Excerpts

I was wound up in my thoughts, going in circles, this day about the same as every other.
Walking to the bus stop.
Skeletons under the bank building - in the cement - three, hands bound behind backs, heads back in death-agony. Look away, hard to see, though I've seen it a hundred times.
Safe deposit boxes filled with guns, cash, fake jewelry.
Butt-plugs everywhere. Does every office worker wear them every day? Must help with the tedium.
Engine valves fluttering on that truck - will need a valve job soon.
Tall skinny guy - should get that tapeworm dealt with.
Breast cancer, always tragic. Hand out a flyer, she gives a brief fake smile, stuffs it in her purse.
Three High School seniors waiting at the bus stop - all three pregnant. Is it a club? A dare? Do they even know? Very happy girls anyway. And what harm? They're having a fine life so far.
Old man, artificial heart valve plugging away. Good morning Mr. Gabriel! Good morning! We've talked many times. Happiest guy out here, knows he's not got long, still takes the daily visit to his wife in the sanitarium, hoping for some flicker of recognition. I love people like him.
Young stockbroker with a gun. A courier? What does he think is gonna happen?
Maybe that guy in the alley, with the knife. Won't he be surprised if he tries it on the stockbroker.
Hard to figure sometimes, foreign object inside someone. She looks like a fashion model but has a penlight up her large intestine. Turned on? Kinky.
Bus driver with hip problem, gonna need a new one by the time he retires. Gives me a tired smile as I get on board, familiar face, I ride several times a week.
The bus a parade of medical issues, bad teeth, bad feet, bad posture. Tragic remodeled multiple defense fractures, abuse victim most likely. Incipient strokes from insufficiency in arteries in neck.
Get off the bus down by the pier. Dredging built up the shore, 100's of feet out from original - back under here a scuttled sailing schooner, looks 18th century, a body in the hold, barrels of lead. Silverware on the galley table!
Two cannon balls embedded in the mud; the trail of their brief glorious trajectory traced in the earth where they came to rest on the old bank. Some skirmish, have to look it up some day.
Guns, guns everywhere, thrown in the bay then covered by time. Will be the mystery to archaeologists of the future - was there a battle here? No, just a long sad history.
Under it all, stone hearths of indigenous tribes. Pottery sherds by the millions, a blizzard of oyster shells. A favorite food! Smart people, and good for your heart.
Look deep under it all, see the long slow beat of a planet's molten heart. A billion years of slow heat and long passion.
Getting melancholy. Hard to see so much and not be able to do anything - one-eyed man in the land of the blind and all that.
Spend a slow day watching the seals with guts full of plastic, seeing through the waves to the barren seafloor, the stubs of old reefs dead and shriveled. Human litter embedded everywhere like a rash.
Brilliant colored patterned seashells, buried in the mud, generations of mollusks.
Hot bright turbine engines of jetliners taking off over the bay, people in racks like cattle, enduring.

"I want to buy one of your slave girls."

"Wonderful! We have a very fine selection, for all tastes! This model just in from Venus, has skills in cryptography, cybernetic systems and fellatio."

Way to lay it out there! The girl though, looked ok, not exactly to my taste but shapely like all Venusian women. It's their diet of cultured yeast and native vermiculan, full of hormones, makes them develop early.

She had pale hair, wispy and almost transparent from all that time in pressure suits, no sunlight. Her skin wasn't the pasty-pale of the sun-deprived because she was naturally dark.

Narrow hips, you couldn't survive on Venus if you couldn't fit into the suits. Her tits bulged just that extra bit that helped them hang down against her ribs like they would spill over with just a little effort.

And that mouth! A lifetime sucking down the worms that passed as food on Venus, gave her a perpetual O-face, pouty lips just begging to have something stuffed in there. That prehensile tongue peeked out, moving with a life of its own.

I just stared for a bit, lips were definitely one of my soft spots. Heh. Hers too!

But not for me, not gonna work out in a machine shop. Which was my real goal.

"Anything in a mech-tech?" I owned a repair shop and wanted mechanos for some routine jobs. Took half your time just keeping mechs lubricated, doing joint maintenance, updating software. They could do it for one another except they weren't allowed, the AI laws forbid it.

"Yes! A Martian crawler maintenance third, logged a thousand hours at Hellas Mining! Stamina like a beast! Keep you gasping for hours!"

She had that sparkly skin that all Martian girls had, growing up in all that sand, embedded in her skin from a lifetime of exposure to sandstorms. I'm sure she was warm and silky inside where it counted, but you'd have to get past that crust first.

Looks like she has good lungs, a barrel chest to breathe the thin terraformed Martian atmosphere, that accounts for the stamina. And here on Deimos she'd not get the bone problems they got on Earth, not built for high gravity, she'd just buckle there.

As if I could live on Earth! Mortgages that would take somebody like me three regens to pay down. If I could stand the gravity either, which I couldn't.

She seemed to be thriving, happy and settled. Her torso expanded and contracted rhythmically, just breathing with those accordion-ribs made her small mammary charms move in the most distracting way. The light made them twinkle as they moved, even her nipples had embedded silica, glittered like a vid-girl's.

She smiled at me, her stiff lips creased, pleased at my build I guess. I'm a 'roid-bred man, spidery they say, long arms and legs, prehensile feet from negotiating negligible gravity during my formative years among the asteroid belt habitats. I smiled back but gave her a pass.

"Something more commercial, not industrial?" Mining crawlers were bulky mechs, monsters. Mine needed a careful hand with all their tiny parts, like clockwork.

"I do have a wire monkey, very trainable, uploaded on all station connections and harnesses, able to negotiate the smallest tubes."

Wiring was half of the job with my mechs. Maybe she would do. A tiny woman, agile arms and fore-shortened legs, tiny hands and feet for the finest work. A long, long neck allowed her to look in any direction, important when there wasn't room to move around in the narrow wiring-ways and service conduit.

"What's her genes look like?" She had a twitch in one eye, I just noticed it now as she turned her head halfway around to peer at me, clutching a spar in one hand and grooming her crotch absently with the other, picking stray station-lice from her flaming red bush and crunching them in her slash of a mouth.

Uncurious, thoughtless, just existing in the moment, happy to be here, to be anywhere.

"Funny you should ask!" That was never a good beginning, now she'd tell me it was a meta, not cleared for reproduction, at the end of her gene line, her telomeres eroded by stray alpha.

"Just refurbed! New lining, DNA extensions, proteas treatment! Her former owner kept his harem well maintained, only rode them on special station-holidays."

What a salesman! Did she think I was a rube? That line was old when I was in the womb. A refurb title meant resale value was negligible, nobody would touch that piece with a ten-meter probe! The former owner probably rode her forty hours a cycle, and yes, I could see her nips were stretched and chewed, like she'd had a dozen cubs sucking.

A pity, I liked the littler ones, they were always so quick. Those clever hands!

"If that's all? I'll be on my way."

She looked alarmed, needed a sale, her body shop was not one of the big names, an indie trader. Probably owed on her O2 bond, desperate. Could I use that?

"You haven't seen my premium stock!" She smiled a nervous smile, waved me to a hatch, another compartment back there? Wouldn't hurt to look.

I stalked to the hatch on my long legs, ducked inside, she was close behind.

Here there were stalls, refurbed lockers really with the doors removed, meant for old-style pressure suits but now each containing a slave girl on a seat. Flickering plasma lights played across their features, making them look exotic and new.

The first was not really premium, just young, fresh from the vats. Full-grown, downloaded with the standard wetware but with a confused look like all newbs, still absorbing the world, everything new to her. Skinny as fuck. Receptive language skills and full motor coordination, but little else.

Did I want the trouble that came with a new model? None of the glitches worked out, have to tape her in mech-skills myself. I could do that, I had an old tape unit, used it on myself from time to time to keep current. Hm.

This job had been in the planning for 20 years, from the day the Colfax Sportsmens’ Club shooting range was built. On DNR land, the wooded lot had been cleared when MC was a teenager. Twenty years of rifle, shotgun and pistol lead flung downrange, embedded in the backstop, the dirt-and-fill berm. They’d known from the beginning it would need rebuilding one day, and today was the day.
MC watched Hank unload the front-end loader. Pull out the ramp, remove the traveling chains, start it and back it off the trailer, bucket held high. He wheeled it around expertly, jockeyed past the shooting stations and headed across the short grass range for the berm along the back.
At 14 feet the berm was tall enough to catch the occasional ground ricochet, deep enough to absorb the highest caliber slug even with lots of powder behind it. Covered in irregular scrub grass, the view was normally blocked by target stands. MC had removed them the day before with the DNR’s mower tractor. Wrapped a chain around the three-point hitch, then low around the post and back to the hitch, raise the hydraulics and the four-by-four frame posts came slowly out of the ground with a sucking noise.
They were stacked out of the way, slats broken and sticking out every which way. The cross slats between posts were what the targets got tacked to. They got replaced every couple of weeks or as needed, shot up pretty regularly, normal wear and tear. The club had them by the bale, in the shed.
Hank had reached the midpoint of the berm, aligned the bucket, shifted down and crept forward to take the first bite from the pile. Sod and hard crust resisted, but the Case loader had plenty of horsepower. With a bucket 11 feet wide it covered a lot of ground. Six cubic yards heaped, it could lift the load 10 feet high.
Not as high as the berm but didn’t need to be. Hank would take dirt from the front and work his way back. He only had to lift high enough to clear the side of the dump truck, which Hank’s teen-aged assistant was coming up the lane with now. Wouldn’t take but a couple days to do the job. Hank had everything figured out. Been doing this for 15 years.
Rubberneckers were already there, one side of the firing range where MC had asked them to stay. Didn’t need anybody to back over a member in good standing of the venerable shooting club; that would ruin the day for sure.
They were OK with that. Most of them had field glasses trained on the action. What they hoped to see, MC didn’t know. Dirt, gravel and lead was all that was coming out.
Hank planned to haul it to a mining concern north of the City. They’d recover the lead, the occasional steel slug, and paid by the pound. What was left over from that windfall, after Hank’s bill, the club would use to pay for a new berm, still have money left over. New signage, repairs to the gun shack and hopefully a gun safe. The old shack and firing line were 20 years weathered and grey, looking shabby. Needed an update.
MC’s job today was just to supervise. It was DNR land, and strictly speaking the DNR owned the range. The club membership had maintained it for all those 20 years, so allowances got made both ways. Today MC was in charge of safety, crowd control and turning away any shooters who hadn’t heard they’d be closed for three weeks. The berm had to be torn down and rebuilt before shooting could recommence.
Hank was dumping the first bucket, the loader at nearly maximum reach. A huge grey cloud enveloped the cab – Hank had anticipated that too, had an air-conditioned cab with dust filters. You could hear the dirt landing in the box with a sound like rain on a tin roof – all that lead hitting the steel truck bed. The crowd cheered for some reason. MC had to grin; their enthusiasm was infectious.
Old Bob Jantz walked over, had something to say.
“That grey – its ash! The berm was made by pushing fill out of the wood behind. It was a dumping ground back then – and sometimes folks burned their trash. All that went into the berm. I remember; I was there!”
Bob was President of the shooting club, had been for most of its existence.
The next bucket load had more ash, old lumber, tin, even part of an old torn shirt. Some rusty tin cans and wire. Dump trash, clearly. It all went in the truck bed.
The third try was deeper, getting down through the sod layer of the berm. Some more torn cloth, a shoe.
And a body. Clear as day, a stiff grey human shape flopped over the back of the bucket where it’d been pulled out of the berm.