I looked around for a solution to this problem. My trained eyes fell on a whistling maintenance drone passing by to repair the hazardous railing. The robot yelped in panic when I jumped on his rice cooker head. Convincing it to throw itself into the void in pursuit of a kidnapper would have taken precious minutes and too much bribe. Thankfully, I had another trick up my sleeve: to reboot its silicone brain by creating an ingenious short-circuit.

  At the same moment, the limo returned, moving straight to the top of the megastructure. Towards the yards.

  “Onward, steed!” I shouted, snapping each of the wires I held between my paws. The confused drone took to the air. Lighter and therefore more sensitive to squalls, it struggled to keep a smooth trajectory. The slightest collision with a plastic bag could mean our death sentence.

  “The vehicle we are following swapped for the express-wallway to the junkyard, mister Māo,” yelped the helpful robot before it brushed and accidentally turned off a delivery boy’s jetpack. “Apologies!” I heard him whine. “Mister Māo, I think I killed a human.”

  “It happens. Be careful, now! I’m going blind.” I had indeed strategically chosen to close my eyes. Not because I was utterly terrified, but because the speed had finally dried out my pupils. Piloting a hacked UAV felt worlds apart from commanding my formidable Kitty.

  “I have to warn you the probability of us ending up flattened on a bumper is increasing by the second, mister Māo.”

  “Reassure me with a song, not fateful presumptions!”

  Teasingly, the machine complied, mimicking the voice of Tracy Cattell: “Here you go, way too fast! Don’t slow down, you’re gonna crash!”

  “Not this one—ouch!”

  The robot’s prediction had proved partially correct. We did print our faces on a vehicle’s bumper, but that was when we finally got to the junkyard. And against the red limousine we’d been tailing.

  The rear door flew open, and I witnessed my partner being violently thrown to the filthy ground. The chloroform had clearly not shown the desired effect. And judging by the blood tarnishing her knuckles, her assailant already paid a heavy price for this blunder.

  “You ok over there, dear, or did you meet your stunt double?” I shouted. One of my hind legs, injured by the shock, slipped on a flattened red ginger can, bringing me to a halt against the back wheel.

  “Lee! That fuckin’ monster took my iron!” she bellowed, rising to her feet.

  The kidnapper got out, and what I saw sent a chill down my spine. Ali had advisedly used the term monster. After all, our Fu Manchu du jour barely resembled a human anymore. Torn to pieces, his crimson jacket left room to six telescopic bionic arms grafted directly along his backbone and shoulders. The many drugs applied to contain the rejection had turned his skin purple around the blackish stretch marks but also the numerous cysts on his ribs. What a disgustingly butchered surgeon job! He looked like a ghoul.

  “You’re no locals. Did Mars send the Techno-Police?” he growled. He mopped up the blood beading on his chin with a flick of his sleeve. “In an Emporium enclave, and to arrest the son of a dignitary? A grievous diplomatic failure.” He glanced briefly in my direction, assessing me with his bloodshot eyes. “No. You’re no Euro-pigs. Mercenaries then? Who appointed you, roaches?”

  “We’re Auxiliaries!” I muttered, my ears flattened.

  The man roared with laughter. Ali’s weapon, first dancing at the end of a tentacle, landed in his shaking organic hand. He immediately pointed it at me, rattling the safety. “Hòu huì yǒu qī, hunter. My thanks for your bikini-babe, though. She and I will have a lot of fun before my arms send her with you in the acid bath.”

  “Is that your confession, Mr. Paul Kai-foon?” Once again, the Commissar and his squinty pug won the title of the quietest entrance. This time, both stood with the jade-eared android near the magnetic crane overlooking the paint-stripping rainbow-like tangy pit. Lao too had finally traced the kidnapper’s trail back to the junkyard—pulling the rug out from under us!

  “High-Commissar. What a lovely surprise!” Mr. Botulism prattled. “How was the tea at my uncle’s? I do apologize for my non-attendance. A special delivery for the Party required my full consideration.”

  Despite what seemed a blatant threat, Lao remained unimpressed. He carefully handed his pug to the Jade man, then delicately reached into his jacket pocket. The unhinged culprit immediately turned Ali’s gun on him. “Your aunt and the chairman were indeed very pleasant hosts.” The Venus envoy then pulled out a simple roll of parchment. “We had a deep and interesting conversation along a Cinnamon Pu-erh. We grow it on Biānyuán Station. Ever heard of Biānyuán, Mr. Paul? It is the last Chinatown before the Rings. A very secluded place. A perfect location for a quiet retreat.”

  The multi-armed cyborg snickered, ignoring Lao’s more subtle threat: “My uncle being the chairperson means you have no authority over me.”

  “I am sorry, but this is not true.”

  “What?”

  “You are no longer under the wing of the chairman, Mr. Paul.” Lao unfolded his paper for all to see. It bore many symbols, seals and signatures. “Nor the Forefathers you seem to actively work for when you are not busy… here.”

  Kai-foon spat. “Is that so?” Following his words, he immediately propelled one of his telescopic limbs towards Ali. Still holding the pug with one arm, Lao’s adjutant pulled a rifle from his coat, a heavy Soviet KS-23. As he prepared to fire from the hip, Lao stopped him, saving my partner taken as a hostage.

  “The Party gives you a chance nonetheless, Mr. Paul,” Lao said calmly. “Your uncle remained dignified. Please, do the same.”

  “Dignified?” He spat again on the floor. “Do you think I’m a spineless coward like him? You can go fuck yourself back on Venus. Deimos is mine! They proclaimed so!”

  “Who exactly proclaimed so?”

  Yet another internal Party skullduggery. A tradition as ancient as the Winter Solstice.

  “The same who gifted me my arms. Don’t you envy them? They’re from a surgeon in Las Pallas. Twin-linked, they run with a real human spinal cord. They possess a will of their own, Commissar.” The weapon shifted from his hand to a tentacle that braced it against my partner’s temple. “And nasty surges too, as you may have noticed at the morgue.” Lao remained calm facing the cyberpsycho. Unlike Kai-foon, panting and sweating. “If you kill me, my arms may fire nonetheless. And un-brain the little white slut!”

  “What? With my own gun? Not a chance, airhead!” Ali cried. “Got rules down here!”

  “Indeed!” The criminal crushed the muzzle against her wounded cheek. “The first being not to meddle in Chinese business!”

  We were heading for disaster. A moment when time stands still…

  Excellent! A perfect opportunity for a sidelined cat like me to highlight the two miscalculations made by Mr. Paul Kai-foon—nephew of He Kai-foon, probably the most powerful Emporium chair of the Inner System. Did you grab your popcorn? Poured an unhealthy quantity of nutri-butter into it? Added some colorful toppings? M&Ms or Skittles? What team are you on?

  Anyway, here we go. First and foremost, Mr. Paul Kai-foon’s main misstep was to threaten my unstable partner—amounting to that using her favorite Desert Eagle. The second mistake—and for this one take note—was to hold Ali against him with one of his organic arms. What a lack of discernment when someone’s spent several million credits grafting chromium tentacles onto you at the price of your physical and mental health. Sadly, money or close relations with Party schemers can’t buy you a brain. Well, actually, on Titan—

  Paul Kai-foon howled. My wild partner had bitten him to the bone. He screamed so vehemently he probably scared off half the alien species crossing the Milky Way. So audibly, we barely heard the henchman’s crackerjack shot.

  Lead pellets crushed the metal pseudopod holding the precious rainbow-colored .50 caliber. Ali escaped. But too focused on retrieving her weapon before it hit the dirty ground, my associate let her guard down. And although our enemy had lost a tentacle, he still had five too many to tear her to pieces. I witnessed him tighten his grip. My partner’s face turned blue.

  “Ali! I will help you!” I shouted before the last free metal appendix whacked me. It sent me sky high, right towards the acid bath. “Ali! Help me!”

  I was oddly rescued. To my unpleasant surprise, I found myself upside down, my tail clenched in the pug’s mouth, a propeller sprouting from the base of his flea-ridden shoulders. Sacrebleu! An airborne dwarf bulldog! As if this congenital breed didn’t look stupid enough. The acid bath bubbled. His glossy orbs probing in the two opposite directions, the silly pug snorted. I thanked him with a grumble.

  Swift as the wind, Lao intervened. A demonstration of kung fu followed—the details of which I won’t go into, as my technical knowledge on the subject was limited to arcade games and Bloodsport. Lao seemed to predict his foe’s every move, swirling like a leaf in a gust, striking with lethal precision like a cobra. Kai-foon ended up losing his limbs gradually, including his organic ones. Ouch.

  On his knees before his executioner, humiliated, Mr. No-limbs-left didn’t await his sentence for long. Taking Kai-foon’s head in his hands, Linus Lao finally snapped the man’s neck with Bruce Lee’s signature scream—checking all the deadly clichés.

  Ali welcomed me in her arms. “Wow, that dude’s a brute…” she whispered. “He’s like 0% body fat and 100% invincible! Sexy-hot.”

  “Curb your hormones…”

  Panting, the High-Commissar looked down on us. His angel-pug and his adjutant joined him; the first with a clean towel coming out of his bottom for his boss to blot his sweaty face. Wait—excuse me?

  “A fine compliment… from a woman emerging unscathed from a crash in a crowded café,” Lao declared. Something flashed behind his lazy eye. “And unaffected by a lethal dose of TCM. Impressive constitution, I must say.” He then probed my partner from head to toe, stopping on her thigh.

  “Yeah, well… quit leering!” she exclaimed.

  “Your tattoo is leaking,” he said.

  Putting me down, Ali sponged with a leaflet the blood and ink from her brand-new cover-up tattoo. Indeed, it was already beginning to fade, without revealing the holo-barcode she kept trying to drape. “Great. So even inks are junk in Chinatown.”

  Lao didn’t insist further. In Mandarin, he requested his henchman to lug his victim’s body into the limousine. Once done the obvious android dismally turned to us.

  Ali pulled her gun. “The fuck you think you doin’?”

  The jade-eared colossus straightened. His boss gave him another order, and he went back to the car. The robotic driver, spooked behind the wheel, didn’t react as the android crushed the outside handles to seal the vehicle. Nailed coffin, its next stop almost certainly the acid bath to erase all evidence.

  Meanwhile, Lao threw at us a wad of red and gold Chinese bills. Right into a puddle of blood. “V¥200,000,” he asserted. “Enough to pay your parking fees.”

  “And bribe us,” I huffed. “The son of a diaspora administrative leader in Techno-space indulging in this kind of lewd facetiousness because of a deranged sentient bioweapon. Could make a few heads roll in the Cloud Cities…”

  “You have been lucky enough today, cat. Do not push it.”

  I obviously pushed it. “Humor me on your real mission, Lao? Save some poor Euro-girls, or the Emporium’s face? This whole debacle screams internal affairs. Everything’s ok on Venus?”

  Lao smirked. After adjusting his plum blossom, he welcomed his bottom-dispensing pet into his arms. They left us without answering.

  The Emporium of Steel, a vestige of Communist China gone under atomic fire, has managed to maintain the Middle Kingdom’s thousand-year-old heritage and, unfortunately, its same bad habits.

  Wait.

  What a conclusion far too gloomy for a festive day in Little China! And I’m not talking about New Year’s Eve, nor Qixi! But a much more personal celebration! As through Dr. Yaojie we had finally gained access to Avery’s ship!

  “My quest is at an end!” I rejoiced.

  Ali stuck her head out the rusty porthole to stare at me on the front wobbly hull. “Meanwhile, you ain’t very helpful inside, fleabag! I’ve been over Avery’s stuff solo with a fine-tooth comb for hours. Found nothing.”

  “Wha—what are you saying?” I stammered. A ball of lead slid into my stomach. “We’ve come all this way for nothing?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “Nothing?”

  My partner huffed as she pulled herself through the broken cockpit glass. “Someone’s already cleaned this place. Ain’t much left but grody trash.”

  “We must go back to town! Investigate! Interview suspects!”

  Ali scratched behind my ears. She knew, as I did, that my quest was a fool’s errand. Still, I would’ve given anything to get back that rented special Betamax edition of Chinatown we’d lent to Avery for just one night. Back then, we really counted as friends.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “Depends. How long have we been looking for it?”

  “Dunno. A fucking year? We must owe Blockbuster a billion bucks in late fees…”

  I breathed. Adjusted for inflation, her math checked out. “Let’s find another job… What about robbing the Federal Reserve?”

  Back to business!

  仕事に戻ろう！

  #03 AN INELUCTABLE DUEL

  第03話 避けられない決

  Deep Space observers from the United Colonies of the Belt had labeled the comet: Vanity. This nasty girl was a newcomer that had started its long dance within Solaris beyond the dwarf planet of Eris, in Kuiper. Its glittering veil of ice amazed many despite disastrous consequences. For Vanity subsequently crossed the highway linking Mars to the main asteroid belt, wreaking havoc throughout an entire area. Marbles, sometimes the size of a basketball, hit several probes and civilian ships at a prodigious speed, turning them into bits. And guess who appeared to be in the middle of the chain-reacting grapeshot? Me, the Kitty and—to get lost in the details—Ali.

  “We’re gonna die!” my partner shouted louder than the sound alerts from our radar already tearing my eardrums apart. “Look at the screens, Lee! We’re gonna fuckin’ die!”

  The control computer tried to plan the cleanest trajectory. After a beep, the report flashed up on the central CRT. It warned us it failed to find a path secure enough to lead our ship to safety through the giant comet’s tail. Such a conclusion made Ali curse even more. Something she possessed an innate talent for.

  “Full steam ahead, Kitty!” I roared as the first impacts could be heard on the armor. The cockpit windows started cracking under the shocks. We had to fold up the metal flaps and continue blind—at the speed we were flying, it didn’t make much difference anyway.

  The following minutes felt like a long winter night listening to the rain falling on the roof. Except that we weren’t relaxing with a good book under a cozy cabin quilt—but undoubtedly about to die pulverized in millions of desperate frozen bits instead!

  I tried to reassure Ali like adults always do. By lying. “We’re fine…”

  “You truthin’?”

  A more violent impact suddenly shook the cockpit. The dashboard turned off and a few sparks came out of the control panel along with the life support systems behind us. Shortly afterwards, a slight hissing sound of depressurization escaped from the cargo bay under our inclined seats.

  I prayed. Everything abruptly stopped. According to the computer, our Swallow had passed through Vanity’s trail. Miraculously, we were still breathing.

  “We’re alive?” Ali asked, patting my back to grab my tail with a trembling hand.

  “We are. But not for long.” On the central polychrome monitor of the dashboard, the busy control computer finished listing the damages by order of seriousness. According to the computer, both our heads were on the chopping block without quickly intervening on the shutdown drive or on the LSS. “What’s the nearest station?”

  Her harness unstrapped, my human refreshed the system map on her side CRT while I was trying to restart the Baltimore reactor despite the numerous leaks of Blue. A column of azure bubbles escaped from the hold and floated across the cockpit. The liquid stained the electronic instruments. Cleaning the cooler off her blond hair, Ali answered between two very distinguished swear words: “Yggdrasil! A few hours away from here… isolated from the celestial highway.”

  Yggdrasil. A name most hadn’t heard for a very long time. Once a simple M-type asteroid, 202 Yggdrasil escaped from the belt, and had been used as a base of exploration to set up colonies on Ceres, Vesta and Pallas before its slow agony. Many worlds shared the same fate when the new generations of post-nuclear engines developed by Lucie Baltimore and her engineers flooded the market during the Hard Reset.

  “Still occupied? It’s no longer a registered port,” Ali pointed out once Yggdrasil in sight.

  “That’s because it doesn’t belong to any corp or state… And according to our computer, you will be pleasantly surprised. Look!”

  The station had been dug into the pure ore which became an indestructible shell with numerous cylindrical windows dotting its surface. On the other side, lush gardens mottling the rock walls and real earth brought back from the original Blue Planet. Since its downfall, Yggdrasil has transformed into a gargantuan celestial terrarium of nickel and armored glass.

  “What’s the big stick?” Ali asked.

  “A tree.”

  The descendants of the first settlers had grown a magnificent tree at the heart of the gardens. It quickly became gigantic, nourished by the reduced gravity and mysterious botanical forces. At its full height, it spanned the entire planetoid. In contrast to the graceful emerald forest that carpeted its roots, its trunk and leaves had grown perfectly white.

  Ali whistled. “It’s definitely the most righteous thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Yet just a simple tree, dirt and tons of mutagenic green moss. Humans felt such melancholy for our home planet that I couldn’t understand why they had ransacked it in the first place.