Chapter 5: Serpents in Paradise

"Just a moment, children," a uniformed staffer interrupted. "We have a situation. There is a protest in the Reptile Section. You'll have to wait in the Orientation Center."

I knew we were in trouble because the 'uniformed staffer' was male. Paxlyn Domain was 99.9% female. I muttered to Fawn that we had to leave right now.

"What? Speak up, Nolan!"

"This is wrong," I said louder. "We need to leave."

The man grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the Orientation Center, a small auditorium rigged for multimedia presentations. My head swam, I almost blacked out. Fawn's voice sounded far away as she explained that I had been sedated—when I became excited I would lose voluntary muscle control and then consciousness until I had calmed down. Okay, Plan B was attempting to communicate with Silvia, my Vix sister. Or pet, if you insist.

Instead of Silvia I found myself sharing thoughts with Scoo, a male Vix. Scoo entered my mind and was instantly seeing my viewpoint. By this time I was in the Orientation Center and unable to stand, barely able to keep my eyes open. The three girls with me were crying. The room contained several dozen people—and two seemed to be men. Several people had weapons. I could smell the acrid stench of a field-fabricated explosive compound used by the sabotage operators of HoChaRa—explosives made from readily-available chemical compounds in nearly every civilized society. It was a hostage situation. The weapons appeared to be HoChaRa military—the obsolete kind that find their way into ship's lockers such as on the Futile Gesture.

I requested that my special channel—the constant video surveillance on me—be forwarded to whatever passed for police on Paxlyn Domain.

YOU ARE BEING OBSERVED. WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE.

Common sense, such as it is, dictated that I simply relax and wait to be rescued. The kidnap crew goofed. Obviously they were unaware that Paxlyn Domain is under full surveillance—with exceptions, but the Orientation Center at the zoo was under exceptionally heavy surveillance because children were allowed "unaccompanied" access. How else are children to learn responsible self-control unless permitted the illusion that they are acting without supervision? I just relaxed, controlled my breathing, and observed—reporting through my link with Scoo and several other Vix.

Council was doing things the Paxlyn Domain way, and impatient Vix were assembling a hostage rescue team. This crisis was going to be over in less than an hour. I had first-hand experience of being partially paralyzed by remote control by Council, by Paxlyn Domain technology. The Vix were able to observe the situation two ways: through our telepathic link, and through the surveillance system. Unless there was something that everybody missed, the kidnappers had doomed themselves. Following that line, I glanced over at the home-made bomb. I wasn't able to see it very well through my own eyes, and the man beside the bomb was wearing some sort of soft helmet with face shield.

"That's a psi cap," Garma was hundreds of kilometers from me—I thought—and I had no idea what a psi cap was all about. I looked at the cord held in the man's hand and guessed that the detonator was mechanical/chemical instead of electronic/chemical.

Speaking of chemicals, long ago and far away I had been screened for self-control. We HoChaRa candidates were placed in a room full of stinging insects. Human fear pheromones would cause these insects to swarm and sting. I watched other boys die, stung to death. I was stung a few times myself. We survivors were removed from the insect room and drafted into the Special Security Service.

The stench of fear in the present was reinforced by whimpering and sobbing. The sources were adult women. I was used to nudity—these women weren't. A pile of clothing next to the door, their wrists secured with plastic self-locking ties behind their backs, a few red marks on adult faces that might color up into bruises—the adults were neutralized.

My situation was being free but handicapped by Paxlyn Domain child control technology and having a child's body. As an adult male two meters tall and a hundred kilos mass, I could kill other humans barehanded at least 256 ways. Some of those techniques relied upon brute strength applied to weak points of the human anatomy. Many required the victim to cooperate. A few were finesse movements. When I applied environmental weapons, my options increased by two orders of magnitude to 65,536—think number base 16 instead of the Paxlyn Domain number base 10—10,000 in base 16 is sixteen to the fourth, just like 10,000 in base ten is ten to the fourth. Knowledge is power. My child body massed only 30 kilograms and I was almost 1.4 meters tall—if I stretched myself hard while being measured. Not much to work with, especially limited by an implant that would shut me down when I got excited.

The other clothed people included a second male with a psi cap and four women. The women held the Standard Personal Defense Weapon (SPDW), a slug thrower that fired a 6mm projectile. Their weapons were standard HoChaRa military issue, which meant that they were user-proprietary—that's "smart gun" to the uninitiated. The men were armed with beamers—a direct energy weapon that had considerable punch for its size. The beamers were also "smart guns" that relied upon biometric recognition panels in the firing grips—and basically the user could only fire the weapon with that specific hand. Now that I was looking, they were wearing body armor and had some sort of filter mask that might protect them against incapacitation gases—the crew of the Futile Gesture had been incapacitated through hypoxia, by removing the oxygen from life support—and by dropping pressure half an atmosphere. I wasn't sure if the Orientation Center could be sealed off and the atmosphere thinned—which would incapacitate more rapidly than any gas I knew. I wasn't sure if the Orientation Center had natural or artificial gravity nor was I aware of how much control over the gravity in the Orientation Center Council exercised.

What I did know is that the six armed adults were quite capable of harming us hostages. I wasn't going to do much—not naked, not in a child's body, not hampered by an implant that would knock me out when my blood pressure peaked or my heart raced.