The Pride of Parahumans (3 page)

"But chemical explosives have barely any
effect in space, they might open the hull or disable the engines
but the gold in our hold would be recoverable. And that's worthless
except for exportation, so wouldn't they want to destroy it?"

Denal snorted loudly enough for me to hear
it. "Then maybe he was just a plain old pirate. They do say that
banditry or violent theft is the second oldest profession after
all."

"And what, dare I ask, would the oldest
profession be?" Aniya asked him in response. He said nothing, or at
least nothing that I could hear, but I had a decent idea of what he
had in mind.

"So what are we going to do about the
draconian Cerean law enforcement that would have us all back in
chains?" I asked my co workers and friends with whom I had
apparently committed the worst criminal offense out of necessity
for our lives.

"Nothing." Cole suggested. "We make no
mention of this incident and pretend we obtained this haul with no
unusual troubles. Odds are he wasn't from Ceres, probably one of
the smaller and more lawless asteroids, there's no way he could get
away with fencing pirated goods back home."

"I could probably cover up the laser damage."
Denal threw in his own contribution. "Those sensor pods are modular
anyways, I could simply remove the remainder of the attachment and
recycle it. Then weld over the hull scars to make it look like
micrometeor pitting."

"Well, I guess that's it then. We're safe."
Yet strangely, despite my words, I did not feel any more assured. I
curled up tighter in a rather appropriately named fetal
position.

Chapter 3

We arrived at Ceres without further incident
two days later. Sure enough, Denal had managed to conceal the
evidence of our skirmish with another ship fairly easily. The
sensor pod turned out to have taken the brunt of the damage and was
easily enough detached and smashed to cover up the melted
instrumentation, we jettisoned the most melted pieces and stowed
the rest for recycling once we got back to the manufacturer, might
as well not pay full price for a replacement. The few scars on the
hull were scratched over with chunks of rock from our cargo hold to
simulate meteor impacts. Still there was a sense of apprehension as
we disembarked from the ship and passed through station security at
the second largest port on the biggest dwarf planet in the asteroid
belt. Nearly two hundred thousand parahumans called Ceres home, the
biggest concentration of our kind in the solar system, there were
even a couple humans, mostly trade reps or ambassadors attempting
to write out some manner of treaty with the Directorship.

Government out in the belt varied a great
deal, most of us had been accustomed to rule by whatever
corporation had fabricated or bought us and had little experience
with governing ourselves. While most human children were taught how
their government worked in childhood and how to participate in it,
if they were among the lucky minority to live in a democracy, we
had to seek out how government worked on our own terms and try to
hammer one out through a lot of trial or error. Asteroid habitats
vary from direct democracy to fascism, and everything in between.
In the case of Ceres the corporations had used it as a base of
operations in the belt and naturally several different corps had
constructed their own processing plants and even regional
administrative offices. Because few humans were willing to travel
several months out to the asteroids, or more importantly sign the
legal waivers disavowing their employer of any legal responsibility
in the case of their gruesome demise, many of the administrative
tasks ended up performed by parahumans. The end result being that
when the revolution won us freedom from the corporations Ceres
already had a vast bureaucracy running things fairly smoothly. The
highest ranking administrators of the different corps, once the
humans had been killed or shipped home, all got together and
decided to change the various "human only" rules their corps wrote
so that they applied to parahumans as well, and otherwise set up
shop like their former owners had done save that they now paid
their workers. After a couple months of trying to handle a payroll
of several thousand on a system intended for a few dozen they laid
off half their employees. However they also allowed the "black
market" that had inevitably popped up to operate in the open, and
in fact focused their layoffs on the merchants and hobbyists who
they had a fair idea were earning an income on their own. These
people were allowed to rent shops in the common areas of the
habitats, cutting out some administrative costs and giving the
Cerean Directorship, as the conglomeration of ex-secretaries called
themselves, an additional source of income besides the money from
exporting their extracted minerals to earth. In addition the
layoffs left the Directorship with a sizeable fleet of surplus
spacecraft that they no longer had the manpower to operate, they
were going to scrap these vessels until some bright manager came up
with the idea of offering some of the laid off miners loans to buy
the extra ships. You can probably guess which category me, Aniya,
Cole, and Denal fell under. So yes, not exactly the best system of
governance ever, but we had one of the lowest crime rates in the
belt, or so the propaganda, sorry, "public relations" department
claimed.

Anyways, that brief history of Ceres does not
do justice to the wonder that is the market caverns. As the corps
mined out the dwarf planet they dug huge holes miles beneath the
surface in order to get to the largest concentrations of mass in
the asteroid. These tunnels were a minimum of two meters tall to
accommodate the miners and their equipment but the caves that had
held the most valuable minerals often reached five meters in height
and a football field or two in length or width. Since there was
plenty of pre-existing living space in the worker barracks and
tunnels many of these caverns had been reinforced with long
titanium columns and filled with multiple levels of storefronts,
the .028 gravities making it easy for most people to simply jump
from one level to another through holes in the rickety paneling
placed in front of shops so the customers had something to window
browse from. It's rather incredible, in a ramshackle slum kind of
way.

This day me and the others were leaping about
in what we knew as "public" clothing, in my case a green plaid
knee-length kilt ("regimental" style, not that I had much to hide)
and a black canvas vest, Cole a sort of jumpsuit that left his
wings and legs completely uncovered, Aniya an orange shirt and a
"quad" of jeans that was specially designed for taurs, and Denal a
pair of tight synth-leather pants and an open white shirt. Yes,
fashion isn't quite a high priority out here. We were carrying the
remains of our destroyed sensor pod in three separate bags and
headed for a dealer we had looked up on the asteroid's local
network. We found them in a three-floor warehouse on the east wall
of the cavern, alongside a number of other shops that sold
spacecraft parts, one would think those would be located near the
docks but Directorate rules were that any merchants not working
directly for the Directorate itself had to reside in the market
caverns. At least they had delivery services and installation
teams. We found a sales rep, a heavy set spider monkey hanging from
the ceiling racks by his tail, and dumped out our collection of
parts.

"Well," he stated as he picked over the
remains with all four of his primary limbs. "It looks like you beat
this up rather thoroughly. You say a meteor did this?"

That was our story and we were sticking to
it. "Yes." I simply replied.

"Surprised your point-defense didn't stop it.
You guys looking to replace that too?"

Denal offered an explanation seemingly
spontaneously. "Our computers glitched, the start-up program for
the auto-guns was omitted from the command queue. We managed to fix
that though."

The salesman snorted derisively, "computers,
nearly two centuries of use and those humans still haven't figured
out how to make them work reliably. We don't sell ship grade
computation materials or programs but I could give you some
recommendations." Denal took a list of stores with decent
electronics on his wrist device, he probably wouldn't actually buy
anything but the gesture would throw off suspicion. "Anyways you
probably want something a bit sturdier than these factory-standard
sensors. I happen to have some brand new pods with carbon nanotube
reinforced superstructures, fresh from the fabricator. A tad
pricey, but I could give you 8-15,000 qcoins worth of store credit
from these parts."

"How much?" I asked somewhat skeptical.

"Oh, about 105,000 Ceres qcoins." He
said.

"So that's what, 90,000 to 97,000 that we'd
need to pay?"

"I think you may have misunderstood me.
That's with the best estimate of the credit you get from these
parts, normally they cost 120 k."

That price was practically obscene. We had
convinced the representative from the Directorate's exports
division, which they held a practical monopoly on, to part with
10.8 million qcoins for the gold we had offloaded at the docks, but
we still had to pay back over 35 million of the loan we had taken
out to buy our ship from the Directorate, plus several thousand a
month for routine maintenance and fueling.

He must have noticed the expression of
disbelief on all our faces because the sales rep spoke up then.
"Tell you what, you must have at least five more sensor pods like
this covering each major surface of your fine vessel. I'll give you
the replacement and trade in all your other pods for 600,000
qcoins."

I did the math quickly, "so you're saying our
intact sensor pods are worth just 21,000 apiece. Is that it?"

He held all four palms up in an open-handed
gesture of surrender. "They're long obsolete and most likely pretty
banged up from all the flying around in this big field of flying
rocks. You're not going to get a better deal than that."

I kind of doubted it, technological progress
in the belt was nowhere near as fast as it was on earth, and there
was little demand for spaceship sensors on earth so most likely our
pods were less than two cycles out of date even after more than a
decade in operation. "I'm thinking more like 500k. These can't be
that much better."

"580,000, they really are, both ten times
more durable and fifty times better resolution than those old
things of yours."

"530, I can tell the chemical composition of
a gas jet at ten kilometers with enough resolution as is."

"Okay, five hundred and fifty thousand Cerean
qcoins and that is my absolute final offer."

"Fair enough." I keyed up my own wristpad's
wallet to transfer 550k to the store's account. We'd still have a
bit over ten megs to pay towards our mortgage once the monthly
expenses had been paid. I felt somewhat satisfied that I'd been
able to negotiate the price down so low. Normally these things went
much less smoothly.

----

Naturally, we got the first indication that
things on Ceres were about to go wrong just as we were leaving the
cavern. We spotted a holographic poster of a ferret in a pilot's
vacuum suit under the words "Missing, information related to the
disappearance of this subject will be rewarded." In smaller print
the hologram elaborated that the subject had taken out a sizeable
loan from the Directorate to purchase one of their short-range
transports approximately a week ago. Three days ago the signal from
his ship went silent. This sort of thing wasn't uncommon, the
shifting orbits of the asteroids made some signals difficult, but
something told me this wasn't an ordinary space trucker. I checked
the model of the ship he had bought again, sure enough, it was the
same model that had almost killed us two days ago, though it
usually didn't carry missile tubes or security-grade lasers.

"You think that was him?" Aniya walked up
behind me and put a hand on my shoulder as she asked the obvious
question that we were all thinking at that point.

"Maybe," I replied, "what I don't get is why
all the fuss over some guy who probably just ran off on his loan."
Aniya shrugged and we continued on to the tunnels that would take
us back home to our ship.

We got our answer the next day as our new
sensor pods were being installed by a team of monkeys and rams. As
I was running one of the new pods through its paces with a hand
tablet plugged into a socket on the base of the pod and looking at
the ceiling in every spectrum the thing could handle, one of the
rams doing heavy lifting came up to me. "Hey, you hear about that
weasel who went missing?"

"I saw some holo-posters." I stated as
nonchalantly as I could manage.

"Well, they say he was a clone of some
Directorate bigwig and that he hadn't gone dark for two days before
daddy had those posted along all the tunnels in the planet." I
looked at him in disbelief. A clone? Those were rare luxuries, it
cost hundreds of thousands of qcoins just to operate the
bio-fabricators used to make them. It would explain though why he
had been so foolish as to attack a Cerean vessel, not only did he
have an influential relative who could conceivably cover his tracks
he was most likely less than five years old, that being when we had
managed to petition the United Nations of Earth for the right to
replicate ourselves. And just because we came out of the vat fully
grown didn't mean that we were born mature, at 28 I pretty much
considered myself to have been a complete idiot before the age of
eight. Yet the laws treated us all the same whether we were two or
thirty-two years old because that had been how the corporations had
treated us and the Directors had been lazy. I tried to smile at
what I presumed to have been meant as a joke by the technician
whose ass wasn't possibly at stake and hurried through the
remaining checks. I did not bother to test the other pods but
instead bounded back inside the ship to discuss the new situation
with my crewmates.