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There were riots in the streets, protests gathered outside the SPPS and the Protectors offices. I stayed in my apartment, having no reason or desire to go out on the streets, odds were that someone would recognize me and either lynch me (as difficult as that would be in this gravity) or fawn over me. Neither option was particularly appealing. And it was while I was sitting there watching the chaos I had wrought that I was caught off guard.\n\tOne minute I was lying back watching the riots and attempting to hide under the covers while keeping my eyes just barely uncovered. The next a team of assassins in camo-suits was materializing in my bedroom. As the mixed species team surrounded me and attempted to grab me I drew my gun, which I had hidden under a pillow after Jakob threatened me, and squeezed off three shots as I attempted to dive for the window. The first shot hit one of the assassins, what looked like a bear or a large cat I couldn't really tell, in the chest but the other two went wide as the explosions issuing from the barrel threw me against the wall. I was momentarily stunned by the impact, giving one of the thugs enough time to shove a drug spray into my mouth. I felt a faint sting for a moment as the nanoparticles burrowed into the roof of my muzzle, then numbness began to spread across my face. I made a brief attempt to make a subvocal call but I couldn't feel my jaw anymore. Then my vision blurred, I felt myself slipping away. Before succumbing to unconsciousness I saw the hit team open a bag made of active camo material, and one of the massive parahumans dragging me towards it.\n***\nAfter what felt like just moments I came to in the bag, it was dark and rough with power cords lining the interior and digging into my sides. I started to struggle, attempting to wiggle my way out of the narrow hole, when I was unceremoniously dumped out onto a metal bed. Two guards held my arms and legs down while a feline of some sort dressed in surgical scrubs poked me in the throat with a pair of sharp needles. I felt my body course with an electrical shock and heard a snap and pop of frying circuitry. Willing myself to breathe again once my limbs stopped twitching I demanded, still somewhat numbly. \"Whaaa?\"\n\t\"My more obedient son here just disabled your subvocal implant.\" I heard a rather unpleasantly familiar voice state. \"Octavius was more inclined towards the medical practices, though he had some trouble passing the surgeon's guild entry exam, something about his ethics.\"\n\tThe doctor next to me, whose serval spots I could now discern underneath his mask, snorted as if his progenitor had said something funny. \"Yeah, he had a little chat with the entry board, now I help him out whenever he needs some chop shop work done.\"\n\tAnd Maximus came from this gene pool? I was starting to wonder if someone had spiked his biofab tank with something. \"What do you want now?\"\n\tJakob's face suddenly popped into my field of vision. \"I thought about what you said.\" He said to me. \"You said that if you died after revealing the big secret that I wasn't really necessary it would lend credibility to the idea that your treatment worked. And then you put a video of me threatening you online. Now I'm thinking that the only way to discredit you is to make you disappear entirely.\" The thugs picked me up and carried me over to a large metallic cylinder with a hatch on the side. \"This is a canister for the mass driver that was built here on Vesta during the last few years of the corporate era. It was never used but it would have shot steel cans full of ore back to earth for processing.\" The two goons dropped me into the cylinder and started to shut the lid, I attempted to scramble out before it was closed but all that accomplished was a heavy steel door slamming on my right hand. I let out a loud yelp in pain and they opened it just enough for me to pull my hand back in. I couldn't see the damage but I could feel blood oozing out and I was pretty sure some bones were broken. I could faintly hear Jakob Grigg's voice through the cylinder wall. \"Now, I don't want earth thinking we're attacking them, so I placed explosive bolts along the seams that will tear the cylinder apart an hour or two out, but you'll keep on going along your pre-programmed trajectory until you reach earth. I'm pretty sure you'll be long dead by the time you are cremated in earth's atmosphere.\"\n\tI seethed with rage at Jakob's speech. \"Seems a bit overly complicated Griggs, planning a new career as a spy movie villain?\"\n\t\"I want you to suffer.\" Came the punctual response. Then I felt the cylinder moving as it was conveyed into the loading chamber of the giant railgun that the corps had intended to use for sending the belt's wealth back home. I crouched down in what I hoped was the rear of the cylinder and waited for it to fire. There was no bang, no explosion like my gun emitted, just a sudden acceleration that pushed me back into the wall and felt like it liquified my organs. I realized seconds later that it wasn't quite the case, I was still alive for one.\n\tI floated, weightless now that the acceleration was over, in the cylinder. I couldn't see a thing but I felt my way forward, pushing myself off the back wall gently. When I came to the opposite side I stopped myself with my hand, forgetting that I'd crushed it minutes earlier. Pain shot up my arm and I suspect a few of the fast-forming scabs my augmented platelets, bleeding is a tad more serious in microgravity or a sealed spacesuit than it is on earth you know, had formed broke open. I cradled it as I drifted slowly back. I guess air resistance slowed me down to a near standstill because I found myself floating in empty space. I still couldn't see anything, and I could breathe still, so I guessed I was somewhere in the middle of the giant can and it still hadn't exploded. I took a moment to think about my situation. I had been naked when they captured me so I had none of my usual wearable electronics to signal for help. I tried to use my subvocal comm and got a nasty shock for my efforts, apparently Jakob was telling the truth about having fried my implant.\n\tSo I was drifting somewhere in the middle of space, on a ballistic path to earth, in a can with no life support that was going to explode in a few minutes, and no way to call for help. I'm pretty sure I broke down sobbing at some point. I don't know how long it took, there was no clocks and when your life is in danger time has a habit of passing extremely slowly, but it felt like I was crying for hours. Eventually I got a hold of myself and started contemplating my situation. I was going to die, there was no question about that, it was just that it was going to happen a lot sooner than I had hoped. I could survive maybe an hour after the pod broke apart, conscious for most of that time, and this cylinder had maybe a couple hours worth of oxygen in it, too bad it was set to blow in an hour.\n\tSo, two hours left to live. What would happen next I wondered? Burning up in the atmosphere of a planet I had never known but had given rise to my ancestors I supposed. But I wouldn't be able to witness my meteoric cremation, my brain would have shut down. What would dying be like? I caught myself wondering. I had never of course subscribed to any religious beliefs but I knew that some humans thought that at death their consciousness separated from their body somehow and moved to another universe of some kind where they gained a new body and were either rewarded or punished for eternity according to how they had lived their previous life. And others believed that your consciousness was transferred to a newly born organism at death, so that you had a new chance to achieve some form of enlightenment, whatever that meant. And of course many others believed that there was nothing after death, you brain simply shut down for good and that was that.\n\tI was starting to think that death would be like simply falling into a deep dreamless sleep from which you would never wake when the can burst open. There were blinding flashes of light above and below me that blew away the ends of the cylinder, followed by streaks of flame running down the walls and sending the body of the cylinder flying away in four separate directions. I looked ahead of me, the view was nothing but stars, burning away in the endless night. If I craned my neck a little I could see the sun, a big blinding ball of yellow light. I chose to look at the stars again, just hanging there. I recalled that most elements heavier than helium were formed when stars exploded in supernovae. I was pretty sure that most of my body was composed of heavier elements, which must have meant that countless stars had to die for me to ever come into being. I thought of what would happen to the atoms that made up every molecule of my being. No doubt most of the organic compounds that composed the vast majority of my body would be burned off into water and carbon dioxide, which might be absorbed by some plant which would be eaten by a cow or something that would be cut up into steaks for some human or maybe a rich parahuman. I would be part of another thinking being but my memories, my personality, what made me distinct from everyone else, would be gone.\n\tI was so wrapped up in my morbid thoughts that I almost didn't notice the harpoon streaking past me. A glint of light that shot out to my left, then retracted. I was still trying to think of what it had been when the second harpoon struck me in the small of my back. There was a stabbing pain and then suddenly a large spear point jutted out of my stomach, or rather my liver on the opposite side. Prongs extended from the sides of the point and it pulled me back towards the source of the intruding weapon. What was going on now? Had Jakob Griggs changed his mind and decided that death by massive organ damage was worse than a slow death from anoxia?\n\tI was still wondering as the airlock doors closed in front of me. Then a suited parahuman glided up to me and detached the head of the harpoon from the cable, pulling it the rest of the way through me. Looking at the gaping hole in my belly they pulled another of those familiar spray bottles out and gave me a squirt in the mouth, I couldn't have been more relieved.\n***\nWhen I came to I was tied down on a zero-g bed with a series of tubes sticking out of me. One notable tube was covering the giant hole in my gut. Above me hung an octopoid assembly of shining plastic arms, I could have sworn it was an autodoc but those were ludicrously expensive, only big-time executives on earth could afford them, or maybe Griggs could as well. Hence my surprise when instead of a sadistic savannah cat a bleary-eyed red panda rushed up to my side.\n\t\"Denal?!\" I shouted in his face. Well, it didn't sound like shouting to me but I reviewed the video later. He started rapidly moving his mouth like he was talking but no words were coming out. \"Speak up, I can't hear a word you're saying!\"\n\tHe looked shocked at my statement, then he seemed to remember something and drew a pair of augmented reality glasses and held them out to me. I reached out with my left hand, my right appeared to be encased in some sort of device, and put them on. Denal made the mouth movements again and text appeared in my field of view. \"Ok, can you hear, I mean, see, my words now?\"\n\t\"I can read the text on these glasses!\" I told him. \"What is going on?!\"\n\tMore movements, more text. \"Your eardrums suffered damage from the sudden exposure to vacuum, you should be lucky the gengineers strengthened our lungs or you wouldn't even be able to speak.\"\n\t\"Where am I?!\" I inquired of him. It didn't make much sense for Jakob to hire Denal to keep me alive after nearly killing me. Was he a prisoner too?\n\t\"Don't you recognize your own ship Argentum?\" More text, but Denal's mouth wasn't moving. He turned towards the door and I followed his gaze to see another one of the parahumans I least expected to see. It was Olga Wolf, or maybe one of her sisters, the vigilante who had saved our lives on our first day in Vesta. \"Of course I made some modifications after my house bought it from the Marquez. Though I suppose since you and panda boy here are technically part owners we shouldn't have been able to buy it at all, probably why we got it so cheap.\"\n\t\"What do you want?!\" I demanded of her. If she was working for Jakob she was certainly going to a lot of trouble just to punish me.\n\tShe cringed a little at my words. \"Stop shouting, I know you're deaf but that doesn't mean we can't hear you perfectly fine.\" Shouting? \"Anyways, didn't you ever wonder just who HoundOfGod was?\"\n\t\"You?\" I asked incredulously, trying to sound a bit softer this time. \"The rebellious clone of one of the major Clans is the net activist who believed me immediately?\" Then I thought of something. \"Wait, if you're HoundOfGod, then that means you've tried out the treatment, does it work?\"\n\tShe smiled a bit at my inquiry. \"The autodoc suggests that it'll be a month before my first oogenesis cycle and Denal's spermatogenesis are complete. I guess we'll know then.\"\n\tI blinked a couple times in shock. \"Wait, you, and Denal?\" Figures that lech would be one of the first parahumans to father a child.\n\tDenal's fur stood up a bit in embarrassment. \"It's a bit of a long story.\" He offered as a bit of a weak explanation.\n\tI gestured with the machine covering my right wrist to the hose leading into my guts. \"I've got nowhere to go for, how long will I be hooked up to these things anyway?\" I addressed the question to Olga, it was her equipment after all.\n\t\"The bioprinter will take about a week to complete your new liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and lengths of large and small intestine.\" She looked regretful, as if sorry about the massive damage her harpoon had to inflict in order to save my life. \"Your cochleal implants and prosthetic hand should be ready in a couple more hours though.\"\n\tProsthetic? I looked back down at the thing where my right hand should have been, and it occurred to me that I couldn't feel that hand at all. The damage must have been more severe than I had noticed. \"So, how did you two end up together?\"\n\t\"Well,\" Denal spoke up before Olga could say anything more. \"After I was framed for two counts of murder I ran as fast as I could for Wolf territory. A few minutes later I was caught by two of their drones and a rather overmuscled coyote enforcer. They took me back to their base and one of her sisters told me that they were considering extraditing me to either the Marquez or Ceres. Thinking fast I gave her the camera hidden in my button and told them to review the evidence.\"\n\tOlga gave something that could have been a loud scoffing sound, the AR glasses couldn't make it out. \"Please, he babbled incomprehensibly for five minutes insisting he was innocent until we pulled him into a holding cell. We discovered the camera while picking over his stuff for anything valuable.\" She snickered a little before continuing. \"I managed to convince my mother that we could tick Marquez off royally if we kept him here.\"\n\t\"Right, anyways.\" Denal interjected. \"After I proved my innocence with the Wolfs they put me to work maintaining their fleet of vehicles. The next day Olga showed me the video she had made with my material and asked me if I was interested in helping her 'tear down this rotted foundation of a civilization' or something like that.\"\n\t\"So, that's all, you're just doing this to express your views on Vestan politics?\" I asked Olga. Referring to the whole trying to get him to knock her up thing.\n\t\"Well, he is pretty good in bed.\" The wolfess admitted. Denal grinned. \"But yes the clone-entrenched administrators of justice with no accountability need to be brought down. Including my mother and sisters I'm afraid.\"\n\tI realized I had one more question to ask of them before I could go back to sleep and recover. \"How did you find me anyways?\"\n\t\"I have a backdoor into the Marquez network. We noticed when the cameras and IR sensors went dark along a certain path leading from your apartment to the mass driver loading bay.\" Olga parted the fur at the base of her neck to show me a capped brain-computer interface port, very difficult to learn how to use but immensely useful for complex computer work. \"Mom shouldn't have prepared me to do all the electronics stuff in the racketeering business.\"\n \n","writing_bbcode_parsed":"The next day the planetoid erupted into chaos. There were riots in the streets, protests gathered outside the SPPS and the Protectors offices. I stayed in my apartment, having no reason or desire to go out on the streets, odds were that someone would recognize me and either lynch me (as difficult as that would be in this gravity) or fawn over me. Neither option was particularly appealing. And it was while I was sitting there watching the chaos I had wrought that I was caught off guard.
\tOne minute I was lying back watching the riots and attempting to hide under the covers while keeping my eyes just barely uncovered. The next a team of assassins in camo-suits was materializing in my bedroom. As the mixed species team surrounded me and attempted to grab me I drew my gun, which I had hidden under a pillow after Jakob threatened me, and squeezed off three shots as I attempted to dive for the window. The first shot hit one of the assassins, what looked like a bear or a large cat I couldn't really tell, in the chest but the other two went wide as the explosions issuing from the barrel threw me against the wall. I was momentarily stunned by the impact, giving one of the thugs enough time to shove a drug spray into my mouth. I felt a faint sting for a moment as the nanoparticles burrowed into the roof of my muzzle, then numbness began to spread across my face. I made a brief attempt to make a subvocal call but I couldn't feel my jaw anymore. Then my vision blurred, I felt myself slipping away. Before succumbing to unconsciousness I saw the hit team open a bag made of active camo material, and one of the massive parahumans dragging me towards it.
***
After what felt like just moments I came to in the bag, it was dark and rough with power cords lining the interior and digging into my sides. I started to struggle, attempting to wiggle my way out of the narrow hole, when I was unceremoniously dumped out onto a metal bed. Two guards held my arms and legs down while a feline of some sort dressed in surgical scrubs poked me in the throat with a pair of sharp needles. I felt my body course with an electrical shock and heard a snap and pop of frying circuitry. Willing myself to breathe again once my limbs stopped twitching I demanded, still somewhat numbly. "Whaaa?"
\t"My more obedient son here just disabled your subvocal implant." I heard a rather unpleasantly familiar voice state. "Octavius was more inclined towards the medical practices, though he had some trouble passing the surgeon's guild entry exam, something about his ethics."
\tThe doctor next to me, whose serval spots I could now discern underneath his mask, snorted as if his progenitor had said something funny. "Yeah, he had a little chat with the entry board, now I help him out whenever he needs some chop shop work done."
\tAnd Maximus came from this gene pool? I was starting to wonder if someone had spiked his biofab tank with something. "What do you want now?"
\tJakob's face suddenly popped into my field of vision. "I thought about what you said." He said to me. "You said that if you died after revealing the big secret that I wasn't really necessary it would lend credibility to the idea that your treatment worked. And then you put a video of me threatening you online. Now I'm thinking that the only way to discredit you is to make you disappear entirely." The thugs picked me up and carried me over to a large metallic cylinder with a hatch on the side. "This is a canister for the mass driver that was built here on Vesta during the last few years of the corporate era. It was never used but it would have shot steel cans full of ore back to earth for processing." The two goons dropped me into the cylinder and started to shut the lid, I attempted to scramble out before it was closed but all that accomplished was a heavy steel door slamming on my right hand. I let out a loud yelp in pain and they opened it just enough for me to pull my hand back in. I couldn't see the damage but I could feel blood oozing out and I was pretty sure some bones were broken. I could faintly hear Jakob Grigg's voice through the cylinder wall. "Now, I don't want earth thinking we're attacking them, so I placed explosive bolts along the seams that will tear the cylinder apart an hour or two out, but you'll keep on going along your pre-programmed trajectory until you reach earth. I'm pretty sure you'll be long dead by the time you are cremated in earth's atmosphere."
\tI seethed with rage at Jakob's speech. "Seems a bit overly complicated Griggs, planning a new career as a spy movie villain?"
\t"I want you to suffer." Came the punctual response. Then I felt the cylinder moving as it was conveyed into the loading chamber of the giant railgun that the corps had intended to use for sending the belt's wealth back home. I crouched down in what I hoped was the rear of the cylinder and waited for it to fire. There was no bang, no explosion like my gun emitted, just a sudden acceleration that pushed me back into the wall and felt like it liquified my organs. I realized seconds later that it wasn't quite the case, I was still alive for one.
\tI floated, weightless now that the acceleration was over, in the cylinder. I couldn't see a thing but I felt my way forward, pushing myself off the back wall gently. When I came to the opposite side I stopped myself with my hand, forgetting that I'd crushed it minutes earlier. Pain shot up my arm and I suspect a few of the fast-forming scabs my augmented platelets, bleeding is a tad more serious in microgravity or a sealed spacesuit than it is on earth you know, had formed broke open. I cradled it as I drifted slowly back. I guess air resistance slowed me down to a near standstill because I found myself floating in empty space. I still couldn't see anything, and I could breathe still, so I guessed I was somewhere in the middle of the giant can and it still hadn't exploded. I took a moment to think about my situation. I had been naked when they captured me so I had none of my usual wearable electronics to signal for help. I tried to use my subvocal comm and got a nasty shock for my efforts, apparently Jakob was telling the truth about having fried my implant.
\tSo I was drifting somewhere in the middle of space, on a ballistic path to earth, in a can with no life support that was going to explode in a few minutes, and no way to call for help. I'm pretty sure I broke down sobbing at some point. I don't know how long it took, there was no clocks and when your life is in danger time has a habit of passing extremely slowly, but it felt like I was crying for hours. Eventually I got a hold of myself and started contemplating my situation. I was going to die, there was no question about that, it was just that it was going to happen a lot sooner than I had hoped. I could survive maybe an hour after the pod broke apart, conscious for most of that time, and this cylinder had maybe a couple hours worth of oxygen in it, too bad it was set to blow in an hour.
\tSo, two hours left to live. What would happen next I wondered? Burning up in the atmosphere of a planet I had never known but had given rise to my ancestors I supposed. But I wouldn't be able to witness my meteoric cremation, my brain would have shut down. What would dying be like? I caught myself wondering. I had never of course subscribed to any religious beliefs but I knew that some humans thought that at death their consciousness separated from their body somehow and moved to another universe of some kind where they gained a new body and were either rewarded or punished for eternity according to how they had lived their previous life. And others believed that your consciousness was transferred to a newly born organism at death, so that you had a new chance to achieve some form of enlightenment, whatever that meant. And of course many others believed that there was nothing after death, you brain simply shut down for good and that was that.
\tI was starting to think that death would be like simply falling into a deep dreamless sleep from which you would never wake when the can burst open. There were blinding flashes of light above and below me that blew away the ends of the cylinder, followed by streaks of flame running down the walls and sending the body of the cylinder flying away in four separate directions. I looked ahead of me, the view was nothing but stars, burning away in the endless night. If I craned my neck a little I could see the sun, a big blinding ball of yellow light. I chose to look at the stars again, just hanging there. I recalled that most elements heavier than helium were formed when stars exploded in supernovae. I was pretty sure that most of my body was composed of heavier elements, which must have meant that countless stars had to die for me to ever come into being. I thought of what would happen to the atoms that made up every molecule of my being. No doubt most of the organic compounds that composed the vast majority of my body would be burned off into water and carbon dioxide, which might be absorbed by some plant which would be eaten by a cow or something that would be cut up into steaks for some human or maybe a rich parahuman. I would be part of another thinking being but my memories, my personality, what made me distinct from everyone else, would be gone.
\tI was so wrapped up in my morbid thoughts that I almost didn't notice the harpoon streaking past me. A glint of light that shot out to my left, then retracted. I was still trying to think of what it had been when the second harpoon struck me in the small of my back. There was a stabbing pain and then suddenly a large spear point jutted out of my stomach, or rather my liver on the opposite side. Prongs extended from the sides of the point and it pulled me back towards the source of the intruding weapon. What was going on now? Had Jakob Griggs changed his mind and decided that death by massive organ damage was worse than a slow death from anoxia?
\tI was still wondering as the airlock doors closed in front of me. Then a suited parahuman glided up to me and detached the head of the harpoon from the cable, pulling it the rest of the way through me. Looking at the gaping hole in my belly they pulled another of those familiar spray bottles out and gave me a squirt in the mouth, I couldn't have been more relieved.
***
When I came to I was tied down on a zero-g bed with a series of tubes sticking out of me. One notable tube was covering the giant hole in my gut. Above me hung an octopoid assembly of shining plastic arms, I could have sworn it was an autodoc but those were ludicrously expensive, only big-time executives on earth could afford them, or maybe Griggs could as well. Hence my surprise when instead of a sadistic savannah cat a bleary-eyed red panda rushed up to my side.
\t"Denal?!" I shouted in his face. Well, it didn't sound like shouting to me but I reviewed the video later. He started rapidly moving his mouth like he was talking but no words were coming out. "Speak up, I can't hear a word you're saying!"
\tHe looked shocked at my statement, then he seemed to remember something and drew a pair of augmented reality glasses and held them out to me. I reached out with my left hand, my right appeared to be encased in some sort of device, and put them on. Denal made the mouth movements again and text appeared in my field of view. "Ok, can you hear, I mean, see, my words now?"
\t"I can read the text on these glasses!" I told him. "What is going on?!"
\tMore movements, more text. "Your eardrums suffered damage from the sudden exposure to vacuum, you should be lucky the gengineers strengthened our lungs or you wouldn't even be able to speak."
\t"Where am I?!" I inquired of him. It didn't make much sense for Jakob to hire Denal to keep me alive after nearly killing me. Was he a prisoner too?
\t"Don't you recognize your own ship Argentum?" More text, but Denal's mouth wasn't moving. He turned towards the door and I followed his gaze to see another one of the parahumans I least expected to see. It was Olga Wolf, or maybe one of her sisters, the vigilante who had saved our lives on our first day in Vesta. "Of course I made some modifications after my house bought it from the Marquez. Though I suppose since you and panda boy here are technically part owners we shouldn't have been able to buy it at all, probably why we got it so cheap."
\t"What do you want?!" I demanded of her. If she was working for Jakob she was certainly going to a lot of trouble just to punish me.
\tShe cringed a little at my words. "Stop shouting, I know you're deaf but that doesn't mean we can't hear you perfectly fine." Shouting? "Anyways, didn't you ever wonder just who HoundOfGod was?"
\t"You?" I asked incredulously, trying to sound a bit softer this time. "The rebellious clone of one of the major Clans is the net activist who believed me immediately?" Then I thought of something. "Wait, if you're HoundOfGod, then that means you've tried out the treatment, does it work?"
\tShe smiled a bit at my inquiry. "The autodoc suggests that it'll be a month before my first oogenesis cycle and Denal's spermatogenesis are complete. I guess we'll know then."
\tI blinked a couple times in shock. "Wait, you, and Denal?" Figures that lech would be one of the first parahumans to father a child.
\tDenal's fur stood up a bit in embarrassment. "It's a bit of a long story." He offered as a bit of a weak explanation.
\tI gestured with the machine covering my right wrist to the hose leading into my guts. "I've got nowhere to go for, how long will I be hooked up to these things anyway?" I addressed the question to Olga, it was her equipment after all.
\t"The bioprinter will take about a week to complete your new liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and lengths of large and small intestine." She looked regretful, as if sorry about the massive damage her harpoon had to inflict in order to save my life. "Your cochleal implants and prosthetic hand should be ready in a couple more hours though."
\tProsthetic? I looked back down at the thing where my right hand should have been, and it occurred to me that I couldn't feel that hand at all. The damage must have been more severe than I had noticed. "So, how did you two end up together?"
\t"Well," Denal spoke up before Olga could say anything more. "After I was framed for two counts of murder I ran as fast as I could for Wolf territory. A few minutes later I was caught by two of their drones and a rather overmuscled coyote enforcer. They took me back to their base and one of her sisters told me that they were considering extraditing me to either the Marquez or Ceres. Thinking fast I gave her the camera hidden in my button and told them to review the evidence."
\tOlga gave something that could have been a loud scoffing sound, the AR glasses couldn't make it out. "Please, he babbled incomprehensibly for five minutes insisting he was innocent until we pulled him into a holding cell. We discovered the camera while picking over his stuff for anything valuable." She snickered a little before continuing. "I managed to convince my mother that we could tick Marquez off royally if we kept him here."
\t"Right, anyways." Denal interjected. "After I proved my innocence with the Wolfs they put me to work maintaining their fleet of vehicles. The next day Olga showed me the video she had made with my material and asked me if I was interested in helping her 'tear down this rotted foundation of a civilization' or something like that."
\t"So, that's all, you're just doing this to express your views on Vestan politics?" I asked Olga. Referring to the whole trying to get him to knock her up thing.
\t"Well, he is pretty good in bed." The wolfess admitted. Denal grinned. "But yes the clone-entrenched administrators of justice with no accountability need to be brought down. Including my mother and sisters I'm afraid."
\tI realized I had one more question to ask of them before I could go back to sleep and recover. "How did you find me anyways?"
\t"I have a backdoor into the Marquez network. We noticed when the cameras and IR sensors went dark along a certain path leading from your apartment to the mass driver loading bay." Olga parted the fur at the base of her neck to show me a capped brain-computer interface port, very difficult to learn how to use but immensely useful for complex computer work. "Mom shouldn't have prepared me to do all the electronics stuff in the racketeering business."
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