The Pride of Parahumans (7 page)

"She claimed that something called the 'SPPS'
gave discounts on clones to guild leaders," I recalled. "Think this
is the SPPS?"

Denal shrugged. "Seems likely." Then he
paused as if in contemplation. "Hey, maybe we should all get
clones. We can be like one of those human families. Me and Cole can
be the dads, Aniya can be the mom, but what would that make
you?"

I snorted derisively. "Save it until we have
enough money to actually buy clones. I doubt they would charge a
bunch of prospectors fresh from Ceres anything less than full
price. And last I checked, clones were expensive."

"Right, right. Let's go find a miners' guild,
then, shall we?" Denal held up his wristpad to look up the local
listings for the various guilds. Instantly, I was reminded of the
video, and the titanium alloy bones falling away from the prying
hands of a future human looter.

***

Denal pulled up a map to the dense-metal
miners' guild main office, and we walked down there in five
minutes. On the way, we called up Aniya and Cole and told them to
meet us there. Cole was already perched on a street light outside
the building by the time we arrived, but Aniya took an extra three
minutes to trot up. Once everyone had shown up, we explained to the
others the guild rules that kept us from selling our ores and how
it seemed that the only way around them was to join a guild, like
the one we were standing outside.

"Sounds like a stupid rule." Cole said from
atop his perch above the walkway.

"He said it was because they didn't have any
analysis equipment," I explained, "which makes some sense as a
cost-cutting measure. But he also said that he didn't trust my own
assessment. Why should being in a guild make me any better at
telling the difference between tungsten and lead?"

"I don't know why don't we ask them?" Aniya
motioned towards the door. I figured we might as well see what they
had to offer and pressed the intercom button by the door.

There was a buzz and the speaker clicked on.
"Hello?"

I answered, "Is this the dense-metals miners'
guild?"

"Yes. Do you have an appointment?"

I hadn't thought of that. "No; were we
supposed to make one?"

"It depends on what you are after."

"We would like to join."

There was a brief pause; then the speaker
crackled again with a response. "Well, then, I've got the
application forms here. I can show you through the process." The
doors opened and we entered.

Inside was a small lobby with some chairs by
one wall and a massive tank of water covering the opposite wall.
Inside the tank was a computer terminal of some sort and a giant
octopus. The cephalopod splayed out several tentacles, changed
color multiple times, and let loose a couple jets of water. A
speaker on the side of the tank came to life. "So, why do you want
to join the guild?"

I moved to the side of the tank closest to
the mollusk's large eye. "We're a group of prospectors who just
moved here from Ceres. We attempted to sell some tungsten, but the
buyer stated that he couldn't take it, because we weren't certified
by a guild."

"Naturally. Freelancers are too
untrustworthy. How can one be sure that their wares are truly
saleable?" A tablet slid out of a slot on the wall opposite of him.
"Each of you fill out your personal information. There's a separate
file for everyone on that tablet."

Aniya picked up the tablet and filled in her
information before handing it to me. It was rather straightforward:
"Name: Argentum. Date of birth: 2069. Gender: neuter. E-mail
address, voice comm code… " For special skills, I selected both
chemical analysis and emergency medic. For employment history, I
listed first my work for the corporation that had commissioned my
creation, then the Ceres Directorate before the layoffs, and
finally my current employment as a freelance prospector. I chose
not to fill in any optional references, given our status as
fugitives from another asteroid. I then passed the tablet to Cole,
who filled it out and passed it to Denal who fitted the device back
in its slot.

"All right then. We will need to assess your
abilities before accepting your application to join the guild.
Tomorrow a representative of the guild will join you on one of your
expeditions to observe your techniques and verify your claims." The
octopus probably had a script written in his translator
specifically for this situation. "Argentum, I am scheduling an
examination of your analysis skills in three days time."

Hold on a second there. "But it takes at
least two days to reach any asteroids that haven't already been
claimed. I'd still be out in space at the time of the exam you have
scheduled."

"Chemical analysts do not accompany miners to
the dig sites. Guild rules to keep them safe from unnecessary
risks. There aren't too many parahumans who know how to identify
the minerals we extract properly."

I did not understand. "So miners don't know
if they have a load of lanthanides or a chunk of carbon until they
get all the way back to port? What if they go broke because they
wasted time hauling worthless material when they could have been
looking for something more valuable?"

The guild clerk released a bit of ink into
the waters of his tank at that statement; I suppose I must have
surprised him a bit. "The guild will subsidize your losses.
Otherwise, your dues will comprise ten percent of your total
profits. The habitat needs carbon too, you know."

"Come on." Aniya grabbed my shoulder in a
gesture of reassurance. "We still have enough money left over from
the last sale to keep us afloat a little bit longer." She was
right: The five hundred thousand qcoins we retained would be enough
to finance another expedition, store the tungsten from the last
haul in one of the portside warehouses, and pay for our protection
plan for another couple weeks.

"Very well." I said with a bit of reluctance.
And we left, headed for an increasingly uncertain future.

Chapter 7

The next morning, a grey parrot came to our
ship and introduced himself as the observer from the miners' guild.
I locked up my lab and emptied my cabin. What I couldn't carry on
me was stored in the cargo hold. I would be spending the next four
to five days in a moderately priced hotel I had found the night
before, while my friends were busy working under the scrutiny of
some bureaucrat. And I didn't even have my experiments to keep me
from getting bored.

I spent the rest of that day reading and
looking for bootleg games on the network. The second day, I found
some locally produced video drama series about a young Protectors'
investigator who seemed to uncover a lot of corpses produced by a
variety of psychopaths who killed in distinctive and quite gruesome
ways. It managed to hold my interest for a couple hours, impressive
for a fifteen minute web show.

Eventually there came the big exam that I had
been waiting for, which turned out to be determining the
composition of a few vials of iron, platinum, and lead dust. I
probably could have told what they were just visually, but I put on
a show of using the scales and the spectrophotometer to conduct a
detailed and highly specific analysis for the benefit of the
bored-looking raccoon assessing me. When it was all over, he
printed out a small plastic card declaring me a certified chemical
analyst of the dense metal miners' guild and gave it to me for
identification. I was starting to think I would have been better
off claiming to be a general miner and going with the others.

Feeling like I should at least try to
celebrate or something, I went to a somewhat high-priced café for
lunch (I'd mostly been eating the algae rations) and ordered a blob
of vat-grown beef. I rarely had the chance to eat meat, as even
in-vitro animal flesh was expensive several million miles from the
nearest pasture, but I felt justified in splurging a little to
satisfy my carnivorous instincts that day.

I'd been sawing at the chunk of artificial
meat for nearly fifteen minutes when he showed up, a muscular
cross-fox wearing synth-leather pants and an open shirt that showed
off his pecs. He spotted me and walked over to my table. "Looks
like you're having some trouble there" he stated without so much as
a word of introduction.

"I'm used to algae products," I replied as I
tore off a chunk of meat and popped it in my mouth. I chewed the
tough material vigorously for several seconds before swallowing.
Who was this guy to suggest that a canine did not know how to eat
meat?

"You should eat meat more often. It's what
our ancestors evolved for." True, though he probably meant the
foxes that contributed maybe two percent of our DNA rather than the
humans who lost their leaf-processing intestines sucking the marrow
from gazelle bones. "My name's Walker. What about you, babe?"

Babe? I choked down the last of my mouthful
and glared at him. "Argen, and for your information, I'm neither a
girl nor an effeminate boy." Most female parahumans have human-like
mammary glands, probably added in there by a lonely genetic
engineer, so I'm not often mistaken for female. However, there
weren't very many neuters made, the aforementioned motivational
issues making us not particularly popular among work crews, so I am
frequently taken for a slim male or, on occasion, a female with
smaller-than-average breasts.

"Oh, really, now? I like a challenge
sometimes." He reached his hand towards mine. About that time, I
realized that he didn't really smell right. The genetic engineers
deliberately chose not to introduce the genes for the distinctive
musk my four-legged kin produced, but my sense of smell was almost
as good as theirs, and even without specialized glands there was a
subtle difference between each species' scents. That said, I'm not
entirely sure whether I realized that Walker smelled more dog-like
than foxy before or after I felt the band snap around my wrist.

Surprised, I yanked my arm back. I saw a
smart handcuff apparently set to close around the first wrist it
came across, connected by a thin cable to Walker's arm. There was
no apparent matching cuff on his wrist, as if the cable came
straight out of his fur. He pulled my arm back down to the table
and flipped his own arm to pin it down. He gave me a wicked looking
grin as he told me, "Argentum, chemical analyst on Ceres deep space
mining vessel ANQ18K458, you are under arrest for the murder of
Kurt, clone of Vice President Cooper."

I panicked then. With my left hand, I drew my
spring knife and slammed it, concealed in my fist, on Walker's arm.
Unfortunately, the trick I'd imagined where I would pop the blade
into my attacker's flesh didn't work as well as I'd hoped. The
blade hit something seemingly impenetrable and the spring sent my
arm flying back off his. As I swung back for another hit, he caught
my blade arm and forced the knife out of my hand. He flung me to
the ground and attempted to wrestle me into submission. As I
struggled, I heard a loud whirring sound, and a quadrotor drone
with a pair of automatic gauss rifles on its undercarriage
descended upon the open café. The few customers that had stayed
behind to gawk hurriedly ran or bounded away. A loud voice erupted
from the drone's speakers: "Unidentified parahuman! You will cease
assaulting this paying customer of the Marquez Guild and explain
yourself!"

Walker scowled at the drone, then hit a space
on his right breast before returning his arm to pinning me down.
The image of the suggestively dressed cross-fox disappeared,
revealing a bloodhound wearing an armored bodysuit. What looked
like spider silk with plates of thick composite or metal spaced was
strategically all over the suit. I spotted a nick over one of the
plates on his cuffed arm where my knife had tried to penetrate.

"I'm Walker, a bounty hunter for the Ceres
Directorate. Ze has committed a crime against the executives of the
Directorate, and I am here to bring zir to justice."

"He was launching missiles at us!" I objected
loudly. But before I could say anything further Walker covered my
mouth with my own arm.

The drone spoke again. "You will allow zir to
stand up and this drone will accompany you two to the nearest
Marquez guard station." A pair of red lights on the barrels of each
coilgun lit up, presumably the capacitors to the electromagnets.
"You have five seconds to comply."

Grudgingly, Walker did comply, yanking me up
as he stood so that I stumbled onto my feet. He dragged me along as
the drone led us, flying backwards to keep its guns on us, to the
station. There we were passed on to a group of mostly feline
parahumans in riot gear with large gauss pistols slung on their
hips, next to a shock baton and a pair of smart cuffs similar to
the ones binding me to the bounty hunter.

We were taken before a massive jaguar whose
name tag read "Marquez, Derrick." Was this one of the Guildmaster's
clones that Olga Wolf had mentioned? He glowered at us before
demanding, "Now what is this all about?"

Walker was the first to speak. "Twenty-six
days ago, a freighter piloted by a parahuman known as Kurt went
dark near Ceres. Three days later, his ship was found floating
derelict; the cockpit was shattered and the body of the pilot was
in several hundred frozen pieces. There was just barely enough
intact genetic material in a severed hand still attached to the
steering column to identify the remains as belonging to Kurt." I
could feel myself cringing a bit at the description of the carnage.
"The Directorate decided to investigate all ships that had been in
the area of the incident at roughly the same time. The only ship
that was unavailable for inspection was the one that zir Argentum
here was serving aboard. When the Directorate received a request
for references from one of the mining organizations here concerning
Argentum and zir companions Denal, Aniya, and Cole, we surmised
that they were somehow responsible and a bounty was posted."