Free The Pride of Parahumans by Joel Kreissman

me back. I looked back and saw Derrick
Marquez reaching across his desk to grab me.
    "Where do you think you're going? We're not
done here yet." I pulled my tail back and sat down again. "You see,
when you and your buddies signed on with us, we figured that you
were running from conviction for some petty theft or tax evasion or
something like that and adjusted your rates accordingly." He sat
back down and leaned back with another wolfish grin on his face.
"Killing an executive's relative is a much more serious offense,
you see. We thus incur many more expenses protecting you from
bounty hunters and assassins. I'd say that we'd be justified in
doubling, or even tripling your premiums."
    Three thousand qcoins a day, combined with
the miners' guild dues and mortgage payments? I didn't want repo
men coming after us too. Not every expedition was as fruitful as
the last couple we'd embarked upon; we'd likely go bankrupt within
a month or two. "But you're solving that problem for good, aren't
you? With the posting and the videos?"
    He laughed disturbingly loudly at that
statement. "I could count on one hand the number of refugees we
cover who had their bounties removed by having evidence of their
innocence posted by a bunch of anarchist barbarians." He held up
three fingers to show what he meant. "Now, V.P. Cooper might take
some flack on the local Ceres blogs for making a pirate. Maybe
he'll even lose his job. But in our experience, that only means
he'll resort to less-than-legal means of getting his revenge. The
next parahumans to come after you might not bother trying to take
you alive."
    I shuddered. The thought of some camo-suited
killer planting a blade in my heart or poisoning my nutrients was
not a pleasant one. I supposed I could see his reasoning, but three
times our current rate still seemed a bit excessive. I told him
that the most we could afford was double our current payments.
    "Well, then, maybe this will convince you to
reconsider a bit." He called up another video from the logs backed
up on my tablet. This one showed the incident as we were arriving
on the bridge at the start of the battle-the one where Denal yanked
me out of Aniya's slimed pouch-from an angle that quite clearly
showed her more private parts. "I don't know about Ceres, but here
there's a significant group of you endophiles. A lot of people
think that their neurons are a bit cross-wired and have a tendency
to avoid them like the plague, especially those parahumans with
pouches, with the exception of a few who make a living prostituting
themselves to those freaks, and they're ostracized just as badly by
the rest of their kind."
    I gripped the arms of my chair like my hands
were hydraulic vises. I blurted out, "It's not sexual to us!" Then
I amended a bit more calmly. "And I thought parahumans had no
taboos."
    "Yeah, that would be all nice and utopian,
now, wouldn't it?" He switched off the hologram and leaned in
closer to me. "If everyone were to know what you two get up to in
the bedroom and apparently on the bridge, you would be hard pressed
to get a job scrubbing out sewage lines. And your friend-Aniya, is
it? Well, she would probably end up having twenty of your filthy
sewage scrubber colleagues inside her every night just to pay her
protection money to the hookers' guild. She might even be picked up
by some of the sex slavers that come through here every now and
then."
    That did it. I couldn't do mass sanitation
work to save my life. And poor Aniya shouldn't have to live that
horrible way just because she helped me relax in such a way. "Okay,
okay. I'll scrape up three times the fee. Just don't include
anything in the video to suggest that I like to sleep in her
pouch."
    "Smart move, foxy," Derrick Marquez said as
he slid over a tablet with a form for the new amount for me to
sign. "And don't even think of telling anyone that I blackmailed
you. I, too, know the advantages of having powerful relatives." He
waved to a printed-out photo on the wall