The Pride of Parahumans (4 page)

When I told them Denal and Aniya just stood
there with a glassy look in their eyes and their mouths hanging
wide open. Cole wasn't particularly surprised, "should have known
it would be one of those fresh from the tank rich morons."

"So what now?" I inquired. "If we did kill
him and the Directorate finds out, I think forced labor until the
days we die might be a light sentence."

"We fly." Cole flapped his wings, knocking me
and Denal off our feet in the low gravity. "We fill our helium-3
tanks and pick another asteroid that won't turn us over to our new
corporate masters."

"Sounds like a plan." I stated simply. "But
which rock might that be?"

Chapter 4

We spent the next three hours going over the
map of the surrounding asteroids and looking up the local wiki's
entries on the inhabited planetoids within our ship's range of
Ceres at this time. Juno was ruled out, they had an extradition
treaty with the Directorate and a history of complying with their
demands. Iris didn't but they operated under a government that
seemed the closest to the human system known as “fascism” known to
the Belt. Hygiea, with one of the largest direct democracies since
ancient Greece, initially looked promising, but then we saw that
the majority of the population were strident pacifists and not even
point-defense guns were allowed, I couldn't imagine that they would
like us very much.

"What about this one?" I pointed at a large
spherical planetoid, similar in size to Ceres. It was near the edge
of our range.

Cole looked where I was pointing. "That
would be Vesta, either the second or the third largest asteroid in
the entire belt, depending on who you ask." He ruffled his feathers
a bit and looked away. "I don't think so."

"Why, what is wrong with it?" Curious I
started to call up the wiki's information on Vesta.

Cole turned back towards me and stared. "I
went there once, about six years ago. It was anarchy, I was almost
assaulted a couple times, some guys tried to pounce on me and when
I flew out of the way one pulled out some sort of jury-rigged gauss
gun and told me to toss over my possessions. Fortunately for me it
short-circuited when he tried to fire a warning shot."

Seriously? I hadn't known there were places
where the crime rate was so bad. What kind of government would
allow such a thing. I read the information I'd pulled up on Vesta.
Gravity: .025 g, orbit: 3.63 earth years, population: ~50,000,
government:…

"There's no government?" I asked, confused.
How could a society even function without any sort of government.
Apparently not well judging from Cole's testimonial. But then I
thought I saw something right below the tab that read "Government:
N/A", it stated: "danger level: low to moderate." I was
confused.

I opened a more detailed description and
jumped to "crime and other hazards", I read on.

…
The ration exchanges created by the
Repairman's in 2090 led to individual shortages of calories and
needed nutrients. In desperation many residents turned to preying
on their fellow parahumans, both figuratively in the form of
stealing rations or other belongings to be traded for rations, or
in rare cases literally in the form of cannibalism. The
introduction of the Vestan qcoin later that year helped alleviate
the starvation as the Guild began to accept them instead of food,
but crime remained high until the formal establishment of the
Protector's Guild in 2092. The Protectors would, in exchange for a
modest monthly fee, do everything in their power to defend the
person and possessions of their customers, and if their defenses
and any personal ones carried by a customer were defeated they
hunted down the aggressor and enacted restitution from them. In
2094 the Protector's Guild fractured into several competing
organizations that still work to keep the peace in Vesta. Many of
the most prominent Guilds offer "Guest plans" for visitors…

I looked away from the article and back to
Cole. "Judging from this article you got there just a year too
early. They've got something called "Protector's Guilds" now that
provide security and got their danger level downgraded to
moderate-low."

"And what's stopping these "Guilds" from
turning us over to the Directorate?" Denal inquired of me.

"Who says they can even do that? They're not
a government or anything." Aniya interjected. "If they're like a
business that just offers protection plans the worst they should be
able to do is cancel our coverage. And the article mentions
"personal defense" which seems to imply that they don't mind people
defending themselves, which is all we did wasn't it?"

"All right, fine. We'll put it to a vote."
Cole stated. "Everyone who wants to take their chances on an
uncivilized rock with no government to speak of raise a hand." Me
and Aniya raised our hands immediately. "And all opposed?" We put
our hands down and Cole raised a wing claw. We all turned to stare
at Denal, whose paws were firmly gripping the handholds along the
edge of the table.

"Well I don't know." Denal protested, "it
sounds like Vesta might be safe from the Directorate but the way
you made it sound it seems like the Protector's Guilds or whatever
are just barely holding things together."

"Look, why don't you go over to the bank and
pay them nine million qcoins towards our loan, think it over on the
way there and back. I'll get us filled up with Helium and reaction
mass so if we still haven't decided where to go we can at least
reach someplace to refuel and set out again." Cole flapped away
from the table and to his own pilot's perch.

"Nine million is a lot." Denal started to
inch towards the door. "What if they get suspicious as to why I'm
paying that much at once."

"Tell them that we don't want to be tempted
into spending all that on something stupid." I suggested. He
bounded out and closed the hatchway behind his ringed tail.

***

Less than an hour later Cole was just
finishing up the refueling procedures as Denal came hurtling up the
docking tube. He panted, out of breath as he shut and locked the
airlock doors tight. "What happened?" I asked, looking up from the
wiki entry on some frontier asteroid that would need at least two
fuel stops to reach.

Denal righted himself and began to explain.
"As I was coming back from the bank I noticed a security inspection
team gathered near one of the ships by the entrance to the port. I
asked a nearby officer what that was all about and he said that
they were checking all the ships that had been in the sector where
that executive's clone had vanished. He said that they were only
asking if anyone had an idea of what had happened to him but I
didn't like the way some of them looked." He jumped into his chair
and started strapping himself in. "I would definitely say that my
vote is now "yes", let's go to Vesta. Like right this instant."

I strapped myself down and signaled for
Aniya, down in the equipment bay, to do the same. Cole resigned
himself and signaled to traffic control his intent to depart. "We
read you. The way out is clear, but why so quick to leave, you just
got back in?"

Cole improvised as he started to pull us
out. "Oh you know." As if that ever convinced anyone. "Just made it
big on our last trip. Thinking we might be able to afford a down
payment on a better ship this time."

"Really?" The traffic controller was still
on the line. "And just where did you say you got all that
aurum
anyways?"

Crap, maybe he was with security, in which
case he could direct some of security's cutters to intercept us
before we even got half a kilometer from dock if he suspected we
were involved in the situation somehow. Cole spoke again, "Trade
secret, if we told anyone the location our secret mine would be
bled dry in a week."

"You know, you can't keep other miners from
jumping your claim unless you file it."

"And since when has registering a claim
stopped anyone?" I spoke up, before remembering that while the
output was on speakers the input was restricted to Cole's headset.
Cole repeated my statement after looking at me odd for a
minute.

"Well, suit yourself. Hope you strike big
again." We were out. For now we were safe.

Once we were ten kilometers out I unstrapped
myself and walked over to Cole's station, the acceleration
providing more "gravity" than Ceres had. "So how long until we
reach Vesta?" I asked him as I leaned around his crash chair to
look at him.

He faced me and said simply "ten days."

Ten days, a bit of a long trip by our
standards. "Guess I'd better go and settle in then."

***

The next day I started work on my hobby.
While my training had been in dead rocks and minerals, I was
interested in the far more complex chemistry of living things. A
large portion of the section of the ship that had been allotted to
my work space was taken up by a variety of different laboratory
instruments that had nothing to do with my official job on the
ship, and quite a bit of the stuff I actually needed could be used
for my hobby too. Fortunately my lab is in one of the few parts of
the ship that has something resembling gravity, the room rotates on
an axis perpendicular to the ship's engines. When the ship is under
burn the room stops moving so that the "floor" is oriented towards
the drive so that the acceleration provides gravity, when the ship
is coasting the room spins so that the samples within stay at the
bottom of their containers. Sometimes I found it ironic that a
place that contained at least four centrifuges was itself in a
centrifuge. To get in or out the giant centrifuge had to be stopped
temporarily, which upset the samples if prolonged for too long so I
would jump in and trigger the motor to start back up again before I
was even through the door all the way.

The room was dominated by a large
refrigerator, a glass door and several compartments inside that
maintained their contents at different temperatures ranging from
slightly above zero degrees Celsius to under 50 below. A set of
cabinets held a spectrometer that could just as easily be used for
living or non-living samples, a miniaturized Polymerase Chain
Reaction thermocycler, a DNA sequencer, and a wide assortment of
various micropipettes, pipettes, beakers, flasks, test tubes, and
heating elements. Water unfortunately had to be carried in a large
carton, no plumbing.

This particular day I drew two sets of four
petri dishes from the fridge, one set with several spots of white
or blue bacteria, the others covered with a green algae. I
carefully lifted two blue colonies from each of the bacterial
plates and suspended each colony in a separate microfuge tube of
solution, I separated the cells in each of these tubes from the DNA
they held via microfilters and centrifugal force. I then
transferred the fluid to new tubes and added a mixture of enzymes,
salts, and fluorescent marked primers to the solutions. Then I
placed the tubes into the rack in the thermocycler and set it to
run a five hour cycle.

While waiting I scooped a teaspoon of algae
from each of those dishes, and placed them on a hot pad for ten
minutes. Once they were dried out I tasted a bit of each sample.
None of them tasted particularly good, my bacon-flavored nutrient
algae apparently still had a long way to go.

After I had finished the impromptu test of
the algae I'd modified I decided to wait out the remainder of the
PCR cycle reading some science-fiction novels from the 20th century
on my tablet. It astonished me how humans dead for so long could be
both so prophetic and so wrong. Naturally, there were five minutes
left on the timer when someone decided to interrupt me. I felt a
rather jarring vibration along my jaw signaling that someone was
trying to contact me on my subvocal comm and I bit down on my right
to answer.

Who is this?
I demanded feeling a bit
annoyed.

It's that "horny panda" as you call
him
. Came the reply. I swear, Denal's subvocal pickup is as
obnoxious as his real voice.
There's something I want you to
see. Come up to my cabin
.

I've already seen your genitalia, several
times.
I remembered the lab coat, goggles, mask, gloves, and
pants I had just put back on in anticipation of the continuation of
the experiment.
And I just got dressed again, I'm not taking
this stuff off now.

What? Oh, you're in the lab aren't
you.
Denal actually sounded surprised, almost like he had
something different in mind this time.

Yes, and I'm in the middle of something
that could potentially shake the belt like nothing since the
revolution.
That wasn't completely true to be technical about
it. The machine would hold the samples at a stable temperature
until I came to retrieve them if I had to leave, but all the
unsecured lab equipment I had lying around before I performed that
last step of the analysis would go floating around once I shut down
the centrifuge to step outside.

I'm serious Argentum, I noticed something
about our trajectory and I think we may be off course.

He'd used my full name, that could mean he
was serious. Or it could just as easily mean he was dedicated to
this particular joke slash attempt to get into my pants.
Since
when do you know anything about astrogation.
I cut off the call
with a hard bite on the left and popped the lid to the
thermocycler.

I drew each sample into the sequencer, the
fluorescent tags attached to the replicated DNA strands allowing
the machine to determine almost the exact code of each based on the
size of the strands and the different colored tags attached to
different bases in the tagged primers. When the sequences were
displayed on my tablet it confirmed my suspicions, when I was
designed the geneticists deactivated several genes related to
gonadal development. The result being that I could never develop
testes or ovaries, it could have gone either way given how my cells
were a mosaic of XX and XY karyotypes that were otherwise
identical. Presumably another set of genes influencing the
development of gonads was responsible for our universal sterility.
The corporations never revealed the exact genes that they had
manipulated to induce these changes, and I intended to find out. I
had stored my own genome, plus those of my three crewmates, in the
form of plasmid libraries. The human genome was public record so I
was going over every gene known to be involved in reproduction and
determine which genes made us unable to have babies. And possibly a
way to make a set of junk for myself if I felt so inclined, there
were plenty of organ printers available in Ceres so there should be
some in Vesta.