“Phoebe…” Ali mumbled after sweeping the bloody device with her computer’s optic for the second time.

  “I can already hear you ranting about making such an excursion back to the Rings,” I said to my human as she placed the FID in her special metal box shaped like a hip flask. “You regret your involvement, don’t you?”

  To collect our reward, we had to throttle to the dark moon S IX Phoebe. The finalization of an Outer System’s contract had to be done in propria persona. No finger-mailing or ID-holoscanning would work through the Techno-web. Beyond the asteroid belt, we kept the Wild West spirit—and pride in our fragile independence.

  “It’s so far away! I fuckin’ hate road trips!”

  “Take a chill pill!” I reacted. “Verily, once we’re done here, I think it’s soon time to go back to Saturn anyway.” I climbed again on her shoulder, and we left the restaurant for good.

  Yet, something about our recent incident still bothered me. This whole poorly planned robbery did smell fishy. Call it a sixth sense. A cat’s sense.

  “What’s the beef?” Ali asked.

  “Not sure yet. Anyway, did you give another gracious gratuity for the pool of hemoglobin left on the floor? And the huge smoking hole in the table?”

  “Tippin’? Here? What for?” My partner proceeded to kick the fettered exit door off its hinges. The violence of the blow knocked down the adjacent ashtray, and its contents poured onto the asphalt sidewalk. Miraculously, the sashes returned to slam against the twisted jamb, but the Plexiglas pane split in two. “Ain’t gonna tip some slimy Inners! Fuck them Martians!” she resumed. As always, Ali turned into an acerbic teenager when thwarted.

  “Are you for real?” I cursed her as the Open/Close holo-sign slowly fell behind us. “Yet another establishment where we won’t be able to come back!”

  She snickered. “You know what? That’s fine! Gettin’ tired of pizza!”

  I let out a gasp, ears up. “Are you mad?” I meowed as I put one of my paws on her pulsing temple. My pad didn’t detect a fever. She appeared serious. “Anyway… you’ll change your bird mind in less than two seconds. As usual.”

  We proceeded down the narrow spiral staircase leading to the main concourse above the silent hall. The green LED on the circular station’s airlocks indicated that the main parking lot was nearly empty and quiet. But it would soon fill up. On the other side of the ceiling’s armored window the size of a baseball field, a dozen luminous purple and blue dots blinked in the infinite night. A convoy of Belter supercargos on their way to Ceres. The pilots would rest here for a few hours or a couple of days.

  Space travel could be lengthy and burn a lot of energy for both crews and ships. Lack of sunshine and confinement could overcome even the most robust minds. Ali and I had found a common getaway: greasy fast food and relatable Betamax. Franchises like Pizza’n’Droid or Blockbuster lined the invisible highway’s stations and attracted local and transiting wildlife alongside criminals. The great distances had sparked a new boom in the age of smuggling and piracy. A lucrative market for us, I reckon.

  “Yo! The coolant full?” Ali asked the red-haired boy snoring in a shiny vinyl bean bag chair in the maintenance hangar.

  His head against one of the huge heat pumps, the boy opened his eyes before taking his Walkman’s headphones off. He turned down the volume. “Huh? Yeah. Full l—load of Blue, miss,” he stammered clumsily rising and dusting off his green pine coverall. “Quite a museum piece you got here, eh?” He fixed his gaze on Ali. Under his pimples, his skin veered to a bright red.

  The same thing happened everywhere my partner went. Rotational gravity gently floated her golden hair and her silk-light jacket, giving her a fairy-tale air, or at least a supernatural presence making heads spin. Or maybe it was her freckles, shaped like the Milky Way. You wouldn’t picture how many bottoms I had to bite each morning to brush libidinous humans off her bed when we stopped on inhabited worlds. Kids will be kids, won’t they?

  From crimson, her hormone-packed potential lovers usually turned to the palest of white when she lifted her top to reveal her silvery badge but also her much too large holster, only to grab her outrageously kitsch pink furry wallet.

  “Y—you’re a police officer? A darned Techno-cop?” the young attendant stuttered while ordering a robot to open the garage door. “No wait!” He smiled, cash in hand and proud of his synaptic performance. “Private? You must hunt for the best gigs to be able to afford such a rad beauty!” the boy concluded.

  The dusty spotlights turned on. A pale blue glow flooded the interior of the garage, revealing on the lobby walls an eerie collection of Molly Ringwald posters lit by candles. But that wasn’t the most important!

  Our ship, the Kitty, vertically stood in the center of the more substantial workshop. A marvel—confluence of design and technology—a Swallow-2 military starfighter of the disbanded United Nations, converted into a lone frigate. Twelve tons of alloys and ceramics with flaked coral paint, legacy of a triumphant past. A 3.5 by 10 meters beauty of earthen-armored hull in the shape of the eponymous bird, with a long-forked tail surrounding the turbine of a real, next generation, post-nuclear Baltimore-IV engine from sixteen generations ago. The vintage class like these bald monkeys no longer assemble. Weapons inventory: no laser beams certainly, nor fancy electronic toys, but good Bofors 40 mm machine guns at the front and a non-registered railgun under the belly. Abraded, yet effective!

  I will spare you the details about the control computer and the power of its IBM 16x bits 50 MHz data-core processor. Quantum upgraded. Time Magazine’s Man of the Year.

  “The rust really ties the ship together, eh?” joked the boy, sarcastic. “How fast can Grandma Swallow push at full cycle up there?”

  “This pimply asteroid-faced uncouth is mocking my vessel!” I muttered between my chops so only my partner could hear it.

  “Dunno…” she breathed while he guided us on the footbridge leading to the octagonal airlock on the flank. “Don’t fly it. Lee does.”

  “Yes! Je suis le pilote!” I hurled, my ears in airplane mode.

  Ali stopped me by taking me in her arms. “Easy there, hairball,” she whispered, as the airlock’s rotary shutters hissed. This scoundrel was saved before I could make canned dolphins out of him. Shame.

  “The cat?” the boy snorted.

  “Sh’yeah. He smart. Read Books,” Ali dropped. “Knows his share of fancy Monopoly words.”

  “Scrabble,” I rectified.

  “For instance.”

  An alarm promptly interrupted her chin scratching supposed to soothe me. A message appeared on her terminal which had just synchronized with our ship’s short-range IR module.

  “What gives?” I asked.

  “Joey Neill.”

  “Cold and stiff.”

  She grunted. “I mean—he wasn’t alone.”

  Here’s what was bothering my tiger sense earlier. “The corrosive gum. If this guy was hiding in the motel, he couldn’t have tampered the door from the outside. I would have seen him coming back.”

  “Maybe you didn’t pay attention, too busy whining over our meal!”

  I silenced Ali with a blow on her nose. “His accomplice blocked our exit, then went to prepare their escape. That’s the ABC.”

  “ABC, my bouncy butt!”

  “With any luck, his lucrative friend may still be around. Why don’t you check?”

  “Already got it.” Ali scrolled up. “According to the register, that’s his wife. Mildred. She’s some kind of scientist. Unemployed for ages. Probably the brain behind all this. Now wanted for insurance fraud.”

  “Cherchez la femme… How much for Bonnie?” I asked, knowing well such a grievous crime could yield a veritable jackpot.

  “C$20,000. That’s twice as much as her psycho-Clyde.”

  “Does their BOLO specify anything about their ship?”

  Ali thrust her sizzling screen and the results of her research work in front of my eyes. “An old Peugeot S-505.”

  “S-505 spacecrafts run on a Douvrin engine rather than a Baltimore,” the intendant interjected from the opened airlock, a dirty finger buried deep in his nostril. “Highly recognizable exhausts.”

  I looked down on him. “You’re still here wasting both our time and oxygen, aren’t you?”

  He smiled. “A ship of this class did arrive here last night. Still docked somewhere on the station, if you’re interested.” His outstretched hand indicated his willingness to get a bribe.

  Ali broke his fingers and extracted the cell datum. An inexpensive spot with direct access to the lodge and the pizzeria level. The perfect place for a quick getaway after a hit.

  Once inside the iron box that doubled as a freight elevator, my partner randomly hammered the buttons. She must have already forgotten the floor number spat by the crying boy. We ultimately arrived at the ship, a dented nutshell that must have taken longer to start than an old NASA probe to make a round trip to Pluto.

  “Nice youngtimer. They were also officially super-broke,” my associate opined.

  “Nobody robs a pizza place over Mars unless they have nothing to lose, Ali.”

  My partner grasped her gun under her jacket. I discreetly jumped onto the wing overlooking the entrance lock. With a nod, she let me know she was eager to burst in. Cyber Macho style.

  “Get ready for anything.”

  I unbarred the doors, using Joey’s severed FID she threw at me. The hatch swung open. A few safety LEDs revealed the ship’s messy interior. Papers and half-shredded medicine boxes lay everywhere around a broken dialysis machine. Humming on a shelf cluttered with tins of microwavable raw nutrigel giving off a rancid odor, an old XT’s screen glowed, casting light over a hung lab coat.

  Interesting. On its sleeve, a disheveled patch featured the heraldry of a former acquaintance. A golden human newborn bathing in a black rising sun. The Dark Sun of M. The twisted seal of the disbanded Monsutā Corporation.

  Never heard of Monsutā Corporation? Well… first and foremost, bless your innocent heart. Second, there’s only one thing you should know about Monsutā Corporation: before the Martian central government closed them for good, if something utterly vile and evil was going on someplace between the sun and the eternal void, our Japanese friends from Big Bad M were certainly behind it.

  “Lee,” Ali whispered, pointing with my chin towards the cockpit.

  In an armchair by a muted TV broadcasting local news, including the robbery, a woman almost disappearing under her thick patchwork plaid clutched a long-cooled, foul-smelling herbal tea. Her reddened, puffy eyes took a gander at the both of us. They shone with fear and anger. A hazardous mix.

  “What will you do with it?” suddenly asked Mildred Neill in a wet voice. She sniffed, looking down.

  “What are you talking about?” I tried, slipping to the floor among analgesic tablets.

  “From our rewards, Joey and I. C$30,000… That’s still quite a sum today.”

  “Indeed.”

  The lady held back a sob. Her hands tightened on her mug. “With that much money, he could have recovered. Dead, we’re worth more than alive.” She paused. “It makes no sense. No sense at all. For them—the corpo-moons, Neil fought the Soviets. Relentlessly risked his life in deep space. Irradiated even more every day fairly! They should have helped him…”

  Another social tale, I thought. Fascinating. Studying humans was like watching an explicable yet inexorable derailment.

  My partner carefully moved forward. I glanced at her. She stopped.

  Meanwhile, I tried a different approach. “Madame, we—”

  The crying woman suddenly leaped, knocking her cup to the floor. It rolled amid crumpled unpaid bills. Her trembling hands shook a Mauser. She yelled: “Vultures, please, come! Collect your dues!”

  A deafening bang. My ears rang with piercing tinnitus, forcing my eyes to shut on instinct. A lukewarm liquid splattered across my face, followed by the sickening stench of iron flooding my senses.

  “Ali, dear?” I tried after a while, as my sharp catlike senses digested the stream of critical signals.

  My heart restarted when I heard my partner hawk. “Her head popped like a fuckin’ snapweed,” she whined.

  I slowly opened my eyes. Mildred’s body, quacking from spasms, lay in her armchair. At her feet spread a pool of blood printed insurance papers could hardly contain. The same blood dripped from the TV and instruments behind what remained of her jaw.

  What a sad and inevitable ending.

  “New-Hollywood was right after all,” I huffed.

  “Whatcha talkin’ about now, Lee?” Also barely spared by the bloody spray, Ali sheathed her gun and angrily grabbed a kitchen knife from a magnetized rack. “Geez! That’s like, totally grody!”

  “Get the FID, dear. We’re leaving at once.”

  At last, we headed back to the Kitty. I had finished washing up on Ali’s shoulder when her microcomputer beeped again.

  “Another dreadful job?” I asked

  My associate opened the announcement and frowned. “A witness protection gig in Deimos’s Chinatown. It’s on our way.”

  “Excellent. Deimos is huge. Once done, we’ll check for other interesting matters in the area,” I said. “And whether we can gather new information about this pitiful pirate of Oswald Avery.”

  “That pirate again?”

  “He’s why we came here in the first place! Remember?”

  She breathed. “I’m out. We have no lead. Runnin’ after him became a yawnfest.”

  “May I remind you what he did to us? Why did we have to leave the Outer Worlds and cross space for almost a year?” Of course, crickets ensued. “Besides, his bounty is also worth C$60,000 minus Techno-taxes…” Still no effect. My ill-mannered sapiens kept ignoring me, therefore I played my last card: “Too bad. C$60,000 That’s at least four thousand supersized pizzas with extra-toppings.”

  “Wow! Let’s fucking go!”

  “Ali! Language!”

  Told you she’d change her mind.

  Bantering, we boarded our beloved ship. Crossing the hold, renovated to combine a cozy bedroom, a fully equipped kitchen and a one-person bath module my sister barely used, I reached the wall ladder leading to the cockpit where the windshield faced the garage’s roof. Meanwhile, Ali dropped her blood-soaked clothes and started to wipe her cheeks with the rag I usually employ to clean my spectacles.

  I jumped on my comfy pilot seat. “Frightening to think that after all these years…” I started, pondering about the lab coat in Neill’s ship. “We still find Monsutā’s ghosts roaming around.”

  Back with only her underwear, Ali stretched up before settling in her own inclined chair on my right. “She could have found the coat in a thrift shop,” she said. “Who cares?”

  She laid her dancing feet on the dashboard, pushing away my clamped pile of books. Meshed on the flesh inside her right thigh shone the same daunting crest embroidered on Mildred Neill’s blouse, overlaying an old holographic barcode and tattooed on her skin with a DNA-lock. Impossible to erase.

  My young partner was another of these ghosts. I was just part of her afterlife.

  “We don’t talk about the dead,” she said, peeking at her bequeathed marking. Between her knuckles rolled our two catches of the day. “We just collect their scalps. To buy pizza and rent movies.”

  “Wise words.”

  “They’re yours, hairball.”

  “I know.”

  The encrypted key in the ignition, the dashboard’s rainbow LEDs lit up. The control computer greeted us with a smiley ideogram on the central polychrome monitor. On the two other CRT lateral screens flashed the ship’s check-up results and the updated regional map. The reactor started its cycle. The rear cooling pumps roared.

  “All systems go?” I asked.

  The Blaupunkt swallowed the cassette. Pressing the faded Play button, my partner nodded while lying back. Soon after, Desireless’s Martian accent arose. Voyage Voyage pulsed through the speakers. My paws on the control sticks, we took off towards the starry sky, plus loin que la nuit et le jour.

  Back to business!

  仕事に戻ろう！

  #02 CHINOISERIE

  第02話 シノワズ

  “He dead?” Ali’s pertinent question came with her usual nonchalance. Hands on her hips and playing with her lychee-flavored Chupa Chups from cheek to cheek, she recidivated: “Like, totally dead?”

  Dr. Yaojie pulled on her Stygian smoke. The radial seal before the filter glowed red. She resignedly ordered the morgue’s general computer to open the body bag barely out of its refrigerant alveolus. The frozen auto-zipper creaked, slowly revealing a blue-lipped man in his fifties, his jaw covered with a moko kauae and charred microchips.

  My partner emitted a smack with her lollipop, spraying a gob of sugary saliva onto the frosty face. “Seems dead enough to me.”

  Sitting on the rack, above the shoulders of the smuggler as stiff as a board, I coldly insisted. “Make sure of it.”

  Ali shrugged. Under the coroner’s bewildered gaze, she plunged her index finger into the glassy eye. “Ew! Avery kicked the bucket, Lee! Mega-murdered-passed on!”

  “Catatonic for sure.”

  Dr. Yaojie cut short our macabre experiments and snapped her prosthetic dactyls for the bag to violently shut, nearly taking my whiskers with it. “He is not catatonic!”

  “Meditating?”

  “Not meditating! This man is dearly departed, hunters. Dead. Killed in a sordid brawl outside the White Devil gynoid brothel.” She puffed. Her smoke glowed red again. “I do not have all day. Why are you so hell-bent on desecrating the body of your friend?”

  I breathed, frostbiting my lungs. “Friend? Friend? Certainly not! Oswald Avery is a pirate of the most unfathomable dye!”

  The coroner chased me off. She put our rattlesnake-flavored Ben & Jerry’s back in the fridge. “Was. Oswald Avery is dead.”

  Ali shivered in her holey jeans and distended t-shirt. She might be mistaken for a valley girl on spring break in Las Pallas, if not for the massive Desert Eagle awkwardly tucked into her pink belt. “Lee, c’mon! Let’s blow this joint. We ain’t gonna spend our afternoon in a giant cold store! I’m not dressed properly! I’m fucking freezin’.”