"Oh, Maximus, I was just looking for-" I cut myself off as I realized that it was not Maximus Griggs but rather his progenitor, with a rather displeased look on his face. "Jakob, sorry; I was expecting your son."
"Was he the one who put you up to this?!" He demanded, angrily. "Did he tell you to release the information about that gene so he could wrest control from me?!"
"No," I said somewhat untruthfully, "it was my decision after two of my friends were murdered by one of the Protectors you claimed you kept in line."
"What exactly are you implying, Argentum?"
"I'm saying that if some Marquez killed my friends over high coverage rates, that tells me that either you lack the control over the Clans that you claim to have," I sucked in a breath and fiddled with some of my vest buttons as I spoke to him "or you ordered their deaths yourself."
He looked slightly surprised at my statement, but not overly so. "What makes you say that?"
I straightened up and started to circle slowly around to the exit while keeping my distance from him. "You told me that you were preventing the Clans from acting like feudal nobles."
"I did," he admitted. "But I can't be held responsible for every little thing they do. I may have told Marquez to increase your friends' rates a little, but I did not expect them to get violent. It's not my fault if he had to defend himself."
"He had cyanide darts," I replied. "He could have used less-than-lethal paralytics, but he shot them with enough poison to kill a baseline elephant." Then I thought of something else he was undeniably responsible for. "And your clones enabled the Guild leaders to make their own allies and cement their positions in place. You and your progenitor are the whole reason why the Protectors' Guilds are known as Houses and Clans in pop culture."
"I wouldn't give the original Griggs too much credit. The discounts for the Guild leaders were my idea. He wanted to charge everyone the same price and even offer financing for lower-income parahumans. He thought my idea would reduce the genetic diversity of the asteroid to levels that were somehow dangerous. That was why he had to go."
I stared at him in horror. "You killed your own father?!"
"It's not like I shot or stabbed him. A few loose bolts in his personal shuttle, a few holes in his spacesuit, some loose wires in his radio… All I needed to do was make a fatal accident a little more possible, and he was as good as dead."
He turned as if he had suddenly realized something. "And now that you know that, you should probably die as well." He began to draw something from under his robe.
"And if the one who brought down your monopoly dies suddenly, what do you think the blogs will say?" I asked. He stopped and stared at me as I continued. "As it is, most people seem to think that the mutation is a joke. Of course that will change once the first few babies are born, but I suspect that my death would convince some of the skeptics that there truly is something to my research."
"Fine." He released the handle of whatever weapon he had and instead pulled out a mini-tablet. As he scrolled down the menu, he said, "Your employment with the Society for the Preservation of Parahuman Species is now terminated. If you are seen within 100 meters of this building again, our in-house security will shoot to kill." He showed me the screen that now listed my employment status as "terminated." "Now get out."
I picked up my trenchcoat and threw it back on. As I left, I looked at one of the buttons on my vest, in particular the blinking light on the back side.
***
To: HoundOfGod
From: GoldFoxie
Subject: You should find this interesting
This is Argentum, you know, the one you more or less exposed yesterday? You didn't have any right to do that, I was fired and almost killed by Jakob Griggs. I realize that eventually the secret would have come out, but I would have preferred at least a week to make a run for it before my life was truly in danger.
That said, I see the value of having someone such as yourself on my side, especially as you are testing out my project yourself. I wish the best of luck to you and your partner.
Attached is a video I recorded earlier today. I hope that you will feature it on your blog tonight.
Chapter 13:
The next day, the planetoid erupted into chaos. There were riots in the streets. Protesters gathered outside the SPPS and the Protectors' offices. I stayed in my apartment, having no desire to go out on the streets Odds were that someone would recognize me and either hang me (as difficult as that would be in this gravity) or fawn over me. Neither option was particularly appealing.
It was while I sat there, watching the chaos I had wrought, that I was caught off guard.
One minute, I was lying back watching the riots and attempting to hide under the covers while keeping my eyes just barely uncovered; the next, a team of assassins in camo-suits was materializing in my bedroom. As the mixed-species team surrounded me and attempted to grab me, I drew my gun, which I had hidden under a pillow after Jakob threatened me, and squeezed off three shots as I attempted to dive for the window. The first shot hit one of the assassins- what looked like a bear or a large cat; I couldn't really tell- in the chest, but the other two went wide as the explosions issuing from the barrel threw me against the wall. I was momentarily stunned by the impact, giving one of the thugs enough time to shove a drug spray into my mouth.
I felt a faint sting for a moment as the nanoparticles burrowed into the roof of my muzzle; then numbness began to spread across my face. I made a brief attempt to make a subvocal call, but I couldn't feel my jaw anymore. Then my vision blurred. I felt myself slipping away. Before succumbing to unconsciousness, I saw the hit team open a bag made of active camo material, and one of the massive parahumans dragging me towards it.
***
After what felt like just moments, I came to in the bag. It was dark and rough with power cords lining the interior and digging into my sides. I started to struggle, attempting to wiggle my way out of the narrow hole, when I was unceremoniously dumped out onto a metal bed. Two guards held my arms and legs down while a feline of some sort dressed in surgical scrubs poked me in the throat with a pair of sharp needles. I felt my body course with an electrical shock and heard a snap and pop of frying circuitry. Willing myself to breathe again once my limbs stopped twitching, I demanded, still somewhat numbly, "Whaaa?"
"My more obedient son here just disabled your subvocal implant," I heard a rather unpleasantly familiar voice state. "Octavius was more inclined toward the medical practices, though he had some trouble passing the surgeon's guild entry exam- something about his ethics."
The doctor next to me, whose serval spots I could now discern underneath his mask, snorted as if his progenitor had said something funny. "Yeah, he had a little chat with the entry board. Now I help him out whenever he needs some chop shop work done."
And Maximus came from this gene pool? I was starting to wonder if someone had spiked his biofab tank with something. "What do you want now?"
Jakob's face suddenly popped into my field of vision. "I thought about what you said," he told me. "You said that if you died after revealing the big secret, it would lend credibility to the idea that your treatment worked. And then you put a video of me threatening you online. Now I'm thinking that I need to limit the damage you can do by making you disappear entirely."
The thugs picked me up and carried me over to a large metallic cylinder with a hatch on the side. "This," Jakob continued, "is a canister for the mass driver that was built here on Vesta during the last few years of the corporate era. It was never used, but it would have shot steel cans full of ore back to Earth for processing."
The two goons dropped me into the cylinder and started to shut the lid. I attempted to scramble out before it was closed, but all that accomplished was a heavy steel door slamming on my right hand. I let out a yelp in pain, and they opened it just enough for me to pull my hand back in. I couldn't see the damage but I could feel blood oozing out and I was pretty sure some bones were broken.
I seethed with rage at Jakob's speech. "Seems a bit over-complicated Griggs. Planning a new career as a spy movie villain?"
"I want you to suffer," he replied punctually.
Then I felt the cylinder moving as it was conveyed into the loading chamber of the giant railgun that the corporations had intended to use for sending the Belt's wealth back home. I crouched down in what I hoped was the rear of the cylinder and waited for it to fire. There was no bang, no explosion like my gun emitted, just a sudden acceleration that pushed me back into the wall. It felt like it liquefied my organs. I realized seconds later that that wasn't quite the case. I was still alive, for one thing.
I floated, weightless now that the acceleration was over, in the cylinder. I couldn't see a thing, but I felt my way forward, pushing myself off the back wall gently. When I came to the opposite side, I stopped myself with my hand, forgetting that I'd crushed it minutes earlier. Pain shot up my arm, and I suspect that a few of the fast-forming scabs that my augmented platelets had formed (bleeding is a tad more serious in microgravity or a sealed spacesuit than it is on Earth, you know) broke open. I cradled my arm as I drifted slowly back. I guess air resistance slowed me down to a near standstill, because I found myself floating in empty space. I still couldn't see anything, but I could breathe still, so I guessed I was somewhere in the middle of the giant can, and it still hadn't exploded.
I took a moment to think about my situation. I had been naked when they captured me, so I had none of my usual wearable electronics to signal for help. I tried to use my subvocal comm and got a nasty shock for my efforts; apparently Jakob was telling the truth about having fried my implant.
So I was drifting somewhere in the middle of space, on a ballistic path to Earth, in a can with no life support that was going to explode in a few minutes, with no way to call for help. I'm pretty sure I broke down sobbing at some point. I don't know how long it took-there were no clocks, and when your life is in danger, time has a habit of passing extremely slowly-but it felt like I was crying for hours.
Eventually I got a hold of myself and started contemplating my situation. There had been no question that I was going to die someday; I had just hoped that my death would be a lot later than now. I could survive maybe an hour after the pod broke apart, conscious for most of that time, and this cylinder had maybe a couple hours' worth of oxygen in it. Too bad it was set to blow in one more hour.
What would happen next, I wondered? Burning up in the atmosphere of a planet I had never known but had given rise to my ancestors, I supposed. But I wouldn't be able to witness my meteoric cremation; my brain would have shut down. What would dying be like? I had never subscribed to any religious beliefs, but I knew that some humans thought that at death, their consciousness separated from their body somehow and moved to another universe of some kind, where they gained a new body and were either rewarded or punished for eternity according to how they had lived their previous life. Others believed that your consciousness was transferred to a new-born organism at death, so you had a new chance to achieve some form of enlightenment, whatever that meant. And of course, many others believed that there was nothing after death; your brain simply shut down for good, and that was that.
I was starting to think that death would be like simply falling into a deep dreamless sleep from which you would never wake…
Then the can burst open. There were blinding flashes of light above and below me that blew away the ends of the cylinder, followed by streaks of flame running down the walls. The body of the cylinder flew away in four separate directions. I looked ahead of me; the view was nothing but stars, burning away in the endless night. If I craned my neck a little, I could see the sun, a big, blinding ball of yellow light. I chose to look at the stars again, just hanging there.
I recalled that most elements heavier than helium were formed when stars exploded in supernovae. I was pretty sure that most of my body was composed of heavier elements, which must have meant that countless stars had to die for me to ever come into being. I thought of what would happen to the atoms that made up every molecule of my being. No doubt most of the organic compounds that composed the vast majority of my body would be burned off into water and carbon dioxide, which might be absorbed by some plant, which would be eaten by a cow or something that would be cut up into steaks for some human or maybe a rich parahuman. I would be part of another thinking being, but my memories, my personality, what made me distinct from everyone else, would be gone.
I was so wrapped up in my morbid thoughts that I almost didn't notice the harpoon streaking past me, a glint of light that shot out to my left, then retracted. I was still trying to think of what it had been when the second harpoon struck me in the small of my back. There was a stabbing pain and suddenly a large spear point jutted out of my stomach, or rather through my liver on the opposite side. Prongs extended from the sides of the point, and it pulled me back towards the source of the intruding weapon. What was going on now? Had Jakob Griggs changed his mind and decided that death by massive organ damage was worse than a slow death from anoxia?
I was still wondering as the airlock doors closed in front of me. Then a suited parahuman glided up to me and detached the head of the harpoon from the cable, pulling it the rest of the way through me. Looking at the gaping hole in my belly, they pulled another of those familiar spray bottles out and gave me a squirt in the mouth. This time I happily accepted the sweet embrace of unconsciousness.
***
When I came to, I was tied down on a zero-g bed with a series of tubes sticking out of me. One notable tube was covering the giant hole in my gut. Above me hung an octopoid assembly of shining plastic arms. I could have sworn it was an autodoc, but those were ludicrously expensive; only big-time executives on Earth could afford them, or maybe Griggs could.
Hence my surprise when instead of a sadistic savannah cat a bleary-eyed red panda rushed up to my side.
"Denal?!" I shouted in his face. Well, it didn't sound like shouting to me, but I reviewed the video later. He started rapidly moving his mouth like he was talking but no words were coming out. "Speak up! I can't hear a word you're saying!"
He looked shocked at my statement. Then he seemed to remember something, drew out a pair of augmented reality glasses, and held them out to me. I reached out with my left hand (my right appeared to be encased in some sort of device) and put them on. Denal made the mouth movements again and text appeared in my field of view. "Okay, can you hear-I mean see-my words now?"
"I can read the text on these glasses! What is going on?!"
More movements, more text. "Your eardrums suffered damage from the sudden exposure to vacuum. You're lucky the gengineers strengthened our lungs, or you wouldn't even be able to speak."
"Where am I?" It didn't make much sense for Jakob to hire Denal to keep me alive after nearly killing me. Was he a prisoner too?
"Don't you recognize your own ship, Argentum?" More text, but Denal's mouth wasn't moving. He turned towards the door and I followed his gaze to see another one of the parahumans I least expected to see: it was Olga Wolf, the vigilante who had saved our lives on our first day in Vesta, or maybe one of her sisters. "Of course," she said, "I made some modifications after my house bought it from the Marquez Clan. Though I suppose, since you and panda boy here are technically part owners, we shouldn't have been able to buy it at all. Probably why we got it so cheap."
"What do you want?!" I demanded. If she was working for Jakob she was certainly going to a lot of trouble just to punish me.
She cringed a little at my words. "Stop shouting. I know you're deaf but that doesn't mean we c
an't hear you perfectly fine." Shouting? "Anyway, didn't you ever wonder just who HoundOfGod was?"
"You?" I asked incredulously, trying to sound a bit softer this time. "The rebellious clone of one of the major Clans is the net activist who believed me immediately?" Then I thought of something. "Wait, if you're HoundOfGod, then that means you've tried out the treatment. Does it work?"
She smiled a bit at my inquiry. "The autodoc suggests that it'll be a month before my first oogenesis cycle and Denal's spermatogenesis are complete. I guess we'll know then."
I blinked a couple times in shock. "Wait, you and Denal?!" Figures that lech would be one of the first parahumans to father a child.
Denal's fur stood up a bit in embarrassment. "It's a bit of a long story." He said.
I gestured with the machine covering my right wrist to the hose leading into my guts. "I've got nowhere to go for… how long will I be hooked up to these things, anyway?" I addressed the question to Olga, it was her equipment, after all.
"The bioprinter will take about a week to complete your new liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and lengths of large and small intestine." She looked sorry about the massive damage her harpoon had to inflict in order to save my life. "Your cochleal implants and prosthetic hand should be ready in a couple more hours, though."
Prosthetic? I looked back down at the thing where my right hand should have been, and it occurred to me that I couldn't feel that hand at all. The damage must have been more severe than I had noticed. "So, how did you two end up together?"
"Well," Denal said before Olga could say anything more, "after I was framed for two counts of murder, I ran as fast as I could for Wolf territory. A few minutes later, I was caught by two of their drones and a ridiculously muscular coyote enforcer. They took me back to their base, and one of her sisters told me that they were considering extraditing me to either Marquez or Ceres. Thinking fast, I gave her the camera hidden in my button and told them to review the evidence."
The Pride of Parahumans Page 10