The Pride of Parahumans (17 page)

Both of them craned their necks to look back
at me. "It's called a 'lover's spat' or something like that." Denal
told me. "You'd know if you had any hormones."

"Would those hormones by any chance be making
you possessive of Olga and Olga interested in other, more
powerfully built males?" I suggested.

"What? I'm not attracted to Maximus!" Olga
objected. This caused Denal to turn back to her and glower. "I get
so hot when you act jealous," she continued, "so it's more your
fault for setting me off like that."

The pheromones those two were giving off were
starting to saturate the already stale air. It was starting to make
me feel strange, like there was a tightness down where my genitals
should have been, an itch I couldn't scratch. My breathing rate and
heart beats increased and I felt my temperature rising. I had to
get out of here quickly.

"Denal," I said, "find someone to help you
remove this thing and look for others. Jakob didn't need Maximus;
the sale was public record, and there were two days before we came
into possession for him to get one of his stooges to plant bombs.
Olga, don't put this on the nets until we've left. If I were Jakob
and knew that the first plan failed I'd put a backup plan in place
as quickly as possible." I then bent myself awkwardly to turn
around and leave.

***

Leaving Denal and Olga's proximity didn't
cause the effect of the pheromones they'd been producing to wear
off as quickly as I wanted. In fact, I'm pretty sure that my fur
and clothes were soaked in it. The flustered feeling persisted as I
wound my way through the miniature canvas town set up in the
spaceport down to the tent set up for Maximus Griggs. When I found
him, he was lying on his inflated mattress, reading something on a
tablet.

"'Men never do good unless necessity drives
them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as
they please, confusion and disorder become rampant,'" he said,
apparently reading out loud. He set aside the tablet as I bent down
to enter his temporary domicile. "Maybe if the original colonists
had read this, we could have avoided this whole situation."

I sat down next to him and picked up the
tablet; it showed an image of what looked like yellowed parchment
covered with a rather exotic font that I hadn't seen before.
"Interesting choice of reading material," I commented.

"
Discourses on Livy
," Maximus
explained. "Supposedly, it's about how to run a republic."

"A what?"

"I'm still trying to figure that out. I
started out looking up human political literature but the books all
contradicted one another. One said that capitalism was the driver
of progress; another claimed that it was a tool of the upper class
to oppress the workers." He shook his head in disgust. "I tried
searching for an author who studied politics like it was a science
instead of trying to forward some ideology, and it came up with an
early sixteenth century Italian named Niccolò Machiavelli."

"Seriously? They haven't done a rigorous
study of politics in nearly six hundred years?"

"Seriously," Max affirmed as he took the
tablet back. "He wrote a much shorter book called
The Prince
that detailed how feudal principalities were run. If I hadn't known
that my father wasn't allowed to consume any human media, I would
have thought he read it."

"You are not making me a king," I said,
shifting across the mattress towards him. "Or a queen for that
matter. A crown wouldn't fit well with these ears." I held one
pyramidal ear in my left hand and showed it to him.

"Well, this book seems to be a bit in favor
of something closer to democracy. Look here." He pointed to the
beginning of one paragraph. "'The demands of a free populace, too,
are very seldom harmful to liberty, for they are due either to the
populace being oppressed or to the suspicion that it is going to be
oppressed…"

"Well, then, you keep reading, and maybe we
can set up one of these republics on Pallas." The depression in the
air mattress sank down, and I found myself sliding closer to him.
Unconsciously, my right hand apparently wandered in the direction
of his crotch, because he jumped slightly in shock.

"Jeez, Argen!" he yelled at me. "Are you
trying to castrate me or something?!"

I realized that my prosthetic hand, which I
still had trouble controlling, was attempting to cup his testicles.
I apologized and slowly withdrew the hand. "Would you rather have
my normal hand?" I flipped over and shot my left hand down his
pants.

"What is up with you?" he asked. "Ever since
you came in, you've been acting like you're drunk or something." He
sniffed my breath for traces of alcohol or other intoxicants.

"Oh." I suddenly remembered my whole
justified to myself reason for coming here. "Denal and Olga were
fighting a bit over you. Denal seems to think you're trying to…" I
trailed off. Even if Maximus wasn't still working for his father,
there was a chance that if he knew about the bombs, Jakob would
find out anyways. So I finished with, "…steal Olga from him. And
Olga said that was ridiculous, but he was so hot when he got
jealous. Apparently, the amount of pheromones they were giving off
as they fought and started to have sex then and there was enough to
affect even those of us without gonads."

"You do smell a bit like them," Max purred as
he reached down towards my hand. I felt his cock swell and grow
hard in my grasp.

"Feels like it's working on you too." I moved
to straddle him and began to unzip his pants.

"I have noticed that my sex drive seems to
have increased since I took the mutagen." He started to help me
remove those pants and pull them downwards. "If everyone out there
is this horny, it could be a problem."

"We'll worry about that later." I then
clamped my muzzle against his and thrust my tongue in. My hands
guided his cock into my rectum.

"Wait." He forced me away for a second and
spat in his hands, rubbed it around, and spread it over his penis.
"Afraid I don't have any proper lubricant, but I think that might
do for now."

"I didn't even know you needed lubrication,"
I commented with a bit of surprise. "Explains why it hurt so badly
that time me and Denal tried it."

"Oh, so that panda has been in here too?" he
asked, grabbing onto my thighs and pulling it down onto him.

"Not for months now." I plunged down and felt
his shaft bend a little as it slid deep inside my colon, rubbing
abrasively against my inner walls, but this time the pain was mild
enough that I could feel a bit of pleasure from the intrusion. I
spread my arms down on either side of him to brace myself as I
bounced up and down on him, both of us starting to moan in
pleasure. Then he came to climax. I felt a spurt of something hot
and sticky flood my bowels and he let out a scream of delight.

That was when the tent flap, swung open and a
militiaman pushed his way in brandishing a pistol. Caught off
guard, I clenched the mattress with both hands. I heard a popping
sound and a hiss of escaping air coming from near my right hand. I
turned to glare at this intruder angrily.

"Oh, sorry," said the militia, an ursine whom
I suspected had worked for one of the Protectors' Guilds. "I heard
the scream and assumed something was wrong. Not the first time I
made that mistake this week. Wait…" Then he finally seemed to
recognize me and glanced around to my prosthetic hand which was
still clamped around a torn piece of the mattress. "Aren't you the
one who discovered the sterility gene?"

"If you mean Argentum then yes, I am." I
withdrew my hand as the mattress sank lower and lower to the floor.
"And I think you owe Maximus here a new air mattress." I showed him
the cybernetic appendage, with pieces of plastic still stuck in the
joints.

"Oh, sorry sir. I just thought I'd heard that
you were a, a, um…"

"Neuter," I supplied. I then lifted myself
off Maximus, letting his dick flop out, and lifted my kilt to show
him my cum-stained derriere. "But that doesn't mean I lack fun
holes."

"Right, right. I'll go get a replacement
mattress right away. Would you like anything else? Some lube
perhaps?"

"Forget it; you killed the mood." I waved him
away and he left. I then flopped down on the still deflating
mattress next to Maximus, pushing it all the way down to the hard
cave floor.

Maximus turned to me and began to speak
again. "You ever consider getting a bioprinted hand to replace that
thing?" he asked, gesturing towards my prosthesis.

I held the hand up, looked at it, rotated the
wrist, and opened and closed the fingers multiple times, getting
the timing wrong and causing my index and thumb to collide on
several of those attempts. "It would take over a month for my
nerves to grow into a biological transplant," I finally said. "And
even more time to relearn how to use it. I may not have full
control over this thing yet, but it's better than lugging around a
completely numb and useless thing on the end of my arm."

"Well, what about sex organs? Have you
considered getting a vagina, or a penis?" He felt under my skirt
and rubbed the featureless surface of my crotch.

"You wouldn't mind a penis?" I asked him.
"Even if I wanted to use it from time to time?"

"Well, we wouldn't be able to have kids
anyways, so why should it matter? I'm not too sure about having a
cock up my butt from time to time, but maybe we could try something
like that. I saw what looked like some prosthetic plastic penises
in one of the sex aid product booths they have set up out
there."

Ah, yes. The sex shops had popped up shortly
after the first few tents. Apparently some of the capitalists out
there in the rest of the asteroid had figured that a group of
people who had just become fertile would be screwing one another a
lot. From what I'd seen, they did indeed have a lot of business. It
was at that moment that the bear who had barged in before chose to
rap on the tent flap.

Both of us got up and unzipped the flap to
see him. He was holding a small inflatable mattress like he had
promised. Maximus took it and moved back to set it up. Now that the
guard had a good look at his face, he said. "Aren't you that clone
of the guy who runs the SPPS?"

"Yes, his name is Maximus, and we knew one
another at work," I told him curtly. "Now why don't you go down to
one of the sex booths and pick up some lube and one of those fake
dicks?"

"Uh, right," he said, a bit flustered. "What
size were you thinking?"

"Small!" was Max's response, with a bit of
fear in his voice.

"As if I'd get a miniscule cock," I said in
reply. Then turning back to the bear outside, I said, "Medium."

"Right, then. I'll go get those." The
militiaman turned around and left, still looking a bit
flustered.

I closed the flap again and went back to my
boyfriend, now laying out the new mattress and attaching the pump
to start inflating. He looked at me and smiled a bit, not showing
as many teeth as his father's scary grins. "You realize that he'll
tell all his friends at the booze tents that their prophet was
seduced by the enemy's son?"

I lay down on my belly and flicked my tail
playfully at him. "So shall I get the story straight when he comes
back and tell him that I seduced you?"

Chapter 17

The day of the launch had arrived. Denal's
team had removed five different charges from various points along
the superstructure of our primary colony ship and hidden them in a
warehouse maintained by Clan Marquez. The habitat modules, like
giant crates, were attached to the superstructure, and pressurized
access tubes were set up so that people could float from module to
module without exposing themselves to vacuum. As we prepared to set
off, I stood on the bridge of the massive freighter and watched as
people filed into the ship and spread throughout its cargo holds.
Others chose to board the numerous smaller ships that would also be
making the journey. They took off one by one. So many out there,
all willing to come simply because I had offered to give them
children. Who would have thought?

Harvey was flying his own ship. Denal and
Olga were on board our old vessel, carrying two habitat modules on
tow cables. I had been offered the captain's cabin on board the
freighter and had been advised to take it so as to not seem
ungrateful. Since it seemed like a waste of space for just one
person, though, I would share it with Maximus, who now hid among
the crowd currently gathered on the bridge.

Once our mothership, as I suppose you could
call it, was fully loaded and ready to depart, I was apparently
expected to give some kind of speech, judging by the camera
minidrones that suddenly began to circle around me. I've seen the
video; it was not particularly flattering compared to some of my
other streamed appearances. I just stood there for three minutes,
looking nervous, until I worked up the courage to say
something.

"Today, we set out to build a new life for
ourselves. We go not only to colonize a new planetoid but also to
build the foundation of a new future for all parahumanity." To be
honest, I was starting to grasp at straws at that point. "We will
build a society where parahumans are not dependent on the whims of
petty wannabe tyrants to reproduce."

I looked around. Everyone was still staring
at me like they were expecting more. "That's it. What do you
expect? I'm a scientist, not a politician."

That last sentence was greeted by a chorus of
laughter and applause. I hadn't really intended to make a joke, but
that seemed to be how it was being received. Freaking
anarchists.

I went over to my seat in the captain's chair
and strapped myself down. The others either found seats or went to
their cabins to strap themselves down in their provided crash
couches. I noticed Maximus heading up to the crew quarters.