Free Shine by Jetse de Vries (ed)

shipment."
    "No newbies?"
    "No people, no parts, no nothing."
    Ani felt fear twist her guts. They'd never missed a shipment. Ever. Not for--
    Not for 15 years.
    Jun shucked his gauntlets and hung them under his name in the rack. He sat down on a bench and began wriggling out of his suit. Nils helped him pull. Jun gave the kid a weak grin and let Nils unlatch his boots.
    "Maybe it went off-course."
    "Has it ever gone off-course?"
    A sudden thought, clear and distinct, as if someone had spoken in her ear: What if this is the end of the shipments?
    Ani paced. "Did you look around?"
    "Yes."
    "Thoroughly?"
    "Peep my stream!" Jun looked up at her. For the first time, she saw his wide eyes. He was terrified, too.
    Ani's watchstream buzzed, signaling a direct message. She glanced at it; messages scrolled, as watchers realized something bad was happening. They'd be looking to her for direction.
    What a terrible time to be Prime , she thought. She'd won the lottery last month.
    "We have to go back out," she told Jun. "We have to look for the drop. The shipment may have gone off course."
    "It's never gone off course--"
    "I know. But we have to look."
    Jun stopped moving and just looked at her, his face an unreadable mask of exhaustion. Ani wondered how many shifts he'd run in a row. Two? Three? More?
    "Put your suit back on," she told Jun.
    Nils stopped helping Jun with his suit and looked up at her, frowning.
    Ani sighed and addressed the nearest surveillance dot: "Anyone else with outside experience and a suit, come down. We need to make as many tracks as we can."
    Slowly, Jun started putting his suit back on.
    "No candy?" Nils asked.
    Ani forced a smile. "I'll see what I can do."
    "You want to sell me insurance?" Thom Lyman said. They were on the tee at the #3 hole of Paradise Springs. Above the rust-colored Arizona hills, the Scottsdale sky was spring-perfect, deep and impossibly blue, with brilliant white streamers of clouds above.
    Roy nodded and forced his widest smile. "That's the idea."
    Thom paused in mid-swing. "Insurance that'll set us up on the moon in case of catastrophic failure of the Earth's economy?"
    Roy Parekh felt himself break into a sweat. "You read it."
    "Of course I read it."
    "Oh."
    "I particularly liked the part about 'an alternate location distribution system with a focus on dramatically new infrastructure and export/import possibilities.'"
    "I..."
    Thom grinned, creasing his face. He waved Roy up to the tee. "Take your shot."
    "Are you--"
    "Take it."
    Roy went to the tee and looked out over the hole. Perfect green grass stretched in front of him, like an old Windows desktop. Roy's hand trembled slightly as he placed the ball. Golf was a really insanely stupid game. But it was how you closed deals. And he was real good at closing deals.
    Until now.
    Roy's shot sliced into the rough and bounced into the sand and cactus bordering the course.
    "How long have you been out of work?" Thom said.
    Roy said nothing for a long time. He thought of throwing his club after the ball. He thought of walking off the course. He thought of the Citicorp work farms.
    "Sixteen months," Roy said, after a while.
    "Your investments?"
    "Nothing left."
    "How about Susan?"
    "She wanted kids. I can't. She left."
    Thom shook his head. "Christ on a barbecue."
    Roy just waited. Waited for Thom to ask, So, you thought I'd fall for it? So, you thought you'd leech off me?
    But Thom just sighed and said, "Why didn't you do something important?"
    "What do you mean?"
    "You were the smart one."
    "What?"
    "Back in USC. Why didn't you do tech or something?"
    "Because--"
    Because the needle bounces off the end of the record, thwup, thwup, thwup, fashions and thought and styles recycled on shorter and shorter swings, nothing new, nothing important. Nobody picking up the needle. Hell, nobody looking at the record and thinking , Time to swap it out for an iPod.
    "--because it was too easy at Prudential."
    "Until the Rethink screwed you."
    Roy blurted a