The Pride of Parahumans (11 page)

Apparently, my silence was answer enough, as
he spoke again. "Sapient beings are no different. Humans almost
depleted their own ecosystem on Earth; it's the whole reason they
sent us out into space to obtain more resources for them to
consume. By controlling the price of cloning, we prevent Vesta from
becoming overpopulated and overstraining the flimsy life support
systems we have in place."

"Surely people are smart enough to stop
reproducing before they reach the carrying capacity of their
environment," I objected. I could not imagine anyone being so
stupid.

"And are you willing to bet the lives of
everyone on this asteroid, possibly the entire Belt, on that
statement?" I could not. That was too big a decision for me to
make. I slumped my head forward and shook it lightly. "So you will
not tell anyone else about your discovery?"

"Yes," I told him, defeat plain on my
face.

"Excellent," Jakob Griggs said before popping
another mouse into his mouth. After swallowing he asked me another
question. "Did you tell anyone else before coming here?"

"Just your clone, Maximus."

"Good. I've already told him why he should
keep his mouth shut." Jakob looked back into the box of mice one
last time and turned back to me. "It appears that I have no more
appetite for mice today, but there is still one left here. Would
you care to try it?"

At that point, I was afraid to refuse
anything he asked of me. I walked up to his side of the table and
glanced down at the box. There was one white mouse remaining, among
the stains left by its siblings in the container, still trying in
vain to scurry up the slick walls of the box. I reached in and
tried to grab it but it ran away to try and vault the opposite
wall. I reached in with my other hand and herded it between the
two. I managed to take hold of its thin tail and pull it out.
Screeching in terror, it tried to wriggle out of my hand or curl
back on my fingers and claw at them, but to no avail. Looking into
its beady black eyes, I steeled myself for what would come next. I
opened my mouth and tried to lead the rodent inside. Still clinging
to a faint hope of survival, it gripped onto my tongue with its
sharp toes. The pain instead prompted me to bite down hard. I heard
the ribs crack, felt the squishy organs spill out of the holes in
its torso, the hot blood streaming down my chin. Not knowing
exactly what to do next, I flicked the corpse to the back of my
mouth with my tongue and, with a great deal of effort,
swallowed.

"You have a bit of something there." Jakob
Griggs, the shadowy director of the anarchy of Vesta, gestured to
his left cheek. I picked up a napkin and dabbed it at the
approximate area he had indicated, it came back stained dark red.
If I had been superstitious, I might have taken it as an omen of
things to come.

Chapter 10

A few days after my encounter with my
all-powerful employer, I was eating dinner with my former
crewmates. Nothing anywhere near the quality of that veritable
feast Jakob Griggs had, just some flavored lichen-based foodstuffs
that grew in some of the smaller caves set aside for food
production. To be honest, I hadn't had much of an appetite after
that eventful luncheon. I was cutting up a greenish loaf when Cole
spoke.

"It's funny," he said to no one in
particular. "Just a couple days ago, all our rates went up ten
percent. Wonder what changed this time?"

"No idea," I said. I really did have no idea
what he was talking about. My own rates hadn't changed since I
started working for the SPPS. Why would everyone else's rise?

Denal offered his own thoughts. "Well, I
asked some of the boys and girls I know by the docks. They said
that Marquez hadn't upped their own bills by any significant
amount."

"So it's just us?" said Aniya, who was
tearing off chunks of two whole loaves of lichen bread as we
talked. "You think it's because of the whole bounty hunter
thing?"

"Doubt it; it's been weeks," Cole said.
"Unless something else happened with Argen over in the genetics
labs."

I paused for a second. I couldn't tell them
anything about MOR10X-6; I had promised Jakob I wouldn't tell
anyone. "No, nothing like that." Which was true in the vaguest
sense. I had not encountered any bounty hunters or anything like
that.

"Here's an idea," Denal began, which probably
meant it was doomed to fail. "That Derrick Marquez guy is just a
big bully, like that VP's kid we splattered out by Ceres. He's not
used to people standing up to him, so how about we miss a payment
or two, and when he comes over looking for money, we firmly, and
with our weapons well at hand, tell him we're not paying the
increased rate?"

I could tell from the start that it was a bad
idea. "Look," I told him, "I still have some money left over after
the insurance deductions. I could give it all to you guys and just
live off the algal dole."

"And what about when the premiums get too
high for even that to help?" Aniya asked.

I honestly hadn't thought of that
possibility, though I doubted my income could make much of a
difference as it was. "Look," I said, "you do not want to fight
this guy. You just don't."

"Maybe you don't, Argen, but the rest of us
do." Even Cole was in on this idiotic plan. What was going on here?
"You don't have to participate but we are going to convince him to
stop charging us such exorbitant prices one way or another."

"Fine then!" I threw down my utensils and got
up to storm out. "Just don't come running to me when you need to
pay your medical bills after this fiasco goes down."

***

The next day, I headed down to the ship after
work, thinking that maybe I'd reacted a bit too harshly to their
plan and should have offered some more coherent arguments as to why
it would be a bad idea to try to intimidate Derrick Marquez into
lowering our payments. All day I had been thinking of new arguments
that I hoped would persuade them more effectively. But all those
ideas were dashed from my mind as I came around the bend and saw
Marquez enforcers setting up a perimeter of yellow tape around the
docking tunnel to our vessel.

"What's going on here?" I asked the nearest
officer, an almost two-meter-tall tiger.

His response was to hold a camera up to my
face and run my image through a tablet app. When he read the
results, he glared down at me and instead of answering my question,
issued a question (or rather a demand) of his own. "Where is the
red panda known as 'Denal'?"

What? They wanted Denal? Had he tried
something stupid already? The only response I could think to give
was a short "I… don't know."

"You liar." The tiger grabbed the front of my
shirt and drew me close. "You two were on the same policy as the
victims; you must have some idea of where he ran off to."

"Leave zir." A disturbingly familiar voice
came from a gurney set up by the Guild vehicle parked next to the
tunnel entrance. On the propped up stretcher was the one cat I
least wanted to see at that time. "Ze's with Griggs," said Derrick
Marquez, the corrupt clone of the Marquez clan's leader.

The enforcer dropped me and stalked off, back
to whatever it was he had been assigned to do. Cautiously, I
approached the commander. I saw that his stomach was bandaged and
he was essentially confined to his impromptu bed by a set of
intravenous tubes and straps to his legs.

"What…" I stuttered, afraid of what the
answer might be. "What was he talking about?"

Derrick snorted; even such a simple act
appeared to take a great deal of effort in his condition. "What do
you think happened?" He lifted a hand to point towards the interior
of the ground car next to him. "Your raccoon buddy went nuts and
shot your other two friends. Then when I tried to stop him, he
attempted to run me through with a sword."

I looked in the direction he was pointing.
There sitting on the bed of the transport lay several items in
plastic bags tagged with numbers for reference. One bag had Denal's
longsword, the thin blade snapped in half. Aniya and Cole's dart
guns were in another pair of bags, next to them a couple of darts
that had apparently been fired. But the interior of the vehicle was
dominated by a pair of very large opaque bags that were zipped
shut; one was just a little over one meter long, the other well
over three.

"Are they…" I started to ask, but I couldn't
bring myself to complete the sentence. "They can't be. I was just
having dinner with them last night. It's not possible."

"Afraid so, Silver." The Marquez scion's
voice was calm and controlled, as if this kind of thing were
routine. "The darts Denal shot them with where loaded with massive
doses of hydrogen cyanide. They were dead within minutes."

"But those are Aniya and Cole's guns," I
objected, still unable to grasp the reality laid out before me.
"They would never put something so lethal in their darts; they
hated killing."

"Then I guess you didn't know your crewmates
as well as you thought you did." Derrick Marquez started to lift
himself up off his stretcher to turn towards me. "I suggest you go
home and go to bed early. This is a lot to deal with." Then his
eyes lit up in a moment of sadistic glee. "Unless… this was your
home, wasn't it? Well, too bad, because it's now evidence in a
murder investigation. You might be able to retrieve some of your
things in two to six weeks, depending on how long the paperwork
takes to process."

"Hope you can handle the mortgage payments,"
I said in a weak attempt at a witty comeback as I slowly walked
away in the direction of the apartment I had called home for five
nights out of each of the last five weeks.

Once I made it there, I found myself taking
Derrick Marquez's advice, I piled every blanket and pillow in the
apartment on top of the bed and burrowed underneath them. It was no
substitute for Aniya's pouch. That would never again offer me the
comfortable safety I had felt inside it. By the time I crawled out
to inform Maximus that I wouldn't be coming in to work the
following morning, the sheets were stained with sweat and
tears.

***

I spent the day following the deaths of two
of my closest and only friends and the disappearance of the third
sitting in my bedroom wrapped in a blanket and watching video
streams. Having fully realized that I was living in a feudal
nightmare, I lost my taste for "Crowns of Furtopia" and began
watching comedy shows. There were hundreds of antique human
comedies on the net (watching our great creators whacking each
other on the heads with hammers never got old) as well as original
parahuman works, often commenting on current events in one asteroid
or another. But then one of the not-so-serious news feeds I was
watching led me to one that was serious, and a bit personal.

This was a video titled "Newcomer to Vesta
Stabs Marquez Clone, why?" and was uploaded by someone who went by
the moniker of "HoundOfGod." The last thing I needed was a reminder
of what had just happened, but curiosity led me onwards.

The video started with a still image of
Derrick Marquez staggering with a bloody broken blade sticking out
of his kevlar body armor, the hilt of Denal's sword in his hand and
an expression of pure fury on his face. The voiceover began in
digitally distorted harsh and gravelly tones; it sounded male, but
for all I knew, the narrator was actually female and using software
to hide her identity. "Yesterday, Derrick Marquez, a commander in
the Marquez Protectors Guild, was stabbed by an individual known
simply as Denal." The image changed to a street camera view of
Denal, from one of our first days in Vesta. "Denal arrived on Vesta
over a month ago with three companions: Aniya"-a picture of Aniya
in her spacesuit was shown-"Cole"-the raven's portrait-"and
Argentum,"-me, obviously. "The four of them had slain a pirate in
self-defense near Ceres a couple weeks prior to their arrival at
Vesta, who just happened to be a clone of a prominent VP in the
Directorate hierarchy. How ironic that they chose Vesta to escape
reprisal for slaying a clone." If only we'd known, Aniya and Cole
might have been doing hard labor instead of lying in some morgue
waiting to be recycled into raw nutrients. "The official report by
House Marquez is that during negotiations with the commander over
insurance premiums, Denal suddenly slew Aniya and Cole with
pressure darts loaded with cyanide, then charged Derrick with a
Jiàn sword. The blade then broke in his attempt to penetrate the
commander's bodysuit, and Denal fled." I did not need to be
reminded; as the video stated this I pulled the sheets closer
together over my eyes.

"However, there is one major problem with
this account. After fleeing the scene Denal ran straight to
territory covered by House Wolf and pled for asylum. What's more,
he had a video recording of the encounter taken via a mini-camera
in one of his vest buttons." So that answered where Denal was,
hiding behind his lupine girlfriend's camouflage and gun. "The
following video has been determined to be the original footage with
no editing, for the simple reason that he had no time to edit while
running for his life."

The video suddenly shifted to a scene of
Derrick Marquez sitting at the far end of a table from the camera.
To either side of the camera, one could barely see some black
feathered wings or furred paws resting on the table. "Now," said
Derrick, "I'm sure you can understand why we had to increase your
rates so drastically, considering your present safety
concerns."

"Yeah, right." The person wearing the camera
had spoken, given how the image jostled, and I instantly recognized
the voice as Denal's. "You just want to suck every spare qcoin we
own out of us."

"There are additional expenses racked up by
fending off bounty hunters after your hide," Derrick continued.
"And your foxy friend is no longer paying zir share of the extra
costs, so you three have to take up the slack."