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killed in my first skirmish?  I
was scared for sure, but even more, I was angry at the waste of it all.  But I
couldn’t think of any way out.  I was starting to panic, to forget all the
training.  Then I heard the lieutenant’s voice on the com.
     

Chapter 2
     

2243 AD
Abandoned suburbs
North of the ruins of Old Houston
Texas, USA, Western Alliance
     
    The Corps got most of its recruits in unorthodox ways, and
it had a tremendous track record of turning cutthroats and gutter rats into top
notch soldiers.  But I wager they found me in the strangest way of all.  I was
stealing from them.
    I was a thief, a damned good one.  I’m two meters tall and
then some, and I look like a big clumsy oaf.  But looks can be deceiving.  I
can sneak around without anybody hearing me, and I can strip everything
valuable out of a warehouse in the time it takes a guard to finish his rounds. 
     I was only sixteen, but I had my own crew.  We had our base
in an old suburb outside Houston.  The fringe areas had been mostly abandoned
by the government, and when the police and other services went, so did the
residents…or at least most of them.  Anyone who tried to stick it out gave up
after Houston was nuked; they built New Houston about 50 klicks west of the old
city, and the fallout-contaminated exurbs surrounding the radioactive ruins sat
almost totally empty for a century.
    The radiation had long since ceased to be a major hazard, at
least this far out, and the place made a great base of operations.  None of the
monitors and detection devices that were so thick in the inhabited areas.  We
hijacked freight shipments, and we raided the Cogs living around New Houston. 
Since the original city had been destroyed, New Houston didn’t have the ancient
factories and decaying slums most of the other metro areas did.  The Cogs lived
in cheap prefab housing units and tent cites set up around the big plasti-crete
and chemical plants the megacorps had built there.  They had it a little better
than those in some other cities.  There was crime, certainly, but there wasn’t
as much of an organized gang presence as in other places.  It was more a series
of company towns, and while the inhabitants lived just above sustenance levels,
they were a little more prosperous than Cogs elsewhere.  They had a bit more
material wealth, and we tried to steal it all.
    We snuck into the city sometimes and stole there too.  We
always targeted the middle classes, never the rich.  Going after the upper
classes was a fool’s game.  The wealthy have power and influence; become too
much of a problem for them and your days are numbered.  But what is some
engineer going to do?
    I was prosperous, at least my own version of it.  I set
myself up in a big old abandoned house.  It must have been a politician or
executive who built the place, because it was huge.  There was a big double
staircase right inside the entry and a high ceiling – at least six meters.  It
looked like the floors had been marble at one time and the walls covered with
paneling, but there were only a few bits and pieces left; the rest had been
stripped long ago by some scavenger who got there a few generations before I
did.
    I’d traveled a long way to get where I was.  My father’s
name was Gregory Jax, and I have no idea what possessed him to name me Darius. 
He was a Cropper, a Cog recruited by a megacorp to work on one of the big
agricultural preserves.  The work was difficult and dangerous, but no worse
than working in one of the factories, and the farming campuses were a little
safer than the outer ghettoes of the cities.  I think he took the job because
he thought it would be better for me; at least I’d grow up away from the Gangs,
which were really bad in the Louisville slums where I was born.  My mother was
gone.  She died when I was young; I’m not really sure how.  My father couldn’t
even talk about her without getting upset, even years later.  I know