#18 THE BLAZING FIRMAMENT
The route to Mars and the Middle System has been shut down. We owed this catastrophic and unprecedented situation to the powerlessness of the Technocratic Government’s army against Kuiper’s pirates. Taking advantage of the chaos that followed the Rings Civil War, buccaneers coming from the New Worlds freely plundered on their way to the main asteroid belt.
Ali and I have been stuck in Jupiter’s orbit for weeks, waiting for fate to turn in our favor. I hated this. Although, let’s face it, alongside a sugar-fed Koviràn, boredom was a luxury I could only dream of.
“I’m bored!” I yelled that day. The aromatic balms and ointments brought tears to my eyes. Ali, a black towel over her face, was being massaged in front of me. She had been tortured that way for at least a thousand rotations. “How much longer is this inquisition going to take?”
My plea managed to receive an effortless grunt. I reiterated my question with harmless taps on her nose. This bold gesture finally elicited a response half-smothered by the damp cloth: “Gimme a break… Unless you have a safe conduct to Ceres, stop ruining my evening…”
“This is preposterous!” I imploded. “What eukaryote would enjoy being smeared with schmaltz, and languorously twiddled by a robot?”
Flustered without reason, Ali pulled the wet towel from her forehead and threw it at me. The hateful projectile missed me by an inch and flew through the weighted satin curtain separating us from the lockers of the steam room.
“Your aim needs practice, partner.”
Letting out a sigh, my copilot rolled on her belly before the robot could spray her bruise-covered back with massage oil. “You never shut it, do you?”
“Good evening, Kitty-kuru!” suddenly uttered a voice. With his head tucked between the two transparent veils, a strange Japanese man grinned after removing the cloth that had landed on his face. “Am I the only one in a sunny mood?”
“Look at that! Here’s Yoyodyne’s grandpa!” Ali exclaimed as she sat up to face him. “It’s been years! ‘Sup?”
“Well, there were highs and lows…” answered this one, unable to divert its glance from my partner’s oiled chest. “I heard you were around. Haven’t you received the news?”
The visitor couldn’t hear a response from my sapiens. Furious, the masseur-bot had already thrown its brush and the oil cup at his face. Binary remonstrances erupted before a cartoonish chase through Medina’s women baths began.
I raised a whisker as Ali grabbed another towel from a rack. “Was he the pervert who had escorted us out of the Mellifluous Caverns? The Oda pilot and poor karaoke singer? I wonder what he wanted.”
“Kumo Raïda, yes…” The terminal on her wrist emitted an audible alarm. Ali had received a message and consulted it immediately. “We have been summoned by the Alliance. I think it’s related,” she informed me, quickly pulling her pink jilbab over her shoulders.
“What for? We won something? Did they hold a new shady raffle?”
“Nope. They’re gathering local personnel to escort a big supercruiser to Ceres. This appeared to be our ticket out of the Outer System!”
“Unless it’s another Purge…” I grumbled.
With this relatively good news, we left the university’s hammam. Beneath a reservoir of the hydroponic gardens surrounding the building, Kumo Raïda was “meditating” on a bench. On several occasions, he couldn’t resist discreetly opening his eyes when groups of plump young women passed by, their transparent veils hiding nothing of their caramel skin and curves.
“The meeting is on the Alliance flagship presently anchored at Ibn al-Shâtir Pier,” the bounty hunter informed us. He hadn’t escaped unscathed. A golf ball-sized lump protruded from his white chonmage. “It is an opportunity to reach the belt before pirates could attack Medina.”
“Could the convoy also take us to Mars?”
“Mars? What do you intend to do on the Red Planet?
“Family Business!” Ali explained.
“An honorable motive. Family is everything…” the samurai concluded while getting up.
Crossing the busy souk surrounding the port, my sapiens salivated so abundantly at the sight of the pastry stalls that I had to dodge the drops slowly falling from her chin. Right after, we passed by the backyard of an old mosque where refugees from the Rings were crowding around the stone porticos. The place of worship and its environs were separated from the Medina’s shipyard by high iron and concrete barriers. There, Raï and Ali had to break through the heavily guarded checkpoint thanks to their platinum badges, and reached the descending elevators to the Alliance’s mothership.
“Sacrebleu! This is a hell of a nef!” I exclaimed once the Plexiglass door opened on the access balcony.
The Calamity was indeed an impressive supercruiser counting at least a hundred cannons protecting a gray steel and aluminum hull as tall as the Sears Tower. It was certainly one of the gas giants’ most powerful warships, specially designed to hunt down ship wreckers and other pirate crews across the New Worlds.
“Ali! Will you be quiet?” I whispered as the various conscripts began to gather in the mess hall. Sat on a table, my partner was scratching her reddened neck and limbs. Her coughing fit became so violent that Raï’s concern grew. “It’s nothing…” I reassured him. “Ali has a severe allergic reaction to any kind of meeting or organization. If Ms. Fonda programmed a holographic keynote, my copilot will suffer an aneurysm.”
The Alliance’s Pirate Hunters Division was led by a former Marine staff admiral named Janice J. Fonda. I was thrilled yet anxious to meet her.
The former admiral made her entrance from the catwalk, instantly establishing an unbreakable silence. Quickly going downstairs, she looked at all the auxiliaries mobilized with three squared eyes displaying a static snow. Contrary to Yoyodyne, the memo had gathered a rather homogeneous group of Homo sapiens. To tell the truth, only Raï and Fonda stood out of the lot. He, with his traditional yukata, and she, with her transparent plastic skin reflecting the white LED lights of the canteen.
“Let’s get started,” the cyborg began, positioning herself in the center of the makeshift amphitheater. She had the croaking voice of an inveterate smoker. “Pirates from the New Worlds now roam around the majority of Saturn’s beltway and half the Jovian moons. Naturally, the Technocratic Marine Corps is unable to stem the fiasco caused by their absurd war.” The front row, hanging on her every word, nodded. “As you know, the situation is deteriorating by the hour. Our Jovian forces must fall back too. Thus, we are organizing this emergency convoy. Being targeted remaining non-negligible, we are waiting for the arrival of the G.T.C. and a TMC flotilla to reach Ceres02. Any questions?”
The summary was rather brief. The assembly hesitated. Finally, a short man with a rocket launcher on his shoulder spoke up after taking a step forward: “Which Marine squadron are we talking about?”
“Relevant as always, Armitage,” Fonda commented. “We’re joined by the T.M.S. Yosemite and some destroyers that escaped the raid on Miranda.”
“What about the G.T.C.?” continued a pilot I recognized as Rao, from the Survivor clan. His Venusian accent was as thick as his prominent forehead.
The Calamity’s commander waved at a photocell sensor. The mess’ screens lit up and displayed the details of the Galactic Trade Company’s fleet. As she stepped up from the center of the room, fine white lines drew the holographic ghosts of the listed vessels. In addition to the twelve supercargos, the commercial megacorporation gathered eight battleships, seven destroyers and four cruisers, including the Marco Polo. The man-o’-war met with the approval of everyone—except for Raï, who apparently knew nothing about warships; and Ali who had passed out.
“Vetorio Van Hoorn himself will be aboard to command our motley little armada,” revealed Fonda, proud of her modest element of surprise.
“Bullshit! Van Hoorn is a corpo! Not an admiral,” an aide-de-camp in the back of the gallery interjected. “Who runs the Marco Polo’s firepower?”
“An orgatronic otherworldly legend with a Corporate Letter of Forgiveness,” Fonda explained. “He will only speak to the most adventurous among us, but the Commodore Bellescharettes joined our side.” Rodrigue Bonisseur-Marie, Marquis de Bellescharettes, appeared in the form of a colored hologram, wearing a beautiful black suit with red and sparkling gold epaulets.
“Rodrigue?” Ali exclaimed when she caught the name of the aristocratic android we had met on Canyon Creek. She was back from limbo.
Fonda heard my partner and took the opportunity to quickly go over the distribution of roles. “Our three members of the top 10, Raïda and the Kitty—who seems to know the good Marquis—will embark the Marco Polo to ensure the liaison. Armitage and McNichol Jr. will leave for the Yosemite.” The man with the rocket launcher and a behemoth with broad, round shoulders performed a hawkish salute. Like the cyborg, they must have been former military. “The rest will stay on the Calamity. You’ve just received the details of the procedure by private messages on your terminals. If you have any questions, DungeonMaster1992, the ship’s AI will answer them. Dismissed!”
The G.T.C. moored its convoy to Medina in the late afternoon. It has been escorted by the last remnants of the Techno-fleet from Miranda. After a brief detour to the public hangar in order to board the Swallow, we immediately flew towards Rodrigue’s man-o’-war, and our anthropophagous friend greeted us at the exit of the airlocks a few minutes later: “Lady Ali! What an exquisite pleasure to see you again!”
“I’m here too…” I grumbled as they shared a hug. Once we were reunited by the book, the android invited us to continue our discussion on the way to his apartments.
“What are you doing on a G.T.C. ship?” asked my sapiens after a long compliment on Rodrigue’s beautiful paramilitary uniform.
“Well, our short encounter upset me…” he answered. “Because of our hopeless love, I decided to take off as well and to travel the system as I did before—during the Hard Reset. Although imperfect, the Company allows me this extravagance. Neosterdam does not care about my orgatronic unit nor my family stories. It treats me like a human being.”
“Yet, the Marco Polo has nothing in common with your Falstaff.”
“It is true that we have here an unusual warship for a commercial company! By the way, how about a tour of the engine room, Monsieur Lee?”
But the man-o’-war had already started its first cycle. An infernal roar shook the hull as the turbines began to spin with the rhythm of the warning lights. The order came from the Marine. Pirate probes have been destroyed near Medina’s AO and we had to leave immediately. Rodrigue apologized all the way to the command bridge which overlooked the main deck where all the officers and engineers were crammed behind the steering consoles.
“Osu, the Beast! How are you doing?” A curious character in a wheelchair waved at me from below as we went down the stairs, abandoning Rodrigue to his petty officers.
“Satori? Ada? What are you doing here?” Against all odds, the duo of mercenaries from Neo-Babylon was waiting for us. It was truly Reunion Day!
“A contrarre is a contrarre,” replied the solo, laying her dirty boots on a console keyboard. “The G.T.C. pays cash to carve itself quickly out of the Outer Worlds.”
“Now that you mention it…” intervened the Commodore by consulting a touch screen the size of a shoebox that one of his subordinates handed him on his way. “The route seems clear, but prudence requires that light fighters fly to the THX1138 quadrant soon. We will be crossing a Metidean asteroid field with a disturbing heat signature.”
“The Kitty’s on it,” I declared before Satori, gathering his tools inside a black briefcase, volunteered to pilot the Swallow.
Out of boredom, Ada offered her services to the railgun, allowing Ali to remain with the G.T.C. command in accordance with Alliance directives. For, curiously, Raï and his Oda had still not joined us for this cruise I did believe as idyllic as possible.
