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Startled I leaped out, or at least as much as one can do so in a zero-g sleeping bag clipped onto the wall at six different points. \"Hey silver!\" Came the voice of the most annoying corvid in the solar system out of that same intercom as the horrid wake-up call. \"Get your Barbie-doll ass out of bed. We're coming up on that rock soon.\"\n\t\"I have more holes than you do Cole.\" If the uplifted raven heard me he gave no sign. Slightly more annoyed than usual I started wriggling out of my insulated cocoon to the door of my cramped cabin. Pausing before the mirrored surface of the metallic door I noticed what Cole had so lovingly referred to as my \"Barbie-doll ass\", grabbing onto one of the handhold bars distributed all throughout the ship I rotated in mid-air and spread my legs apart so I could see the reflection of what lay between them. That is, a bunch of black fur with white guardhairs like the rest of my body, hence the nickname \"silver\", but if you looked close enough you might spot my butthole and if you looked really close you could see the opening of my urethra. \"Barbie-doll ass\", please I look more like a plushie, or one of those non-humanoid animals in Japanese anime. Yes, you read that right, I have no genitals, the twisted corporate bioengineers who spliced human and fox DNA together and extruded the resulting transgenic slush over a calcium-titanium alloy skeleton did not see fit to print me a set of reproductive organs. The vast majority of parahumans had genitalia of some sort even though the geneticists had made sure that they were sterile, but I was part of an experiment of some sorts to see if workers who couldn't waste valuable company time screwing one another functioned more effectively than those who did. It turned out that we did not, without the extra testosterone or estrogen from a set of gonads it seemed that we were less, motivated than those who had semi-functional ovaries or testes.\n\tOkay, we were downright lazy. They could have asked anyone who owned a neutered dog or cat and saved themselves a few million bucks.\n\tAnyways, introspection over I flung myself out the door and into the corridor. Not going to bother with clothes until I know whether they want me to go outside. Isn't like I've got much to hide anyways.\n\tAs I was floating up the corridor to the bridge I felt a paw slap me on the rear and propel me into a bulkhead. Looking back I saw a meter-and-a half tall red panda wearing a set of workman's coveralls trying to catch himself on a handrail with his ringed tail. Denal, our mechanic. \"The hell were you thinking?\" I snarled at him getting increasingly annoyed by the second. \"Doing that in the middle of a wide open hallway? In zero gravity?\"\n\t\"Hey, Argentum, you dress like that and you have to expect some workplace harassment.\" He was joking of course, when you can't make babies and have no diseases the corp crèche supervisors don't bother to instill taboos about sex. It was practically expected for co-workers to hold orgies in the break rooms, now that we actually had breaks. I couldn't see the appeal of it, me and Denal had had sex once or twice but all I felt was a pain in the butt that made it impossible to sit for half a week. Thank the corps for using us in microgravity. I shrugged it off and darted for the hatch to the bridge.\n\tI should probably explain the name I gave myself, Argentum, or \"Argen\" for short, is ancient Greek or something for, well, silver. I know, original, but I'm a chemist by training and during my accelerated education I found myself wondering why so many elements had symbols entirely unrelated to their names. There is neither an \"a\" nor a \"u\" in gold, or for that matter silver doesn't have an \"a\" or a \"g\". So I did a bit of research in the crèche library and found that scientists liked to name things in long dead languages that nobody spoke anymore and after discovering the full names of certain metals in those languages I thought they sounded cool. What? I was barely three years old.\n\tCole and Aniya were already there. Cole was a raven the size of a large turkey, albeit with a much bigger head. His wings were also modified with small claws at the ends, apparently a small atavism the bioengineers found that dated back to the earliest birds from the time of the dinosaurs, that allowed him to hang onto an overhead handlebar while his feet manipulated the flight controls. Apparently there was a prevailing theory among some of the corps that created us that creatures that evolved in a three dimensional environment would be better suited to navigating the depths of space than us terrestrials. So rather than adding some animal genes to a human baseline genome like most did for their deep space workforce, they took the genomes of dolphins, parrots, octopi, corvids, seals, basically any aquatic or flying animal that showed a decent level of intelligence, and boosted their brainpower until they could operate a spaceship. I don't know how well it worked but I do know that for all his annoying quirks, Cole is a great pilot.\n\tAniya couldn't be more different, she was a rescue taur. A four-legged, two armed centauroid of mixed human, wolf, and possum heritage designed for both heavy lifting in the low-gravity mines out here in the Belt, and bailing out fellow workers whose suits sprung leaks. Above her waist she looked like a lot of parahumans, anthropomorphic torso covered in black fur with a lupine head, but below she looked like one of her natural kin, except considerably larger, like the size of a fully grown horse. And a peek under her pressure suit would reveal a bit of her possum genome, a prehensile (but mercifully still furred) tail, and a pouch big enough to accommodate an adult human or most parahumans. Yes, a nice soft pouch modified to seal airtight around a small hose that would supply a distressed miner with oxygen as he calmed down all safe and warm in a secure pocket of flesh. Oh dear I was rambling wasn't I?\n\tRight, so there I was on the bridge with the rest of the crew of the nameless prospecting ship we'd managed to get a hold of sometime after the combination of violent raids on corp bases and legislative action on the behalf of sympathetic lobbyists that won us our freedom. The monitors were displaying several different views of an asteroid a couple kilometers in diameter that our scanners seemed to indicate held a promising concentration of mass. The plan was simple, latch onto the rock, toss out Aniya and whoever happened to draw the short straw with a load of mining equipment, prop up a burrowing mass driver over the masscon, and drill until it got within a few centimeters. Then they'd chip off some samples, I'd analyze them in my lab, and if the mass was something valuable dig it out and take it back to Ceres for sale to one of the local fabricators or the freighters supplying earth with needed minerals.\n\t\"We should arrive in a little more than half an hour.\" Cole announced to the rest of the crew. \"Better get ready.\" Knowing his tricks it was more likely we'd be there in fifteen to twenty minutes, whichever unlucky bastard had to go with Aniya wouldn't have much time to suit up.\n\tAniya glanced at me and Denal and shrugged. \"Might as well get it over with.\" She pulled three straws out of her suit pocket with her right hand while she held onto a rail with her left. She grabbed one straw in each of her free semi-prehensile forepaws so that they all appeared roughly the same length. Cole flapped over and took the one in her hand before flying back to his console, leaving me and Denal to take the ones in her paws. I looked at the one in my hand, it was barely five centimeters long, I compared it to Denal's, his was a full cm longer. Dismayed I floated over to Cole, sadistic corporations, his straw was seven cm.\n\t\"Guess I better get dressed.\" I said dejectedly as I let the losing straw fly off. Aniya plucked it out of the air and put it back in her pocket. Then she held out a foreleg and drew me close to her. She bent over and looked down at me with an amused expression on her wolfish face.\n\t\"Come on, I'll let you sleep in my pouch tonight if you don't complain too much.\" So maybe going out on that exposed hunk of rock wasn't so bad after all.\n***\nFor once, that avian bastard gave us the correct time to arrival, I spent fifteen extra minutes standing in the airlock wearing the light pressure suit that was sufficient for parahumans of my model to survive in the vacuum of space. One of the perks of being built rather than grown being that we have a much greater tolerance of low pressure than humans do. If necessary I could remain conscious in hard vacuum for up to ten minutes, more than enough time for a nice rescue taur crewmate to drop her pants and shove me in her pouch, but I wasn't going to take any chances. Space is a harsh, unforgiving environment, under the supervision of the corporations we lost ten percent of our number every year. I don't know the mortality rate now that we're free but I would bet pretty good odds that it's still rather high, definitely above birth rates now that the corps aren't popping a thousand of us out of the tanks every quarter. We used to have two full time miners but then Billy ignored the warnings of an incoming radiation storm and got his brains fried, his share of that haul bought us a 'bot with enough sense to scurry for shelter at the first sign of cosmic rays.\n\tThere was a series of jarring lurches forward as the harpoons pulled us down to the surface of the asteroid and anchored us there. The airlock opened and the ramp lowered as we made our way down to the regolith. Aniya gleefully bounded across the landscape carrying some 500 kilos of equipment while I drove a rover with the really heavy stuff. Conceivably the two of us could carry the mass driver between us, but neither of us was experienced enough with maneuvering in microgravity to risk doing so while bouncing around. After half an hour of that we arrived at what our radar indicated was the shallowest point above the mass concentration we were interested in. As we unpacked I prepared a portable spectrophotometer, unlike the clunky devices of the 20th century this device was little bigger than a suitcase, including a specialized computer for interpreting the data. I scooped up a sample of regolith and poured it into a sample cuvette that I inserted into the machine, within a few minutes the device had exposed the asteroid dust to every wavelength of light known to mankind and its creations, and contrasted the reflections with those given off by baseline samples stored internally. Once I'd analyzed the readouts I addressed Aniya subvocally using the implants in our throats, no point wasting breath when some subtle movements of the larynx would do. Looks like basic nickel-iron, maybe a little heavy on the iron but not exceptional.\n\tIn my experience certain metals tend to aggregate around iron. Came the wolf-possum's sub-vocal response. Some of those are worth quite a few qcoins if I am correct.\n\tI'm not saying that it isn't valuable, if nothing else we could try to sell the coordinates to one of the big haulers.\n\tOoh, almost lost your bedmate you asexual dog.\n\tDid you intend to subvocalize that Denal?\n\tNo, sorry. Not really.\n\tI cut the horny Asian raccoon off of my channel. Seriously I thought pandas were going extinct from lack of sex or something. I tried not to think of his commentary as I helped Aniya set up the burrower. We set it up more or less exactly above the masscon, whatever it was, and switched it on. The drill bits at the bottom of the machine dug into the asteroid and every few minutes a rock was magnetically accelerated out the top, pushing it slightly deeper in and flinging the fragments far out of the way. Every hour or so I opened a hatch to siphon off some dust for analysis. After the first hour all I could see was an increase in the iron content, as well as some minute quartz and agate crystals. The second hour I noticed the dust was starting to reflect more light between 570 and 590 nm in wavelength. Don't get too excited, I told the others still linked to my comm channel, there's a lot of things it could be, likely just some pyrite.\n\t\"I'm still going to be looking up the price.\" Cole couldn't use subvocal comms like we did, something about the avian voice box being much differently shaped than the more-or-less human ones we had. \"Just in case it is what everyone but you is thinking.\"\n\tAnd I think it's time to turn this thing off and dig in by hand and paw. Aniya turned off the mass driver and pushed it over. She then began to shuffle around in the dust with her forepaws, looking a bit like a baseline dog burying a bone.\n\tI picked up a rock hammer and inched towards the two-meter wide hole. I need a large sample for a density index. I explained as I attempted to pry out a rock that looked like it would weigh maybe two kilograms. Once I had it loose I carried it over to the rover, there I calibrated a balance to the minute gravity of the asteroid and weighed the rock, quite a bit more than 2 kilos, promising. Then I did a few laser scans to determine the stone's exact dimensions, which I then plugged into my suit's computer with a series of blinks and bites on different teeth oriented to various keys. I saw the results. Well, it could be gold, I subvocalized, or maybe platinum, or lead. Gold was one of the most discussed elements in the Belt these days, when the corporations had started to mine the asteroids the price of gold had sunk to levels unseen in human history. But when the revolution occurred gold prices soared above the peak they'd reached during the early 21st century economic recession, until the parahuman colonies declared that they'd be exporting minerals to earth and the price started to decline again. Currently it was hovering somewhere around 50 Cerean qcoins per gram, not quite a fortune but still a significant amount of money for a small mining outfit like ourselves. I personally didn't understand why the humans thought it was so valuable, sure there were some chemical and electronic applications for it, but the market value couldn't account for those practical uses alone. I could understand why platinum was worth more though, a lot of life-support systems used it in catalytic converters. Still, lead was worth something too, a lot of habitats built radiation shelters out of it. I signaled the excavation bot to unfold and prepare to bring up the pieces of the masscon.\n\tThe spider-like robot walked over to the site on four spindly legs and positioned itself over the hole where Aniya was digging. As she exposed the concentration of mass that had drawn us to the asteroid a four-pronged claw lowered itself on a winch down the hole. She guided it over one of the larger exposed stones she had drilled out of the asteroid and signaled for it to pull up. As it walked over to the rover I stole a glance at the piece of rock it had pulled out, though mostly grey stone I could see a few spots where the yellow metal shone through. There was a lot of it, three big rocks and dozens of smaller ones, a total of almost a quarter of a metric ton once we'd taken off most of the worthless silica and iron. Over twelve million Ceres qcoins worth of gold, we might even be able to pay off the mortgage on our ship.\n\tIf we had known the trouble those rocks would bring us we might have just left them there.\n \nChapter 2\nIt was dark, I could feel myself enclosed on all sides in sticky wet mucus and veined flesh. But I didn't feel scared of alarmed, rather I felt calmed by the encasing pressure, safe and secure. I moved myself deeper into the flesh pocket as I felt the gentle massage of my host's pulse. But then I was thrown out of my serenity by a loud siren interspersed with Cole's frightened screeching.\n\t\"Everyone to the bridge, we've been hit by laser fire, I repeat we are under attack!\" I could feel Aniya jump off her bunk and propel herself down the hallway with me still inside her pouch. It must have looked odd to anyone watching, a fat half-naked wolf taur with a second tail sticking out from under her groin, which was covered by a pair of taur-sized panties you perverts.\n\t\"What is going on?\" It felt strange to hear Aniya's voice echo through her body like that, the extra pair of lungs in her lower body allow her quite the reverb.\n\t\"About a minute ago something fried one of our aft sensor pods. There wasn't any indication of a radiation storm and I picked up a heat signature 200 kilometers in that direction. So I took us behind the nearest asteroid.\" Cole's voice carried none of his usual jocularity, he was truly scared. \"Where's Argen, ze is better at reading these sensors.\"\n\tAt that moment I felt a hand grab my tail. \"Found zir,\" came Denal's voice as he yanked me out of the pouch. I burst out in a cloud of mucus and reached around to grab him for pulling me out of my hiding place, making sure to coat his fur in a nice layer of pouch slime. He cringed at the feeling and let me float there next to Aniya's backside. \"Makers, for an asexual being you have some odd kinks Silver.\"\n\t\"Later.\" I did not feel inclined to explain, for at least the tenth time, that I did not consider my fondness for the interior of my crewmate to be sexual. Though to be honest I sometimes wondered if my adrenals did provide enough hormones for a proper sex drive and my brain had redirected it somewhere away from my lack of traditional reproductive organs. Anyways I wiped my hands off on Denal's coveralls and jumped over to a tablet to call up the sensor logs. Sure enough, they showed a heat signature following us since we left the asteroid where we had picked up the gold chunk. Unfortunately it didn't tell me much, it seemed we hadn't bothered much with active radar on that side of the ship, and now we were completely blind in that area thanks to our pursuer's precision shot. \"Worthless, we need a better view of them to even know what we're up against. Can you try sending a drone out to the edge of the rock we're hiding behind?\"\n\t\"Yeah, yeah, sure I'll launch one.\" Denal tried to avoid putting himself in contact with the slime I'd left on him as he went over to his console. We had half a dozen survey drones that Denal would frequently send out on arcs around asteroids we thought looked promising. They'd circle the rock a couple times, playing their radar over it and taking snapshots of the surface in multiple wavelengths, and transmit it back to our ship, saving a lot of time on prospecting for ores. He shot one out to swing around the asteroid we were currently using for cover and programmed it to scan outwards rather than at the asteroid. Meanwhile me and Aniya called up manual controls for our primary collision avoidance coilguns, hitting a stray rock with a fast-moving iron slug tended to get it out of the way a lot faster than melting it with a beam of concentrated light, and anyways lasers were a bit out of our price range.\n\tThe drone reached the far side of the asteroid and transmitted back a view of the region of space beyond. Radar imaging finally brought me a view of what I had been looking for in the first place, a small (relatively speaking, we were about twice as large thanks to the need for mining equipment and landers) cargo ship covered with laser turrets and a pair of long tubes that I had no reference for. It didn't seem to be moving as we scanned it. \"It's like it's just waiting to see what we do.\"\n\tAniya had the first suggestion, \"Maybe they're moving when we're not watching. Why don't we send the drone back out to see if they've come any closer.\" Denal punched in the commands and the drone flew back out to take a second look. It hadn't moved, however there was now another, smaller and much faster object moving out towards us.\n\t\"Incoming missile!\" Cole screeched as the object swung around the asteroid heading straight for us. Panicked I switched the auto-tracking on my turret back on just as Aniya did the same. Registering the small, fast incoming object as a collision threat the automated systems sent streams of darts at the missile. Mere seconds from impact one of the darts ruptured the missile's fuel tanks and triggered an explosion that took out the explosive weapon entirely and sent shrapnel flying everywhere, thankfully not fast enough to do much damage to our ship.\n\tI didn't understand how they had been able to lock onto us from the far side of an asteroid but before I could think of something another missile came in from the opposite side of the previous one. Aniya just barely managed to shoot that one down as well. Noticing the drone following the missile it came to me. \"Denal, shut down the transmission to that drone! They're tracking it!\"\n\tThe panda switched off the transmitter, then as an afterthought shut down all of our transmitters just to be safe. Now we could see nothing of the attacking ship, until either us or the pirates moved to our side of the asteroid we were blind.\n\t\"Now what?\" Denal asked, evidently a bit scared now that we had just barely escaped death twice. I thought it was obvious, we wait for the pirates to get bored and leave. Unfortunately that wasn't the case, after half an hour of sitting there the enemy ship came up around the asteroid and began to approach us. As it drew nearer I saw docking arms unfold from the underside of the miniature freighter.\n\tI panicked again, hastily aiming the gauss turret I was controlling at the pirate vessel I blasted away with a stream of iron. I saw a docking claw tear itself off and fly out into space, a laser turret shattered into a million shards of glass, then there was a puff of gas out of one of the holes I made in the main hull of the ship. But it still kept coming at us. \"Move, move, move!\"\n\tCole swung our ship away from the asteroid, the pirate ship continued on in the same direction it had been following the whole time. Of course, there being no friction in space you needed to fire retro-rockets in order to slow down before you hit anything, which didn't bode well for the crew of that ship. Either their control systems were damaged, or, as suggested by the gas vent I'd opened up, they were dead.\n\t\"I'm not picking up any signals from them.\" Cole stated as he moved the ship in for a closer look. I called up a spectroscopic analysis of the cloud streaming out of the ship, approximately 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen, with traces of carbon dioxide and other trace gases. Plus ice crystals of a red fluid that appeared to contain a significant concentration of iron.\n\tI dropped the tablet in shock, not quite the effect it has in gravity as it just hung there suspended in mid-air. \"I killed somebody,\" I exclaimed in horror, \"it's blood, I didn't just rupture their crew compartment, I shot someone and made them bleed out.\"\n\tCole pulled up some schematics of the enemy ship based on what we could see of it. \"One person space truck, designed for short hops from one asteroid to another. Pilot sits in a polarized plexiglass bubble. You got lucky.\"\n\t\"Lucky?\" Denal exclaimed, \"do you know what the Cerean directorate does to anyone who kills someone?\"\n\t\"Seizure of all assets and fifty years hard labor?\" Aniya suggested, everyone who lived full or part time on Ceres knew the basic penalties for criminal acts. \"But ze was acting in self-defense, they launched missiles at us.\"\n\t\"They don't care, there's nothing in the laws to make exceptions and the computerized judging systems follow the laws to the letter.\" This information about the consequences of my rash actions sent my adrenal glands into another overdrive, but since there was no one to fight this time I instead prepared for flight, right into Aniya's pouch, shoving her into the nearest wall. \"That's not going to help, she's just as guilty as you are as far as the judges are concerned, for that matter we all are.\"\n\t\"Crap,\" I murmured from inside the wolftaur's nice and safe belly as I pulled my tail in behind me. With such severe penalties I wondered why that guy in the other ship had even bothered to attack us if he knew what was in store for him. \"Any idea what drove that guy to try and kill us?\"\n\tCole ruffled his feathers in a way that might have been a shrug. \"I heard talk of some extremists who wanted us to break off trade with earth, they apparently nuked some freighter docks on the east side a while back. Trying to annihilate anything that was of more value to earth than to the Belt.\"\n\t\"I've seen nuclear detonations before,\" Aniya's voice reverberated down to her pouch. \"They were a lot larger than the explosions those missiles produced when we destroyed them.\" If anyone could have seen them at the moment I might have rolled my eyes.\n\t\"Nukes don't have nuclear reactions when they're ripped apart by high speed projectiles.\" I told her in a rather matter of fact way. For some reason when I said that her pulse dropped slightly. \"However, if they were carrying fissile material it would have set off a radiation alarm.\"\n\t\"But chemical explosives have barely any effect in space, they might open the hull or disable the engines but the gold in our hold would be recoverable. And that's worthless except for exportation, so wouldn't they want to destroy it?\"\n\tDenal snorted loudly enough for me to hear it. \"Then maybe he was just a plain old pirate. They do say that banditry or violent theft is the second oldest profession after all.\"\n\t\"And what, dare I ask, would the oldest profession be?\" Aniya asked him in response. He said nothing, or at least nothing that I could hear, but I had a decent idea of what he had in mind.\n\t\"So what are we going to do about the draconian Cerean law enforcement that would have us all back in chains?\" I asked my co workers and friends with whom I had apparently committed the worst criminal offense out of necessity for our lives.\n\t\"Nothing.\" Cole suggested. \"We make no mention of this incident and pretend we obtained this haul with no unusual troubles. Odds are he wasn't from Ceres, probably one of the smaller and more lawless asteroids, there's no way he could get away with fencing pirated goods back home.\"\n\t\"I could probably cover up the laser damage.\" Denal threw in his own contribution. \"Those sensor pods are modular anyways, I could simply remove the remainder of the attachment and recycle it. Then weld over the hull scars to make it look like micrometeor pitting.\"\n\t\"Well, I guess that's it then. We're safe.\" Yet strangely, despite my words, I did not feel any more assured. I curled up tighter in a rather appropriately named fetal position.\n \nChapter 3\nWe arrived at Ceres without further incident two days later. Sure enough, Denal had managed to conceal the evidence of our skirmish with another ship fairly easily. The sensor pod turned out to have taken the brunt of the damage and was easily enough detached and smashed to cover up the melted instrumentation, we jettisoned the most melted pieces and stowed the rest for recycling once we got back to the manufacturer, might as well not pay full price for a replacement. The few scars on the hull were scratched over with chunks of rock from our cargo hold to simulate meteor impacts. Still there was a sense of apprehension as we disembarked from the ship and passed through station security at the second largest port on the biggest dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. Nearly two hundred thousand parahumans called Ceres home, the biggest concentration of our kind in the solar system, there were even a couple humans, mostly trade reps or ambassadors attempting to write out some manner of treaty with the Directorship.\n\tGovernment out in the belt varied a great deal, most of us had been accustomed to rule by whatever corporation had fabricated or bought us and had little experience with governing ourselves. While most human children were taught how their government worked in childhood and how to participate in it if they were among the lucky minority to live in a democracy, we had to seek out how government worked on our own terms or try to hammer one out through a lot of trial or error. Asteroid habitats vary from direct democracy to fascism, and everything in between. In the case of Ceres the corporations had used it as a base of operations in the belt and naturally several different corps had constructed their own processing plants and even regional administrative offices. Because few humans were willing to travel several months out to the asteroids, or more importantly sign the legal waivers disavowing their employer of any legal responsibility in the case of their gruesome demise, many of the administrative tasks ended up performed by parahumans. The end result being that when the revolution won us freedom from the corporations Ceres already had a vast bureaucracy running things fairly smoothly. The highest ranking administrators of the different corps, once the humans had been killed or shipped home, all got together and decided to change the various \"human only\" rules their corps wrote so that they applied to parahumans as well, and otherwise set up shop like their former owners had done save that they now paid their workers. After a couple months of trying to handle a payroll of several thousand on a system intended for a few dozen they laid off half their employees. However they also allowed the \"grey market\" that had inevitably popped up to operate in the open, and in fact focused their layoffs on the merchants and hobbyists who they had a fair idea were earning an income on their own. These people were allowed to rent shops in the common areas of the habitats, cutting out some administrative costs and giving the Cerean Directorship, as the conglomeration of ex-secretaries called themselves, an additional source of income besides the money from exporting their extracted minerals to earth. In addition the layoffs left the Directorship with a sizeable fleet of surplus spacecraft that they no longer had the manpower to operate, they were going to scrap these vessels until some bright manager came up with the idea of offering some of the laid off miners loans to buy the extra ships. You can probably guess which category me, Aniya, Cole, and Denal fell under. So yes, not exactly the best system of governance ever, but we had one of the lowest crime rates in the belt, or so the propaganda, sorry, \"public relations\" department claimed.\n\tAnyways, that brief history of Ceres does not do justice to the wonder that is the market caverns. As the corps mined out the dwarf planet they dug huge holes miles beneath the surface in order to get to the largest concentrations of mass in the asteroid. These tunnels were at least two meters tall to accommodate the miners and their equipment but the caves that had held the most valuable minerals often reached five meters in height and a football field or two in length or width. Since there was plenty of pre-existing living space in the worker barracks and tunnels many of these caverns had been reinforced with long titanium columns and filled with multiple levels of storefronts, the .028 gravities making it easy for most people to simply jump from one level to another through holes in the rickety paneling placed in front of shops so the customers had something to window browse from. It's rather incredible, in a ramshackle slum kind of way.\n\tThis day me and the others were leaping about in what we knew as \"public\" clothing, in my case a green plaid knee-length kilt (\"regimental\" style, not that I had much to hide) and a black canvas vest, Cole a sort of jumpsuit that left his wings and legs completely uncovered, Aniya an orange shirt and a \"quad\" of jeans that was specially designed for taurs, and Denal a pair of tight synth-leather pants and an open white shirt. Yes, fashion isn't quite a high priority out here. We were carrying the remains of our destroyed sensor pod in three separate bags and headed for a dealer we had looked up on the asteroid's local network. We found them in a three-floor warehouse on the east wall of the cavern, alongside a number of other shops that sold spacecraft parts, one would think those would be located near the docks but Directorate rules were that any merchants not working directly for the Directorate itself had to reside in the market caverns. At least they had delivery services and installation teams. We found a sales rep, a heavy set spider monkey hanging from the ceiling racks by his tail, and dumped out our collection of parts.\n\t\"Well,\" he stated as he picked over the remains with all four of his primary limbs. \"It looks like you beat this up rather thoroughly. You say a meteor did this?\"\n\tThat was our story and we were sticking to it. \"Yes.\" I simply replied.\n\t\"Surprised your point-defense didn't stop it. You guys looking to replace that too?\"\n\tDenal offered an explanation seemingly spontaneously. \"Our computers glitched, the start-up program for the auto-guns was omitted from the command queue. We managed to fix that though.\"\n\tThe salesman snorted derisively, \"computers, nearly two centuries of use and those humans still haven't figured out how to make them work reliably. We don't sell ship grade computation materials or programs but I could give you some recommendations.\" Denal took a list of stores with decent electronics on his wrist device, he probably wouldn't actually buy anything but the gesture would throw off suspicion. \"Anyways you probably want something a bit sturdier than these factory-standard sensors. I happen to have some brand new pods with carbon nanotube reinforced superstructures, fresh from the fabricator. A tad pricey, but I could give you 8-15,000 qcoins worth of store credit from these parts.\"\n\t\"How much?\" I asked somewhat skeptical.\n\t\"Oh, about 105,000 Ceres qcoins.\" He said.\n\t\"So that's what, 90,000 to 97,000 that we'd need to pay?\"\n\t\"I think you may have misunderstood me. That's with the best estimate of the credit you get from these parts, normally they cost 120 k.\"\n\tThat price was practically obscene. We had convinced the representative from the Directorate's exports division, which they held a practical monopoly on, to part with 10.8 million qcoins for the gold we had offloaded at the docks, but we still had to pay back over 35 million of the loan we had taken out to buy our ship from the Directorate, plus several thousand a month for routine maintenance and fueling.\n\tHe must have noticed the expression of disbelief on all our faces because the sales rep spoke up then. \"Tell you what, you must have at least five more sensor pods like this covering each major surface of your fine vessel. I'll give you the replacement and trade in all your other pods for 600,000 qcoins.\"\n\tI did the math quickly, \"so you're saying our intact sensor pods are worth just 21,000 apiece. Is that it?\"\n\tHe held all four palms up in an open-handed gesture of surrender. \"They're long obsolete and most likely pretty banged up from all the flying around in this big field of flying rocks. You're not going to get a better deal than that.\"\n\tI kind of doubted it, technological progress in the belt was nowhere near as fast as it was on earth, and there was little demand for spaceship sensors on earth so most likely our pods were less than two cycles out of date even after more than a decade in operation. \"I'm thinking more like 500k. These can't be that much better.\"\n\t\"580,000, they really are, both ten times more durable and fifty times better resolution than those old things of yours.\"\n\t\"530, I can tell the chemical composition of a gas jet at ten kilometers with enough resolution as is.\"\n\t\"Okay, five hundred and fifty thousand Cerean qcoins and that is my absolute final offer.\"\n\t\"Fair enough.\" I keyed up my own wristpad's wallet to transfer 550k to the store's account. We'd still have a bit over ten megs to pay towards our mortgage once the monthly expenses had been paid. I felt somewhat satisfied that I'd been able to negotiate the price down so low. Normally these things went much less smoothly.\n----\n\tNaturally, we got the first indication that things on Ceres were about to go wrong just as we were leaving the cavern. We spotted a holographic poster of a ferret in a pilot's vacuum suit under the words \"Missing, information related to the disappearance of this subject will be rewarded.\" In smaller print the hologram elaborated that the subject had taken out a sizeable loan from the Directorate to purchase one of their short-range transports approximately a week ago. Three days ago the signal from his ship went silent. This sort of thing wasn't uncommon, the shifting orbits of the asteroids made some signals difficult, but something told me this wasn't an ordinary space trucker. I checked the model of the ship he had bought again, sure enough, it was the same model that had almost killed us two days ago, though it usually didn't carry missile tubes or security-grade lasers.\n\t\"You think that was him?\" Aniya walked up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder as she asked the obvious question that we were all thinking at that point.\n\t\"Maybe,\" I replied, \"what I don't get is why all the fuss over some guy who probably just ran off on his loan.\" Aniya shrugged and we continued on to the tunnels that would take us back home to our ship. \n\tWe got our answer the next day as our new sensor pods were being installed by a team of monkeys and rams. As I was running one of the new pods through its paces with a hand tablet plugged into a socket on the base of the pod and looking at the ceiling in every spectrum the thing could handle, one of the rams doing heavy lifting came up to me. \"Hey, you hear about that weasel who went missing?\"\n\t\"I saw some holo-posters.\" I stated as nonchalantly as I could manage.\n\t\"Well, they say he was a clone of some Directorate bigwig and that he hadn't gone dark for two days before daddy had those posted along all the tunnels in the planet.\" I looked at him in disbelief. A clone? Those were rare luxuries, it cost hundreds of thousands of qcoins just to operate the bio-fabricators used to make them. It would explain though why he had been so foolish as to attack a Cerean vessel, not only did he have an influential relative who could conceivably cover his tracks he was most likely less than five years old, that being when we had managed to petition the United Nations of Earth for the right to replicate ourselves. And just because we came out of the vat fully grown didn't mean that we were born mature, at 28 I pretty much considered myself to have been a complete idiot before the age of eight. Yet the laws treated us all the same whether we were two or thirty-two years old because that had been how the corporations had treated us and the Directors had been lazy. I tried to smile at what I presumed to have been meant as a joke by the technician whose ass wasn't possibly at stake and hurried through the remaining checks. I did not bother to test the other pods but instead bounded back inside the ship to discuss the new situation with my crewmates.\n\tWhen I told them Denal and Aniya just stood there with a glassy look in their eyes and their mouths hanging wide open. Cole wasn't particularly surprised, \"should have known it would be one of those fresh from the tank rich morons.\"\n\t\"So what now?\" I inquired. \"If we did kill him and the Directorate finds out, I think forced labor until the days we die might be a light sentence.\"\n\t\"We fly.\" Cole flapped his wings, knocking me and Denal off our feet in the low gravity. \"We fill our helium-3 tanks and pick another asteroid that won't turn us over to our new corporate masters.\"\n\t\"Sounds like a plan.\" I stated simply. \"But which rock might that be?\"\n \nChapter 4\n\nWe spent the next three hours going over the map of the surrounding asteroids and looking up the local wiki's entries on the inhabited planetoids within our ship's range of Ceres at this time. Juno was ruled out, they had an extradition treaty with the Directorate and a history of complying with their demands. Iris didn't but they operated under a government that seemed the closest to the human system known as “fascism” known to the Belt. Hygiea, with one of the largest direct democracies since ancient Greece, initially looked promising, but then we saw that the majority of the population were strident pacifists and not even point-defense guns were allowed, I couldn't imagine that they would like us very much.\n\t\"What about this one?\" I pointed at a large spherical planetoid, similar in size to Ceres. It was near the edge of our range.\n\tCole looked where I was pointing. \"That would be Vesta, either the second or the third largest asteroid in the entire belt, depending on who you ask.\" He ruffled his feathers a bit and looked away. \"I don't think so.\"\n\t\"Why, what is wrong with it?\" Curious I started to call up the wiki's information on Vesta.\n\tCole turned back towards me and stared. \"I went there once, about six years ago. It was anarchy, I was almost assaulted a couple times, some guys tried to pounce on me and when I flew out of the way one pulled out some sort of jury-rigged gauss gun and told me to toss over my possessions. Fortunately for me it short-circuited when he tried to fire a warning shot.\"\n\tSeriously? I hadn't known there were places where the crime rate was so bad. What kind of government would allow such a thing. I read the information I'd pulled up on Vesta. Gravity: .025 g, orbit: 3.63 earth years, population: ~50,000, government:… \n\t\"There's no government?\" I asked, confused. How could a society even function without any sort of government. Apparently not well judging from Cole's testimonial. But then I thought I saw something right below the tab that read \"Government: N/A\", it stated: \"danger level: low to moderate.\" I was confused.\n\tI opened a more detailed description and jumped to \"crime and other hazards\", I read on.\n…The ration exchanges created by the Repairman's in 2090 led to individual shortages of calories and needed nutrients. In desperation many residents turned to preying on their fellow parahumans, both figuratively in the form of stealing rations or other belongings to be traded for rations, or in rare cases literally in the form of cannibalism. The introduction of the Vestan qcoin later that year helped alleviate the starvation as the Guild began to accept them instead of food, but crime remained high until the formal establishment of the Protector's Guild in 2092. The Protectors would, in exchange for a modest monthly fee, do everything in their power to defend the person and possessions of their customers, and if their defenses and any personal ones carried by a customer were defeated they hunted down the aggressor and enacted restitution from them. In 2094 the Protector's Guild fractured into several competing organizations that still work to keep the peace in Vesta. Many of the most prominent Guilds offer \"Guest plans\" for visitors…\n\tI looked away from the article and back to Cole. \"Judging from this article you got there just a year too early. They've got something called \"Protector's Guilds\" now that provide security and got their danger level downgraded to moderate-low.\"\n\t\"And what's stopping these \"Guilds\" from turning us over to the Directorate?\" Denal inquired of me.\n\t\"Who says they can even do that? They're not a government or anything.\" Aniya interjected. \"If they're like a business that just offers protection plans the worst they should be able to do is cancel our coverage. And the article mentions \"personal defense\" which seems to imply that they don't mind people defending themselves, which is all we did wasn't it?\"\n\t\"All right, fine. We'll put it to a vote.\" Cole stated. \"Everyone who wants to take their chances on an uncivilized rock with no government to speak of raise a hand.\" Me and Aniya raised our hands immediately. \"And all opposed?\" We put our hands down and Cole raised a wing claw. We all turned to stare at Denal, whose paws were firmly gripping the handholds along the edge of the table.\n\t\"Well I don't know.\" Denal protested, \"it sounds like Vesta might be safe from the Directorate but the way you made it sound it seems like the Protector's Guilds or whatever are just barely holding things together.\"\n\t\"Look, why don't you go over to the bank and pay them nine million qcoins towards our loan, think it over on the way there and back. I'll get us filled up with Helium and reaction mass so if we still haven't decided where to go we can at least reach someplace to refuel and set out again.\" Cole flapped away from the table and to his own pilot's perch.\n\t\"Nine million is a lot.\" Denal started to inch towards the door. \"What if they get suspicious as to why I'm paying that much at once.\"\n\t\"Tell them that we don't want to be tempted into spending all that on something stupid.\" I suggested. He bounded out and closed the hatchway behind his ringed tail.\n***\nLess than an hour later Cole was just finishing up the refueling procedures as Denal came hurtling up the docking tube. He panted, out of breath as he shut and locked the airlock doors tight. \"What happened?\" I asked, looking up from the wiki entry on some frontier asteroid that would need at least two fuel stops to reach.\n\tDenal righted himself and began to explain. \"As I was coming back from the bank I noticed a security inspection team gathered near one of the ships by the entrance to the port. I asked a nearby officer what that was all about and he said that they were checking all the ships that had been in the sector where that executive's clone had vanished. He said that they were only asking if anyone had an idea of what had happened to him but I didn't like the way some of them looked.\" He jumped into his chair and started strapping himself in. \"I would definitely say that my vote is now \"yes\", let's go to Vesta. Like right this instant.\"\n\tI strapped myself down and signaled for Aniya, down in the equipment bay, to do the same. Cole resigned himself and signaled to traffic control his intent to depart. \"We read you. The way out is clear, but why so quick to leave, you just got back in?\"\n\tCole improvised as he started to pull us out. \"Oh you know.\" As if that ever convinced anyone. \"Just made it big on our last trip. Thinking we might be able to afford a down payment on a better ship this time.\"\n\t\"Really?\" The traffic controller was still on the line. \"And just where did you say you got all that aurum anyways?\"\n\tCrap, maybe he was with security, in which case he could direct some of security's cutters to intercept us before we even got half a kilometer from dock if he suspected we were involved in the situation somehow. Cole spoke again, \"Trade secret, if we told anyone the location our secret mine would be bled dry in a week.\"\n\t\"You know, you can't keep other miners from jumping your claim unless you file it.\"\n\t\"And since when has registering a claim stopped anyone?\" I spoke up, before remembering that while the output was on speakers the input was restricted to Cole's headset. Cole repeated my statement after looking at me odd for a minute.\n\t\"Well, suit yourself. Hope you strike big again.\" We were out. For now we were safe.\n\tOnce we were ten kilometers out I unstrapped myself and walked over to Cole's station, the acceleration providing more \"gravity\" than Ceres had. \"So how long until we reach Vesta?\" I asked him as I leaned around his crash chair to look at him.\n\tHe faced me and said simply \"ten days.\"\n\tTen days, a bit of a long trip by our standards. \"Guess I'd better go and settle in then.\"\n***\nThe next day I started work on my hobby. While my training had been in dead rocks and minerals, I was interested in the far more complex chemistry of living things. A large portion of the section of the ship that had been allotted to my work space was taken up by a variety of different laboratory instruments that had nothing to do with my official job on the ship, and quite a bit of the stuff I actually needed could be used for my hobby too. Fortunately my lab is in one of the few parts of the ship that has something resembling gravity, the room rotates on an axis perpendicular to the ship's engines. When the ship is under burn the room stops moving so that the \"floor\" is oriented towards the drive so that the acceleration provides gravity, when the ship is coasting the room spins so that the samples within stay at the bottom of their containers. Sometimes I found it ironic that a place that contained at least four centrifuges was itself in a centrifuge. To get in or out the giant centrifuge had to be stopped temporarily, which upset the samples if prolonged for too long so I would jump in and trigger the motor to start back up again before I was even through the door all the way.\n\tThe room was dominated by a large refrigerator, a glass door and several compartments inside that maintained their contents at different temperatures ranging from slightly above zero degrees Celsius to under 50 below. A set of cabinets held a spectrometer that could just as easily be used for living or non-living samples, a miniaturized Polymerase Chain Reaction thermocycler, a DNA sequencer, and a wide assortment of various micropipettes, pipettes, beakers, flasks, test tubes, and heating elements. Water unfortunately had to be carried in a large carton, no plumbing.\n\tThis particular day I drew two sets of four petri dishes from the fridge, one set with several spots of white or blue bacteria, the others covered with a green algae. I carefully lifted two blue colonies from each of the bacterial plates and suspended each colony in a separate microfuge tube of solution, I separated the cells in each of these tubes from the DNA they held via microfilters and centrifugal force. I then transferred the fluid to new tubes and added a mixture of enzymes, salts, and fluorescent marked primers to the solutions. Then I placed the tubes into the rack in the thermocycler and set it to run a five hour cycle. \n\tWhile waiting I scooped a teaspoon of algae from each of those dishes, and placed them on a hot pad for ten minutes. Once they were dried out I tasted a bit of each sample. None of them tasted particularly good, my bacon-flavored nutrient algae apparently still had a long way to go.\n\tAfter I had finished the impromptu test of the algae I'd modified I decided to wait out the remainder of the PCR cycle reading some science-fiction novels from the 20th century on my tablet. It astonished me how humans dead for so long could be both so prophetic and so wrong. Naturally, there were five minutes left on the timer when someone decided to interrupt me. I felt a rather jarring vibration along my jaw signaling that someone was trying to contact me on my subvocal comm and I bit down on my right to answer.\n\tWho is this? I demanded feeling a bit annoyed.\n\tIt's that \"horny panda\" as you call him. Came the reply. I swear, Denal's subvocal pickup is as obnoxious as his real voice. There's something I want you to see. Come up to my cabin.\n\tI've already seen your genitalia, several times. I remembered the lab coat, goggles, mask, gloves, and pants I had just put back on in anticipation of the continuation of the experiment. And I just got dressed again, I'm not taking this stuff off now.\n\tWhat? Oh, you're in the lab aren't you. Denal actually sounded surprised, almost like he had something different in mind this time.\n\tYes, and I'm in the middle of something that could potentially shake the belt like nothing since the revolution. That wasn't completely true to be technical about it. The machine would hold the samples at a stable temperature until I came to retrieve them if I had to leave, but all the unsecured lab equipment I had lying around before I performed that last step of the analysis would go floating around once I shut down the centrifuge to step outside.\n\tI'm serious Argentum, I noticed something about our trajectory and I think we may be off course.\n\tHe'd used my full name, that could mean he was serious. Or it could just as easily mean he was dedicated to this particular joke slash attempt to get into my pants. Since when do you know anything about astrogation. I cut off the call with a hard bite on the left and popped the lid to the thermocycler.\n\tI drew each sample into the sequencer, the fluorescent tags attached to the replicated DNA strands allowing the machine to determine almost the exact code of each based on the size of the strands and the different colored tags attached to different bases in the tagged primers. When the sequences were displayed on my tablet it confirmed my suspicions, when I was designed the geneticists deactivated several genes related to gonadal development. The result being that I could never develop testes or ovaries, it could have gone either way given how my cells were a mosaic of XX and XY karyotypes that were otherwise identical. Presumably another set of genes influencing the development of gonads was responsible for our universal sterility. The corporations never revealed the exact genes that they had manipulated to induce these changes, and I intended to find out. I had stored my own genome, plus those of my three crewmates, in the form of plasmid libraries. The human genome was public record so I was going over every gene known to be involved in reproduction and determine which genes made us unable to have babies. And possibly a way to make a set of junk for myself if I felt so inclined, there were plenty of organ printers available in Ceres so there should be some in Vesta.\n***\nDenal was waiting for me when I exited the lab, he was holding a tablet out for me. \"Look at this,\" he said, pulling up a map of the Belt, \"we're following a trajectory that takes us far from Vesta.\" A line showing our course appeared and passed the tag marked VESTA by several thousand kilometers.\n\t\"Have you asked Cole yet?\" I inquired of him.\n\t\"I called once and he shut off his intercom.\" Denal replied. \"He said he was taking a nap and not to disturb him.\"\n\tThat sounded a bit suspicious. \"We should go wake him up.\" I suggested. The two of us floated over to Cole's cabin, the door was locked but Denal was able to easily bypass it.\n\tThe damn crow was nestled in a cubbyhole when I found him, his head tucked under a wing like a stupid chicken. I grabbed him by the other wing and yanked him out, he awoke with a start. Now, Cole may have had sharp talons and a beak, but I had solid bones and they were almost 50% solid titanium, so I was strong enough to break all his limbs and wring his uplifted neck before he could give me more than a few gouges that were easy enough to patch in my lab.\n\t\"Where are we Cole?!\" I shouted in his bird brained face. \"I've seen our trajectory, we're not going to Vesta.\"\n\tTo his credit he didn't bother with lying this time. \"We're on a course to an ice asteroid, about three thousand kilometers spinward of Vesta.\"\n\t\"You know that raw ice is shitty reaction mass.\" I snarled, my vulpine genes making themselves known. \"If we were lucky the contaminants wouldn't blow up our engines.\"\n\t\"I'm not going back to Vesta.\" He insisted.\n\t\"Either we go to Vesta, or this fox is having fresh poultry for breakfast.\" I wouldn't really eat him, though if we did try to extract reaction mass from a dirty snowball and it ended up leaving us stranded I couldn't make promises.\n\tHe reached for the intercom with a wing claw and pressed down a button marked \"voice control\". \"Autopilot, alter course and take us to Vesta, most direct path from current location.\"\n\tThe ship's computer responded in seconds. \"Calculating… warning, insufficient reaction mass. Along suggested course we will fail to reach Vesta by 147.2 kilometers.\"\n\t\"Then we call in a tug, that's why we retained most of a million qcoins isn't it? Unexpected expenses?\" I gave the corvid a toothy grin, he confirmed the course and I let go of him. Then left the room to confirm that he had in fact set us along the right course this time.\n\tAs we headed for the bridge Denal turn to ask me something. \"So, what were you working on anyways?\"\n\tI shrugged. \"Trying to figure out a way to give myself genitals.\"\n\t\"That's great.\" The panda said in response. \"So what's it going to be, pole or a hole? Or maybe both?\"\n\t\"Currently I'm thinking that I'd rather be male.\"\n\t\"What?\" Denal looked aghast. \"You know that I'm straight, don't you?\"\n\tI just smirked in response. \"Why do you think I want to be a guy?\"\n \nChapter 5\nWe were able to reach Vesta's primary docking port despite the lack of fuel on our part. I did indeed call a tug boat to bring us in, though traffic control charged us quite a bit for the tow, one hundred thousand Cerean qcoins. As we were brought in I realized that the transaction could probably be traced back to us and used to locate us on Vesta, I decided we'd want to exchange our qcoins for Vestan ones or some sort of commodity currency, and open a completely new set of accounts. While we couldn't convince Cole to move in immediately he did agree to check it out for a couple days, that would give us time to decide whether or not we should stay, and if we decided to leave it would allow us to refuel and resupply before moving on to the next habitat.\n\tAs soon as we were within range of the Vesta network I contacted a money exchange and traded our 900,000 Ceres qcoins for 700,000 Vestan qcoins. Apparently Vestan coins hadn't been mined for as long as their Ceres counterparts and thus were worth significantly more due to their lower quantity. Next I called up the webpage for the Protector's Guild whose service area encompassed the sector of the port and many of the surrounding markets, and according to the reviews I found were one of the most thorough in their guardianship of their customers property and wellbeing. When I saw that they offered group plans and required a live video consultation I called the rest of the crew up. I transferred the page to the large bridge monitor and opened the link to the video chat. The screen was filled with the visage of a female cat of some kind wearing a green business suit and sitting at a desk.\n\tShe looked up from the tablet in her hands and spoke to us. \"Good afternoon, my name is Jessica and I'll be your agent for the Marquez Guild. Shall we get started?\"\n\tWe indicated our affirmation and introduced ourselves, one by one.\n\t\"Now then, you want a group plan?\" We told her that was the case. \"All right then. To start with are you affiliated with any Guild, company, or government?\"\n\t\"No,\" I replied. \"We are freelance prospectors, though we did work with the Cerean Directorate most of the time.\" She scrawled this information on her tablet, tapped a few things that we couldn't spot, and then her eyes widened and her ears turned to press themselves against her cranium. That did not look good.\n\t\"Very well.\" She forced her face back into the friendly expressions she had been wearing when the conversation had first started. \"What is the purpose of your visit to our fine habitat?\"\n\tPretty much all of us showed our shock and worry at this question. Cole's tail feathers fanned out, Aniya's hackles raised underneath her shirt, Denal grabbed his own tail and started wringing it nervously, and I could have sworn that my tail doubled in diameter when the fur stood up. \"We got bored in Ceres, wanted to see what some of the other asteroids were like.\"\n\t\"Not much excitement.\"\n\t\"Thought the Directorate exports guy was stiffing us.\"\n\t\"Charged too much for life support.\"\n\tJessica tapped a few virtual keys and spoke to us again. \"Your rate is calculated at 2,000 Ceres qcoins a day, rounded up to the nearest day. As long as you are on Vesta and within our service area our surveillance network will keep track of you and automatically deploy armed drones if you are attacked.\" A map of the habitat with multiple areas covered partially or completely in green appeared on the screen by her image. \"Be advised that if you try to leave the habitat without paying your bill we operate a number of photon and kinetic turrets situated around the docking bay.\"\n\tI threw something else in before she could terminate the connection. \"We already exchanged our qcoins for Vestan ones.\"\n\tShe looked at me and tapped something else on her tablet. \"Then that shall be 1,200 Vestan qcoins per day. Same rules and conditions apply. Shall that be all?\"\n\tI shook my head no. She ended the call. Though honestly I was a bit curious, the difference in price was considerably greater than the exchange rate I had seen earlier. Did the Vestans prefer their own currency so strongly? I suppose it made some sense given how long the light speed delay made transactions that used servers not physically located on the same asteroid, after all that was why so many habitats had their own distinctive qcoins in the first place.\n***\nWhen the tug finally towed us all the way into dock we first refilled our reaction mass and then we all left to check out the habitat. In particular to see if it was still as bad as when Cole had been there. The market cavern on this asteroid was practically right next to the docks, took barely a minute to walk down there. It was much like those on Ceres, except that there seemed to be very little in the way of urban planning in this cave, shops and fabricators were intermingled with townhouses and restaurants. In fact it seemed like nearly all of the buildings were used as places of residence, or rather people had set up shop in their apartment complexes. We could only tell which were businesses and what were simply dwellings only because most of the stores and fabricators had small signs on their front doors, I noticed that most had a symbol of some archaic tool, a compass rose or a hammer or a sword or something accompanied by an odd sign that looked like a pair of inverted chevrons with a short squiggly line a little ways above them. \n\tAfter browsing the slapped together city for nearly an hour and seeing no signs of criminal activity Denal suggested we check out one of the areas not covered by Marquez. \"If this section is so crime-free with one of the highest rated Guilds keeping the peace, we should see how the other Guilds handle things.\"\n\tWe had some doubts but his reasoning seemed solid, we headed to a side cave that was outside the Marquez Guild's service area. The tunnel leading into the cave was unusually wide and the ceiling varied in height a great deal, at one point it was 2 meters high but just half a meter further down it went up to 3 meters tall. I was passing under one of those high ceilings when I felt what seemed like a ton of bricks landed on top of me. Still in shock I felt a pair of hands lift my head up and press a sharpened blade to my neck.\n\t\"All right you newbs.\" I heard a hoarse voice from on top of me. \"Hand over your wristpads, tablets, and anything you may have bought at the market. Or missy here is going to look like a red fox if you get my drift.\"\n\tI saw Aniya and Denal turn around to stare blank faced at me and my attacker. Cole simply flicked his eyes upward to glance at the ceiling, I got the impression he was doing the avian equivalent of rolling his eyes. \"And here you were saying that the Protector's Guilds kept everyone safe here.\"\n\tThe high-altitude mugger on my back reared up, pulling his knife away from my throat, and laughed. \"The Houses don't cover the tunnels you stupid newbies. It's all for your-\"\n\tPFFEW PFFEW\n\tI heard some quick bursts of compressed gas and the mugger slumped over. Moving quickly I threw him off and got to my feet. On the ground behind me was a large rat parahuman lying limply on the ground like a rag doll, his eyes wide open. Sticking out of his neck I spotted a pair of red feathered darts. Denal made a surprised squeaking sound and I turned to see what he was looking at. It was a pressure pistol, seemingly hanging suspended in mid-air.\n\tNo, not suspended, there was a shape nearby that was colored the same as the cave wall behind. It moved slightly and became a canid woman dressed head to toe in a chameleon suit. As we watched she holstered the weapon and pulled the hood off, revealing that she was a grey wolf with close-cropped hair.\n\t\"Well, hello there babe.\" Denal began but was silenced by a threatening finger pointed in his direction by our camouflaged savior. She walked past him to the rat she had downed and started collecting her darts.\n\tI watched her do her work for a few seconds before speaking to her. \"Thank you for saving me like that. Miss?\"\n\tShe glanced up at me to answer my query. Instead she flashed me a comm number on her wristpad, which I entered into my own in conference with the rest of my crewmates. Olga Wolf. I heard in a soft voice resonating through my jawbones. I'm an investigator for Guild Wolf. Yes, I know, creative name. Even through subvocals I could discern the sarcasm.\n\tWhy are we using subvocalization? Aniya asked before anyone else came up with the idea.\n\tBecause the tetrodotoxin in those darts doesn't always paralyze their sensory neurons. Came Olga's response. It mostly goes after voluntary muscle control, including the diaphragm. Only reason he hasn't suffocated to death is the oxygen retaining modifications our designers added.\n\tI picked up the wannabe mugger's wrist and put two fingers to the inner edge. Sure enough there was a faint pulse, but I couldn't hear any breathing. Why are you so concerned about being heard by this guy anyways? I asked her.\n\tOh, that. Well you heard him, I'm not supposed to be here. Thanks to some pissing match between mom and old man Jerome the tunnels are supposed to be neutral territory. But this guy has been preying on not only newcomers like you but our own clients who have to use this tunnel to get to and from the spaceport. She walked towards Aniya and Denal and drew her dart gun. So here's what you're going to do. One of you is going to take this gun, you're all going to take this waste of biomass back to the Marquez side, and you're going to report to the nearest Marquez officer or drone that he attacked your friend here and you shot him with an open-source dart shooter that you printed off before coming on board. She held the gun out grip first to see who would take it.\n\tAniya took the gun and looked at the inexpensively 3d printed weapon a bit apprehensively for several seconds before stuffing it into one of the pouches on her tauric pants, barely leaving a bulge. Are you sure they won't mind us pumping someone full of deadly poisons? I would have thought that the Protector's Guilds would take a bit of offense to people that sort of thing.\n\tOlga suppressed a snort as she reattached her hood. Why, is that why you left your old place? Everyone's eyes widened a bit at the half joking accusation. Oh, well Vesta was founded mainly on the principle of \"you can't tell me what I can't do\" so you'll generally find that people here wouldn't care whether you tip your darts with cyanide. And anyways the Guilds operate like insurance, the more you do yourself the less they have to pay. She finished fastening her hood and reactivated her camouflage, I could still see a bit of an outline as she started to walk away.\n\tBut then I remembered some minor thing that she had mentioned. Wait, you said something about \"mom\" and an \"old man Jerome\", who are they?\n\tThe silhouette paused for a few seconds. I'm a clone of Georgia Wolf, the Guildmistress of Guild Wolf. Jerome Marquez is the Guildmaster of the Guild you guys are paying.\n\t\"Does everyone on this rock have two names like a human?\" Cole threw in his own comment. The rest of us glared at him for failing to remember that we were not speaking aloud to preserve the secret identity of the part-time vigilante we had here.\n\tNo, just those who are part of a clone family have last names. Often it's the first name of the line's founder but some, like my oh so imaginative mother, come up with completely new names to add on to their own. Also many of the Guildmasters have multiple clones, the SPPS gives them discounts for some reason, I've got five sisters and Jerome has eight sons. The shadow that had saved our possessions and possibly our lives then ran off back down the way we had been headed.\n\tI walked over to the immobile rat still lying there in the middle of the hallway. I thought I saw one of his eyes twitch a bit. So I went up to his head and flipped my kilt up, giving him a brief view of my featureless crotch. \"I'm no 'missy' you scumbag.\" I told him and then grabbed his left hand and started pulling him back down the way we had came by his arm. Aniya came up to pick up his legs a few seconds later.\n\tWe did as Olga suggested, we dragged the thug up to the nearest agent of Guild Marquez and told him the story she had given us. He entered the information into his wristpad, and asked Aniya to see the gun. She produced it, he looked it over, then handed it back satisfied that it was indeed an open source design that could have come from anywhere. \"You should have told us you were armed.\" He informed Aniya after giving her the weapon back. \"We would have adjusted your rates accordingly.\" He then bound the mugger's hands in zip-ties and injected him with the antidote to the tetrodotoxin. We left before he fully regained his mobility.\n\tOn the way back to our ship we bought a load of feedstock for our on-board fabricator. Most spaceships intended to operate more than a day or two out from a habitat had at the very least a multi-material \"omni-printer\" that could make a variety of items from a number of different plastics and metals, even some basic electronics. There were even a few well-equipped ships that had nanofabricators imported all the way from earth that could construct anything from a pizza to the latest model of augmented reality contact lenses. Us, we just had an omni-printer that had a couple of robotic armatures for assembling the parts as they came out of the printer, and my lab had a chemical synthesizer for automatically mixing whatever non-solid compounds we needed and a variety of microbe cultures for producing biological substances.\n\tCole elected for an exact copy of the pressure dart gun Olga had given Aniya, I'd engineer a plate of bacteria to make tetrodotoxin to fill the darts with. Denal of all things wanted a Chinese longsword with a stylized pair of procyonid's paws on the hilt, I didn't think he even knew how to use a sword but I queued it up anyways. Myself, I decided on two weapons, a spring-loaded stiletto of the type where the blade popped straight out of the hilt rather than flipping out, if I got jumped like that again I figured I could pull it out and slam the side of my fist into the mugger and pop the blade into his flesh, and a gun. A number of designs were now public domain so I selected a steel semiautomatic handgun that dated back almost two hundred years but seemed to still be popular. I assembled many of the parts myself but allowed the armatures to make the bullets, filled with gunpowder mixed by the synthesizer. As I slipped the finished weapon into the printed plastic holster I now wore on my belt I hoped that I would never have occasion to use it.\n","writing_bbcode_parsed":"Chapter 1
I was woken from my comfortable sleeping position by a siren blaring less than a meter away from my fairly large vulpine ears. Startled I leaped out, or at least as much as one can do so in a zero-g sleeping bag clipped onto the wall at six different points. "Hey silver!" Came the voice of the most annoying corvid in the solar system out of that same intercom as the horrid wake-up call. "Get your Barbie-doll ass out of bed. We're coming up on that rock soon."
\t"I have more holes than you do Cole." If the uplifted raven heard me he gave no sign. Slightly more annoyed than usual I started wriggling out of my insulated cocoon to the door of my cramped cabin. Pausing before the mirrored surface of the metallic door I noticed what Cole had so lovingly referred to as my "Barbie-doll ass", grabbing onto one of the handhold bars distributed all throughout the ship I rotated in mid-air and spread my legs apart so I could see the reflection of what lay between them. That is, a bunch of black fur with white guardhairs like the rest of my body, hence the nickname "silver", but if you looked close enough you might spot my butthole and if you looked really close you could see the opening of my urethra. "Barbie-doll ass", please I look more like a plushie, or one of those non-humanoid animals in Japanese anime. Yes, you read that right, I have no genitals, the twisted corporate bioengineers who spliced human and fox DNA together and extruded the resulting transgenic slush over a calcium-titanium alloy skeleton did not see fit to print me a set of reproductive organs. The vast majority of parahumans had genitalia of some sort even though the geneticists had made sure that they were sterile, but I was part of an experiment of some sorts to see if workers who couldn't waste valuable company time screwing one another functioned more effectively than those who did. It turned out that we did not, without the extra testosterone or estrogen from a set of gonads it seemed that we were less, motivated than those who had semi-functional ovaries or testes.
\tOkay, we were downright lazy. They could have asked anyone who owned a neutered dog or cat and saved themselves a few million bucks.
\tAnyways, introspection over I flung myself out the door and into the corridor. Not going to bother with clothes until I know whether they want me to go outside. Isn't like I've got much to hide anyways.
\tAs I was floating up the corridor to the bridge I felt a paw slap me on the rear and propel me into a bulkhead. Looking back I saw a meter-and-a half tall red panda wearing a set of workman's coveralls trying to catch himself on a handrail with his ringed tail. Denal, our mechanic. "The hell were you thinking?" I snarled at him getting increasingly annoyed by the second. "Doing that in the middle of a wide open hallway? In zero gravity?"
\t"Hey, Argentum, you dress like that and you have to expect some workplace harassment." He was joking of course, when you can't make babies and have no diseases the corp crèche supervisors don't bother to instill taboos about sex. It was practically expected for co-workers to hold orgies in the break rooms, now that we actually had breaks. I couldn't see the appeal of it, me and Denal had had sex once or twice but all I felt was a pain in the butt that made it impossible to sit for half a week. Thank the corps for using us in microgravity. I shrugged it off and darted for the hatch to the bridge.
\tI should probably explain the name I gave myself, Argentum, or "Argen" for short, is ancient Greek or something for, well, silver. I know, original, but I'm a chemist by training and during my accelerated education I found myself wondering why so many elements had symbols entirely unrelated to their names. There is neither an "a" nor a "u" in gold, or for that matter silver doesn't have an "a" or a "g". So I did a bit of research in the crèche library and found that scientists liked to name things in long dead languages that nobody spoke anymore and after discovering the full names of certain metals in those languages I thought they sounded cool. What? I was barely three years old.
\tCole and Aniya were already there. Cole was a raven the size of a large turkey, albeit with a much bigger head. His wings were also modified with small claws at the ends, apparently a small atavism the bioengineers found that dated back to the earliest birds from the time of the dinosaurs, that allowed him to hang onto an overhead handlebar while his feet manipulated the flight controls. Apparently there was a prevailing theory among some of the corps that created us that creatures that evolved in a three dimensional environment would be better suited to navigating the depths of space than us terrestrials. So rather than adding some animal genes to a human baseline genome like most did for their deep space workforce, they took the genomes of dolphins, parrots, octopi, corvids, seals, basically any aquatic or flying animal that showed a decent level of intelligence, and boosted their brainpower until they could operate a spaceship. I don't know how well it worked but I do know that for all his annoying quirks, Cole is a great pilot.
\tAniya couldn't be more different, she was a rescue taur. A four-legged, two armed centauroid of mixed human, wolf, and possum heritage designed for both heavy lifting in the low-gravity mines out here in the Belt, and bailing out fellow workers whose suits sprung leaks. Above her waist she looked like a lot of parahumans, anthropomorphic torso covered in black fur with a lupine head, but below she looked like one of her natural kin, except considerably larger, like the size of a fully grown horse. And a peek under her pressure suit would reveal a bit of her possum genome, a prehensile (but mercifully still furred) tail, and a pouch big enough to accommodate an adult human or most parahumans. Yes, a nice soft pouch modified to seal airtight around a small hose that would supply a distressed miner with oxygen as he calmed down all safe and warm in a secure pocket of flesh. Oh dear I was rambling wasn't I?
\tRight, so there I was on the bridge with the rest of the crew of the nameless prospecting ship we'd managed to get a hold of sometime after the combination of violent raids on corp bases and legislative action on the behalf of sympathetic lobbyists that won us our freedom. The monitors were displaying several different views of an asteroid a couple kilometers in diameter that our scanners seemed to indicate held a promising concentration of mass. The plan was simple, latch onto the rock, toss out Aniya and whoever happened to draw the short straw with a load of mining equipment, prop up a burrowing mass driver over the masscon, and drill until it got within a few centimeters. Then they'd chip off some samples, I'd analyze them in my lab, and if the mass was something valuable dig it out and take it back to Ceres for sale to one of the local fabricators or the freighters supplying earth with needed minerals.
\t"We should arrive in a little more than half an hour." Cole announced to the rest of the crew. "Better get ready." Knowing his tricks it was more likely we'd be there in fifteen to twenty minutes, whichever unlucky bastard had to go with Aniya wouldn't have much time to suit up.
\tAniya glanced at me and Denal and shrugged. "Might as well get it over with." She pulled three straws out of her suit pocket with her right hand while she held onto a rail with her left. She grabbed one straw in each of her free semi-prehensile forepaws so that they all appeared roughly the same length. Cole flapped over and took the one in her hand before flying back to his console, leaving me and Denal to take the ones in her paws. I looked at the one in my hand, it was barely five centimeters long, I compared it to Denal's, his was a full cm longer. Dismayed I floated over to Cole, sadistic corporations, his straw was seven cm.
\t"Guess I better get dressed." I said dejectedly as I let the losing straw fly off. Aniya plucked it out of the air and put it back in her pocket. Then she held out a foreleg and drew me close to her. She bent over and looked down at me with an amused expression on her wolfish face.
\t"Come on, I'll let you sleep in my pouch tonight if you don't complain too much." So maybe going out on that exposed hunk of rock wasn't so bad after all.
***
For once, that avian bastard gave us the correct time to arrival, I spent fifteen extra minutes standing in the airlock wearing the light pressure suit that was sufficient for parahumans of my model to survive in the vacuum of space. One of the perks of being built rather than grown being that we have a much greater tolerance of low pressure than humans do. If necessary I could remain conscious in hard vacuum for up to ten minutes, more than enough time for a nice rescue taur crewmate to drop her pants and shove me in her pouch, but I wasn't going to take any chances. Space is a harsh, unforgiving environment, under the supervision of the corporations we lost ten percent of our number every year. I don't know the mortality rate now that we're free but I would bet pretty good odds that it's still rather high, definitely above birth rates now that the corps aren't popping a thousand of us out of the tanks every quarter. We used to have two full time miners but then Billy ignored the warnings of an incoming radiation storm and got his brains fried, his share of that haul bought us a 'bot with enough sense to scurry for shelter at the first sign of cosmic rays.
\tThere was a series of jarring lurches forward as the harpoons pulled us down to the surface of the asteroid and anchored us there. The airlock opened and the ramp lowered as we made our way down to the regolith. Aniya gleefully bounded across the landscape carrying some 500 kilos of equipment while I drove a rover with the really heavy stuff. Conceivably the two of us could carry the mass driver between us, but neither of us was experienced enough with maneuvering in microgravity to risk doing so while bouncing around. After half an hour of that we arrived at what our radar indicated was the shallowest point above the mass concentration we were interested in. As we unpacked I prepared a portable spectrophotometer, unlike the clunky devices of the 20th century this device was little bigger than a suitcase, including a specialized computer for interpreting the data. I scooped up a sample of regolith and poured it into a sample cuvette that I inserted into the machine, within a few minutes the device had exposed the asteroid dust to every wavelength of light known to mankind and its creations, and contrasted the reflections with those given off by baseline samples stored internally. Once I'd analyzed the readouts I addressed Aniya subvocally using the implants in our throats, no point wasting breath when some subtle movements of the larynx would do. Looks like basic nickel-iron, maybe a little heavy on the iron but not exceptional.
\tIn my experience certain metals tend to aggregate around iron. Came the wolf-possum's sub-vocal response. Some of those are worth quite a few qcoins if I am correct.
\tI'm not saying that it isn't valuable, if nothing else we could try to sell the coordinates to one of the big haulers.
\tOoh, almost lost your bedmate you asexual dog.
\tDid you intend to subvocalize that Denal?
\tNo, sorry. Not really.
\tI cut the horny Asian raccoon off of my channel. Seriously I thought pandas were going extinct from lack of sex or something. I tried not to think of his commentary as I helped Aniya set up the burrower. We set it up more or less exactly above the masscon, whatever it was, and switched it on. The drill bits at the bottom of the machine dug into the asteroid and every few minutes a rock was magnetically accelerated out the top, pushing it slightly deeper in and flinging the fragments far out of the way. Every hour or so I opened a hatch to siphon off some dust for analysis. After the first hour all I could see was an increase in the iron content, as well as some minute quartz and agate crystals. The second hour I noticed the dust was starting to reflect more light between 570 and 590 nm in wavelength. Don't get too excited, I told the others still linked to my comm channel, there's a lot of things it could be, likely just some pyrite.
\t"I'm still going to be looking up the price." Cole couldn't use subvocal comms like we did, something about the avian voice box being much differently shaped than the more-or-less human ones we had. "Just in case it is what everyone but you is thinking."
\tAnd I think it's time to turn this thing off and dig in by hand and paw. Aniya turned off the mass driver and pushed it over. She then began to shuffle around in the dust with her forepaws, looking a bit like a baseline dog burying a bone.
\tI picked up a rock hammer and inched towards the two-meter wide hole. I need a large sample for a density index. I explained as I attempted to pry out a rock that looked like it would weigh maybe two kilograms. Once I had it loose I carried it over to the rover, there I calibrated a balance to the minute gravity of the asteroid and weighed the rock, quite a bit more than 2 kilos, promising. Then I did a few laser scans to determine the stone's exact dimensions, which I then plugged into my suit's computer with a series of blinks and bites on different teeth oriented to various keys. I saw the results. Well, it could be gold, I subvocalized, or maybe platinum, or lead. Gold was one of the most discussed elements in the Belt these days, when the corporations had started to mine the asteroids the price of gold had sunk to levels unseen in human history. But when the revolution occurred gold prices soared above the peak they'd reached during the early 21st century economic recession, until the parahuman colonies declared that they'd be exporting minerals to earth and the price started to decline again. Currently it was hovering somewhere around 50 Cerean qcoins per gram, not quite a fortune but still a significant amount of money for a small mining outfit like ourselves. I personally didn't understand why the humans thought it was so valuable, sure there were some chemical and electronic applications for it, but the market value couldn't account for those practical uses alone. I could understand why platinum was worth more though, a lot of life-support systems used it in catalytic converters. Still, lead was worth something too, a lot of habitats built radiation shelters out of it. I signaled the excavation bot to unfold and prepare to bring up the pieces of the masscon.
\tThe spider-like robot walked over to the site on four spindly legs and positioned itself over the hole where Aniya was digging. As she exposed the concentration of mass that had drawn us to the asteroid a four-pronged claw lowered itself on a winch down the hole. She guided it over one of the larger exposed stones she had drilled out of the asteroid and signaled for it to pull up. As it walked over to the rover I stole a glance at the piece of rock it had pulled out, though mostly grey stone I could see a few spots where the yellow metal shone through. There was a lot of it, three big rocks and dozens of smaller ones, a total of almost a quarter of a metric ton once we'd taken off most of the worthless silica and iron. Over twelve million Ceres qcoins worth of gold, we might even be able to pay off the mortgage on our ship.
\tIf we had known the trouble those rocks would bring us we might have just left them there.
Chapter 2
It was dark, I could feel myself enclosed on all sides in sticky wet mucus and veined flesh. But I didn't feel scared of alarmed, rather I felt calmed by the encasing pressure, safe and secure. I moved myself deeper into the flesh pocket as I felt the gentle massage of my host's pulse. But then I was thrown out of my serenity by a loud siren interspersed with Cole's frightened screeching.
\t"Everyone to the bridge, we've been hit by laser fire, I repeat we are under attack!" I could feel Aniya jump off her bunk and propel herself down the hallway with me still inside her pouch. It must have looked odd to anyone watching, a fat half-naked wolf taur with a second tail sticking out from under her groin, which was covered by a pair of taur-sized panties you perverts.
\t"What is going on?" It felt strange to hear Aniya's voice echo through her body like that, the extra pair of lungs in her lower body allow her quite the reverb.
\t"About a minute ago something fried one of our aft sensor pods. There wasn't any indication of a radiation storm and I picked up a heat signature 200 kilometers in that direction. So I took us behind the nearest asteroid." Cole's voice carried none of his usual jocularity, he was truly scared. "Where's Argen, ze is better at reading these sensors."
\tAt that moment I felt a hand grab my tail. "Found zir," came Denal's voice as he yanked me out of the pouch. I burst out in a cloud of mucus and reached around to grab him for pulling me out of my hiding place, making sure to coat his fur in a nice layer of pouch slime. He cringed at the feeling and let me float there next to Aniya's backside. "Makers, for an asexual being you have some odd kinks Silver."
\t"Later." I did not feel inclined to explain, for at least the tenth time, that I did not consider my fondness for the interior of my crewmate to be sexual. Though to be honest I sometimes wondered if my adrenals did provide enough hormones for a proper sex drive and my brain had redirected it somewhere away from my lack of traditional reproductive organs. Anyways I wiped my hands off on Denal's coveralls and jumped over to a tablet to call up the sensor logs. Sure enough, they showed a heat signature following us since we left the asteroid where we had picked up the gold chunk. Unfortunately it didn't tell me much, it seemed we hadn't bothered much with active radar on that side of the ship, and now we were completely blind in that area thanks to our pursuer's precision shot. "Worthless, we need a better view of them to even know what we're up against. Can you try sending a drone out to the edge of the rock we're hiding behind?"
\t"Yeah, yeah, sure I'll launch one." Denal tried to avoid putting himself in contact with the slime I'd left on him as he went over to his console. We had half a dozen survey drones that Denal would frequently send out on arcs around asteroids we thought looked promising. They'd circle the rock a couple times, playing their radar over it and taking snapshots of the surface in multiple wavelengths, and transmit it back to our ship, saving a lot of time on prospecting for ores. He shot one out to swing around the asteroid we were currently using for cover and programmed it to scan outwards rather than at the asteroid. Meanwhile me and Aniya called up manual controls for our primary collision avoidance coilguns, hitting a stray rock with a fast-moving iron slug tended to get it out of the way a lot faster than melting it with a beam of concentrated light, and anyways lasers were a bit out of our price range.
\tThe drone reached the far side of the asteroid and transmitted back a view of the region of space beyond. Radar imaging finally brought me a view of what I had been looking for in the first place, a small (relatively speaking, we were about twice as large thanks to the need for mining equipment and landers) cargo ship covered with laser turrets and a pair of long tubes that I had no reference for. It didn't seem to be moving as we scanned it. "It's like it's just waiting to see what we do."
\tAniya had the first suggestion, "Maybe they're moving when we're not watching. Why don't we send the drone back out to see if they've come any closer." Denal punched in the commands and the drone flew back out to take a second look. It hadn't moved, however there was now another, smaller and much faster object moving out towards us.
\t"Incoming missile!" Cole screeched as the object swung around the asteroid heading straight for us. Panicked I switched the auto-tracking on my turret back on just as Aniya did the same. Registering the small, fast incoming object as a collision threat the automated systems sent streams of darts at the missile. Mere seconds from impact one of the darts ruptured the missile's fuel tanks and triggered an explosion that took out the explosive weapon entirely and sent shrapnel flying everywhere, thankfully not fast enough to do much damage to our ship.
\tI didn't understand how they had been able to lock onto us from the far side of an asteroid but before I could think of something another missile came in from the opposite side of the previous one. Aniya just barely managed to shoot that one down as well. Noticing the drone following the missile it came to me. "Denal, shut down the transmission to that drone! They're tracking it!"
\tThe panda switched off the transmitter, then as an afterthought shut down all of our transmitters just to be safe. Now we could see nothing of the attacking ship, until either us or the pirates moved to our side of the asteroid we were blind.
\t"Now what?" Denal asked, evidently a bit scared now that we had just barely escaped death twice. I thought it was obvious, we wait for the pirates to get bored and leave. Unfortunately that wasn't the case, after half an hour of sitting there the enemy ship came up around the asteroid and began to approach us. As it drew nearer I saw docking arms unfold from the underside of the miniature freighter.
\tI panicked again, hastily aiming the gauss turret I was controlling at the pirate vessel I blasted away with a stream of iron. I saw a docking claw tear itself off and fly out into space, a laser turret shattered into a million shards of glass, then there was a puff of gas out of one of the holes I made in the main hull of the ship. But it still kept coming at us. "Move, move, move!"
\tCole swung our ship away from the asteroid, the pirate ship continued on in the same direction it had been following the whole time. Of course, there being no friction in space you needed to fire retro-rockets in order to slow down before you hit anything, which didn't bode well for the crew of that ship. Either their control systems were damaged, or, as suggested by the gas vent I'd opened up, they were dead.
\t"I'm not picking up any signals from them." Cole stated as he moved the ship in for a closer look. I called up a spectroscopic analysis of the cloud streaming out of the ship, approximately 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen, with traces of carbon dioxide and other trace gases. Plus ice crystals of a red fluid that appeared to contain a significant concentration of iron.
\tI dropped the tablet in shock, not quite the effect it has in gravity as it just hung there suspended in mid-air. "I killed somebody," I exclaimed in horror, "it's blood, I didn't just rupture their crew compartment, I shot someone and made them bleed out."
\tCole pulled up some schematics of the enemy ship based on what we could see of it. "One person space truck, designed for short hops from one asteroid to another. Pilot sits in a polarized plexiglass bubble. You got lucky."
\t"Lucky?" Denal exclaimed, "do you know what the Cerean directorate does to anyone who kills someone?"
\t"Seizure of all assets and fifty years hard labor?" Aniya suggested, everyone who lived full or part time on Ceres knew the basic penalties for criminal acts. "But ze was acting in self-defense, they launched missiles at us."
\t"They don't care, there's nothing in the laws to make exceptions and the computerized judging systems follow the laws to the letter." This information about the consequences of my rash actions sent my adrenal glands into another overdrive, but since there was no one to fight this time I instead prepared for flight, right into Aniya's pouch, shoving her into the nearest wall. "That's not going to help, she's just as guilty as you are as far as the judges are concerned, for that matter we all are."
\t"Crap," I murmured from inside the wolftaur's nice and safe belly as I pulled my tail in behind me. With such severe penalties I wondered why that guy in the other ship had even bothered to attack us if he knew what was in store for him. "Any idea what drove that guy to try and kill us?"
\tCole ruffled his feathers in a way that might have been a shrug. "I heard talk of some extremists who wanted us to break off trade with earth, they apparently nuked some freighter docks on the east side a while back. Trying to annihilate anything that was of more value to earth than to the Belt."
\t"I've seen nuclear detonations before," Aniya's voice reverberated down to her pouch. "They were a lot larger than the explosions those missiles produced when we destroyed them." If anyone could have seen them at the moment I might have rolled my eyes.
\t"Nukes don't have nuclear reactions when they're ripped apart by high speed projectiles." I told her in a rather matter of fact way. For some reason when I said that her pulse dropped slightly. "However, if they were carrying fissile material it would have set off a radiation alarm."
\t"But chemical explosives have barely any effect in space, they might open the hull or disable the engines but the gold in our hold would be recoverable. And that's worthless except for exportation, so wouldn't they want to destroy it?"
\tDenal snorted loudly enough for me to hear it. "Then maybe he was just a plain old pirate. They do say that banditry or violent theft is the second oldest profession after all."
\t"And what, dare I ask, would the oldest profession be?" Aniya asked him in response. He said nothing, or at least nothing that I could hear, but I had a decent idea of what he had in mind.
\t"So what are we going to do about the draconian Cerean law enforcement that would have us all back in chains?" I asked my co workers and friends with whom I had apparently committed the worst criminal offense out of necessity for our lives.
\t"Nothing." Cole suggested. "We make no mention of this incident and pretend we obtained this haul with no unusual troubles. Odds are he wasn't from Ceres, probably one of the smaller and more lawless asteroids, there's no way he could get away with fencing pirated goods back home."
\t"I could probably cover up the laser damage." Denal threw in his own contribution. "Those sensor pods are modular anyways, I could simply remove the remainder of the attachment and recycle it. Then weld over the hull scars to make it look like micrometeor pitting."
\t"Well, I guess that's it then. We're safe." Yet strangely, despite my words, I did not feel any more assured. I curled up tighter in a rather appropriately named fetal position.
Chapter 3
We arrived at Ceres without further incident two days later. Sure enough, Denal had managed to conceal the evidence of our skirmish with another ship fairly easily. The sensor pod turned out to have taken the brunt of the damage and was easily enough detached and smashed to cover up the melted instrumentation, we jettisoned the most melted pieces and stowed the rest for recycling once we got back to the manufacturer, might as well not pay full price for a replacement. The few scars on the hull were scratched over with chunks of rock from our cargo hold to simulate meteor impacts. Still there was a sense of apprehension as we disembarked from the ship and passed through station security at the second largest port on the biggest dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. Nearly two hundred thousand parahumans called Ceres home, the biggest concentration of our kind in the solar system, there were even a couple humans, mostly trade reps or ambassadors attempting to write out some manner of treaty with the Directorship.
\tGovernment out in the belt varied a great deal, most of us had been accustomed to rule by whatever corporation had fabricated or bought us and had little experience with governing ourselves. While most human children were taught how their government worked in childhood and how to participate in it if they were among the lucky minority to live in a democracy, we had to seek out how government worked on our own terms or try to hammer one out through a lot of trial or error. Asteroid habitats vary from direct democracy to fascism, and everything in between. In the case of Ceres the corporations had used it as a base of operations in the belt and naturally several different corps had constructed their own processing plants and even regional administrative offices. Because few humans were willing to travel several months out to the asteroids, or more importantly sign the legal waivers disavowing their employer of any legal responsibility in the case of their gruesome demise, many of the administrative tasks ended up performed by parahumans. The end result being that when the revolution won us freedom from the corporations Ceres already had a vast bureaucracy running things fairly smoothly. The highest ranking administrators of the different corps, once the humans had been killed or shipped home, all got together and decided to change the various "human only" rules their corps wrote so that they applied to parahumans as well, and otherwise set up shop like their former owners had done save that they now paid their workers. After a couple months of trying to handle a payroll of several thousand on a system intended for a few dozen they laid off half their employees. However they also allowed the "grey market" that had inevitably popped up to operate in the open, and in fact focused their layoffs on the merchants and hobbyists who they had a fair idea were earning an income on their own. These people were allowed to rent shops in the common areas of the habitats, cutting out some administrative costs and giving the Cerean Directorship, as the conglomeration of ex-secretaries called themselves, an additional source of income besides the money from exporting their extracted minerals to earth. In addition the layoffs left the Directorship with a sizeable fleet of surplus spacecraft that they no longer had the manpower to operate, they were going to scrap these vessels until some bright manager came up with the idea of offering some of the laid off miners loans to buy the extra ships. You can probably guess which category me, Aniya, Cole, and Denal fell under. So yes, not exactly the best system of governance ever, but we had one of the lowest crime rates in the belt, or so the propaganda, sorry, "public relations" department claimed.
\tAnyways, that brief history of Ceres does not do justice to the wonder that is the market caverns. As the corps mined out the dwarf planet they dug huge holes miles beneath the surface in order to get to the largest concentrations of mass in the asteroid. These tunnels were at least two meters tall to accommodate the miners and their equipment but the caves that had held the most valuable minerals often reached five meters in height and a football field or two in length or width. Since there was plenty of pre-existing living space in the worker barracks and tunnels many of these caverns had been reinforced with long titanium columns and filled with multiple levels of storefronts, the .028 gravities making it easy for most people to simply jump from one level to another through holes in the rickety paneling placed in front of shops so the customers had something to window browse from. It's rather incredible, in a ramshackle slum kind of way.
\tThis day me and the others were leaping about in what we knew as "public" clothing, in my case a green plaid knee-length kilt ("regimental" style, not that I had much to hide) and a black canvas vest, Cole a sort of jumpsuit that left his wings and legs completely uncovered, Aniya an orange shirt and a "quad" of jeans that was specially designed for taurs, and Denal a pair of tight synth-leather pants and an open white shirt. Yes, fashion isn't quite a high priority out here. We were carrying the remains of our destroyed sensor pod in three separate bags and headed for a dealer we had looked up on the asteroid's local network. We found them in a three-floor warehouse on the east wall of the cavern, alongside a number of other shops that sold spacecraft parts, one would think those would be located near the docks but Directorate rules were that any merchants not working directly for the Directorate itself had to reside in the market caverns. At least they had delivery services and installation teams. We found a sales rep, a heavy set spider monkey hanging from the ceiling racks by his tail, and dumped out our collection of parts.
\t"Well," he stated as he picked over the remains with all four of his primary limbs. "It looks like you beat this up rather thoroughly. You say a meteor did this?"
\tThat was our story and we were sticking to it. "Yes." I simply replied.
\t"Surprised your point-defense didn't stop it. You guys looking to replace that too?"
\tDenal offered an explanation seemingly spontaneously. "Our computers glitched, the start-up program for the auto-guns was omitted from the command queue. We managed to fix that though."
\tThe salesman snorted derisively, "computers, nearly two centuries of use and those humans still haven't figured out how to make them work reliably. We don't sell ship grade computation materials or programs but I could give you some recommendations." Denal took a list of stores with decent electronics on his wrist device, he probably wouldn't actually buy anything but the gesture would throw off suspicion. "Anyways you probably want something a bit sturdier than these factory-standard sensors. I happen to have some brand new pods with carbon nanotube reinforced superstructures, fresh from the fabricator. A tad pricey, but I could give you 8-15,000 qcoins worth of store credit from these parts."
\t"How much?" I asked somewhat skeptical.
\t"Oh, about 105,000 Ceres qcoins." He said.
\t"So that's what, 90,000 to 97,000 that we'd need to pay?"
\t"I think you may have misunderstood me. That's with the best estimate of the credit you get from these parts, normally they cost 120 k."
\tThat price was practically obscene. We had convinced the representative from the Directorate's exports division, which they held a practical monopoly on, to part with 10.8 million qcoins for the gold we had offloaded at the docks, but we still had to pay back over 35 million of the loan we had taken out to buy our ship from the Directorate, plus several thousand a month for routine maintenance and fueling.
\tHe must have noticed the expression of disbelief on all our faces because the sales rep spoke up then. "Tell you what, you must have at least five more sensor pods like this covering each major surface of your fine vessel. I'll give you the replacement and trade in all your other pods for 600,000 qcoins."
\tI did the math quickly, "so you're saying our intact sensor pods are worth just 21,000 apiece. Is that it?"
\tHe held all four palms up in an open-handed gesture of surrender. "They're long obsolete and most likely pretty banged up from all the flying around in this big field of flying rocks. You're not going to get a better deal than that."
\tI kind of doubted it, technological progress in the belt was nowhere near as fast as it was on earth, and there was little demand for spaceship sensors on earth so most likely our pods were less than two cycles out of date even after more than a decade in operation. "I'm thinking more like 500k. These can't be that much better."
\t"580,000, they really are, both ten times more durable and fifty times better resolution than those old things of yours."
\t"530, I can tell the chemical composition of a gas jet at ten kilometers with enough resolution as is."
\t"Okay, five hundred and fifty thousand Cerean qcoins and that is my absolute final offer."
\t"Fair enough." I keyed up my own wristpad's wallet to transfer 550k to the store's account. We'd still have a bit over ten megs to pay towards our mortgage once the monthly expenses had been paid. I felt somewhat satisfied that I'd been able to negotiate the price down so low. Normally these things went much less smoothly.
----
\tNaturally, we got the first indication that things on Ceres were about to go wrong just as we were leaving the cavern. We spotted a holographic poster of a ferret in a pilot's vacuum suit under the words "Missing, information related to the disappearance of this subject will be rewarded." In smaller print the hologram elaborated that the subject had taken out a sizeable loan from the Directorate to purchase one of their short-range transports approximately a week ago. Three days ago the signal from his ship went silent. This sort of thing wasn't uncommon, the shifting orbits of the asteroids made some signals difficult, but something told me this wasn't an ordinary space trucker. I checked the model of the ship he had bought again, sure enough, it was the same model that had almost killed us two days ago, though it usually didn't carry missile tubes or security-grade lasers.
\t"You think that was him?" Aniya walked up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder as she asked the obvious question that we were all thinking at that point.
\t"Maybe," I replied, "what I don't get is why all the fuss over some guy who probably just ran off on his loan." Aniya shrugged and we continued on to the tunnels that would take us back home to our ship.
\tWe got our answer the next day as our new sensor pods were being installed by a team of monkeys and rams. As I was running one of the new pods through its paces with a hand tablet plugged into a socket on the base of the pod and looking at the ceiling in every spectrum the thing could handle, one of the rams doing heavy lifting came up to me. "Hey, you hear about that weasel who went missing?"
\t"I saw some holo-posters." I stated as nonchalantly as I could manage.
\t"Well, they say he was a clone of some Directorate bigwig and that he hadn't gone dark for two days before daddy had those posted along all the tunnels in the planet." I looked at him in disbelief. A clone? Those were rare luxuries, it cost hundreds of thousands of qcoins just to operate the bio-fabricators used to make them. It would explain though why he had been so foolish as to attack a Cerean vessel, not only did he have an influential relative who could conceivably cover his tracks he was most likely less than five years old, that being when we had managed to petition the United Nations of Earth for the right to replicate ourselves. And just because we came out of the vat fully grown didn't mean that we were born mature, at 28 I pretty much considered myself to have been a complete idiot before the age of eight. Yet the laws treated us all the same whether we were two or thirty-two years old because that had been how the corporations had treated us and the Directors had been lazy. I tried to smile at what I presumed to have been meant as a joke by the technician whose ass wasn't possibly at stake and hurried through the remaining checks. I did not bother to test the other pods but instead bounded back inside the ship to discuss the new situation with my crewmates.
\tWhen I told them Denal and Aniya just stood there with a glassy look in their eyes and their mouths hanging wide open. Cole wasn't particularly surprised, "should have known it would be one of those fresh from the tank rich morons."
\t"So what now?" I inquired. "If we did kill him and the Directorate finds out, I think forced labor until the days we die might be a light sentence."
\t"We fly." Cole flapped his wings, knocking me and Denal off our feet in the low gravity. "We fill our helium-3 tanks and pick another asteroid that won't turn us over to our new corporate masters."
\t"Sounds like a plan." I stated simply. "But which rock might that be?"
Chapter 4
We spent the next three hours going over the map of the surrounding asteroids and looking up the local wiki's entries on the inhabited planetoids within our ship's range of Ceres at this time. Juno was ruled out, they had an extradition treaty with the Directorate and a history of complying with their demands. Iris didn't but they operated under a government that seemed the closest to the human system known as “fascism” known to the Belt. Hygiea, with one of the largest direct democracies since ancient Greece, initially looked promising, but then we saw that the majority of the population were strident pacifists and not even point-defense guns were allowed, I couldn't imagine that they would like us very much.
\t"What about this one?" I pointed at a large spherical planetoid, similar in size to Ceres. It was near the edge of our range.
\tCole looked where I was pointing. "That would be Vesta, either the second or the third largest asteroid in the entire belt, depending on who you ask." He ruffled his feathers a bit and looked away. "I don't think so."
\t"Why, what is wrong with it?" Curious I started to call up the wiki's information on Vesta.
\tCole turned back towards me and stared. "I went there once, about six years ago. It was anarchy, I was almost assaulted a couple times, some guys tried to pounce on me and when I flew out of the way one pulled out some sort of jury-rigged gauss gun and told me to toss over my possessions. Fortunately for me it short-circuited when he tried to fire a warning shot."
\tSeriously? I hadn't known there were places where the crime rate was so bad. What kind of government would allow such a thing. I read the information I'd pulled up on Vesta. Gravity: .025 g, orbit: 3.63 earth years, population: ~50,000, government:…
\t"There's no government?" I asked, confused. How could a society even function without any sort of government. Apparently not well judging from Cole's testimonial. But then I thought I saw something right below the tab that read "Government: N/A", it stated: "danger level: low to moderate." I was confused.
\tI opened a more detailed description and jumped to "crime and other hazards", I read on.
…The ration exchanges created by the Repairman's in 2090 led to individual shortages of calories and needed nutrients. In desperation many residents turned to preying on their fellow parahumans, both figuratively in the form of stealing rations or other belongings to be traded for rations, or in rare cases literally in the form of cannibalism. The introduction of the Vestan qcoin later that year helped alleviate the starvation as the Guild began to accept them instead of food, but crime remained high until the formal establishment of the Protector's Guild in 2092. The Protectors would, in exchange for a modest monthly fee, do everything in their power to defend the person and possessions of their customers, and if their defenses and any personal ones carried by a customer were defeated they hunted down the aggressor and enacted restitution from them. In 2094 the Protector's Guild fractured into several competing organizations that still work to keep the peace in Vesta. Many of the most prominent Guilds offer "Guest plans" for visitors…
\tI looked away from the article and back to Cole. "Judging from this article you got there just a year too early. They've got something called "Protector's Guilds" now that provide security and got their danger level downgraded to moderate-low."
\t"And what's stopping these "Guilds" from turning us over to the Directorate?" Denal inquired of me.
\t"Who says they can even do that? They're not a government or anything." Aniya interjected. "If they're like a business that just offers protection plans the worst they should be able to do is cancel our coverage. And the article mentions "personal defense" which seems to imply that they don't mind people defending themselves, which is all we did wasn't it?"
\t"All right, fine. We'll put it to a vote." Cole stated. "Everyone who wants to take their chances on an uncivilized rock with no government to speak of raise a hand." Me and Aniya raised our hands immediately. "And all opposed?" We put our hands down and Cole raised a wing claw. We all turned to stare at Denal, whose paws were firmly gripping the handholds along the edge of the table.
\t"Well I don't know." Denal protested, "it sounds like Vesta might be safe from the Directorate but the way you made it sound it seems like the Protector's Guilds or whatever are just barely holding things together."
\t"Look, why don't you go over to the bank and pay them nine million qcoins towards our loan, think it over on the way there and back. I'll get us filled up with Helium and reaction mass so if we still haven't decided where to go we can at least reach someplace to refuel and set out again." Cole flapped away from the table and to his own pilot's perch.
\t"Nine million is a lot." Denal started to inch towards the door. "What if they get suspicious as to why I'm paying that much at once."
\t"Tell them that we don't want to be tempted into spending all that on something stupid." I suggested. He bounded out and closed the hatchway behind his ringed tail.
***
Less than an hour later Cole was just finishing up the refueling procedures as Denal came hurtling up the docking tube. He panted, out of breath as he shut and locked the airlock doors tight. "What happened?" I asked, looking up from the wiki entry on some frontier asteroid that would need at least two fuel stops to reach.
\tDenal righted himself and began to explain. "As I was coming back from the bank I noticed a security inspection team gathered near one of the ships by the entrance to the port. I asked a nearby officer what that was all about and he said that they were checking all the ships that had been in the sector where that executive's clone had vanished. He said that they were only asking if anyone had an idea of what had happened to him but I didn't like the way some of them looked." He jumped into his chair and started strapping himself in. "I would definitely say that my vote is now "yes", let's go to Vesta. Like right this instant."
\tI strapped myself down and signaled for Aniya, down in the equipment bay, to do the same. Cole resigned himself and signaled to traffic control his intent to depart. "We read you. The way out is clear, but why so quick to leave, you just got back in?"
\tCole improvised as he started to pull us out. "Oh you know." As if that ever convinced anyone. "Just made it big on our last trip. Thinking we might be able to afford a down payment on a better ship this time."
\t"Really?" The traffic controller was still on the line. "And just where did you say you got all that aurum anyways?"
\tCrap, maybe he was with security, in which case he could direct some of security's cutters to intercept us before we even got half a kilometer from dock if he suspected we were involved in the situation somehow. Cole spoke again, "Trade secret, if we told anyone the location our secret mine would be bled dry in a week."
\t"You know, you can't keep other miners from jumping your claim unless you file it."
\t"And since when has registering a claim stopped anyone?" I spoke up, before remembering that while the output was on speakers the input was restricted to Cole's headset. Cole repeated my statement after looking at me odd for a minute.
\t"Well, suit yourself. Hope you strike big again." We were out. For now we were safe.
\tOnce we were ten kilometers out I unstrapped myself and walked over to Cole's station, the acceleration providing more "gravity" than Ceres had. "So how long until we reach Vesta?" I asked him as I leaned around his crash chair to look at him.
\tHe faced me and said simply "ten days."
\tTen days, a bit of a long trip by our standards. "Guess I'd better go and settle in then."
***
The next day I started work on my hobby. While my training had been in dead rocks and minerals, I was interested in the far more complex chemistry of living things. A large portion of the section of the ship that had been allotted to my work space was taken up by a variety of different laboratory instruments that had nothing to do with my official job on the ship, and quite a bit of the stuff I actually needed could be used for my hobby too. Fortunately my lab is in one of the few parts of the ship that has something resembling gravity, the room rotates on an axis perpendicular to the ship's engines. When the ship is under burn the room stops moving so that the "floor" is oriented towards the drive so that the acceleration provides gravity, when the ship is coasting the room spins so that the samples within stay at the bottom of their containers. Sometimes I found it ironic that a place that contained at least four centrifuges was itself in a centrifuge. To get in or out the giant centrifuge had to be stopped temporarily, which upset the samples if prolonged for too long so I would jump in and trigger the motor to start back up again before I was even through the door all the way.
\tThe room was dominated by a large refrigerator, a glass door and several compartments inside that maintained their contents at different temperatures ranging from slightly above zero degrees Celsius to under 50 below. A set of cabinets held a spectrometer that could just as easily be used for living or non-living samples, a miniaturized Polymerase Chain Reaction thermocycler, a DNA sequencer, and a wide assortment of various micropipettes, pipettes, beakers, flasks, test tubes, and heating elements. Water unfortunately had to be carried in a large carton, no plumbing.
\tThis particular day I drew two sets of four petri dishes from the fridge, one set with several spots of white or blue bacteria, the others covered with a green algae. I carefully lifted two blue colonies from each of the bacterial plates and suspended each colony in a separate microfuge tube of solution, I separated the cells in each of these tubes from the DNA they held via microfilters and centrifugal force. I then transferred the fluid to new tubes and added a mixture of enzymes, salts, and fluorescent marked primers to the solutions. Then I placed the tubes into the rack in the thermocycler and set it to run a five hour cycle.
\tWhile waiting I scooped a teaspoon of algae from each of those dishes, and placed them on a hot pad for ten minutes. Once they were dried out I tasted a bit of each sample. None of them tasted particularly good, my bacon-flavored nutrient algae apparently still had a long way to go.
\tAfter I had finished the impromptu test of the algae I'd modified I decided to wait out the remainder of the PCR cycle reading some science-fiction novels from the 20th century on my tablet. It astonished me how humans dead for so long could be both so prophetic and so wrong. Naturally, there were five minutes left on the timer when someone decided to interrupt me. I felt a rather jarring vibration along my jaw signaling that someone was trying to contact me on my subvocal comm and I bit down on my right to answer.
\tWho is this? I demanded feeling a bit annoyed.
\tIt's that "horny panda" as you call him. Came the reply. I swear, Denal's subvocal pickup is as obnoxious as his real voice. There's something I want you to see. Come up to my cabin.
\tI've already seen your genitalia, several times. I remembered the lab coat, goggles, mask, gloves, and pants I had just put back on in anticipation of the continuation of the experiment. And I just got dressed again, I'm not taking this stuff off now.
\tWhat? Oh, you're in the lab aren't you. Denal actually sounded surprised, almost like he had something different in mind this time.
\tYes, and I'm in the middle of something that could potentially shake the belt like nothing since the revolution. That wasn't completely true to be technical about it. The machine would hold the samples at a stable temperature until I came to retrieve them if I had to leave, but all the unsecured lab equipment I had lying around before I performed that last step of the analysis would go floating around once I shut down the centrifuge to step outside.
\tI'm serious Argentum, I noticed something about our trajectory and I think we may be off course.
\tHe'd used my full name, that could mean he was serious. Or it could just as easily mean he was dedicated to this particular joke slash attempt to get into my pants. Since when do you know anything about astrogation. I cut off the call with a hard bite on the left and popped the lid to the thermocycler.
\tI drew each sample into the sequencer, the fluorescent tags attached to the replicated DNA strands allowing the machine to determine almost the exact code of each based on the size of the strands and the different colored tags attached to different bases in the tagged primers. When the sequences were displayed on my tablet it confirmed my suspicions, when I was designed the geneticists deactivated several genes related to gonadal development. The result being that I could never develop testes or ovaries, it could have gone either way given how my cells were a mosaic of XX and XY karyotypes that were otherwise identical. Presumably another set of genes influencing the development of gonads was responsible for our universal sterility. The corporations never revealed the exact genes that they had manipulated to induce these changes, and I intended to find out. I had stored my own genome, plus those of my three crewmates, in the form of plasmid libraries. The human genome was public record so I was going over every gene known to be involved in reproduction and determine which genes made us unable to have babies. And possibly a way to make a set of junk for myself if I felt so inclined, there were plenty of organ printers available in Ceres so there should be some in Vesta.
***
Denal was waiting for me when I exited the lab, he was holding a tablet out for me. "Look at this," he said, pulling up a map of the Belt, "we're following a trajectory that takes us far from Vesta." A line showing our course appeared and passed the tag marked VESTA by several thousand kilometers.
\t"Have you asked Cole yet?" I inquired of him.
\t"I called once and he shut off his intercom." Denal replied. "He said he was taking a nap and not to disturb him."
\tThat sounded a bit suspicious. "We should go wake him up." I suggested. The two of us floated over to Cole's cabin, the door was locked but Denal was able to easily bypass it.
\tThe damn crow was nestled in a cubbyhole when I found him, his head tucked under a wing like a stupid chicken. I grabbed him by the other wing and yanked him out, he awoke with a start. Now, Cole may have had sharp talons and a beak, but I had solid bones and they were almost 50% solid titanium, so I was strong enough to break all his limbs and wring his uplifted neck before he could give me more than a few gouges that were easy enough to patch in my lab.
\t"Where are we Cole?!" I shouted in his bird brained face. "I've seen our trajectory, we're not going to Vesta."
\tTo his credit he didn't bother with lying this time. "We're on a course to an ice asteroid, about three thousand kilometers spinward of Vesta."
\t"You know that raw ice is shitty reaction mass." I snarled, my vulpine genes making themselves known. "If we were lucky the contaminants wouldn't blow up our engines."
\t"I'm not going back to Vesta." He insisted.
\t"Either we go to Vesta, or this fox is having fresh poultry for breakfast." I wouldn't really eat him, though if we did try to extract reaction mass from a dirty snowball and it ended up leaving us stranded I couldn't make promises.
\tHe reached for the intercom with a wing claw and pressed down a button marked "voice control". "Autopilot, alter course and take us to Vesta, most direct path from current location."
\tThe ship's computer responded in seconds. "Calculating… warning, insufficient reaction mass. Along suggested course we will fail to reach Vesta by 147.2 kilometers."
\t"Then we call in a tug, that's why we retained most of a million qcoins isn't it? Unexpected expenses?" I gave the corvid a toothy grin, he confirmed the course and I let go of him. Then left the room to confirm that he had in fact set us along the right course this time.
\tAs we headed for the bridge Denal turn to ask me something. "So, what were you working on anyways?"
\tI shrugged. "Trying to figure out a way to give myself genitals."
\t"That's great." The panda said in response. "So what's it going to be, pole or a hole? Or maybe both?"
\t"Currently I'm thinking that I'd rather be male."
\t"What?" Denal looked aghast. "You know that I'm straight, don't you?"
\tI just smirked in response. "Why do you think I want to be a guy?"
Chapter 5
We were able to reach Vesta's primary docking port despite the lack of fuel on our part. I did indeed call a tug boat to bring us in, though traffic control charged us quite a bit for the tow, one hundred thousand Cerean qcoins. As we were brought in I realized that the transaction could probably be traced back to us and used to locate us on Vesta, I decided we'd want to exchange our qcoins for Vestan ones or some sort of commodity currency, and open a completely new set of accounts. While we couldn't convince Cole to move in immediately he did agree to check it out for a couple days, that would give us time to decide whether or not we should stay, and if we decided to leave it would allow us to refuel and resupply before moving on to the next habitat.
\tAs soon as we were within range of the Vesta network I contacted a money exchange and traded our 900,000 Ceres qcoins for 700,000 Vestan qcoins. Apparently Vestan coins hadn't been mined for as long as their Ceres counterparts and thus were worth significantly more due to their lower quantity. Next I called up the webpage for the Protector's Guild whose service area encompassed the sector of the port and many of the surrounding markets, and according to the reviews I found were one of the most thorough in their guardianship of their customers property and wellbeing. When I saw that they offered group plans and required a live video consultation I called the rest of the crew up. I transferred the page to the large bridge monitor and opened the link to the video chat. The screen was filled with the visage of a female cat of some kind wearing a green business suit and sitting at a desk.
\tShe looked up from the tablet in her hands and spoke to us. "Good afternoon, my name is Jessica and I'll be your agent for the Marquez Guild. Shall we get started?"
\tWe indicated our affirmation and introduced ourselves, one by one.
\t"Now then, you want a group plan?" We told her that was the case. "All right then. To start with are you affiliated with any Guild, company, or government?"
\t"No," I replied. "We are freelance prospectors, though we did work with the Cerean Directorate most of the time." She scrawled this information on her tablet, tapped a few things that we couldn't spot, and then her eyes widened and her ears turned to press themselves against her cranium. That did not look good.
\t"Very well." She forced her face back into the friendly expressions she had been wearing when the conversation had first started. "What is the purpose of your visit to our fine habitat?"
\tPretty much all of us showed our shock and worry at this question. Cole's tail feathers fanned out, Aniya's hackles raised underneath her shirt, Denal grabbed his own tail and started wringing it nervously, and I could have sworn that my tail doubled in diameter when the fur stood up. "We got bored in Ceres, wanted to see what some of the other asteroids were like."
\t"Not much excitement."
\t"Thought the Directorate exports guy was stiffing us."
\t"Charged too much for life support."
\tJessica tapped a few virtual keys and spoke to us again. "Your rate is calculated at 2,000 Ceres qcoins a day, rounded up to the nearest day. As long as you are on Vesta and within our service area our surveillance network will keep track of you and automatically deploy armed drones if you are attacked." A map of the habitat with multiple areas covered partially or completely in green appeared on the screen by her image. "Be advised that if you try to leave the habitat without paying your bill we operate a number of photon and kinetic turrets situated around the docking bay."
\tI threw something else in before she could terminate the connection. "We already exchanged our qcoins for Vestan ones."
\tShe looked at me and tapped something else on her tablet. "Then that shall be 1,200 Vestan qcoins per day. Same rules and conditions apply. Shall that be all?"
\tI shook my head no. She ended the call. Though honestly I was a bit curious, the difference in price was considerably greater than the exchange rate I had seen earlier. Did the Vestans prefer their own currency so strongly? I suppose it made some sense given how long the light speed delay made transactions that used servers not physically located on the same asteroid, after all that was why so many habitats had their own distinctive qcoins in the first place.
***
When the tug finally towed us all the way into dock we first refilled our reaction mass and then we all left to check out the habitat. In particular to see if it was still as bad as when Cole had been there. The market cavern on this asteroid was practically right next to the docks, took barely a minute to walk down there. It was much like those on Ceres, except that there seemed to be very little in the way of urban planning in this cave, shops and fabricators were intermingled with townhouses and restaurants. In fact it seemed like nearly all of the buildings were used as places of residence, or rather people had set up shop in their apartment complexes. We could only tell which were businesses and what were simply dwellings only because most of the stores and fabricators had small signs on their front doors, I noticed that most had a symbol of some archaic tool, a compass rose or a hammer or a sword or something accompanied by an odd sign that looked like a pair of inverted chevrons with a short squiggly line a little ways above them.
\tAfter browsing the slapped together city for nearly an hour and seeing no signs of criminal activity Denal suggested we check out one of the areas not covered by Marquez. "If this section is so crime-free with one of the highest rated Guilds keeping the peace, we should see how the other Guilds handle things."
\tWe had some doubts but his reasoning seemed solid, we headed to a side cave that was outside the Marquez Guild's service area. The tunnel leading into the cave was unusually wide and the ceiling varied in height a great deal, at one point it was 2 meters high but just half a meter further down it went up to 3 meters tall. I was passing under one of those high ceilings when I felt what seemed like a ton of bricks landed on top of me. Still in shock I felt a pair of hands lift my head up and press a sharpened blade to my neck.
\t"All right you newbs." I heard a hoarse voice from on top of me. "Hand over your wristpads, tablets, and anything you may have bought at the market. Or missy here is going to look like a red fox if you get my drift."
\tI saw Aniya and Denal turn around to stare blank faced at me and my attacker. Cole simply flicked his eyes upward to glance at the ceiling, I got the impression he was doing the avian equivalent of rolling his eyes. "And here you were saying that the Protector's Guilds kept everyone safe here."
\tThe high-altitude mugger on my back reared up, pulling his knife away from my throat, and laughed. "The Houses don't cover the tunnels you stupid newbies. It's all for your-"
\tPFFEW PFFEW
\tI heard some quick bursts of compressed gas and the mugger slumped over. Moving quickly I threw him off and got to my feet. On the ground behind me was a large rat parahuman lying limply on the ground like a rag doll, his eyes wide open. Sticking out of his neck I spotted a pair of red feathered darts. Denal made a surprised squeaking sound and I turned to see what he was looking at. It was a pressure pistol, seemingly hanging suspended in mid-air.
\tNo, not suspended, there was a shape nearby that was colored the same as the cave wall behind. It moved slightly and became a canid woman dressed head to toe in a chameleon suit. As we watched she holstered the weapon and pulled the hood off, revealing that she was a grey wolf with close-cropped hair.
\t"Well, hello there babe." Denal began but was silenced by a threatening finger pointed in his direction by our camouflaged savior. She walked past him to the rat she had downed and started collecting her darts.
\tI watched her do her work for a few seconds before speaking to her. "Thank you for saving me like that. Miss?"
\tShe glanced up at me to answer my query. Instead she flashed me a comm number on her wristpad, which I entered into my own in conference with the rest of my crewmates. Olga Wolf. I heard in a soft voice resonating through my jawbones. I'm an investigator for Guild Wolf. Yes, I know, creative name. Even through subvocals I could discern the sarcasm.
\tWhy are we using subvocalization? Aniya asked before anyone else came up with the idea.
\tBecause the tetrodotoxin in those darts doesn't always paralyze their sensory neurons. Came Olga's response. It mostly goes after voluntary muscle control, including the diaphragm. Only reason he hasn't suffocated to death is the oxygen retaining modifications our designers added.
\tI picked up the wannabe mugger's wrist and put two fingers to the inner edge. Sure enough there was a faint pulse, but I couldn't hear any breathing. Why are you so concerned about being heard by this guy anyways? I asked her.
\tOh, that. Well you heard him, I'm not supposed to be here. Thanks to some pissing match between mom and old man Jerome the tunnels are supposed to be neutral territory. But this guy has been preying on not only newcomers like you but our own clients who have to use this tunnel to get to and from the spaceport. She walked towards Aniya and Denal and drew her dart gun. So here's what you're going to do. One of you is going to take this gun, you're all going to take this waste of biomass back to the Marquez side, and you're going to report to the nearest Marquez officer or drone that he attacked your friend here and you shot him with an open-source dart shooter that you printed off before coming on board. She held the gun out grip first to see who would take it.
\tAniya took the gun and looked at the inexpensively 3d printed weapon a bit apprehensively for several seconds before stuffing it into one of the pouches on her tauric pants, barely leaving a bulge. Are you sure they won't mind us pumping someone full of deadly poisons? I would have thought that the Protector's Guilds would take a bit of offense to people that sort of thing.
\tOlga suppressed a snort as she reattached her hood. Why, is that why you left your old place? Everyone's eyes widened a bit at the half joking accusation. Oh, well Vesta was founded mainly on the principle of "you can't tell me what I can't do" so you'll generally find that people here wouldn't care whether you tip your darts with cyanide. And anyways the Guilds operate like insurance, the more you do yourself the less they have to pay. She finished fastening her hood and reactivated her camouflage, I could still see a bit of an outline as she started to walk away.
\tBut then I remembered some minor thing that she had mentioned. Wait, you said something about "mom" and an "old man Jerome", who are they?
\tThe silhouette paused for a few seconds. I'm a clone of Georgia Wolf, the Guildmistress of Guild Wolf. Jerome Marquez is the Guildmaster of the Guild you guys are paying.
\t"Does everyone on this rock have two names like a human?" Cole threw in his own comment. The rest of us glared at him for failing to remember that we were not speaking aloud to preserve the secret identity of the part-time vigilante we had here.
\tNo, just those who are part of a clone family have last names. Often it's the first name of the line's founder but some, like my oh so imaginative mother, come up with completely new names to add on to their own. Also many of the Guildmasters have multiple clones, the SPPS gives them discounts for some reason, I've got five sisters and Jerome has eight sons. The shadow that had saved our possessions and possibly our lives then ran off back down the way we had been headed.
\tI walked over to the immobile rat still lying there in the middle of the hallway. I thought I saw one of his eyes twitch a bit. So I went up to his head and flipped my kilt up, giving him a brief view of my featureless crotch. "I'm no 'missy' you scumbag." I told him and then grabbed his left hand and started pulling him back down the way we had came by his arm. Aniya came up to pick up his legs a few seconds later.
\tWe did as Olga suggested, we dragged the thug up to the nearest agent of Guild Marquez and told him the story she had given us. He entered the information into his wristpad, and asked Aniya to see the gun. She produced it, he looked it over, then handed it back satisfied that it was indeed an open source design that could have come from anywhere. "You should have told us you were armed." He informed Aniya after giving her the weapon back. "We would have adjusted your rates accordingly." He then bound the mugger's hands in zip-ties and injected him with the antidote to the tetrodotoxin. We left before he fully regained his mobility.
\tOn the way back to our ship we bought a load of feedstock for our on-board fabricator. Most spaceships intended to operate more than a day or two out from a habitat had at the very least a multi-material "omni-printer" that could make a variety of items from a number of different plastics and metals, even some basic electronics. There were even a few well-equipped ships that had nanofabricators imported all the way from earth that could construct anything from a pizza to the latest model of augmented reality contact lenses. Us, we just had an omni-printer that had a couple of robotic armatures for assembling the parts as they came out of the printer, and my lab had a chemical synthesizer for automatically mixing whatever non-solid compounds we needed and a variety of microbe cultures for producing biological substances.
\tCole elected for an exact copy of the pressure dart gun Olga had given Aniya, I'd engineer a plate of bacteria to make tetrodotoxin to fill the darts with. Denal of all things wanted a Chinese longsword with a stylized pair of procyonid's paws on the hilt, I didn't think he even knew how to use a sword but I queued it up anyways. Myself, I decided on two weapons, a spring-loaded stiletto of the type where the blade popped straight out of the hilt rather than flipping out, if I got jumped like that again I figured I could pull it out and slam the side of my fist into the mugger and pop the blade into his flesh, and a gun. A number of designs were now public domain so I selected a steel semiautomatic handgun that dated back almost two hundred years but seemed to still be popular. I assembled many of the parts myself but allowed the armatures to make the bullets, filled with gunpowder mixed by the synthesizer. As I slipped the finished weapon into the printed plastic holster I now wore on my belt I hoped that I would never have occasion to use it.
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