The Pride of Parahumans (5 page)

***

Denal was waiting for me when I exited the
lab, he was holding a tablet out for me. "Look at this," he said,
pulling up a map of the Belt, "we're following a trajectory that
takes us far from Vesta." A line showing our course appeared and
passed the tag marked VESTA by several thousand kilometers.

"Have you asked Cole yet?" I inquired of
him.

"I called once and he shut off his
intercom." Denal replied. "He said he was taking a nap and not to
disturb him."

That sounded a bit suspicious. "We should go
wake him up." I suggested. The two of us floated over to Cole's
cabin, the door was locked but Denal was able to easily bypass
it.

The damn crow was nestled in a cubbyhole
when I found him, his head tucked under a wing like a stupid
chicken. I grabbed him by the other wing and yanked him out, he
awoke with a start. Now, Cole may have had sharp talons and a beak,
but I had solid bones and they were almost 50% solid titanium, so I
was strong enough to break all his limbs and wring his uplifted
neck before he could give me more than a few gouges that were easy
enough to patch in my lab.

"Where are we Cole?!" I shouted in his bird
brained face. "I've seen our trajectory, we're not going to
Vesta."

To his credit he didn't bother with lying
this time. "We're on a course to an ice asteroid, about three
thousand kilometers spinward of Vesta."

"You know that raw ice is shitty reaction
mass." I snarled, my vulpine genes making themselves known. "If we
were lucky the contaminants wouldn't blow up our engines."

"I'm not going back to Vesta." He
insisted.

"Either we go to Vesta, or this fox is
having fresh poultry for breakfast." I wouldn't really eat him,
though if we did try to extract reaction mass from a dirty snowball
and it ended up leaving us stranded I couldn't make promises.

He reached for the intercom with a wing claw
and pressed down a button marked "voice control". "Autopilot, alter
course and take us to Vesta, most direct path from current
location."

The ship's computer responded in seconds.
"Calculating… warning, insufficient reaction mass. Along suggested
course we will fail to reach Vesta by 147.2 kilometers."

"Then we call in a tug, that's why we
retained most of a million qcoins isn't it? Unexpected expenses?" I
gave the corvid a toothy grin, he confirmed the course and I let go
of him. Then left the room to confirm that he had in fact set us
along the right course this time.

As we headed for the bridge Denal turn to
ask me something. "So, what were you working on anyways?"

I shrugged. "Trying to figure out a way to
give myself genitals."

"That's great." The panda said in response.
"So what's it going to be, pole or a hole? Or maybe both?"

"Currently I'm thinking that I'd rather be
male."

"What?" Denal looked aghast. "You know that
I'm straight, don't you?"

I just smirked in response. "Why do you
think I want to be a guy?"

Chapter 5

We were able to reach Vesta's primary docking
port despite the lack of fuel on our part. I did indeed call a tug
boat to bring us in, though traffic control charged us quite a bit
for the tow, one hundred thousand Cerean qcoins. As we were brought
in I realized that the transaction could probably be traced back to
us and used to locate us on Vesta, I decided we'd want to exchange
our qcoins for Vestan ones or some sort of commodity currency, and
open a completely new set of accounts. While we couldn't convince
Cole to move in immediately he did agree to check it out for a
couple days, that would give us time to decide whether or not we
should stay, and if we decided to leave it would allow us to refuel
and resupply before moving on to the next habitat.

As soon as we were within range of the Vesta
network I contacted a money exchange and traded our 900,000 Ceres
qcoins for 700,000 Vestan qcoins. Apparently Vestan coins hadn't
been mined for as long as their Ceres counterparts and thus were
worth significantly more due to their lower quantity. Next I called
up the webpage for the Protector's Guild whose service area
encompassed the sector of the port and many of the surrounding
markets, and according to the reviews I found they were one of the
most thorough in their guardianship of their customers property and
wellbeing. When I saw that they offered group plans and required a
live video consultation I called the rest of the crew up. I
transferred the page to the large bridge monitor and opened the
link to the video chat. The screen was filled with the visage of a
female cat of some kind wearing a green business suit and sitting
at a desk.

She looked up from the tablet in her hands
and spoke to us. "Good afternoon, my name is Jessica and I'll be
your agent for the Marquez Guild. Shall we get started?"

We indicated our affirmation and introduced
ourselves, one by one.

"Now then, you want a group plan?" We told
her that was the case. "All right then. To start with are you
affiliated with any Guild, company, or government?"

"No," I replied. "We are freelance
prospectors, though we did work with the Cerean Directorate most of
the time." She scrawled this information on her tablet, tapped a
few things that we couldn't spot, and then her eyes widened and her
ears turned to press themselves against her cranium. That did not
look good.

"Very well." She forced her face back into
the friendly expressions she had been wearing when the conversation
had first started. "What is the purpose of your visit to our fine
habitat?"

Pretty much all of us showed our shock and
worry at this question. Cole's tail feathers fanned out, Aniya's
hackles raised underneath her shirt, Denal grabbed his own tail and
started wringing it nervously, and I could have sworn that my tail
doubled in diameter when the fur stood up. "We got bored in Ceres,
wanted to see what some of the other asteroids were like."

"Not much excitement."

"Thought the Directorate exports guy was
stiffing us."

"Charged too much for life support."

Jessica tapped a few virtual keys and spoke
to us again. "Your rate is calculated at 2,000 Ceres qcoins a day,
rounded up to the nearest day. As long as you are on Vesta and
within our service area our surveillance network will keep track of
you and automatically deploy armed drones if you are attacked." A
map of the habitat with multiple areas covered partially or
completely in green appeared on the screen by her image. "Be
advised that if you try to leave the habitat without paying your
bill we operate a number of photon and kinetic turrets situated
around the docking bay."

I threw something else in before she could
terminate the connection. "We already exchanged our qcoins for
Vestan ones."

She looked at me and tapped something else on
her tablet. "Then that shall be 1,200 Vestan qcoins per day. Same
rules and conditions apply. Shall that be all?"

I shook my head no. She ended the call.
Though honestly I was a bit curious, the difference in price was
considerably greater than the exchange rate I had seen earlier. Did
the Vestans prefer their own currency so strongly? I suppose it
made some sense given how long the light speed delay made
transactions that used servers not physically located on the same
asteroid, after all that was why so many habitats had their own
distinctive qcoins in the first place.

***

When the tug finally towed us all the way
into dock we first refilled our reaction mass and then we all left
to check out the habitat. In particular to see if it was still as
bad as when Cole had been there. The market cavern on this asteroid
was practically right next to the docks, took barely a minute to
walk down there. It was much like those on Ceres, except that there
seemed to be very little in the way of urban planning in this cave,
shops and fabricators were intermingled with townhouses and
restaurants. In fact it seemed like nearly all of the buildings
were used as places of residence, or rather people had set up shop
in their apartment complexes. We could only tell which were
businesses and what were simply dwellings only because most of the
stores and fabricators had small signs on their front doors, I
noticed that most had a symbol of some archaic tool, a compass rose
or a hammer or a sword or something accompanied by an odd sign that
looked like a pair of inverted chevrons with a short squiggly line
a little ways above them.

After browsing the slapped together city for
nearly an hour and seeing no signs of criminal activity Denal
suggested we check out one of the areas not covered by Marquez. "If
this section is so crime-free with one of the highest rated Guilds
keeping the peace, we should see how the other Guilds handle
things."

We had some doubts but his reasoning seemed
solid, we headed to a side cave that was outside the Marquez
Guild's service area. The tunnel leading into the cave was
unusually wide and the ceiling varied in height a great deal, at
one point it was 2 meters high but just half a meter further down
it went up to 3 meters tall. I was passing under one of those high
ceilings when I felt what seemed like a ton of bricks landed on top
of me. Still in shock I felt a pair of hands lift my head up and
press a sharpened blade to my neck.

"All right you newbs." I heard a hoarse voice
from on top of me. "Hand over your wristpads, tablets, and anything
you may have bought at the market. Or missy here is going to look
like a
red
fox if you get my drift."

I saw Aniya and Denal turn around to stare
blank faced at me and my attacker. Cole simply flicked his eyes
upward to glance at the ceiling, I got the impression he was doing
the avian equivalent of rolling his eyes. "And here you were saying
that the Protector's Guilds kept everyone safe here."

The high-altitude mugger on my back reared
up, pulling his knife away from my throat, and laughed. "The Houses
don't cover the tunnels you stupid newbies. It's all for your-"

PFFEW PFFEW

I heard some quick bursts of compressed gas
and the mugger slumped over. Moving quickly I threw him off and got
to my feet. On the ground behind me was a large rat parahuman lying
limply on the ground like a rag doll, his eyes wide open. Sticking
out of his neck I spotted a pair of red feathered darts. Denal made
a surprised squeaking sound and I turned to see what he was looking
at. It was a pressure pistol, seemingly hanging suspended in
mid-air.

No, not suspended, there was a shape nearby
that was colored the same as the cave wall behind. It moved
slightly and became a canid woman dressed head to toe in a
chameleon suit. As we watched she holstered the weapon and pulled
the hood off, revealing that she was a grey wolf with close-cropped
hair.

"Well, hello there babe." Denal began but was
silenced by a threatening finger pointed in his direction by our
camouflaged savior. She walked past him to the rat she had downed
and started collecting her darts.

I watched her do her work for a few seconds
before speaking to her. "Thank you for saving me like that.
Miss?"

She glanced up at me to answer my query.
Instead she flashed me a comm number on her wristpad, which I
entered into my own in conference with the rest of my crewmates.
Olga Wolf
. I heard in a soft voice resonating through my
jawbones.
I'm an investigator for Guild Wolf.
Yes, I
know, creative name.
Even through subvocals I could discern the
sarcasm.

Why are we using subvocalization?
Aniya asked before anyone else came up with the idea.

Because the tetrodotoxin in those darts
doesn't always paralyze their sensory neurons
. Came Olga's
response.
It mostly goes after voluntary muscle control,
including the diaphragm. Only reason he hasn't suffocated to death
is the oxygen retaining modifications our designers added.

I picked up the wannabe mugger's wrist and
put two fingers to the inner edge. Sure enough there was a faint
pulse, but I couldn't hear any breathing.
Why are you so
concerned about being heard by this guy anyways?
I asked
her.

Oh, that. Well you heard him, I'm not
supposed to be here. Thanks to some pissing match between mom and
old man Jerome the tunnels are supposed to be neutral territory.
But this guy has been preying on not only newcomers like you but
our own clients who have to use this tunnel to get to and from the
spaceport.
She walked towards Aniya and Denal and drew her dart
gun.
So here's what you're going to do. One of you is going to
take this gun, you're all going to take this waste of biomass back
to the Marquez side, and you're going to report to the nearest
Marquez officer or drone that he attacked your friend here and you
shot him with an open-source dart shooter that you printed off
before coming on board.
She held the gun out grip first to see
who would take it.

Aniya took the gun and looked at the
inexpensively 3d printed weapon a bit apprehensively for several
seconds before stuffing it into one of the pouches on her tauric
pants, barely leaving a bulge.
Are you sure they won't mind us
pumping someone full of deadly poisons? I would have thought that
the Protector's Guilds would take a bit of offense to people that
sort of thing.

Olga suppressed a snort as she reattached her
hood.
Why, is that why you left your old place?
Everyone's
eyes widened a bit at the half joking accusation.
Oh, well Vesta
was founded mainly on the principle of "you can't tell me what I
can't do" so you'll generally find that people here wouldn't care
whether you tip your darts with cyanide. And anyways the Guilds
operate like insurance, the more you do yourself the less they have
to pay.
She finished fastening her hood and reactivated her
camouflage, I could still see a bit of an outline as she started to
walk away.