The Pride of Parahumans Read online

  Despite all this, theft remained a bit of a problem. The focus had just shifted from algae rations to other products they couldn't afford but still desired. Thus the Protector's Guild expanded until their organization became unwieldy and was divided into several smaller guilds.

  As great as the system that had emerged spontaneously from the chaos was, there were still some problems evidently.

  ***

  "What do you mean by 'We can't buy from you'?" Denal demanded from the representative of the Marquez habitat's industrial fabrication guild. The red panda was practically in the rep's face leaning across the desk.

  "It's guild rules: We can only accept raw materials gathered by one of the miners or chemists guilds," the mixed breed dog parahuman replied, nonplussed by Denal's particular way of asking him questions.

  After deciding that Vesta was, in fact, safer than most of the other asteroids in the immediate area, we bought a long-term coverage contract from the Marquez Guild and set out to find uncommon minerals in the surrounding rocks. After a week out in the black, we came back with a load of tungsten, a very dense and strong metal used in a lot of heavy-duty construction work. Normally we could get a decent price for it, but now we were finding it a bit difficult to offload on the locals.

  "And just why can't you accept ores from independent miners?" Denal propped his drooping upper body over the desk with his arms as he asked further questions that I was sure would not get us closer to making money from this particular venture.

  The dog stuck behind the desk paused for a few seconds as if having difficulty thinking of a good reason for the rule. "Well, for one thing, we don't maintain the equipment needed to determine the purity or even identity of the product. The miners' guilds do."

  Okay, now I was feeling a little offended. "I analyzed that ore," I threw out before the bureaucrat in front of us. "It is ninety percent pure tungsten. I guarantee it."

  He turned slightly to face me. "And what is your guarantee worth, madam, er, sir, er…?"

  I hate it when people don't recognize that I have no gender. "I'm pretty sure the word is "zir", I'm neuter. And the name is Argentum, like the metal."

  "Yes, well, Argentum, is it? How do I know that your assessment is accurate without certification from a guild? For all I know, you're lying outright about the contents of those containers that you and your colleagues want to sell me."

  I grabbed my head in my left hand and started rubbing my forehead in exasperation. "At least the Ceres Directorate had their own mineral composition team," I mumbled to myself at what I was sure was a barely audible level.

  Denal pushed himself up off the desk and started for the door. "So, what, we should try selling to the miners' guild instead?"

  "No, I think you misunderstood me," the fabricator's rep said. "The guild as a whole doesn't buy materials; they only license and certify. You have to join the miners' guild."

  ***

  As we left the office Denal and I noticed a large animated advertisement on the side of a building. It showed a view of the city around us, but the buildings were decayed, like they hadn't been maintained for decades. It seemed deserted. A caption stated "VESTA, 2300 A.D." Then a figure in a pressure suit was seen walking down an alleyway; his species was indeterminable but appeared primate in origin. He walked into a house. The interior was covered with dust that he left a shuffling trail through. Entering the bedroom one noticed a bluish metal parahuman skeleton, with the distinctive skull of a feline, lying on the bed. The figure picked up a wristpad the skeleton was wearing, dislodging the remains of the owner's hand and sending the bones clattering to the floor.

  The figure flipped his visor upwards to examine his prize, revealing the furless face of a human being. Words appeared at the bottom of the display and began to move slowly upwards, "EVERY YEAR, HUNDREDS OF PARAHUMANS DIE FROM VIOLENCE, EXPOSURE TO HARSH ENVIRONMENTS, AND DISEASE. UNLIKE MOST SPECIES, WE CANNOT REPLACE THOSE LOSSES WITHOUT TECHNOLOGICAL ASSISTANCE AND CONSCIOUS EFFORT. OUR PEOPLE ARE HEADED FOR EXTINCTION."

  Then scene began to shift, subtly at first but becoming clearer and clearer. Dust vanished, broken shelving was restored, and burnt-out lights came back on. "BUT WE AT THE SOCIETY FOR THE PRESERVATION OF PARAHUMAN SPECIES BELIEVE WE CAN REVERSE THAT TREND." Finally, the human picking over the bones of long-dead parahumans disappeared, and the skeleton was replaced by a sickly-looking, but live, panther. Then the door opened, and another panther who could have been a copy of the one in the bed, just healthier- wait, not healthier, just much younger- came through, carrying a tray of foodstuffs. The old cat smiled as he saw his clone (for surely that was what the other feline was) placed the tray on a cabinet next to the bed, and pulled up a chair.

  Then the scene shifted to a factory setting, a row of cylindrical glass tanks with robotic arms within that laid flesh and sinew over metallic bones inside the tanks. It panned over to a tank with a nearly complete male red fox suspended in the tank while a team of technicians and another male fox, this one with grey hairs spotting his fur, stood nearby. "OUR CLONES ARE NOT MERE LUXURIES. THEY ENSURE A FUTURE FOR ALL PARAHUMANITY."

  "Tugs at the heartstrings, doesn't it," I said as the scene started to repeat before me. Denal nodded in agreement.

  "Hey, didn't that Olga Wolf babe say that she was a clone?" I thought back to our first day in Vesta. She had said she was a clone of the guildmistress of Guild Wolf, no less. And there was something else…

  "She claimed that something called the 'SPPS' gave discounts on clones to guild leaders," I recalled. "Think this is the SPPS?"

  Denal shrugged. "Seems likely." Then he paused as if in contemplation. "Hey, maybe we should all get clones. We can be like one of those human families. Me and Cole can be the dads, Aniya can be the mom, but what would that make you?"

  I snorted derisively. "Save it until we have enough money to actually buy clones. I doubt they would charge a bunch of prospectors fresh from Ceres anything less than full price. And last I checked, clones were expensive."

  "Right, right. Let's go find a miners' guild, then, shall we?" Denal held up his wristpad to look up the local listings for the various guilds. Instantly, I was reminded of the video, and the titanium alloy bones falling away from the prying hands of a future human looter.

  ***

  Denal pulled up a map to the dense-metal miners' guild main office, and we walked down there in five minutes. On the way, we called up Aniya and Cole and told them to meet us there. Cole was already perched on a street light outside the building by the time we arrived, but Aniya took an extra three minutes to trot up. Once everyone had shown up, we explained to the others the guild rules that kept us from selling our ores and how it seemed that the only way around them was to join a guild, like the one we were standing outside.

  "Sounds like a stupid rule." Cole said from atop his perch above the walkway.

  "He said it was because they didn't have any analysis equipment," I explained, "which makes some sense as a cost-cutting measure. But he also said that he didn't trust my own assessment. Why should being in a guild make me any better at telling the difference between tungsten and lead?"

  "I don't know why don't we ask them?" Aniya motioned towards the door. I figured we might as well see what they had to offer and pressed the intercom button by the door.

  There was a buzz and the speaker clicked on. "Hello?"

  I answered, "Is this the dense-metals miners' guild?"

  "Yes. Do you have an appointment?"

  I hadn't thought of that. "No; were we supposed to make one?"

  "It depends on what you are after."

  "We would like to join."

  There was a brief pause; then the speaker crackled again with a response. "Well, then, I've got the application forms here. I can show you through the process." The doors opened and we entered.

  Inside was a small lobby with some chairs by one wall and a massive tank of water covering the opposite wall. Inside the tank was a computer terminal of
some sort and a giant octopus. The cephalopod splayed out several tentacles, changed color multiple times, and let loose a couple jets of water. A speaker on the side of the tank came to life. "So, why do you want to join the guild?"

  I moved to the side of the tank closest to the mollusk's large eye. "We're a group of prospectors who just moved here from Ceres. We attempted to sell some tungsten, but the buyer stated that he couldn't take it, because we weren't certified by a guild."

  "Naturally. Freelancers are too untrustworthy. How can one be sure that their wares are truly saleable?" A tablet slid out of a slot on the wall opposite of him. "Each of you fill out your personal information. There's a separate file for everyone on that tablet."

  Aniya picked up the tablet and filled in her information before handing it to me. It was rather straightforward: "Name: Argentum. Date of birth: 2069. Gender: neuter. E-mail address, voice comm code… " For special skills, I selected both chemical analysis and emergency medic. For employment history, I listed first my work for the corporation that had commissioned my creation, then the Ceres Directorate before the layoffs, and finally my current employment as a freelance prospector. I chose not to fill in any optional references, given our status as fugitives from another asteroid. I then passed the tablet to Cole, who filled it out and passed it to Denal who fitted the device back in its slot.

  "All right then. We will need to assess your abilities before accepting your application to join the guild. Tomorrow a representative of the guild will join you on one of your expeditions to observe your techniques and verify your claims." The octopus probably had a script written in his translator specifically for this situation. "Argentum, I am scheduling an examination of your analysis skills in three days time."

  Hold on a second there. "But it takes at least two days to reach any asteroids that haven't already been claimed. I'd still be out in space at the time of the exam you have scheduled."

  "Chemical analysts do not accompany miners to the dig sites. Guild rules to keep them safe from unnecessary risks. There aren't too many parahumans who know how to identify the minerals we extract properly."

  I did not understand. "So miners don't know if they have a load of lanthanides or a chunk of carbon until they get all the way back to port? What if they go broke because they wasted time hauling worthless material when they could have been looking for something more valuable?"

  The guild clerk released a bit of ink into the waters of his tank at that statement; I suppose I must have surprised him a bit. "The guild will subsidize your losses. Otherwise, your dues will comprise ten percent of your total profits. The habitat needs carbon too, you know."

  "Come on." Aniya grabbed my shoulder in a gesture of reassurance. "We still have enough money left over from the last sale to keep us afloat a little bit longer." She was right: The five hundred thousand qcoins we retained would be enough to finance another expedition, store the tungsten from the last haul in one of the portside warehouses, and pay for our protection plan for another couple weeks.

  "Very well." I said with a bit of reluctance. And we left, headed for an increasingly uncertain future.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning, a grey parrot came to our ship and introduced himself as the observer from the miners' guild. I locked up my lab and emptied my cabin. What I couldn't carry on me was stored in the cargo hold. I would be spending the next four to five days in a moderately priced hotel I had found the night before, while my friends were busy working under the scrutiny of some bureaucrat. And I didn't even have my experiments to keep me from getting bored.

  I spent the rest of that day reading and looking for bootleg games on the network. The second day, I found some locally produced video drama series about a young Protectors' investigator who seemed to uncover a lot of corpses produced by a variety of psychopaths who killed in distinctive and quite gruesome ways. It managed to hold my interest for a couple hours, impressive for a fifteen minute web show.

  Eventually there came the big exam that I had been waiting for, which turned out to be determining the composition of a few vials of iron, platinum, and lead dust. I probably could have told what they were just visually, but I put on a show of using the scales and the spectrophotometer to conduct a detailed and highly specific analysis for the benefit of the bored-looking raccoon assessing me. When it was all over, he printed out a small plastic card declaring me a certified chemical analyst of the dense metal miners' guild and gave it to me for identification. I was starting to think I would have been better off claiming to be a general miner and going with the others.

  Feeling like I should at least try to celebrate or something, I went to a somewhat high-priced café for lunch (I'd mostly been eating the algae rations) and ordered a blob of vat-grown beef. I rarely had the chance to eat meat, as even in-vitro animal flesh was expensive several million miles from the nearest pasture, but I felt justified in splurging a little to satisfy my carnivorous instincts that day.

  I'd been sawing at the chunk of artificial meat for nearly fifteen minutes when he showed up, a muscular cross-fox wearing synth-leather pants and an open shirt that showed off his pecs. He spotted me and walked over to my table. "Looks like you're having some trouble there" he stated without so much as a word of introduction.

  "I'm used to algae products," I replied as I tore off a chunk of meat and popped it in my mouth. I chewed the tough material vigorously for several seconds before swallowing. Who was this guy to suggest that a canine did not know how to eat meat?

  "You should eat meat more often. It's what our ancestors evolved for." True, though he probably meant the foxes that contributed maybe two percent of our DNA rather than the humans who lost their leaf-processing intestines sucking the marrow from gazelle bones. "My name's Walker. What about you, babe?"

  Babe? I choked down the last of my mouthful and glared at him. "Argen, and for your information, I'm neither a girl nor an effeminate boy." Most female parahumans have human-like mammary glands, probably added in there by a lonely genetic engineer, so I'm not often mistaken for female. However, there weren't very many neuters made, the aforementioned motivational issues making us not particularly popular among work crews, so I am frequently taken for a slim male or, on occasion, a female with smaller-than-average breasts.

  "Oh, really, now? I like a challenge sometimes." He reached his hand towards mine. About that time, I realized that he didn't really smell right. The genetic engineers deliberately chose not to introduce the genes for the distinctive musk my four-legged kin produced, but my sense of smell was almost as good as theirs, and even without specialized glands there was a subtle difference between each species' scents. That said, I'm not entirely sure whether I realized that Walker smelled more dog-like than foxy before or after I felt the band snap around my wrist.

  Surprised, I yanked my arm back. I saw a smart handcuff apparently set to close around the first wrist it came across, connected by a thin cable to Walker's arm. There was no apparent matching cuff on his wrist, as if the cable came straight out of his fur. He pulled my arm back down to the table and flipped his own arm to pin it down. He gave me a wicked looking grin as he told me, "Argentum, chemical analyst on Ceres deep space mining vessel ANQ18K458, you are under arrest for the murder of Kurt, clone of Vice President Cooper."

  I panicked then. With my left hand, I drew my spring knife and slammed it, concealed in my fist, on Walker's arm. Unfortunately, the trick I'd imagined where I would pop the blade into my attacker's flesh didn't work as well as I'd hoped. The blade hit something seemingly impenetrable and the spring sent my arm flying back off his. As I swung back for another hit, he caught my blade arm and forced the knife out of my hand. He flung me to the ground and attempted to wrestle me into submission. As I struggled, I heard a loud whirring sound, and a quadrotor drone with a pair of automatic gauss rifles on its undercarriage descended upon the open café. The few customers that had stayed behind to gawk hurriedly ran or bounded away. A loud voice erupted from the dron
e's speakers: "Unidentified parahuman! You will cease assaulting this paying customer of the Marquez Guild and explain yourself!"

  Walker scowled at the drone, then hit a space on his right breast before returning his arm to pinning me down. The image of the suggestively dressed cross-fox disappeared, revealing a bloodhound wearing an armored bodysuit. What looked like spider silk with plates of thick composite or metal spaced was strategically all over the suit. I spotted a nick over one of the plates on his cuffed arm where my knife had tried to penetrate.

  "I'm Walker, a bounty hunter for the Ceres Directorate. Ze has committed a crime against the executives of the Directorate, and I am here to bring zir to justice."

  "He was launching missiles at us!" I objected loudly. But before I could say anything further Walker covered my mouth with my own arm.

  The drone spoke again. "You will allow zir to stand up and this drone will accompany you two to the nearest Marquez guard station." A pair of red lights on the barrels of each coilgun lit up, presumably the capacitors to the electromagnets. "You have five seconds to comply."

  Grudgingly, Walker did comply, yanking me up as he stood so that I stumbled onto my feet. He dragged me along as the drone led us, flying backwards to keep its guns on us, to the station. There we were passed on to a group of mostly feline parahumans in riot gear with large gauss pistols slung on their hips, next to a shock baton and a pair of smart cuffs similar to the ones binding me to the bounty hunter.

  We were taken before a massive jaguar whose name tag read "Marquez, Derrick." Was this one of the Guildmaster's clones that Olga Wolf had mentioned? He glowered at us before demanding, "Now what is this all about?"