{"submission_id":"512105","keywords":[{"keyword_id":"40496","keyword_name":"bloodhound","contributed":"f","submissions_count":"74"},{"keyword_id":"3","keyword_name":"dog","contributed":"f","submissions_count":"83996"},{"keyword_id":"123","keyword_name":"female","contributed":"f","submissions_count":"519851"},{"keyword_id":"33","keyword_name":"fox","contributed":"f","submissions_count":"135367"},{"keyword_id":"165","keyword_name":"male","contributed":"f","submissions_count":"639815"},{"keyword_id":"6157","keyword_name":"neuter","contributed":"f","submissions_count":"395"},{"keyword_id":"363","keyword_name":"raven","contributed":"f","submissions_count":"1550"},{"keyword_id":"157","keyword_name":"red panda","contributed":"f","submissions_count":"7071"},{"keyword_id":"714","keyword_name":"sci-fi","contributed":"f","submissions_count":"2558"},{"keyword_id":"164","keyword_name":"wolf","contributed":"f","submissions_count":"111553"}],"hidden":"f","scraps":"f","favorite":"f","favorites_count":"1","create_datetime":"2013-11-24 04:56:22.580423+01","create_datetime_usertime":"24 Nov 2013 04:56 CET","last_file_update_datetime":"2013-11-24 04:54:27.195146+01","last_file_update_datetime_usertime":"24 Nov 2013 04:54 CET","username":"Zarpaulus","user_id":"105552","user_icon_file_name":"111454_Zarpaulus_icon_from_jen.gif","user_icon_url_large":"https://nl.ib.metapix.net/usericons/large/111/111454_Zarpaulus_icon_from_jen.gif","user_icon_url_medium":"https://nl.ib.metapix.net/usericons/medium/111/111454_Zarpaulus_icon_from_jen.gif","user_icon_url_small":"https://nl.ib.metapix.net/usericons/small/111/111454_Zarpaulus_icon_from_jen.gif","file_name":"667188_Zarpaulus_nanowrimo_2013_chapter_7.doc","file_url_full":"https://nl.ib.metapix.net/files/full/667/667188_Zarpaulus_nanowrimo_2013_chapter_7.doc","file_url_screen":"https://nl.ib.metapix.net/files/screen/667/667188_Zarpaulus_nanowrimo_2013_chapter_7.doc","file_url_preview":"https://nl.ib.metapix.net/files/preview/667/667188_Zarpaulus_nanowrimo_2013_chapter_7.doc","files":[{"file_id":"667188","file_name":"667188_Zarpaulus_nanowrimo_2013_chapter_7.doc","file_url_full":"https://nl.ib.metapix.net/files/full/667/667188_Zarpaulus_nanowrimo_2013_chapter_7.doc","file_url_screen":"https://nl.ib.metapix.net/files/screen/667/667188_Zarpaulus_nanowrimo_2013_chapter_7.doc","file_url_preview":"https://nl.ib.metapix.net/files/preview/667/667188_Zarpaulus_nanowrimo_2013_chapter_7.doc","mimetype":"application/msword","submission_id":"512105","user_id":"105552","submission_file_order":"0","full_size_x":null,"full_size_y":null,"screen_size_x":null,"screen_size_y":null,"preview_size_x":null,"preview_size_y":null,"initial_file_md5":"1951da75878538dfd7beb2721d859368","full_file_md5":"1951da75878538dfd7beb2721d859368","large_file_md5":"","small_file_md5":"","thumbnail_md5":"","deleted":"f","create_datetime":"2013-11-24 04:54:27.195146+01","create_datetime_usertime":"24 Nov 2013 04:54 CET"}],"pools":[{"pool_id":"19658","name":"The Pride of Parahumans","description":"My Sci-Fi novel and related stories.","count":"34","submission_left_submission_id":"509820","submission_left_file_name":"664227_Zarpaulus_nanowrimo_2013_chapter_6.doc","submission_right_submission_id":"516426","submission_right_file_name":"673379_Zarpaulus_nanowrimo_2013_chapter_8.doc"}],"description":"Still working on this. Also writing up chapter 11.","description_bbcode_parsed":"Still working on this. Also writing up chapter 11.","writing":"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.\n\tI spent the rest of that day reading and looking for bootlegged games on the network. The second day I found some locally produced video drama series about a young Protector's investigator who seemed to uncover a lot of corpses produced by a variety of psychopaths who killed in different distinctive and quite gruesome ways. It managed to hold my interest for a couple hours, impressive for a 15-minute web show.\n\tEventually 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 tired-looking raccoon assessing me. When it was all over he printed out a small plastic card declaring me to be a certified chemical analyst of the heavy metal miners guild and gave it to me for identification. I couldn't have been more excited, in fact I was starting to think I would have been better off claiming to be a general miner and going with the others.\n\tFeeling 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 this day.\n\tI'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-front 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.\n\t\"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?\n\t\"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?\"\n\tBabe? 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 earlier mentioned motivation 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.\n\t\"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.\n\tSurprised 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 it was like 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.\"\n\tI 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 tough and seemingly impenetrable and the spring instead 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 slung to 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 drone's speakers. \"Unidentified parahuman! You will cease assaulting this paying customer of the Marquez Guild and explain yourself!\"\n\tWalker 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 pads of thick composite or metal spaced strategically all over the suit. I spotted a nick over one of the pads on his cuffed arm where my knife had tried to penetrate.\n\t\"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.\"\n\t\"He was launching missiles at us!\" I objected loudly. But before I could say anything further Walker covered my mouth with my own arm.\n\tThe 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.\"\n\tGrudgingly 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.\n\tWe 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?\"\n\tWalker was the first to speak. \"Twenty-six days ago a freighter piloted by a parahuman known as Kurt went dark near Ceres. Three days later his ship was found floating derelict, the cockpit was shattered and the body of the pilot was in shattered frozen pieces. There was just barely enough intact genetic material in a severed hand that was found still attached to the steering column to identify the remains as belonging to Kurt.\" I could feel myself cringing a bit at the description of the carnage. \"The Directorate decided to investigate all ships that had been in the area of the incident at roughly the same time. The only ship that was unavailable for inspection was the one that zir Argentum here was serving aboard. When the Directorate received a request for references from one of the mining organizations here concerning Argentum and zir companions Denal, Aniya, and Cole we surmised that they were somehow responsible and a bounty was posted.\"\n\tDerrick 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?\"\n\tI 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 and 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 that indicated some of it was organic in nature.\"\n\t\"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.\"\n\t\"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?\"\n\t\"Yes! I have a copy of the video and the sensor logs on my tablet.\" Finally I had something I could use to defend myself with. \"It's in my hotel room. I can give you the address and keycard now.\" \n\t\"Now wait a second!\" Walker had yet another objection. \"Those can be faked.\"\n\t\"I have a pretty good technical team.\" Derrick 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. \"Tell me, piracy is a pretty serious offense pretty much everywhere in the belt last I recall. Why didn't you think of reporting the incident to the authorities on Ceres?\"\n\t\"The Directorate does not recognize self defense as a valid excuse for violence.\" I explained. \"And in any case we found out later that he was the clone of a vice president, we figured we were better off taking our chances out here.\"\n\t\"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.\"\n\tTen 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.\n\tDerrick 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.\n\t\"Yes, it is.\" Walker replied.\n\tThe 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 mining craft, especially one that makes berth at a habitat that I 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 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. \"Oh, and apparently that's not a mining ship, it's a mid-range cargo transport with neither the ability to land on asteroids or the heavy equipment to harvest minerals from one. Guess your suggestion of Argentum here stealing that gold of theirs from him doesn't make any sense.\"\n\tWalker slumped forward in defeat. \"All right, all right, I'll leave Argentum and zir friends alone.\"\n\tDerrick 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 you retrieved our client's information from and stating that as long as ze is a paying customer of ours bounty hunters will not be allowed to pursue zir. And 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.\n\t\"Thank you, 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.\n\t\"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. And as such we 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.\"\n\tThree 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?\"\n\tHe laughed disturbingly loudly at that statement. \"I could count the number of refugees we cover for whom having evidence of their innocence posted by a bunch of anarchist barbarians removed their bounties on one hand.\" 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.\"\n\tI 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.\n\t\"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.\"\n\tI gripped the arms of my chair like my hands were hydraulic vises. I practically burst out at him, \"It's not sexual to us!\" And then I amended a bit more calmly. \"And I thought parahumans had no taboos.\"\n\t\"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 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.\"\n\tThat 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.\"\n\t\"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.\n\tNervously 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.\n","writing_bbcode_parsed":"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.
\tI spent the rest of that day reading and looking for bootlegged games on the network. The second day I found some locally produced video drama series about a young Protector's investigator who seemed to uncover a lot of corpses produced by a variety of psychopaths who killed in different distinctive and quite gruesome ways. It managed to hold my interest for a couple hours, impressive for a 15-minute web show.
\tEventually 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 tired-looking raccoon assessing me. When it was all over he printed out a small plastic card declaring me to be a certified chemical analyst of the heavy metal miners guild and gave it to me for identification. I couldn't have been more excited, in fact I was starting to think I would have been better off claiming to be a general miner and going with the others.
\tFeeling 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 this day.
\tI'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-front 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.
\t"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?
\t"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?"
\tBabe? 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 earlier mentioned motivation 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.
\t"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.
\tSurprised 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 it was like 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."
\tI 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 tough and seemingly impenetrable and the spring instead 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 slung to 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 drone's speakers. "Unidentified parahuman! You will cease assaulting this paying customer of the Marquez Guild and explain yourself!"
\tWalker 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 pads of thick composite or metal spaced strategically all over the suit. I spotted a nick over one of the pads on his cuffed arm where my knife had tried to penetrate.
\t"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."
\t"He was launching missiles at us!" I objected loudly. But before I could say anything further Walker covered my mouth with my own arm.
\tThe 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."
\tGrudgingly 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.
\tWe 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?"
\tWalker was the first to speak. "Twenty-six days ago a freighter piloted by a parahuman known as Kurt went dark near Ceres. Three days later his ship was found floating derelict, the cockpit was shattered and the body of the pilot was in shattered frozen pieces. There was just barely enough intact genetic material in a severed hand that was found still attached to the steering column to identify the remains as belonging to Kurt." I could feel myself cringing a bit at the description of the carnage. "The Directorate decided to investigate all ships that had been in the area of the incident at roughly the same time. The only ship that was unavailable for inspection was the one that zir Argentum here was serving aboard. When the Directorate received a request for references from one of the mining organizations here concerning Argentum and zir companions Denal, Aniya, and Cole we surmised that they were somehow responsible and a bounty was posted."
\tDerrick 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?"
\tI 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 and 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 that indicated some of it was organic in nature."
\t"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."
\t"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?"
\t"Yes! I have a copy of the video and the sensor logs on my tablet." Finally I had something I could use to defend myself with. "It's in my hotel room. I can give you the address and keycard now."
\t"Now wait a second!" Walker had yet another objection. "Those can be faked."
\t"I have a pretty good technical team." Derrick 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. "Tell me, piracy is a pretty serious offense pretty much everywhere in the belt last I recall. Why didn't you think of reporting the incident to the authorities on Ceres?"
\t"The Directorate does not recognize self defense as a valid excuse for violence." I explained. "And in any case we found out later that he was the clone of a vice president, we figured we were better off taking our chances out here."
\t"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."
\tTen 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.
\tDerrick 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.
\t"Yes, it is." Walker replied.
\tThe 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 mining craft, especially one that makes berth at a habitat that I 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 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. "Oh, and apparently that's not a mining ship, it's a mid-range cargo transport with neither the ability to land on asteroids or the heavy equipment to harvest minerals from one. Guess your suggestion of Argentum here stealing that gold of theirs from him doesn't make any sense."
\tWalker slumped forward in defeat. "All right, all right, I'll leave Argentum and zir friends alone."
\tDerrick 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 you retrieved our client's information from and stating that as long as ze is a paying customer of ours bounty hunters will not be allowed to pursue zir. And 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.
\t"Thank you, 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.
\t"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. And as such we 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."
\tThree 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?"
\tHe laughed disturbingly loudly at that statement. "I could count the number of refugees we cover for whom having evidence of their innocence posted by a bunch of anarchist barbarians removed their bounties on one hand." 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."
\tI 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.
\t"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."
\tI gripped the arms of my chair like my hands were hydraulic vises. I practically burst out at him, "It's not sexual to us!" And then I amended a bit more calmly. "And I thought parahumans had no taboos."
\t"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 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."
\tThat 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."
\t"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.
\tNervously 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.
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