“Torpedo at 0200!” I shouted from the copilot chair, my eyes on the Swallow’s radar.
With a spin, Satori easily dodged the rocket that wasn’t intended for us and the projectile flew straight towards the convoy. Fortunately, a decoy glowed and absorbed the silent blast. A Marine battleship had intercepted the deadly missile.
“I’m warning Ali that the pirates are hiding in this cluster!” I announced through Ada’s retaliation.
“Something tells me they already know!” laughed Satori as he hurried back to our armada.
Skirting the orange smoke screen deployed by the military, we ended up in the middle of a full-scale assault. Small but fast mirror-coated cruisers emerged from the sidereal void, appearing in the shadows between our ships. Over-equipped, they fired heavily at anything that didn’t carry their black flag. Meanwhile, Marine and G.T.C. light fighters battled swarms of droïdodrones that cackled over every radio wave. Amid the chaos, the shimmering Calamity turned around, displaying three rows of firing cannons.
“Ali? Ali?” I shouted through the secure channel provided by the man-o’-war. “Ali, do you read me?”
“Lee? Whatcha doing? This is brutal over here!” replied my associate, gasping for air. “Have you seen Yoyo-grandpa? He’s nowhere to—Hey! Fuck you, dude!” A loud crash followed by an agonizing gurgle made me jump before Ali resumed: “We’re being fucking boarded!”
“Boarded?” I exclaimed as the cackling of a droïdodrone and the echoes of gunfire from my partner’s .50 caliber ended the brief conversation. “How can mere buccaneers approach a cruiser of this size?”
“Maybe thanks to a cruiser of this size,” Big Brain replied, turning my head towards what I thought was a mirage.
The strange fog enveloping the G.T.C. flagship’s port side dissipated, revealing a titanic warship with a spiky black hull. The pirates had worked their way into the heart of our fleet by taking down by surprise the escorting vessels. Then, their most significant asset came in to decapitate our line of battle.
“That reptile-headed flag seems familiar,” I noted, dropping the radio to get a better look at the scaly nef. “The situation is more than catastrophic. We need to go back inside the Polo! The Kitty’s too old for modern warfare!”
“All the hangars should be locked…” Ada answered at her companion’s request. She was back and had brought three new pils of high-g sugar alongside Satori’s attaché case. “Fortunately, we have another way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Put this on your big head instead of asking questions. Presto!” ordered the solo with her usual sweetness. She then placed on me some sighting glasses she pulled out from the carrying case and tightened them to the maximum. After a beep, the device deployed a blast shield panel that closed over my snoot and obscured my view.
“What are you doing? This gadget is way too loose for me! I can’t see!”
“Your eyes can deceive you, don’t trust them!” Satori replied, although his voice sounded distant.
“Don’t Obi-Wan me!”
A metal tip pierced my left ear to the tympanum then it was as if my body rocked forward into a dark emptiness. My stomach flipped as the tingling of uncontrollable dizziness invaded the tips of my toes and tail. All around me flew infinite green lines. I almost threw up, yet an orange flash suddenly pulled me back into reality. I was no longer in the cockpit of the Kitty but in the middle of a bloody melee.
“By the 79 moons of Jupiter! Where am I?” I squealed with dignity.
“On the Polo’s main deck,” a distorted voice from beyond the grave answered. It was Satori’s. “We took control of a pirate through his brain implant. We should hold the remote connection by clamping the Kitty to the hull.”
Sacrebleu! I was a sapiens again! As if my experience over Saturn wasn’t enough!
“Can you see Bambi?”
With a mace picked up from the ground as my only weapon, I pushed my way through the chaos, shoving bandits and sailors with my steel shoulder pads. Facing me, the G.T.C. guards in their red and black bulletproof carapace returned fire in order. Between two volleys, one of my new colleagues’ visage disengaged itself from its skull to cover my breastplate. The person responsible for this hemoglobin shower was Raï—or rather his katana doubled with a .44 Magnum. He wasn’t wearing a kimono but a space suit resembling a traditional armor from the Edo period.
“Stop!” I shouted as his blade grazed the tip of my apparent moon-juice reddened nose.
The samurai scoffed. “Where is your honor, mangy dog?” His voice was barely muffled by its mempo visor.
Satori switched me to the Polo’s encrypted radio channel. “By this understated oxymoron, you’re comparing myself to a deplorable genealogical cousin. And I do not enjoy it.”
My savior from Yoyodyne burst out laughing before effortlessly slashing without having to turn his gaze away at an assailant who tried to take him down. “You are scholarly, brigand. Or am I dealing with Lee? The best karaoke singer in Solaris. If so, by what miracle?”
“The wonder of computer engineering!” I meowed, rolling down my stripy visor. “Do you know where the copilot with whom I happily share my all too hectic existence may be found?”
After knocking down another foe, Raï pointed to an angry pink form that had just jumped off the command bridge. The next second, I was impaled in the kidneys by my partner handling a boarding sword. I let out a real scream of pain. “I always knew I’d die by your hand…”
“Lee?” Ali said as she immediately withdrew her blade from my borrowed gut. “I’m so sorry! What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Good question indeed, because I never asked for it.” Recovering from the shock thanks to my cybernetic body, I had abandoned my mace for a machine gun ripped from the hands of an unidentifiable corpse. “Let’s kill some fart knockers, shall we?”
Taking advantage of the confusion generated by my apparent betrayal, I managed to stop a new wave of curious mechanical beings. This incessant flow of belligerent quadrupeds equipped with circular saw heads descended from one of the many pods that had just punctured the Polo’s meager armor, sucking a part of its air. Beside me, Raï and Ali were fighting fiercely with swords and curses. Both seemed to take great joy in slashing the flesh and steel of their enemies as they retreated in disarray to the emergency monopods.
“Who have taught you to fence that way?” asked Raï to my partner as a dreadful bang sounded behind the commanding bridge’s navigation computers.
“Rodrigue,” Ali replied as she defended herself against a mutant’s assault. “Pretty solid, huh? Look at that!” My associate performed a feint that knocked his weasel-faced opponent off his feet. Stumbling against a bullet-riddled console, the pirate slipped backwards before catching himself on the control panel. My accomplice cut his wrist then his shoulder, though protected by meshed carbon fibers. The privateer’s inaudible cry of pain turned into a gurgle as she slit his throat. “Booyah!” she exclaimed as he fell on the floor.
“You know who you remind me of, fighting like a crazy person?” continued the samurai. Sitting on a pile of corpses, he was slowly reloading his .44 through a small gap under his katana’s guard.
“Uh?” Ali reacted.
The assault decreased in intensity and Raï got up after cocking his sword-gun. “Your father, of course!”
“You knew my old man?” my partner went on.
Smiling, Raï shook a pearl bracelet hanging on his wrist.
I made the connection with our passage on Titan while helping a disoriented G.T.C. sentry to refasten his oxygen tank. “So that was you in Neo-Babylon?” I asked. “The pearl bracelet on the grave…”
“Indeed,” he admitted. “Your father and I were friends… a long time ago. Back then, the Alliance did not exist and disco music was rocking the system!” A shock followed by a high-pitched whistle alerted us to another assault pod hit and was about to spill a new wave of assailants for a second round of bloody hand-to-hand combat. “I was, however, most saddened to hear of his death,” Kumo Raïda continued, aiming at the first saw-headed dogs. “But what was he thinking? Rescuing child slaves from Luna… surely someone was going to rat him to the Gods!”
“What?” I gulped, letting my machine gun slip from my fingers.
Ali had turned around. As the melee resumed, she was pointing her blood-dripping gun at the strangely delighted samurai. “What do you know about those children?”
“Quite a lot. Innocuous tank girls—molded, brought to life and tattooed by mad scientists to serve the cursed Castes of the Moon,” Raï explained. “Enhanced clones saved from a burning Lunar ship after a suicide mission called Damocles. Félix Koviràn raised you as his own—I am glad you have become worthy of his name, though.”
“I just prefer to wear mine,” my partner replied coldly, impervious to the chaos that surrounded her again. “—being just Ali is fine.”
“A safer choice,” Raï scoffed. With an almost invisible movement, he decapitated a pirate crawling on the pile of corpses he was sitting on. “What is not safe, on the other hand, is the fuss you two made throughout the system. You are a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Don’t care.”
“You don’t care? The Moon knows who you are and where you are. They will kill you when they choose too.”
In a brusque movement, Raï aimed his .44 right at my human’s head and pulled the trigger. She crouched. The cyborg who was about to stick his blade between my partner’s shoulders hiccupped in surprise and collapsed like a disjointed marionette.
“Now, shall we focus on a more urgent matter?” he resumed.
Ali and I acquiesced. Behind us, between the burnt-out consoles and shattered computer screens, the last of the G.T.C. riflemen were struggling, soon to be swept away by the final wave of battle androids that followed the dog-robots. Meanwhile, an alarm warned us that the ship was decelerating.
Leaping towards the mezzanine in the reduced gravity that made the corps float, Raï grabbed a soldier gliding down the stairs. “What’s the situation on the bridge?” he asked. The unfortunate woman couldn’t answer as a bullet passed through her throat. A spray of blood immediately flooded her helmet. “Shinjimae!” the bounty hunter shouted as he unloaded his gun on our attackers before disappearing into the hazy fray.
At the same moment, Rodrigue surfaced from the mist of black powder and burning smoke. The sword drawn, he was fighting against the hostile pack that was besieging the command bridge upon us.
“Rodrigue!” Ali yelled to get his attention.
The Commodore took down his opponent and waved at her. Distracted, he received a blow behind his neck and was suddenly thrown in the air, over the safety railing. Fortunately, the android’s body didn’t touch the ground. We had caught him at the very last moment to preserve his fragile orgatronic unit as the Polo’s swerved.
“Marquis? Are you alive?” I asked, readjusting his nasal cannula providing oxygen to its orgatronic unit.
“What an unfamiliar and grotesque face,” the humanoid complimented me, opening his ice-blue eyes. “Lady Ali? If I may, this new companion of yours is far below your standards.”
“It’s Lee,” she reassured him. “He hacked into a ‘borg’s mind.”
“Merveilleux!” he replied. “Can you help me get up? We need to go. All our reactors are hit and the whole ship is about to blow up!”
But Rodrigue had barely straightened that a monstrous shape slowly landed behind us. This one barred our retreat to the last square of the G.T.C. heading towards the emergency monopods under Raï’s command. Half-man, half-reptile, Captain Morton Osborn had sharper teeth than Jupiter had moons. The improbable Freak T-Rex stared at us with his yellow eyes while cracking the joints of his scale-covered bare arms.
“At what point did you, sapiens fools, conclude that designing such creatures was a good idea?” I screamed, feeling fear through my borrowed implants.
