The Pride of Parahumans Page 2

  "Yeah, yeah, sure I'll launch one." Denal tried to avoid putting himself in contact with the slime I'd left on him as he went over to his console. We had half a dozen survey drones that Denal would frequently send out on arcs around asteroids we thought looked promising. They'd circle the rock a couple times, playing their radar over it and taking snapshots of the surface in multiple wavelengths, and transmit it back to our ship, saving a lot of time on prospecting for ores. He shot one out to swing around the asteroid we were currently using for cover and programmed it to scan outwards rather than at the asteroid. Meanwhile me and Aniya called up manual controls for our primary collision avoidance coilguns, hitting a stray rock with a fast-moving iron slug tended to get it out of the way a lot faster than melting it with a beam of concentrated light, and anyways lasers were a bit out of our price range.

  The drone reached the far side of the asteroid and transmitted back a view of the region of space beyond. Radar imaging finally brought me a view of what I had been looking for in the first place, a small (relatively speaking, we were about twice as large thanks to the need for mining equipment and landers) cargo ship covered with laser turrets and a pair of long tubes that I had no reference for. It didn't seem to be moving as we scanned it. "It's like it's just waiting to see what we do."

  Aniya had the first suggestion, "Maybe they're moving when we're not watching. Why don't we send the drone back out to see if they've come any closer." Denal punched in the commands and the drone flew back out to take a second look. It hadn't moved, however there was now another, smaller and much faster object moving out towards us.

  "Incoming missile!" Cole screeched as the object swung around the asteroid heading straight for us. Panicked I switched the auto-tracking on my turret back on just as Aniya did the same. Registering the small, fast incoming object as a collision threat the automated systems sent streams of darts at the missile. Mere seconds from impact one of the darts ruptured the missile's fuel tanks and triggered an explosion that took out the explosive weapon entirely and sent shrapnel flying everywhere, thankfully not fast enough to do much damage to our ship.

  I didn't understand how they had been able to lock onto us from the far side of an asteroid but before I could think of something another missile came in from the opposite side of the previous one. Aniya just barely managed to shoot that one down as well. Noticing the drone following the missile it came to me. "Denal, shut down the transmission to that drone! They're tracking it!"

  The panda switched off the transmitter, then as an afterthought shut down all of our transmitters just to be safe. Now we could see nothing of the attacking ship, until either us or the pirates moved to our side of the asteroid we were blind.

  "Now what?" Denal asked, evidently a bit scared now that we had just barely escaped death twice. I thought it was obvious, we wait for the pirates to get bored and leave. Unfortunately that wasn't the case, after half an hour of sitting there the enemy ship came up around the asteroid and began to approach us. As it drew nearer I saw docking arms unfold from the underside of the miniature freighter.

  I panicked again, hastily aiming the gauss turret I was controlling at the pirate vessel I blasted away with a stream of iron. I saw a docking claw tear itself off and fly out into space, a laser turret shattered into a million shards of glass, then there was a puff of gas out of one of the holes I made in the main hull of the ship. But it still kept coming at us. "Move, move, move!"

  Cole swung our ship away from the asteroid, the pirate ship continued on in the same direction it had been following the whole time. Of course, there being no friction in space you needed to fire retro-rockets in order to slow down before you hit anything, which didn't bode well for the crew of that ship. Either their control systems were damaged, or, as suggested by the gas vent I'd opened up, they were dead.

  "I'm not picking up any signals from them." Cole stated as he moved the ship in for a closer look. I called up a spectroscopic analysis of the cloud streaming out of the ship, approximately 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen, with traces of carbon dioxide and other trace gases. Plus ice crystals of a reddish-black fluid that appeared to contain a significant concentration of iron.

  I dropped the tablet in shock, not quite the effect it has in gravity as it just hung there suspended in mid-air. "I killed somebody," I exclaimed in horror, "it's blood, I didn't just rupture their crew compartment, I shot someone and made them bleed out."

  Cole pulled up some schematics of the enemy ship based on what we could see of it. "One person space truck, designed for short hops from one asteroid to another. Pilot sits in a polarized plexiglass bubble. You got lucky."

  "Lucky?" Denal exclaimed, "do you know what the Cerean directorate does to anyone who kills someone?"

  "Seizure of all assets and fifty years hard labor?" Aniya suggested, everyone who lived full or part time on Ceres knew the basic penalties for criminal acts. "But ze was acting in self-defense, they launched missiles at us."

  "They don't care, there's nothing in the laws to make exceptions and the computerized judging systems follow the laws to the letter." This information about the consequences of my rash actions sent my adrenal glands into another overdrive, but since there was no one to fight this time I instead prepared for flight, right into Aniya's pouch, shoving her into the nearest wall. "That's not going to help, she's just as guilty as you are as far as the judges are concerned, for that matter we all are."

  "Crap," I murmured from inside the wolftaur's nice and safe belly as I pulled my tail in behind me. With such severe penalties I wondered why that guy in the other ship had even bothered to attack us if he knew what was in store for him. "Any idea what drove that guy to try and kill us?"

  Cole ruffled his feathers in a way that might have been a shrug. "I heard talk of some extremists who wanted us to break off trade with earth, they apparently nuked some freighter docks on the east side a while back. Trying to annihilate anything that was of more value to earth than to the Belt."

  "I've seen nuclear detonations before," Aniya's voice reverberated down to her pouch. "They were a lot larger than the explosions those missiles produced when we destroyed them." If anyone could have seen them at the moment I might have rolled my eyes.

  "Nukes don't have nuclear reactions when they're ripped apart by high speed projectiles." I told her in a rather matter of fact way. For some reason when I said that her pulse dropped slightly. "However, if they were carrying fissile material it would have set off a radiation alarm."

  "But chemical explosives have barely any effect in space, they might open the hull or disable the engines but the gold in our hold would be recoverable. And that's worthless except for exportation, so wouldn't they want to destroy it?"

  Denal snorted loudly enough for me to hear it. "Then maybe he was just a plain old pirate. They do say that banditry or violent theft is the second oldest profession after all."

  "And what, dare I ask, would the oldest profession be?" Aniya asked him in response. He said nothing, or at least nothing that I could hear, but I had a decent idea of what he had in mind.

  "So what are we going to do about the draconian Cerean law enforcement that would have us all back in chains?" I asked my co workers and friends with whom I had apparently committed the worst criminal offense out of necessity for our lives.

  "Nothing." Cole suggested. "We make no mention of this incident and pretend we obtained this haul with no unusual troubles. Odds are he wasn't from Ceres, probably one of the smaller and more lawless asteroids, there's no way he could get away with fencing pirated goods back home."

  "I could probably cover up the laser damage." Denal threw in his own contribution. "Those sensor pods are modular anyways, I could simply remove the remainder of the attachment and recycle it. Then weld over the hull scars to make it look like micrometeor pitting."

  "Well, I guess that's it then. We're safe." Yet strangely, despite my words, I did not feel any more assured. I curled up tighter in a rather appropriately named fe
tal position.

  Chapter 3

  We arrived at Ceres without further incident two days later. Sure enough, Denal had managed to conceal the evidence of our skirmish with another ship fairly easily. The sensor pod turned out to have taken the brunt of the damage and was easily enough detached and smashed to cover up the melted instrumentation, we jettisoned the most melted pieces and stowed the rest for recycling once we got back to the manufacturer, might as well not pay full price for a replacement. The few scars on the hull were scratched over with chunks of rock from our cargo hold to simulate meteor impacts. Still there was a sense of apprehension as we disembarked from the ship and passed through station security at the second largest port on the biggest dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. Nearly two hundred thousand parahumans called Ceres home, the biggest concentration of our kind in the solar system, there were even a couple humans, mostly trade reps or ambassadors attempting to write out some manner of treaty with the Directorship.

  Government out in the belt varied a great deal, most of us had been accustomed to rule by whatever corporation had fabricated or bought us and had little experience with governing ourselves. While most human children were taught how their government worked in childhood and how to participate in it, if they were among the lucky minority to live in a democracy, we had to seek out how government worked on our own terms and try to hammer one out through a lot of trial or error. Asteroid habitats vary from direct democracy to fascism, and everything in between. In the case of Ceres the corporations had used it as a base of operations in the belt and naturally several different corps had constructed their own processing plants and even regional administrative offices. Because few humans were willing to travel several months out to the asteroids, or more importantly sign the legal waivers disavowing their employer of any legal responsibility in the case of their gruesome demise, many of the administrative tasks ended up performed by parahumans. The end result being that when the revolution won us freedom from the corporations Ceres already had a vast bureaucracy running things fairly smoothly. The highest ranking administrators of the different corps, once the humans had been killed or shipped home, all got together and decided to change the various "human only" rules their corps wrote so that they applied to parahumans as well, and otherwise set up shop like their former owners had done save that they now paid their workers. After a couple months of trying to handle a payroll of several thousand on a system intended for a few dozen they laid off half their employees. However they also allowed the "black market" that had inevitably popped up to operate in the open, and in fact focused their layoffs on the merchants and hobbyists who they had a fair idea were earning an income on their own. These people were allowed to rent shops in the common areas of the habitats, cutting out some administrative costs and giving the Cerean Directorship, as the conglomeration of ex-secretaries called themselves, an additional source of income besides the money from exporting their extracted minerals to earth. In addition the layoffs left the Directorship with a sizeable fleet of surplus spacecraft that they no longer had the manpower to operate, they were going to scrap these vessels until some bright manager came up with the idea of offering some of the laid off miners loans to buy the extra ships. You can probably guess which category me, Aniya, Cole, and Denal fell under. So yes, not exactly the best system of governance ever, but we had one of the lowest crime rates in the belt, or so the propaganda, sorry, "public relations" department claimed.

  Anyways, that brief history of Ceres does not do justice to the wonder that is the market caverns. As the corps mined out the dwarf planet they dug huge holes miles beneath the surface in order to get to the largest concentrations of mass in the asteroid. These tunnels were a minimum of two meters tall to accommodate the miners and their equipment but the caves that had held the most valuable minerals often reached five meters in height and a football field or two in length or width. Since there was plenty of pre-existing living space in the worker barracks and tunnels many of these caverns had been reinforced with long titanium columns and filled with multiple levels of storefronts, the .028 gravities making it easy for most people to simply jump from one level to another through holes in the rickety paneling placed in front of shops so the customers had something to window browse from. It's rather incredible, in a ramshackle slum kind of way.

  This day me and the others were leaping about in what we knew as "public" clothing, in my case a green plaid knee-length kilt ("regimental" style, not that I had much to hide) and a black canvas vest, Cole a sort of jumpsuit that left his wings and legs completely uncovered, Aniya an orange shirt and a "quad" of jeans that was specially designed for taurs, and Denal a pair of tight synth-leather pants and an open white shirt. Yes, fashion isn't quite a high priority out here. We were carrying the remains of our destroyed sensor pod in three separate bags and headed for a dealer we had looked up on the asteroid's local network. We found them in a three-floor warehouse on the east wall of the cavern, alongside a number of other shops that sold spacecraft parts, one would think those would be located near the docks but Directorate rules were that any merchants not working directly for the Directorate itself had to reside in the market caverns. At least they had delivery services and installation teams. We found a sales rep, a heavy set spider monkey hanging from the ceiling racks by his tail, and dumped out our collection of parts.

  "Well," he stated as he picked over the remains with all four of his primary limbs. "It looks like you beat this up rather thoroughly. You say a meteor did this?"

  That was our story and we were sticking to it. "Yes." I simply replied.

  "Surprised your point-defense didn't stop it. You guys looking to replace that too?"

  Denal offered an explanation seemingly spontaneously. "Our computers glitched, the start-up program for the auto-guns was omitted from the command queue. We managed to fix that though."

  The salesman snorted derisively, "computers, nearly two centuries of use and those humans still haven't figured out how to make them work reliably. We don't sell ship grade computation materials or programs but I could give you some recommendations." Denal took a list of stores with decent electronics on his wrist device, he probably wouldn't actually buy anything but the gesture would throw off suspicion. "Anyways you probably want something a bit sturdier than these factory-standard sensors. I happen to have some brand new pods with carbon nanotube reinforced superstructures, fresh from the fabricator. A tad pricey, but I could give you 8-15,000 qcoins worth of store credit from these parts."

  "How much?" I asked somewhat skeptical.

  "Oh, about 105,000 Ceres qcoins." He said.

  "So that's what, 90,000 to 97,000 that we'd need to pay?"

  "I think you may have misunderstood me. That's with the best estimate of the credit you get from these parts, normally they cost 120 k."

  That price was practically obscene. We had convinced the representative from the Directorate's exports division, which they held a practical monopoly on, to part with 10.8 million qcoins for the gold we had offloaded at the docks, but we still had to pay back over 35 million of the loan we had taken out to buy our ship from the Directorate, plus several thousand a month for routine maintenance and fueling.

  He must have noticed the expression of disbelief on all our faces because the sales rep spoke up then. "Tell you what, you must have at least five more sensor pods like this covering each major surface of your fine vessel. I'll give you the replacement and trade in all your other pods for 600,000 qcoins."

  I did the math quickly, "so you're saying our intact sensor pods are worth just 21,000 apiece. Is that it?"

  He held all four palms up in an open-handed gesture of surrender. "They're long obsolete and most likely pretty banged up from all the flying around in this big field of flying rocks. You're not going to get a better deal than that."

  I kind of doubted it, technological progress in the belt was nowhere near as fast as it was on earth, and there was little demand for spaceship sensors on earth s
o most likely our pods were less than two cycles out of date even after more than a decade in operation. "I'm thinking more like 500k. These can't be that much better."

  "580,000, they really are, both ten times more durable and fifty times better resolution than those old things of yours."

  "530, I can tell the chemical composition of a gas jet at ten kilometers with enough resolution as is."

  "Okay, five hundred and fifty thousand Cerean qcoins and that is my absolute final offer."

  "Fair enough." I keyed up my own wristpad's wallet to transfer 550k to the store's account. We'd still have a bit over ten megs to pay towards our mortgage once the monthly expenses had been paid. I felt somewhat satisfied that I'd been able to negotiate the price down so low. Normally these things went much less smoothly.

  ----

  Naturally, we got the first indication that things on Ceres were about to go wrong just as we were leaving the cavern. We spotted a holographic poster of a ferret in a pilot's vacuum suit under the words "Missing, information related to the disappearance of this subject will be rewarded." In smaller print the hologram elaborated that the subject had taken out a sizeable loan from the Directorate to purchase one of their short-range transports approximately a week ago. Three days ago the signal from his ship went silent. This sort of thing wasn't uncommon, the shifting orbits of the asteroids made some signals difficult, but something told me this wasn't an ordinary space trucker. I checked the model of the ship he had bought again, sure enough, it was the same model that had almost killed us two days ago, though it usually didn't carry missile tubes or security-grade lasers.