We waited almost two hours before they showed up. As they came, Denal and our other bodyguards held out portable IR, UV, and radar scanners to make sure they weren't accompanied by more than the four fully armored men we could see, as if they needed more. They were Jerome Marquez, Georgia Wolf, and a ram who went by the name of Nicholas Oak, all dressed in suits that I guessed concealed body armor, as well as a familiar-looking savannah cat dressed in the white robe of the SPPS hierarchy. A very familiar-looking savannah cat, I realized, as he sat down and shot me a small wink.
"Maximus!" I exclaimed in a moment of recognition.
"Yes. Father thought that you would be more inclined to trust the one of us you already knew best."
I looked around at the other negotiators. Olga and her mother were staring at one another with expressions of mutual disapproval, while Jerome Marquez was shooting Denal a look that couldn't be interpreted as anything less than murderous intent. Harvey and Nicholas on the other hand, seemed to be studying one another, attempting to guess one another's next move, I supposed.
I turned back to the Griggs representative. "How can I be sure that you're really Maximus? There are, what, six of you? And Octavius helped your dad shoot me out into space and fried my subvocal comm."
Maximus withdrew at that accusation. "Seriously? We knew dad gave him some help passing the entry exams but I didn't know he was assisting in executions." Noticing that everyone at the table had turned to stare at him, he cleared his throat and addressed my question. "Anyhow, I could remind you that you showed me the mutation in the promoter to MOR10X-6 in the first place. Or that I was the one who told you all that stuff about sexual reproduction's benefits and gave you the backup I'd made of the data Dad made you delete."
The others on his side of the table turned on him immediately. "You did that?!" Jerome Marquez sputtered. "You're the one who gave this creature the means to tear down the very foundations of the society we've worked so hard to build?!"
Olga threw in her own comment. "When the foundation is rotten, it needs to be torn down. And this society is founded on the worst form of government known to humanity."
Georgia Wolf leaned across the table to glower at her clone. "We have been working our hardest to treat our clients with the respect they deserve." She pointed to Denal. "We even took in that murderer when he gave us evidence that he had been framed."
Denal cowered behind his mate at this statement. Olga only laughed at it. "Please. I know that you only decided to defend him in order to use him as a bargaining chip with Marquez at some point." I could see her rolling her eyes as she added. "And I've seen some of the stuff my sisters have gotten away with."
"So what does Jakob want?" I cut in, not particularly caring for this little family reunion that was interrupting the peace talks we so desperately wanted at this point.
"Right," Maximus started. "He wants you all off this rock." I just stared at him blankly for a few seconds. "He's chartered a fleet of passenger liners to move you and all your supporters to Ceres."
"An entire fleet?" I asked incredulously. "For just a few hundred of us? Sounds a bit expensive."
Nicholas Oak finally spoke up. "It's not just the small army you have gathered here. We're estimating that with all the rioters scattered across the asteroid and the non-violent followers of yours, there are possibly five thousand 'reproductionists,' as some of us have started to call them."
"Five. Thousand." I had no idea there were so many parahumans who believed me, much less that they were willing to fight for the right to use my invention.
"Yes," Maximus confirmed. "And Dad wants them all out of Vesta by the end of the week. So badly that he'll spend a small fortune to get them out of his way."
"Sounds like a very generous offer," I mused. "But I'm afraid I can't go to Ceres, as I'm sure you can recall why."
"Then go to Hygeia or something. I don't care so long as you're not interfering with our rule over these habitats." Marquez's statement seemed rather angry, but it sounded sincere, like he really thought that this was the best plan for dealing with us, which actually made me suspicious.
"We can order the ships to go anywhere within their range," Maximus stated. I perked up at the word "we." He seemed to notice, because he then said, "I'm coming with you."
He pulled at his SPPS robe and began to tear it off. "I no longer feel safe here," he said as he tossed the discarded robe to one of the bodyguards.
We stared in amazement as the now naked feline walked around the table to stand next to us. Our own guards training their guns on him.
I turned back to the remaining Guild negotiators. "Tell Jakob we accept his offer." I moved to stand up, wincing a little as the hole in my side was forced to bend. "And I believe that concludes our meeting for today. Goodbye."
Georgia Wolf, Jerome Marquez, and Nicholas Oak gave us a last parting look of displeasure before getting up to leave. Once they were gone, Olga turned to Maximus. "What are you thinking?! You're a clone of Argen's sworn enemy entering a camp full of people who want to overthrow your father! How long do you think you'll survive here?!"
Max grimaced as he tried to formulate an answer. Finally he settled on this: "You're a clone of one of my dad's lapdogs. They seem to accept you just fine."
"They know that I'm HoundOfGod; they're well aware that I'm on their side," Olga responded rather emphatically. "And for the record, House Wolf has a reputation as one of the… the…" her gaze drifted downwards as she trailed off. Suddenly, she slammed her palm over her eyes and said. "Somebody give him some pants; that's very distracting."
At this command, Denal walked up behind his mate and put his arms around her possessively. A low hissing sound began to utter from his throat. Seeking to diffuse the situation, I undid my kilt and held it out to Maximus. Now everyone's eyes were on me instead. "It's not like I have anything to hide," I retorted. Then I moved to change the subject. "So, Max, what's the catch that you didn't want to talk about in front of the goons?"
As Maximus struggled to put on the kilt, he spoke again. "Well, they didn't tell me anything, but after seeing that video of yours, where he confessed to engineering my grand-progenitor's demise, I expected that he had somehow sabotaged the ships he chartered."
Harvey, Denal, and two of our bodyguards mouths dropped open in shock. I had expected as much though, and if Olga was surprised, she didn't show it.
"And what do you suggest we do about it?" I asked.
Max shrugged. "I do have quite a few qcoins in my personal wallet." He held up his wristpad, which, aside from my kilt was the only thing he was wearing. "I might be able to purchase some old freighters and habitation modules to take us wherever we decide to go."
"Let me see," I said, and he pulled up the qcoin wallet on his pad. I read the number, and my eyes went wide open in shock. "This may be enough for the habitat modules and a down payment on a junker freighter to carry them. We would need a lot more to buy one outright. And it might be enough to transport 3,000 people."
"Well, how many ships do our supporters have?" Denal asked. "We might be able to cram a dozen people into our ship, and I think we have the capacity to haul enough modules for twenty more."
"At the moment," I said, "I'm more concerned about where we'd go. You and I cannot return to Ceres, and I get the feeling that these people will want to follow us wherever we go."
"How about Pallas?" We turned to Harvey. This was the first time we'd heard him speak since the negotiations began. "It's pretty close in size to Vesta, but there are no permanent settlements due to its erratic orbit. Any colonists would be cut off from the majority of the Belt for months at a time."
"But that happens to be what we want now isn't it?" I stated. "But how would we get there if there's no permanent settlements?"
"I own a small cargo hauler," Harvey replied. "I think I could transport maybe fifty people in habitat modules. And to answer your question, Denal, the people down here have at least partial ownership of maybe five mi
ning ships like yours and eight cargo ships of various sizes. We could load them up with habitat modules, use the mining ships to land them on the surface of Pallas, and dig tunnels for more permanent habitation-or seal up the ones already dug by prospectors."
"You've thought this out, haven't you?" I suggested.
"Always helps to have an escape plan," the horse told us. "But if that sheep was telling the truth about there being nearly five thousand of us out there, we are going to need that freighter this clone was talking about." He pointed at Maximus.
I looked at Maximus as if expecting him to do something. Finally I told him, "Transfer the money to Olga. We're going shopping."
Chapter 16
We found a trans-system rated freighter older than me for a down payment of a mere one million qcoins, about half of what Maximus Griggs had given us. The dealer took some persuasion to give it to a bunch of "zealots who would be taking it far beyond any resemblance of civilized space," though. And to be fair, there was a decent chance that we wouldn't be able to make very many of the quarterly payments on it.
The habitat modules, equipped with cabins, carbon dioxide scrubbers, and algae tanks sufficient to support two to twenty people apiece, were much easier to acquire, though most of the ones we could find were intended for temporary mining camps rather than building a long-term settlement. Just to be safe, we also bought some inflatable air tanks to give us extra space to move around in once we got to the planetoid.
When Olga posted our plan online, we got over four thousand replies expressing interest in leaving with us. They brought another pair of mining ships and a trio of cargo ships with them. It took three days to find all the ships and equipment our little colony would need to get started, followed by another week to prepare it all for the journey. It was during this step that the first problems began to emerge.
Four days from our scheduled time of departure, I found myself and Olga in one of the maintenance crawlspaces on our "new" freighter while Denal showed us something he had spotted while certifying it as spaceworthy. The object was a small cube about ten centimeters to a side and welded onto one of the support struts. "What is it?" I asked.
"Cutting charge." Said Denal curtly. "At a pre-set time or a signal from a detonator it will send a blast of hot plasma through this beam and sever it neatly. Could cause the entire ship to fold in half if it blew during or before a burn."
"They sabotaged it this quickly?" Olga asked. "We've only had it a week! Who would have been able to put it in place?"
"I think I know," said Denal. "He may not have picked this one out, but Maximus was there when we bought it."
"It was his money we used," Olga objected. "He had the right to know what we were using it for."
"There you go again!" Denal swung himself towards his mate in the cramped space of the crawlway. "Ever since he joined us, you've been defending him every time I suggest that something's going on." He drew in right up against her face. "And don't think I haven't seen you sneaking peeks at his butt."
"Jealous?" Olga sniggered.
Exactly what was going on? It was starting to remind me of some human movie I'd seen a while ago, though exactly which one escaped my mind for a while. Then I registered a strange musky scent coming from the feuding couple, and they suddenly began to grapple with one another, bouncing around in the tiny space banging into the walls. As I watched, I noticed their mouths attempting to close around one another's, biting each other's muzzles. Then I spotted Olga pulling Denal's dick out of his pants, and it clicked. "You two, what are you doing?!"
Both of them craned their necks to look back at me. "It's called a 'lover's spat' or something like that." Denal told me. "You'd know if you had any hormones."
"Would those hormones by any chance be making you possessive of Olga and Olga interested in other, more powerfully built males?" I suggested.
"What? I'm not attracted to Maximus!" Olga objected. This caused Denal to turn back to her and glower. "I get so hot when you act jealous," she continued, "so it's more your fault for setting me off like that."
The pheromones those two were giving off were starting to saturate the already stale air. It was starting to make me feel strange, like there was a tightness down where my genitals should have been, an itch I couldn't scratch. My breathing rate and heart beats increased and I felt my temperature rising. I had to get out of here quickly.
"Denal," I said, "find someone to help you remove this thing and look for others. Jakob didn't need Maximus; the sale was public record, and there were two days before we came into possession for him to get one of his stooges to plant bombs. Olga, don't put this on the nets until we've left. If I were Jakob and knew that the first plan failed I'd put a backup plan in place as quickly as possible." I then bent myself awkwardly to turn around and leave.
***
Leaving Denal and Olga's proximity didn't cause the effect of the pheromones they'd been producing to wear off as quickly as I wanted. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my fur and clothes were soaked in it. The flustered feeling persisted as I wound my way through the miniature canvas town set up in the spaceport down to the tent set up for Maximus Griggs. When I found him, he was lying on his inflated mattress, reading something on a tablet.
"'Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant,'" he said, apparently reading out loud. He set aside the tablet as I bent down to enter his temporary domicile. "Maybe if the original colonists had read this, we could have avoided this whole situation."
I sat down next to him and picked up the tablet; it showed an image of what looked like yellowed parchment covered with a rather exotic font that I hadn't seen before. "Interesting choice of reading material," I commented.
"Discourses on Livy," Maximus explained. "Supposedly, it's about how to run a republic."
"A what?"
"I'm still trying to figure that out. I started out looking up human political literature but the books all contradicted one another. One said that capitalism was the driver of progress; another claimed that it was a tool of the upper class to oppress the workers." He shook his head in disgust. "I tried searching for an author who studied politics like it was a science instead of trying to forward some ideology, and it came up with an early sixteenth century Italian named Niccolò Machiavelli."
"Seriously? They haven't done a rigorous study of politics in nearly six hundred years?"
"Seriously," Max affirmed as he took the tablet back. "He wrote a much shorter book called The Prince that detailed how feudal principalities were run. If I hadn't known that my father wasn't allowed to consume any human media, I would have thought he read it."
"You are not making me a king," I said, shifting across the mattress towards him. "Or a queen for that matter. A crown wouldn't fit well with these ears." I held one pyramidal ear in my left hand and showed it to him.
"Well, this book seems to be a bit in favor of something closer to democracy. Look here." He pointed to the beginning of one paragraph. "'The demands of a free populace, too, are very seldom harmful to liberty, for they are due either to the populace being oppressed or to the suspicion that it is going to be oppressed…"
"Well, then, you keep reading, and maybe we can set up one of these republics on Pallas." The depression in the air mattress sank down, and I found myself sliding closer to him. Unconsciously, my right hand apparently wandered in the direction of his crotch, because he jumped slightly in shock.
"Jeez, Argen!" he yelled at me. "Are you trying to castrate me or something?!"
I realized that my prosthetic hand, which I still had trouble controlling, was attempting to cup his testicles. I apologized and slowly withdrew the hand. "Would you rather have my normal hand?" I flipped over and shot my left hand down his pants.
"What is up with you?" he asked. "Ever since you came in, you've been acting like you're drunk or something." He sniffed my breath for traces of alc
ohol or other intoxicants.
"Oh." I suddenly remembered my whole justified to myself reason for coming here. "Denal and Olga were fighting a bit over you. Denal seems to think you're trying to…" I trailed off. Even if Maximus wasn't still working for his father, there was a chance that if he knew about the bombs, Jakob would find out anyways. So I finished with, "…steal Olga from him. And Olga said that was ridiculous, but he was so hot when he got jealous. Apparently, the amount of pheromones they were giving off as they fought and started to have sex then and there was enough to affect even those of us without gonads."
"You do smell a bit like them," Max purred as he reached down towards my hand. I felt his cock swell and grow hard in my grasp.
"Feels like it's working on you too." I moved to straddle him and began to unzip his pants.
"I have noticed that my sex drive seems to have increased since I took the mutagen." He started to help me remove those pants and pull them downwards. "If everyone out there is this horny, it could be a problem."
"We'll worry about that later." I then clamped my muzzle against his and thrust my tongue in. My hands guided his cock into my rectum.
"Wait." He forced me away for a second and spat in his hands, rubbed it around, and spread it over his penis. "Afraid I don't have any proper lubricant, but I think that might do for now."
"I didn't even know you needed lubrication," I commented with a bit of surprise. "Explains why it hurt so badly that time me and Denal tried it."
"Oh, so that panda has been in here too?" he asked, grabbing onto my thighs and pulling it down onto him.
The Pride of Parahumans Page 12