Against all odds, there was no cookery, but a white room which possessed all the equipment a chemist could dream of: from aluminum stills to a collection of dusty beakers. And the sailors, if they once were, had fused with the furniture. Their gray bones were lost in a layer of burnt umber grit.
“Ali? These people are ancient history. Everyone’s been dead for decades…”
The computer sent me an ultimate alert. The core of the system had broken down, and I could access its entire data-core with all its main functions. I finally found out the name of this cursed mausoleum.
“Bastard!” This was the flowery language of my sapiens.
I desperately searched for her using the still-running cameras. “Here!” I cried, selecting the image of a suit floating towards a gutted electrical cabinet. “Ali?”
The space suit turned over to reveal its occupant. A mummy had dried in its confined micro-atmosphere. I could almost make out his wrinkles and the color of his beard. Another one was flying a little further in a red coat this time. An old Makarov between his fingers, the man had shot himself through the temple.
“What happened here?” I asked myself before a visual alert from the interactive map pulled out of my dark thoughts. The program had detected my human in the large hangar just below the monopod dock where the Kitty was. “Ali? Ali!” I repeated.
“Hemingwest’s here too, Lee! He shot Félix! His whole goddamn clan of scoundrels is laughing at me, because I can’t harm them!” I heard the discharges from his Desert Eagle. “I’ve got him in my sights and that son of a bitch won’t budge!”
I scrolled through the list of cameras and finally found visual access to what seemed to be a large factory plant. In the gloom stood Ali in a firing position, both hands around the grip. But she was alone. The distillery was empty, and neither the Arch-Countess Athena nor Nigel Hemingwest were back from the dead. Instead appeared huge, gutted vats and a thick layer of beige crystals lined with gray deposits on the floor. Ali wasn’t aiming at the infamous bounty hunter, yet at the decomposed body of a Soviet engineer, slumped in his office chair.
“No one’s here, dear…”
“Fuck you, Lee! I see him with his fucking Lunar uniform!” Ali shouted, tearing her larynx. “They captured Zéphyr and Braun too!”
The shoulder dislocated, she fired again and again until the skeleton was pulverized, nailing it to the lead pipes covering the walls. The bullets pierced the still intact hoses and burst the time-frozen taps. A buff vapor began to escape before some of it crystallized in the atmosphere. Snow fluttered around the young woman.
“Lee? Lee… get me out of here…” She was crying. “Please… I’m scared…”
Isola64. It was the codename for this laboratory where some sociopaths from Earth had developed the Mirazh, a new poison gas, far from the eyes and ethics committees of the ineffectual United Nations. The Mirazh was a powerful hallucinogenic molecule bearing the nickname of its inventor, and a leak in the vats may have sounded the death knell for the station’s occupants and newcomers, like Connie Senghor decades later.
But thanks to us, the hunter’s last message would no longer lure innocent souls into this vicious trap. Her FID could be returned to her family in Las Pallas. As for Isola, it was reduced to ashes; suffering the same fate as the Communist powers of the lost ages.
Immediately afterwards, the Kitty had left the main asteroid belt for good. It took my partner several days to recover from the gas effects and another week from the trauma of her visions. The Arch-Countess, Hemingwest and our poor Félix went back in limbo.
I acknowledged once again that space hadn’t spared her lately. The death of Zéphyr, Ada and Rodrigue were difficult to endure for my sapiens. And I hadn’t been around much. “Talk about a Maine Coon and a pilot bounty hunter… all I can do is complain and eat. And meanwhile, Ali—I’ll end up losing her. Like Satori with Ada…”
You got it. Using terms my partner would understand… I sucked. And I needed to apologize to her.
Throwing away my last cigarette pack, I hoped to pay her a morning visit to the cabin when the control computer alerted me to an incoming signal. The linear printer spit out a mile of punched paper before I could read the message. Only the Techno-Marine would send a fax rather than an electronic missive.
“What do they want?” coughed my partner, back in the cockpit for the first time in a week. She remained very weak.
I looked at the green and white paper and the news was extremely exciting. When I got to the formalities, I could report to my human: “It comes from a certain Colonel Gaylord Graves. He’s flying along with someone called ‘Major Rasputin’. Is that Braun?”
“Alive and well… ” my associate grumbled, chafed by the MP’s long absence. “What does Colonel Mustard want?”
“We’re summoned aboard the T.M.S. Africa for special contracts given by the DIA.”
“The Africa?” said Ali. “It must be the big-ass thing maneuvering in front of us.”
I had been so absorbed in my reading that I hadn’t seen the squadron that was taking shape around the Swallow. Between destroyers and cuirassiers, behind the escorts Atlas and Kilimandjaro, stood the marvel of the Fourth Special Fleet: the hypercruiser T.M.S. Africa with its golden lion as a figurehead.
“Braun’s here. Everything can only get better from now on…” I concluded as an Interceptor that I recognized as the Noah’s Ark clamped the Kitty beneath its left wing.
Back to business!
