Kitty kitty, p.12
KITTY KITTY, page 12
We overlooked a huge square room bathed in a greenish halo coming from large canopies invisible from the outside, covered with mutant honeysuckles. The floors, rusty metal mezzanines, had almost completely caved.
The air duct had recently given way, sending us sliding down into the basement. The stale atmosphere clung to our skin as we tumbled. The fall was rougher than I’d anticipated, and my clumsy human sprawled forward with a jarring thud, landing in front of two grimy, plastic half-domes, each as big as a taxicab. The entire basement was filled with them, rows of transparent domes in various states of filth, numbering dozens and stacked across eight damp, dripping levels.
“That’s an amio-tank…” my favorite bounty hunter pursued, tapping the spheroid with her index finger.
The surface appeared to be soft. A bubble escaped from the base and rolled against its wall, bringing up a partially decomposed corpse swollen by humidity. Its white skin grazed the globe’s envelope, depositing brownish mucus along the way.
Ali let out a muffled scream. I had to retreat in disgust, and Braun broke his silence: “It’s now a grave.”
“Gag me with a spoon!” Ali reacted, brushing dust from an old engraving.
“That’s not a regular amio,” I said. “See the markings?”
“That’s Monsutā-made,” Ali concluded. Her knowledge of the subject was beyond question.
The Techno-Marine’s clone hives were an open secret, yet precisely the kind of oversight the authorities preferred to sweep under their soiled little rug. Still, I hadn’t realized Big Bad M was tangled up in it. How naive of me…
The Marine slalomed between the clone incubation units. His gun rose and his finger on the trigger, he finally expressed his full resentment: “To hell with them! They haven’t emptied anything at all! They left everything… everyone. They have no decency!”
It was the first time I saw an officer questioning the Corps. Braun was harboring a huge bitterness.
Who wouldn’t? The army has been involved in hundreds of unethical partnerships but also led its share of borderline operations during the last century. The failed Paperclip, Big Itch, Holmesburg, SHAD, the Eros’s experiment, the Metal Rain tomfoolery with the Contras… Well, you got the picture. “Lots of dirt. Lots of rugs. Mars should open a bazaar.”
“Silence!” Braun cut me off.
Did I say that out loud?
“Is that a kid?” Ali asked, brandishing her gun.
Braun placed his hand on my partner’s weapon, before dimming the flashlight strapped to his barrel. He then approached another incubator. A small shadow was hidden behind. “It’s a child. A little girl.”
The darkness and foul odor of the place had masked her from my keen senses. For the Marine to see Samantha Smith within that hunched goblin, draped in lichen and half-decayed plastic waste, he must have had an extraordinary paternal instinct buried deep beneath layers of discipline and military conditioning. In any case, it wasn’t our target, but a brand-new child with big, bright terrified eyes.
“How many feral kids roam Ceres18?” I asked.
“The fuck Rasputin’s doing?” Ali breathed.
“You monsters! Don’t you have any empathy? Can’t you see she’s distressed?” The Marine moved closer to the child. One hand outstretched with palm up—as if to a wild animal. “It’s all right, girl…” he whispered, careful not to stumble.
“C$50 she’s gonna Cowabunga his butt,” Ali bet.
“I hope his shots are up to date.”
“What about us?”
“We will never set foot in a vet.”
“Sh’yeah. Vaccines are for siss—”
Braun screamed before falling backwards into a pool of icky mud. “Shit! She bit me!” he growled, massaging his right hand.
“Ali, you’re prophetic,” I sighed.
“Where did she go?” Braun snarled, sponging blood onto his silt-stained uniform.
We found out quickly. Behind the large incubator stood a way out: a cluttered corridor leading to what seemed to be a laboratory. Between the mummified corpses welded to the floor and the walls, piled up anarchic pillars of computers in operation. On the shelves, sizzling monochrome screens showed a multitude of cyan-colored graphics through the dust. Plastic tiles appeared in places not covered with a thick layer of garbage and rotten 192-column punched cards. It smelled horrible. We were exposed to an exquisite mixture of mold, sweat and…
“Crap?” Ali concluded.
“It’s unlikely to find a charnel house like that on Ceres. We’re a few dozen meters from one of the belt’s most active ports!” I murmured while inspecting a body before Braun once again imposed silence.
A collapsed desk occupied the center of the room. Mold had grown on the old wood. But the worst was behind. Next to a mountain of waste stood an ancient medical bed. Its monitors glowed in the darkness, and we could hear a respirator’s agony.
“Braun?” Ali said. I heard the soldier swallow as we approached the bed. “There’s like, a freakin’ dude.”
“I know,” the MP reacted, then at the foot of the mattress. There, the skeleton of a blond woman in a stained lab coat was still seated on a wobbly chair.
Under the dirty off-white sheets covered with moisture and dead bed bugs lay an old man. His eyes welded by dust and a purple mycosis. His skin was a shroud ready to break at the slightest pressure, we could discern every blood vessel, every tendon and every bone that drew his limbs and his dead face. He was—spoiler alert—a sticky version of Anakin Skywalker at the end of The Return of the Jedi.
“Professor Herbert Poppendick…” Braun mumbled.
I knew that cognomen. Poppendick was once a famous geneticist. I heard his wife was even greater. But mankind’s history somehow forgot about her.
“Funny name. An acquaintance?” Ali asked him as she kept a handkerchief over her nostrils and mouth.
“The former Surgeon General and Director of the TMC cloning program…” Taking him off his ventilator was a gamble. Most of the epidermis remained welded to his nose, a simple warped cartilage. The long plastic tube crumbled in the hand of the Marine.
“They forgot him here? Not cool!” pursued my copilot. “Poor guy looks like he’s at least two hundred years old…”
I thought Braun had just smiled for the first time, but the lighting had played a trick on me. The poor MP tried somehow to hide a mixture of disgust and hatred. “Close enough. This bastard fought in the Somme.”
“Sum of what?” Ali asked, rummaging through the bedside.
“You mean he’s a boomer?” I intervened, slightly flabbergasted.
Skeptical, my partner cast aside a framed picture of the man wearing a US Navy uniform standing next to his wife, shaking the hand of a grumpy Japanese scientist in a lab coat. Probably a consultant or contractor from Big Bad M. “That wilted mummy is from Earth-that-was, uh?”
The individual spasmed unexpectedly, making us jump. “My little ones…” he mumbled.
Horror! The corpse had spoken. The lich had even slightly straightened. Ali gagged, almost dropping her weapon into a pile of blood-soaked clothes.
“Professor? Can you hear us?” Braun’s voice was barely audible. With his mouth and nose behind his elbow, he was inspecting the excited instruments. Most were very outdated with their apparent memory chip the size of a cigarette pack.
“My little ones…” Poppendick croaked again.
His single line of dialogue looped like those Mattel toys. He couldn’t whisper anything more. His voice became weaker with each iteration. His now natural breathing evolved into a hoarse cough. His rib cage was crushing his lungs.
“We’ll never be able to get him out of here,” Ali whined. “Look at him, he’s fused with the fuckin’ springs!”
“Poppendick’s the least of our worries now,” Braun mumbled.
Paralyzed by horror at Professor Poppendick’s discovery, we barely noticed the shadows closing in around us. Out of the darkness, nearly twenty deranged children emerged, just like the one we’d chased minutes ago, their laughter echoing off the walls in mocking, distorted tones. They crept out from piles of trash, slithered from cracks in the walls, moving with a fluid, unnatural silence that sent chills down my spine. No eerie glow in their eyes this time. These were lifeless, hollow puppets, driven by some primal instinct, abandoned to their own twisted demise. And each puppet clutched a battered, rusting machine gun.
“Got a plan, Captain?” Ali coughed. Raised by our enemies, spores and dust entered our throat.
“I’m thinking about it.”
Braun wasn’t reassuring. With his semi-automatic weapon, he could quickly zero half a dozen Poppendick’s legacy-clones, but then? My feline eyes were seeing more of them.
“Can’t you ponder faster, useless sapiens?” I asked as I witnessed the foul spectacle. “Because I don’t want to die tonight…”
“To-night!” my human yelled.
She had thrown herself at Braun, causing him to startle. The goblins seized the opportunity and rushed us.
“What are you doing?” Braun reacted.
Undiplomatic, Ali ordered us to close our eyes between two unholy curses. The Soviet and I complied, and we heard a first bang near my tail, then a second one slightly further down the hall. My partner had detonated the two flash grenades hanging on the Marine’s belt, blinding these creatures of the night. Brilliant move. In every way.
“Take cover!” Braun yelled.
The following moment, a rain of lead warmed my back hair. Their first line mowed down like ripe wheat by the MP and Ali, the wild children immediately returned to their hiding places.
“Well done! What’s next?” cried Braun in quite a monotonous tone given the gravity of the situation. I did believe that guy had seen his share of desperate scenarios in the past.
“Run!” I shouted as I perceived movements again, among the rubble.
“And the Surgeon General? We must bring him to justice!”
“Fuck him!” Ali answered.
First hard to convince, a new onslaught of psycho-children made Braun change his mind. We had never dashed so fast before. Bullets whizzed everywhere, bursting most of the globes. A yellow liquid with a strong smell of over-fermented alcohol spread over the ground of the man-made Panamanian jungle.
“Almost out!” I yelled, fortuitous red exit doors in sight.
“Good! I’m running short on ammo,” my partner said.
“Last clip too!” Braun informed us. But right after the last alley of globes, the Marine slipped on a metallic patch, ready to be devoured on the spot by our pursuers. “Shit!” he shouted. Reloading his weapon, he courageously faced his incoming end. “Just run! I’ll— ”
“This ain’t no place to be a fuckin’ hero, Rasputin!” Ali cut him off as she had immediately come back, punching her way through two rotten monstrosities until one deeply bit her thigh.
“Ali!” I panicked.
My favorite bounty hunter proceeded to smash the homicidal little girl we met before straight to the ground with her gun’s grip. She then stomped on the abomination’s neck, multiple times—as she 100% solved the moral dilemma expressed this morning.
My partner finally grabbed Braun by his vest’s collar, dragging him to the rusted steel frame of the emergency doors while he was shooting at a new wave of assailants with both guns.
The Marine thanked her, his prominent muscles covered in gore.
“Keep your thanks, Matrix! We have a situation here. The gates are sealed!” I uttered.
“Unseal them, dummy!” my associate ordered while giving me access to the corroded distribution board up her head.
We heard a roar. Behind us, Braun had spent our last bullets and, under a greenish halo of light, started fighting hand-to-hand with the remaining twisted vanguard clones, as more were approaching in the distance. Gruesomely Homeric.
“Lee!” Ali insisted, bringing my wandering mind back to reality.
“Alright! Alright! I need a hair clip. A left-handed garlic press. And a diesel poppet.”
“Here’s a clip. That’s all I have!”
“That’ll do!” The right wires switched off, the doors slid up abruptly. Thank you, Richard Dean Anderson!
“Well done!” the blood-covered Soviet congratulated me, before eyeballing my partner. “Now, do you want to be true to your reputation?”
Ali immediately curled her lips before pursuing: “I don’t know what naughty stuff you heard about me, dude, but this isn’t th—” Braun handed her a white phosphorus grenade. “Oh Captain, my Captain!” Ali moaned before biting her lips.
That Soviet boy knew how to talk to psychotic ladies as she instantly exchanged me for the formidable incendiary device. I couldn’t blame her for this fair deal.
My partner smiled while she threw the explosive apparatus into the closest globe. Three seconds later, the whole first level was engulfed in flames. So was her left leg.
“We’re done here!” Braun concluded, putting out the sparks on Ali’s bottom.
Once outside, the hidden factory was nothing but a huge inferno spewing sprays of flames through its canopies. Poppendick had disappeared with his Monsutā Morlocks. Good riddance!
Despite my supervision, my Pop Tart jumped out of the Milton toaster. It tried to commit suicide a few centimeters further against the microwave, and this useless armless F.A.B. couldn’t catch it.
I cursed as I pulled a mutant fly off the cream cheese before Ali climbed down from the cockpit to sit next to me in the small kitchen of the hold. She seemed pensive, applying a burn aid on her heavily injured inner thigh. Her Dark Sun holo-code was gone for a while. Until it irremediably grew back again.
“Want some hot cocoa?” I asked. Blossom Child’s one-hit wonder gave way to a brief info-ads segment on the Blaupunkt. Seconds after, the hold’s speakers vibrated to the frenzied beat of Footloose. Luckily, this was more in line with my morning mood. “How many straws?”
“Five—wow!” she went on, handing me her wrist-implant where I could glance at the front page of the day. “Check this out, hairball!”
“Two twits blow up the Police’s coolant reserves of Ceres18,” I read on the screen. “That’s undoubtedly us! And nothing about the base and Monsutā’s amio-tanks?”
She snorted while turning on Benàn’s old VR set she put on her head. “Jack shit! Rasputin covered it up.” She stopped and loudly blew into her game’s cartridge. “The Corps doesn’t want to make the headlines with Poppendick and his clones as a méchoui.”
“At least Al-Dhedi canceled parts of our accumulating debts,” I concluded by putting things in perspective.
The autopilot guided us towards the heart of Ceres City, following the restricted inner ring highway reserved for spacecraft. Through the small window of the airlock, I caught sight of the sprawling residential grid of the suburbs, stretching endlessly to the curved painted horizon. It stood in stark contrast to the void of space. The subterranean vault belonged to the largest metropolises in the system. And on its smog-choked streets, the hunt for contracts never ceased.
Back to business!
仕事に戻ろう！
#07 HONOR AMONG THIEVES
第07話 盗賊の間の名誉
Most animal species that once populated Earth had already succumbed to extinction long before humanity set foot on Titan. Indeed, the few remnants of Earth’s fauna preserved after the third World War found it exceedingly difficult to survive in the cosmos. Have you ever attempted to administer a tapeworm pill to an uncooperative dog? Quite the challenge, I presume. Now, imagine forcing it to monthly consume high-g sugar. An exercise in futility, wouldn’t you agree?
Besides hating solitude, humans appeared to be particularly gloomy about their existence in our good ol’ Blue Planet. It didn’t take much more for megacorporations to turn melancholia into an extremely lucrative business. Clear-sighted marketing suit-teams immediately pushed the development of genetically manufactured animals. Dodos made a comeback. On Black Friday, nonetheless!
But miracles do exist in the universe. Some species managed to survive with unaltered DNA. I, for example, was a real Maine Coon—not a vat critter. I framed my certified pedigree over the Kitty’s relief valves.
I met a natural fish for the first time at the Ceres City Water Market. Two years before, during our previous visit. And I remember perfectly this sublime small white koi dappled with red. Back to Ceres, this delicate creature was still dancing in its fresh filtered water basin; its silky scales shining under the colored kandeel lanterns. I couldn’t believe it—even an hour later. “What magnificence! The best meal of my lives!” I cried out.
Behind the white plastic counter in front of me, Germaine snickered. “I kept dat lil’ one ’specially for ya, Frenchy!”
Germaine O’Maley, Bewitch’s Endora’s doppelganger with her shaggy rust-colored perm and blue mascara, became the chef of the most popular restaurant in the water market decades ago, before Nixon’s impeachment. I befriended this lovely lady on my last visit. At the time, Ali and I had secured her annual profit in one single week. In hindsight, that explained some of our financial problems prior to the Blockbuster matter.
Germaine served me a pint of soda from the chrome implant sticking out of her right hand. Her skinny shoulders bore a fiberglass collar holding more than ten bricks of alcohol and various Campa Cola flavors from vanilla to Buffalo wings. Unfortunately, they tasted from gasoline to liver cancer. “Isn’t little Blondie with ya?” she asked with the thickest Irish accent I have ever heard.
I couldn’t answer fluently, my mouth full of carp curry: “Dunno. Widout any interesting contracts since this VR porno-program smugglers, Ali had disappeared in the Red Lights District despite the AIDS pandemic. ’been there for seven Martian rotations now. I’m starding to worry.”
“She’s young and having fun. Let her be.”
Germaine turned on the color TV set. A bikini-bimbo with a whale spout and her unbearable McKee hosted the evening info-ads on SpaceFox, the crappiest network of the system. Between two insufferable giggles, they started reporting the latest news on a ninth planet’s potential discovery beyond the Dwarves. The entire system has been talking about it for a few days. Settlers and corporations were in turmoil. Pirates too.
