The Pride of Parahumans (14 page)

I seethed with rage at Jakob's speech. "Seems
a bit over-complicated Griggs. Planning a new career as a spy movie
villain?"

"I want you to suffer," he replied
punctually.

Then I felt the cylinder moving as it was
conveyed into the loading chamber of the giant railgun that the
corporations had intended to use for sending the Belt's wealth back
home. I crouched down in what I hoped was the rear of the cylinder
and waited for it to fire. There was no bang, no explosion like my
gun emitted, just a sudden acceleration that pushed me back into
the wall. It felt like it liquefied my organs. I realized seconds
later that that wasn't quite the case. I was still alive, for one
thing.

I floated, weightless now that the
acceleration was over, in the cylinder. I couldn't see a thing, but
I felt my way forward, pushing myself off the back wall gently.
When I came to the opposite side, I stopped myself with my hand,
forgetting that I'd crushed it minutes earlier. Pain shot up my
arm, and I suspect that a few of the fast-forming scabs that my
augmented platelets had formed (bleeding is a tad more serious in
microgravity or a sealed spacesuit than it is on Earth, you know)
broke open. I cradled my arm as I drifted slowly back. I guess air
resistance slowed me down to a near standstill, because I found
myself floating in empty space. I still couldn't see anything, but
I could breathe still, so I guessed I was somewhere in the middle
of the giant can, and it still hadn't exploded.

I took a moment to think about my situation.
I had been naked when they captured me, so I had none of my usual
wearable electronics to signal for help. I tried to use my subvocal
comm and got a nasty shock for my efforts; apparently Jakob was
telling the truth about having fried my implant.

So I was drifting somewhere in the middle of
space, on a ballistic path to Earth, in a can with no life support
that was going to explode in a few minutes, with no way to call for
help. I'm pretty sure I broke down sobbing at some point. I don't
know how long it took-there were no clocks, and when your life is
in danger, time has a habit of passing extremely slowly-but it felt
like I was crying for hours.

Eventually I got a hold of myself and started
contemplating my situation. There had been no question that I was
going to die someday; I had just hoped that my death would be a lot
later than now. I could survive maybe an hour after the pod broke
apart, conscious for most of that time, and this cylinder had maybe
a couple hours' worth of oxygen in it. Too bad it was set to blow
in one more hour.

What would happen next, I wondered? Burning
up in the atmosphere of a planet I had never known but had given
rise to my ancestors, I supposed. But I wouldn't be able to witness
my meteoric cremation; my brain would have shut down. What would
dying be like? I had never subscribed to any religious beliefs, but
I knew that some humans thought that at death, their consciousness
separated from their body somehow and moved to another universe of
some kind, where they gained a new body and were either rewarded or
punished for eternity according to how they had lived their
previous life. Others believed that your consciousness was
transferred to a new-born organism at death, so you had a new
chance to achieve some form of enlightenment, whatever that meant.
And of course, many others believed that there was nothing after
death; your brain simply shut down for good, and that was that.

I was starting to think that death would be
like simply falling into a deep dreamless sleep from which you
would never wake…

Then the can burst open. There were blinding
flashes of light above and below me that blew away the ends of the
cylinder, followed by streaks of flame running down the walls. The
body of the cylinder flew away in four separate directions. I
looked ahead of me; the view was nothing but stars, burning away in
the endless night. If I craned my neck a little, I could see the
sun, a big, blinding ball of yellow light. I chose to look at the
stars again, just hanging there.

I recalled that most elements heavier than
helium were formed when stars exploded in supernovae. I was pretty
sure that most of my body was composed of heavier elements, which
must have meant that countless stars had to die for me to ever come
into being. I thought of what would happen to the atoms that made
up every molecule of my being. No doubt most of the organic
compounds that composed the vast majority of my body would be
burned off into water and carbon dioxide, which might be absorbed
by some plant, which would be eaten by a cow or something that
would be cut up into steaks for some human or maybe a rich
parahuman. I would be part of another thinking being, but my
memories, my personality, what made me distinct from everyone else,
would be gone.

I was so wrapped up in my morbid thoughts
that I almost didn't notice the harpoon streaking past me, a glint
of light that shot out to my left, then retracted. I was still
trying to think of what it had been when the second harpoon struck
me in the small of my back. There was a stabbing pain and suddenly
a large spear point jutted out of my stomach, or rather through my
liver on the opposite side. Prongs extended from the sides of the
point, and it pulled me back towards the source of the intruding
weapon. What was going on now? Had Jakob Griggs changed his mind
and decided that death by massive organ damage was worse than a
slow death from anoxia?

I was still wondering as the airlock doors
closed in front of me. Then a suited parahuman glided up to me and
detached the head of the harpoon from the cable, pulling it the
rest of the way through me. Looking at the gaping hole in my belly,
they pulled another of those familiar spray bottles out and gave me
a squirt in the mouth. This time I happily accepted the sweet
embrace of unconsciousness.

***

When I came to, I was tied down on a zero-g
bed with a series of tubes sticking out of me. One notable tube was
covering the giant hole in my gut. Above me hung an octopoid
assembly of shining plastic arms. I could have sworn it was an
autodoc, but those were ludicrously expensive; only big-time
executives on Earth could afford them, or maybe Griggs could.

Hence my surprise when instead of a sadistic
savannah cat a bleary-eyed red panda rushed up to my side.

"Denal?!" I shouted in his face. Well, it
didn't sound like shouting to me, but I reviewed the video later.
He started rapidly moving his mouth like he was talking but no
words were coming out. "Speak up! I can't hear a word you're
saying!"

He looked shocked at my statement. Then he
seemed to remember something, drew out a pair of augmented reality
glasses, and held them out to me. I reached out with my left hand
(my right appeared to be encased in some sort of device) and put
them on. Denal made the mouth movements again and text appeared in
my field of view. "Okay, can you hear-I mean see-my words now?"

"I can read the text on these glasses! What
is going on?!"

More movements, more text. "Your eardrums
suffered damage from the sudden exposure to vacuum. You're lucky
the gengineers strengthened our lungs, or you wouldn't even be able
to speak."

"Where am I?" It didn't make much sense for
Jakob to hire Denal to keep me alive after nearly killing me. Was
he a prisoner too?

"Don't you recognize your own ship,
Argentum?" More text, but Denal's mouth wasn't moving. He turned
towards the door and I followed his gaze to see another one of the
parahumans I least expected to see: it was Olga Wolf, the vigilante
who had saved our lives on our first day in Vesta, or maybe one of
her sisters. "Of course," she said, "I made some modifications
after my house bought it from the Marquez Clan. Though I suppose,
since you and panda boy here are technically part owners, we
shouldn't have been able to buy it at all. Probably why we got it
so cheap."

"What do you want?!" I demanded. If she was
working for Jakob she was certainly going to a lot of trouble just
to punish me.

She cringed a little at my words. "Stop
shouting. I know you're deaf but that doesn't mean we can't hear
you perfectly fine." Shouting? "Anyway, didn't you ever wonder just
who HoundOfGod was?"

"You?" I asked incredulously, trying to sound
a bit softer this time. "The rebellious clone of one of the major
Clans is the net activist who believed me immediately?" Then I
thought of something. "Wait, if you're HoundOfGod, then that means
you've tried out the treatment. Does it work?"

She smiled a bit at my inquiry. "The autodoc
suggests that it'll be a month before my first oogenesis cycle and
Denal's spermatogenesis are complete. I guess we'll know then."

I blinked a couple times in shock. "Wait, you
and Denal?!" Figures that lech would be one of the first parahumans
to father a child.

Denal's fur stood up a bit in embarrassment.
"It's a bit of a long story." He said.

I gestured with the machine covering my right
wrist to the hose leading into my guts. "I've got nowhere to go
for… how long will I be hooked up to these things, anyway?" I
addressed the question to Olga, it was her equipment, after
all.

"The bioprinter will take about a week to
complete your new liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and lengths of
large and small intestine." She looked sorry about the massive
damage her harpoon had to inflict in order to save my life. "Your
cochleal implants and prosthetic hand should be ready in a couple
more hours, though."

Prosthetic? I looked back down at the thing
where my right hand should have been, and it occurred to me that I
couldn't feel that hand at all. The damage must have been more
severe than I had noticed. "So, how did you two end up
together?"

"Well," Denal said before Olga could say
anything more, "after I was framed for two counts of murder, I ran
as fast as I could for Wolf territory. A few minutes later, I was
caught by two of their drones and a ridiculously muscular coyote
enforcer. They took me back to their base, and one of her sisters
told me that they were considering extraditing me to either Marquez
or Ceres. Thinking fast, I gave her the camera hidden in my button
and told them to review the evidence."

Olga gave a sound that could have been a loud
scoff; the Augmented Reality glasses couldn't make it out.
"Please," she said sarcastically (the AR glasses highlighted the
tone). "He babbled incomprehensibly for five minutes, insisting he
was innocent until we pulled him into a holding cell. We discovered
the camera while picking over his stuff for anything valuable." She
snickered a little before continuing. "I managed to convince my
mother that we could tick Marquez off royally if we kept him
here."

"Right." Denal interjected. "Anyway, after I
proved my innocence with the Wolfs, they put me to work maintaining
their fleet of vehicles. The next day, Olga showed me the video she
had made with my material and asked me if I was interested in
helping her 'tear down this rotted foundation of a civilization' or
something like that."

"So that's all?" I asked Olga. "You're just
doing this"- referring to the whole trying
to-get-him-to-knock-her-up thing- "to express your views on Vestan
politics?"

"Well, he is pretty good in bed," the
she-wolf admitted. Denal grinned. "But yes, the clone-entrenched
administrators of justice with no accountability need to be brought
down. Including my mother and sisters, I'm afraid."

I realized I had one more question to ask of
them before I could go back to sleep and recover. "How did you find
me anyways?"

"I have a backdoor into the Marquez network.
We noticed when the cameras and IR sensors went dark along a
certain path leading from your apartment to the mass driver loading
bay." Olga parted the fur at the base of her neck to show me a
capped brain-computer interface port-very difficult to learn how to
use, but immensely useful for complex computer work. "Mom shouldn't
have prepared me to do all the electronics stuff in the
racketeering business."

Chapter
14

I spent most of the week it took to print out
my new vital organs trying to learn how to use my new hand. I
assure you it is not like the movies. By the end of that week, I
was able to open and close it, but more complex gestures were still
nearly impossible to perform. My nerves and brain simply couldn't
rewire themselves any faster. The autodoc stapled the severed ends
of the nerves in my wrist to the control circuits of the new hand,
but it was still vastly different from my organic hand, and there
was nothing they could do. Once the last chunk of liver was in
place, surgical micro-bots stitched everything together at the
cellular level, leaving nothing but a tender bald spot on my
abdomen. It hurt to stand, up but Denal and Olga decided it was
time for me to appear before the public regardless.

While I had been getting pieced back
together, Jakob Griggs' memetic engineers had been hard at work
spreading the idea that my treatment was a fake. Like he had said,
they were capitalizing on the fact that I had disappeared without a
trace to discredit the research I had presented. It was known that
a few dozen people had synthesized and used the treatment after
HoundOfGod's endorsement, but since it took a month for the effects
to become apparent, many of them now doubted that it had done
anything but make them feel ill for a few days. There was a slim
chance that eventually some of them would become pregnant by sheer
accident and the treatment would catch on, but for now, it looked
like the very concept of parahuman fertility would be relegated to
the waste basket of pseudo-science. There needed to be drastic
action, now.

So the very day my surgeries were completed,
Olga set up her recording gear in my infirmary to stream a very
special installment of her blog. It would be streamed live that
evening as they were recording, with questions from viewers that I
would be able to answer. As the appointed time drew near I sat up
on the bed, still wearing my patient's gown. They thought that
emphasizing the abuse I had taken might stir sympathy.