The Pride of Parahumans (8 page)

Derrick glanced first at myself, then at
Walker, then back at me. "When the drone intervened you said
something about him 'launching missiles at you.' Would you care to
elaborate?"

I suppose I'd already blown my chance to
insist that I knew nothing of Kurt's death. I took a deep breath
and started to explain. "Twenty-five days ago, we were headed back
for Ceres after discovering a significant quantity of gold in one
of the lesser asteroids. All of a sudden, our aft sensor pod
suffered damage inflicted by a military-grade laser beam. Our
pilot, Cole, took us behind another asteroid, and we attempted to
hide there. That was when the missiles came. Our automated defense
turrets detonated the missiles at a safe distance. A few minutes
later, a ship came around as well. We played dead for a while until
the other ship came closer and began to extend docking claws." I
began to dip my head in regret then. "I panicked and assumed manual
control of one of our gauss turrets. I fired a stream of slugs
across the ship, and some of them penetrated the cockpit. I did a
spectroscopic analysis of the debris and found that some of it was
organic in nature."

"This is ridiculous!" Walker objected. "Is ze
trying to claim that Kurt was a pirate of some kind after zir gold?
He was the clone of a high-ranking executive of the Directorate!
Why would he resort to stealing? For all we know, he mined those
shiny yellow rocks and ze and zir friends killed him for them!"

"These are both serious accusations the two
of you are making," Derrick stated flatly. "Do either of you have
video recordings of the event in question?"

"Yes!" Finally something I could use to
defend myself. " I have a copy of the video and the sensor logs on
my tablet. It's in my hotel room. I can give you the address and
keycard now."

"Now wait a second!" Walker had yet another
objection. "Those can be faked."

"My technical team has a lot of experience
with falsified evidence," said Derrick. "They'll be able to tell."
He motioned for two of his subordinates to take the keycard I had
drawn from my kilt pocket and go to the hotel room I mentioned.
Then he stared at me. "Piracy is a pretty serious offense pretty
much everywhere in the Belt, last I recall. Tell me: Why didn't you
think of reporting the incident to the authorities on Ceres?"

"The Directorate does not recognize
self-defense as a valid excuse for violence," I explained. "In any
case, we found out later that he was the clone of a vice president,
so we figured we were better off taking our chances out here."

"Yes, I know how the progeny of the rich and
powerful are prone to act." Derrick shot me a grin that looked
disturbingly wolfish for a big cat. "Always thinking that they can
get away with anything just because they have an influential
relative."

Ten minutes later, my tablet was brought in
and the video logs of the event were reviewed behind closed doors
in a side room. Fifteen minutes after that, the door opened and an
officer came back out. Apparently they had found no evidence of
editing; the footage was raw from the sensors as far as they could
tell.

Derrick called up a still image from the
video on his desktop holopad. It displayed the ship that had
attacked us. "Is this the victim's spacecraft?" he asked
Walker.

"Yes, it is," Walker replied.

The apparent leader of the local guild branch
advanced the video several frames until the craft had rotated so
that the underside, with the missile tubes, was facing the camera.
"Looks a bit heavily armed for a freight craft, especially one that
makes berth at a habitat that I just confirmed does not allow
violence in self-defense." The bounty hunter started to form a
response, but Derrick continued. "I mean, the lasers might be
justified as anti-meteor point defense, but the missiles are a bit
much, don't you think?"

Walker seemed to be gasping for words at this
point, but none came. He slumped forward in defeat. "All right, all
right, I'll leave Argentum and zir friends alone."

Derrick dismissed the image and began
entering something that we couldn't see. "Bounty hunter Walker, you
are barred from entering the area of service covered by Guild
Marquez. We will also be posting to the board from which you
retrieved our client's information, stating that as long as ze is a
paying customer of ours, bounty hunters will not be allowed to
pursue zir. The video will be mailed to every employee and
executive of the Ceres Directorate with a publicly known address."
The cuff around my wrist was uncoupled, and Walker was taken out of
the room by a pair of officers.

"Thank you," I said. "I was a bit worried
there." But as I got up and turned to leave, I felt a strong paw
grab onto my tail and pull me back. I looked back and saw Derrick
Marquez reaching across his desk to grab me.

"Where do you think you're going? We're not
done here yet." I pulled my tail back and sat down again. "You see,
when you and your buddies signed on with us, we figured that you
were running from conviction for some petty theft or tax evasion or
something like that and adjusted your rates accordingly." He sat
back down and leaned back with another wolfish grin on his face.
"Killing an executive's relative is a much more serious offense,
you see. We thus incur many more expenses protecting you from
bounty hunters and assassins. I'd say that we'd be justified in
doubling, or even tripling your premiums."

Three thousand qcoins a day, combined with
the miners' guild dues and mortgage payments? I didn't want repo
men coming after us too. Not every expedition was as fruitful as
the last couple we'd embarked upon; we'd likely go bankrupt within
a month or two. "But you're solving that problem for good, aren't
you? With the posting and the videos?"

He laughed disturbingly loudly at that
statement. "I could count on one hand the number of refugees we
cover who had their bounties removed by having evidence of their
innocence posted by a bunch of anarchist barbarians." He held up
three fingers to show what he meant. "Now, V.P. Cooper might take
some flack on the local Ceres blogs for making a pirate. Maybe
he'll even lose his job. But in our experience, that only means
he'll resort to less-than-legal means of getting his revenge. The
next parahumans to come after you might not bother trying to take
you alive."

I shuddered. The thought of some camo-suited
killer planting a blade in my heart or poisoning my nutrients was
not a pleasant one. I supposed I could see his reasoning, but three
times our current rate still seemed a bit excessive. I told him
that the most we could afford was double our current payments.

"Well, then, maybe this will convince you to
reconsider a bit." He called up another video from the logs backed
up on my tablet. This one showed the incident as we were arriving
on the bridge at the start of the battle-the one where Denal yanked
me out of Aniya's slimed pouch-from an angle that quite clearly
showed her more private parts. "I don't know about Ceres, but here
there's a significant group of you endophiles. A lot of people
think that their neurons are a bit cross-wired and have a tendency
to avoid them like the plague, especially those parahumans with
pouches, with the exception of a few who make a living prostituting
themselves to those freaks, and they're ostracized just as badly by
the rest of their kind."

I gripped the arms of my chair like my hands
were hydraulic vises. I blurted out, "It's not sexual to us!" Then
I amended a bit more calmly. "And I thought parahumans had no
taboos."

"Yeah, that would be all nice and utopian,
now, wouldn't it?" He switched off the hologram and leaned in
closer to me. "If everyone were to know what you two get up to in
the bedroom and apparently on the bridge, you would be hard pressed
to get a job scrubbing out sewage lines. And your friend-Aniya, is
it? Well, she would probably end up having twenty of your filthy
sewage scrubber colleagues inside her every night just to pay her
protection money to the hookers' guild. She might even be picked up
by some of the sex slavers that come through here every now and
then."

That did it. I couldn't do mass sanitation
work to save my life. And poor Aniya shouldn't have to live that
horrible way just because she helped me relax in such a way. "Okay,
okay. I'll scrape up three times the fee. Just don't include
anything in the video to suggest that I like to sleep in her
pouch."

"Smart move, foxy," Derrick Marquez said as
he slid over a tablet with a form for the new amount for me to
sign. "And don't even think of telling anyone that I blackmailed
you. I, too, know the advantages of having powerful relatives." He
waved to a printed-out photo on the wall behind him, which showed
nine nearly identical jaguars, with only their clothes to
differentiate them. In the center of the field of view sat a jaguar
wearing a closely tailored suit, a scar running down his left cheek
marring his features.

Nervously, I quickly applied my thumbprint to
the document and left. When my crew mates arrived the next day, I
practically leaped into Aniya's arms. I spent the entire night and
half of the next day huddled up in her pouch, with all the security
equipment within five meters of her room disabled.

Chapter 8

"A bounty hunter, seriously?" Denal sounded
incredulous. "How did he even know we were here?"

It was the day after my friends had come back
from their assessment trip. They'd found a decent sized chunk of
something dense and grey. They hadn't checked what it was
officially but the readings I'd seen suggested something in the
area of osmium. And they had become certified members of the
miners' guild like myself except that they would still be going on
these expeditions. Though now I wasn't too sure I wanted to leave
the habitat.

"He said that he tracked us thanks to the
miners' guild sending messages asking for references to the Ceres
Directorate," I replied, Denal looked a bit guilty about something
after my statement. "Anyways," I added, "even if none of us were
stupid enough to list some references on their applications, there
are several financial records that would place us here: the
large-scale exchange of our Ceres qcoins for Vesta's, the mortgage
payments we send their way to fend off repossession, et cetera.
Probably why he was in the region in the first place; no way he
could have flown all the way here from Ceres in the three days
since we applied to the guild."

"Not necessarily," Cole threw in. "Vesta is
passing fairly close to Ceres now, and there are a lot of ships
faster than ours. I'd guess that a bounty hunter would use a fast
courier-class ship or maybe a military surplus interceptor if
they're chasing people. And maybe we should keep running, to make
it harder to find us."

"Cole, with the communication relays
connecting every station in the Belt, anywhere we tried to hide
would be known everywhere within hours." I found it a bit hard to
believe that he was still determined to leave this place. "And most
governments would have just let him take me, and you too once you'd
come into port. The Marquez Guild reviewed the evidence and sent
him packing, even if they tripled our rates."

"Tripled?!" Aniya exclaimed in disbelief.
"Can we even afford that?"

"I don't know. Maybe. It depends on how much
we can make off these jobs."

"We should move to the Wolf Guild's
territory," Denal suggested. I suspected he was still a bit
infatuated with that rules-bending investigator who had saved our
lives on our first day in the asteroid. "I bet Olga would give us a
better price than these guys."

Yep, definitely infatuated. At least he was
leaving me relatively alone now.

"Odds are her progenitor would charge us just
as much. And that would make the commute to and from the spaceport
a regular gauntlet, where anyone who wanted to claim our bounty
could go after us. Marquez at least will be able to keep us safe
from bounty hunters and hit men near where we live and work." I
opted not to mention the real reason, the blackmail.

"So, what are we going to do if we can't
afford it?" Cole asked, with a bit of justification, but I thought
he still sounded overly critical of Vesta's society.

I came up with an idea that I thought might
work. "I'm not stuck on the ship for extended periods of time
anymore. Maybe I could do some more analysis work for the guild
while you're out mining or something." Surely the miners' guild
needed all the analysts they could get if we weren't even allowed
in the field.

***

A week later, I found myself in the minute
apartment I'd rented, looking over job listings. It turned out that
being the newest chemist in the miners; guild, despite having just
as much experience as most of the "senior" members, meant that
hardly any jobs were ever thrown your way. I wasn't even allowed to
perform the tests on the osmium sample that my friends had brought
back. That load, combined with the tungsten we had brought in on
the previous run, had barely netted enough to pay the Marquez clan
for another couple weeks, what with the guild's ten percent and the
storage fees for the tungsten and other assorted expenses. So they
were already out on another expedition to find more heavy metals
for the guild to profit off.

Did I say "clan" when referring to the
Marquez Protectors' Guild? Well, that was about when I started to
see the Protectors' Guilds for what they truly were. To be honest,
I should credit a web show that I started watching while waiting
for the miners' guild to send me some work, "Crowns of Furtopia" I
think it was. It was this fantasy series that took place on an
alternate earth inhabited by parahumans instead of humans and
technologically equivalent to tenth-century Europe. The main
plotline seemed to involve these families (yes they could reproduce
sexually in the fictional world of Furtopia) known alternately as
"clans" or "houses," that governed various regions of the country
on which the show was set. Apparently, the show had gained such a
following on Vesta that some of the terminology had seeped out, and
it wasn't uncommon to refer to the Protectors' Guilds as "House
Wolf," or "Clan Marquez," or any of a dozen different variations on
those, because the leaders of the Guilds had such large clone
families. Anyways, it was an impressive piece of work. They filmed
with live actors wearing replica Middle Ages clothing on board one
of the few bubble-type habitats ever constructed that was pretty
heavily terraformed, and they edited out the sloped ground and sky
to make it look like it was actually on a planet.