Walker was the first to speak. "Twenty-six days ago, a freighter piloted by a parahuman known as Kurt went dark near Ceres. Three days later, his ship was found floating derelict; the cockpit was shattered and the body of the pilot was in several hundred frozen pieces. There was just barely enough intact genetic material in a severed hand still attached to the steering column to identify the remains as belonging to Kurt." I could feel myself cringing a bit at the description of the carnage. "The Directorate decided to investigate all ships that had been in the area of the incident at roughly the same time. The only ship that was unavailable for inspection was the one that zir Argentum here was serving aboard. When the Directorate received a request for references from one of the mining organizations here concerning Argentum and zir companions Denal, Aniya, and Cole, we surmised that they were somehow responsible and a bounty was posted."
Derrick glanced first at myself, then at Walker, then back at me. "When the drone intervened you said something about him 'launching missiles at you.' Would you care to elaborate?"
I suppose I'd already blown my chance to insist that I knew nothing of Kurt's death. I took a deep breath and started to explain. "Twenty-five days ago, we were headed back for Ceres after discovering a significant quantity of gold in one of the lesser asteroids. All of a sudden, our aft sensor pod suffered damage inflicted by a military-grade laser beam. Our pilot, Cole, took us behind another asteroid, and we attempted to hide there. That was when the missiles came. Our automated defense turrets detonated the missiles at a safe distance. A few minutes later, a ship came around as well. We played dead for a while until the other ship came closer and began to extend docking claws." I began to dip my head in regret then. "I panicked and assumed manual control of one of our gauss turrets. I fired a stream of slugs across the ship, and some of them penetrated the cockpit. I did a spectroscopic analysis of the debris and found that some of it was organic in nature."
"This is ridiculous!" Walker objected. "Is ze trying to claim that Kurt was a pirate of some kind after zir gold? He was the clone of a high-ranking executive of the Directorate! Why would he resort to stealing? For all we know, he mined those shiny yellow rocks and ze and zir friends killed him for them!"
"These are both serious accusations the two of you are making," Derrick stated flatly. "Do either of you have video recordings of the event in question?"
"Yes!" Finally something I could use to defend myself. " I have a copy of the video and the sensor logs on my tablet. It's in my hotel room. I can give you the address and keycard now."
"Now wait a second!" Walker had yet another objection. "Those can be faked."
"My technical team has a lot of experience with falsified evidence," said Derrick. "They'll be able to tell." He motioned for two of his subordinates to take the keycard I had drawn from my kilt pocket and go to the hotel room I mentioned. Then he stared at me. "Piracy is a pretty serious offense pretty much everywhere in the Belt, last I recall. Tell me: Why didn't you think of reporting the incident to the authorities on Ceres?"
"The Directorate does not recognize self-defense as a valid excuse for violence," I explained. "In any case, we found out later that he was the clone of a vice president, so we figured we were better off taking our chances out here."
"Yes, I know how the progeny of the rich and powerful are prone to act." Derrick shot me a grin that looked disturbingly wolfish for a big cat. "Always thinking that they can get away with anything just because they have an influential relative."
Ten minutes later, my tablet was brought in and the video logs of the event were reviewed behind closed doors in a side room. Fifteen minutes after that, the door opened and an officer came back out. Apparently they had found no evidence of editing; the footage was raw from the sensors as far as they could tell.
Derrick called up a still image from the video on his desktop holopad. It displayed the ship that had attacked us. "Is this the victim's spacecraft?" he asked Walker.
"Yes, it is," Walker replied.
The apparent leader of the local guild branch advanced the video several frames until the craft had rotated so that the underside, with the missile tubes, was facing the camera. "Looks a bit heavily armed for a freight craft, especially one that makes berth at a habitat that I just confirmed does not allow violence in self-defense." The bounty hunter started to form a response, but Derrick continued. "I mean, the lasers might be justified as anti-meteor point defense, but the missiles are a bit much, don't you think?"
Walker seemed to be gasping for words at this point, but none came. He slumped forward in defeat. "All right, all right, I'll leave Argentum and zir friends alone."
Derrick dismissed the image and began entering something that we couldn't see. "Bounty hunter Walker, you are barred from entering the area of service covered by Guild Marquez. We will also be posting to the board from which you retrieved our client's information, stating that as long as ze is a paying customer of ours, bounty hunters will not be allowed to pursue zir. The video will be mailed to every employee and executive of the Ceres Directorate with a publicly known address." The cuff around my wrist was uncoupled, and Walker was taken out of the room by a pair of officers.
"Thank you," I said. "I was a bit worried there." But as I got up and turned to leave, I felt a strong paw grab onto my tail and pull me back. I looked back and saw Derrick Marquez reaching across his desk to grab me.
"Where do you think you're going? We're not done here yet." I pulled my tail back and sat down again. "You see, when you and your buddies signed on with us, we figured that you were running from conviction for some petty theft or tax evasion or something like that and adjusted your rates accordingly." He sat back down and leaned back with another wolfish grin on his face. "Killing an executive's relative is a much more serious offense, you see. We thus incur many more expenses protecting you from bounty hunters and assassins. I'd say that we'd be justified in doubling, or even tripling your premiums."
Three thousand qcoins a day, combined with the miners' guild dues and mortgage payments? I didn't want repo men coming after us too. Not every expedition was as fruitful as the last couple we'd embarked upon; we'd likely go bankrupt within a month or two. "But you're solving that problem for good, aren't you? With the posting and the videos?"
He laughed disturbingly loudly at that statement. "I could count on one hand the number of refugees we cover who had their bounties removed by having evidence of their innocence posted by a bunch of anarchist barbarians." He held up three fingers to show what he meant. "Now, V.P. Cooper might take some flack on the local Ceres blogs for making a pirate. Maybe he'll even lose his job. But in our experience, that only means he'll resort to less-than-legal means of getting his revenge. The next parahumans to come after you might not bother trying to take you alive."
I shuddered. The thought of some camo-suited killer planting a blade in my heart or poisoning my nutrients was not a pleasant one. I supposed I could see his reasoning, but three times our current rate still seemed a bit excessive. I told him that the most we could afford was double our current payments.
"Well, then, maybe this will convince you to reconsider a bit." He called up another video from the logs backed up on my tablet. This one showed the incident as we were arriving on the bridge at the start of the battle-the one where Denal yanked me out of Aniya's slimed pouch-from an angle that quite clearly showed her more private parts. "I don't know about Ceres, but here there's a significant group of you endophiles. A lot of people think that their neurons are a bit cross-wired and have a tendency to avoid them like the plague, especially those parahumans with pouches, with the exception of a few who make a living prostituting themselves to those freaks, and they're ostracized just as badly by the rest of their kind."
I gripped the arms of my chair like my hands were hydraulic vises. I blurted out, "It's not sexual to us!" Then I amended a bit more calmly. "And I thought parahumans had no taboos."
"Yeah, that would be all nice and utopian,
now, wouldn't it?" He switched off the hologram and leaned in closer to me. "If everyone were to know what you two get up to in the bedroom and apparently on the bridge, you would be hard pressed to get a job scrubbing out sewage lines. And your friend-Aniya, is it? Well, she would probably end up having twenty of your filthy sewage scrubber colleagues inside her every night just to pay her protection money to the hookers' guild. She might even be picked up by some of the sex slavers that come through here every now and then."
That did it. I couldn't do mass sanitation work to save my life. And poor Aniya shouldn't have to live that horrible way just because she helped me relax in such a way. "Okay, okay. I'll scrape up three times the fee. Just don't include anything in the video to suggest that I like to sleep in her pouch."
"Smart move, foxy," Derrick Marquez said as he slid over a tablet with a form for the new amount for me to sign. "And don't even think of telling anyone that I blackmailed you. I, too, know the advantages of having powerful relatives." He waved to a printed-out photo on the wall behind him, which showed nine nearly identical jaguars, with only their clothes to differentiate them. In the center of the field of view sat a jaguar wearing a closely tailored suit, a scar running down his left cheek marring his features.
Nervously, I quickly applied my thumbprint to the document and left. When my crew mates arrived the next day, I practically leaped into Aniya's arms. I spent the entire night and half of the next day huddled up in her pouch, with all the security equipment within five meters of her room disabled.
Chapter 8
"A bounty hunter, seriously?" Denal sounded incredulous. "How did he even know we were here?"
It was the day after my friends had come back from their assessment trip. They'd found a decent sized chunk of something dense and grey. They hadn't checked what it was officially but the readings I'd seen suggested something in the area of osmium. And they had become certified members of the miners' guild like myself except that they would still be going on these expeditions. Though now I wasn't too sure I wanted to leave the habitat.
"He said that he tracked us thanks to the miners' guild sending messages asking for references to the Ceres Directorate," I replied, Denal looked a bit guilty about something after my statement. "Anyways," I added, "even if none of us were stupid enough to list some references on their applications, there are several financial records that would place us here: the large-scale exchange of our Ceres qcoins for Vesta's, the mortgage payments we send their way to fend off repossession, et cetera. Probably why he was in the region in the first place; no way he could have flown all the way here from Ceres in the three days since we applied to the guild."
"Not necessarily," Cole threw in. "Vesta is passing fairly close to Ceres now, and there are a lot of ships faster than ours. I'd guess that a bounty hunter would use a fast courier-class ship or maybe a military surplus interceptor if they're chasing people. And maybe we should keep running, to make it harder to find us."
"Cole, with the communication relays connecting every station in the Belt, anywhere we tried to hide would be known everywhere within hours." I found it a bit hard to believe that he was still determined to leave this place. "And most governments would have just let him take me, and you too once you'd come into port. The Marquez Guild reviewed the evidence and sent him packing, even if they tripled our rates."
"Tripled?!" Aniya exclaimed in disbelief. "Can we even afford that?"
"I don't know. Maybe. It depends on how much we can make off these jobs."
"We should move to the Wolf Guild's territory," Denal suggested. I suspected he was still a bit infatuated with that rules-bending investigator who had saved our lives on our first day in the asteroid. "I bet Olga would give us a better price than these guys."
Yep, definitely infatuated. At least he was leaving me relatively alone now.
"Odds are her progenitor would charge us just as much. And that would make the commute to and from the spaceport a regular gauntlet, where anyone who wanted to claim our bounty could go after us. Marquez at least will be able to keep us safe from bounty hunters and hit men near where we live and work." I opted not to mention the real reason, the blackmail.
"So, what are we going to do if we can't afford it?" Cole asked, with a bit of justification, but I thought he still sounded overly critical of Vesta's society.
I came up with an idea that I thought might work. "I'm not stuck on the ship for extended periods of time anymore. Maybe I could do some more analysis work for the guild while you're out mining or something." Surely the miners' guild needed all the analysts they could get if we weren't even allowed in the field.
***
A week later, I found myself in the minute apartment I'd rented, looking over job listings. It turned out that being the newest chemist in the miners; guild, despite having just as much experience as most of the "senior" members, meant that hardly any jobs were ever thrown your way. I wasn't even allowed to perform the tests on the osmium sample that my friends had brought back. That load, combined with the tungsten we had brought in on the previous run, had barely netted enough to pay the Marquez clan for another couple weeks, what with the guild's ten percent and the storage fees for the tungsten and other assorted expenses. So they were already out on another expedition to find more heavy metals for the guild to profit off.
Did I say "clan" when referring to the Marquez Protectors' Guild? Well, that was about when I started to see the Protectors' Guilds for what they truly were. To be honest, I should credit a web show that I started watching while waiting for the miners' guild to send me some work, "Crowns of Furtopia" I think it was. It was this fantasy series that took place on an alternate earth inhabited by parahumans instead of humans and technologically equivalent to tenth-century Europe. The main plotline seemed to involve these families (yes they could reproduce sexually in the fictional world of Furtopia) known alternately as "clans" or "houses," that governed various regions of the country on which the show was set. Apparently, the show had gained such a following on Vesta that some of the terminology had seeped out, and it wasn't uncommon to refer to the Protectors' Guilds as "House Wolf," or "Clan Marquez," or any of a dozen different variations on those, because the leaders of the Guilds had such large clone families. Anyways, it was an impressive piece of work. They filmed with live actors wearing replica Middle Ages clothing on board one of the few bubble-type habitats ever constructed that was pretty heavily terraformed, and they edited out the sloped ground and sky to make it look like it was actually on a planet.
Speaking of those clone families, I had been scrolling through the list of jobs that were currently open on the asteroid when I came across a listing from the Society for the Preservation of Parahuman Species. Curious, I opened the entry and found that it was for a position as a biotechnician in their cloning facility. The pay was substantial, with negotiable hours, but what really caught my attention was the line that stated, "All insurances, health, property, and Protectors' Guild, covered entirely." If that meant what I thought it meant, the job was as good as 99% pure platinum for someone like me. I might even make enough to pay for my friends' insurance. I applied immediately.
I was taken by surprise an hour later when I received a call from the SPPS on my tablet. They wanted an interview by video chat already. I opened the chat app and was greeted by the image of a large brown creature that looked halfway between a badger and a bear, a wolverine, I would later learn. I could barely see more than his head but he seemed to be wearing some sort of white lab coat or possibly a ceremonial robe of some kind with intricate designs of DNA helixes patterned up and down the lapels in gold. The interviewer directed his large brown eyes at mine and introduced himself. "Good morning Argentum. My name is Caleb Burns, and I'm here to determine if you're the type of parahuman the Society for the Preservation of Parahuman Species needs in order to continue our most worthy goal of ensuring the survival of our culture."
That was an interesting question. "The type of parahuman the
SPPS needs?" What types of parahumans was he referring to? Species of non-human genes? Skill sets? Body type? I couldn't tell what he was referring to, so I started to talk about my hobbies: "Well, I have been performing my own DNA tests using the genetic material of myself and my crewmates for about four years, attempting to find the genes that were modified to make me a neuter instead of male or female."
This Caleb being was obviously not too interested in my statement, probably because I had already listed my hobby of messing with the codes of life. "Yes, yes, but what exactly was it that persuaded you to apply for this position?"
I thought that saying "The insurance coverage" wouldn't be particularly well received, so I chose to share the other thing that had attracted me to the opening. "That advertisement, with the human picking over the remains of parahuman civilization after we've all died off. I thought it was rather inspiring."
He stared at me with an expression of surprise on his face. "Really? Those ads worked? I thought they would never convince anyone. You know, the idea of family being too foreign for most parahumans."
Family? Oh, the last scene with the clone taking care of his ailing progenitor. "I suppose some things are just embedded in our genes."
"Yes, yes, I suppose they are. The directive to propagate those genes being one of the strongest, I suppose. Would explain why the Guildmasters all rushed to support the old man when he offered them additional clones." The wolverine suddenly seemed to realize that he'd said something he hadn't intended to let slip and covered his mouth with two pairs of hands, or rather one pair of hands and one pair of paws; it seems he was a taur. Slowly, he moved his hands and paws away and continued. "Anyhow, speaking of clones, what do you think of them?"
I thought back to the vice president's clone who attempted to kill us and the Marquez clone that threatened to expose certain details of my and Aniya's lives. One's progenitors had sought disproportionate retribution for his death and the other's had apparently enabled him to extort extra money from their customer base. But I also recalled the message presented by that ad, as well as Denal's half-serious comment about our group getting a bunch of clones once we had enough to commission them all. I thought of the possibility of those powerful people's clones becoming the entirety of parahumanity within the next century. They might even become the majority within my own lifespan and make my last few years a living hell before I broke down and ceased to be. "I believe that we need to think about our future. And clones are the future for our kind."
The Pride of Parahumans Page 6