From the porthole, I saw Ali watching what was happening near the ship in front of us. Our eyes met for a moment, and I could read on her lips: “diet kibble.”

  “Better off dead!” I shouted while my paw finally reached the bottom of the dashboard, activating the mechanical opening of both doors and windows. As well as the loudest horn in our known dimension.

  My partner immediately jumped outside, pointing her gun at Zéphyr. Surprised by the thunderous din, her target pivoted towards us, uncovered; turning her back to the human with the magnificent chin, who yelled: “What in the whole universe—wait! You brought privates!” He smiled. “Doesn’t make me no never mind, Maiden!”

  The laughing man shouted, and his machine gun produced a rain of bullets. It first hit the taxicab’s windshield, passing through the front compartment where I was. The rounds bent the armored glass, but it held. This wasn’t the case for the hood protecting the engine and the reservoir full of coolant which ended up covering the seat and… my face. Fortunately, the sticky alcohol allowed me to escape from the trap and graciously jump out of the vehicle thanks to the window I had previously opened.

  I landed outside and free. Once again, a fire ring enveloped the machine gun’s cannon. Perched on the rear-view mirror, I awaited my tragic fate. I meowed before closing my eyes.

  Violently tackled, I hit the ground just before bullets dismantled the hood of the taxicab. Zéphyr had saved me at the very last moment. What took her so long?

  Other projectiles ricocheted off the metal money drawers on the floor and got lost in the ceiling, activating the sprinklers. This incident triggered a silent light alarm throughout the hangar while the mobster prepared a new salvo.

  “Don’t hurt my pilot, you fuckin’ narbo!” my partner roared.

  Ali, this time taken as a target, retaliated. She fired a single shot towards the rascal with formidable precision. No one could handle a heavy gun like her. She was my human. She was the best in her field: murder. And I taught her almost everything.

  The leader of the robbers tried to reload the magazine of his weapon, unaware that his heart had been punctured a few seconds before. Adrenaline did the job, but his pressure dropped, and the bloodstream no longer reached the brain sufficiently. He was already in a coma when his shoulders touched the ground. Luckier than the average Joe, he died a few moments later.

  “Are you two, alright?” My voice was trembling, still in shock from this disaster. I was wet and frozen.

  Zéphyr got up with difficulty. Next to us, one of the metal drawers was opened, revealing wads of green bills and a much stranger spoil: an eight-inch gold diskette with suspicious Chinese sigils.

  More importantly, my partner has stayed on the ground. Blood dripped from her black suit and mixed with the clear firefighting fluid falling like an endless rain. I tried to talk to her again. My voice got lost in a groan.

  “Why are you whining, big baby? It’s just blood.” Her nose’s tip in a red puddle, my human smiled at me. Her hand compressed her hip. It wasn’t that bad after all, but she scared me. She deserved a scratch on the wrist. “What the fuck?” she screamed.

  “And the medical expenses? Have you thought about the bill? We don’t have insurance!”

  “God, Uncle Scrooge! I hate you so much right now!”

  “Can’t you understand we won’t be able to repay our debt thanks to your heroic outbursts!” I grunted to mask my joy of seeing her in one piece.

  “Like, you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?”

  “Language!”

  We hadn’t gotten into a fight in quite some time

  “Guys—” intervened Zéphyr.

  “What?” we said simultaneously.

  “These three ruffians had apparently planned to steal the diskette from me once we got back. So… thank you… I guess.”

  “You’re welcome!” my human dryly answered while sitting. “But you’d better hit the road, Jack…”

  “What? Wait!” Although our transvestite driver saved me, I didn’t share the same kindness. “We’re not letting her go! Do you understand who she is?”

  Zéphyr, known as the Data Maiden. This androgynous cyborg, a breakout prodigy, gained notoriety throughout the entire system for her link with the Data Brokers Guild. With an incredible bounty of C$800,000, she or he… whatever—as advanced cyborgs and other post-humans got rid of any sexual affiliation a long time ago—was the Knight on the Big Data’s chessboard. Frankly, I always thought she was an urban legend.

  “We had enough for today,” Ali declared. “Unless—” She winced in pain. “—unless you hope to go after her with this big fat gut of yours.”

  “By the 79 moons of Jupiter! You shall pay for this, woman!” I meowed, my ears backwards and my hair spiky. But soaking wet, my stand just made Ali and the Data Maiden laugh. Disgrace!

  “He’s so cute when he’s furious.” On her knees, the night-skinned androgynous thief blotted Ali’s wound with a torn piece of fabric from her driver’s uniform. “But more seriously, yes—I need to go. With the bounty, you’ll be able to repair your vessel. As for the hospital fees, I will contact a good friend who will mend you for free. She’s the ship’s chief medical officer.”

  “Thank you,” I replied as she tried to help my partner get back on her feet before this one refused.

  “It’s the least I can do, furry ball. I wasn’t interested in the money. This is more important,” she said while picking up the floppy disk.

  The golden Chinese diskette that the Maiden shook to dry it off must have been worth a lot of cash for her to tread the boards as a taxicab driver. Of course, I had perceived her job smelled fishy. My sister Ali focused on steroids-grown muscles, while I specialized in gray matter.

  Halfway to her Swift-0, the data thief stopped, looking down. “See nothing personal here, you know. We’re all just trying to make our way. The best we can.” And she ultimately left after adding: “Maybe we’ll bump into each other again! You seem like funny psychos.”

  Before fleeing away, the Data Maiden abandoned the boxes near the criminal’s corpse. Thus, she validated the theory of a robbery that had gone wrong. When the security arrived a few minutes later, we were the heroes of the day. And with a small bribe, nobody cared about her missing Swift.

  This whole story surely left a bitter taste in our mouth. A feeling of defeat and humiliation the swimming pool under the warm artificial sun couldn’t appease, even a day later.

  This experience painfully reminded me you can never trust cyborgs. Something to do with their synthetic optics. Truth and lies hide in the human eyes, windows to the soul. This trick saved my life in the past. But with an enhanced being as sophisticated as the Data Maiden, it was like staring at a dangerous one-way glass.

  “She undoubtedly played us like rookies, with her little face of distressed damsel,” I said to Ali right after the end of the daily Brett Maverick featuring a bank robbery and dispensed on a couple of giant screens suspended by drones. “There were Chinese symbols on the diskette. Do you think this is another affair involving Venus? Something stirs in the veiled heights of the Cloud Cities…”

  Until then, Ali was sulking on her deckchair; with a brick of sour juice stuck between her breasts swathed in bandages and a pair of straws between her teeth. Only inaudible grunts emanated from her mouth since the departure of the sexually unclassifiable mugger. “Quit your crazy theories,” my human finally mumbled as she squeaked her rainbow flip-flops.

  “Admit it—it’s not my speculation that unsettles you so,” I answered, seated on my motorized buoy, a prize from my diet kibbles’ package.

  “Duh!” the dormant volcano exploded, spitting out her plastic straws with infinite curls. “These bandages will leave nasty tan marks! Like, this is a nightmare, Lee! A fuckin’ nightmare!”

  “Don’t worry, you heal fast…” I chuckled, while my buoy slowly slipped towards the ledge.

  Done extrapolating, I closed my eyes as the pre-recorded sound of the waves crushing on some forgotten rocky shores lulled me before a roller-skating server came to bring us our Blizzard milkshakes.

  “I swear that if we run into that borg again, I’ll square her fuckin’ angel face,” Ali finally concluded, biting on her plastic spoon.

  Back to business!

  仕事に戻ろう！

  #05 THE MELLIFLUOUS CAVERNS

  第05話 甘美な洞窟

  The infamous Hum often sabotaged my sleep. Humans had already encountered this infernal phenomenon on Earth-that-was, without truly discovering its origin. Back then, numerous speculations arose in the scientific community: from spontaneous otoacoustic emissions to tectonic plates’ movements—unproven theories supposed to become ancient history thanks to the void. Alas, a low-pitched droning continued to drive the most sensitive of us crazy through space, time and dimensions.

  “Let’s see what we picked up earlier,” I grumbled while sitting on my spot.

  I pushed the cassette tape into the radio player and started an analysis of my ultimate recording. I have perfected my equipment over the last three years. By fine-tuning my baseline to the correct frequency, I could flawlessly isolate the unpleasant cosmic hum, which had never been as intense as it was near the main belt. That day, with the volume cranked to its peak, my keen feline ears could detect even the faintest harmonics of the ominous melody.

  After a moment, a murmur resonated. “An asteroid vibration? I knew it!”

  Drawing on my most recent measurements, my hypothesis was on the verge of confirmation. In my opinion, this celestial hum was a magnetic resurgence from the main belt. A rocky symphony. In other words, something mineral inside the asteroids was singing in the shower. And it warbled as badly as Bob Dylan.

  “I need to—” A shadow interrupted my train of thought. “What’s going on? Sacrebleu!” The Maiden’s face appeared in front of me, behind the cockpit’s windows. Someone had printed a wanted poster before sticking it on an old nutrigel can. “Ali?” I asked after grabbing my microphone. “Are you done with your silly antics?”

  As an answer to my question, the metal box suddenly exploded. The data thief’s identikit turned into bits. Bullets sparked as they ricocheted off the Kitty’s armor. Outside, my beloved weirdo of a partner was improving her shooting skills in her white and pink space suit. She had designed a proper floating range. Her clay pigeons displayed the effigies of the Maiden, Hemingwest or the Xerox slaver we had come across shortly after the first asteroid clusters.

  Standing still on the drifting rock’s dusty surface on which we had anchored the Kitty, Ali pulled her trigger again. A sphere of smoke sprayed from her cannon. Inertia gently propelled her backwards while the silent bullet demolished her new target. Blow after blow, my human let loose, waltzing in the void. She ultimately returned to the ship with her jetpack.

  She didn’t resume the conversation until she took off her suit out of the airlock. “What’s up, Doc?” she asked before removing her sweat-soaked shirt.

  “The origin of the Hum does seem mineralogical. Asteroids vibrating and producing sound,” I replied as I heard her climbing the ladder. “It’s rather odd.”

  It caught my partner’s attention. While undressing, she moved closer to the screens and quickly examined the information I had obtained. “Tremors here on the ship? Impossible because of the vacuum. How?”

  The remark appeared pertinent and my explanation simple: “Not a clue.”

  She pouted. The refined results remained unclear, even to me. I would have to wait a few hours more for the computer to scrutinize another megabyte of data and finally determine a potential hypocenter of the song I heard while sleeping.

  “Anyway! Enough with your homework, hairball!” Ali ultimately said as she gently pushed me out of my pilot chair and escorted me downstairs to the hold. “It’s shower time!”

  “Ugh!” I hated bathing. But even worse, I despised licking myself. Nutrigel had the well-known effect of acidifying the saliva. For a cat, it could mean ending up as bald as Captain Picard.

  “I’ll go after you,” Ali pursued while heading back to the cockpit. “And watch your buttocks if you leave any hair behind. I don’t wanna pull a Critter out of the drain again!”

  “Alright. Alright! I concede this time. But in exchange, don’t leave your underwear—” A rubber band snapped, and I witnessed her dirty underpants nestling on a lever. “—lying around up there…”

  I began to understand why no mate lingered very long in her gravitational field. My human was wild. Impossible to tame.

  A few minutes later, I heard the control computer emit an audible alarm as I came out of the bath module. It hadn’t finalized its analysis but had updated the Alliance database—a weekly routine. My cat-size towel on the neck, I was back in the cockpit. Ali floated naked towards the Blaupunkt, turning off the Go-Go’s. After finishing her mug of melted marshmallows with an inch of hot chocolate, she handed me my own sugar rush in my favorite Family Ties cup.

  “Any interesting new contracts?” I asked.

  Several names lit up on the lateral screen Ali turned on. The first one was double underlined. Our organization offered gifts and vouchers for an extraordinary capture. “Cixi Mixcoatl a.k.a. Thunder Sword. A lovely little butt worth C$200,000,” she explained to me. “A super-bonus-mega-death contract, because she got scanned by CCTV on an unoccupied asteroid in the heart of the belt: Yoyodyne84.”

  I loudly grunted, my chops loaded with a multicolored sweet foam. “Another discount at Rogers Video…”

  “What do you have against Rogers? It’s a decent renter. And unlike Blockbusters, they didn’t send robot-collectors after us.”

  “They lease VHS!” I yelled while getting angry at this blasphemy to the sacrosanct Betamax. “This standard belongs to the past—what do you think I am? An Amish?” My rant done, I could focus on the contract again: “You talked about Yoyo-something84. It sounds like a UCB mining platform, doesn’t it?”

  The computer beeped anew. It had just finished my calculations on the origin of the Hum emissions much faster than expected.

  “Disused,” replied Ali before consulting the result on the central monitor. “But apparently in the large area isolated by the computer as one of the hum’s sources. It’s near Eunomia.”

  “Perfect. We could kill two birds with one stone. Ready-go?”

  We immediately throttled back in the heart of the belt. Ceres City and its eighteen ports could wait a week or two until we have a few thousand credits to spend on bowling and milkshakes.

  It took two long days to hit Yoyodyne84 because of electromagnetic interference. Dozens of vessels of all sizes and appearances were already pressed against the parking cells occupying one of the croissant-shaped hemispheres of the asteroid.

  “Kinda crowded for an abandoned mine,” Ali remarked as she helped me to clamp the Kitty on the steel pontoon.

  The foldable bridge of the station had finally reached our airlock, and my human could put her magnetic boots on. Immediately outside the Swallow, gynoid hostesses analogous to vacuum cleaners from the beginning of the Atomic Era greeted us. Amid the relentless welcoming formalities in multiple languages, they invited us to follow them to the station’s old refectory, treating us as if we were tsarist ambassadors. Shortly afterwards, we entered a huge hall segmented in several levels. It looked like the bleachers of a giant boxing arena. Food and drink stalls that rose from the floor between the tables and chairs occupied each of them. The air smelled of festivities and grilled meat.

  “C$200,000 wouldn’t hide on such a busy station, would they?”

  “Sh’yeah…” Ali whispered back, fleeting worried glances over her shoulder.

  The improvised gathering swarmed with people. A multitude of palladium badges gleamed with silvery reflections, marking them all as bounty hunters of the Cronian Alliance.

  “And so close to Ceres and Eunomia?” I replied. “You bet such a reward attracted all the belt’s auxiliaries here. There must be a hundred of our lovely colleagues!”

  In this heterogeneous crowd, I could discern some great names of the Alliance’s register. At a table in front of us, gobbling a salt-saturated hot dog, sat Dicklan Hemingwest. A former TMC sniper and one of Nigel’s—the bounty hunter we met on Yggdrasil—seven half-brothers. Leaving the unisex toilets, the grim Beverly B. Bones and her crew of zombies were dragging their bare feet to join the Pack of Knives; the Freak-wolf of Amalthea leading a regiment of mutant auxiliaries. Ahmed Sheik—a tall, bearded man covered with weaving neon tattoos under his fishnet crop tee, was dozing near the 3D-pinball machine with Debbie N’Guyen, the Butcher of Tiananmen Station, still showcasing her Emporium uniform.

  Although most of the others were unknown to me, a few stood out—like a samurai in traditional attire, wearing a broad straw hat and a white pearl wristlet.

  “It’s a circus!” I cried while stealing a bent cigarette from a random stranger’s pack lying on a foldable table. “Like a Billy Idol concert!”

  “Lee?” Ali asked, looking down at the center of the room. “I now believe Mixcoatl was on this station.”

  She lifted me on her right shoulder, and I could glance at what she was pointing at. Behind the safety railings made of empty Budweiser kegs and a crowded bar stood a pyre several meters high. On a stake had been impaled the gutted corpse of a young woman. Devoured by ethanol flames. There wasn’t much Cixi Mixcoatl left except its macuahuitl, a giant magnesium alloy sword—pie spade—stuck through her charred chest.

  “Sacrebleu!” I cursed.

  “Yeah…”

  “What a waste of my time! Without this hum story, we’d have come for nothing!”

  “Like, totally. I’ll get us a drink…”

  On our way to a soda fountain, a jingle suddenly came from the loudspeakers hanging on the four corners of the room. A candid pre-recorded female voice started requesting quietness. Once Beverly B. Bones silenced the last spoilsports, a new robotic voice could be immediately heard. The mysterious orator finally began his announcement with a metallic tone: “Greetings and welcome to Yoyodyne84, chums! We are deeply honored by your presence.” A few shouts from some elements of the audience who were rather too drunk welcomed the statement. “Calm down! Be quiet!” But nobody was listening. “Come on, shut the fuck up!” thundered the voice. “Grand. Thank you. First, let me introduce myself. I am the Dungeon Master, an Alliance AI. And we are gathered here today to celebrate the fall of Thunder Sword!” A group of mutants with a heavy arsenal shouted a cry of victory just behind us. They immediately stopped once the accesses to the main pontoon locked while the other routes to the heart of the station remained open. “As well as many of you. Sadly.” A deathly silence instantly invaded the room. The audience stood still, except for the samurai. The mysterious warrior gently slid towards an exit from the refectory. “Behold as we present you the Purge!” exclaimed this Dungeon Master. “Now confined to the station, unable to go back to the docks, here are the rules of this amazing event—sponsored by Budweiser. And the rules are rather simple: only one Auxiliary of Justice, and I say only fucking one, will be able to leave Yoyodyne84 alive. Got that, chums?”