The Pride of Parahumans by Joel Kreissman Read Free Book Online Page A

not speaking aloud to
preserve the secret identity of the part-time vigilante we had
here.
    No, 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.
    I 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.
    We 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.
    On 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
with 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.
    Cole 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.

Chapter 6
    We spent the next three days touring the
habitats in Vesta and asking people what they thought of the
present situation on their asteroid. Many told us that the
Protectors had drastically reduced the crime rate, and some other
immigrants from different asteroids stated that dealing with them
was preferable to most of the governments they had previously lived
under. We weren't accosted by anyone else, though whether that was
due to the Guilds keeping the criminal