Only Superhuman Read Free Page B

Plus it loosens up the imagination, keeps me flexible. Good to have in a—”
    Then the habitat rumbled. Then it groaned. Then it heaved.
    *   *   *
    Arkady Nazarbayev knew space habitats. Back before Independence, he’d been a construction worker, helping to build the things. It had been a booming business what with all the emigrés coming up from Earth—many voluntarily, others not so much, but all needing homes. Once Earth had gone to war with Ceres and Vesta for control of their abundant resources, it had only seemed natural to use his heavy-duty construction symbot—which augmented his strength twenty times over and was hardened against vacuum, radiation, and construction hazards—to defend his home and family. He’d modified the powered exoskeleton into a fighting machine, though he’d striven to keep its weapons mostly nonlethal. After all, many Terrans were still family, as far as he was concerned.
    Not everyone had agreed, of course, and matters had very nearly come to a cataclysmic level until the Great Compromise was struck, granting Earth rule over everything in its orbital space (including the Moon and all five Earth-Moon Lagrange points) in exchange for the independence of the Main Asteroid Belt. Afterward, the newly independent Striders had perhaps relished their individuality too much, and the wartime coalition had collapsed. Rivalries had erupted—between the powerful states of Ceres and Vesta and the smaller independent habitats, between the Cereans and Vestans themselves for economic dominance, between the puritanism of the pioneer generation and the rebelliousness of the young, between all of them and the new habitats that had relocated, voluntarily or otherwise, from cislunar space. And many of the mods, both states and individuals alike, had exploited the chaos to assert dominance over the less enhanced. So it had only seemed natural for Arkady to keep using his combat-rigged symbot to defend his home and family. And then it had only seemed natural to help his neighbors when they couldn’t help themselves, to fend off the conquerors and raiders and mobsters so they wouldn’t keep hurting good honest folk. After all, he was hardly the only vet to do that sort of thing, though others had done it in their own ways, with their own special tech or mods.
    But not all of them had been as concerned about nonlethality as Arkady, or as hesitant to profit from their “protection” efforts. Before long, these “Troubleshooters” were fighting each other as much as the bad guys, or at least clashing over methods, jurisdiction, and miscommunications. So when Yukio Villareal, one of the architects of the Great Compromise, had proposed to his fellow Troubleshooters that they found a corps to coordinate their efforts and regulate their own members—an independent, nongovernmental organization recruiting and training the best and brightest from all over the Belt—it had only seemed natural to sign on.
    The media may have painted Arkady as some great frontier hero, but he was just a guy who’d done what came naturally. At heart he was still just a simple, brawny lug who was good at driving a symbot.
    And he knew space habitats. So he had a pretty good sense of what was wrong with Chakra City even before he tapped into their security web. As soon as the groaning began, he gathered up Emerald in his arms (something she accepted far more easily now than on that terrible day nine years ago) and rocketed for the nearest exit into the habitat’s interior space. He had to blast out a few conduits to get there, but that was the least of Chakra City’s problems—as he and Emerald saw clearly as soon as they were in view of the skylights that arched overhead, forming the inner half of the toroidal shell. The radiators—the two long, narrow panels that extended from the axis on the northern side of the habitat rings, permanently edge-on to the Sun—were gone. White-hot stubs remained where they had