Oopsie. Ali and her tattoo were such remnants. “Is that so?” I quivered.

  I glanced at my happy-go-lucky partner who blew a raspberry, tightening the dirty burn aid inherited on C18 around her compromising healing thigh. “The story about the treasure quest sounded better… Your history class sucks big time. Your job sucks even more!”

  “Are you kidding? I’m totally living my best life right now pissing off the Martians!” the Maiden laughed. Freed from all clothing, she helped herself with a glass of distilled water filled to the brim with tetrahedral ice cubes that she pressed against her forehead.

  After all these transformations, I preferred her original appearance. Judging how she eyed the cyborg, Ali seemed to agree with me about this metal-skinned post-human swaying to the Kang Susie tune playing on the radio.

  “Well, bullying the Techno-Police is a good cause. Therefore, the theft is excused, right?” I justified myself. “Yet, I do think the Kitty should leave Ceres as soon as possible!”

  Meaning before Ali blew her cover.

  “Does that mean I’m keeping the very expensive bracelet as a souvenir?” my partner tried.

  Our new friend, amused by her comment, came and lay next to Ali. She then moved her fingers towards my associate to retrieve the booty. “You may. Yet not before I—”

  But when she touched Ali’s skin to grasp the bracelet, they both froze as if a magnetic field prevented them from separating. Petrified, they silently stared at each other. My partner was lost in the cyborg’s ivory eyes without reflection.

  “Lee?” she breathed.

  Uh. Oh! I knew that intonation. It wasn’t long before I’d be evicted without further trial. The trash pandas and I would spend the evening watching Cyber Macho with Germaine. A better alternative. For human coitus—cyborgs involved or not—constituted a repugnant and distasteful spectacle.

  Back to business!

  仕事に戻ろう！

  #08 FIRST DATE & COUP D’ETAT

  第08話 初デートそしてクーデター

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but right after you gulp down a multi-steroid turbo-shake, the big vein on your forehead starts waving to the crowd.”

  “Lee, you’re literally a pain in my neck.”

  “How come?”

  Ali’s trembling arms dropped her long dumbbell on the jacked storage. The sonic shock startled a muscular fellow jumping rope nearby. In a palm tree’s shade, Muscle Beach’s gorilla manager Joseph-Désiré glared at us over his half-moon sunglasses.

  “How come?” She raised her head to look daggers at me. Her mesmerizing vein pulsed between two drops of sweat.

  I leaped from my highly comfortable position on her throat to the humming Gatorade cooler. “I can’t fathom your new infatuation with cast iron,” I yawned, stretching. “Has dethroning Arnold Schwarzenegger become a dream of yours? What nonsense!”

  Massaging her sore shoulders, Ali straightened. She surveyed the open-air gym wedged between the ocean front walk and the beach volleyball courts where artificial quartz sand glistened under the halogen spotlights screwed to the immense domed city’s ceiling. Over the courts and the shore-wide swimming pool, a huge LED screen dispensed a memory of a maritime horizon; captured in Technicolor decades ago on Earth-that-was. The Pier—probably Las Pallas’s best district for leisure and vanity—appeared to be an unreal place.

  “Just trying to get rid of my extra pounds,” Ali confessed with a grimace.

  At the foot of a basketball hoop close to us, two large keowing legless ostriches started fighting over a burrito. The last one to go into sudden cardiac arrest would emerge victorious. On 2 Pallas, seagulls fed on Hamburger Hamlet’s greasy fries would roll like rabid tumbleweed from dumpsters to dumpsters.

  “Like, to keep in shape.” My copilot immediately began a new series of grotesque movements exhausting to follow.

  Initiating a short toilet, I reminded her that her altered metabolism ran like clockwork, meaning she didn’t need HGH-shakes or any physical activity to regulate her BMI. “Where do you get all these ideas, anyway? Have you been browsing those self-esteem degrading magazines at the 7/11 again?”

  “Always such a pretentious judgmental cat. Can’t you accept that I just want to be sexy-hot?”

  “There goes another silly concept. Appearance is such a human societal burden. As a Felis catus, you know I don’t give a snoot!”

  “You’re such a self-centered mop! This ain’t for you! It’s for Zéphyr.”

  I stopped mid-lick, my leg straight-up in the air like an exclamation point. “What did you say, little sapiens? That you keep flirting with the Data Maiden! Are you utterly mad?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Here comes the daily lecture.”

  “Do I need to remind you she’s hunting you? The moment she finds out about your tattoo, she will ship us both to the Emporium! With a nice package and a beautiful ribbon! The Maiden is cute—your words—but downright baleful!”

  My unwise partner huffed. Straightening again, she tossed the dumbbell aside. It sank into the sand. “I just think she’s psych! Some things can’t be explained. That’s all!”

  “Actually, science explains it very well. We call it hormone effervescence! It’s a classic of adolescence, I read.”

  “Don’t you patronize me! You’re literally half my age.” Ali exercised her talent for mental arithmetic only to prove her right. “Sorry—I’m a bit stressed too, Lee. This is like our first date tonight. You know what it means!”

  This answer set my synapses in motion, striving to bring back from buried parts of my memory countless purposeless discussions about even more pointless teen movies Ali forced me to watch over the past few years. “No. But it’s most certainly the last one!”

  She leaped to her feet, as Donkey Kong and a robot-crane toiled to extract the bulky bar from the ground. “Whatever!” Angry, Ali grabbed the incredibly heavy dumbbell to return it to its place on his rack. “You’re a snore, Lee! I’m outta here! See ya.” She left for an open-air shower.

  God Darwin. I’d been dealing with Ali’s nonsense for a decade, and my sapiens still made as much sense as Mork and Mindy. Knowing she was rubbing shoulders with a member of the Guild specifically looking for Monsutā relics worked on me. I could only hope that she would take steps to camouflage her tattoo. Or cut short this dangerous situation once her elliptical crush is gone.

  I chose to entrust her and leave her be and strolled along the over-tanned pedestrian artery running by the beach. In the 3D-printed coconut palms’ shade, I skirted the bustling skate park. Enraged off-duty speed-delivery dashers challenged each other on tricked-out magnetic boards. Magneboards recently joined Las Pallas’s folklore, along with the blackout orgies of New-Hollywood’s nepotistic top billings and the weekly drive-by shootings occurring in the central neighborhoods when you’d get shot depending on the color of your underwear—or another human nonsense I was too colorblind to understand.

  Without incident, my jaunt took me to the Semper Fi Dodgers, a warm tearoom run by former Techno-draft objectors overlapping local baseball fans. The terrace, worthy of an old British parlor, overlooked the Pier with its famous Ferris wheel. The Semper Fi was an elegant, refined establishment, where I could rest assured that no trouble would disturb my peace.

  “Good evening, Mr. Lee.”

  Trouble sat at my table which levitated over dry sand, shaped as Linus Lao in a cream power suit; his abominable drooling pug turned into a handheld cooling fan in his arms.

  “Seeing you so relaxed after the events in Ceres City—sipping a cold infusion while reading a book—is an example of the Zen spirit.”

  “My adoptive father took the Bodhisattva vows,” I breathed. “Taught me a few hippie gimmicks back on Titan.”

  Lao beckoned to a waiter, who tiptoed at once to activate the table’s built-in computer interface. “Few people today follow such an ascetic way. And that is a pity. Take a look at that enormous screen, for instance. What futility,” he heaved, pointing with his chin to the giant wall slowly transitioning into a sunset after a brief Marlboro info-ad. “Amazing how Westerners crave wasting their time and resources on self-centered trivia.”

  I cut off his philosophic outburst more politely than Ali would: “Might I inquire as to what it is that you seek?”

  Lao’s bionic eye twinkled as he received the yellow tea he’d ordered. “Always so pedantic? Anyway, I had to send half my intelligence team away, you know. None of them managed to find the Kitty was working for both the Alliance and the Data Brokers Guild.”

  “We have no connection with the Guild. Our cooperation with Zéphyr the Data Maiden over the years was entirely serendipitous.”

  “I could—with little effort—believe in two lucky and illegal occurrences, Mr. Lee…” His fuming tea barely touched his lips. But he put it down. “A third one—however—does leave me somewhat dubious as to the veracity of your words. See… It is a probability anomaly.”

  Lao turned towards the fire-colored false horizon again. Wearing a wetsuit, my partner passed in the distance on a jet ski. An artificial wave caused her to lose control and cry out. She disappeared into the grayish froth. I realized at that moment that she’d never learned to swim. Still, I kept my anxiety level to my personal baseline. The Data Maiden immediately dived to her rescue, despite the dispatched airborne Malibu-drones armed with red buoys.

  “It does not matter after all,” Lao resumed. “It suits me. I have come to offer one last mission to Zéphyr. The Kitty could play a major role.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I want to hire you.”

  My anxiety went down a few clicks. “We’re not for sale!”

  “You’re literal Cronian privates.”

  “Try mercenary agencies—like the Thanatos Cartel or the Hells Angels—hold on! My partner can’t swim, and the Maiden is entirely made of metal!”

  I was ready to pounce. But Lao held me back with a hand on my shoulder. “Your friends are safe. I have sent Su Song to watch over them. They will join us.”

  “As if your mute lackey could pressure my sister—an accomplished Auxiliary—to—”

  Still drenched, Ali parachuted into the chair to my right, startling me. “Check this out, hairball! That jade-eared tin can knows what’s up.” She slid a Hot Fudge Brownie Sundae the size of an inhabited asteroid in front of my snout. Three spoons picked on the side—all for her. I’d forgotten that my copilot could be easily bribed with chocolate.

  A towel around her neck, the Maiden sat to my left. “How are you, Lee?”

  How was I? Caught between a rock and a hard place with a whole crate of nitroglycerin called Ali in between. “Well, my day was going adequately before a High Commissar of the Emporium and a Data-operative crashed into my Sunday afternoon tea!”

  The data-thief scratched the back of my ear, before turning to Lao. “Have the trainees you didn’t send to the lead mines already gone through the Ceres microfilm, Commissar? I wish I could have taken advantage of my paid vacation. I wonder—do you have paid vacations as a communist?”

  Lao put his untouched cup down again. “To hell with your frivolities,” he replied curtly before leaning towards us. “Our plan has to be finalized today!”

  The Maiden huffed. “Always on the rush…”

  “What’s he talking about?” inquired Ali, whipped cream all over her cheeks and nose.

  “And more importantly, what does it have to do with the Kitty?” I snapped.

  “I will address the matter somewhere more private,” Lao concluded. He rose from the table without drinking his beverage. “My limousine is at the end of the Pier. Please, follow me.”

  In the car, the answers finally came. Commissar Linus Lao’s outrageous scheme snapped into focus—crystal-clear if riddled with plot holes straight out of a Knight Rider rerun. Still, one fact stood unshaken: Ali and I had well and truly tangled ourselves in a mess by meddling with the Emporium and the Guild. And on this bright, sunny day in Las Pallas, it was the Kitty who would trigger the downfall of the Venusian Communist Party. As for Linus Lao? Turns out, he might just be a decent human being after all.

  Listen to me, all. Today is the day for the presentation of the next Five-Year Plan. An opportunity not to be missed. Party pundits will be brain-wired from Venus, but chairs from the Belt and the Outer Worlds will be connected locally. Security will be at a maximum on the surface. However, disguised as LPDWP employees, you will sneak through the underground metro line system under extension beneath Las Pallas’s Chinatown. This gambit is straightforward. It is the easy part.

  “Just give me a few seconds.” The Maiden’s eyes turned mauve. The bulbs dotting the tunnel’s meshed walls flickered like neon lights on a space motel’s road sign.

  “What a subtle way to announce our visit…” I groaned from the elevator controls, gazing out over the construction site of the new metro line—hailed as the pinnacle of mass transit in the main belt.

  Her weapon in hand, my partner jumped into the empty underground passage also deprived of all functioning cameras. “You’ve been grumbling since the beach, Lee. Swap the tape.”

  “We’ll keep exploiting this hacking method masked in an overload. Power outages are the norm on Pallas. The screen-horizon devours more energy than the fission reactor buried under the Hills can ever hope to generate,” clarified the Maiden. She then showed us the entrance to a secret well that would lead us underneath our objective.

  “I thought the Embassy had its own grid!” I remarked, remembering Lao’s extensive explanation.

  The Maiden rectified: “No. The Emporium has deployed its own web. That’s why we can’t hack them remotely and need to log in.”

  She invited us downward on a scree. Recent landslides had forced the contractors and robo-workers to come to a halt. The sprawling city was threatening the integrity of the 500 km-wide asteroid and its titanic dome. Giants and more insidious cracks started to appear in the crust and structures. And one of them led us straight into the embassy’s underground passageways.

  Inside, we walked as discreetly as possible in a cold gallery. Security cameras and concealed sensors once again fell victim to the Maiden’s talents. Unfortunately, to reach our goal, we had to pass through a physical welcoming committee. And it didn’t take long for this one to show its sharpened fangs.

  “Hide!” whispered our metal-skinned scout, pressing herself against the wall draped with colorful Party propaganda posters.

  “Where?” I asked, faced with the total absence of cover.

  Ali grabbed me by the tail and climbed, leaning on a switch and a dusty speaker. The data thief joined us, clinging to the cables and pipes nailed between the sticky stalactites wide as bamboo.

  “Our ROE are clear, Maiden,” I whispered, digging my claws into my associate’s neck for her to pay attention. “We’re not allowed to intervene if we’re dealing with diplomatic personnel. Otherwise, the Alliance will write us off.”

  “Trust Lao.”

  “Trust a commie?”

  “If Ceres intel checks out, your presence is critical.”

  “Here’s a group!” my partner cut in. Her weapon’s safety gave a click covered by the hum of the AC.

  The data we’ve accumulated over the years is troublesome. Apparently, some of Venus’s highest-ranking officials are deeply corrupt and follow their own interests. Alas, the Ceres microfilm not only validates the theory of a covert cabal within the Party but also exposes the involvement of mercenaries—recruited expressly for their dark deeds. Thanks to you, Zéphyr, we know they’re armed with forbidden Monsutā technologies, and that they operate on the fringes of the decaying Emporium. In no way do they enjoy its official protection.

  Heavy, mechanical footsteps of cyborgs echoed through the tunnel. Four of them formed a line, each wearing chrome armor, with reinforced artificial muscles and eyes glowing a cold red—like Lao’s bionic orb. Their sliding drawer-covered arms could be converted into modular weaponry. Judging by their wrist markings, some had sharp blades, others… lasers?

  “Any volunteers?” I asked.

  Her temporal wire anchored in an apparent outlet next to the fire alarm, the Maiden chuckled. “My skills are hiding in the shadows, pickpocketing and reading languages.”

  Obviously. “I picked piloting, diplomacy and adjudicating Ali’s questionable hookup choices.”

  My partner rolled her eyes. She jumped to the floor. “As always, the sexy-hot gunslinger gets her hands dirty.” She whistled. “And oh, does she love that!”

  A first cyber-sentry immediately detected her cocky entrance. He charged at her. His footsteps shook the ground. Ali trundled past him, dodging his slashing attack. She shot two precise bullets through the metal of his skull, sending sparks and brain chunks into the air. Pop! Goes the Weasel! she sang.

  The rest of the cyborgs opened fire, flashes of light piercing the darkness our silver-haired master of shadows had just created. With my cat eyes, I followed Ali dashing with almost superhuman agility towards the nearest wall. Impassive, focused, she ran up the same wall for several meters, and retaliated by aiming at the cyborgs’ vulnerable joints, exploiting the booting time for their optics to adapt to night vision.

  Losing his footing, the closest thug turned his arm into a blade. Ali swiveled deftly and fired at point-blank range, her pistol emitting a thud as the bullet tore through the armored chest. Sparks flew again. Her target collapsed heavily to the ground, between his own severed legs.

  Smirking, my copilot faced her last two adversaries, two women equipped with laser whips that gleamed in the night. “Rad…” she moaned, biting her lips. “Lee? Can I have one for Christmas?”

  “Absolutely not, dear.”

  With a primal Belter war cry, the two mercenaries raced. Their movements synchronized. Their tactics shifted seamlessly. It was clear this would be a grueling challenge—even for an experienced killing machine like Ali willing to settle her score with Big Bad M.