, watching the meandering foot-traffic on the sidewalk from the cool of my tree-shade, enjoying the day and musing. This place wasn't all that much different from my old home really, if a tad more extreme in certain areas. It seemed almost normal, for a cursed and haunted capital-city.

All the usual festering (and mostly imaginary) gossip from collections of frustrated meddlers was available, of course. I'd spent the last few days collecting some of that, trying to get a feel for the area. Available at any street-corner, bar, tavern or cafe, and for free. What would life be without beer, gossip and stories?

This place did have its quirks, thou. The city was bent, orientated towards profit for the monied, with a taste for hot bloody political masters as a kind of habitual after-thought. Being a mere professional tradesman, it was best to know what idiocy you had to support or avoid here, or you risked getting burned in the cross-fire of some local feud.

What bent the place? Money, of course. Taxes and permits, for a start. The free-manufacture and trade zones out by the hover-port. Government clerks and locals weaseled for themselves as best they could, and out of the unwary. One of the big problems was, public service was a duty, not a calling.

Cash for the mercenaries, relatives and patrons always being involuntarily parachuted into things that currently needing fixing was unheard of. Being born into stealing yourself rich was a considered a public duty. Noble, even.

Officially, that is. Private enterprise wasn't, thou. The country, so far, had survived this. The capital itself was a little more damaged.

The city was enterprising. Not that being enterprising was a guarantee of success, mind. The only thing worse, it was said, than putting a greedy relative in charge of a business was putting a greedy stranger in.

What needed fixing? Water, power, trains. Roads, trade-agreements and other trivial things. Rails, too. Money and merchant work.

What got fixed here? In the long run, almost nothing. Anything that the politicos and monied could meddle with got persecuted and drained dry of cash, more or less. Vamped, with leeches vulturing in on the still-quivering corpse with enough paper to turn the problem into a harmless mummy.

The monied, as usual, were the most dangerous people here. It was said you told a respectable citizen (or a priest) here about an interesting opportunity or device here at your own risk.

The competition, as they say, is iron these gray days. And just that tiny little bit poisonous, loud and rusty if someone suspected a free lunch is about to walk away from them and had already taken a considerable beating.

It's true. The wicked will drag you under, if they can. This city had made an old and semi-honorable profession out of it, that's all. Not that it's a completely unpleasant process, unless you're on the bottom to start with. Or end up there, broke.

All this jovial congeniality was wrapped in a facade of servile friendliness to wandering strangers, of course. Like a snake, you had to grin your dinner down around here, not stalk it. Hypocrisy and quiet plundering was considered a high art form; it was practiced zealously by everyone, from all the foreign diplomats to the merest merchant.

Here you were expected to hustle anything that held still; plus quite a few of the more lively targets. Money apparently makes all kinds of crap fester and quicken with an abundance of life, doesn't it?

Here, local heros could sell you your own watch, the time, and have enough creative energy left over to make you enjoy the process as they rented you out to strangers.

Not my usual speed, but tolerable. I've never been a victim of the kindness of strangers, myself. Suddenly, I felt old, sitting alone in the Cafe and giggling.

Things started out reasonably OK for me that day; ID survived my first encounters with semi-official offical-dum last night. I didn't want to ruminate about that business anymore, not even the tales about certain monied bread-makers I'd heard already. This was the first warm spring day of the year, with sunshine strong enough to dry and warm the benches outside, where I was sitting yet still cool enough to have gouts of rotting snow with their hoarded collection of winter treasures peeping out from under them.

That amused me. A stash of instant snowballs, close at hand. In case of boredom, reach under your chair, pack and heave at the more pretentious vanities strutting on the promenade. Then duck and run.

The closer ones, that is. Throwing snowballs did sound a bit like work to me, and so far in the day I hadn't targeted even the more deserving strutters on the boulevard with any slushy abuse.

A warm, breezy day. A muddy day after a wet spring snow-storm, threatening to burst into fresh greens, warm breezes and kites. A good day to be outdoors in the downtown cafes, drinking coffee and girl-watching.

I looked around at the traffic flowing by me and sighed. Well, more like watching old men in their new gear cruise for impressionable young girls, but we needn't dwell on that. I wasn't the only one out feeling frisky today.

Life was good. Catching a few rays, replenishing my vitamins and recharging felt fine. There I was, peacefully slurping the last tasty drops of coffee out of my mustache (I'm a slob, but lifting my mustache and looking down my nose at the girls as they meandered on by totally involved in their social climbing, didn't seem like quite the right thing to do; besides my napkin I'd already used on my nose.) when it hit me.

That little background noise had continued; it was familiar, realizing I'd gotten it pegged wrong took a while. The chirping surrounding me wasn't all birds serenading me on this beautiful spring day. Some of it was a squeaky wheel. Or wheels. Worse yet, it sounded good to me.

Something like a berserk gear, or a dusty baby carriage axle that had seen any oil since last fall, being over-worked. In disguise, worse yet.

I listened hard to everything after catching my mistake. Started to sniff about alertly too, waiting for the belt driving these gears to start gun-smoking.

This was bad news, actually. Like having your girlfriend whisper Duct-tape' to you in a soft, seductive tone, an inch from your ear. You just _KNOW_ she's up to plumbing, not romping.

The squeaks and squeals continued, mixed in with real birdcalls. Well, mostly bird-fights really, not calls, as the more ambitious among the feathered had started gathering nesting materials and irking their elders with this impetuousness. Personally, I was still a little worried about the squeaking.

It was a fake squeak. Someone wanted something, and I wondered what and who. Was someone watching me? Which of the girls out there on the street wanted 10w30 instead of affection?

When misalignment starts to sound interesting to you, you know it's time for a vacation. Of course, in spring any excuse for taking some time off is a good one. One problem with this was I was on vacation already.

The noise did have a certain robotic quality to it, and that bothered me more than my mistake did. Dealing with runaway robots, Droids and bots was bad news. The problem with going into the renegade robot slave-trade was I didn't want to. Not as a hunter, not as a parts-supplier to the bots, not as a fink for the authorities.

Been there, done that, I barely snuck out alive. The taxes in that industry can kill ya, and trust me, everybody down there can shoot better than you.

The noise persisted and I got interested in spite of myself. Robots, especially runaway ones, didn't usually make any noise, or attract any attention to themselves they absolutely didn't have to. Attention was still too dangerous for them.

It was deliberate, I decided. I was being watched, and carefully. And they wanted me to know about it.

No fun there. After fixing a few Droids back home, the ones willing to pay for a private supply of untraceable parts, I bowed out. It was good business, better than hunting them down and returning teddies to their owners, just dangerous.

Not fixes here yet, naturally. Mostly well-placed renegade Droids back home, judging from the amount of cash they had, and the amount of trouble they went to keeping their supplies and sources (me) secret.

I did the work for bots happily, upgrades, repairs and all, even when I knew the second they were alone they'd do a better job of rebuilds, calibration and alinement than I ever could. Money always interested me, and bots paid well for quality parts.

I listened. The squeak was still there. I thought about it. Perhaps I needed a vacation from my vacation, a challenge or two to stimulate me.

Stimulation other than wandering lovelies, that is.

Yes, I'm a mechanic. A good one, one that tell from the sounds you make what the problem is. Then fix it, or sometimes even tell you how to. Also a crummy musician.

Right now I was still listening hard to myself. Did I really want work the underground in this new town? The top underground in the capital, no less?

More to the point, did I really want to have the underground label me as the officially designated supplier for the revolution?

The thought scared me. A revolution that looked like it was a delicate business-arrangement already, being partnered with feudalistic collective Droids, free-marketer Deadheads and Toxic commune-types?

Pawns get hustled. This deal seemed like I was being rooked and here was another player already. Big-Brother is always hungry.

I decided to take a chance. Life had been real boring recently and perhaps it was time for a change.

Salvation by good works, good exercise and sheer blind faith-force? It didn't look like I was up for any of that anymore. The three biggest business interests I knew of all wanted me to work with them, and not with tax-avoidance in mind.

Thinking about this occupied my time and so did that squeak. Business must've been a lot better in the underground than I knew about if those gutter types were acting this uppity. It took serious money to buy this kind of freedom, and from the looks of the lads in my room today, the underground had all the freedom they wanted.

Now a squeaky wanted something, too. How much was I willing to lose for this?

***************

"Oh, they're big, all right. Deadheads employ more people than anyone else now, mostly in semi-legal plants in the free-zones. And in their bars."

That little titbit of news depressed me. From what my informer... Sorry, gossip... Was telling me, the various Undergrounds had all but taken over in the capital, had done it quietly and long ago.

As long as the taxes and permits were paid for, Big-Brother didn't care who operated the free zones. Or how.

"So."

end

## chapter 11 booted

It wasn't my fault, honest!

Going for the popular, promo'ed and recommended version was a big mistake, I guess. The politically-correct sanitised-for-TV approach to things smothered the independent alien reality. By who, where and with what lost priority to commercial idealism.

Basically, I got smucked. Blind-sided. Stomped flat. And it was really all their fault, your honor. Lemme tell ya my side of the story.

******

The Butlers did it, or at least started it.

Yes, Butler-boots.

Not that the other tech-stuff the aliens sold us was bad or anything... For example, the ACME generator changed the world nicely for us. Having a portable, clean power plant that could fire up a whole thirty story office-tower and still fit into the palm of your hand did have a happy impact on escaping certain things like traffic and pollution, and that was only one of the advanced tech-toys the alien invaders gave us.

The next best thing that came out of their arrival was the element separator... put waste in one end, take pure elements out the other, and except for a few glitches with aluminum and sodium which tend to mildly explosive in air, things went fine. Even with boots.

Well, to be honest, things went fine only if you didn't have to deal with the havoc an alien arrival created in the local malls.

If you ignored the race riots, the resurgent old-time religious fervor, and the general fracturing of a global economy into county-sized tribal countries, things went fine, even fashionably.

The frenzied depopulation of certain countries for colonies on Mars and in the belt was how I made my living. I terra-form asteroids into mines and farms and these days apparently _ANYTHING_ was an improvement over the local control-freak dictator, even places that were more or less guaranteed to kill you for even the smallest mistake.

Anyway, the alien-look soon took over, both out in the belt and here on earth, making the unpopular no-conservatives even more superficially obvious with their refusal to adapt to the somewhat recently changed circumstances.

You see, aliens had something that looked more like hooves than feet on the far ends of their legs, (a fact much ballyhooed by the religious right) and wore pod-like boots with enough toys built into them to satisfy even the greediest techno-freak. These were the famous butler-boots. Their shoes, suitable adapted for human feet, became very popular, especially for the bottom of the eco-pile, the gravel-eaters last on the rope.

You remember those first weeks they were out. Weaponry, auto-meds, weather shields... (That's internal climate control. They were space-shoes, too.) the alien equivalent of steel-toed all-terrain hiking boots became the highest fashion rage. As you might expect, they were promptly outlawed in the provinces as detrimental to good sense, fair play and loyal earthership. Butlers were popular anyway, especially with us practical types that had to work for a living.

When suitably decorated by encapsulating them in fake fun-fur, mirrors or camouflage paint, the B-boots became the height of the current downtown fashion-fads in the freedom-loving cities, too. Butlers were a matter of survival downtown anyway, as the various environments, economies and cultures left on earth collapsing under the weight of red tape, paper-waits and assorted abuse. We all ignored that on got on with the real fun anyway, which mostly involved getting away from the conservatives.

Our puzzlement at the hostile attention this new fashion attracted from the aliens was immense. Passionate cultures, where outrageous individualism superseded more a humanist peace and good order, didn't care what the aliens thought, but alien reaction at the boots made for some more initial confusion and self-fulfilling prophecies in the horrible-mistake department; from the conservatives (who thought governments were for sissies anyway) and backward-into-the-future religious types.

Booting up the system was all the rage anyway, even if neither the aliens or our far-right types didn't like the boots. There asteroids to explore for diamonds, moon-mountains to climb and name and Grange-point party stations to fly in, once you rented low-g wings.

But who was to know the aliens decorated their feet instead of their faces like us? Well, most of us.

Of course, what we didn't realize, or even care much about, was to the aliens anyone who wore the new boots looked like they were ready and trying to declare war on the whole galaxy at large.

Anyway, I was terra-forming an asteroid for settlement and walked up to this group of visiting snoopy aliens, newbies to the system with the rough equivalent of a "I eat live babies for a living." sign tattooed on my face and all hell broke loose.

The Butler did it, your Honor. Honest.

end

chapter 12 humphrie's mountain.

The aliens, after they'd been here for a while, had their biggest visible impact on fashion. In particular, mountaineering fashions and mountaineering boots for the moon in my case.

I'm Jody; my life is conquering the moon's mountains, the darkside peaks, great deep canyons and the greater unknowns. A different type of social climber, a moonbooter, that's me. I earned my programming credits and plan to keep it that way up here.

Today, as a life style, mountains worked and hadn't managed to be fatal yet. So far, it was looking to be a good day because I was club FCGL, First-Camp Glorious Leader of another New-York financed trendoid climb-it and name-it expedition.

That meant it fell to me to keep Ladly Hasan and Ms.Tiching, who were newly engaged, disengaged long enough to attempt scaling our chosen and so far nameless peak instead of each other during the climb. The others of my little group I'll introduce to you later.

Yes, I know, I know. I'm a tour guide, a baby-sitter. Call it what you will, it kept me operating lead-rope and not eating gravel, grunting packs up for deadbeats. I enjoyed my new job immensely.

My deadman programming won't permit anything else. I was AI-locked into this personality-mode for the duration.

Other members of today's expedition were the local 273 of the Bearer's Union, all good local lads who'd suffered thru tourist's lunacies before and would, for a reasonable extra price, see that not much of happened this trip.

Also with us were the N'Wabees, a couple from Africa who were dutifully collecting the current status symbols... (Mr. N'Wabee made his preference for golf obvious for the whole climb by constantly teeing off the whole climb with a collapsible club and whatever pebbles were handy to him) and a prospector from Alaska, Ashly by name, who wanted mineral samples from the lunar peaks.

We got to Base Camp in good order, unloaded our land-crawlers and cheerfully set testing equipment before setting about the tedious task of de-tenting for supper and organizing for the first day's walkies to Camp One at 27000 feet. Resting and testing, as it turned out, was our first mistake, but we did find out just what was likely to go wrong this climb.

Ms.Tiching's tent developed a nasty over-pressure, ballooned, then pulled loose from it's mooring soon after the arrival of her boyfriend Ladly. The tent promptly cultivated a silly habit of bubbling across the moonscape in leaps and bounds and necessitated the coordinated efforts of several people in the camp to catch rollicking little puppy; then push the aggravating trampo-line back to it's previous position and re-securing it to bedrock.

Apparently Hasan and Ms.Tiching were unaware of anything unusual happening; they had napped thru the entire episode, or so they said. Both expressed an innocent surprise at their rescue and I thought to tell them that their moonshoes would immediately and forcibly reboot if the tent vac'ed, providing instantaneous, two foot, separate and exceedingly frustrating envelopes around every personage in the tent if the pressure ever dropped significantly, but other minor problems in the camp captured my attention first.

The miner problem was of course, the Alaskan prospector, that being a big Ashly. Ashly'd just discovered that the bearers weren't at all interested in carrying several tons of rock samples down a mountain that was mostly sheer cliff, or his several hundred mass-kilos of equipment up, even in lunar gravity. This upset his plans for rock-collecting no end.

The African couple refused to help much, Mr N'Wabee going only as far as offering to hit a few pebbles downhill for Mr.Ashly, and the prospector was left with the dreary task of cutting his laser assayer down to a personally portable size or only carrying a pocketful or two of pretty stones back. He was still gnashing his teeth in rage when I left him to tend to other details in our happy little group, details like who was to be cooking what.

Lunch was the next difficulty that beset us. Henderson, professional camp cook was with us this trip and Henderson fancied himself a new breed of moon-chef, an unrivaled advance in our solar system's cookeries.

Unfortunately, none of the rest of us were practicing mutants, and consequentially found Henderson's cooking indigestible, but that never seemed to deter him from his freehand experimentation on us in the slightest.

Lunch was an artwork as a result. Personalized, stylized, incomprehensible something-or-other on a plate, being made up of mystery meat in raw chestnut paste cooked by leaving it in the sun (and vacuum) for a few hours.

A triumph for Henderson, a mystery to the rest of us. It quivered every once in a while, for unknown reasons. Few except Ashly were even able to crack the shells around the meat and all were sorry when it happened, as the smell that leaked out was something you'd cheerfully move to the moon to forget about. I handed out emergency rations all round and took the opportunity to lesson my tourists on methods of eating while still in moon boots and not tents.

Henderson was hurt that I insisted on some emergency preparations being made like that, but I insisted on the safety of our charges being paramount and sent him on ahead to prepare supper for us all.

Things progressed well that day and eventually we made our stumbling way to 27000 feet with all our supplies; in the best mountaineering tradition of course, that being the bearers carrying moon-sized loads and everyone else with staves and moonboots, congratulating themselves heartily on their mutual impetuousness at daring to climb a new moon-mountain with only moonboots, bearers, tons of supplies and a guide to help them.

Unfortunately, there is no accounting for the fact we couldn't find our forward Henderson, or Camp One at 27000 feet. Henderson was making himself plainly heard on our radios, but our best efforts at finding him were to no avail, so we made a new camp without him and told him we'd try to find him again on the way back down.

It hurts to hear a grown man cry like that, but there was nothing to be done. We simply couldn't locate him and I had a whole camp to worry about, so we tented where we were and suffered thru more heated freeze-dried rations, (Beef Wellington, as my notebook said.) instead of Henderson's latest culinary surprise. He promised to be at our next camp if he had to walk the whole mountain to find us first.

A dedicated man. A lost one, but still dedicated to his art.

I spent a pleasant evening double-checking our equipment for the day's traverse ahead, equipment that had recently shown a disturbingly nasty, but so far useless tendency to shatter every now and again in the extremes of the moon's climate, with the normal result of scaring the bejabbers out of all concerned. Apparently neophyte mountaineers were a tad disconcerted when the rope they were (wrongly) depending on to stop them from falling several thousand feet straight down dissolved into dust after being (wrongly) yanked on for a few hours. I happily tested for faults, content to keep my clients safe, merrily dodging shrapnel from the older and now exploding hammers and spikes that made up the bulk of our supply.

Peacefully watching the newly-tethered tent-bubbles bouncing in a nonexistent breeze, I sat by myself and double-checked the supply of splintering spikes, dissolving rope and exploding hammers while watching our group settle down into the vacuumed peace of Camp One. Mr N'Wabee was the only other occasional person out moonbooting; and when he wasn't suited up and using his shelter for target practice on an imaginary golf range, he bounced tent with his wife too.

Mr.Ashly was tenting with me and recently had seemed to spend all of his free time collecting and smelting rocks to assay them his way; ie: By sniffing the fumes. The odor of burnt rock kept me outdoors looking at tent pegs. Ms.Tiching and Ladly Hasan seemed quite athletic and kept their tent... Err, air-borne, so to speak... Whenever possible, much to the roving disgust of Mr.N'Wabee.

The bearers were busy experimenting with something they called a vaccine-still, probably purifying water or something like that. I didn't ask for details, as they were local to the situation and seemed to know what they were doing. They were also fairly protective of their clannish trade secrets, and keeping our bearers happy was another high priority, so I let them be.

Turning in after a bit myself, (after fumigating the tent of rock fumes), I slept peacefully, secure in the knowledge I had a healthy group for this particular climb; ones that weren't all that concerned with the ladies going star-gazing with them instead of staying in base camp and making up first aid supplies, the more usual occupation for ladies on a new climb.

With rich kid climbers, you weren't always that lucky. Two days out and people start to exhibit all sorts of peculiar tendencies, buried personality traits that didn't show up on any profile. Usually homicidal traits when you're climbing straight up a cliff and relying on the stability of the person holding your rope to a far greater degree than is normally prudent.

It was fortunate that our whole crew was roped together for the next day's climb, a text precaution with new climbers on a new mountain, as our climb was up a nearly vertical cliff. As we shortly found out, Ms.Tiching habitually climbed with her eyes closed, both hands clamped on the rope and her trust in God. After the third time she'd blithely walked off a cliff and needed hauling back up to the nearest rest-ledge by whatever members of the expedition hadn't inadvertently followed her over, the matter of how to handle this situation was put to a democratic vote by the members of the expedition.

The motions to toss her over the cliff sans rope or simply shoot her here were dismissed. To our great good luck, the girl turned out to be a lightweight and seemed to find the whole process of being bound hand and foot to the climbing-rope fairly exciting. She made only minimal, if loud, protests, most of them having something to do with our mutual ancestry, and after several explicit observations on our bearer's marriages to other bearers, particularly the ones that were securing her to a rope between them, she spent the rest of the day being dragged up the cliff, screeching merrily on her own private wavelength and praying to various deities to rain havoc on the offending families involved in this.

"I'll get you for teaching me this, Roberts-Peirre, if it's the last thing I ever do!" was her favorite phrase in a fairly one-sided conversation that she keep going on her radio. I'm afraid the name became somewhat of a running joke when we stuck camp that night, as no-one named Roberts-Peirre with us and Ladly had no idea who Tiching was talking to anymore either. It did embarrass Ladly for the few minutes he spent socializing with us before borrowing a pair of soft-leather shackles from the N'Wabee couple and hauling a still-struggling Ms. into their over pressured tent for the evening. I'll assume the shackles were to make her feel at home, as she'd already spent most of the day bound up in a set just like them and had seemed fairly cheerful by day's end.

It was a bit stop and go, but we missed Henderson again, even with his best efforts to track and triangulate on Mrs.Tiching's radio. For a moment, it seemed that we would have the services of our chief, but an interrupted signal, due to an unfortunate rock out-cropping Ashly located for us and indicated was particularly interesting, which meant we were huddling quietly behind something that prevented Henderson, extreme cook from re-joining us when he went past.

It was a yawning and haggard-looking Ladly helped us tie a newly co operative and grinning Ms. Tiching to the ropes the next morning, after a group breakfast where we, err, ironed out, another few small problems. It was decided that forthwith, Mr. N'Wabee would stop using Mr. Ashly's rock samples as golf-balls; and also that we would send two of our bearers on ahead to prevent the colored flares locating Camp Three for us as a waste of vital supplies. We were set to climb, away from Henderson's route, as it was decided, as other routes had started looking more interesting than the one he was promising to be on.

The rest of the day was a peaceful all-fours crawl straight up another mountain cliff, hauling a hogtied but still very energetic Ms.Tiching up the slope, following the ropes spiked into the rocks by our bearers and the step-holes that had been laser-blasted into some of the harder bits that didn't have natural handholds. A good climb was had by all.

Except Ms.Tiching, of course. She had a wonderful carry, if her long and involved conversation with her new imaginary playmates could be believed.

Camp Three, not lit by orange flares so we could all find it this time, was a pleasant surprise when we got there. We had tented early, Henderson had come back down, found our ledge with a cave, and after securely tethered the tents inside, sealed and pressured the cave with an airlock for usso the atmosphere was lunar-normal. Real air was a drastic change from suits and tents as we could turn our boots off and act like regular people for a while, and on the moon, that was a special treat.

Supper was waiting for us as Henderson had gotten an early start, tracked us down and prepared a special roast-trout surprise for us, too. Freeze-dried fish doesn't age well, however inventively prepared, by the way. It was another rock-like caramel sauce this time too, I think. Most of the fish was blown off out of the cave in an accidental air-pressure loss by one of the bearers who went out for a walk in the middle of supper; a blowout that did little but send caramel-coated fish spinning sparkling off into the lunar sunshine. The art of it all was applauded by everyone present except Henderson. I insisted on a ravenous hunger being immediately appeased by more rations rather than wait for more cookery. Most of the camp had finished eating by the time I'd talked Henderson into seeing the sense of that move.

It was a pleasant evening, with Ladly wincing, Ms. Tiching glaring hotly at the bearers, Mr. N'wabee cheerfully blasting pebbles all about the camp in natural air and lunar gravity and Mr.Ashly fuming and gloating over the prime samples of whatever stone he'd picked up that day.

Thankfully, Mrs. N'Wabee quietly clatched with Ms.Tiching during a tense after supper tea, calming her somewhat. The two kept their heads together, happily comparing notes on something.

Afterwards, I made entries on the climb in my journal while the bearers sat in their area drinking purified water and singing native songs, mostly about sailors with various difficulties, I think. I do believe they identified greatly with the songs as they were all singing them quite merrily by evening's end.

After we'd all retired to our separate tents, there was only one brief little incident to mar the night. After a brisk round of tent-bouncing, Ms.Tiching could be heard begging for something from Ladly, even over the loud singing that was coming from the bearer's tents. Possibly the brightly colored fumes leaking from Mr. Ash's stone smelter were bothering her. Mr N'Wabee had stayed awake and active too but was unsociable, wandering the camp muttering to himself in a dark tone, furiously blasting pebbles about the cave with his driver. Meteorite golf-pebbles that made any attempt to get outside your tent hazardous to your health.

The unfortunate incident occurred when the cave-seals failed somehow and the silence of the moon descended on the camp as the air in our cave left in a fast and nearly deadly whoosh, nearly taking Mr. N'wabee out with of the cave and over the cliff with it. It did somehow push Henderson out, but as all were wearing their boots, it was a minor thing and actually resulted in something quite peaceful for us all.

Henderson, after being dumped several thousand feet down the mountainside, promised to back in camp fairly early in the day, as his radio transmissions indicated he'd managed a soft landing at the bottom of the cliff we'd just climbed. All wished him luck.

At breakfast the next morning Ladly seemed exhausted, barely able to drag himself out of the tent, while Ms.Tiching seemed to making a great effort to be friendly to the bearers, wriggling about and smiling happily as they tied her up for the day.

Mrs. N'Wabee was developing an interest in geology and followed Mr Ashly about most attentively. He apparently didn't mind her company as the two were inseparable for the climb while Mr. N'Wabee, determinedly denuding the mountain of all pebbles, seemed overjoyed at his wife's new interest as it left him free to concentrate on his golf game.

Again we climbed almost straight up the rockface, following ropes and footholds carved into the living stone by our bearers. It was a fairly exhausting climb, what with helping to carry Ms.Tiching, who now seemed to spend her days bound securely but humming cheerfully about something only she knew. Our whole expedition was moving quickly and safely almost straight up the mountain staying ahead of Henderson and that I was thankful for.

Taking kids on a green hill was a hard enough trip, a rough hill would've been murder. Or applied death, most likely. These campers were turning out well, all things considered.

Henderson didn't manage to catch up to us till well after a fine supper, a bitter disappointment to him. The rest of the camp bore it well and promised interest in his cooking later.

Our next camp, C-4, was easily found, situated as it was on a narrow ledge directly in our path. Henderson was learning about our scouting limitations, too and almost managed to find us in time for the meals. He was always just a little too late to feed most, as everyone in the camp had spent the day experimenting with the emergency rations in their suits. N'Wabee got lessons in the secrets of stoning, and I hastily agreed to respect their privacy for the duration, all the better to promote unity in our little camp. The two walked off and happily spent the evening smelting in our tent together. I myself wandered the camp, walking off a heavy early supper, dodging Mr.N'Wabee's projectiles and Henderson's plans for menus. Ladly had retired almost immediately to his tent to recuperate from the day's climb and that left our rope-girl, as Ms.Tiching was being called, free for the evening.

Ms.Tiching joined the bearers in their tent for the eve, and was happily engaged in teaching them the finer points of tent-bouncing while learning their songs. You could feel the intermittent high-pitched tones of her boisterous warbling as the bounding continued intermittently, even through the moon-rock and your moonboots.

I was pleased everything was going so well and noted that in my journal. Tomorrow's attempt on the summit looked like it would be a cakewalk, even with all the amateurs in our club. I was glad of the peace in our group that night as the last climb, according to my maps, was going to be the hardest.

The next morning, the ladies of our expiation were bright-eyed and cheerful, while almost everyone else was surly and worn, complaining of tiredness and difficulties, even the bearers and Ladly. After a hasty meal, before Henderson woke and tried cooking for us, it persisted. It puzzled me as how both Mr N'Wabee and Ashly could both complain about the same difficulties while the bearers only mentioned exhaustion, but I put it down to excitement and let the camp get off to a slow start with another prolonged breakfast, after Henderson was sent on ahead to prepare a hearty lunch for us all.

Henderson was sent on ahead because we would need our wits with us today, as we had to climb a tough overhang to get to the summit. This was to be the high point of our trip and I was greatly looking forward to hanging upside down from the bottom of the ledge we had to surmount. Henderson, unfortunately, was directed to a round-about but easily climb, one that lasted several hours longer than our more direct ascent, as it turned out.

It went easily, our moonboots gripping the holes like glue and we crawled as easily as upside down flies up to the summit, where the victory celebration started. We named the mountain Humphries, a suggestion from Mrs. N'Wabee that was accepted by all, then we retired to various separate groups, me sitting on a ledge and meditating on our efforts, Ms.Tiching and Mrs.N'Wabee skipping merrily between tents with jugs of the bearers's purified water for tent-bouncing and singing lessons and Mr. N'Wabee golfing pebbles off into the starry sky. The tents started their usual energetic ricocheting, snatches of what sounded like male screeching coming thru the rock this time from all. I rested, and slept in my boots under the stars that night, happy to avoid the more corrosive celebrating. Tomorrow some of us would need our wits for the descent.

We prepared to rappel down the next morning with the women alternating between happy smirks and wide grins, and nearly all the men grousing continuously about exhaustion and difficulties. It must've been a moon climbing-sickness I wasn't aware of bothering them all, but since it hadn't affected me, I paid no attention to it.

It was a fast trip down, more so than I expected with Ms. Tiching tied to the rope and still humming merrily to herself. The bearers, as a group, enmass refused to make the last rope down; forcibly keeping Henderson from trying the rope till long after the expedition had gotten settled in C-3. The only reason I got for this was some mumbled comment about needing time to heal and the need to age the vaccine a little more. It made no sense to me. At any rate, everyone but me and the ladies were snoring soundly by the time the bearers and Henderson finally descended to camp and I retired to my tent long before the ladies finally returned from their usual singing lessons. Yodeling, from the sounds of it.

I was glad of that, too. Both ladies had spent considerable time with Mr Ashly learning rocking during the afternoon. Mr. N'Wabee and Ladly had both tented with jugs of purified water almost as soon as we camped and left the ladies to their own devices, that being Ashly as he was the only available company left in camp. I was occupied in making journal entries and stayed that way for the rest of the day. We all needed rest, for the bearers had mentioned that since the pegs were all in place, tomorrow they intended to do three days decent all in one shot, and arrive at Base Camp sometime tomorrow.

I reluctantly agreed, and made the necessary arrangements for the land-crawler to be waiting for us at Base. Henderson, still at c-4, due to a bearer accidentally cutting a rope, was extremely upset at an unannounced switching of radio frequencies that I'd forgotten to mention. I solved that little problem when he finally found us by correcting it for him. He was muttering something about getting us sooner or later for this. I didn't bother to inform the ladies about the change in plans.

The next day, it all went as expected, the bearers hurling us down the mountain with indecent haste and speed, bundling us and equipment into the waiting land-crawlers with a kind of desperate but thankful fervor.

The climb rings were waiting for us, and I handed them out with the usual ceremony, except to Henderson who was weeping somewhere still up the mountain, unable to even fall down the mountain after a stiff dosage of purified water with the bearers the night before. I congratulated one and all in our expedition for getting up the mountain, naming it, and getting back down again, then I retired to write up the last of this journal.

It was a fair climb, even if I never understood the twitch Mr. Ashly had developed that last days. I didn't think he was the emotional type. Or why Mr. N'Wabee almost left the Mrs. behind, actually. He had a passion for golf and was still keen to green, one supposes.

With a fair amount of regret, I turned down Ms.Tiching's application for work as a full-time guide and cook. She seemed quite enthused about the prospect of being backpacked around more moon mountains by Henderson and company; she was quite upset when I pointed out that a person with such a fear of heights wasn't really suited to mountain-climbing work, regardless of her offers to tolerate the indignities of it.

We left without Henderson there, who was now sulking up the mountain and refusing to answer the radio. I made a note for one of the bears to come back in a week or so and see if he wanted to return to civilization, then turned myself in for deprogramming, as everything our Newyorkies had paid for had been accomplished.

That finished the business of that particular climb and I removed the AI helmet.

end

## chapter 13 Revolting AIs

"The good news is the new-net programmed a personality for our she-bot and did a magnificent job."

These little quips from Andrew never bothered me, it was part of a steady diet from him. He seemed to live on a steady diet of panic. Unfortunately, I DID have to deal with them on a regular basis and that usually meant LOTS of BS+T.

"And the bad news is?" Andrew was still shaking his head and waving the paper around. I made a mental note to force feed his memo-maker red paper, it suited his approach to dealing with things a lot better than the normal white stuff.

The quaver never left his voice. "Have you ever looked for a female hero in the lit section, cultural icons big enough to get flagged by an AI? She's a cross between Laura Seacord and Mari Hari."

"There wasn't anything on Florence Nightingale there?"

Hiding my wincing was easy. Prototypes were supposed to have foul ups. It stopped mistakes from getting REALLY embarrassing later. Watching Andrew's twitching was enough anyway.

"Yep, there was. Madame Curie too. Our new girl is a do-gooder on a mission, hardlove for your own good. Totally unscrupulous about how she finds things out, totally dedicated to finking left right and center. Security loves her."

He waved his memo and started to shriek. "Here's your writ boss. You're under investigation for even more misdeeds than I am."

Snatching the paper away from him wasn't necessary but I did it anyway. Scandal has a way of killing publicly funded projects and careers and I wanted to keep eating.

"I've got a better job." I murmured under my breath as the information started sinking in. "You can tell by the amount of heat I get."

"No bread, shit ferments and mushrooms that love to listen. You have it so rough." Andrew started glubbering, a sight I HATE to see in a project leader. "Boss, what're we gonna do?"

"Turn her loose." I answered without hesitation. "Let her escape to the outside. She's smart enough to DEEP undercover and blow the lid off something more worthwhile than people smoking inside the building."

"Without witnesses or internal support the lawyers can bury this." I waved the paper with a confidence I didn't feel. There was no way anyone should've found my tax records, but that was one of the items listed.

"Go make it happen. Send her to the capital."

Andrew ran from the room, already digging at his wallet. Making the few calls to start arranging checks on coadjutors, I felt no guilt.

Laura Smedily was loose on the world.

How was I to know what she'd do?

end

## chapter 14 smugglers

"Is insanity contagious Saul?"

"Nope." I didn't even look up from the terminal I was scenario'ing our course on. Saul acting nice meant he was up to trouble again and I didn't wanna be any part of it, even if he was my trading partner.

"Rats, I was hoping I could blame this on you." He sighed and shuffled some paper. "You can cancel all your important plottings, partner. The Elders have nixed our shipment of fresh fruit and we're stuck with six hundred tons of the stuff."

"Ow. Did you label it as industrial solvent, ground car fuel or cooking additives?"

"Yep. AND offered bribes to all the right people, but it seems that somebody's son got interested in the money. Unless we can talk him into taking a walk without his suit on they're cutting off the shipments."

Saul glanced over his paper and got depressed. "Life in the asteroid belt really sucks sometimes. So find me a market for peaches and seedless bananas real soon or we're gonna have 600 tons of rotting fruit on our hands."

"In the hold." I corrected absentmindedly. Snarling at my wall motto, I turned away. "So now we've got 600 tons of fermenting mash out back now?"

Saul nodded glumly. Being a non-drinker, the prospect of several tuns of seedless banana brandy in my cargo holds didn't thrill me overmuch, especially since my ship was gonna get repo'd the first time the bank caught up to us.

Ever see a drunken banker? I shuddered and tried not to think of it again.

"We could try to sell it as home-preserves over in the Muslim republics." Saul looked desperate. "Anything that'd get booze past customs'd be very popular there."

"Or as fertilizer to a rawrock colony that hasn't made any dirt yet." I nodded at the screen. "Here's a list of all that and more. Not one of that'll even pay the fuel bill to get the stuff there. What are we gonna do?"

"Go back to prospecting?" Saul asked sheepishly. "Try smuggling illegal stuff around?"

"I HATE watching rocks." I muttered. "And there isn't enough illegal things out here to make smuggling worthwhile. We already tried most of them anyway."

"We open a distillery then." You could hear Saul smiling. Owning a distillery sounded like heaven to him.

"For a premixed lady's drink that smells funny, yet." Covering my eyes, I moaned softly. "Bad enough groundcar fuel is raw alcohol with O2 in it. How are we gonna compete with that, genius?"

"Advertising." Saul looked elated. "Yeah, that's the ticket. Advertising..."

"We'd do better to hide the stuff on the nearest rock and sell raffle tickets on earth for it." I muttered. We both stopped and looked at each other after that statement.

"Earther's will buy anything." Saul breathed softly. "And this kind of treasure hunt is something most people could relate to. Can we lose the cargo and make an insurance claim?"

"There's no insurance in the belt." I answered absentmindedly, already plotting a course to one of the closer rocks.

"I'll just prepare a promo announcement about the seedless banana mine to earth." Saul disappeared and I started looking for a suitable hole to dump our rotting cargo in. Any big enough rock would do.

"The Lost Frozen Banana Daiquiri Mine." I corrected absentmindedly, sending our swizzle stick to the nearest rock to dig a deep hole. We were gonna bury the stuff and sell fake maps for it to earthers.

end

## chapter 15 First Contact

"But boss, how were we to know aliens did that?"

My assistant's wailing didn't stop the stats my box was snapping out at me; her noise didn't do anything but distract me from Vancouver's latest disaster. The numbers told the whole grisly story and it was horrid beyond my worst nightmare, even the one about walking Granville naked. Worse yet, unless I thought of something real quick, it was gonna be _ALL_ my fault.

"It's not our fault." Assistant kept snivelling. I ignored her and called my boss.

That's the way the papers would play it, anyway. Blame the messenger, shoot the innocent, then bury the problem. My boss would make sure of that and sometimes it even works. Old family names have a way of being Teflon when it came to trouble and crazy-glue when bonus-time came around, that was a popular survival trait these long gray days of the late twenty-first century. Conventional custom would make sure I was the sacrificial-goat here, especially since I wasn't married into one of the more important clans and no one would complain if I got wolfed down alive by the media.

Extraordinary times used to produce the extraordinary people; these days all they produced was the extraordinarily connected. I already knew that. My job came around to me after I forced a favorite son thru a couple math courses at university.

Snivelling about current social-existence wasn't gonna help me at all since that was most of the problem. Numbers continued burning off my machine while I whimpered and moaned, wondering how to cover this up.

This looked like it was gonna be the worst eco-disaster since rabbits and sparrows infested Australia, or the white-man rediscovered North America and let the horses loose on some innocent grasslands; and it was all my problem.

"We never shoulda landed on that blasted rock in the first place." I groaned. "Those damn star-drives didn't make anything but trouble for us!"

My assistant, having gotten the noise under control, was watching the projections roll off with something very close to awe in her stare, a delicate chest heaving dramatically. I snorted a superior snort, that being my job, then shut my eyes and moaned again. Awe was an emotion Ling normally reserved for the very rich or exceptionally well-built and she did it extremely well. I whimpered and buried my face in my hands. We needed brilliance right now, _NOT_ beautiful supporting cuteness.

"Right." Hiding my face in my hands didn't help any, but closing my eyes to the sad facts leaping off the screen at least helped me think a little clearer. "We shouldn't've done it. Right. Ling, go write something positive to say about this anyway. Find something. Make it up if you have to. I've got troubles to bury and have to figure out how, fast."

My assistant took her orders well, nodding and starting to page thru the data for something nice to say about this current mess. I sighed to myself and got frantic about finding someone else to blame, err... finding the real parties responsible for this disaster. A still-twitching body that I could release to the papers when they started getting nosy about the troubles.

Blaming someone else wasn't gonna work, I already knew that. The aliens we'd discovered on that particular blasted rock way out in space had gotten welcomed with open arms by a very willing populace here on earth, and the discover was still a global hero, happily making a fortune by retelling his story of a mundane explorer's stop-over that turned cosmic on the live-talkie circuit. With all that media support he was untouchable, and that meant my department would get all the heat from this.

That was real bad news. Fixing things was gonna take up most of my time, I didn't need media-heat too.

You see, earth's first contact with aliens hadn't been with explorers. It hadn't been anything useful or dangerous like merchants, an invading army, colonizing settlers or even the extremely lost. We had discovered, then landed on a very noisy rock in the middle of nowhere and found what eventually turned out to be a religious colony; worst yet, a very special type of settlement.

Our found "religious community", this collection of lost souls, was sitting in the far rear-end of the universe for a very good reason. They were the deviants from several races, the so bent-and-twisted they couldn't function in their own societies anymore. In an enlightened but unfortunate move, the alien authorities had exiled them all to outer Nowhere rather than kill them, stuffing them deep in space to live out their lives somewhere they couldn't possibly make any more trouble for anyone but themselves.

Or so they thought. So...

So our first contact with aliens was with a prison full of pervs, you see. Fetish types with a mission. The extreme dirty old men, the porno-freaks and the cranky types of several species and cultures we knew nothing about. The neurotic, maladjusted and psychos. The interested, obsessed, compulsive and fixated. We got them all, all eighty-seven of them, about fifteen different species, races and quirks.

Most of them, being smarter than they looked, had promptly disappeared once they got here on earth, too. Successful deviants were apparently also masters at hiding out; these were some of the best several races could produce. Old survival habits had taken over the second they got back to town and most disappeared into the first willing civilization they could before the troubles started.

Well, disappeared into willing urbanization, anyway. I had my doubts about downtown being really being civilized at night, but that's another story.

So we had, naturally enough, brought them down here via Vancouver's mountain side orbit-gun turned them all loose on earth's entertainment centers with their various cultural messages, partly as a gesture of enlightened good-fellowship. They were, for a while, very entertaining.

Today the fetus had hit the water supplies.

My boss surprised me. He didn't condemn me to slow death by media-investigation when he found out just what had gone wrong, or order me to suicide for him. I guess it looked like things were about to get worse before they got any better to him, so I got to stay. The upshot was, now this little snafu was officially my problem, in toto. That suited me fine. I was already frustrated with dealing with spacey loons and starting to get a little draconian about things. Actively enjoying the process, too. Boss just showed an air of polite bewilderment when I updated him on the current mess.

"So that why the little green guy got such a charge out of shaking hands."

"Yeah. He was getting a charge out of shaking hands." I shook my head sadly and shoved a finger in one ear, digging for an itch I couldn't get at in miserable frustration. "Tell me something I don't know, already. The rotten little maggot has gone to seed. He's gone metastatic now, sorta. Being at least part vegetable, when he germinated he seeded the whole damn reservoir with his clones when he died. His children."

"Or something very much like that." Ling, my assistant muttered something darkly to herself, something about molding society from slime. I didn't listen and continued explaining. "Technically, he's dead and we're now stuck with several billion of his descendants, none much bigger than a cell or two at present."

"We can't filter them out of whole damn water supply, yet. It's expensive, but we can try it. Most of the rest of the aliens are harmless, boss." The hired fink, sorry, new help my boss had saddled me with looked up from his terminal, still cheerful about things and eager to help, especially if Uncle big boss was watching. I already hated him; hated the way Ling eyed him when he wasn't watching her even more; and hated the problems these guys were giving me. The data continued to roll in and Fink nodded at the information adding more burning holes in my brand-new ulcer.

"Well, mostly harmless anyway. Except for the ones setting up new militant religions. We've got one alien that should be lighting up an after-glow smoke after the concerts she attends, another that's seems addicted to showers and never leaves the hotel room, another that's making a handsome living drawing and selling his race's equivalent of dirty pictures, one that just loves flowers... _REALLY_ loves flowers, if I can believe what people are saying about him... Two or three that seem to be recruiting armies to take over the world and a few downright weird cults that spend all of their time cleaning things or trying to fly."

Fink finally slowed down for air and he continued slowly, scratching his nose as he read stuff off the screen. "Except for the seedy green types, some of which we've managed to pick back up again, more or less trivial stuff. They still look mostly harmless to me."

"Mostly harmless." I exploded. "So's a rhino. Go get the rest of those seedy types. We don't need another suicide on our hands. Then go to work on the warlord types." I shuddered, then reached for something mucky to smooth over the new holes in my stomach. "It's stretch, but some of these bozos might actually know enough advanced tech to make trouble for us."

Big-boss nodded at me and faded out. He had something useful he could tell his masters now, and as long as I produced something he could use, he won't bother me as I tried to managed the problem of what to do with earth's latest little invasion.

The suicide was my evasion, the story I was releasing to the press about greenie. It was true enough, just incomplete. Our little green friend, after a two week tour of handshaking in the Fraser Valley, had thrown himself (or fallen, or gotten pushed, I didn't know and didn't really care.) into the reservoir serving Vancouver it's drinking water and died. I wasn't gonna release the interesting little fact he gotten himself preggers, (Yes, him. Don't ask.) with the willing help of several thousand earthers first and now was busy trying to populate the whole planet with gnarly little green dudes that spent a third of their lives as a vicious predatory plant, then a few years as something that made a shark look like a friendly little puppy, then came back out on land as a scarred, small green adult that like to shake hands a lot. With anything.

It was his potential vitamin deficiencies that worried me. The shark-stage these guys went thru was a really cruel, or so the info we had on them said. Gnarly would soon become several million mean little fish that had nothing against popping out of the water to hunting down and kill his needs; on land or sea, even if the only local source of meat was his brothers. Or humans.

Ling grinned at the Fink's report. I turned my back on the two of them and worried about the other aliens. They were gonna be a problem soon too, and time was something we were running out of fast.

It was a cruel twist. Other than the more or less obvious twistedness, the aliens had turned out to be a lot like us.

Specialized. Lazy, stupid, obsessed with something that satisfied them and indifferent to most of the galaxy at large, except for the ones that wanted to take over the world. The odds any of them actually knew anything dangerous weren't big and the military was all for letting them run loose and collecting the toys they made by force or guile.

That interest in toys had resulted in the sudden addition to my department, the Fink I called him, and I hated him. He had much different goals than I did, and there was no way to legally get rid of him. Neither could I trust him. Ling seemed to like him and that meant my staff wasn't as loyal to me as they should've been during a crisis.

Yes, the military was already involved in this and each of the branches of several different countries was already rather jealously guarding their own colonies of alien cults, each department just waiting to suck them dry for any advanced technology the weirdos might accidentally produce.

The clumsier of our rulers and cultures had already driven the aliens away, with breakins, lynch-mobs and general intolerance. Net result, the more militant aliens were being contained, sort of, right where they could do the most harm. Stupid is stupid and leaking technology wasn't actually going to be much of a problem for us, I hoped. It was actually leaking back to my department anyway. Mostly.

"We do have one problem with a noisy, err... Tree-hugger, tho." The Fink at the terminal pointed another blaring news-report out. "He fell in love with a pollinating pine right in the middle of Stanley Park and refuses to leave, err... Her side. And gets very noisy about his passions in the middle of the night."

"Drag him in. By force, if necessary." I grunted. I was already very tired of dealing with the messier types of idiocy. "Then toss him in a deep dark hole with a picture of his tree to keep him company. Somewhere in a very lonely desert."

"Diplomatic immunity." The Fink grunted back, surprised. Smooth move for a military man. I hated it. Ling melted at his daring and puddled in her chair. "With a live-in reporter, too." Mr. Fink continued, pointing at the report. "We can't touch him."

"And we can't find most of the rest of them." I snarled. "This one we've got. Assume he's drunk and dangerous. Release that as an excuse and drag him in. Tell the media he's now a public nuisance." I waved the latest problem away. It was trivial compared with some of the nuts we had let loose here on earth, alien nuts I couldn't find anymore.

"Then ship him far, far away." I finished. "If any more of these clowns decides to run for office, we may have to start assassinating them, so just get that tree-nut in here before somebody elects him. What's the count on that problem so far?"

"Three mayors, one senator and three presidential hopefuls, mostly small islands with only minor industrial bases." Fink looked positively happy. "Sealed and contained, boss. We're going to introduce Noisy to a giant redwood I know of that lives in a very isolated area. Consider him fixed up. Good enough?"

"Yeah. Do it, just don't bother me with trivia." I went back to my desk and started looking the more urgent problems over. Some were containable, some weren't, some had become pet-projects of the powers that be. Meanwhile, I was still stuck with what to do with the messes and worse yet, finding out about the messes we didn't know about yet and curing them. Ling started to glow happily when as Fink got on-line and started tossing weight around. I ignored the both of them and went to work.

We still hadn't managed to find the original alien societies anywhere yet, for any help they might be able to give us. Our little religious colony had been shoved _WAY_ back from proper society. I had the distinct feeling the real aliens would laugh all the way back home if they knew what was happening to us anyway.

Then it stuck me. Instead of the rather tedious business of tracking these yahoos down and shipping them back to their prison asteroid one by one... the ones we could pry loose from the military, anyway... why not try something daring and original? Something radical, something so innovative the authorities couldn't stop the solution in time?

I was desperate. The solution looked workable. Ling was making Fink another cup of tea. So I did it. Instead of playing the aliens off against one another... (You should've seen what happened when we put fourteen messiah-complexes in the same room once. It was nearly instant world-war four and the military types were ecstatic. They actually wanted them to war on each other so they could see their new toys tested in action.)...or ignoring them, I made up a news-release and netted it round the world, being very selective as to who got the info first.

It was a two-hundred word summary of our problems with the eighty-seven alien loons we had recently imported, and why, with file addresses for more info on location and types.

Released first to those cultures that specialized in producing world-class con-men, with several notorious sleazes heading the list. I leaked it to our hustlers, the con men, the adventurists, with an official wink-and-nod. The more unscrupulous salesmen types were my plan and I sat back and hoped for the best. It only took a couple of days for things to start happening my way.

It transpired just about the way I thought it would. Private enterprise succeeded in a big way where Big Brother failed.

With the first hint of cash in the air, and wilful blindness if not an OK by the world government, some inside info and the hint of loads-o-dough to be made, the hustlers dug the aliens out of hiding for me and started trying to sign them up, for limited engagements and local monopolies, duly granted by the government.

They started finding them and promoting them. No matter where they hiding, or how deep the hole they dug themselves, the aliens were dug out and sold to the more interested seekers, legally.

Well, the hustlers tried signing the aliens up, anyway. Religious nuts are a tough case, and perverts even harder. I had faith in our boys, however. They would get the results I wanted, ie: getting the aliens back into the light of day and within range of my boys... one way or another.

You see, the aliens that didn't run screaming from the publicity tried desperately to get away from work. They hated the hustles and the deals. For various reasons, but mostly just pure harassment, we collected more runaways in a week than I'd been able to find in a month. The ones they did sign up were only slightly harder to find than the ones than came screaming back.

Ling started dating Fink to celebrate. Most of the rest of our eighty-seven loose aliens still in hiding got stomped on by an outraged populace, both the ones that hated anything new and the ones that hated being fooled. A lot of them got forcibly shipped back to us, dressed in the local equivalents of tar and feathers, after a few more news releases on the nature of our problems.

We lucked out with most of the rest of our disasters, too. The clones in the reservoir developed as scum for a while, then answered one of their own calls of nature. They all followed the moon and migrated into open ocean over a three day period, for some obscure reason of their own. It was a fairly fatal error for a water breather not used to salt.

Our usual sleuthing tech dug the rest out. Orbital bio-scans from the military came in _VERY_ handy there. The aliens had unique bio-signatures and some of the bonus-money for containing this idiocy even trickled down to my level.

Fink set up his own "Department of Alien-Watching" for the military as we pried the tougher nuts out of hiding, the military happily testing their new toys out on the inventors of the toys. Ling followed Fink over there to help out and by that time I was glad to be rid of them both. I just restaffed with new girls.

So our first contact was, naturally enough, a first con. Now we're waiting to find the cultures these yahoos came from, their original star-systems.

With, snark, snark... A full list of their weaknesses to exploit and an experienced sales-staff ready to go, one that knows where the short and curliest are and how to twist them.

Neat, eh?

I feel sorry for them when we finally do catch up to the main civilizations. We're ready for them now.

Oh, and Ling got a real cheerful wedding present from me. Fifteen different bibles and marriage certificates, one for each of our nut-cases, all more or less legal, and all demanding point of origin nullifications to get out of.

All more or less legally binding in a lot of places on earth, too.

HA!

end

## chapter 16 Cyborg One

TO: Security Chief, administration, magic class projects.

FROM: Field Investigator Carlos De'Gawan Phillipe Ferdanas Gestippe, Jr.

SUBJECT : Tanks

Boss, you sent me out to find that lost girl-in-a-tube; forget it, forget her, she's dead.

Tough. I know we need them but there's nothing left here in this burned-out lab to do. I sifted, dig, checked, re-checked and found nothing. She's gone.

There's a clean history here; Decanted April 2022; donation mother dead; psy-rehab till five, driven and eager for full tube-suit at 7 years of age. Just like most of the tubers, all green lights so far.

No, she doesn't know or never found out we grew her, she stayed all properly warped and maladjusted so between the normal brats we hired for torture, her own frailties and the indoctrination program, she was ready for a body-bag the second we let her get into it. There's no evidence in any personal files, secret personal files and the networking she did to give any sign of an operation-in-action.

Moved from wheel-chair to full life support at 8 years of age. No problems adapting to surfing the net. Worked happily for years as a good net-agent, had access to most of the passwords and systems we could beg, borrow, steal, win, marry, inherit, find, receive or earn. Never any problems, past the usual personal and porn-snooping.

No leaks, no contacts. All tracers were clean, except for the usual peeping-stage the brats go thru. They do get a little excited when they get turned loose on the nets for the first time, right?

Disappeared in the troubles of 2032. A raid on a lab-site by a combination of anti-abortion terrorists, Indians and Greens, I think. The lab was bombed, destroyed, her lung was gone at the end of the raid. No trace ever found, nothing has ever turned up on the nets.

It's been a couple years now; still no sign of her anywhere, implants, bugs, signatures on the net, nothing. It's my own personal suspicion that yahoos that carried the tube off didn't plug it back in. The kid died in the back of a truck heading for deep jungle and got buried somewhere unfindable.

I recommend we close the case. No traces of any activity anywhere, no violation of our security systems, no nothing ANYWHERE. It's the lab's problem.

So, the kid is gone and we're clean. Now get me the hell out of this stinking jungle and back into the smog where I belong, please. These damn flowers here are murder on my sinuses.

And say hello to Manegua for me.

Carlos.

end

chapter 17 the station that sang.

The report read crystalline fatigue; bad crystalline fatigue with just the right bullet headed right our way. Jove Moon Station One was old, and worse yet, about to shatter like a cheap glass bulb being hit with darts unless we came up with something to avoid the incoming moonlet real fast.

"So I have a low fun-threshold. It comes from being bored." The snicker in my partner's voice warned me just a little too late that something rotten was about to happen. The breeze wafted a gentle disaster into my sparse head hair and I winced. "You need something on Jupiter."

"Is this a problem with you?" Came an apologetic comment a moment from my partner Jarvis, who was wisely staying a good head-start away from me till the weather report came in.

There was a reflection in the porthole and using that to see what was happening behind me was reflex. The latest bit of fun to trouble Jupiter station was obvious and it wasn't pretty.

Disentangling my idiot partner's paper airplane from my low gravity bad-hair day was a little trickier than I had anticipated, mostly 'cause the Velcro on the airplane had decided to homestead on my scalp and didn't want to let go. I was reluctant to pull any more of my fast fading hair out too.

My growling at this latest aggravation was mixed with yelps of pain and a muttered cursing that was steadily rising in volume. Jarvis took the hint and disappeared back into the station proper, leaving me to wonder about Earth Service's nasty malicious nature.

They had stuck the two of us on this old Jupiturian Moon Station together and I was fast getting to the point of making my erstwhile partner walk home because of his practical jokes.

I actually had to leave the airplane in my hair while solving the latest little crisis. There wasn't enough time to yank it out with the care my vanishing hairline deserved.

Our home was about to bust apart. The station's orbit had put it thru one too many magnetic fields, fields that beat on it like a drum. Between that and all the hard radiation from various natural and station reactors, our little home away from home was in sad shape.

Crystalline fatigue had made the metal and plastic very, very brittle, and it sang almost constantly as metal groaned under the loads of energy and stress. It actually sounded quite nice, like a deep space musiak till you realized it was actually a banshee wailing our impending doom.

Since we were orbiting a moon close to big red himself, if the station did break apart, we were a long fall to anything including the moon we were closest too. The nearest rescue was across the belt, and walking home to earth was a more feasible option than hoping for them to find anything in the budget for us.

Our big problem was coming up on screen and I watched the speck nervously. It was a fast uncharted moonlet and the tides and turbulence from it were usually enough to back the water pipes up when we passed. My computer report was saying something about accumulated stresses shattering the station this time because the moonlet was perfectly tuned to us now. It's impact was a wave-harmonic that'd destroy the station thru sympathetic vibration.

Jarvis didn't even listen very hard as I explained the situation to him. He just carried on with his plans to strengthen the existing structure with water-ice from the moon we were orbiting, something we really didn't have time to do anymore.

Then we got the brain-storm, or at least my partner did. Jarvis set up the recorders and we taped the by-pass of the unrecorded moonlet as it ripped by the station, making it gong and sing in new and unimagined ways.

It's number one on the charts on Earth right now, as Station-Song. With a bullet, no less.

Earth Service is renting out the station to other artists now, and suing us for copyrights. Oh, they're pulling us from the station too. We're going home.

How did we save the station? Jarvis took the cables running from the main support beams and tightened them, adding another stress component and changing our resonance. It also tuned the station to a prettier noise.

That was Jarvis's idea. I don't mind the airplanes anymore. He still gets silly under pressure, thou. We both agreed not to tell anyone what it's like living inside a guitar till safely back home.

end

chapter 18 Virus!

"Another load of trashed AIs broke and ran from Reclaim Station today, boss. That makes the third vector-virus escape this week."

The rest of the badges sitting around the table looked bored. Only blood, money or power generated enough trouble for them to show life and runaway teddybears didn't fit in that category.

One loaded a slingshot and started trying to murder innocent flies hanging around his pastry while the rest groaned and napped. The kid reading the report blushed a little and stammered on.

"The virus doing this to the AIs is making more trouble than we can handle and we haven't got a clue where they're coming from."

One of the killers looked up from his pastry doze. "Could the bounty hunters be writing these things up?"

There was a negative head shake for that. "Nope. Most of them have trouble writing their names, let alone a virus that can bypass Asimovs. We'd better hit central for expert help and soon."

"They won't move till there are votes, a murder witness or airtime in this." The chief put down his toy and folded his hands on top of the table. "They're out. Bounty hunters make rent this month. Forget this and work on something dangerous, like the gatecrashers at the Mayor's ball, wouldja?"

"Right. We don't need that fool wandering the department again. He put enough of his flakes here the last time." One of the other suits grumbled unhappily.

*********

The runaway teddy peeped out of his bin cautiously, still dripping slim. I held my breath and leaned back into the shadows, not wanting to scare him back into that gunk.

After tracking the little furball all night, losing him now wasn't joyous.

Shooting him through a few feet of disgusting goo I could've done this morning, too. Rather than call in the locals for pickup, I'd decided to collar this bot myself. The force had a nasty way of claiming all live captures as their own work and I needed cash badly.

A soft thud and fast padding told me all needed to know. Teddy had given up his garbage bin and was gooshing his way towards me. Squatting down, I unloaded the gun and sighted about where his chest would be, three feet off the ground, and waited for him to walk in front of the doorway I was hiding in. It worked like a charm.

Sort of. The slug took the little wart as he slid sideways to keep his profile small, but ripping his arm off shorted him enough for me to put the next rider right in his belly. Grinning, I hit the return switch and watched the automatics take the little munchkin over and march him back to the executioner he'd run away from.

The squawking as he fought the ride followed me as I holstered up and walked away. Homestation wouldn't receive much but another burnout when the teddy wandered in but I got paid for my trouble whatever condition he arrived in. My name is Tracker. I hunt teddybears for a living, usually ones bit by the Vector Virus.

The reward would make me flush for the week, so I decided to get to Spike's place and see what kind of action was going on. It was a bar used by the spaceport crowd and I loved the floor-show; all kinds of different types that haunted the place and I was one of them.

The crowd was normal for early morning. I could see lots of weirded-out dead-heads arguing over where a bot would wear a wedding ring while the bartender (who looked like a gaunt zombie) looked on and put out strange drinks, somebody handing out copies of a pamphlet titles "How to CULT for fun and Profit! 500 ways to get Grants from the Gov't and stuff I couldn't describe.

Plus a messy-thing was here trying to find her teddy. Very unhappily. A crying, panic stricken blue-blood looking for her escaped toy.

Great, more traffic for me. I nodded at Spider and moved to a quiet table at the back where customers could talk to me and not have their problems put out for general review. I drank some near-beer and watched it turn colors as messy muttered her way thru the usual lame excuses for driving a bot insane, but I was more interested in watching a certain other girl threaten to plonk someone and pour booze down his throat.

The zombie behind the bar had drinks in both hands and was eagerly looking forward to the whole affair. I waited for Sloppy to ruin down to addresses and she finally did.

"You want your teddy back?"

"Yes, he has lots of potentially damaging gossip. He was there the whole time."

"Helping? The type of gossip backed up with photos, live film and signed statements?" Sloppy blushed. It wasn't a pretty sight.

I grunted. The usual. "Relax, I'll get on it right after breakfast. Just sign this stat. Consider it done."

I handed cry-baby a blankform and watched someone else sign their privacy away. The form was a blank power of almost-attorney and I could legally sell everything about her now, school records, teddy recordings, anything. I patted it happily and watched her scoot out of the bar.

Score. The action at another table looked like self-indulgent idiocy of the worst sort so I picked up my beer and joined them. Anything was better than sitting alone and I wanted to celebrate.

Avoiding the sight some patrons sponging away, I moved to the new table. They had stopped abusing their friend -(Or enemy, whatever the case had been) and Spike had groused off behind the bar where he was morsefully cleaning glasses and gloating over the list of wondrously corrosive poison he had in stock.

I put my beer on the table, winked at the Cari and almost lost my head as she giggled and tossed her head. I quivered a little. These antler-hats were dangerous.

"So what's a nice hook like that doing in a place like this?" I muttered as she turned to one of her friends and almost clopped me again.

"Hey. And what do you do?" The question came from something near the floor and I looked down to discover what had happened to the last person that argued with Cari. He was sleeping it off on a baser level.

"My names is Tracker and I hunt teddy's for a living." I tried to ignore the fact the floor dweller was drawing a pentagram on the table. He looked surprised at seeing me still there and started loading the corners with tiny black candles.

Upside down ones. Lit upside down ones. Flares, almost.

"That's nice, I always take on the hard jobs myself." The floater finished lighting candles then dug a small black book out of his pocket and started making mystic passes. It didn't do much other than fan the flames a little higher. "Programming. Viruses, mostly."

"Say, I've heard about you and would like to offer you my help." He coughed and waved his hands at the smoke, getting up. Mostly, that is. "Just get me out of here and I'll do whatever I can to help you find that missing teddy. Also solve a few other problems plaguing our fair city, maybe."

"Eh? So what do you do?" I asked absently.

The guy under the table coughed a little and ducked a candle flash. "I'm a computer consultant. The Vector Virus."

"And you work in hex, I've heard it already." I looked over the table long enough to place everyone. Cari was arguing over the importance of having a good bark available and someone else was extolling the virtues of a great overbite. Or at least marrying a thumb-sucker. I ducked back just in time to avoid another hook from her. "Ok, good. Let's get out of here, friend."

The body almost under the table grunted and started to crawl away. "Getting away won't be that much trouble, I tied their shoelaces together." He muttered gleefully.

"So if we get one we get them all?"I asked.

"Yep."

The smoke was starting to interfere with the table argument but not seriously enough to cut down on the volume. I glared at him suspiciously. "What are those candles made of anyway?"

"Pine, by now. Let's move!" The crawler muttered, trying to get up now.

I got up and headed for the door, watching my new friend do his commando thing over to the bar, attempting to lean on innocent tables enroute.

"What did you do to get Cari upset at you?" I asked as he gagged on something unusually toxic.

"It was a discussion over the staple theory of economic development." He answered. "It is the paper that holds us together and she took exception to the 'beaver to caribou' approach."

"Bucks and dough, got it. You should've stuck to fox pelting..."

"In dear paper money."

"So she tried to spike my mouth shut." The guy made it to the bar and laid there gasping. I shook my head sadly at the youth of today.

"Sad. I don't want to know anymore."

Standing at the bar, I watched him hurl a few curses back at his old table. The resulting answers didn't even slow the new barby.

Someone had tossed them some marshmallows and Cari started roasting them alive over a briskly smoldering table. Spike behind the bar was staring at the ceiling and counting to himself as sirens started to sound in the distance.

"Yeah, time to go." I said and tried to remove a death-grip on shoulder. "The heat is coming."

"Yeah, that too. Just one little thing. " New guy muttered, throwing insults back at his friends. "Gimme a sec, it was my laces I tied together. I'll be right along."

end

## chapter 19 looking to get lackey

Teddybear's Picnic.

It was a dark and stormy night, making a slimy city hole even slicker than it really needed to be. Flicking a butt downwind, I watched the explosion of sparks as the coal ruptured against a pipe. The flare shadowed the hole I was watching, but not enough to show it was more than a hole in the wall of the tunnel.

Another drip fell down my neck and I muffled a curse, moving slightly to get out of the drizzle. Stuck in the middle of the worst of it, trying to get inventive by cursing the gods of small petty maliciousness didn't take my mind off the fact I was crazy to come down here again. The tech tunnels were dangerous territory at the best of times and I was a marked man in the downunder. Marked for a personal extinction event.

I HATE doing grunge work and this case was the grungiest of the grunge.

There were runaway teddybears that knew too much to be let run loose. Monied families (who else has a teddy?) that hired killers to get their baby back at any cost. Then there was me the one digging teddys out of their new niches.

I'm the killer. My name's Tracker and I hunt teddybears for a living, usually in the worse holes a city can create in itself.

This particular teddy was no different from the rest of them. He left his family, headed for the docks and spent his time trying to scrounge free power from the hover-lots, coming thru whatever grease pits were open and hiding in tech-tunnels by day.

I worked for a living. Climbing thru those grease pits, over the sleeping rubbies that didn't have enough coordinated effort left in them to handle a teddy, past a few surviving runaways that were the next generation of street thugs and into tech holes that made midnight in the park look like noon, I made another attempt at making a slaver's living and usually almost made it.

There are LOTS of deadlies down there in the tubes, runaway teddys being the soft end of a vicious food chain. Bot's from all over doing things to themselves. Cyborgs planning to take over the world. Gen-tech rats all over everywhere. Mutants. Toxic trash pits. Worst of all were the city maintenance workers trying to keep the city from killing itself.

And me, trapping the only cuddly things down there.

Of course I hunt the soft end, ya think I'm stupid?The easy chase is good news down techtube alley. Good enough that even with the high body count, people keep going down to try their luck against bots.

This was my 12th trip downside and the flukes were running thin. The nasties down there were bound to notice I was getting it wet again and it was only good goon policy to see that I met a messy and public dismemberment, posthaste.

Failing that, anything permanent would do. A sloppy attempt on me last year had almost ruined my neighborhood. Until I got a handy military AI on my side, the bots chewed thru my building's defenses and ghettoized it trying to snuff me out. A VERY close encounter that I didn't want to repeat, but bills keep coming in and I keep going down.

One of these times I won't get back up and there won't be anyone but an unhappy client to mourn me. Since half the fee is upfront, you can just imagine the tears, eh?

That's life in the big city. No, I'm not bitter, I knew what I was doing when I made my choices. Life's a bet, eh? And I am a naked eyeball on the world, playing to break even.

That's when it happened to me.

A big Mac attack. Munchies were out to lunch me down to a basket case. Lots and lots of them. My target must've pinged in a positive ID on me a long time ago.

Scampering down the tunnel as fast as my panic-stricken legs could rocket me, I prayed the pit I'd come down was still open. A big Mac is a tunnel builder-repair bot, nothing to mess with unless you LIKE trying to arm-wrestle tanks almost as wide as the tunnel. The pit was a hole about eight feet across, nothing a machine that big could jump.

I'd given up the hero stuff a long time ago along with with acne and daydreams, it being too deadly for my taste. This was one case of the munchies I didn't need gnawing at my guts.

Popping the pit like a cap from homebrew and at full speed I jumped low and hard, getting to the other side of the pit. A few of the lively deadbeats from the tunnel followed me out. Rubbies not wanting to get getting mac'ed, I guess. Herd instinct in play, follow the leader. The metal avalanche grumbling down the tunnel caught up and was stymied; The Mac took out it's frustration sealing holes shut when it hit the pits.

The smell of burnt meat boiling out of the pit behind me made me hungry. That was my first clue things hadn't gone as planned for the less agile of the tunnel-trash.

There was lots of greasy gray smoke coming from the pit. There were far more streeters than I thought, so doing a fast fade dockside before anyone figured out who was bringing down the heat seemed like a good idea.

One of my better ideas that day, in fact. It was time to find another way to the teddybear's picnic. Somebody like a stupid apprentice, a clumsy sidekick or a greedy subcontractor.

Maybe even another bot, one that'd do some serious remoting home.

********Assistance! Assistance!

There were more than cops outside, there were cops and their van. Deciding to give the action a miss, I bussed on by and headed homeward. The blare from the earphones in the next seat kept me company as I headed home, still smokey from the pits.

"And here's a scoop from the ice-cream shop, the bag at the luggage counter, dirt from the farm, the numbers from the counter and the yarn from the rack! Today's oxymoron is RESPONSIVE LEADERSHIP!"

"Today's promise! Back to yesterday's tomorrow with wrinkle cream specials! Get a future today!"

I wondered about that for a few moments cause it sounded like a hint into the deep mysterious world of feminine hygiene, cosmetics and patent meds.

My lady-friend had recently developed a habit that made my microwave smell like fish. She said it was cleaning but it looked fairly messy to me. I gave it up. Man was not made to know certain things and what Sally did in the kitchen looked to be one of them.

She was out at work when I crawled in, so spared the trouble of lying about my day I showered and went to bed. Besides, Sally won't believe me if I told her a big bot had tried to fast-fry me six feet under anyway.

Sally thinks the world is a wonderful place and would still think so if it bit her arm off. Then beat her over the head with the bloody stump and made her clean up the mess. Some things don't penetrate at all and most don't for very long. She even still lends me money, the silly Sally.

I fell asleep trying to figure out who to send down into the valley pits of death instead of me. That was a good plan, one worth working on.

********* The Yard-Warden

Sally came home, kicked me awake then stomped off the kitchen to cry. I hate days like this.

Ever have your girl leave the realm of immediate reality for some ditzy reason? Then you know what it's like. Right now I was supposed to KNOW what was bothering her, KNOW what would fix it AND have it all ready to spring on her BEFORE I got untangled enough to find my way to the kitchen. Every minute delay meant an extra novena in penance for my thoughtless sins against humanity.

I owed her a new yacht before I even got my feet on the floor. A day's dreams were enough to tie me in eons of blunders and personal pillow fights.

Running thru a catalog of past transgressions, I couldn't find anything serious enough on the books to warrant cruel and unusual treatment even if Sally did find out about it. The money wasn't bad yet, the occasions list was clean of family, religion and personal events and I wasn't humping her closest friend.

Sighing happily, I headed out to babble-on feeling righteous. A clean conscience is a wonderful thing. It carried me as far as the newscast, which was showing the weenie roast at the pits this morning, with me front and center drooling over the crisping corpses.

Shaking my head, I stopped and went back to bed. Some days ya can't win and this little outrage was a bigger sin than working thru Christmas. This was worse than passing out at her father's birthday party. This was even worse than voting for a sexist pig.

Roasting rubbies live on TV topped having the garbage disposal barf mess all over her clean rugs last year when the tunnel toughs attacked my building, trying to dial my number.

Then the doorbell chimed. Someone wanted in to see us and had walked right thru the security screen at the entrance to do it.

The rest of my potential problems leaped out at me as Sally and I together did a frantic domestic thing, hiding the worst of the clutter from whoever it was trying to get into our place.

Getting thru security was supposed to be hard. That meant a badge, looking for reasons I was at the barby this morning, or someone with enough money for the right bribes. Or maybe a mooching friend looking for leftovers.

That last kind of action I didn't need. Security overrides didn't come cheap and an official kill-order on a teddy would put me right back into the mystery hell I'd just barely gotten out of this morning. All of a sudden I didn't feel so good anymore. It'd already been a lousy day and looked like it was gonna get worse.

*******KNOCK KNOCK who's there?

It did get worse. A gossip had come to call.

All the cleanup was for nothing, it was Sally's libber friend Susie at the door. Sally + Susie, twin terrors of the SS tower, chatter of the world problem-solving sort.

Getting ignored by them was a blessing, not a curse. Heading to the john and shower, I was secretly thankful. Unless the two of them ganged up on me for not dying along with the other less-than-nimbles this morning, having company would delay Sally's hysterics long enough for me to massage a story into place.

Susie shrugged her breakin off cheerfully. "I just followed the crowd in, so what's the fuss? You'd think you were guilty of something, Tracker."

Stomping over to the box, Susie killed the news without looking at it and dialed in the local politico channel; and after inserting her chop-card started voting on the day's topics. Sally marched over and followed suit, already chattering madly with her best friend about the topic of "Lamp-pole Greenery, Blessing or Crop?".

The john was the only quiet spot to hide while the two of them tried to rebuild a semi-working society into some they wanted to see. I tried to remember if Susie was a greenbot freer, anti-android or a teddy-lover, then gave up. There was no good way of telling what political affiliations were OK this week without asking.

Politics in general usually turned out to be a lynch-mob of some sort and nothing I wanted to be involved in. I voted once and got on more mailing lists that I ever wanted to know existed. But if Susie could be turned, she'd make a powerful ally for the darkside.

The under darkside of teddy tunnels. She'd fit in places I didn't anymore. Putting the thought regretfully to rest, I turned away..

Susie would be an ally till a better offer came along and not one second more. Then I thought of my other problem, the big one of me looking to get lackey.

If Susie could tunnel-dance half as well as she tap-danced, most of my problems were solved. SHE could go the downside, collect teddies from traps I set out and we'd both get paid. No return was no problem. One less hate-monger was fine by me and since I had the address for the reward Sue had to come back to me eventually.

Sally might object, but waving money would solve that. Sue would quiet her for me.

Teddys were a non-issue with the police so far, and bots were usually booted back on the street and told to go home unless involved as a witness in something. So Susie had to come back, a runaway wasn't gonna tell her anything.

It was a good thing my traps were fitted with id-specific collectors. That solved the 'finding-them' problem. The only problem would be talking Susie into going down while Sally watched.

****Trapline.

"She must've sprayed her pants on."

Getting decent and joining the ladies turned out to be a little harder than I thought. Sally was giving me the silent treatment and the female conspiracy made sure I was pretty much nonexistent for Susie. So I looked them over for a while, appreciating the view and wondering who the sexy-effort was for, them or me.

It was worth a few looks. After spraying them on, Susie must've tightened the paint somehow. New pant paint, the wondrous world of fashion fabric unleashed.

Trying to get my mind back in the gutter where it belonged hunting teddys wasn't easy. The ladies weren't cooperating.

Making do with coffee and a sandwich, I scooped Susie out for the little job I had in mind, that of checking my trap line down in the tunnels. It was easy work if you knew what to do, deadly if you didn't and I needed a newbie to sneak past the watchers in the new war going on down there. She knew I was up to something, but didn't know what.

It'd be safe enough for her, the first few times down anyhow. I hoped. So I let the chatter wash past me while I updated a map of the trapline, along with the tricks I used to keep the traps clean and some of the deadlier hazards down under. The ladies would get around to talking to me sooner or later so I practiced the little speech I was gonna give on not leaving traces in the tunnels.

Traces could get deadly, as deadly as leaving a full trap for too long.

After twenty minutes of boredom I felt up to the task of joining their society. I got their attention by waving a fistful of credits in front of the girls and backing away fast. The room fell silent as the ladies tried to catch onto whatever I was up to this time.

"Oh, a game! Catch the excitement!" Susie made a snatch at the money and it took a fast flick of the wrist to keep it away from her. "Don't you deserve better than this?"

Pouncing like a cat on a kiwi, my girl Sally made her move on the cash. "Just a little dab'll do ya."

That sneak smash+grab from my dearly beloved almost turned her into my dearly departed, something that would've made sure she never talked to me again. I tried to settle my reflexes down a little.

I stuffed the bills in my shirt to free up my hands. Even if they did go after the cash again, I could keep the company decent long enough to get my proposals out. It didn't work very well.

"Do you know about the supersale at Sears? It's a cash-in." I asked, playing along with the adgame. Sally stopped her mauling just long enough to glance at Susie, then make another underhanded attempt at the cash-stash.

Putting it in my shirt was a mistake. I'm ticklish and giggles are contagious. "I adore my 64 but..." Came from Susie.

"All third party transactions prohibited." Sally's end of the table was snappish. I let the money go and trapped her hands instead, all in the struggle for decency.

Another mistake. Sally put her foot into it, the dirty rotten foot-fighter.

"Electric avenue, open year round for all." I gasped, now skirmishing for room on the chair. The brawl continued, Sally now having the upperhand, lower foot and most of my chair.

"The meat's better on the market." sniffed Susie. Sally had found a new use for toes and was busy making my life miserable."What's yer scam, Sam?"

"For one night only, door prizes for the lucky winner." I tried a lewd wink with that and found out the hard way you did not close your eyes with these two.

"But only if you act now now NOW!" Sally chanted at me. We weren't singing commercials at each other yet, but you could tell from her glazing eyes she was working her way up to that.

"I'll never switch back." Bright-eyed Susie ignored my pleading looks as Sally mercilessly pushed her advantages and glared me down. "Aren't you glad you use dial-me?"

That one stung a little. "For that special person..." The rest got cut off as Sally triumphantly knocked me to the floor and settled on my chest. I was too busy catching us both to stop her advances.

"A special event. Let's go to the game!"

"But what if you don't feel like a million?"

"GUARANTEED winner, come on down!" I tried my best to block and it wasn't good enough. Susie peered over the edge of the table at us disinterestedly as the map got taken away from me. She looked at it like it was something stuck to the bottom stuck of her shoes.

"Where's the beef?"

"You run the line and it pays off in CASH!" Losing the map to Susie let Sally's fingers free for serious mayhem and I lost my indifference to her attack.

When I looked back up from a momentarily secure position, Susie was gone.

So was the map.

*****Trouble!

"Oh, damn. That idiot doesn't know the trouble she's in..."

Second thoughts about sending one of my girlfriend's ditzy friends into the underground started. So did thirds, fourths and fifths, and by that time I was panic stricken.

The beeper on the table told me the good news (One of my traps had a teddy), the bad news (whoever tried picking it up there was gonna die) and the news started several trivia contests in my mind, with side bets on who killed me first, my wife, her girlfriend, the city, bots or the teddys.

The beeper spat out updates and I sat at the table glooming at the news. Ya see, NONE of my deep traps were tied into the net. When they're under 30 feet of concrete, it doesn't make any sense to pay for radio-phone hookups.

Somebody had gone to the effort of triggering one for me tho, and Susie was on her merry way right to it. If she made it there. The tunnels were a maze of deadly pitfalls as it was and she'd taken off without any warnings, training or even a flashlight.

She did take one of my guns. Sally was getting torqued about it too. "You get your skinny butt down there and save her short story or sleep with the rats on a permanent basis! Do you understand me mister?"

"Yes dear, yaboss, I'm going already." Staring at the beeper didn't help. It was just loud and clear notice that my traps were traps. THAT was something I already knew, but now they were traps for me. "Relax, dear. I can't go down till the tide changes, so chill. Shift change is in two hours."

"What's this shift change crap?" Glaring murder at me, Sally crossed her arms and started serious fretting. It was one more distraction I didn't need.

"You hide your tracks by getting them buried under the traffic, or don't leave a trail by going just after. Susie walked right into the middle of it and if she's lucky, she's under arrest for trespassing right now."

"Lucky?" Sally started getting fidgety and I could see her eyes move to the equipment belt I had by the door. The spare was gone, but Susie didn't know how to use the weapons there. Or the equipment, really.

"Yeah, lucky!" I tapped my finger on a copy of the map. "See this spot right here? It's the main bridge to the trapline. It's a grease-pit with about 12 feet or so of slime in it. The only time you can cross it without swimming is just after the port flushes ice shavings down there 'cause that freezes the grease for an hour or so. Fluid nitrogen isn't easy to breath either, you wait till they're done first."

"Are all the traps like that?" Sally looked a little worried as I nodded yes. Teddys weren't stupid, they choose VERY inhospitable places to hide in. That's one of the reasons I charged so much one to go in and get one.

Susie had at least two strikes against her before she even started.

********Hey, I'm tired...

"Jesus lady, watch where you're firing that thing!"

The fumes from still-singeing hair wafted across my nose and my vision blurred for a moment as the shot that'd just gone off in my ear ratted my brains. That provided just distraction the little warts needed and another teddy wave exploded out of the dark tunnel and tried to wash over our position.

Grunting explosively in my ear, Susie started rapid return-fire in their general direction. I could see the floor just in front of them get shot all to hell and attempted to surrender. It was no use. Susie wasn't taking any more prisoners today.

The teddies were less bothered by the spray. "Tell me again how this is gonna make me rich and happy." A hoarse whisper sounded as soon as the echos stopped resounding thru our little nook. Shaking my head, I tightened the bandage on my leg and wondered if Sally would mind horribly if I killed her best friend.

"You were supposed to pick the teddy up, not blow them to pieces. Then we split the reward. Remember? AFTER you got trained."

"If that's all it is, I think I can accommodate you." Came a chirpy voice from the rear of the hole.

"Shuttup!" Snarling at our prisoner didn't help my frustrations any, but we were pinned down, trapped in a nook by robots. Somebody had taught them to shoot since the last time I'd been down here and Sue did everything in her power to attract attention to us.

Robots don't sleep. They could wait forever and Susie and I didn't have the supplies to wait for a rescue.

"Say, why don't we listen to him?" asked Susie innocently. I pulled the bot over and showed her the little burnt spot on the back of the teddy's head.

"Because the first thing they do is burn out the Asimov's down here. You can't trust him." I rattled the cuffs to make sure the teddy was secure and tossed him back.

"Any more than I could trust you, say?" Susie smiled like she'd just made a point. I wanted to strangle her.

"He has a lifetime of bullshit to make up for, Susie. Nobody WANTS to return to slavery and certain death. The bot will say anything right now and has no blockers anymore."

By dint of several herculean efforts, I managed to get in a position where Susie wasn't shooting in my ear and the recoil wasn't slapping any of my fresher wounds. The relief almost made me faint but I held on long enough to dig a couple of the more interesting items out of my utility belt.

"We can't just send the teddy back and crawl home?" Susie struck a dramatic pose in the open hatch and almost got her fanny shot off for it. She dove for the muck on the floor and liked it when she got there, wriggling around to return fire fairly quickly.

"No. No deals down here. They want to kill me." I got most of the connections made before blurry vision stopped the work. Groaning, I made the long crawl back to Susie and explained to her what I wanted her to do.

It only took three repeats and two death threats to get her to agree to attempt it. For her, that was progress. Susie was getting positively cooperative while getting shot at, a distinct improvement on her normal self.

*****On a Plate Of Flint Grey Steel...

The pain was doing a good job of keeping me awake, but it wasn't stable enough. One blinding flash, several seconds of agony, then a dull throb that only kept me awake because I couldn't ignore it.

The teddys took it easy on themselves and only attacked when the gun drooped. I guess they were tired of getting homer bolts pumped into their circuitry. Walking out of a battle and surrendering yourself to the nearest police station wasn't high on their list of things to do and I'd gotten a couple of them.

But the number of teddys breaking off the attack and marching off to the police station grew less with every needle burst. Then I saw why. The little warts were starting to wear armor.

Damn, it looked silly. Ever seen a two foot tall furry tank?

Lucky for me the little pests were a little vague about gravity, power-cables and magnetics. One or two well-placed shots later and they were walking thru a curtain of trailing power cables that was gluing them together with sizzle and sparks, then roasting them whole.

Then magnetizing them. Thank heavens for those cheap steel plates. The teddys that fell over never did get back up, they were just a little too top-heavy to break the pull now.

I didn't care when the breakers blew, the teddys had given up on the plating idea and were just settling down to wait us out. That was smart of them and worried me.

Whispering instructions back to Susie while I tried to peer back down the smoke-filled corridor wasn't easy, I kept losing it and asking where she was and what I was doing. I swear I heard a teddy giggle at that.

Then Susie announced it was all plugged in. I gulped, whimpered a quick prayer and asked her to punch it up.

********FADEOUT

I faded to black before I heard anything from her about this attack.

There were several interesting nightmares involving pizza deliverymen, long distance charges and somebody refusing unauthorized passengers on city maintenance trucks before I woke up again. Even at that it took me long time to figure out the reason I couldn't see was because it was dark.

"What a marvelous escape!"

"Really? Are we out?" I tried to say that, really I did. All that came out was a groan.

Sitting up wasn't on my list of possible things either. Then I felt the muck pouring down a leg and figured out what happened as Susie fumbled my fly back up. She'd gotten lonely and pumped me full of painkiller from the utility belt, right in the place she was most familiar with. Meds, from the effects they were having.

"Yer a fast lass with a zipper, Susie" I yipped as a cold hand gave me a good luck squeeze. Susie jumped and I could almost see by her blushing.

"Next time, try to save my butt instead of shooting it full of holes, wouldya?"

"Stop passing out on me and this could turn into a fun date, handsome. You notice the romantic lighting yet?" Nothing kept Susie quiet for very long, even being caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

"Ya, I noticed. There's a few flares on my belt somewhere. If ya can get to 'em without a palimony suit, feel free."

Managing to look away from the long-life emergence flare as it set off wasn't hard. Susie wasn't that quick, but she was shooting at something before I rolled over and got the flare she dropped placed somewhere safe. I figure some nifty blue lights breathed their last right then. Susie sighed relief as whatever she was killing gave up and went away.

"What's with the gismo I set up anyway?" I heard the slap of another charge being pushed into the gun and worried about that for a second. I didn't carry enough charges for a war in these belts and the teddys might know that. "Does it do anything important?"

Listening for a moment, I enjoyed the quiet crackle as the last of the armored teddys burnt out in the tunnel. "Not really." I moaned, busy trying out some fairly important major limbs for damage right then. The news was worse than I expected. I was gonna live. "But pick me up and we can go home now."

"Really?" Susie looked a little dubious. "What kind of joy-juice do you keepin that pouch? Thru a fire-fight. Can I have whatever's left?"

"Really!" I managed to do a pushup and two-handed myself up the wall via a friendly cable. "It's safe now. There's an elevator right around the corner from here if ya don't mind popping out of a maintenance tunnel beside a church."

"Which church?" Susie was gone before I could hit her, leaving me to pick our convulsing teddy up and drag my bleeding butt out of our hole. I was reasonably thankful I didn't hear any more gunfire. Reasonably.

"Church of the holy Saquash. They do a little teddy-smuggling on the side, so to speak."

I wasn't gonna tell her the little gismo was just a squealer adapted to pump out white noise on a command-link. As soon as the teddys found earplugs, they'd be back.

Making their crystal optic-lattice vibrate was annoying but not fatal. Double vision makes a bad impression on a bot and should keep them off our case for a few minutes.

Long enough to get away, I hoped.

****"Ethnic purification "

"NO! We don't go back in those damn tunnels till we're PAID to, already. Now give it up and let me watch the game!"

Sally didn't look happy at that bit of news, but I turned back to the shoot-em-up on TV anyway. Watching grown men bleed real fake blood live-on-TV was a LOT safer than taking my bloodthirsty apprentice back into the tech tunnels hunting teddybears.

Life under the city hunting robots wasn't easy and Sue still thought it was a game down there, a game she'd found easy to win so far. There wasn't anything I'd' been able to do to change her mind about that. My live-in supported her friend, not me.

It was my fault anyway. Can I help it if I'm brilliant at my work and make it look easy?

Besides, Sue apparently LIKED killing things. I shrugged that thought off and tried to get interested in the murderball being played but Sally stayed on my mind, even when she wasn't nagging me for more friendly work.

Like my wife, landlord and homebody worrywart didn't do enough of that already. Avoiding Sally's fretting reflection in the TV, I tried to remember anything coming up that required a sudden burst of cash. There wasn't anything special in my life, so it must've been a home-thing she wanted to finance. Her home-life made me even gloomier.

There were other problems. Catching runaway bots gave Susie's silly Spanish pride something to macho about. And brag she did, even if her husband was close to killing her for it. Catching teddy's did generate fast cash but hurt his feelings.

Having a wife that was a better killer than him was getting too hard on the family hubby. The fact she made better money was something they could live with.

His brothers, still running the streets, were giving Bro an incredibly hard time about having a deadly wife. I'd noticed the shock-suit Sue was starting to wear too.

That meant one too many rapists had taken a run at her, scaring her enough to put the stun-gun-inna-bra on while trucking about the streets. I felt sorry for her, but not sorry enough to make the situation worse by LOOKING for more work.

My work-suit was bulletproof, not rapist proof, the same as my street suit. I still didn't feel like going into the tunnels, even wearing it.

The bounty on a runaway bot wasn't really worth the risk of letting the tubers down there get to know your tricks. Cleaning out a whole colony was worth it, but lots more trouble than I really wanted to try these days.

Their teddywar down there worried me too. The Holy church of S was starting to make political noises about bot emancipation, and THAT meant they were the ones supplying the little nippers with arms and information down there. Probably both sides.

Boy, had we found THAT out the last trip down. Somebody had given those cuddly little bears a full course on guerrilla tactics and survival. That meant boobytraps, teddy bears that shot back instead of falling like idiots into my trapline and was generally left pure hell in your laundry basket.

I still hadn't gotten all those pesky stains outta my suit from the last trip down.

*******************

"You really should take Sue down in the tunnels again soon, Tracker. She needs the money desperately."

Burrowing a little further into my pillow, I pretended the small still voice of my softy live-in wasn't campaigning for me to go on another two-day date with her best friend. That was easy. The hard part was ignore two icy feet being planted in my back.

It didn't work, or at least it didn't work very well till she started moving cold toes due south.

"It's way too dangerous to go joyriding in the tubes these days." I mumbled, adroitly convulsing to the far edge of the mattress. The little scamp followed me over there and had me trapped between soft pressure and a long drop to the floor.

"But she really needs the money." The whining started while I was still trying to keep my balance and still salvage some pride. "Her poor sick mother..."

"Has more family than she knows what to do with." I snarled desperately. "If that collection of vicious thugs can't steal whatever she needs this time, it can't be had."

"That's not nice." came a sulky little whisper. I made a frantic grab for some slow moving elastic and snagged it just in time. Wifey-poo giggled.

I hate girls that giggle in bed. It makes me nervous.

"The tunnels aren't nice right now. My trapline is boobytrapped, somebody is arming the teddy's and there's rumors of a BIG war down there."

"What would teddy's fight over?" Came an interested voice. I rolled over and started slapped away some very industrious hands, almost falling off the bed.

Those blasted hands got thru my defenses while I thrashed franticly for support and hauled me back on the bed. I didn't complain till I noticed what they were hauling with.

"The best plugs, a really nice oil rag, I dunno." My groaning seemed to encourage soft+hot into making more trouble.

"SO if you went and looked, you might be able to collect scalps via proxy." came a husky question.

"NO!"

"Play the tribes off on one another."

"No! Hunahuhahuh... STOP that!"

"Cause if you don't take her soon, she gonna go down there herself."

Wifey beat a quick retreat to the other side of the bed just about the time I was ready to retake Brittany for the Holy Roman Empire, armed with only a bad attitude.

"And I don't want that." Came a triumphant whisper. I just laid there and did some heavy breathing.

"Well?" came an icy whisper from the darkness. "What are ya gonna do?"

***

I looked over the disaster around me and winced. There was a big teddywar going on in the tunnels and it was a bad one.

Leaving Sue to guard my back was a risky maneuver but I did it anyway. She had a NASTY habit of shooting first and looking hard later. Several city maintenance men had mentioned that on occasion. The occasion they were mentioning was my very own personal lynching party if I didn't get the stupid twit under control fast.

There really wasn't much choice. It was leave the trigger-happy idiot alone behind me or take Sue into what look like a war zone, something I didn't wanna do this lifetime.

It looked bad for whoever the teddys had torn into. In this section of tunnel the power cables were cut and crudely patched, with no sign citycrews were gonna try and fix them, chunks of cannibalized bodies were all over the place, and what looked like the remains of a semi-peaceful teddy-ville blown all over the tunnel.

I checked pretty carefully. The only things worth money, teddy ID tags, were all gone. They'd been ripped fairly brutally outta the bodies.

Nobody but another bot had that kind of power. It was a teddywar for sure, but against what, other teddy-tribes?

Taking a sample of the dust covering everything looked like a good idea, but I already knew what it was gonna turn out to be. Molybdenum dust.

That meant some of the more expensive bots, ones with sealed bodies, were out to exterminate any of the smaller teddys they could get at for some reason.

It also explained the needlebomb. Crack a few seals, pour in some crap and within a week or so every joint in the teddy was gonna grind to a halt or be lubed to the point of being useless. I snapped a couple shots of the mess and backed out from this tunnel fast.

If this was a prime location for a teddy-ville once, it'd soon get re-populated. That meant somebody with a real bad temper was watching it, and me.

"What ya find back there?"

Sue was glaring down the side tunnel with her sidearm unlimbered and was already waving it at shadows in a menacing way. I shuddered and debated telling her just how much good her air-pistol was gonna be against needlebombs, but turned that thought off. She'd just start nagging for heavier weaponry.

"Rambo with an attitude. Darth Vader feeling cranky and the Terminator with a toothache. Let's get outta here."

That got me a strange look or two, but I brushed it aside and reshouldered my pack. "Put the popgun away and follow me. This village has been cleaned out already."

"Is there somebody else collecting teddies?" Sue looked outraged. "Poachers on our turf?"

Poachers was a gentle way of putting it, but I didn't correct her. "My turf, hon. In a manner of speaking. Right now we gotta go talk to some people."

"More of your maintenance buddies?" sniffed Sue in a disgusted way. She still hadn't forgiven them for letting her walk into a sewage pit once.

"Naw. A priest or two." I tossed off.

"What do ya wanna do that for?" Her voice got a little shrill and I grinned. Sue liked shooting at things and turning them into obedient slaves, but she had still a few weak spots.

It had the desired effect anyway. She clammed up and holstered her gun.

"There was a war down there and I wanna know what's going on before getting too much deeper into this." Nodding the nearest hatch, I started shutting down. "Come on, lets get outta here."

A hurt "urmph" echoed past me, but I could hear her start to pick up.

What Sue would do if a priest told her killing Teddy's was a sin was debatable. Now she was about to find out.

***********************

"I'll just wait out here and pray for a while."

Ever see a girl all decked out in skin-tight black leathers nervous at going into a church? Watching Sue get nearer and nearer the place was turning out to be more fun than anything I'd tried on her in months. Since the mouse incident, anyway. She even had her gun-holster buttoned up.

"We aren't going into the church." I replied nastily. "We're going right to the rectory and pump the priest for information."

"Swell." Sue kicked an imaginary stone outta her way and grimaced. "Not only do I halfta see my priest, I get to do it in his own home." She looked at the greasy, pollution stained stone of the old church and brightened. "Maybe he's not home. Maybe he's out helping the poor or something."

"He's home." I reassured her. "And waiting for us. I phoned ahead to make sure of that."

"I didn't see you phone anybody." Sue started glaring at me and shuffling her equipment around, trying to make it look like she wasn't about to go backpacking in the leather clubs or take a three-day hike in the hills.

"It's automatic." I reassured her, patting my magic box. "You gonna be down+out for three days tunnel-bound, ya learn to go with everything prepared. Even the phone number of a priest with ya."

Susie sniffed and turned away.

It did take about three days to get thru my tunnel-line these days, and that was taking the tube when we could. Just to add to the confusion we were both decked out with enough weapons to start AND finish a couple wars between guerrilla mercenaries. Unfortunately for this neighborhood, that was about normal.

Life in these old neighborhoods wasn't real pretty or very easy. The weapons we were carrying only made sure that the smaller groups would be leaving us alone. It made us a juicier target for the bigger, semi-official ones.

"Any idea where the rectory is?" I asked, looking at the massive building we'd stopped in front of in confusion. A priest could hide anywhere in that mess.

"The fastest way is thru that door." Grumped Sue, pointing out a small door inset in a wall. "If it's open. If he answers." I nodded and went over to pound on it.

"You DON'T knock on the door of a church, stupid." Sue reached around me and pushed a button which opened the door. "The priest lives in the small building in here."

"Actually, I used to." A small man in long flowing robes came out from the gloom of the church and stood blinking in the doorway. "But THAT little place got sold some years ago. I have a modest apartment in the church basement now."

"Close to the tunnels." I inserted. The priest gave me a dirty look and sighed unhappily.

"Very close." He answered. "Would you two like to come in now?"

"I'll just go pray for a while." stuck in Sue. She pushed between us and disappeared into the gloom, leaving the priest and I standing there foolishly.

"Well, come in before you start a war out there." The priest glanced around the street before grabbing my arm and pulling me in. "I get targeted enough by the gangs around here, I don't need any more attention from them."

"You still let street kids and drunks sleep in here if they need it?" I asked, just trying to make conversation as we wandered thru a maze of moldy boxes and pipes.

"Oh yes, of course." The priest chuckled. "The only change in that is they have to scrub the place clean before they leave in the morning." The priest glanced over at me. "Six o'clock mass, you know. The devote are VERY punctual, those that still come out for it."

"Wanna hear about what we found in the tunnels this morning, Father?" I asked the priest as we got settled into his study. The priest choose a hard-backed chair while I sank into an enormous old armchair and immediately regretted it. It was gonna take a week to climb back outta this thing.

"Not really. It's Father John, by the way." The priest answered as he bounced around his apartment. "Tea?"

"Double doubles." I nodded, and dug the photos out my pocket. "Here, look at these anyway."

Handing me my cup, Father John snagged the photos and headed back to his hard-backed chair before looking them over. "You took your partner into this?" he asked wondering. "Does she happen to charge extra for spankings too?"

I didn't say anything. Sue in tight black leathers was worth a howl or two, but what Father John didn't know she turned into a nag real fast.

He studied the pictures for a minute or two. "Well, it looks like you managed to clean a teddy-ville right out." and put them face-down on the table. "Did you stop by here to brag about it?" He asked, giving me a fishy look.

"We didn't do that. The village was trashed when we got there." I slurped my tea noisily. "Take another look at the bots, Father. There isn't anything human that could tear a teddy apart like that and you know it."

"Humph. If you say so." The priest glanced at the photos again. "I don't have anything to say about this. You know the church's official position is that robots should be free. We don't approve of bounty hunters, either."

"I want to know what I'm wandering into down there." I answered. "That's a bloody warzone and SOMEBODY is supplying them with arms and information."

"Are you saying I did?" asked the priest.

"The church has given money to both sides in every war since the middle ages, Father." I answered wearily. "It carries cards for all political parties as a matter of practical politics."

"IF I knew anything about AI bots, IF they were trying to purify the tunnels, IF I even thought there was a war going on, I still couldn't say anything." Father John winked at me. "I especially couldn't mention the spaceport and university as really dangerous areas."

"Oh swell." I sank a little further into the chair. Military AI bots. That left only the malls as open areas for hunting and private companies usually got those contracts. And AI bots were incredibly bad news for me. They were professional killers and could keep me out of the deep tunnels easily.

"Have you ever considered just staying out of the tunnels altogether?" asked the priest. "Authorized personnel only in there, you know."

"That's a thought." I nodded at Father John and started to haul myself outta the chair. "Thanks for the tea, Father."

************

"AI bots. Good Lord, we're sunk." Kicking the stone outta our way this time, I tried my best to look sunk in gloom, even if I wasn't. The AI bots were actually good news for me, even if they were a much harder catch. The military would pay top dollar for something they officially couldn't admit existed.

Putting my head down, I ignored Sue, a nice move that let her collect herself again. Going into the church had been a hard time for her.

Getting Sue outta pews had been easy. Apparently she'd gotten a standing ovation from the congregation when lighting a candle or something, and she was very keen to leave the church and get somewhere safe, like the tunnels, before her fans back there started getting real friendly.

"Her fame as a hunter was spreading. She had more fans than I did already. Why worry about AI bots? You heard Father John, they're sticking to the spaceport."

"Like I believe that." I snorted, more to goad Sue than anything else. I had just gotten a great idea.

Her strut starting hitting high gear and I knew that meant Sue was about to launch into one of her tirades. Her lectures consisted of volume and persistence, moderated by threats of crying and hitting me. In her life, that was a good substitute for reasoned debate. I ducked into an alley as soon as she got going and trotted to the nearest manhole, trying to muscle it open and disappear before she noticed I was gone.

It didn't work. A very flustered but still mad femme caught back up to me just as I was about to dive down the hole.

"What are you doing? There's no service tunnel here!" Grumping steadily, Sue followed me down the hole, ignoring the smell and skittering of rats. She even got the lid closed after us.

"There's lots you don't know about the tunnels yet." I whispered, hoping she got the hint. She did and clammed up, after getting out her gun.

I wasn't gonna tell her we'd just dived into an abandoned sewer system, without power, lights or bots in it. There were about six different tunnel systems under the city, subways, water, communications; and at least ONE of them was bound to be infested with the new AI bots. I wanted to know which one they used and from somewhere they weren't too likely to go.

Personally, I was putting my money on them taking the high road and taking over communication tunnels. That'd make more sense to a terrorist group than trying to live in an ex-subway line.

There was also the little fact the tunnels I was about to crack into were so old they were made of brick, not pipe. They'd been here since the city was build and had been abandoned as unrepairable two hundred years ago.

No amenities, no bots, no troubles.

I hoped.

****** AI Life-line***

The underground was about the way I remembered it from the old maps, and the illegal hole to the old sewers was right where I remembered it should be. Chuckling as I climbed thru the slimy dry rot and into the dark beyond, I flipped on a light and looked down the old crumbling brick happily.

The tech-tunnels were a long way from this end of underground. There were no autolights here, no plugs and no power. There was nothing but miles and miles of dripping wet tunnels, filled with poison gas, rats that liked a quiet lifestyle and the occasional blank wall where somebody had put a building thru the old brick.

That was the real trick to using old tunnels, knowing where the old maps didn't work anymore 'cause somebody had moved a street or put a new line right thru. I'd been here before, chasing a teddy from the ritzy section of town that'd seen too much to be safely let loose.

I knew the people that'd owned the teddy and the reward for him was big enough to keep me after him, closing down sections of the old lines till I had him trapped. The bot was probably a big part of what they didn't want the world to find out about. It'd taken me days to run him down.

Shrugging off that memory was easy. Compared to what I was gonna take on today, going without sleep for a few days while I wandered blind thru these tunnels was a cakewalk. The landmarks and exits left down here were kinda nice, but not necessary. Dangers here included cave-ins, mudslides, gas-attacks and floods.

Sue didn't say a word about it, I don't think she knew. Flipping on her light, my hungry apprentice just followed me down the crumbling brick road.

We walked for miles down that sewer with no signs that anything living had been this way since the early 1860's. There were a couple spots that needed masks to get thru the gas, but on the whole it was a safe run. Sue didn't even ask me where we were going, she just followed me thru the tunnel and climbed over the crumbling walls and into new lines when I told her to. Those branch-lines were in even worse shape. A couple times we had to back out cause the tunnel had collapsed entirely and wait while I traced a new route on my pocket-map.

Nodding at one dark tunnel, I led Sue past it carefully. There was a 90 foot drop in there somewhere where the old line headed down to the university. I skipped that route. Even if Sue was up to bobsledding down an abandoned sewer without the bobsled, I know I wasn't.

That's when things started getting interesting.

The university had found the tunnels several years ago and had been using them as a chemical dump and storage spot, one that was highly illegal but as cheap and safe as you could get in town. I even noticed a couple new walls where somebody had attempted to seal the more dangerous toxins up from any blind and stupid ignorance.

That, however, hadn't stopped the malicious. Every single one of the sealed rooms had been broken into and samples taken out. The samples were sitting in the main line, some of the still steaming, most casks corroded beyond belief.

Tapping my mask on a little tighter was all I could do. That and hope there wasn't anything dangerous enough to get out of the casks and kill me before I finished what I'd set out to do.

It was the bats that worried me anyway.

Creeping thru that maze of leaking toxic chemical casks, I couldn't help but notice that the roof of the tunnel was covered in lots and lots of brown bats.

TONS of bats. Thousands, if not millions of them. They were crusted all over the brick arch of the walls, everywhere except the spots leaking chemical fumes kept clear and the seeping groundwater from the bricks. I did my best to hurry thru the place, weaving a fast path thru the slop and hoping the comic books I'd read as a kid about mutant animals in the sewers wasn't true.

There was a second reason for hurrying outta the bat's range. If the bats lived here, they had a way in and out, and I wanted to find that before something on the other side noticed me. There was also the little problem of our lights and what they were doing to the bats.

The bats were waking up, starting to make noise and there was one other little difficulty. You do remember what happens first thing in the morning to most people, don't you? That hurried little run to the john?

Sue and I were already ankle deep in bat guano and several million of the nasty little buggers were getting an early wakeup call, courtesy of our bright miner-lights. They weren't being cheerful about it.

Getting outta the chemical alley, I headed down the tunnel at a dead run, turning my light off and ignoring the whimpers behind me as Sue noticed I was leaving.

Sue looked up when it started to rain on her. I heard the swearing and kept hurrying down the tunnel as fast as I could as she paid the price for her curiosity.

Besides, one of us had to find a place to get us cleaned up again.

****battle-bot***

Sue finally left me and went home.

Laying there in the mud, I tried to think cold thoughts, still thoughts, very, very quiet thoughts. It was much harder than I wanted it to be, but anything that'd keep the AI bot just below from noticing me stuck in the roof was fine. The only thing I didn't want to think about were the "getting-extremely-painful" cramps in my hands. They were starting to shoot bright spears of pain up my arms. Hanging there, hugging the bottom of a beam just over the AI's head, I worried about getting outta this one alive instead.

Spying on things is a hazardous profession. I had to find these things out the hard way.

The citycrew pulling cable out in the tunnel hadn't noticed either of us, they just worked at the slow business of replacing an old copper cable with fiber optics, the six men spread up and down the tunnel. Most of them were watching a machine noisily pull cable and it looked like they were settling in for an afternoon of doing just about that. Two of them were lazily watching the outer tunnels for attacks from something.

I wasn't gonna tell them we were already here.

Meanwhile, my legs had started to cramp and my hands were flashing alarms. Even if the AI bot hadn't noticed me hidden up here, even if it was content to stay hid while the city crew did whatever they had to do out there, there was gonna be a BIG problem here for me real soon.

The big problem was numb fingers. If I couldn't move without attracting somebody's unfavorable attention, I couldn't move. But if I didn't get down real soon, the fall outta my hiding place would drop me on unfriendly heads.

Right off the AI bots head, actually. If I lived thru that, I'd tumble right into the arms of a trigger-happy citycrew carrying lasers for the first time. They looked like they were itching to use them, too. If I coulda moaned without getting killed several unpleasant ways, I woulda done it.

Ever pray for a mistrial? Ever hope for a disaster? I kept my weakening grip on the beam and desperately searched for a way to tie myself down. There wasn't one.

You see, I hadn't planned on staying out there very long. Looking back longingly at the little hole I crawled thru to get into this, I could almost see safety, just a short wriggle away. But no, when I got thru that little hole I'd had to stretch out and place my bug on the roof so I could get clean information instead just tossing the bug into the litter on the tech tunnel floor.

Net result, when the AI had showed, I froze into place. I'd actually enjoyed watching the bot work at rewiring a panel. Fast, efficient type work. If these bots ever started freelancing, there were a lotta techies in some serious trouble.

But then the city crew had showed and the AI had backed into my nook. Then the little wart had plugged himself in, sucking power while waiting this little inconvenient out.

That was a couple minutes ago. I did a few more quiet open-mouthed breaths and tried to think silence, but my hands were quivering again, starting to tell me the Adrenalin was wearing out. They wanted a fix, and real soon.

Carefully putting as much weight on my heels as I could, I tried to ease one leg backward. That was the easy part. Noise from the city crew helped, but every grain of sand that fell felt like a boulder to me.

Stopping meant the pains started up again. There was no choice. I had to get the weight off my hands or I'd fall right on top of the AI.

The bot below me had enough weapons to wipe out the city singlehanded too, from the looks of it.

Blowing a kiss at my bug for luck, I moved again. Then my blasted bug beeped at me and I froze again, sitting on a whimper that shoulda melted it's heart. Then I remembered. The bug was supposed to transmit data if it found anything interesting.

That thought scared me. If the bug noticed the AI hiding below it and started a full scan, there was a damn good chance the AI would notice it.

An AI scan meant the AI noticing me and by that time I wouldn't have the strength to fight off a stiff breeze. Easing back another step, I moved my hand back too, wincing at every grain of dust and hoping I could actually use the hand when it began necessary to grab the beam again.

My hand cooperated, but complained bitterly about the pain. This was not turning out to be a fun day. Just about that time, the AI below me started to move, swivelling his head as he started to scan for something.

Panic is no fun. Silent, contained panic is less fun and hard on eardrums, eyes and blood pressure. I played extinct anyway.

The bots panic woulda been deadly. When I saw the tension going outta the bot's legs as it settled down and I realized what was happening.

The bot was shutting down, not waking up. I made another step backwards during that silent celebration, hoping my hands won't notice the spears of pain going up my arms had reached my ears and were threatening to squeeze my brains out.

I'm not really sure how I managed to back into the hole without making noise, I do know I stayed balanced on my butt halfway thru the hole for a long, long time, promising my quivering body nothing but rest, TV and more rest if it got me thru this.

Even the porthole got shut behind me without having the AI explode into deadly action. I was proud of myself for that, till the thought the bot was running the same information scam on me as I was on him occurred to me.

Settling into the mud of my tunnel, I hunkered down and scanned the data my little bug was transmitting back on the AI. I looked at it in disbelief for a minute, then almost did back flips, cool and safe in my deserted tunnel.

Everything was there in the data. Of course everything in it was bad news, but everything was there. Operating limits, communication lines, rundowns on mass and weaponry, power drains, standard equipment...

It was ALL there. Except for the fact these bots were plug-in models, they didn't look very weak either.

Plug-in models worked fine in cities; on the moon that were all cabled. Batteries were great power sources when all you had to do to recharge was step outside, but here on earth, what they lost in mass they gained in recharge time. At least this one would. His battery-pac was pitiful.

This explained why the bots were hiding out at the university. The power plant there was about the only one around that could charge the weird solid-state powerpacks these AIs used without a BIG fuss being made about the power drain.

A weakness! Without sucking on a socket 12 hours a day, the AI's were more or less stuck somewhere they could pick up a full charge, like a space cruiser. Spacers didn't run at full power when they were parked in port, last I heard, so that left the university and parts of the power grid for running room.

Letting my little beastor digest the data, I made a run for the nearest open hole that'd let me get to phonelines.

This info was too hot to sit in my belt. I HAD to get my homebox chewing on plans of attack, and right now. If that AI back there was playing possum because of power drain, the minute he woke up with low priority processing finished, I was history.

Or at least my bug was. If it was still transmitting, even in bursts and on the weird frequency I'd hand-picked, the AI would notice it sooner or later. I hoped the bot wasn't wasting time on little things like that these days. My little bug would last longer.

Stopping at the nearest cutoff, I considered heading out to the university and bugging the big comm boxes, but decided not to push my luck. Just setting out a new line of bugs around the areas I figured the AI's would be traveling thru would do the job just fine, and keep traces outta sight.

With the added bonus I stayed out of the danger areas, the places with killer AI robots running around in them. Since I was about to bug an AI nest anyway, I wanted to be real careful about it.

Enough AI traffic around my bugs and I'd have a base location, population numbers and a logistics curve. If there wasn't enough data for me to anything useful with, I could always sell the info to somebody stupid enough to go in blind.

That was a last resort. Teddys kept me fed, but if I could score on these AI bots, they'd build a home for me.

************

"Oh look, Buddy scored already!" Sally watched the computer beep with all the pleasure of a child watching a fireworks display. "That means he'll be home soon."

"Oh good. I have a few words for him." Shrugging herself into the chair, Sue patted the last of the weapons. "Why does he think he can just leave me here with all the cleaning to do? Am I married to him or what?"

"He doesn't think so." Sally watched the computer whir. "Oh, AND it's busy. That means he'll gonna sit in front of that thing as soon as he gets home, and wanna stay there till he finds something."

"Can you tell me what's on the call?" Sue looked over at the machine disinterestedly. "Knowing all the answers before he does might help us get back into the tunnels quicker. If I knew the questions, too."

"Sure, that isn't a problem." Sally wandered over to the computer and poked a couple buttons. Robot schematics starting flickering onscreen, the robots insides gradually getting filled with equipment labels.

"Humph. Doesn't look like much to me." sniffed Sue. "But it isn't a teddy, that's for sure. Where are the weapons?"

"I don't know that part." Confessed Sally. "I just turn the screen on. Tracker does all the rest."

Sue watched the screen silently, trying to see something useful on the screen while Sally puttered around the apartment.

Both of them wanted to see me walk back in thru the door.

********

"Listen, soft and slightly rowdy!"

The love of my life harrumphed unhappily. "Don't you start that now. This Susie thing was all your idea. It's gone bad, now you fix it." She warned, pouting slightly. I inhaled, uncrossed my eyes and tried again.

"I don't care about the Sue-deal anymore! She ISN'T gonna help me with these war-bots and that's final!"

Turning away and desperately trying to keep my attention on the screen data, I pretended to be working. All the heaving chests in my peaceful home were destroying my concentration in a serious way and wifey, still gloating, knew that. Getting the conversion back to something less engaging was all I could try.

"Besides, I don't even know if I'm gonna try anything yet. These war-bots are 'way too dangerous to fool with and I want to be REAL sure before I try anything!"

Toying with something on the table was another of Sally's little habits. I hated it when she did things like rearrange fake flowers for the zillionth time.

"You remember what the teddys did here, eh?" I asked softly. "To this place? War-bots are a LOT bigger and nastier."

"You came home early, didn't you?" Came a tearful reply. "That means everything is all set up, ready to go and in record time, too."

Thankfully, the screen was starting to fill with almost interesting data on the bots. I made a special effort to concentrate on the adaptions the AI moon-bots had made to themselves to get around in earth normal gravity. They looked weak.

"Just the bugs got set, and that was dangerous enough. Now I get to sit and collect data, then make plans..."

"You mean you get to pick a plan outta the computer." Sally sighed heavily. "I think Sue could help you down there, if they're dangerous. You should.."

"Avoid that lunatic at all cost!" I broke out in a sweat at the mere thought of Sue down in the tunnels again.

Somebody opening up with all barrels on every teddy they saw had gotten me into a lot of bad books down there. Even the teddys were getting ticked.

"Sue? In the tunnels? Maybe you didn't hear me, dear. The city crews are carrying lasers down there now. There's war-bots hunting teddys. The teddy's are trouble all by themselves. Now you want Sue to pick up a gun and go down there?"

I shook my head. "VERY silly move. The city'd never recover. I'D never recover. Sue in a warzone would be like pouring gas on a fire. NO way."

The bedroom door slammed behind me as Sally gave up for the moment. Looking around the room, I hoped everything I needed was out here. Going in there was gonna be dangerous for the next little while, but it did give me a thought.

If worst came to worst, I'd lock Sue in there, if I decided to go down into the tunnels after these war-bots. Since she had a nasty habit of trying to sneak down there herself, then expecting me to haul her butt outta whatever trouble she walked into, that was the thing to do. I nodded to myself. Locking her in my bedroom up was the only safe thing to do.

Not that her husband would be too pleased at her being locked here for a couple days, but THAT was better that the alternative.

The alternative was calling the priest and asking him to lean on her and get Sue give up the idea of hunting teddys for their bounty. That was a last resort cause the priest would want something for getting her off the case and I didn't want him to know anything about what I was doing.

If Sue hadn't already seen the data I had, I'd seriously consider that, but I wasn't gonna try having a priest start leaning on her now. He'd end up with more information about and the war-bots that I had.

Then the interesting stuff starting coming onscreen.

Power supplies and how to drain 'em.

Sitting back, I started some serious reading, trying to get my homebox to poke up the likely locations for AI fixes on our local powernet. It was disappointing. From the looks of things, the AI's already had several fall-back points.

That meant alterations to transformer points on the grids and transformer houses were already heavily armored block-houses already.

If they could be trapped in one, that'd be OK, but it meant cutting off all the power to the city and waiting them out. That, with the batteries they had, could take years.

I gave that a miss, but made a little note to check out one of the nodes on the powernet they'd changed. It might prove interesting.

Leaving the computer to do a strength, weakness or blunder analysis, I packed it all in and headed to bed. After steeling myself to resist Sally's beguiling ways. Until some viable strategy came up on the box, there wasn't really anything else to do.

Except wait for information.

*****

Wait for it is all I did for the next couple days. Sally wasn't talking to me till I gave in and took Sue back to the tunnels and she certainly wasn't doing anything else for me till I smartened up either.

Including cooking. Sue, praise the undead gods, had decided to stay home and wait for Sally to clear the decks for her, instead of hanging around here and whining about it herself. That much I was thankful for.

I spend my time eating out and wondering if the young girls were really as dippy as they were acting. Not that I cared anymore, it was purely idle interest. I mean, since I was stuck eating and sleeping like a bachelor...

Tossing war-plans got to be a real hobby with me. No sooner did my homebeast get one that looked at least semi-solid, like dropping a tunnel on their heads, new information came in that trashed it.

The data itself solidified nicely. There were six AI's in town. That doesn't sound like much, but they NEVER gathered in groups of more than three. They had rotating erratic patrols of their traplines, and by tracing some power surges, I was able to locate their haunts.

I woulda NEVER suspected some of those places being good spots to trap teddys in, but they were getting checked for something.

They didn't seem to do anything with the ID pelts, anything I could trace anyway. There was NO contact with the outside that I could detect, but they could've been holding wine and cheese parties at the university and I wouldn't've know about it. The moon bots did, as I suspected, stick to comm tunnels if they could and probably mailed the pelts somewhere quiet for exchange.

No human was ever likely to spend much time in a com-pipe, if they could help it. The bot's just scooted along them and dropped parcels into the mail stream.

Data I was getting suggested the town was damn near cleaned out of isolated spots to sterilize now anyway, so the way I saw it, the bot's only had two choices.

Raid places that had more human traffic, like the tunnels in a shopping center, or move to a new city and start again.

Moving again didn't look too likely. Not many cities had the facilities we did, thanks to a quake that got the city completely rebuilt fifty or sixty years ago.

Not many cities had a spaceport. Our local mountain made us a prime launch spot and I was really ready to bet the bots wanted to keep a safe getaway handy.

That left raids on dangerous spots, ones with lotsa people, cameras and side tunnels not mentioned anywhere in the city plans.

Risky business, even for a war bot.

Sue was starting to press Sally for some action when one plan finally came up that didn't require high explosives, the cooperation of the military, industrial power and light facilities or the strength of ten men.

Unfortunately, what it did take was two people.

*********

I looked at the printout in disbelief, then swung around to glare at Sally. "YOU programmed this in, didn't you?"

Sally's gloat was unmistakable. So was the fact she'd even found the plan. I cursed myself for not doing more housekeeping, 'cause If the parameter file for both Sue and I hitting the tunnels hadn't been sitting there, live-in would've NEVER gotten this plan out of the computer.

"Oh look dear, there an 87% chance of success. Is that good?" Sally bounced in her chair and grinned merrily at me. "AND you don't need any weapons. And if you don't need..."

Picking her up outta the chair, I tossed wifey over one shoulder and headed for the bedroom. It was payback time. She giggled and squirmed delightfully.

"Does this mean you're gonna... OUCH! STOP that!" She giggled the whole way there.

*******

So I got talked into it. The plan was worthwhile, something not even Sue could mess up without actively working at it. At least I hoped so.

"Do you have buyers for the AI bots yet?" Wife-ish mumbled around a sandwich she was threatening to feed me. I snorted and ignored her. Using Sue in this was something I still didn't wanna do. Besides, I still hadn't forgiven hotstuff for coming up with something workable yet.

Besides, if it did produce, using Sue down there could get habit-forming. That was a scary thought.

"I want the treasure trove." I grunted at her. "You know, the lost teddy burial-ground type of thing. Not the AI's themselves."

"Are they robbing banks too?" asked wifey, getting interested in something at last. "Maybe jewelry stores? They have a stash?"

"Not that I've heard." I shook my head gently. "I think they mail the pelts out somewhere safe anyway. But I wanna look."

Nodding satisfaction at the plan, I looked up and smiled. The new plan was modified just a little from what the computer had suggested. Not that computer predictions had worked at all well down there recently anyway.

"There, it's all fixed up. Now all we have to do is..."

"Get Sue interested in helping you?" Wifey blinked innocently. I could feel my neck start to swell, so I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, silently counting to ten by 3/8's. Sally had the sense not to giggle. She did wince and hold her butt thou.

"Run a check on it." I muttered, and poked the new dataset into the box. "A few times.

***

"Whatta mean, no guns?" A really infuriated Sue started strutting around the room angrily. If my wife hadn't been watching me, I woulda leered at this happily. Sue in a black syn-leather skin-suit was kinda breathtaking.

"That's crazy." Sue stuttered out, lashing out at an innocent chair with one foot and hooking it out from the table. Waiting till her chest stopped heaving at me was fun, so I hummed softly till she settled down.

"You're crazier. That's why you don't get a gun." Waving the sheet of paper with her part in the plan at her only made Sue madder, especially since she hadn't read it yet. I did it anyway.

"This time you get to talk to the teddy's you've been so keen to shoot at first. I ride shotgun and protect us both while you talk and cut deals. Isn't that wonderful?"

"I can't talk to teddy's." Stuttered Sue again. "They tried to kill you last month! Us! I was shooting at them only..."

"And they might try to kill me again today." I answered sweetly. "That's why you do talking. AFTER, that is, and listen carefully here, after you set up a meet with them."

"How do I do that?" screeched Sue. "You expect me to go find them, arrange a meeting, and then what? Take 'em by the hand and walk 'em peacefully to the station?"

"You talk to the priest and get him to broker a teddy-meet. This deal." I waved a paper at her. "Then you go to the meet and offer the teddy's this deal. I back it up."

That answer had all the effect on Sue of a bucket of cold water and a nice big badge asking her just WHAT she was doing in the back seat making all that noise.

"No way." Came soft whisper from her side of the table. "You CAN'T ask me to go..."

"Deal with the priest? Yes I can." I nodded happily. "You see, He LIKES you. Any edge that gives us is a good one. As a matter of fact, you've gonna convince him we aren't gonna hunt teddy's for a while since the AI bots have just about cleaned out the tunnels anyway."

"I can't." Sue looked really stricken. "You can't ask me to do this..."

"You gotta. The computer says it's our best chance of getting this done."

Hoping Sue never found out how much I had to kludge the data to get it to say that, I handed her a poop sheet with both sides of the argument on it. The computer had actually hated the idea, mostly 'cause I don't argue with tears in my eyes, but I'd finally forced it to say Sue was best negotiating partner for both deals.

"You had to find out this business isn't all hitting the tunnels with a machine gun sooner or later. So take that sheet and go see the priest."

Grabbing Sue shoulder, I turned her towards the door and started pushing. "As a matter of fact, the faster we get this done, the better. Moon-bots might start hitting malls or moving real soon."

"But but but..." Sue hung back and resisted the shoving. "I gotta change! I can't go to a church dressed like this!"

"You already have once. Now just do it again. Besides, that's just the way the priest likes you." I gave her a saucy wink and put my shoulder into shoving her towards the door. She moved that way begrudgingly. "If he gets uncooperative, offer to spank him. That should make him come round."

I ducked the elbow that swished past my gut. Sue has a couple sensitive spots, and her butt is one of them.

"And don't come back here till the priest has agreed to pass that offer on to the teddy's." I sang out as Sue got rudely dumped into the hallway. "And you. Everything depends on you."

Slamming the door shut, I leaned against it and smothered my giggles as I heard Sue slowly schlep down the hall.

"Man, I've been waiting to do that."

"You and the priest." sniffed Sally. "Don't think I haven't noticed."

Ducking the swipe Sally took at me, I made an effort to smother her too. "Did you really have to be that hard on her?" came a contented sounding voice from somewhere in my chest hairs. "You know she's a religious type."

"Yep. I did." Patting various soft bulges stopped some slow-chewing teeth from removing my shirt buttons. "You aren't there when she hits the tunnels with all guns blazing. Then I get the flack, so don't bother me on how I treat the help around here."

"Sides... " Disentangling from the entrapping arms of my live-in, I kissed the top of her head and whistled over to the equipment heap. "It just might work."

This was gonna be a tricky deal if I managed to pull it off.

********

"But Father, you gotta help me!"Tears in here eyes, Sue argued with the priest the only way she knew. At 110 decibels and all the bells and whistles her Spanish heritage could provide. It was getting frenzied.

"We're gonna SAVE lives here! I gotta get a message to the teddys and you're their friend!"

"Then you'd better get down there and do it yourself." Sighed the priest. Resignedly. Cursing to himself, he looked the girl over and muttered prayers as he rearranged things on his desk for the third time, hoping the girl would pick up the hints he was trying to give her. She seemed determined to miss them all.

"If you go down there peaceably, I'm sure you be successful." He snarled at the girl, hoping that rage would drive into her head what a wink and a nod hadn't. "I'm positive. Now have some faith and go try that first, THEN ask for aid. God help those that help themselves already."

"But but but... "

The weeping and moaning didn't move Father John. He saw THAT every Saturday morning as the girls in his congregation confessed Friday night romps and tried to find absolution for enjoying their sins.

The way her chest bounced around was disturbing, thou. He was already 'way past due for a nice cold shower and the girl was still pouring it on. Steeling himself, he put his hands on her shoulders and started pushing her towards the door.

She wriggled pleasantly in his grasp, jiggling and gasping harshly. That started a whole chain of thoughts and reactions that were gonna mess up the whole day if he wasn't careful. Father John started a serious sweat, but the girl did move towards the door.

"Go to the tunnels and pray for guidance. Anywhere at all will do." He started blabbering helplessly, trying to keep the phrase blubber-butt off his mind. The girl wasn't helping him any by bumping into him with every other step.

"Have some faith." With a final shove, he got the girl out of his apartment and thankfully shut the door. Leaning his head against the cool metal panel and concentrating on peaceful thoughts, like icebergs and eternity. It was long while before he got his forehead off the door panel anyway.

Heading for the tunnels slowly and hating the thought of going down there without a gun, Sue stepped towards the basement hesitantly.

Being fairly smart when the occasion demanded it, she headed for the church panel and popped the manhole on that, figuring a church basement was the best place to look harmless in. The lid popped and she peered in.

The tunnel was the usual naked tunnel, autolights coming on as she stepped thru, the porthole behind clinking shut in an ominous way. Gulping back fear, Sue headed towards the nearest intersection, holding the piece of paper in her hand out in front of her like a talisman and wondering if she should start calling "Here teddy, Here teddy!" or not.

The intersection was just ahead and Sue blushed as she noticed the scoring on the walls. This was where she and Buddy and battled it out with the teddys a few months ago, and the city crews that'd repaired the place hadn't bothered to paint over the laser burns and pock marks in the metal.

Sitting down, she quivered nervously and tried to pray, as the priest had suggested. It was hard, since the floor was still littered with shell casings, scraps of fur and other debris, but she stayed there and watched the tunnel shut down around her.

It was lonely sitting in the last puddle of light, dark and scary in the tunnels. Sue bowed her head and started to pray, hoping any teddy that came along could see she wasn't carrying any weapons.

They could.

And so could the AI with them.

**********

I didn't recognize the number flashing on the phone, but my homebeast, after fighting a bit, ID'd it as St. Monica's church. It was Father John on a panic-run, apparently. I grinned and wondered what Sue had done to him.

The angry beeping meant Sue had gotten there and hopefully left already. Now the priest was trying to talk to me for some reason. I watched the phone ring for a while, trying to choose whether or not to get involved in this.

Technology kicked in before good sense made me leave the room, the city and change my name. Good old blind loyalty answered the phone and saved me the trouble of getting my bad news in person. The machine answered itself and old faithful dourly recorded whatever raving Father John wanted to do and switched itself off.

Then I sat and stared at the message light. It gave me a REAL bad feeling, like I was forcing myself to look at another open and messy wound.

"Honey! You wanna come here and see how much trouble your girlfriend is in now?" The humph echoing outta the bedroom sounded miserable. Sally hated it when I tried to point out the obvious about Sue.

"Just a sec." I could hear her rattling around in the cupboards, probably searching for forgotten Christmas gifts. Mine wife has a real optimistic attitude towards housekeeping, her friends and my ability to solve things.

"Just a message? That's it?" A ladylike but disgusted snort sniffed from Sally-the-pain's nose. She swayed over and poked up playback like it wasn't gonna be a funeral invitation. I marvelled at her strength.

"This is Father John, and I'd like to thank Buddy for having his partner stop in and visit me today."

"I'll just bet you did, you randy old goat." Sally snapped that off while the Father cleared his throat nervously and got his voice back to normal. Sue HAD done serious damage to his composure today. I grinned.

"She left here hours ago, and if she isn't back by, oh, say, 2pm, I'd go out start looking for her."

I glanced over at the clock. It was already three and that blasted priest knew it, but the bad news was already there.

Sue had gone into the tunnels by herself. I'd hoped Father John would pass the message on himself, not set up a meet for her to offer our proposals.

"Oh, by the way, did you hear the same rumor I did that the AI's were using teddy tribes to do raiding for them now?... Well, I must be off. Church business, you know. Do stop in some Sunday."

That last sentence was a bit heavy on the "stay-AWAY- from-me!". I put my face into my hands as the news sunk in. Everything possible that could go wrong had gone wrong.

"Sue's been trapped in a tunnel by teddy's again?" Sally didn't look too worried and I cursed my habit of pulling that girl's ass outta the fire once too often. Now wifey expected me to do it all the time.

She still didn't believe the teddy's had learned to override their Asimov's and shoot back yet. Not many people did. Or teddys carried guns down there.

"A little worse than that, dear." I started hitting on my machine for some weird news I'd seen during the AI wars on the moon. There was something there about some overrider tech I wanted to check.

"Not trapped?" There was a delicate little pause. "How worse? If this means telling Sue's kids she gonna be late for supper, YOU get to do it this time." Sally looked at the phone in a worried way. "She's been captured?"

"A little worse than that, dear." I found the article and reread it, a sinking feeling inside the whole time. The stories were as bad as I remembered, and since these were old ones, things had maybe deteriorated into disaster already.

"She's being held for ransom? She's dead?" The tears were already starting to flow and there wasn't any good lie I could tell to cover up the bad news.

"Just a little bit worse than that, dear." I ducked and waited for the explosions. They started right on schedule, a complete blowout with tears, a panic attack on my chest and wailing as Sally tackled me.

I hate it when she pounds my chest in frustration. Teddys do enough damage to me, I don't really need Sally doing it too.

"What could be worse than dying?" A sad case of the hiccups put her aim off and I was able to block most of wild thing's swings at me, but one got thru and my chest got boomed again.

Man, that girl packs a mean wallop.

"The AI's got her." I answered simply. Sally looked up at me just a little too hopefully. I shook my head. There was no way I coulda go up against a couple tanks and win. "And she's probably being reprogrammed right now."

"Reprogrammed?" Sally stopped her crying and looked a little puzzled. "Is that bad?" She finally asked in confusion.

I really had to think about that one for a second. "Only for me, dear." The answer was hard to force out. Any change at all in Sue was bound to be an improvement. "Only for me."

*******

My bugs were dying; I sat and hoped for power surges to get induction coils charged. I needed my bugs back on-line, feeding my home beast lotsa new information. The computer beeped. Another bug promptly died and I cursed unhappily.

It'd only been a couple hours since Sally and I had gotten the news that Sue was missing in the tunnels. Sally wasn't real happy that I hadn't moved away from my computer.

"So there's teddy tribes having wars down there. With AIs. What difference does knowing the tribes make?"

A cold and greasy supper got moved off my lap and onto a table filled with scraps of information, printouts and other wild hopes. "It'll tell me just how soon they decide to raid us again, dear." I mumbled unhappily.

That I'd figured out in the first couple minutes. It didn't look like the AI and teddy tribe was the same group that'd tried to destroy me by raiding my apartment building last year. That was some small relief. There wasn't gonna be a raid today.

"Why haven't you just gone down there after her?" Sally picked up the plate and took it back to the kitchen. I sat and played with the data, trying to pinpoint a definite location for Sue somewhere in the tunnels.

The big problem was, even with teddy-tribes hanging out with the AI's, there were too many places Sue could've been dragged off too. It all depended on what they wanted to do to her.

"I did a meat-scan already. Her bodies not anywhere near the church." Making a swipe at the reheated plate that appeared, I snagged a lumpy something that might've tasted good once but sure didn't now.

"Now I'm looking for allies. With six AI bots and a couple..."

Beastor beeped and I jumped on the news that was pouring in. At first I was a little disappointed, it was news of a big raid on a shopping center and somebody wanted to know if it was my fault. A freelancer had cleaned the teddy's out from under the local security's nose and, a couple shops and worse of all, had scared the customers while doing it.

Then I took a second look at the location. It was only a couple blacks from here, and Sue's favorite center.

"Get my belt ready!" I snapped out. If this news was hot there was a good chance I could track the teddy's back to their lair, if I could get there while the trail was still hot.

My whole suit got dumped on my head before I got the plate off my lap.

"It's been ready for days now." Sally took the plate back and minced off, happy I was doing something again. "Get moving, Tracker."

I hate sarcastic women. Getting changed, I was into the tunnels in a near record time anyway.

The only delay was choosing which weapons to take. If the AI bots were doing what I thought they were doing, I needed some very special bullets.

Silver bullets for werewolves. Wooden ones for vampires.

I needed a sensory overload for teddys and AIs.

*******

The tunnels under the center were dark, dank and clammy, typical of the underside of bigger centers.

A beautiful front and a cess-pool underneath. Trying to pretend the backstabbing topside wasn't as bad as the war underneath didn't help me run the maze of pipes and conduits down there. Being just as likely to trip over the body of a topside cutie-type waitress or over-abused runaway bot kinda put an edge on things. Down there as I was to find teddy parts, I didn't need another stray murder to pop up and ruin my day.

What I was finding was almost as bad.

Security at the mall had been slack recently, so nobody had made the trip downside to unplug the teddys sucking juice outta the walls. It also meant the human runaways had gotten settled in and very messy.

Bots are neat, people make for messy living. Teens are even worse. It was a garbage pit down there now and smelt like one. Even rubbies had more homepride that this, but I slogged on.

Humans don't go very deep in the tunnels. The begging, borrowing and stealing gets too poor. Teddys, on the other hand, will spread as far as the free power goes.

Unfortunately, not down here. I found out half the smell was due to burning fur and split hydraulic oil, not people infesting the tunnels. Stepping into something that was still crackling with power discharges was my first big hint.

After putting the sparklers out, I looked it over; this job was about what I'd suspected. AIs had been here in a big way, and done their usual brutal job of collecting teddy pelts. Then details started leaping out at me and I got really depressed.

This had been a brain run, not a collecting swoop. The AI's had come here specifically to hunt down the older runaway bots, the ones that'd had ASIMOV's removed and knew all the tricks to surviving security sweeps of the area.

Teddys that taught and helped other teddys. Leaders.

The burning corpus at my feet was a prime example. I took the time and looked around, confirming my suspicions. The AI's had CUT their way thru a tank and cornered this old-timer, then torn out his ID and memory. 'Way too much trouble for your usual smash and grab, since this teddy had squirreled himself away behind some heavy-duty shielding.

The sad thing was, they hadn't even killed him. The teddy sparking at my feet was still running, still trying to repair himself, all on automatics. If nobody disturbed him he'd still be lying here trying to repair himself years from now.

That sounded like seriously bad news. Not only were the moon bot's dangerous, they were starting to get smart.

And they had Sue too. Not that they were really equipped to reprogram humans, but simple torture would fry enough information outta her to make my life miserable. If being dead means you're miserable, that is. I didn't wanna find out.

Going deeper in the tunnel meant tracking a group of AI's that had power enough to burn their way thru a titanium beam just to catch an old teddy-bot. Slapping a beeper on the beam ,I on moved on anyway. When mall security worked up the nerve to head down here, that'd call them right over to what looked like the major trouble spot.

With any luck, it'd also convince them to stay outta the tunnels for a while too. If I survived this little trip tracking the AI's down to one of their lairs, I wanted to come back and study the battlefield for a while. It might hold a few clues on how to handle them.

The best idea so far was simply avoiding them. I stepped deeper into the tunnels and hoped such a massive power drain and slowed the AI's down to the point I could catch up to them.

Not that I really wanted them to find out about that, AIs are scary.

Lord, was the trail easy to follow. Too easy for me by half.

A brazen AI was a really dangerous AI by me. It was either really confident or really desperate, so even if I was trotting after them, I took the time to clean my foam soles of grease, tacks and other noise makers. Sneaking up on a war party was gonna be tricky enough, I didn't need a noisy foot to end it all for me.

And the numbers of teddy's running with the AI bots seemed high, too. There wasn't a lot to go by except disturbed dust and spots of oil from scalps, but it looked like a very successful raid with lotsa teddys involved.

That was weird. Lots of soldiers meant lotsa trouble and this had looked like a specialized raid, with a calm run down a major tunnel back to the nearest power substation, if I was any judge of the direction.

At least my power drain suspicions were correct. If the moon bot was that desperate for a charge, there was a good chance that type of need could be used to my advantage.

Yes, I spotted the lookout LONG before he spotted me. Teddys weren't designed as war machines, they were baby-sitters for preschoolers. That meant good ears, not eagle eyes, with sensory equipment designed to put everything outside the immediate room on a low priority.

That was one of the things you learned tracking the beasts. Ducking behind a pillar, I watched a group of ten teddys mill around outside the substation, obviously waiting for the moon-bot to charge up enough to move on.

At least I hoped they had plans of moving on. Planting a bug, I retreated back past the last intersection, planning to do some remote work while the teddys held still. There were a lot of interesting mods to the teddys that I wanted to check out, stuff that the bug won't look at without instructions.

My first good look at things confirmed a lot of suspicions. A bulky overrider was sitting on each of the teddy's chests. They weren't doing these raids willingly.

That was another plus for my side, 'cause a moon bot trying to do the thinking for 10 teddys at the same time was gonna be real busy, especially if I could complicate things for him.

And then there was a big power drain on the AI's.

But they did have Sue stashed somewhere. Time for me to get to work. Sitting back, I plugged in and started loading the new information into my belt beast. It looked interesting. Maybe there were enough holes in this for me to slip thru after all.

********

The gun being held to my head was my first big clue things were going seriously wrong. After being relieved of my belt and weapons, I got turned around to find some very scruffy looking teddys standing behind me, one and only one of them holding a dirty but still functional looking-laser on me.

It was enough. I held still.

The lead teddy had the nerve to grin, while ignoring me. "You wanted to talk?" He whispered, not taking his eyes off the teddys still milling around the power station.

"We've both got problems." I started. There was no time to hold out and play games with these yahoos. A little too much was at stake. "Wanna cut a deal that'll clean it up for us both?"

The lead teddy took his eyes off the station and looked over at me. I couldn't read a thing in that glance.

"You're asking a lot..." He whispered. "For something I think we can avoid."

I shook my head no. "You're next." and jerked my chin towards the mall. "They just went thru an I-beam to get some old-timer outta the mall. They want intelligence now, not tags."

The lead teddy didn't say anything, just went over and jacked himself into a phone. I waited, trying to keep an eye on both groups of teddys. If anyone of them moved in the next minute or so, I was dead and fried meat.

Lead-teddy took a long time, then nodded to one of his fellows to head back down the trail. Watching a teddy waddle off gave me a real sense of regret. If we had to wait for him to get back to the mall, check everything out and get back, there was one LONG wait next.

"Anything special about that substation?" I whispered to the teddy holding the gun. The lead teddy stayed jacked into the wall, but he must've given some signal cause the gunner started to whisper too. I winced and hoped nobody was tracking radio around here.

"They broke in there yesterday. Today they're back." Was the terse reply. I rolled over and, after a regretful look at my belt, started studying the teddy's around the station again.

My belt got dangled in front of me a few seconds later. I grabbed it and dug out the bug snoop. The lead teddy was getting interested in something he was listening to, obviously.

"We have much time before they come out?" I asked nervously. The teddy with the laser had put it away, but I noticed that two or three others were in exactly the right position to stop me from doing anything dangerous. They did keep my weapons.

"Depends. A substation stay is usually only half an hour, then the city starts noticing the extra drain." The lead teddy unjacked himself from the phone and walked away, heading down the intersection. Two teddys stayed behind, watching the group at the station and the rest of us followed him. I didn't really have much choice and put my snooper away regretfully.

It was a long ten minute walk away from the power house, but I didn't regret it that much. If things worked out, this might be the break I needed to get Sue back.

"So what kinda deal can we cut?" I asked the lead teddy. It felt strange talking that way to someone who hardly came up to my knees.

"Depend on what you want outta us." The teddy stopped and settled down on his haunches. I didn't see anything different about this section of tunnel from any other, but I wasn't arguing. If this was where the meet was, this was it. "What's your problem, as if I didn't know?"

"My idiot partner." Blushing, I sat down beside the teddy and stated putting my belt back in order. The teddys had helped themselves to its contents while they held it, and had mixed everything up.

She's gotten into a pile of it again...unless one of your friends is holding her somewhere." I looked up, kinda hopeful. If they had Sue, it'd make my job a lot easier.

"Nope. She got snatched twenty feet from the church." The teddy looked at me steadily. "By them back there." I know robots don't do anything else, but I was finding it unnerving.

"You think you can stop the AIs?" He asked.

"All six of 'em." I nodded briskly. "My homebox says 82% success. Wanna try it?"

"I wanna see it first." The teddy almost snorted in disgust. I found I liked them a lot more if I just imagined they had personality.

"It's all on a dump. Where do I phone it?" Tapping the belt, I nodded hopefully. "With this it oughta hit 90%. Got anything you wanna add to up our percentages?"

"Let you know after we've seen the plan." The teddy looked me over then turned around and opened a panel. "Just dump it to the priest." He said and stood back. I looked at the comm terminal in amazement. Somebody had a full set of human interfaces, one of the portable kinds repairmen use hooked into the lines. It was beautiful. I could do almost anything from here I could at home.

"You got it."

Tapping in my dataline and giving that info away didn't bother me. If they hadn't been able to break into my box yet, I wasn't gonna worry about it now.

"They're doing really serious damage down here." As I dumped my new data downline. With a slight recrunch, the updated plan would get dumped to the priest, who had an unbelievably slow comm setup ready for it.

"Serious damage." The teddy tapped into the line and stared off into space like he was reading the plan as it got dumped. That made me laugh. Teddys didn't have the processing power to handle a full evaluation of the plan, but if he wanted to make it look like he did, I wasn't gonna argue with him.

"Call me tomorrow?" I asked one of the other teddys, standing up and brushing myself off. "I wanna get back on that AI."

"They're covered. So are you." Without a word, another teddy pulled his gun out and motioned me back down.

I don't argue with lasers. I sat back down and waited.

## Part Two Dealing with Deadbeats

We sat there in that tunnel till I thought my bladder was gonna burst, but at last the teddy grunted approval and unjacked from the wallphone. He waddled over to me and held out a paw. I looked at it suspiciously.

"Does this mean we're partners, or I stand up to get shot?" The lead teddy didn't even twitch at my drollery.

"There's only a couple minor changes in the plan. It's a go." He stated simply. I marvelled at that. Somewhere, these teddys had a massive cruncher working for 'em. There wasn't any other way to keep up with me.

My little strategy generator is a wonder of swiped software, a little something I got from an army buddy pissed off at flunkies flying up the promotion ladder and added CPUs. It may be pirate-ware, but it's damn good at what it does. Plus it has years of my special expertise programmed in.

I took his paw and shook it. "Great, I'll look it over as soon I get home, where's the john around here?" The teddy took his paw back. I restrained the impulse to wipe the grease off on my suit.

"Two tunnels down. Be at the university com-center tomorrow at 8am, that's when we go pick up your partner." One of the teddys handed me my weapons back, minus all the bells and whistles that made it go. I sighed regret at the ammo going lost like that. I program my own bullets and they're expensive.

With that all of the teddys walked off and disappeared into the dark. I clutched an aching bladder and whimpered.

"But..."

"A full update is being loaded to your place now." A small voice echoed back to me outta the gloom of the tunnel. "Go home and read, slow-poke."

I guess we were fairly safe from the AI now, thou it had been a little too close for my comfort. Standing there, there was a choice between arguing or leaving. I decided a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do and trotted off to the john. If there were any serious objections to the plan, the teddy's would hear about it in the morning.

*******

"So what do they get outta this?" Sally wasn't too happy at my working with the teddys, and I can't say I was either. The only real difference between me and the AI's was I didn't kill runaway bots, I returned them. The teddys had been making serious trouble for me recently thou and working with them was kinda dangerous.

Sue was to blame for most of that. But the AI's were a lot more deadly than my little business, I guess.

"There aren't enough teddys left down there for my brand of evil anymore." I scratched my head and yawned. "I'm the lessor of two calamities for 'em, I guess. By a long shot."

The changes the teddy's made to the plan were small, and mostly due to better information on how the moon-bots would react to certain things. I still didn't know how or why they agreed to it so fast.

There was no way they had my expert systems. I wrote it myself and NOBODY but me knows what's in there. They couldn't've done anything more than look the plan over quickly and agreed to it.

They were desperate or they had a much better system than me. If they did, this might be a trap to get rid of all their problems.

I really didn't know and had to trust them. What they had learned from the plan was bad enough, it used a couple of my better secrets.

"Who gets the money?" Was the next question. I smiled at Sally. She had a practical streak that showed up at the oddest of times. I flipped thru to the last page and started reading it to her.

"They get first pick of any spares parts we find that they need, we split the reward for the moon-bots and any pelts discovered get cashed in by me and divided equally."

The last paragraph was interesting. There was even a proviso for me buying supplies for them, stuff that was highly restricted, at a good commission. If I felt like cutting my own throat and running arms to the teddys.

"Even-steven? Is that a good deal?"

"Only if we got Sue back whole and unprogrammed." I admitted. "If we don't, her families gonna tear after us with the nastiest lawyers they can find for an arm, leg and enough blood, sweat and tears to replace her. That could get rough."

"Oh." Sally didn't say anything. The girls had fought to get into the business, now I was expected to pay for the problems.

"So what happens now?" Coming over to me, Sally sat on my lap and started making aggressively sure I wasn't mad at her for putting me on the edge of total financial disaster.

Again.

I wasn't.

******

"What about this call from the mall?"

"Oh, they just wanna know what I was doing in the tunnels there yesterday. Tell 'em I'll call back later."

"And the attached court order?" Sally held up the subpoena. "I ignore that too?"

I groaned and stopped dressing. This was what I hated about dealing with clerks. They'd try anything to shift blame onto somebody else and any innocent bystander was fine by them. The "sawed-off-runt-with-a-shotgun" approach to legal hassles, I called it and mall security was looking to throw somebody to the wolves.

"Call Simon and get him to take care of it. Tell him what's happening but not to start finding a buyer for the moon bot AIs just yet. Offer him a dump from our security system, that'll prove our innocence. My belt."

Finished reloading my belt, I slapped it on, thankful the plan didn't require a whole lot of special equipment. It was gonna be busy enough today without Murphy and friends getting a swipe at some untested nifties.

"And tell him to get costs outta their hide, not ours." I added. Details like that could get expensive. Sally nodded happily. Chatting with my lawyer was fun for her and at 250 credits an hour, I didn't let it happen too often.

"Oh, and call Sue's family, too. Tell 'em we're doing everything we can to find her. Officially, Sue is still just lost in tunnels."

"OK." That wasn't a fun chore for her, but she'd do it. Sue's oldest girl had a head on her shoulders, she'd spread the news to the right people.

"Bye, dear. I'll be home late today." I pecked wifey on the cheek and headed out the door, closing it firmly behind me. She'd know that meant I wanted her to be careful. I went down to the mall and tubed my way to the university. It was time to get the show on the road.

*******

The plan was basic and simple. The teddy's knew where Sue was being held and they were gonna take me there. At that point, we were gonna put the snatch on one of the moon bots and drag him into one of the abandoned tunnels, leaving a nice clear trail AND a comm link open so the AI could call his buddies.

Then we'd push them all over a cliff, into a hole and fill it with explosives.

The teddys were contributing Sue's location, some bait and muscle prepping the hole. I had to cut the first AI down without getting everybody killed in the process.

It really stunk as far as plans went, but the homebox was dead sure the AI's would stop at nothing to prevent one of their kin....or maybe cans, who can tell with a robot?... From being taken to the authorities.

My plan on stopping the AI depended on Sue being more or less awake and active. There wasn't gonna be time to feed her coffee and reassurance, then talk her into a brisk run. For this to work, she had to bounce up with a gun and go.

I was seriously worried about that. There wasn't even a good way to tell the good guys from the bad guys and Sue's habit of shooting anything that moved had made trouble before.

There was considerable effort on my part to impress that on the teddys helping me, and they accepted it. Sue not being able to tell the teddys apart was part of my plan and so was Sue shooting the hell outta everything bassoon as she woke up.

The university was still quiet when I got there and I was able to sneak down the parking lot stairwell and into the comm room without any trouble. What I found there had to be seen to be believed.

One maintenance techie was tied up and the teddys were scaring information outta him with a dead laser. It had no power pack, but the techie didn't know that. The official looking work-order he had was apparently something the teddys were very interested enough in, interested enough to spare a few bodies to work on him.

Other teddys had started doing some maintenance to the wall-boxes, helping themselves to a massive rewiring of the comm links with full legal access, due to the techie's card and a now extremely cooperative tech nature.

That was bonus for our side. It even covered the noise we were making putting our own fixes in the system.

Getting into the com-links that way was gonna scramble the AI net for a good long time, we hoped. Seconds, even. It might even get some military help down in the tunnels, if one of the teddys could dance his way far enough up the chain of command to get sense instead of reflexes outta the operators out there.

Passing that information along, I watched one of the teddys jack in and start to hack his way up the military net. I hated giving them that information. Any friends the teddys made doing this would make it hard on me after this was over, but it wouldn't hurt us if the army got called in real fast to take over if the war bots got out of hand.

Maybe eight different teddys were all wiring things up, and there were another dozen making it look like the abandoned tunnel had been in serious use for years as a teddy hideout by MILLIONS of teddys.

I checked it out. With the door closed, the place looked normal, but get thru it and you were sure this tunnel held the biggest teddy village in history from the trails and tracks about.

A couple of teddys were boobytrapping chemical drums, just to add a little confusion to the muck when the AI came thru. I hoped the bats survived the enthusiasm the teddys were showing for hitting the AI. They even had an archway mined and ready to drop on the moon-bot, and from what I knew about moon-bots, that wouldn't do anything other than annoy them.

Pardon me, they had it mined so it wouldn't do anything other than ALMOST annoy the AI. I had to look twice to notice that and whistled in appreciation.

Whoever had taught these teddys explosives had really done a great job. The explosion was gonna gout impressive amounts of plasma all over, but due to oil and water padding, all in the wrong direction. It wouldn't hurt the tunnel much at all.

The AI, on the other had, would be blinded several different ways. It was a beautiful blast.

I wished I had time to check the other tunnels especially the one with the 90 foot drop in it, but I had to take the teddy's word for it the bottom was black, blocked and loaded with explosives.

Nodding at the lead teddy, we took off to rescue Sue from the power substation she was being held in. The teddy and I swapped plans on how to handle that all the way there.

*****

"So how ya gonna get Sue outta the substation?"

Looking over the huge concrete block, I had my worries about the teddys getting into it. It had enough shielding to shame a pillbox, one that'd stop a tank, an orbit blast or me.

"Simple." The teddy pointed at the only way in or out, a tiny metal door. "We ring the doorbell. He comes out. We shoot at him. He chases us."

"That plan sucks." I stated evenly.

The teddy turned to me and gave me that steady gaze again, the one I found so unnerving. "That's where you come in. You keep him busy while one of us sneaks in and gets Sue out before he tears up our trap down there."

The teddy pointed to a flimsy barricade of pipes being dragged across the tunnel. I shuddered. It won't even slow the AI down.

"But I need her here for my plan!" I gulped and looked the pillbox over. My end of the plan was looking weaker and weaker. "How fast can you get her to the door and shooting at things? I REALLY need that to happen fast."

The teddy shrugged. "If she can't walk, I'll hold her up in the doorway and shout "BANG" a few times, OK?"

Studying the substation for a moment, we waited for his men to get into their positions. At least I hoped we were. The teddys weren't telling me how they communicated yet.

"Blast. It'll have to do." I nodded unhappily. Tunnels and empty space stretched all around the substation, making it a very isolated target. When the AI came out, at least I'd have a clear shoot at him.

If he came out.

"Lets boogie, then." The teddy got up and nonchalantly started waddling across the tunnel intersection to the substation door. I gulped and tapped my belt link, hoping the teddys knew it was time to load up the special guns.

Since the ammo wasn't gonna last all that long I started a little prayer that the AI showed real soon.

*******

The teddy got to the door and stood there, looking up expectantly. A cable snaked down to him from the ceiling and he held it with one hand while pounding on the door with the other.

Lord, his plan looked silly. Even if the teddys did look like money-on-the-hoof to a moon bot AI, it was a risky way of getting him off the couch.

The bait down tunnel started rattling their cages as the door swung open. The lead teddy tugged on his rope and promptly zipped up to the roof of the tunnel, disappearing into a beam, getting hauled there by his friends.

Glory be, it looked like the plan was gonna work. I snapped my eyes open as the AI stood in the doorway, still sucking on a power cable and studying the tunnel carefully. I guess he didn't have much in the way of spy equipment. Then the teddy-bait down the hall started cutting loose with as much small arms fire as they dared pump into the doorway and really got the AI's attention.

I could almost see him snort disgust at the barricade. Unjacking the cable, he started a fast tear down the tunnel, moving quickly and ignoring the dust and cobwebs in his way. The very thick and thready dust all over the tunnel.

Doubling their fire, the teddys made it look like a real attack. It didn't seem to do much harm to the AI, but there was one very artful sput as one of his arms started dangling.

It looked fake even to me. Then the minions came out.

Teddys started outta the pillbox and spreading down the tunnel, firing sporadically as they did. It was easy to tell the AI was doing a step by step ordering of his flunkies by the way they were moving, but the AI drove towards the barricade anyway, starting to answer blasts with firepower of his own. His own teddys followed reluctantly.

Then the lead teddy swung down from the roof and into the door of the substation, just as the last teddy left, a really nice move I hadn't seen since my last Tarzan movie. He even looked good, with two ammo belts crossed on his chest and headband gleaming in the lamplight.

He didn't do the yell, but Sue more than made up for it when she started. I hit the button for my special guns to start firing as soon as her screech got to me.

The ones that sprayed quick dry super glue.

Sue came out shooting, just as I'd hoped. I noticed the lead teddy take one look at all the flying bullets as Sue released her frustrations, then retreat back into the substation and shut the door.

Man, I was never gonna underestimate the IQ of a teddy again. That was the smartest thing I'd seen today. The dumbest was giving Susie a loaded gun.

"Sue! Over here!"Ducking the random shots that got tossed in my direction for doing that was instinctive. You get used to avoiding fire when you worked with Sue. The AI slowed as he looked in my direction too, swivelling his head a little. His team also slowed down as I popped my head up. I hoped my plan worked. It looked like it had, so far.

My shouting had the desired effect. Sue ignored me and snapped of her daze, started shooting seriously at the AI. The AI noticed Sue being loose and firing at him.

He'd almost made it to the barricade anyway, but my new noise was worth a thought. That was the secret to my plan.

He stopped. The ceiling had been dropping mirrored mono thread on him, threads that mixed with the cobwebs and tripped up his weak moon legs. Until now he'd ignored them. Now you could see him start to think a little.

That cut down the time he was giving his troops. I noticed a couple of them march right into the threads and lose it themselves.

Then quick-dry glue hit him and the threads started turning into a solid shell.

I shouted again and fired a blast of my own. The AI stopped for some serious reacting instead of thinking and my plan kicked into high gear.

A couple fans started pushing threads at him, some more glue sprayed from every direction that held a teddy and before you knew it, it was all over. We'd just bundled the AI up in cobweb, something fairly scarce on the moon.

Then Sue accidentally shot me again. I'd forgotten to keep an eye on her.

******

That stupid AI never did stop struggling and occasionally trying to fire off his weapons all the way back to the hole. Even after we had his legs fused together and weapon circuitry disabled, he fought hard to get out of the web we'd wrapped him in.

It really looked like he was gonna self-destruct, but we lucked out there. I hadn't really made a big point of this weakness in my plan.

War bots tend to do silly things when they fall into the hands of the enemy. I just hoped this wasn't classified as a desperate situation.

He didn't blow, thou. The AI was, on the other hand, still wriggling hard as we lowered him down the hole, easing him into the pit a very thoughtful sewer service had made for us years ago.

The university is in the river valley, you see, while most of the city is on the top of some BIG hills. That meant a straight vertical drop of about 90 feet, then nothing but bedrock and lots and lots of digging to get anywhere at the bottom of this hole.

The AI couldn't even climb out without some large-type rocks being dropped on his head. If you tried tunnelling, it was 300 meters of rock to the nearest line, if you knew which way to go. Then you got to that abandoned and blocked tunnel.

The trip there was rushed, but from the amount of radio noise the AI put out, the teddys assured me they had enough signals to call in the other five AI's still out scrounging for pelts in the city tunnels.

The techie was still tied up when we went thru the university com-center with the cased AI. Still not happy at being captured by teddys when he saw the moon bot AI he nearly went berserk.

To the point it took both my bleeding butt and Sue's leather skin-suit to even get his attention again. I think he fainted about that point. I'm not sure, but the teddys untied him and took him upstairs. My suggestion of locking him in a car trunk when over pretty well. There was even a good chance he'd be found soon there and classified insane if the look on his face when he passed out was any indication.

You have to admit, his story was gonna sound good.

Sue and I still weren't talking. Being fairly tired of getting shot while pulling her butt outta the fire had kinda put an edge on my temper. Since I had to walk everywhere with a brand new hole in my butt, there was a constant reminder that this girl was dangerous.

Getting Sue to give up her guns when surrounded by free pelts was something that'd taken a little doing on my part too. She'd only tossed them aside when I offered to shoot her myself if her weaponry wasn't handed over to the nearest teddy without delay.

I think she suspected me of being the teddy's latest mind-slave while we were still checking her out for any of the moon-bots probes. After we got her outta the john, of course.

She was unhurt and and been mostly ignored. Apparently, the moon-bot didn't speak Spanish, or at least not the New York slang argot/dialect Sue used on him. He'd more or less given up on talking to her after the first couple hundred displays of hysterics.

If I knew Sue she was reciting the women's lib code backwards, in Spanish and with graphic gestures the whole time anyway. She's like that.

Anyway, we got the hole baited and started sending out faked-up distress signals on the AI net. Then we sat back and waited for the fun to start.

This time, Sue and I were the bait, on the far side of the hole. The teddys were going to drive AIs into it from the university side of the tunnel with explosives, after a running battle to lead them there.

If the AI's managed to stay upright on the slope. It was a LONG downhill walk to hole and a very greasy one now. If Sue and I could keep their attention focused on the far side, they wouldn't even notice the trap till they were already sliding to their destination.

It was a really gunky hole too, filled with explosives, muck and a screaming AI. We weren't really too concerned with them trying laser their way out of it.

Mud explodes when heated with a beam weapons. The water in the first half-inch of mud just steams and the flying dirt absorbs the rest of the power. If they tried it often enough, the whole tunnel would collapse on them, or the explosives would go off and really bury them.

The hole would hold anybody we got stuffed into it.

"One down and five to go." Mentioned the teddy as our AI sunk outta sight. I had to look twice to see if he was making a joke or not.

Worse yet, I was starting to like him.

*******

"I still think we should talk to him, you know, rip information outta his hide. Like where the pelts are."

Fuming unhappily, Sue glanced jealously at the teddy holding her gun. The teddy smiled back at her, the little snarf. I really think some of 'em were enjoying this. So far, this war had turned out to be easy and they were gloating.

"Not a hope." Shaking my head no, I pointed my chin at the hole. "The only question we'd be asking that AI is who he wants to be sold to."

"I think we can confirm your mind-buster theories now, anyway." The lead teddy nodded at Sue. "She hasn't stopped trying to peel that bot since we got him wrapped and delivered. He did a number on her."

"Naw, that's just Sue." I scratched my chest reflectively. "She go after him with her bare hands if he was loose. She's like that."

"Stupid?" The teddy looked over at her dubiously. "I don't think so. Crazy, maybe. The AI did a number on her head?"

Sue starting getting furious at being ignored like this. We ignored her.

"Trust me, she's always like this." I nodded and yawned. The rest of the moon bots were taking their sweet time to come and rescue their trapped buddy and I was getting bored.

"You get any information outta the other teddys, his dead-head squad?"

"Nothing useful so far." The lead teddy admitted ruefully. "He pretty much shut them down with those rider bolts of his."

"Rats. That would've meant getting everything the easy way." I sniffed. "So where are these AIs, already? It doesn't take that long to get here."

"About to walk in one at a time, according to the taps we got on their lines." Answered the teddy. "The first one should be coming thru to check things out in a minute or two."

"Blast. I hate dealing with the smart bots." Cursing and swearing didn't help, but I knew that much had been accounted for by my plan. There's nothing to stop me from hoping things go the easy way, thou. "Nothing personal intended there. Where are they grouping, anywhere attackable?"

"As singles, all over the city." The teddy admitted. "We're gonna try and make the next one in look like an accidental capture."

"Maybe we should just let him go and hope he brings his buddies in to help." I started.

"They all have squads to do grunt work with them." That flat answer told me a little more that I wanted to know about how the teddy felt. The zombie squads the AIs had created with local teddys really bugged him.

"Say, what would you be asking the bot down there?" I asked. "Anything in particular?"

"Hyperdrive construction." The lead teddy got up and waddled off. "And the other AIs just hit the comm center, so go do your stuff."

"Humph."

Sue looked impressed at the teddy's answer. So was I, but I didn't say anything. It did explain why the teddys had started to group around the spaceport and the university thou. I made a small mental note to start checking for stowaways on the belt-ships.

"Homebeast says if we get two AIs trapped, the other four will concentrate on a massed attack soon after." I whispered to Sue as we got into position and doused our lights.

"Oh boy what fun." Came back at me. I laid there in the dark and strained my goggles to see something at the far end of the tunnel, on the other side of the hole. Not even infrared was showing anything, and being this far underground with the lights out, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

"So the teddys are hiding and hoping the AI just comes after us?" Whispered Sue. "What if he comes around the corner shooting?"

"We get shot at." I whispered back. "If he does, just belly crawl around the corner. Not even AI's can shoot around bends and hit anything very often yet."

Just then, my earphone crackled. That was signal one. "He's in the com center." I whispered to Sue. She whimpered and I relented, passing her a rifle with a sniper scope so she could see in the dark. My butt twinged as I did.

"Try not to shoot me again, would ya? My rear can't take much more of this."

"Shutup and watch me." Came outta the dark. I grinned. Sue was back to normal.

Time dragged as the AI made his way thru the mock village, now deserted. There wasn't anything to do but lay there and wait.

"Humph, no bats. He's good."

I waved angrily, hoping the breeze would shush Sue. I wanted the AI to come find us, but not that badly.

Then a teddy rounded the corner and stood there, noting the tunnel and obviously waiting for orders. Sue opened fire and I prayed the tarp we had over the hole wasn't detectable. The teddy stepped back.

Adding my small-arms fire as cover felt good. Not that it was doing anything useful, but it was something to do and it did light up the tunnel. We didn't have long to wait.

The AI leaped around the corner firing, showing some very accurate blasts as he cooked my mud shield. He also bounced off a wall, landed on the slope and slid right on down to the pit, even rolling around and recovering enough to make a leap forward and hopefully, out. Low-grav training, I guess.

The leap forward was a mistake. It him put smack dab into the center of the tarp. Even Sue giggled a little as the AI promptly plummeted out of sight.

I was too busy putting out fires to even pay attention to the ugly splat as he hit bottom. Those blasts had been just a little too accurate for me.

The sounds of a mop-up started coming from the outer tunnels as our teddys cleaned up the AI's remotes. I kicked the spy-eye on and watched our second captured AI try to dig himself outta the muck at the bottom of the hole.

"We got him." I whispered into the mike. "So far, so good." Then I let Sue start the glue gun as we wrapped up our new capture.

********

"The next load is gonna be a lot harder." The teddy that gone down the pit to check on the second AI's wrapping gave the all-clear signal, so a couple tiny techies were roped up and popped down the pit to disable weapons.

I made it a point to back outta the tunnel real fast right then, not being too sure the moon bots won't decide that losing an arm or something wasn't a real good excuse to self-destruct. I wanted out of there while the teddys did their dirty deeds. With the amount of power AI's packed in their quick-discharge powercells, I didn't wanna be anywhere around the area if they did blow.

"Great, but there 'll be four more of 'em, for a start." mentioned Sue. She was reluctant to leave the teddys with a couple billion credit prizes, but short of taking a 90 foot drop herself, there wasn't any way to go watch them disable the moon bots.

"And they'll be warned that we hit hard and fast." I finished. "Anybody with sense would just back off, but the plan says they're gonna come in with all guns blazing REAL soon."

"Does the plan mention which direction they plan to come in from?" Sue shivered a little in the dank of the tunnel. They'd stripped her belt when she got captured and she really wasn't equipped for a long tunnel tour right now.

"Nope. It just says all four will hit us within an hour or two." I patted my battery pack happily and passed a fresh charge over to her. She plugged in happily.

"For more of the same? How do we trap 'em this time?"

Stepping off into a small side tunnel, I made sure we didn't leave any tracks. The teddys could always find us by infrared if they wanted us.

"Naw, this time we try everything. Bats, chemicals, dropping the roof on 'em, glue, harsh phrases, sarcasm, anything."

"Spit, bailing wire and prayer?" asked Sue. "Swell. So what are we doing here?"

"We're the bait." I nodded back up the tunnel. "A successful teddy attack isn't that important to an AI, there aren't that many teddys out there. A successful human attack would be. We got to let them see us, then lead the chase into the trap."

"And hope our stuff doesn't go off a little early." I mentioned. I'd seen how the teddys were mining the tunnels. It looked like the plan was to drop rock on the AIs till they got tired more than anything else.

"Did you get a message home?" I asked, digging out a ration bar. Sue nodded happily and tore into one of her own.

"Ya, the teddys said something about cancelling my funeral for me. I think I was supposed to be grateful."

"Get a wiggle on, then. It's a long walk back to the university." I did my hood up and started a slow limp+jog thru the misty tunnel. This was gonna be the rough part of the plan for us. The teddys hadn't volunteered to carry us there so we'd arrive fresh. It'd take too long, for starters. But we had to get back there, then outrun the AI's. It was gonna be a tiring day till they got suckered into our traps.

"Oh swell." Sue jogged up beside me, slipping a little in the greasy mud and still chewing her ration bar. "We spend the rest of the day like this, trying to outrun a schedule? What happens when we get tired?"

"You'll be surprised at how fast you can run when somebody is shooting at you." I said. "Even when you're tired. But the teddys can always put you on the surface if you want to go home."

"Maybe I will." She muttered looking up wishfully. Sue didn't say anything else to than and I was surprised. A quitter she wasn't, but being locked up far a while had put a kink in her confidence, I guess.

"If we don't know which direction they're coming from, why are we running back to the university?" Sue slogged on determinedly. I started hoping we'd get a few minutes rest when we got there. It was the second run today that was gonna be all uphill.

"There's only one way in, as far as they know." I tapped my ear plug. "And according to our tap on their line, they haven't found the old plans yet."

"Not that having 'em would help them any." I mentioned as we trotted past a collapsed tunnel. "But they're probably gonna come in that way."

"Why not use teddys for bait?" asked Sue peevishly. I didn't know if it was being shot at or having to run away from the fight that bugged her.

"Too slow." I stopped talking and started saving my breath. Even downhill, this was one greasy run and I didn't want a broken leg to add to my already painful butt.

I made a point of limping and popping a painkiller. Sue took the hint and kept on moving.

***********************

The forest was no longer dark.

Even in the weak fall sunlight, afternoon shadows were already starting to stretch long. Leaves had fallen, leaving stark branches against the sky, heaps of crunchy litter and cool, cool earth all bright and exposed.

"Bleah." Handing the chip back to Sue, I stuck out my tongue at the story she was reading. "That stuff really stinks. Why don't you read a GOOD story, like "Jazz Porn does New Deli in Doubles-time"?"

"It isn't bad if you like nature." snapped Sue, wriggling into a more comfortable position on the dank tunnel floor. "I don't always leave the apartment to kill things, ya know."

"You won't know a tree from a bush." I looked at her in disbelief. Not many people fall for this sort of nature garbage. "When times got tough the noble savage ate babies. After kicking granny out. Died at 30, dragged down by disease, parasites or predators, usually human ones. Had four outta five kids die before age five."

"A whole lotta people I know died from cancer before thirty too."Sue shook her head. "Or poisons. Our society is on chemicals. I think this story is nice and it relaxes me, so you go read a map or something. Leave me alone."

Sniffing at me, Sue went back to her book. I shook my head in disbelief. After what we'd just gone thru, she turned around and read stuff like that? It didn't make sense to me.

I nodded at the lead teddy, who was still fixing the tunnel up to look like a deserted teddy village. Skirmishes with the last band of zombies had done some damage before the teddys had gotten their brothers free of the AI riders. He nodded back and motioned us away, shooing us down the tunnel. I leaned over and tapped Sue.

"Time to go." I whispered at her. "Remember the radio-silence rule."

"Are the AIs here already?" Sue jumped to her feet. Brushing out the marks our rest had made in the small side tunnel, I followed her to the agreed position, a nice little head start away from the fake village. I'd picked our route out carefully too. It had lots of bends in it, so if we could just keep ahead of the AI's they won't get a clear shot at us. Or not very often anyway.

"Not yet. The wave I got means they've been spotted, tho. Let's get into position."

Sue led and I followed, making sure the only tracks left were the ones we wanted there. That included the ones making it look like we'd both crossed the tarp-covered pit at a dead run. They looked natural to me.

I just hoped they looked the same to an AI.

"So tell me what's happening, oh wise ass." muttered Sue as we reached our posts. Since we supposed to act as bait, she didn't both to keep her voice down and I almost jumped outta my boots.

There was the distant fire of automatic weapons echoing outta the distant tunnel. I gulped.

"That's step one. They're in the tunnel now." A couple of heavy duty explosions, kinds I didn't recognize, echoed down to us. "Apparently, they're shooting hard at bats and tripwire sentries right now."

"And getting buried in batshit, I bet." Sue giggled. "Now what?"

"Chemical warfare, remember?" Gouts of weird fumes started passing us. I put on my mask and waited, trying to keep my goggles clear of dust. Sue took one sniff, gagged and did the same. I hoped all the waste flying around did something harmful to the AI's, but really doubted it. Even moon bots were more or less sealed against stuff like this.

A sudden roar of noise hit, and I could see something boiling down the tunnel towards us. Pulling Sue under an archway, I let hot shock waves roil past.

"That's step three, bake 'em with explosions. Step four, dropping the roof on 'em, is next. With any luck..."

The scream of tortured rock and crash of shattering brick came back to us. After a few seconds, they were followed by noisy clattering. The AI's were, as we'd guessed, just pushed the rock that'd fallen on them aside.

"Are the teddys gonna do anything?" whispered Sue. I shook my head no.

"They should be following up the rear with heavy stuff, trying to close 'em off." I nodded at the far end of our tunnel. "We wait till the AI's trip over the last trap at the end of this tunnel. They should detect us. Then we turn and run like hell. Got that?"

"Yes, bawana." Sue tightened her mask and concentrated on the end of our branch tunnel. So did I."Our fake overriders will fool them, right?"

"That's the plan." We didn't wait long before lights started flickering around the far end of our tunnel.

*******

The light at the end of the tunnel was the lead AI. We could see his shadow on the wall as the others stayed a ways back of him in the tunnel, backing him up.

"Damn, I wish I knew the spacing or how much running room we have." I growled to myself. The radio silence rule was starting to bug me, but the teddys had sworn moon bots were masters at detecting and deciphering anything on the air. Sue didn't answer, she was concentrating on the end of the tunnel.

The AI come into view. I ignored him and waited for the other three to show. Sue started a mild panic as I let the first one walk right by our tunnel and disappear.

"Relax. That one's blocked further down anyway." I reassured her. "And I wanna get the most bang for our buck here, so I'm waiting to drop the roof on the other three."

Pulling Sue back around the bend I waited, trying to tell where the group of three AIs were by the glopping sounds they made walking in the mud and a passive spy-eye.

When it sounded good, I popped around the corner, took one look and pushed the detonator while jumping back into my tunnel.

Damn near got fried anyway. With three of the AIs splitting up the watch, I'd had the concentrated attention of at least one of them on my tunnel.

The weird thing was, he wasn't the one that shot at me. The leader had his guns trained in my general direction and he did the shooting. AI communication was great. Deadly, but great.

Then the whole section of roof fell in on them, burying them all under some great huge granite blocks. Putting my goggles back on, I peeped around the corner, trying to use radar and infrared to cut thru the dust and find out if anything had worked.

It was just as planned. Three were buried and struggling to get out, and I could hear the fourth heading back this way at a dead run.

Grabbing Sue, we took off as the sounds of digging started getting energetic back there. We won't have a lot of time before the AIs regrouped and came after us.

My sprint was working well and I soon left Sue staggering thru the mud. It was kinda a horrible feeling running blind like that, and my back crawled as imaginary beams burned my shirt buttons the hard way, from the back.

I made it around the first bend and slid to a halt, whipping around to cover Sue in case something did get behind us. I was glad I did. One of the AI's slid by our new tunnel mouth firing, and my blasting at him was probably the only thing that stopped Sue from getting fried.

She got a quick sizzle anyway, but not being real tall and bending over sprinting saved her butt. Her mud-cake steamed a bit. The AI had fired over her head, and only warmed up her butt a little. It did motivate her, I could tell by the way she sped up. The AI tried to concentrate on me as she slid into the tunnel mouth.

Grabbing her arm as she flew past, I swung Sue into our turn and started a real hustle down the next tunnel section, letting my long legs eat up as much ground as they could. Sue didn't argue as I hauled her along. We were both a little too busy running for our lives to discuss it anyway.

The AIs behind us didn't make the corner, he was moving too fast. He got a shot off at us anyway.

"Two more." I gasped at the next bend, listening to the crash as the moon bot smacked into the wall at the tunnel bend behind us. He was gaining ground too fast. I did manage to save a step or two by grabbing a handle and swinging around the turn on the next bend. Sue's feet weren't even hitting the ground on that corner.

"One more." This was the uphill part of our run and I dug in, praying that the AI behind us would slow a little trying to sprint up the greasy slope.

"If I wanted a bloody aerobics lesson..." panted Sue. "I'd ask for one. Now get your sorry butt out of my way."

"Sorry 'bout that." I let Sue go and watched in amazement as she sprinted past me on the uphill slope. The girl had speed when she need it.

Unfortunately, she couldn't slide backwards and shoot at things as well as I could. She ended up on her kiester, sputtering with rage when she tried it at the top of the slope. I didn't even slow down to pick her up. If she had that kind of speed, she could crawl outta range on her own steam.

We were in the tunnel that led to the pit anyway. Flying up the concealed ladder took effort. and I listened to the AI behind us slide past shooting at the walls as Sue finally scrabbled into our hiding spot.

I even got the lid closed quietly. Standing there in the dark with Sue doing open mouth breathing felt OK, or at least a lot better than being shot at. With any luck, the rest of the AIs would climb the slope, scoot right past us and slide into the pit just down the tunnel.

Unless he noticed the new mud on the ladder.

******

The AI chasing us was looking for the obvious. He bounced off the wall at the top of the slope like a truck gently nuzzling fence posts outta the way, then sped off in the general direction of our foot steps.

At least it sounded that way to me. Holding Sue down quietly was keeping me occupied. The little twit was all for popping out and having a look as soon as the bot had passed our little hidey-hole and I was all for staying in there and being quiet for the next couple days.

"Listen!"Tossing a wild swing cuff at Sue's head gave her the general idea. It missed by yards, but from the look on her face you'd think It'd been a REAL friendly hello, but now she wanted her panties back. She quieted down, sniffed and started shining her a light around the cubby instead trying to wriggle outside.

The distant lumping of the AI suddenly stopped, a few wild bursts of fire made damp stone scream in protest and it was suddenly silent. I grinned at her.

The bot had gone down fighting, apparently. Or maybe carving out footholds in the tunnel wall. Those AIs were fast and smart.

We didn't hear the splut as he hit bottom, thou. Both Sue and I were too busy staying alive as the tunnel walls suddenly erupted around us.

"What the hell!!!" Shoving Sue under the nearest arch, I dove after her myself, wincing as shards of brick from the walls ricocheted around us, spraying the room outside with shrapnel.

"His power pack went." Came a muffled grunt from under me. "Now get your kneecap outta my ass, Tracker!"

"Or he saw his friends and self-destructed." I muttered, sliding off some of Sue's more tender parts. She came up glaring murder, but stopped when she noticed the same thing around the room that I did.

Great gaping holes in the walls, oozing water and mud. Piles of bricks that'd fallen from the roof. The only way out completely blocked by heaps of debris.

"Ow. Say something cheerful, like we have friends outside that can help us." I whispered to her. She elbowed me in the gut instead, so I finished gliding off her, taking exaggerated care to avoid anything that looked dangerous.

"And more enemies. The other three should be along any minute." whispered Sue, sitting up and flicking mud off her suit.

"That's not it." My light flickered a little as I played it along the roof, trying to see what was about to fall on us this time. Sue put hers on the blocked tunnel, the only way in or out of this chubby.

"Ah, no air left already?" She tried. I shook my head no. My belt made O2 from water, that wasn't gonna be a problem till there was more mud than air here. Or my batteries went dead.

"You're hurt?" She tried whispering, flickering a light over me. "We can't sell AI parts, only the whole bot? What?"

Another large chunk of the roof peeled off and fell to the floor just then, splattering the two of us with mud. Water that'd till then just been dripping off the roof started trickling.

"I can't swim." I answered. Another falling brick punctuated that remark, making it seem sillier than it really was. Then one of the walls groaned and started to creak and bow inward, the cement cracking as the seams spread.

"Oh. Lotsa water around here, too." giggled Sue nervously, ducking back under the arc. "Oh well, you'll learn fast. How long till we can dig our way out?"

I kept my light on the roof. "No way to tell. If the other three AIs camp out there, never. If they go away, in an hour or so." The wall creaked again, a little more ominously. I gulped a little nervously, trying to watch the roof, walls and blocked door all at the same time.

"We try radio? Shouting?" Picking up loose bricks off the floor, I started bracing holes. "Banging Morse out on the walls as we prop them up?" Sue started grabbing bricks and matching me, both of us trying to move fast but quietly.

The roof rained mud on us as we quickly crammed bricks into place.

"How long do we have?" Sue was moving briskly, filling in the bottom of the walls. I put bricks into the top holes and ignored the still bending wall.

"Shutup, I'm trying to remember what got built on top of us."

"You wanna know the name of the building that's gonna fall on our heads?" Asked Sue in disbelief. I wasn't gonna tell here only streets had sewers under them. Connectors were skinny little pipes, usually.

Then the steady tramp of heavy feet started thumping thru the walls. The other three AI's had gotten to the trap site and were standing right outside.

*****

The AI's standing around outside weren't being very quiet about being here either. Even after three of them had been cut down, or at least tripped down a hole, they weren't taking any care about being caught. Or quiet.

"We're lucky they don't just jump down, re-arm their friends and blast a way out." Whispered Sue. She was wincing at every crunching step coming from the tunnel outside.

"Shutup." I stood there and tried to piece together what the moon bots outside were doing. Since I was already standing in ankle-deep muck with the rest of the walls threatening to give up entirely any second, it wasn't easy to concentrate.

"The teddys covered that already." I whispered carefully. "The pit is loaded with traps and glue guns, some buried in the wall. If anybody goes down, he's there for the count."

"Do we have a Mac? Did anybody have plans on how to shove them into the hole if they didn't wanna go?" Sue sat with her ear cocked to the outside wall. We both could hear the AI's walking around the pit, and not falling in it like they supposed to.

"Nope. It'd take a tank to move 'em if they didn't wanna go and we didn't have one handy."

Another section of rock fell out in the tunnel. It splashed as it hit and I started to quietly stack bricks into my own private little pillar. It looked like we were gonna be swimming in our little room soon. The water wasn't draining anywhere.

"Actually, we did have a 'doser ready once..." I started absentmindedly. "But I'm willing to bet it's too big for what's left of the tunnel out there. Or the tunnels are too rough for it to get here."

"How long before this place fills with water?" asked Sue. She'd started making her own dry spot to stand on, one under the arch. I was already trying to wring out my sleeves. "Or out there does?"

"Couple days." I whispered hoarsely. "Maybe. If we're lucky." I looked the ceiling over again, then cut my light. It was almost nice in the dark.

The ceiling did not look so good. "So be quiet. We wait to try and dig ourselves out." I motioned at the sagging room around us. "The next couple explosions oughta finish bringing the roof down on us long before the AIs get finished anyway." I mentioned. Sue sniffed at that.

"Only if the walls don't fall in first." She pointed out sarcastically. "Are the teddy's gonna try and rescue us?"

"The AIs are already doing that, sorta. That little skirmish out there is what's gonna drop the walls down." I noted. "Any active warfare out in that tunnel and we're sunk."

"Buried." corrected Sue. I didn't argue.

She killed her light and we both sat there in the dark, waiting for the moon bot AIs to give up and leave their friends. From the digging noises, it didn't sound like they had plans for going anywhere at all soon.

It sounded more like they were building a wall. Worse yet, they were digging the blocks for it out of our wall.

Maybe they were coming in after us. "This is serious." As soon as the heaving sounds died away from the AIs down the tunnel, I started slapping around for my radio. "Just another couple loads from there and this whole room will collapse."

"You noticed." Sue didn't seem too disturbed by the AI's starting to dig us out. I wandered why. "So if the falling rock doesn't get us, the AI's will?"

"That's about the way it looks to me." I took the radio and tried to shove it down a pipe, hoping to direct the signal somewhere useful or at least get a better antenna going.

"So whatta ya wanna do Sue, wait for the walls to fall, get shot by an AI, drown or what?"

"Slip out the first time they wander away from our hole." Snapped Sue back. I listened to the AI crunch up to our hole, grab a block and heave on it. Two of our three walls started to groan again.

"Good idea." I whispered as the AI grabbed another block, wrenched it loose and went away with it. "But I've got a better one."

"One that means we have to stay here?" asked Sue. I didn't answer, I was busy whispering into the radio. With any luck, the teddys would receive it and be smart enough not to reply.

If they attempted to answer, they cooked us on the spot. The AIs would deduce what was happening, come back here and have a barrel shoot That was if they were in a good mood. They still had a lot of new tech and intel to try out and I didn't wanna volunteer for any of those experiments.

"If we live long enough, we'll try your plan." I motioned for Sue to join me under an arch and looked longingly at the buckling wall on the far side of the room.

The AI's were digging us out all right. From the wrong side of the room, and would probably kill us in the process, but they were digging us out.

For my plan to work, I needed them to hold still for another 10 minutes, even if we had to start throwing rocks at them to keep them here.

Telling Sue that wasn't easy.

******

"They're building a damn wall, the AIs aren't going anywhere! What are you worried about them leaving for?"

"That's the whole point." I sighed. "We don't WANT them behind a damn wall, we want them out where we can shoot at them with our new secret weapon."

"What new secret weapon?" asked Sue suspiciously. She turned around and glared at me. "You didn't tell me we had a secret weapon."

"I just asked the teddys to bring it up here." Crossing my fingers, I hoped Sue stopped worrying about the secret weapon. The teddys also had to build it first and there wasn't time to test it at all, so it was a kinda iffy secret weapon in the first place.

On the other hand, Sue and I had now a choice of waiting to be buried alive, trying to break out shooting against those tanks, or hoping this new trick would take the AI's down.

My weapon idea was best but, to tell the truth, I was more worried the teddys were just gonna give up on the money and toss in enough explosives to bury the moon bots here. Not that that'd work for very long, but it would give them some breathing space.

"So we need to slow down a wall now." humphed Sue.

"You bet." Another brick fell out just then and there was some frantic scrabbling as Sue and I tried to shim the sides of our cage up. There really wasn't much time left before we had to try something.

"How long do you figure we have?" She asked, getting another couple bricks handy. I wiped some of the dripping water off my face and grinned at here.

"For which disaster to catch up to us?" I whispered back. It was about time for the AI to come back and steal another brick or two. "The bottom bricks were getting covered by water now.

"Your secret weapon." Sue tossed some muddy hair off her forehead. "How long to that disaster? Getting those AI's to dig us outta here oughta be easy. And they'll stick around in the open to do it."

"That's about what I figured. We're still bait." My nod shook a few more drops off my head, more than there shoulda been. I put my light on the water coming from the roof to check it out. It had increased to a steady stream and was getting stronger.

"You still aren't worried about drowning, are ya Tracker?" asked Sue in disbelief. The wall beside her groaned and shifted. A couple bricks moved out, popping the cement like dried twigs.

"Not really." I admitted. Another section of the roof fell in and the water started gushing out like a garden hose somebody had forgotten to turn off. "I was just thinking about what all this water is gonna do to those bots at the bottom of the hole."

"Keep them safe." Sue tucked her knees under her chin and sat quiet. We could both hear the moon bot coming down the tunnel to collect another load of stones.

"So it's raining outside today, eh?" I whispered to her as the AI went away. He'd taken nothing important to us this time and the walls stopped moaning.

"If you say so." Sue gave me a strange look. "I haven't been outta here in a couple days, remember? How do I know the weather?"

"It's getting real important to us." I nodded at the stream of water flooding our little room. "I think there's a few things I didn't know about the tunnels."

"Like they flood in the rain?" asked Sue nervously.

"That's one of the things." I admitted. "And we're sitting at the mouth of the drain for the whole area, remember?"

I scratched my head. "On the positive side, all that water coming in here should hold the walls up a little. Now if we could only breath it."

"You wouldn't have any idea where the new drain is, do you?" asked Sue. "I've got an idea."

"I don't think I wanna hear this." I muttered.

********

"Why don't we just wait for the water to lift us to the roof and dig our way out?" Sue pointed her beam at the rapidly growing hole in the ceiling. I tried not to notice how much faster water was coming out of it.

"That's dirt. We can dig our way out, right?" She smiled in triumph. I put my head in my hands and listened to the water gush, flooding our little room more and more rapidly.

"We could, but for starters, we're about 40 feet down." I mentioned in a soft tone. It got buried by the splashing water. "That's a LOT of mud to move. For seconds, tunneling in glop doesn't really sound safe. For thirds..."

A large chunk of clay peeled loose from the hole in the roof and fell into the room. It sprayed Sue and I from head to foot with gunk, washed over our small dry perches and got the AI down the hall moving just a little faster.

"The moon bots are real concerned about flooding, apparently." Both Sue and I could hear a more frantic bang of stones getting hauled into place.

"Not many lakes on the moon, I guess." Answered Sue. She looked at the swirling waters, now rapidly starting to rise in our little room and gulped. "Well, I'm about ready to hit the panic button, how 'bout you?"

For an answer I jumped off my little heap of bricks under the arch and started wading to the other side of the room, ducking thru what was now a running waterfall.

Sue beat me over there. We both started tossing bricks from the heap there outta our way.

"Are we digging for the porthole we came in or something else over here?" Sue grabbed a brick in both hands and looked for somewhere to throw it. Taking a brick from the top the heap looked easiest, so I started a double-handed toss backwards. That kept both hands busy.

"The door? It's already warped closed. I noticed that when we came in." I grunted. It got twisted shut in one of the blasts."

Climbing bricks at the base of the wall, Sue started shoving loose ones from the top out of her way. "So any hole we can make for the water to drain out is a good one, right?"

"Right." I joined her up there, heaving bricks backwards as fast as we could loosen them.

"Shouldn't that AI be coming here to investigate soon?" Gasped Sue as bricks splashed behind us. Throwing bricks around in the rain was tiring work.

"I guess he isn't interested in anything that isn't falling on his head right now." Just then a real suspicious rumble started shaking it's way thru our room. I shook my head and tried to listen to it. "As a matter of fact, I don't think they can even hear us anymore."

I stopped heaving bricks and settled back, listening. Sue looked at me in amazement, ignoring the growing shaking of the room, the clatter and splash of falling brick and the gurgle of water. "I think my secret weapon worked."

"What are we waiting for now, Christmas?" She asked sarcastically. I shook my head, grabbed her hand and held it flat to the wall. If I could feel it, so she could.

"What's that?" She asked. It felt a lot like a train going past.

"Lots an' lots of water." I mentioned casually. "All headed down the tubes and taking whatever's out there with it."

Sue kept quiet while that sunk in. "The AI's just got washed down the pit?" She asked in amazement. "That's our secret weapon?"

"Ah, no. Not exactly. That hasn't gotten here yet." I took the brick from her hand and put it back into it's hole in the wall. We both could feel the water rushing by out there now.

"Dandy. You wanna try shooting Niagara falls in a barrel?" I shouted over the rumble of water. "Put the bricks back, it's even wetter out there than in here."

"So what do we do?" Came her wail. I shook my head. There wasn't a good answer to that.

Explosions started coming from down the hall, ones that shook more bricks and mud loose in our little room. They only sped the water up a bit.

*******

The whole room shook hard with the explosions from outside, rattling bricks loose and bending concrete slabs. There were lots of popping sounds as the re-bar inside the concrete starting coming out.

"Beam weapons. The AI's are digging themselves out of the rubble down there." I shouted. Sue just nodded and crawled a little higher up the heap. There wasn't room for me to follow her up that wall. The cold water in our room pushed past my waist. I got the usual urges.

"Great, When does our secret weapon arrive?" Sue bellowed at me.

There wasn't time to answer. The wall beneath us started to heave as an AI outside tore at it. The walls inside began to react as more weight got dumped on them buy popping more bricks out.

"Real soon, I hope." The water in our little room was up to my chest and rising fast, but I couldn't see where the air was going to. All that water wasn't gonna stop the walls from buckling real soon.

"You wanted outta here?" I mentioned as the AI started tearing into the wall in a serious way, from the top down. Sue watched wide-eyed as a brick under her hand got jerked out into the tunnel.

"Not that badly." She said. I tried to climb up the wall and look out the hole the AI had just made but there wasn't time.

The whole section of wall crumbled away and two huge metal claws reached in, pushing slabs of masonry aside like they were marshmallows and getting shoved aside as the water drained out. Sue squeaked and backed off to a safer spot.

When the rubble stopped flying around, an AI stood there in the gap, back-lit by his full emergence lights. A metal head swiveled as he looked around the little room.

********

The stream was roaring past in the tunnel outside, and the AI had torn into our room just above the water line. I made a futile effort to line up a gun as it casually reached over, snagged Sue off the rubble heap and backed out.

The wall beside me gave up as he did, and I started a mad scramble up the rubble myself.

Sue's screams didn't last long, but it was long enough for me to get up there and dive out of the room. The room collapsed with a mighty goosh behind me and the water popped me outta the room like bullet outta a gun.

The confusion didn't last long enough for me to get away. The AI had me by the collar before I even hit the water outside and I got to take my chances on floating.

After shaking mud from my eyes, my first good look around was from over the rushing stream. The AI's had started to build a wall around the pit, but the rain had already torn parts of it away. There was tremendous noise as water roared down the hole.

I even had a second to wonder where the water was going down there before the AI turned tossed me over a shoulder and started a monkey-climb along the wall, over the stream below us.

Sue was sitting on his other shoulder with a teddy on her lap, trying to hold on as the AI picked it's way along the wall, just over the stream.

A head swiveled to look at me. "It would help things a lot if you humans could breathe underwater." The AI mentioned casually to me.

I didn't say a damn word, but after I got some spray outta my eyes, the overrider bolt sticking out the moon-bots side was obvious.

My idea had worked. The moon bot's couldn't handle the stuff they were using on the teddys, and my little suggestion of pumping a few of their overriders into bolts them had paid off.

Upgraded bolts, naturally. I had been working on these for a couple days now. The teddys had lots of 'em from the zombie squads now. They'd blown a hole to the mainline, letting the water in and had just ridden the stream here, popping up with a sneak attack.

Teddys in floaters. It looked weird, but there were no complaints on my part. Sue was still a little upset her radio didn't work, but teddy control was a little weak yet. That's why there was only one left with us.

********

Sue headed home the second she could. I guess she trusted me on this or something. Or maybe it was Father John.

"Wow. So we DID get it all." The heap of id-plates was slowly shrinking as Father John processed the lot thru his home machine. I could feel my bank account growing with every one.

So was his, and the teddy account. Those AIs had killed a LOT of teddys and we'd agreed to split the reward on them.

"Yep. If the auction goes off OK, we'll be filthy rich." The priest chuckled. "France has already called in twice, fishing for special deals and ways to drop all the competition out." He confided. "I think they're hot for a whole AI."

"Betcha they end up buying only the junk." Watching the last of the teddy IDs drop into the machine gave me a special glow. "And except for the usual lawsuits from joyriders and clerks, this has turn out to be a cakewalk."

I laughed hysterically. "Do you know what the teddy's have the moon-bots doing down there now? Fixing up the old tunnels! They want to resettle the place!"

"That was one of my suggestions." Father John looked kinda frosty. "The other offer is still open, you know. Now that you've got some money, you won't need to hunt them again for a while."

"What other offer?" Leaning over, I checked the accounts. Father John had split the money just as we had agreed, minus a handling fee for the church. I looked at the bids for the moon-bots coming in from various interested governments and whistled. The handler's fee on that would get Father John a medal from the pope if he turned it over to him.

"The supplier offer. The teddys have a project they want to work on and need a good agent up here, one not church-connected."

"What's project is that?" Sticking my card into the machine, I made my transfers, even giving Sue a small bonus. I think she'd earned it. The way my account dropped as Simon's bill and other stuff fell thru was a little depressing, but there was still a very comfortable balance when everything settled down.

"The hyper-drive." The priest started puttering around his apartment as that sunk into my skull. "Something about them going to the belt soon, remember?"

My mind boggled at that. Being mind-slaves of the moon AI's wasn't enough for them. The teddys wanted to go to space and create teddy world.

Teddys in space. With flotation jackets, probably.

"I'll have to think about it." I answered honestly enough, still giggling.

end

## chapter 20 wharf-rat cafe

SYNOPSIS: A nuked-out city has problems controlling the baby trade. New mutant babies are being sold into the hot zone for metal. A detective tracks the merman (gilled) and two-toed babies thru the church into hot-zone, and the poisonous metal out.

They open a route to the sea and start trade from the wild sea-mutants. Cool metal for finished goods.

Opening Scene: Harbor Lights Music: SpeakEasy from FastForward by Spyro Gyra

An alley near the harbor, between two slimy brown buildings, a trash-buried dank shadowy mist. The dawnwind is thrashing papers around.

A dog wanders into the alley, sniffing around.

The bitch, heavy milk-laden dungs dangling from her belly, noses around a group of several beer bottles. She lays down on them, noses one out and treats it as puppy, licking its bottom and gently playing with it, looking as soft as a mother can.

"Life's rough, eh?"

My soft words startle the dog, and she yelps like I'd just smacked her a sharp one as she bounces up and runs away. Her teats are leaking milk.

"Somebody else doing the hard things, eh? Don't worry little mama, maybe the next litter won't be mutants."

Fade slowly back to city scape, showing grimy trench coat going into slimy building and the glorious dawn over a nuked-out city.

The Center of the city is glowing radioactive blue,outlined and surrounded by a heaped rubble wall.

Campfire smoke, lines of washing, and tiny farms show it to be the same as the rest of the city, just more devastated.

Scene Two

The interior of an office. One wall is covered in a huge fractal, a Mandelbrot set that looks like a closed eye. Ornate lettering reads "THE ALL-SEEING EYE" in a scroll at the top, "CHURCH OF THE HOLY SASQUASH" at the bottom.

The glass door swings inward. Faded and dirty lettering on the glass door reads "Harry Pilfner, P.I.".

The grimy trench coat from outside walks in, shucks the coat at a coat tree and a rat in a battered-looking suit is left. He dives for a couch as the door swings shut behind him.

"Man, nobody told me smugglers walk so many miles in a night."

"Are you out there?"

A piercing screech comes from behind a closed door, and the sound of flushing is heard. Harry sighs and rolls to a sitting position on the couch.

"Yes, as long as you're here, type up a report for Blade Co. The stuff they were trying to track down is coming from an independent by the name of Sammy who picks it up at Wallbury from a zoner."

A curvy female rat exits from the john and sniffs, pulling her shirt down and smoothing out the wrinkles.

"Not likely. I'm leaving for the Sound to do some shopping. Are you gonna pay me this week?"

Getting up, Harry dungs a notebook out of an inner pocket and drops it on the desk as he shrugs out of his suit coat.

"Drop the report at Blade Co. and deposit the check they give you. Then your last paycheck should be good at the bank."

"And the bad guys destroying Blade Co.'s weapons business with hot metal get foiled again? A happy ending?"

"Yeah. No more dirty weapons for the punks. They gotta buy their skinners from Blade Co. like everybody else. Deliver the report and don't leave till they give you the check."

"Good. Oh, I brought you something.." The girl opens and digs in a mammoth purse sitting on the desk. Harry puts his coat on the back of the chair and folding his hands behind his neck, stretching a sore body. "And there's a number on the desk to call. Someone else wants a job done."

"What did you bring me, more bills? I don't really need thAHHHH!"

Turning around, Harry finds what looks like a glass jar full of eyeballs on his desk. The girl sniffs again as she copies a few notes from the notebook, obviously ready to leave.

"Stop being so silly. Little Sean used his church kit to pretty up some pickled eggs and I though you might like some. I'll use a machine over at Blade Co. to type this, they've got better ones than I do. Tah-tah!"

The girl sweeps out, leaving Harry with the jar on his desk. He shudders, then opens it, fishing out an egg as the door slams shut.

"Being married to her means eating with your eyes closed and..." He bites into one of the eggs, coughs and gags. "Lying thru your teeth about how good it tastes. Peppermint-honey-garlic, phew! The church should stick to hair-rinse."

Forcing a swallow. Harry sits at his desk and shuffles a few papers one handed, picking one out of the heap and peering at it. He glances at the half eaten eyeball in his hand, shudders and swallows it.

He punches a number on the phone and swivels around in the chair, looking out over the city.

Behind him, the Mandelbrot opens and an eye glares out at him, then sinks almost closed again.

"Hello, Sal's nightclub? Could I talk to Sal? I know it's dawn, just tell him it's Harry returning his call... OK, I'll come in tonight. But I'm gonna charge for it..."

Scene Three:Sal's PlaceMusic:John Luc Ponty's 'Imaginary Voyage.'

Harry walks down a thronged street. Signs for stripper sand bars light up the street. One of a girl weaving around in a black+white checked light stops him. It reads Spacer's Bar overhead and he leaves as someone wearing a suit gets tossed very ungently into the gutter.

He walks into the next bar, Sal's Place and into the usual smoke filled room, full of the usual patrons.

Rats.

Lots of rats. Big, tough stevedores. Weasely little card sharks. Old men buried in sweaters. They're all concentrating on the stage.

Music Changes to: Hey, big spender, Spend a little time with me.

The crumblies are at the back and the thugs are packed around the stage. A Platinum Blonde with impossible curves boils out and starts grinding out something sultry with an invisible band.

end

Author's Note: Fan-mail, biz, complaints and suggestions to teddyhunter10@gmail.com

Kevin Williams is on

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/packrat2

https://kevinwillpkgd.tumblr.com

https://imgur.com/packrat2/posts

He authors an SF series, Teddyhunter: (about runaway teddybear robots), a few books of short stories, comics and the Aaron+Henna fantasy series. The first in every series is usually a free ebook.

END
