“Tell me, Lee,” began the Maiden enjoying her front seat in the fight. “Ali seems to have a taste for dealing with villains—permanently.”

  “She genuinely loves what she does.”

  “Genuinely? She seems rather—”

  I pawed at the busybody’s metal nose. “Do you think now is a good time?”

  She ran a finger over the scratch my claw left. “Fair. Let’s go help our girl before those two 49ers sliced her into a—”

  A shriek cut through the air, ending our argument. A decapitated body staggered a few steps before crumpling against a closet door, its arms falling away, each with glowing fresh wounds. Dismembered limbs rolled to the floor, only to be stopped by another fallen corpse, over which my partner nimbly leaped, clutching a severed head by its Manchurian braid. “Todd Christensen in the end zone!” she uttered. As the lights switched on, she smashed the head against the ground. “Touchdown! Neo-Babylon, Titan!”

  I turned to the Maiden. Before jumping to the ground, she shrugged. “Ok, Lee, it was genuinely funny…” She then went to kneel beside the closest corpse. And wired into the still smoking carcass of the Chinese mercenary.

  “Whatcha doing?” asked Ali.

  The Maiden appeared puzzled. “Of all your bounty-hunting jobs—”

  “We’re Auxiliaries.”

  “Sorry. As badge killers, have you ever come across enhanced thugs of that kind?”

  “We’ve often come across some fine bunch of characters,” Ali replied. “Homicidal robots. Cannibalistic children.”

  “Disturbing space clowns over Io,” I added.

  “Freaks. Some were chill. Some weren’t.”

  “Vikings. A lecherous samurai.”

  The Maiden pouted. “I can see you two have been busy. Check the markings.”

  Ali picked up a laser whip but put it down immediately after receiving my glare. “A sun and a creepy mutagenic newborn.”

  “Monsutā toys. They look brand-new.” the Maiden replied. “But thankfully for everyone in Solaris, they’re not.”

  “We’re dealing with second-hand sellers,” I explained, examining the retractable bio-claw of the last survivor.

  A drop of acidic poison rolled down the blade, which unfolded with a jerk, stopping only a few millimeters from my muzzle. The fatal blow had been intercepted by the Maiden’s superhuman reflex. “My apologies. I hit a circuit I shouldn’t have…” She disconnected herself from the dead cyborg. “You’re right, Lee. Probably a small stock recently unveiled on a forgotten moon.”

  “Does that mean Lao’s was right?” I asked.

  “Yes. Some folks within the Emporium are playing a dangerous game…” The Maiden smirked, grasping the laser weapons before breaking it in half. “Lucky us, these poorly trained boosters didn’t have the right protocols to deal more serious damage.”

  “Or maybe I was too strong!” Ali boasted.

  The Maiden smiled. “Anyway, I recovered a map of the patrols before his brain fried itself. It’s encrypted. But a subroutine of mine detected a pattern. Follow me. We must stick to Lao’s plan.”

  The two humans set off again. Still in shock, I stood alone. In front of me, the cyborg’s skull had split open, revealing a fuming mush and circuit boards, the central processor of which was marked with the black emblem of Monsutā. The Chinese man’s entire brain had been perverted into a killing machine: a robo-zombie. His mind, and perhaps even his soul, had been stolen for a cause not his own.

  Humans being inhuman. Nothing new around the Sun.

  “Lee?” My lifelong partner had turned around. “Everything’s all right, hairball?”

  “Remember what I always say?”

  “Please, Ali, stop messing up the remote with your fingers full of Chee-tos dust?”

  “No. The dead and the reward thing.”

  She crossed her arms. “Yes, well?”

  The data thief waved at us from down the hall. “Are you guys coming? We’re tight on schedule.”

  “Don’t forget that rule, today, dear.”

  Ali stroked my cheek. “Roger that.”

  I jumped on her shoulders. This time looking straight ahead.

  Since graduating as a Commissar, I have only been to the Las Pallas Embassy in the United Colonies of Belt once. It is as much an embassy as a Helvetic bank the Salvation Army. Every single of its 182 floors is dedicated to spying on the Techno-colonies in the beltway. Even I today—with a White Lotus Access—could not step into the most secure areas. The basement secret server room, for instance. But I will give you a piece of advice: follow the larger electrical cables. The volume of data processed down there surely requires an enormous amount of power.

  “Are you sure about this, Maiden? Lao said something regarding electric cables. I don’t see any,” I asked, doubtful as we dodged a fifth patrol. Drones this time.

  “Lao said a lot of things,” replied our master thief. Connected to the local network again, she modified the schedule and coverage of the last rounds to divert the mechanical spies programmed to inspect the past area. “But, with your sharp cat senses, can’t you feel a slight difference in the air?”

  Ali sniffed, like a wolf probing its hunting ground. “Ew! It smells like red ginger. I hate red ginger!”

  “The air is warmer than earlier,” I replied, also noticing the ginger.

  “The datacore is evidently self-powered,” the Maiden theorized. She pointed with her thumb to a whirring air-conditioning grill. “But its air-cooling system does give away its location.”

  “Shall I scout ahead?” Agent Whisker back on duty.

  “We’ll find a door. These ducts are far too dusty for your soft mane, little lion,” the Maiden flattered me, scratching the back of my ear. “And way too narrow for us.”

  Ali pouted. “Callin’ me fat?”

  “No. You just have very broad shoulders,” she went on, resuming her walk. “But I do like muscular babes.” She winked at my partner before vanishing through an electric closet door.

  “You see? Musclin’ pays off,” Ali taunted me. On her date’s heels, she rolled up the sleeves of her stolen coveralls to pump up her biceps like those bodybuilders in a Mr. Universe pageant.

  “No shoulders would get stuck in that vent…” I retorted, stepping into a new crevice. A disorganized fiber-optic curtain of the electrical closet concealed the latter. “... but your huge ankles, that’s another—Sacrebleu! What’s that?”

  The Kitty traveled through the entire solar system. We trampled the moons of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. We’ve seen so many preposterous things during our short career as private Auxiliaries that I could easily produce a TV series out of it. But nothing had prepared me for what Las Pallas’s bowels had in store for us, namely the vilest piece of engineering art known to man—and most certainly to cats.

  At the far end of a traditional Chinese wooden walkway, stretching above an ornamental pool of coolant with a sharp, chemical scent, a towering thirty-meter bookcase loomed, connecting the floor to the high ceiling. At its base sat an ATM-like booth, its sizzling screen flickering, shiny chrome ports. The access terminal looked insignificant, dwarfed by the dozens of shelves, but then the contents above made my heart drop.

  A grotesque collection of human skulls, mounted on transparent pipes intertwined with multicolored wires, filled the shelves. Their hollow eyes, encrusted with lambent miniature cathode-ray screens, followed the Data Maiden’s slow advance, shifting from green to a chilling red. Ersatz spinal cords, severed midway through the thoracic vertebrae, twitched spasmodically. With each jerk, a ripple spread across the shelves, floor to floor. The wall seemed to undulate, as if reacting to the rhythm of her footsteps.

  It knew. It knew we were here. It felt our presence.

  “L—Lee?” Ali begged behind me.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “I reckon I got a habit of falling asleep during lectures but… I think I’d remember Lao mentioning a giant and creepy StarMart’s Halloween decoration shelf.”

  More serious than before, the Maiden stopped midway and cast a few glances at the pool of Blue bubbling in places. “Linus Lao doesn’t know how far the Emporium has strayed into the darkness. This technological absurdity is called an Orugu-M. An Orgue Macabre. One of the many calamities to emerge from Monsutā Corporation’s secret laboratories. I expected something else; though. Something far worse.”

  “What, one might inquire, is the purpose of such a goosebumps cabinet of curiosities?” I asked, scouting ahead.

  “Is that what smells like rotten ginger?”

  “It’s an old self-powered datacore. But unexpectedly bio-built,” replied the Maiden with a hint of disappointment. She had resumed her walk, and past me had moved closer to the console. “The human brain functions as an extraordinary data storage system, capable of holding an amount of information comparable to the number of stars in the observable universe. When interfaced with the appropriate technology, it also has the potential to generate energy output on par with the intensity of the most powerful supernovae. What prodigious technology, yet…” She frowned at the discovery.

  “You’re the first data thief to be disappointed in front of a gigantic datacore.”

  With the tip of her index, the Maiden applied pressure to her metal collarbone. The latter lifted, before ejecting a floppy disk which fell into her hand. She rolled the red drive with its golden reflections between her nimble thieving fingers. “I can’t wait, however…”

  Now, listen closely. Once you enter the server room, you must use this. This diskette—more lethal than any thermonuclear warhead—holds a program capable of hijacking the Party conference. When activated, it will broadcast to each attendee the damning truth from the datacore: a covert society within the Cloud Cities is willing to sell its soul, and our collective honor, in exchange for weapons and technologies that defy every moral code. Now you understand that the purification of the Emporium is my crusade. Truth is my banner. And this diskette, your sword.

  The Maiden snickered after a few seconds of absence staring at the fateful floppy disk. “I can’t wait to find out how Linus Lao will play us.” Then she inserted the artifact into the terminal.

  The gaudy red flag with the two golden circles of the Emporium of Steel gave way to a loading screen. Lao’s vindictive program was slowly creeping into the datacore.

  “There you go protocol, Maiden,” I began as the data-thief stepped back. The committee of skulls stared at Ali, busy throwing pebbles into the quiet pool of Blue from the center of the bridge. “I’d have thought—” The next half-second, the cyber-thief embedded her temporal wire into an outlet. Immersed in the local net, she let her real-world body sit at the foot of the wall. “I saw it coming a mile away… but spoke too fast.”

  “Your signature move. She dived? Why?” Ali asked, dragging her boots to the terminal.

  “Snooping for deep-fried Chinese data.”

  “Do you know how long this is gonna take?” She tapped the screen glass as if to advance the progress bar, which pixelated. “Gotta munch.”

  “How can you be hungry in an environment like this?” I averted my gaze to the wall of skulls above my head. Since the Maiden’s intrusion into the subweb, several cathode orbits had tinted purple.

  “Easy. I picture myself like, at a fancy candlelit dinner. Faced with gnocchi nutri-gratin with inches-wide multi-cheese layers. I was flirt-dating before that horror story, remember?”

  “How could I forget?” My stomach rumbled. “There! Now I’m starving too. Despite the horrid smell.”

  “Isn’t there any way to speed this thing up?” she growled, tapping randomly on the keys. Her frantic clicking led to an avalanche of audible error alerts.

  “Don’t touch anything! You’ll set off an alarm or something way worse!”

  Sighing in frustration, Ali slid to the floor, her back to the wall too. “We were supposed to smash a diskette in the computer… not linger in a creepy basement!”

  A horrible howl startled us. My partner leaped to her feet again.

  “What have you done now, you jinx?” I scolded her.

  Above us, the entirety of the Orgue Macabre’s skulls had gaped their mouths to scream in terror. Their blazing red eye sockets transformed the server room into the antechamber of hell.

  “I just triggered an alarm…” my sapiens yelped. Her right hand slid through the opening in her overall, towards her holster under her armpit. “...and something way worse”

  I turned around slowly. From the seething waters of purgatory emerged a tall Lucifer angel. A cursed bio-entity, guardian of the organ and its secrets. A semi-mechanical son of Belial from Genesis.

  “Gag me with a spoon!” Ali reacted. “It looks like a giant gummy ginger root rolled in greasy auto parts…”

  An equally apt biblical-free description.

  “Another Monsutā thrift monstrosity!” I cried.

  My partner first aimed at the roborganic golem that had been sleeping in the cooling alcohol until she woke him up, but then pointed her gun above its shoulder. “And the Organ has also mustered his Chinese buddies with surprise pouch arms!”

  On the other side of the bridge, a new cyborg in high heels and a long red leather jacket burst in from the staircase leading to the real entrance. She shouted an order in Belter Cantonese. Her drone sidekicks blindly dashed into the low gravity.

  “I’m going to wake the Maiden!”

  “Lee! Don’t! You’re crazy? We’re goin’ to get scolded!”

  “You are gonna get scolded!”

  “Oh, geez!”

  My partner emptied half her magazine at the two flying assailants. They dodged part of the incoming burst, but some lucky slugs still pierced their armored lining. Struck mid-stroke, they collapsed to the ground before sliding at the feet of the colossus who had fully risen from his makeshift jacuzzi. Alas, their over-optimistic charge was only a diversion. For their devoted master attacked from the air, all her claws drawn from her four arms!

  The situation grew worse at the foot of the Organ, with the Maiden sprawled in the dust. The alarm had activated a security protocol in the subweb, causing a short circuit that has paralyzed her. Red and green sparks ran through her dark body from head to toe. Her marble eyes had taken on the rainbow colors of the Technical Difficulties screen.

  “Sacrebleu! Ali? Do you have any ideas?”

  “That’s like, your job!”

  My partner had engaged in an unequal duel with her assailant. She dodged swiftly, but the cyborg’s attacks were even faster. Blades hissed, and Ali dived to the side, rolling against the chopped railing to avoid what turned out to be a feint. Rising instantly, she was skewered in the thigh by a sharpened high heel transformed into a weapon. “Fuck! You—cheatin’ bitch!” At close quarters, my partner grabbed the smiling cyborg’s jaw with her free hand. The red-clad lady couldn’t free herself quickly enough. Sticking her .50 Desert Eagle to the back of the Chinese woman’s throat, Ali emptied the entire contents of her skull with the clip’s last bullets.

  “Well done, girl!” I exclaimed.

  “Swiss Army Wolverine got me with her slutty shoes!” she grumbled, holding her injured leg. The blow from the blade had ripped off her technician overalls all along her right thigh. A deep gash glistened with blood below her tattoo. “And here I am—crippled—just as the gnarly gum face is showing its… gnarly… gum… face!”

  The demonic colossus had curiously stayed on the sideline. Steady and silent. But suddenly, his riddled pink flesh convulsed as the powerful hydraulic jacks of his steel skeleton hoisted him onto the gangway. His Swamp Thing-like face swallowed, and three pairs of yellow optics popped, desperately searching for the target the sensors flashing around his almond-shaped head like a metallic crown would then surely order him to smash. Or eat.

  Ali reloaded her pistol with the few bullets she found in her chest pocket. “This thing’s goin’ to sponge! How’s Zéphyr? Can she help fry him—or get us out of here by one of her hidden rifts?”

  The Maiden! In my panic, I’d forgotten all about her. I tore the temporal cable from the server that was holding her prisoner. “—ouch!”

  “Lee!”

  Ali’s scream hummed through my skull. A dizzying buzz blurred everything. A heavy migraine rattled the fragments of thought that hadn’t already melted away from the electric arc that had jolted me six feet into the air. Was my mission… done?

  “Lao, you son of a bitch fibbing commie crook!” the Maiden’s voice crackled. She seemed utterly mad. “Their subweb was already a mess riddled with viruses like a corrupt data graveyard, and he’s throwing a—wow! What’s going on here? What’s that monster? Why is everything on fire? What did you do?”

  The fire was new. The electric arc had plunged into the pool of highly flammable alcohol, starting an immense blaze that had engulfed the floor. Added to the screeching of skulls, we were indeed in the ninth circle of Hell.

  “It’s all Ali’s fault.”

  “Snitch!”

  The creature attacked. And it was much faster than it appeared. Its giant fist, whose skin gave way to a studded armature, split the air, heading straight for the Maiden, who froze in surprise.

  Ali bravely stepped in, seconds from the impact. The latter never came. The monster’s arm remained extended. Its deadly phalanges paralyzed a few centimeters from the nose of my defiant partner, who hadn’t even closed her eyes.

  “Uh—Zéphyr? One of your speedhacks just saved our butts?”

  The Maiden stammered. “I—I did absolutely nothing.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “The ginger golem stalled?”

  Ali fell backwards into the arms of her date. With both hands on her wounded thigh, she tried in vain to contain a serious hemorrhage. I feared that the leader of the scoundrels had also coated his blade with poison!

  “Maiden! We need to motor as fast as we can before anyone else with a grim agenda shows up!”

  The data thief tore at the fabric around Ali’s cut. “Here you go bleeding again, girl. Remember our first meeting on the Danaë?” Proactive, she sponged the blood that was running profusely down my human’s leg.