“Ali here. And this is Lee,” my human answered for both of us.

  “Hajimemashite. Nice to meet you,” Raï said. “I saw your arrival earlier. Your spacecraft looked familiar. I grew curious to know who was piloting this rusty UN vessel.”

  “I won’t allow you to insult my ship, ronin!” I hurled.

  The samurai apologized. He continued the conversation as we walked through the empty silos of the refinement center. We had to climb mountains of abandoned androids and excavation machines.

  At the end of our journey, the FID-reader robot came back to us and made a few loops. The flying can squeaked as if it suffered from a panic attack: “Annyeonghaseyo! Jay-Jay Cleaver alias ‘Knives’, Auxiliary #AM-3-23XX-088, slight changes following—”

  Footsteps resounded behind us. The pack of Freaks had emerged victorious from the mine shoot-out and was heading towards our retreat. That means that they had taken care of Dynamo… and Dan.

  “We must leave. Now!” Raï ordered, smashing the door that separated us from the checkpoint with his augmented fist.

  The study included a single locker and a desk once owned by the human engineer responsible for this concession. However, the premises showed signs of recent activity. Such as space-coffins, most of them ripped open. They displayed no religious markings—but tampered holographic tracking manifests.

  “A smuggler’s hideout,” Ali scoffed. She kicked open one of the still-closed caskets. Its contents spilled out. Strange large caliber cartridges containing glass micro-vials as pellets. “Dan and the monk’s doing, you think?” She picked up some peculiar ammunition. Inside the flacon floated a tiny organic sphere.

  “I’m afraid so…,” I went on. “They knew the place.”

  Raï opened another coffin with the flat of his blade and concluded with us that Yoyodyne84 had effectively been used as an old trafficking hub. He seemed, however, more pragmatic about our condition. “This horrid collection from beyond the grave will end up in the sun. Let’s try not to share its fate. What do you think?”

  We agreed.

  A pile of After Dark magazines hid the porthole of the emergency monopod. The latter appeared to be dusty and stuffed with used tissues cemented to the mattress. I had to demonstrate twice the talent to get this flying coffin running again. After securing the access door with Ali, Raï and F.A.B. jumped inside to help me with the last electronic connections.

  Sadly, the Freak-wolf violently emerged beyond the shattered Plexiglas panel; his body studded with gunshot wounds already healing beneath the rhodium covering him. Frenzy, Frankenstein’s monster aimed at my partner with an improvised harpoon from a drill bit.

  “Ali-chan! Come quickly!” alerted the samurai. “You are wasting your time! Knives can regenerate himself!”

  “Can he?” said my associate, as arrogant as usual.

  The alpha wolf threw his weapon which ended up just beside the young woman’s left thigh. A few drops of blood escaped from a superficial wound. She hadn’t flinched and concluded with a shot. The bullet passed through the Jovian wolf-man’s jaw, pulverizing his fangs.

  “Ho!” the samurai reacted. “What an interesting iridescent gun…”

  “Way to go, girl!” I shouted, head out of the monopod to admire my human betting up this canis lupus full of fleas.

  The Freak howled. But against all odds, the mutant gruesomely tore his mandible off with his own hands. He immediately limped towards our pod after having picked up his cyclops glasses.

  “Very well,” Ali sighed while rolling up the sleeves of her pink jacket. “Let’s get physical!”

  “Ali! Come quickly! I’m afraid that this fellow isn’t in the mood right now!” I shouted.

  “I warned you,” the samurai crooned, my rear paws on his forehead.

  Once my human on her way back, I huddled between Raï and his flying pet to give her enough room. Ali dived inside, headfirst, just in time for the warrior to close the steel lid on Knives’s claws.

  The monopod plummeted into its expulsion chute and fired up its weak reactors, spinning wildly until it shot out into space like a torpedo. I couldn’t imagine a worse time or place to lose my lunch. Ali, barely holding it together, teetered between pale and green. Only Raï appeared unaffected, his face buried deep in my partner’s chest.

  “Lee? What is he speaking of?” my associate asked me, while the samurai was babbling about something.

  “We are safe, now!” cried Raï in a hiccup, struggling to catch his breath.

  “Ali? Can you request the Kitty to pick us up? Now out of the station, you should be able to reach the control computer if we’re within range.”

  My copilot nodded, trying to free her left arm trapped between the first aid drawer and the samurai’s body. “Wait… I’m doing what I can,” she grunted. “Sorry Raï, my hand’s stuck under what seems like the handle of your sword.”

  “Do not worry about it…” Raï apologized while blushing.

  “Are you done with your naughty mischiefs?” I yowled, kicking the pervert in the nose.

  A few minutes later, a thud. Our monopod was shaken around. Ali then warned us we landed in the Swallow’s airlock.

  “Finally, some fresh air!” I sighed as I ran out of the doom coffin.

  “Well done, my friends! Now, it is time to set sail!” shouted the samurai. “Escaping is unfortunately not part of the rules.”

  “Do you think the Alliance’s monitoring the station? I mean more seriously than just this rude Dungeon Master cursing over the speakerphone?”

  As the Kitty stealthily distanced herself, our savior invited me on his shoulder as he walked towards the cockpit. Behind the windshield Yoyodyne84 and its sinister mining complex slid into the void. Two gigantic Hangmen Stellar Destroyers at least a thousand times bigger than a Swallow pulled the immense asteroid out of its orbit. On their armor was drawn the Alliance’s coat of arms and bellicose motto: Crime Does Pay.

  “Foolish corporations! Bunch of white-collar criminals themselves!” I cursed before sighing under Raï’s sad gaze. “Anyway… farewell to my work on the Cosmic Hum, I guess…”

  “The Hum?” the samurai noted. “That is why you were ecstatic in front of these singing stones?”

  “To begin with, please leave this underwear where you found it,” I replied, biting his hand roaming over the control panel. “To provide a detailed response, we are at the moment focused on deciphering the origin and transmission mechanism of this incessant buzzing.”

  “Only a few people know the secret of the Mellifluous Caverns. These rest within hidden asteroids,” Raï specified to us. “They do not produce sounds, but strange electromagnetic waves amplified by the rhodium. In the vacuum, the hulls of the ships transform it into an unbearable roar that is distinctly perceptible when the systems are on pause.”

  “Perfect!” I grumbled. “All I have to do now is winch all these giant pebbles straight towards the sun and I’ll be able to sleep in peace!”

  “I wish you good luck.”

  “Sarcasm.”

  “My apologies. I’m not familiar with sarcasm.”

  Shortly afterwards, the samurai led us to his spacecraft, subtly hidden in the crater of a meteorite a few minutes’ flight from Yoyodyne84. His ship was a Kamui-64, an antique even older than the Kitty; a Japanese-built starfighter, from a time when the former United Nations oversaw the Inner System—just after the World War Last. As incredible as it may seem, he proclaimed he had reached the station without a suit, nor his vessel.

  Ali joined us mid-conversation with a towel around her waist after her quick shower. Raï then heavily insisted on having dinner with us.

  “I see that you fostered your own setup,” our guest remarked after meticulously inspecting the cockpit. “I can understand how a tomcat could fly a Swallow.”

  I jumped back on my seat, happy to give him a tour. “Satori—a friend—helped me out on Titan,” I answered while skimming the dashboard’s keys. “This ship is our father, Félix. A lot of work needed to be done as she spent decades collecting dust in a barn. Yet, we saved her!”

  “You did a great job. This spacecraft has a long history—a long and sad history.”

  I frowned at him. “How can you tell?”

  Raï smiled while carefully brushing the top edge of the lateral CRT. “Kioku nokoru. Kanjō nagarete. Chi to kiri ni. Memories linger. Emotions flow, blood surrounds. All is bound in mist… Can’t you feel it?”

  Alright. Our unsettling Toshiro Mifune undoubtedly exhibited signs of profound eccentricity. “I had my share with the Hum,” I said. “I don’t want to feel any other emotions, blood or whatever you’re raving about.”

  “Fair enough. Rehashing the past is never a good thing.”

  Behind us, Ali startled us by violently opening a soda, splashing foam all over my seat. “Look at you, depressing fucks!” she yelled. “We, like, totally survived the Purge! Cheers, my dudes!”

  “Indeed!” Raï agreed. “Kanpai!”

  After a long night of stories, dirty jokes and an abysmally bad karaoke session, the samurai finally disappeared into the cosmos. Our companion of misfortune left us a trinket as a souvenir: the ivory pearl bracelet he wore on his wrist.

  “What a nutjob, flying a Kamui without a control computer,” Ali yawned, wrapped in the bed cover like a burrito. “This Kumo Raïda is a rad grandpa.”

  My ears straightened.

  “Kumo Raïda? The Kumo Raïda? The former #4 of the Alliance? Why didn’t I recognize him?” I asked as I abruptly emerged from the floating pile of empty sake bricks and squashed bags of nutrigel shrimp chips. “I’m so stupid!”

  I admit I hadn’t bothered to confirm this deviant’s full identity in the Alliance’s registry. Not that it would’ve mattered—the top hunters were ghosts to the system.

  “The flying popcorn machine snitched on him last night while you were butchering Dancing Queen and Kim Wan-sun’s whole repertoire,” Ali confided to me.

  “Annyeonghaseyo!” cried the annoying F.A.B. as it escaped from a cereal box.

  Back to business!

  仕事に戻ろう！

  #06 LORD OF THE TANKS

  第06話 槽の主

  Once primitive creatures, mindlessly hurling chewed bones at a mysterious black monolith, humanity found itself landing on Pluto—a feat captured in Technicolor. A singularity, according to them! Worth, in a vain attempt to sever all remaining ties with their grotesque earthbound ancestors, to rebrand themselves from Homo sapiens to Homo stellarum—the men of the stars.

  This act of graceless self-reinvention served as a poignant testament to the fallacy of Darwinian evolution. Quoting myself, far from evolving, humanity had undergone a process of desevolving. Stripped of hope by a society hurtling towards its own demise, humans began to lose even their most basic faculties of reason, developing an erratic form of empathy. The Sun, in a fit of cosmic cynicism, blamed glam rock and videogames. Was this the true cause? Perhaps.

  Over time, humankind gradually transformed into a disordered horde of monsters. For this, I gathered evidence—nine lives’ worth. My postulate was further confirmed during a brief stop the Kitty made at one of the belt’s largest ports and the primary gateway to the libertarian Outer System and the New Worlds: Ceres18.

  “Got ourselves into a moral dilemma here,” Ali issued, calmly reloading her magazine.

  “Do you think now is the time?” I replied by passing her the last .50 Action Express ammunition as big as my paw.

  A new machine gun’s burst rat-a-tated within a few centimeters of her scalp, shredding the red lid of the metal box that sheltered us.

  “I mean he’s still a fuckin’ kid…”

  “Language!” I meowed. “Besides, you seem to forget that we witnessed this high-strung child plateauing half a dozen people an hour ago—before nibbling their guts out like one would eat printed corn sticks.”

  Our target. A psycho-boy on a murdering spree. We had previously dislodged the child from the local recycling facility then pursued him through the cargo port in a glorious duty-free cavalcade.

  “You’re right. Fuck that kid. At his age, he should be watchin’ The Wuzzles this early in the mornin’!”

  “Let’s put an end to this, dear.”

  I was exhausted and smelled like rotten fish. I craved a warm bath, a good book and a nice breakfast with real Uncle Buck’s pancakes, crispy bacon and enough maple syrup to drown a Canadian moon.

  My partner glanced through a smoking bullet hole. According to her, the shooter took cover a few meters behind an out-of-order black and yellow power loader, taking advantage of the darkness provided by the artificial night. Those nights maintained an illusion of time cycles on hospitable stations such as Ceres. Frankly, as useless as the “g” in lasagna.

  Ali shouted when she heard the child cocking his machine gun. He had left his hiding place and stood on the top of the giant exoskeleton, his foot on the orange flashing light, the only glow in this improvised night. I saw him for the first time. A shiver went down my spine. His skin and teeth ranged between khakis and brown. Moss and mushrooms had grown on his shoulders before getting lost in his bushy hair. His look testified to a whole life in the sewers. And yet he knew how to perfectly handle a semi-automatic weapon.

  I grimaced. “That’s a gnarly walking microbial microcosm.”

  “To me he looks like a pickle forgotten beneath a Big Chill. Anyway—see those aluminum convectors over there?” Ali calmly asked me, clipping on her magazine. With her chin, she pointed to a set of spare parts by the huge compactor. Its menacing shadow loomed in the distance. “Run there as fast as you can, Sonic-boy.”

  I gulped. “Are you setting up the same trick as on Neosterdam? Would you want me dead, dear?”

  The child suddenly screeched, bursting his lungs. Nothing human about his cry. It sounded like the crunching of a blade on a stone. I was petrified.

  “I said run, hairball!”

  “Sacrebleu!” Once my sapiens kicked me in the buttocks, my body finally obeyed me.

  I’d always remember the lead fragments and the pieces of concrete, knocked out at each impact, pecking at my legs; the crackling every time the projectiles broke the sound barrier before getting lost above my ears; and the cloud of dust burning my eyes and throat.

  Evidently, my heroic diversion made the desired effect. Our target ran short on ammunition, and Ali retaliated. Her first bullet ripped off his left ear before a second smacked him right in the shoulder. He dropped his weapon.

  “Eat shit, snot-nosed!” Ali exalted.

  The child finally fell to the ground amid his own melted plastic cases. Despite the low gravity, his head violently smashed the dusty floor. He remained unconscious until the Ceres18 police arrived several minutes later.

  High on adrenaline, which had almost blown up my sensitive little four-legged mammal heart, I came back to reality once safe in the local commissioner’s office.

  “Ali? Don’t tell anyone but I think I nearly wet myself.”

  “You did piss yourself.”

  “Liar!” I objected hollowly—my public credibility being presumably shattered.

  “Pussy.”

  She scratched me between my ears. I was still shaking and had trouble holding my mint tea carton between my paws. But when the Ceres18 commissioner entered, my limbs regained their forgotten strength. It was a matter of putting on a good show to firmly renegotiate the agreement we had made with the local police. I anticipatingly read the Art of the Deal.

  “We have a bloody problem!” the man reported. Sinking into his chair made of synthetic leather, he blew a cloud of dust into the air. His flowing purple eyelids, shaggy black mustache, and crumpled beige uniform indicated that this charming person, the Commissioner Al-Dhedi, hadn’t slept for years.

  Remember when I told you the night cycles on Ceres were useless? No. You just recall the lasagna joke. Admit it.

  The police officer’s fingers tapped for a few seconds on an invisible keyboard, activating a diode as large as a penny over his temporal implant. He then promptly turned the cathodic monitor of his computer station in our direction before a remote surveillance video slowly loaded on the CRT screen.

  “What are we looking at?” Ali asked. “That’s just a guy diddling behind a phone pole.”

  “Wait for it…”

  It then showed our previous target, this child with a wild look, murdering with a rifle stock the busy Marine, before devouring what was left of the man’s pixelated genitals.

  Ali frowned.

  “It’s the brothels’ avenue—running along the port from the former military base to the recycling facility,” the commissioner explained, freezing the audio-visual flow with a hand movement like he was ousting an invisible fly.

  “C18 is definitely a small village of characters with folkloric customs,” I teased him. “Worth the detour…”

  “... not,” my partner added, slumped on her shaky chair.

  A grunt made me understand that Al-Dhedi wasn’t in the mood to listen to our jests. Frankly, this spiritual son of Frank Burns and Donald Duck was never really in the mood for anything—especially in our presence.

  “Another homicide. So what?” Ali added, henceforth playing with the very loud pencil sharpener’s crank.

  “Yes, we got your guy and closed the case this morning. What about our agreement?” I insisted.

  Al-Dhedi lengthily looked up at the speckled ceiling, before pointing the wobbly digits at the bottom of the screen. “This gruesome footage was captured less than two hours ago. You were in the ambulance—covered in piss. Your quarry tied up in an armored van—his arm wrapped in a separate ice crate!”

  Odd. Yet the child on the video clip strangely resembled our psycho in absorbent panties: same skeletal build, same moldy skin and same anthropophagous tendencies.

  “Congratulations. You got twins,” Ali breathed.

  “We can’t say that for sure! Because we don’t have any FID to scan,” I thought out loud as I watched the police officer nervously scratching his own ring-implant.