Now come the mousies nosing out their hole, thinks Kuhru as he wipes fresh bone marrow from his snout. Three pretty little mousies. Humans. Females. Ripe and soft and full of warm blood. He shudders. It will be ecstasy to hunt them down.

“Steady, you mongrels!” Kuhru growls at his snipers, both built like him, with gnarled manes of black hair, matted beards, their faces cratered with pox marks and battle scars. “Miss the shot, and I'll flay your miserable hides.”

He tracks the girls as they scurry from the closed mine shaft onto the tundra. Ore buckets in hand, they fight the lacerating winds, oblivious to the snipers' red laser dots dancing on the backs of their heads.

A dozen meters from the shaft, they begin digging. One keeps watch.

Kuhru snarls when he sees pillars of their cold breath. Careless. Stupid. Soft. Such easy prey. “Fire, you dogs!”

Crack! Crack!
Two girls drop.

Crack!
The third girl falls writhing on the ice, a bullet hole in her calf.

“Not the leg!” Kuhru roars. He punishes the snipers with the bone he sucked dry, slamming the heavy knot of the hip joint against their skulls. “I said, not the leg!”

Then he bounds down the rise, his knuckles almost touching the ice. The wounded girl doesn't see Kuhru until he blots out the sun. She screams and tries to crawl away.

“DrÃ¦u!” she cries, her voice a rasping whisper. “No, no! God, please no.”

Kuhru kicks her wounded leg. Laughs as she passes out, her head striking the tundra with a clack. An amusing sound. Lovely little mousie. How easily he could snap her soft neck and suck the life out of her body.

He squats and breathes her in, then notices something clutched to her chest. A shell? Here? He plucks it from her grip. It is as wide as his hands, the ridged back marked with a hexagonal pattern. He stuffs it in his belt.

“Wake up, mousie,” he growls, spitting into her face. “Crawl back into your hole and tell the miners this,” he says, when her eyes open. “My queen demands six for her table.”

“No!” the girl screams, and pounds him with her fists. “You'll take no more from us.”

“DrÃ¦u take what the DrÃ¦u want!” Kuhru backhands her,
and blood flies from her mouth. “Six children. The queen gives you ten days.”

“What aboutâ¦” she says, her voice fading, “â¦my friends?”

He stands and slings the dead little mousies over his shoulder. “The DrÃ¦u don't waste good meat.”

CHAPTER 1

Above the Fossiker Line, Mars
ANNOS MARTIS
238. 4. 7. 06:01

Mars stinks. From the depths of its rock quarries to the iron-laden dirt that covers the planet's crust, it has a pungent, metallic tang that you can taste in your mouth. And it isn't just the soil. Our polluted air is poisoned with the stink of human waste and burning fuel. The terraformed oceans stink; the newborn rivers reek; as do the lakes, which spew a perpetual efflux of sulfur. The whole planet is a compost heap, intentionally designed to rot and burn endlessly so that one day, its air will be completely breathable, and its waters capable of supporting life. But tonight the stink is so powerful, I can smell it up here. Ten kilometers above the surface. Where I'm standing on a small square platform. Looking straight down.

About to wet myself.

“Oh, quit whining, Durango,” Mimi tells me. “You are such a melodramatist.”

“That's not even a word.” I flip up the visor of my helmet.
Take a healthy sip of oxygen from a tank I brought along for the job. This high up, the atmosphere is as thin as a layer of old lady skin, and I'm seeing black spots dance before my eyes. It's bitter cold, too. Ice crystals have formed on the metal platform like it's sprayed with quartz, and my exhaled breath stretches out like a frozen rope. Forget the poetryâit's cold enough to make pashing an icicle feel like puckering up to a hot capstove.

“
Melodramatist
isn't listed in my thesaurus data bank,” she says. “But I
am
capable of adaptive self-programming.”

Bugger. It's bad enough having an artificial intelligence flash-cloned to my brain, now said AI tells me she's spawning new words.

“I heard that,” she says.

Which comes as no surprise. Mimi hears everything. “I meant for you to hear me,” I say.

“Did not.”

“Did so.”

“Are you arguing inanely for a reason? Or just stalling?”

“Just stalling.” I peek over the edge of the elevator platform. No railing. No lifeline. One missed step, and you're a human meteoroid. My knees start shaking. Vertigo hits, and I almost pitch headlong over the edge.

“Speaking of my thesaurus data bank,” Mimi pipes up. “Would you like me to look up the meaning of
chicken
as well?”

I drop to hands and knees. “I'm about to die, to cark it,
to shuffle off this mortal coil. Your talking is only going to make it happen faster.”

“âWee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,'” Mimi quotes from her favoriteâand my most despisedâpoem, written by some fossilized Earther. “âO, what a panic's in thy breastie!'”

“Why did I ever agree to this job, anyway? What kind of idiot takes a space elevator ten kilometers into the atmosphere just to jump off it? That's a rhetorical question,” I forewarn Mimi. “Don't answer it.”

“You're so cute when you're terrified.”

I lean over the edge again. A few meters below hangs an escape pod. Beanstalk operators use them when the space elevator gets stuck. All I have to do is hop from here to the pod.

From here to the pod. Here. To the pod.

Might as well ask me to jump from here to Earth.

“You are wasting time,” Mimi says. “Your acrophobia is simply a manifestation of your desire to control every aspect of your life. To defeat it, all you have to do is adjust your heart rate and breathing. And then, let go.”

“Easy for you to say, Madame Freud. You don't have any hands.”

“Also? You should use the mask again. My sensors are reporting a drop in blood gas levels.”

“Are you accusing me of passing gas?”

“No, of being full of hot air. Now shut up and get on with it.”

“Fine.”

I suck down enough oxygen to saturate my lungs. Set the tank aside on the platform. Cinch the strap holding the assault rifle to my back. Then check that the small fortune hidden inside my body armor is safe. The fortune is to pay a ransom, and the rifle is for the criminal I'm hired to killâif the fall from space doesn't kill me first.

“Cowboy,” Mimi says, “you have less than one minute to begin descent protocols. Move.”

“MiststÃ¼ck!”
I swear. “I'm too young to die.” But I flip my visor shut. Clench my eyes tight. And drop into nothing. A second later my boots hit the top of the escape pod. My stomach keeps going.

“That was very anticlimatic,” Mimi says.

“Tell that to my stomach.”

“Is it too young to die, too?”

“No, but it's good at passing gas.”

I slide the pod's air lock open. Then drop inside. On the floor, I peek through the porthole of the second lock and get another eyeful of atmosphere. The plan calls for me to drop through the lock. Then slide down the chute. It's a bad plan. A bad, bad plan. And I'm the whacker who thought of it.

“I'm an idiot,” I say aloud.

“Some truths are self-evident.”

“Ha-ha.”

I stare at the clear polymer tube that extends
almost
the length of the space elevator's elephantine cable.
Almost
.
Right. The
almost
part of the equation really bothers me.
Almost
can land you several kilometers from the drop zone. Maybe in a nice, quiet sand field. Or maybe in the middle of an acid-rain retention pond. Both mean a quick funeral, and I can't afford a funeral right now. The squad I command, my davos, is so flat-busted broke, we've eaten nothing but red dust in two days. It's my job to make sure we get fed, and I'm doing a lousy job of it. Which is what brought me to this.

After pausing to do a final systems check on the nanobots that regulate my body armor, I search the night sky for a fixed point of reference. Phobos and Deimos, the twin moons, are potato-shaped lights on the horizon. In the distance is Earth, pretending to be a star, taunting us with its arrogant blue oceans. I fix my eyes on the false star, a technique for reducing nausea. If it works, I won't puke in my helmet this time.

“Mimi,” I say. “Engage all communication and tracking frequencies. I'm ready for drop. On my mark, in thrâ”

“Your mark calculations are incorrect,” she says, then makes my foot hit the switch to activate the lock. The hatch's irises open. The bottom drops out.

“Buh-bye,” Mimi says.

“Not carking funny!” I yell as I fall like a ton of ore dropping through the tubeâjust before the air gets sucked out of my lungs.

“Hold your breath, cowboy,” Mimi says. “It's a long way to the surface.”

“Gah!” My eyes flutter. Feel consciousness slipping away.

“Speed of descent is nine hundred sixty-one kilometers per hour,” Mimi says. “Terminal velocity reached. Isn't this fun?”

“No!”

As strong as my symbiarmor is, it can never protect me from a terminal velocity fall. The impact will liquefy my internal organs and turn my brain to gray matter soup. I try to give a command to Mimi, instructing her to control my descent. But the g-force is too great. Throat can't form a sound. Head lolls back. Hits the tube with a thump.

That's when Mimi zaps my brain stem with a jolt of static electricity. “Wake up. One horrible, disfiguring death was enough. I do not need a repeat performance. Wake up!”

“Ouch!” Reflexively, I slam both forearms against the sides of the tube. My descent rate slows.

“Deceleration maneuver in progress,” Mimi says. “Good recovery, cowboy.”

My teeth chatter. “Th-thanks. F-for no-no-thing.” The fabric that coats my symbiarmor sops up the friction from the tube walls, but it can't do anything about a jolt of electricity to the brain stem. My limbs jerk, and I make embarrassing grunting noises. Never again, I promise myself. No matter how much a job pays, I'm never doing a space elevator jump again.

“That's what you said last time,” Mimi reminds me.

“This time,” I say with absolute conviction, “I mean it.”

“You said that last time, too.”

I look at the bustling twin cities of Valles Martis and Nuevo Madrid, two clusters of brilliance that overpower the dim lights of their smaller neighbor, New Eden, our crumbling old capital city. Where the man I'm to kill is hiding out.

“Six seconds to impact,” Mimi says. “Drop zone on the roof of New Eden Waterworks targeted and confirmed.”

“I'm still going too fast!” I yell as the tube ends and I fall through low-lying clouds. Reddish gray wisps shoot by. Precip condenses on my visor. Where's a squeegee when you need one?

“Four seconds.”

I tuck into dive position.

“Prepare for impact. Threeâ¦twoâ¦”

Whomp
. I slam into the roof feetfirst. Instantly my symbiarmor solidifies. My body is a projectile, and I tear through the steel roof like it's foil. Cut through the iron trusses. The heavy gauge wire catwalk. The thick ductwork. And land hard on a concrete platform.

“Landing successful,” Mimi says. “Symbiarmor now in normal operational mode.”

“Landing successful? Says you,” I subvocalize so that only she can hear me. “I hit so hard, I cracked my butt.”

“I believe you had a butt crack before you landed.”

“Har. Har.” Bad poetry and bad jokes? I thought she was an artificial
intelligence
.

“I heard that.”

“Good!” Slowly I climb out of the impact crater I made in the concrete. Dust and debris tumble from the hole in the roof. “Think anybody heard me fall?”

“There are dead people on Earth who heard you fall.”

“You're exaggerating again.”

“I am not programmed for exaggeration.”

“You're not programmed for sarcasm, either, but that hasn't slowed you down.” I catch a whiff of air and gag. “Why does it stink like a sewer in here?”

“Because it
is
a sewer in here.”

“See what I mean about sarcasm?” I unholster my armalite assault weapon. Pull the half-moonâshaped clip and blow dust out of it. “Where are they?”

“Which
they
do you mean precisely?”

“The kids I came to rescue? And the man I'm supposed to kill?”

“Thank you for using nouns,” she says. “That
they
is on the opposite end of the waterworks, four hundred meters to the south.” Then her tone changes. “However, I am reading nine biorhythm signatures in close proximity. You need to move, cowboy. This
they
is coming fast.”

She doesn't have to tell me twice.

“Move, cowboy!”

Maybe she does.

I run past a huge supply pipe and slide into the shadows as nine CorpCom shock troops slam through the doors. They
carry needle cannons and wear heavy metal-plated armor that makes their movements slow and mechanical. My symbiarmor's technology is light years ahead of theirs. But they have me outnumbered, so I don't do anything stupidâlike trying to take them all out at once.

Been there. Done that. Have the head wound to show for it. “Did they see me?” I ask Mimi. Using the circuitry in my suit, she can monitor telemetry communications in the vicinity. Very helpful. It almost makes up for her smart mouth.

“No,” she answers. “But they have noticed the hole.”

“You think?”

“The leader just said, âLook at that carking big hole.'”

Their leader orders two troopers to do recon on the crater. The rest fan out to search the perimeter. A pair of troopers heads toward my hiding place. Silently I click the safety off and raise my armalite. Ready to fire.

“Would you like me to signal your backup?” Mimi asks.

The pair is in my sights. Too busy chatting to spot me. Sloppy. “I can handle a couple of shock troops.”

“The two approaching soldiers, yes,” she says. “Statistically, however, the odds don't favor engaging all nine at once.”

The troopers move like they're in slow motion, and their needle cannons can't pierce symbiarmor. Easy targets.

“May I remind you that the objective is to rescue and recover, not to engage shock troops?” Mimi pauses. “Even if you have a sixty-five percent chance of success.”

“Ha. More like ninety-eight percent.”

“Eighty percent.”

“Ninety.”

“Eighty-five is my final calculation,” she says. “Take it or leave it.”

“What if I leave it?”

“Then there is a fifteen percent chance your handsome face will have a third eye socket.”

Ouch. “I only see one alternative.” I slide my weapon into its holster. Then stand, hands raised. Walk toward the approaching squad. One of the troopers stops. His eyes widen, and his arms drop flaccidly to his sides.

“I surrender,” I say, then wink. “Take me to your leader.”

So what happens? Instead of just accepting a willing prisoner, the trooper's partner opens fire and sprays a round of needles into my belly.

“Whoop!” he yells. “Look at that! We caught ourselves a Regulator.”

I look down at the mass of metal needles sticking out of my chest. That confounded rooter. When this is over, I'm kicking his big, fat ass.

The shock troopers surround me. The leader barks, “Come with us.”

“Mimi,” I say, walking slowly. “We're going to need that backup.”