The Pride of Parahumans Page 4

  "Then we call in a tug, that's why we retained most of a million qcoins isn't it? Unexpected expenses?" I gave the corvid a toothy grin, he confirmed the course and I let go of him. Then left the room to confirm that he had in fact set us along the right course this time.

  As we headed for the bridge Denal turn to ask me something. "So, what were you working on anyways?"

  I shrugged. "Trying to figure out a way to give myself genitals."

  "That's great." The panda said in response. "So what's it going to be, pole or a hole? Or maybe both?"

  "Currently I'm thinking that I'd rather be male."

  "What?" Denal looked aghast. "You know that I'm straight, don't you?"

  I just smirked in response. "Why do you think I want to be a guy?"

  Chapter 5

  We were able to reach Vesta's primary docking port despite the lack of fuel on our part. I did indeed call a tug boat to bring us in, though traffic control charged us quite a bit for the tow, one hundred thousand Cerean qcoins. As we were brought in I realized that the transaction could probably be traced back to us and used to locate us on Vesta, I decided we'd want to exchange our qcoins for Vestan ones or some sort of commodity currency, and open a completely new set of accounts. While we couldn't convince Cole to move in immediately he did agree to check it out for a couple days, that would give us time to decide whether or not we should stay, and if we decided to leave it would allow us to refuel and resupply before moving on to the next habitat.

  As soon as we were within range of the Vesta network I contacted a money exchange and traded our 900,000 Ceres qcoins for 700,000 Vestan qcoins. Apparently Vestan coins hadn't been mined for as long as their Ceres counterparts and thus were worth significantly more due to their lower quantity. Next I called up the webpage for the Protector's Guild whose service area encompassed the sector of the port and many of the surrounding markets, and according to the reviews I found they were one of the most thorough in their guardianship of their customers property and wellbeing. When I saw that they offered group plans and required a live video consultation I called the rest of the crew up. I transferred the page to the large bridge monitor and opened the link to the video chat. The screen was filled with the visage of a female cat of some kind wearing a green business suit and sitting at a desk.

  She looked up from the tablet in her hands and spoke to us. "Good afternoon, my name is Jessica and I'll be your agent for the Marquez Guild. Shall we get started?"

  We indicated our affirmation and introduced ourselves, one by one.

  "Now then, you want a group plan?" We told her that was the case. "All right then. To start with are you affiliated with any Guild, company, or government?"

  "No," I replied. "We are freelance prospectors, though we did work with the Cerean Directorate most of the time." She scrawled this information on her tablet, tapped a few things that we couldn't spot, and then her eyes widened and her ears turned to press themselves against her cranium. That did not look good.

  "Very well." She forced her face back into the friendly expressions she had been wearing when the conversation had first started. "What is the purpose of your visit to our fine habitat?"

  Pretty much all of us showed our shock and worry at this question. Cole's tail feathers fanned out, Aniya's hackles raised underneath her shirt, Denal grabbed his own tail and started wringing it nervously, and I could have sworn that my tail doubled in diameter when the fur stood up. "We got bored in Ceres, wanted to see what some of the other asteroids were like."

  "Not much excitement."

  "Thought the Directorate exports guy was stiffing us."

  "Charged too much for life support."

  Jessica tapped a few virtual keys and spoke to us again. "Your rate is calculated at 2,000 Ceres qcoins a day, rounded up to the nearest day. As long as you are on Vesta and within our service area our surveillance network will keep track of you and automatically deploy armed drones if you are attacked." A map of the habitat with multiple areas covered partially or completely in green appeared on the screen by her image. "Be advised that if you try to leave the habitat without paying your bill we operate a number of photon and kinetic turrets situated around the docking bay."

  I threw something else in before she could terminate the connection. "We already exchanged our qcoins for Vestan ones."

  She looked at me and tapped something else on her tablet. "Then that shall be 1,200 Vestan qcoins per day. Same rules and conditions apply. Shall that be all?"

  I shook my head no. She ended the call. Though honestly I was a bit curious, the difference in price was considerably greater than the exchange rate I had seen earlier. Did the Vestans prefer their own currency so strongly? I suppose it made some sense given how long the light speed delay made transactions that used servers not physically located on the same asteroid, after all that was why so many habitats had their own distinctive qcoins in the first place.

  ***

  When the tug finally towed us all the way into dock we first refilled our reaction mass and then we all left to check out the habitat. In particular to see if it was still as bad as when Cole had been there. The market cavern on this asteroid was practically right next to the docks, took barely a minute to walk down there. It was much like those on Ceres, except that there seemed to be very little in the way of urban planning in this cave, shops and fabricators were intermingled with townhouses and restaurants. In fact it seemed like nearly all of the buildings were used as places of residence, or rather people had set up shop in their apartment complexes. We could only tell which were businesses and what were simply dwellings only because most of the stores and fabricators had small signs on their front doors, I noticed that most had a symbol of some archaic tool, a compass rose or a hammer or a sword or something accompanied by an odd sign that looked like a pair of inverted chevrons with a short squiggly line a little ways above them.

  After browsing the slapped together city for nearly an hour and seeing no signs of criminal activity Denal suggested we check out one of the areas not covered by Marquez. "If this section is so crime-free with one of the highest rated Guilds keeping the peace, we should see how the other Guilds handle things."

  We had some doubts but his reasoning seemed solid, we headed to a side cave that was outside the Marquez Guild's service area. The tunnel leading into the cave was unusually wide and the ceiling varied in height a great deal, at one point it was 2 meters high but just half a meter further down it went up to 3 meters tall. I was passing under one of those high ceilings when I felt what seemed like a ton of bricks landed on top of me. Still in shock I felt a pair of hands lift my head up and press a sharpened blade to my neck.

  "All right you newbs." I heard a hoarse voice from on top of me. "Hand over your wristpads, tablets, and anything you may have bought at the market. Or missy here is going to look like a red fox if you get my drift."

  I saw Aniya and Denal turn around to stare blank faced at me and my attacker. Cole simply flicked his eyes upward to glance at the ceiling, I got the impression he was doing the avian equivalent of rolling his eyes. "And here you were saying that the Protector's Guilds kept everyone safe here."

  The high-altitude mugger on my back reared up, pulling his knife away from my throat, and laughed. "The Houses don't cover the tunnels you stupid newbies. It's all for your-"

  PFFEW PFFEW

  I heard some quick bursts of compressed gas and the mugger slumped over. Moving quickly I threw him off and got to my feet. On the ground behind me was a large rat parahuman lying limply on the ground like a rag doll, his eyes wide open. Sticking out of his neck I spotted a pair of red feathered darts. Denal made a surprised squeaking sound and I turned to see what he was looking at. It was a pressure pistol, seemingly hanging suspended in mid-air.

  No, not suspended, there was a shape nearby that was colored the same as the cave wall behind. It moved slightly and became a canid woman dressed head to toe in a chameleon suit. As we watched she holstered the wea
pon and pulled the hood off, revealing that she was a grey wolf with close-cropped hair.

  "Well, hello there babe." Denal began but was silenced by a threatening finger pointed in his direction by our camouflaged savior. She walked past him to the rat she had downed and started collecting her darts.

  I watched her do her work for a few seconds before speaking to her. "Thank you for saving me like that. Miss?"

  She glanced up at me to answer my query. Instead she flashed me a comm number on her wristpad, which I entered into my own in conference with the rest of my crewmates. Olga Wolf. I heard in a soft voice resonating through my jawbones. I'm an investigator for Guild Wolf. Yes, I know, creative name. Even through subvocals I could discern the sarcasm.

  Why are we using subvocalization? Aniya asked before anyone else came up with the idea.

  Because the tetrodotoxin in those darts doesn't always paralyze their sensory neurons. Came Olga's response. It mostly goes after voluntary muscle control, including the diaphragm. Only reason he hasn't suffocated to death is the oxygen retaining modifications our designers added.

  I picked up the wannabe mugger's wrist and put two fingers to the inner edge. Sure enough there was a faint pulse, but I couldn't hear any breathing. Why are you so concerned about being heard by this guy anyways? I asked her.

  Oh, that. Well you heard him, I'm not supposed to be here. Thanks to some pissing match between mom and old man Jerome the tunnels are supposed to be neutral territory. But this guy has been preying on not only newcomers like you but our own clients who have to use this tunnel to get to and from the spaceport. She walked towards Aniya and Denal and drew her dart gun. So here's what you're going to do. One of you is going to take this gun, you're all going to take this waste of biomass back to the Marquez side, and you're going to report to the nearest Marquez officer or drone that he attacked your friend here and you shot him with an open-source dart shooter that you printed off before coming on board. She held the gun out grip first to see who would take it.

  Aniya took the gun and looked at the inexpensively 3d printed weapon a bit apprehensively for several seconds before stuffing it into one of the pouches on her tauric pants, barely leaving a bulge. Are you sure they won't mind us pumping someone full of deadly poisons? I would have thought that the Protector's Guilds would take a bit of offense to people that sort of thing.

  Olga suppressed a snort as she reattached her hood. Why, is that why you left your old place? Everyone's eyes widened a bit at the half joking accusation. Oh, well Vesta was founded mainly on the principle of "you can't tell me what I can't do" so you'll generally find that people here wouldn't care whether you tip your darts with cyanide. And anyways the Guilds operate like insurance, the more you do yourself the less they have to pay. She finished fastening her hood and reactivated her camouflage, I could still see a bit of an outline as she started to walk away.

  But then I remembered some minor thing that she had mentioned. Wait, you said something about "mom" and an "old man Jerome", who are they?

  The silhouette paused for a few seconds. I'm a clone of Georgia Wolf, the Guildmistress of Guild Wolf. Jerome Marquez is the Guildmaster of the Guild you guys are paying.

  "Does everyone on this rock have two names like a human?" Cole threw in his own comment. The rest of us glared at him for failing to remember that we were not speaking aloud to preserve the secret identity of the part-time vigilante we had here.

  No, just those who are part of a clone family have last names. Often it's the first name of the line's founder but some, like my oh so imaginative mother, come up with completely new names to add on to their own. Also many of the Guildmasters have multiple clones, the SPPS gives them discounts for some reason, I've got five sisters and Jerome has eight sons. The shadow that had saved our possessions and possibly our lives then ran off back down the way we had been headed.

  I walked over to the immobile rat still lying there in the middle of the hallway. I thought I saw one of his eyes twitch a bit. So I went up to his head and flipped my kilt up, giving him a brief view of my featureless crotch. "I'm no 'missy' you scumbag." I told him and then grabbed his left hand and started pulling him back down the way we had came by his arm. Aniya came up to pick up his legs a few seconds later.

  We did as Olga suggested, we dragged the thug up to the nearest agent of Guild Marquez and told him the story she had given us. He entered the information into his wristpad, and asked Aniya to see the gun. She produced it, he looked it over, then handed it back satisfied that it was indeed an open source design that could have come from anywhere. "You should have told us you were armed." He informed Aniya after giving her the weapon back. "We would have adjusted your rates accordingly." He then bound the mugger's hands in zip-ties and injected him with the antidote to the tetrodotoxin. We left before he fully regained his mobility.

  On the way back to our ship we bought a load of feedstock for our on-board fabricator. Most spaceships intended to operate more than a day or two out from a habitat had at the very least a multi-material "omni-printer" that could make a variety of items from a number of different plastics and metals, even some basic electronics. There were even a few well-equipped ships that had nanofabricators imported all the way from earth that could construct anything from a pizza to the latest model of augmented reality contact lenses. Us, we just had an omni-printer with a couple of robotic armatures for assembling the parts as they came out of the printer, and my lab had a chemical synthesizer for automatically mixing whatever non-solid compounds we needed and a variety of microbe cultures for producing biological substances.

  Cole elected for an exact copy of the pressure dart gun Olga had given Aniya, I'd engineer a plate of bacteria to make tetrodotoxin to fill the darts with. Denal of all things wanted a Chinese longsword with a stylized pair of procyonid's paws on the hilt, I didn't think he even knew how to use a sword but I queued it up anyways. Myself, I decided on two weapons, a spring-loaded stiletto of the type where the blade popped straight out of the hilt rather than flipping out, if I got jumped like that again I figured I could pull it out and slam the side of my fist into the mugger and pop the blade into his flesh, and a gun. A number of designs were now public domain so I selected a steel semiautomatic handgun that dated back almost two hundred years but seemed to still be popular. I assembled many of the parts myself but allowed the armatures to make the bullets, filled with gunpowder mixed by the synthesizer. As I slipped the finished weapon into the printed plastic holster I now wore on my belt I hoped that I would never have occasion to use it.

  Chapter 6

  We spent the next three days touring the habitats in Vesta and asking people what they thought of the present situation on their asteroid. Many told us that the Protectors had drastically reduced the crime rate, and some other immigrants from different asteroids stated that dealing with them was preferable to most of the governments they had previously lived under. We weren't accosted by anyone else, though whether that was due to the Guilds keeping the criminal element under control or to the weapons we were now openly carrying I do not know. Regardless, I got the impression that many of the people we asked weren't telling us everything.

  Eventually, we pieced together the story of Vesta's controlled anarchy. After the revolution, the inhabitants of Vesta, which had extensive mines and worker barracks but minimal supervision, decided to embrace the concept of no rulers. The nutrient algae vending machines were hacked so that anyone could add their biometric data to the system and receive a daily allotment of calories from the machines. The fabricators were open to use by anyone who felt they needed something. If there was a shortage of fabricator materials or some of the life support systems began to malfunction or the algae went bad someone would fix the problem. If someone went crazy and started killing people they figured that an angry mob would drag him to the nearest airlock.

  Inevitably this turned out not to be the case. Air scrubbers crapped out, leaving entire sectors unlivable at a rate that overw
helmed the few people who had the initiative to fix them. Infected algae were ignored until the food became toxic, and psychopaths found ways to murder people with no witnesses to form mobs.

  The tipping point came, ironically enough, when some people who were concerned about the degradation of the habitat organized and began working to fix the various problems full time. This group, known as the Repairmen's Guild, initially suffered from a lack of manpower to resolve all the broken pieces of the habitat, until they came up with the idea of offering their members extra food rations. At first, this extra food came from algae trays and hydroponics farms maintained by the guild itself and voluntary donations from grateful civilians. But as time passed, they needed more and more workers, and many Guilders assigned to collect donations started using physical force to intimidate people into giving up their food. This led to many people becoming malnourished, and some resorted to stealing food from others. During this time, the Protector's Guild formed, and refused to aid anyone who didn't "donate" to them, and even more people starved as a result of them taking yet more of the food. Some people tried to avoid giving away their rations by offering resources they had mined, items they had fabricated, or services they could provide. After some initial incidents, the Guilds decided that they would accept payments other than food rations, which convinced many people to find things that they could produce.

  Eventually, so many people were producing products and performing services that they formed guilds of their own and began exchanging products or services for those produced by others besides the Repairmen and Protectors. At some point people started giving written promises of a future good or service instead: "This file is redeemable for one kilogram of carbon from Phil" and such. And then people began to trade these promises around. Unfortunately they were easy to copy, and there were disputes as to who had the valid file.

  One group noticed this phenomenon and noticed that many other asteroids used qcoins that were nigh impossible to counterfeit. They obtained a set of quantum servers and formed a guild that began trading promise files for freshly mined qcoins. The issue of starvation was largely solved. Many people even started growing plants imported from Earth or raised small animals for sale, increasing the general food supply, though the algae vending machines remained open for those who could not afford other foodstuffs.