Free Only Superhuman by Christopher L. Bennett Page A

online world, interacting with virtual playmates, even conducting business transactions through gaming analogies. But Striders, ironically, tended to lead more grounded lives; spread out over cubic light-minutes, they didn’t have the option of real-time onlining, except on the local scale. And even there, they preferred to live in reality as a matter of cultural preference.
    Yet Vestans tended to be eccentric. Vesta was in the “desert,” the ice-poor Inner Belt, its habitats only able to survive on imported water and carbon; but Vesta’s giant size and planetlike, differentiated geology gave it a mineral wealth unequaled in the Belt. So its civilization was heavy with entrepreneurs and elites, those who could not only afford to make the desert bloom but could do so in style. Here was the home, not only of the Striders’ cybernetic and metallurgical industries, but their jewelry industry, their entertainment industry, their gambling industry, their erotic industry. Here were the wealthy elites accustomed to having their way, and here were the prosperous Terran emigrés who sought the kind of luxuries they knew from home. Thus, Vesta was not as centralized as Ceres despite being nearly as populous. Instead of one united cluster and various outliers, Vesta was circled by multiple large, independent habitat-states and their various tributaries—the latter of which included Pellucidar, a theme-park habitat built by a Vestalia-based entertainment conglomerate but jointly managed by several Vestan states. It was an Earth-style immersive cyberfantasy with a Strider twist, relying as much on soligrams and bots as virtual projections. But there were still those who let themselves get too caught up in the illusions.
    Emry threw Banshee over her shoulder, but the simulant rolled smoothly to its feet, wearing that patented Pout of Fury that made up half the starlet’s repertoire of expressions. “You dragged me down into this life!” she intoned, lunging at Emry with a flurry of inhumanly fast blows, keeping her busy dodging and blocking. “You made me a criminal! But no more, Javon! I’m free of you now! And I swear to the Goddess, I will devote the rest of my life to making amends for what you made me do, by fighting scum like you wherever—”
    “Oh, shut up .” With a thought, Emry set her laser pistol to shock mode, then drew it and discharged it into Banshee’s scrawny torso, holding it there long enough to make sure the android’s circuitry was thoroughly fried. She’d been reluctant to waste the power on this petty obstacle, but damn, did it feel good. “You don’t know a vackin’ thing about it.”
    Some in the audience cheered, while others groaned, wishing for a longer catfight. A moment later, though, they started screaming as electric discharges began raining down from the sky. Emry shoved them all under the nearby trees, resisting an insane urge to tell the Cheshire Cat in the branches to run for safety. Then she reviewed her visual logs, enhancing her peripheral glimpse of the attackers’ forms against the patchwork landscape of the Bernal sphere’s far side. Damn, the Zelkoids are back! “Hey, Zephyr, any luck? I could use some backup here, you know!”
    “I’m not exactly lounging on the veranda myself,” came a wry, mellow baritone over her selfone. “I’m hacking my best, but Sorceress is a grand-master player.”
    “Zephy, baby, this isn’t a game!”
    “In fact, Emry, that’s exactly what it is. To her, anyway. She hasn’t tried to harm me, just impede me.”
    A lightning-gun blast set fire to the tree sheltering Emry, forcing her to break cover and run across the clearing. “Why can’t she extend the same courtesy to the rest of us?”
    Zephyr switched to her transceiver implant so she could hear him over the blasts. he said, his words transmitted directly to her brain’s auditory center.
    “Great, so she’s