The Pride of Parahumans (2 page)

No, sorry. Not really.

I cut the horny Asian raccoon off of my
channel. Seriously I thought pandas were going extinct from lack of
sex or something. I tried not to think of his commentary as I
helped Aniya set up the burrower. We set it up more or less exactly
above the masscon, whatever it was, and switched it on. The drill
bits at the bottom of the machine dug into the asteroid and every
few minutes a rock was magnetically accelerated out the top,
pushing it slightly deeper in and flinging the fragments far out of
the way. Every hour or so I opened a hatch to siphon off some dust
for analysis. After the first hour all I could see was an increase
in the iron content, as well as some minute quartz and agate
crystals. The second hour I noticed the dust was starting to
reflect more light between 570 and 590 nm in wavelength.
Don't
get too excited
, I told the others still linked to my comm
channel,
there's a lot of things it could be, likely just some
pyrite
.

"I'm still going to be looking up the price."
Cole couldn't use subvocal comms like we did, something about the
avian voice box being much differently shaped than the more-or-less
human ones we had. "Just in case it is what everyone but you is
thinking."

And I think it's time to turn this thing
off and dig in by hand and paw.
Aniya turned off the mass
driver and pushed it over. She then began to shuffle around in the
dust with her forepaws, looking a bit like a baseline dog burying a
bone.

I picked up a rock hammer and inched towards
the two-meter wide hole.
I need a large sample for a density
index.
I explained as I attempted to pry out a rock that looked
like it would weigh maybe two kilograms. Once I had it loose I
carried it over to the rover, there I calibrated a balance to the
minute gravity of the asteroid and weighed the rock, quite a bit
more than 2 kilos, promising. Then I did a few laser scans to
determine the stone's exact dimensions, which I then plugged into
my suit's computer with a series of blinks and bites on different
teeth oriented to various keys. I saw the results.
Well, it
could be gold
, I subvocalized,
or maybe platinum, or
lead.
Gold was one of the most discussed elements in the Belt
these days, when the corporations had started to mine the asteroids
the price of gold had sunk to levels unseen in human history. But
when the revolution occurred gold prices soared above the peak
they'd reached during the early 21st century economic recession,
until the parahuman colonies declared that they'd be exporting
minerals to earth and the price started to decline again. Currently
it was hovering somewhere around 50 Cerean qcoins per gram, not
quite a fortune but still a significant amount of money for a small
mining outfit like ourselves. I personally didn't understand why
the humans thought it was so valuable, sure there were some
chemical and electronic applications for it, but the market value
couldn't account for those practical uses alone. I could understand
why platinum was worth more though, a lot of life-support systems
used it in catalytic converters. Still, lead was worth something
too, a lot of habitats built radiation shelters out of it. I
signaled the excavation bot to unfold and prepare to bring up the
pieces of the masscon.

The spider-like robot walked over to the site
on four spindly legs and positioned itself over the hole where
Aniya was digging. As she exposed the concentration of mass that
had drawn us to the asteroid a four-pronged claw lowered itself on
a winch down the hole. She guided it over one of the larger exposed
stones she had drilled out of the asteroid and signaled for it to
pull up. As it walked over to the rover I stole a glance at the
piece of rock it had pulled out, though mostly grey stone I could
see a few spots where the yellow metal shone through. There was a
lot of it, three big rocks and dozens of smaller ones, a total of
almost a quarter of a metric ton once we'd taken off most of the
worthless silica and iron. Over twelve million Ceres qcoins worth
of gold, we might even be able to pay off the mortgage on our
ship.

If we had known the trouble those rocks would
bring us we might have just left them there.

Chapter 2

It was dark, I could feel myself enclosed on
all sides in sticky wet mucus and veined flesh. But I didn't feel
scared or alarmed, rather I felt calmed by the encasing pressure,
safe and secure. I moved myself deeper into the flesh pocket as I
felt the gentle massage of my host's pulse. But then I was thrown
out of my serenity by a loud siren interspersed with Cole's
frightened screeching.

"Everyone to the bridge, we've been hit by
laser fire, I repeat we are under attack!" I could feel Aniya jump
off her bunk and propel herself down the hallway with me still
inside her pouch. It must have looked odd to anyone watching, a fat
half-naked wolf taur with a second tail sticking out from under her
groin, which was covered by a pair of taur-sized panties you
perverts.

"What is going on?" It felt strange to hear
Aniya's voice echo through her body like that, the extra pair of
lungs in her lower body allow her quite the reverb.

"About a minute ago something fried one of
our aft sensor pods. There wasn't any indication of a radiation
storm and I picked up a heat signature 200 kilometers in that
direction. So I took us behind the nearest asteroid." Cole's voice
carried none of his usual jocularity, he was truly scared. "Where's
Argen, ze is better at reading these sensors."

At that moment I felt a hand grab my tail.
"Found zir," came Denal's voice as he yanked me out of the pouch. I
burst out in a cloud of mucus and reached around to grab him for
pulling me out of my hiding place, making sure to coat his fur in a
nice layer of pouch slime. He cringed at the feeling and let me
float there next to Aniya's backside. "Makers, for an asexual being
you have some odd kinks Silver."

"Later." I did not feel inclined to explain,
for at least the tenth time, that I did not consider my fondness
for the interior of my crewmate to be sexual. Though to be honest I
sometimes wondered if my adrenals did provide enough hormones for a
proper sex drive and my brain had redirected it somewhere away from
my lack of traditional reproductive organs. Anyways I wiped my
hands off on Denal's coveralls and jumped over to a tablet to call
up the sensor logs. Sure enough, they showed a heat signature
following us since we left the asteroid where we had picked up the
gold chunk. Unfortunately it didn't tell me much, it seemed we
hadn't bothered much with active radar on that side of the ship,
and now we were completely blind in that area thanks to our
pursuer's precision shot. "Worthless, we need a better view of them
to even know what we're up against. Can you try sending a drone out
to the edge of the rock we're hiding behind?"

"Yeah, yeah, sure I'll launch one." Denal
tried to avoid putting himself in contact with the slime I'd left
on him as he went over to his console. We had half a dozen survey
drones that Denal would frequently send out on arcs around
asteroids we thought looked promising. They'd circle the rock a
couple times, playing their radar over it and taking snapshots of
the surface in multiple wavelengths, and transmit it back to our
ship, saving a lot of time on prospecting for ores. He shot one out
to swing around the asteroid we were currently using for cover and
programmed it to scan outwards rather than at the asteroid.
Meanwhile me and Aniya called up manual controls for our primary
collision avoidance coilguns, hitting a stray rock with a
fast-moving iron slug tended to get it out of the way a lot faster
than melting it with a beam of concentrated light, and anyways
lasers were a bit out of our price range.

The drone reached the far side of the
asteroid and transmitted back a view of the region of space beyond.
Radar imaging finally brought me a view of what I had been looking
for in the first place, a small (relatively speaking, we were about
twice as large thanks to the need for mining equipment and landers)
cargo ship covered with laser turrets and a pair of long tubes that
I had no reference for. It didn't seem to be moving as we scanned
it. "It's like it's just waiting to see what we do."

Aniya had the first suggestion, "Maybe
they're moving when we're not watching. Why don't we send the drone
back out to see if they've come any closer." Denal punched in the
commands and the drone flew back out to take a second look. It
hadn't moved, however there was now another, smaller and much
faster object moving out towards us.

"Incoming missile!" Cole screeched as the
object swung around the asteroid heading straight for us. Panicked
I switched the auto-tracking on my turret back on just as Aniya did
the same. Registering the small, fast incoming object as a
collision threat the automated systems sent streams of darts at the
missile. Mere seconds from impact one of the darts ruptured the
missile's fuel tanks and triggered an explosion that took out the
explosive weapon entirely and sent shrapnel flying everywhere,
thankfully not fast enough to do much damage to our ship.

I didn't understand how they had been able to
lock onto us from the far side of an asteroid but before I could
think of something another missile came in from the opposite side
of the previous one. Aniya just barely managed to shoot that one
down as well. Noticing the drone following the missile it came to
me. "Denal, shut down the transmission to that drone! They're
tracking it!"

The panda switched off the transmitter, then
as an afterthought shut down all of our transmitters just to be
safe. Now we could see nothing of the attacking ship, until either
us or the pirates moved to our side of the asteroid we were
blind.

"Now what?" Denal asked, evidently a bit
scared now that we had just barely escaped death twice. I thought
it was obvious, we wait for the pirates to get bored and leave.
Unfortunately that wasn't the case, after half an hour of sitting
there the enemy ship came up around the asteroid and began to
approach us. As it drew nearer I saw docking arms unfold from the
underside of the miniature freighter.

I panicked again, hastily aiming the gauss
turret I was controlling at the pirate vessel I blasted away with a
stream of iron. I saw a docking claw tear itself off and fly out
into space, a laser turret shattered into a million shards of
glass, then there was a puff of gas out of one of the holes I made
in the main hull of the ship. But it still kept coming at us.
"Move, move, move!"

Cole swung our ship away from the asteroid,
the pirate ship continued on in the same direction it had been
following the whole time. Of course, there being no friction in
space you needed to fire retro-rockets in order to slow down before
you hit anything, which didn't bode well for the crew of that ship.
Either their control systems were damaged, or, as suggested by the
gas vent I'd opened up, they were dead.

"I'm not picking up any signals from them."
Cole stated as he moved the ship in for a closer look. I called up
a spectroscopic analysis of the cloud streaming out of the ship,
approximately 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen, with traces of carbon
dioxide and other trace gases. Plus ice crystals of a reddish-black
fluid that appeared to contain a significant concentration of
iron.

I dropped the tablet in shock, not quite the
effect it has in gravity as it just hung there suspended in
mid-air. "I killed somebody," I exclaimed in horror, "it's blood, I
didn't just rupture their crew compartment, I shot someone and made
them bleed out."

Cole pulled up some schematics of the enemy
ship based on what we could see of it. "One person space truck,
designed for short hops from one asteroid to another. Pilot sits in
a polarized plexiglass bubble. You got lucky."

"Lucky?" Denal exclaimed, "do you know what
the Cerean directorate does to anyone who kills someone?"

"Seizure of all assets and fifty years hard
labor?" Aniya suggested, everyone who lived full or part time on
Ceres knew the basic penalties for criminal acts. "But ze was
acting in self-defense, they launched missiles at us."

"They don't care, there's nothing in the laws
to make exceptions and the computerized judging systems follow the
laws to the letter." This information about the consequences of my
rash actions sent my adrenal glands into another overdrive, but
since there was no one to fight this time I instead prepared for
flight, right into Aniya's pouch, shoving her into the nearest
wall. "That's not going to help, she's just as guilty as you are as
far as the judges are concerned, for that matter we all are."

"Crap," I murmured from inside the wolftaur's
nice and safe belly as I pulled my tail in behind me. With such
severe penalties I wondered why that guy in the other ship had even
bothered to attack us if he knew what was in store for him. "Any
idea what drove that guy to try and kill us?"

Cole ruffled his feathers in a way that might
have been a shrug. "I heard talk of some extremists who wanted us
to break off trade with earth, they apparently nuked some freighter
docks on the east side a while back. Trying to annihilate anything
that was of more value to earth than to the Belt."

"I've seen nuclear detonations before,"
Aniya's voice reverberated down to her pouch. "They were a lot
larger than the explosions those missiles produced when we
destroyed them." If anyone could have seen them at the moment I
might have rolled my eyes.

"Nukes don't have nuclear reactions when
they're ripped apart by high speed projectiles." I told her in a
rather matter of fact way. For some reason when I said that her
pulse dropped slightly. "However, if they were carrying fissile
material it would have set off a radiation alarm."