Ganymede was the last backwater shithole Zed wanted to find himself in, stranded without a spaceship in a small fishing village, with no credits to his name and nothing but the worn clothes on his back and the pistol tucked away inside of his waistband. He hadn't asked for this job when he'd volunteered to take part in “The Run”, the job that brought him here—the scam that had brought him here—but now here he was anyway, stuck in Ganymede where there were only two people left alive who knew anything at all about his trip to this fishing village. They called it New Israel, and just like the one back home on Earth, it was a worthless backwater shithole filled with religious zealots. The village of New Israel had little more than a port and a few warehouses, all owned by the CHYTEK corporation, which controlled everything from manufacturing to shipping to banking and provided jobs galore for everyone except those unlucky souls whose genetic code didn't match its perfect vision of what humanity should be or how they fit into their utopian world of tomorrow. If you didn't have the CHYTEK gene code implant, you couldn't even get a taxi ride anywhere, much less an actual job—and the sole reason Zed came to Ganymede was so he could meet Zara (who also had been implanted with CHYTEK DNA) and get her out of town fast before someone figured out that she wasn't supposed to be on Ganymede. Now it looked as if some sleazeball named Silas Rainier might figure out that they weren't really CHYTEK employees at all, but imposters sent here to steal secrets and technology for their employers, and Zed's life was going straight down the tubes thanks to that asshole. And then there was Kolby, who had agreed to join them in New Israel only because she needed safe passage back to Taipei-01, the only spaceport on Ganymede. Zed knew he couldn't trust Kolby past the meager amount of credits he paid her to get him into New Israel's containment zone, the place where the criminal element of Ganymede chose to call home, but Zed had no other option than to put his trust on the street urchin, she knew the layout of the land better than his recon scanner hardware. So it was up to them to find a way off this planet without getting arrested, shot, or killed, and fast—before anyone else figured out who they were or what they'd done with the “lost” prototype robot they stole from CHYTEK. It was an impossible task, especially when Zed discovered he had lost track of Zara after their last meeting ended abruptly and mysteriously; now he couldn't reach her via the radio signal embedded in his implant, and all attempts to contact her had failed—but something told him that she hadn't gone far if she could still receive his signals, so perhaps they didn't need to worry about chasing after her right away, not with all of Ganymede looking for them already, and they would have plenty time to take care of business once they cleared the containment zone and got to safety on a free space station.
That was just fine by Zed, because while New Israel may be nothing more than a shithole full of religious zealots who worship at the altar of CHYTEK's profit margin, it did have one very nice feature: it was filled with cheap drugs, cheap booze, and some good-looking women. Zed wasn't exactly planning on spending his next two years here like a pimp or a drug dealer, but if he was going to be stuck here, getting a bead on the local flavor would be important.