Despite the efforts of our stabilizers, we were only able to return to a normal trajectory after a much too long quarter of an hour.

“What a nightmare!” I exclaimed, completely dazed. “You alright, dear?”

“Fuck no!” spat my strong partner, unstrapping her shoulders.

“My vision is blurry! Where are we?”

Five bangs suddenly echoed in the cockpit and brought me back to reality. The copilot’s seat shattered. Ali had collapsed on the dashboard, on which was bubbling a ruddy liquid. As blood began to fade in the weightlessness, smoke was coming out of the foam backrest cover.

Someone had just shot my partner from the other side of the cabin.

“Who?” I yelled, turning around.

Nora, her face bleeding white cyber-cooler, stood at the top of the ladder. The five barrels of Marcus’s powerful Desert Eagle were still fuming. She was reloading the heavy gun with her left hand as her augmented one was cut in half.

“What the… Ali!” I exclaimed before turning to my sapiens.

With a deep breath, my partner immediately sat up, literally spitting her lungs out on the flashing dashboard.

“Damn it!” swore Nora before another of her shots dislocated the mainframe of the control computer.

Several audible and visual alerts told me that there was critical damage overlapping, including a leak in the coolant tank. A short circuit even activated the next cycle of the Baltimore reactor.

“Hell, Nora! What’s going on?”

Neglecting her mortal wounds, my partner tore off her harness to turn to her sister. Blood beads were spilling from her black body, but that didn’t stop her from putting on her pink vest and grabbing her firearm. “Don’t move, sis’…” my associate grumbled between two harsh breaths. “I’m about to open up a can on you…”

“Ali! Sit still!”

My sapiens vomited blood but continued her walk.

“You’d better listen to your mate, Bambi…” Nora taunted her, pointing Marcus’s gun at her for the third time while entering the cockpit.

“Only if you explain to me what’s going through your cyber-head. You got some fucking microchips taking your over brain over or what?”

The sudden ignition of the monoturbine slammed me against my seat and propelled Ali to the back of the cockpit, against the sliding door and her sister. The .50 caliber gun slipped from her fingers and disappeared into the dismantled equipment.

Another shot rang out and weakened the armored windows. Fortunately, my partner managed to disarm Nora. Despite her wounds, a violent hand-to-hand fight ensued between the two Nikus.

I couldn’t contribute to this sibling fight, because the Kitty appeared to be in a very bad position. The control computer was no longer responding. Just before it gave up the ghost, it had locked onto improbably erroneous coordinates beyond the system’s confines. The Baltimore would send us through Planet Nine head first!

“Hell!” I swore, frying my pads on the short circuits that sparked across the dashboard, triggering an electric arc which stopped all auxiliary functions.

Behind me, Nora had gained the upper hand and was hammering her attacker’s shoulders with the butt of her gun.

The Kitty was lost but not my partner. I had to act! As the air became thin and the lights went out, leaving only the emergency white LEDs, I perceived Ali’s saber floating above my pilot chair. Ignoring the error reports piling up on the last remaining monochrome monitor, I initiated the mechanical deployment of the emergency brake fins.

The shock had the desired effect. The crashing parts, including the radio and the katana stolen from Earth, rushed to the cabin’s porthole. Ali’s back caught some of them, but the sword impaled her sister in the abdomen.

“Shit! You’re kidding me…” the cyborg screamed, slashing her plastic palms on the sharp pink steel. “You’re really pissing me off!”

Ali silenced her with a hook before floating backwards. Breathing hard, her first reaction to my anxiety was a casual wink. “Don’t worry, Lee! Tis but a scratch!” She remained as white as snow. Her eyes were half-closed.

“You’re impossible!” I reframed her. “Altered genome or not, your wounds are extremely serious!”

“Take a chill pill… damn!” she answered by pushing me back to face our opponent who had finally freed herself. “So, Nora… Crab-Face already on Sedna’s orbit. You—lurking in the rumbles ready to jump on us. Nice trap. But why?”

Her sister spit white glittering blood. “You wouldn’t get it…”

“She’s not talking about the Civil War and Lunar takeover!” I intervened.

“Yes. We ain’t give a flying fuck about that!” shouted my sapiens. “What we want to know is why? Why have you been conspiring with the same lunatics who have turned half of our lives into hell? Since when are you a fucking bitch?”

The former DIA agent slid against the closed hatch, her broken hands compressed against her bubbling gash.

“Weightlessness and severe wounds don’t mix, do they?” added Ali while floating towards the hold and displaying her own. Her lips were blue. She had to stop bragging.

“Ali….” I tried.

“Titan…” sighed Nora.

“I misheard,” Ali replied, sticking her face closer to the cyborg. “Speak louder when you die.”

“The Gods came to me on Titan when I called them for help.”

“Help?” I gasped. The system rebooted, releasing a blast of air.

“I never belonged to Titan,” Nora continued. “I belonged to Lunapolis.”

Ali’s sister winced as my partner pressed her stomach with her boot. “Have you forgotten what vat experiments like us were designed for? Why did we run away with Félix?”

“I am not a meat doll, you dolt!” Nora roared. “I never was!”

My sapiens sketched a backward movement as we exchanged a look.

“I am the Arch-Princess Sirona of the Awen Metacaste,” Nora yelled, standing up. Pulling the saber from her artificial guts, she grunted as her skin seemed to have fused again. Her enhanced body was already regenerating! “Twenty five years ago, when Koviràn ‘saved’ me… I was a diplomatic hostage on the Omega’s flagship. Hidden among the filthy cattle because the operation aimed at killing Hera and freeing me turned into a bloodbath!”

“What?” Ali said.

“You heard that. Damocles was a hit ordered by the Awen against the Omega. And amid the chaos, I chose to flee… a poor decision.”

“I… but our father…” my partner stammered and took the words out of my mouth.

“Don’t worry. Félix wasn’t part of the original plan. Never was. He knew nothing about me… Nothing until years later when my ‘brother’ Taranis sent his goons,” Nora continued. Spatting, she tore off the top of her suit. The katana still in her hand, she cleaned off the crust that had formed over her injury. Her golden iris and engravings shone brighter than before. “Even his friend the samurai couldn’t save him… poor idiot… the only thing he could do was give the final blow when our dear ‘dad’ begged for mercy!”

“Another victim of your cruelty!” I heard Ali scream.

“You slew him—not me!” Nora went on. “Do you know that we worked together? My brother offered me a place on the Moon again. But to punish me from hiding all these years on Titan, he ordered me to work with Raïda in the shadows. Hearing his remorse was such a burden… until you guys met, he thought the Moon killed you too. Poor fuck… At least you were more useful than him when you did some missions alongside me… spying for the Awen… Yet I should have listened to my brother and melted your head right off like that jerk Kamirov!”

My sapiens rushed on Nora. The impact bent the access door to the cockpit and they sank into the hold from which a thick black smoke emerged. Our recent confrontations around Sedna had severely damaged the Swallow. The oxygen replicator had been destroyed, and a fire had broken out in the life support module.

Worse still, the Blue tanks exploded. Outside, leaving a trail of azure drops like parting tears in its wake, the Kitty had re-established its course, hurtling towards the icy unknown with no way to stop it.

Despite the all-out disaster, the fight between the two sisters had resumed in the small Baltimore’s chamber beneath the hold as the reactor was running critically low on coolant.

“Ali!” I shouted as I stuck my head through the hold’s hatch, overlooking them. “We have to figure out how to freeze the cycle or we’ll implode like a supernova!”

“I’m pretty busy right now!” my partner yelled at me, out of breath.

She gave a kick to Nora who landed on the protective hull. Heated to white, the radiation shield burned the back of her skull before cracking dangerously.

“Too bad you’re not a Niku,” my sapiens grumbled. “It must hurt like hell!”

Nora wanted to counterattack by surprise, but only received another punch in the face and she hovered backwards. Ali caught her just before she stumbled towards the reactor spurting boiling fuel as the radiation soared.

“I was scared…” Nora sobbed. Red sparkling tears oozed from her eyelids. “I didn’t know what to do—my brother…”

“What?” Ali uttered.

“On the Moon—on that ship… on Titan…” her sister cried, gasping for air. “I have always been fucking scared. They’re monsters you know… the Moon… you have no idea…”

“No idea?” Filled with rage, my sapiens clutched the face of the Lunar goddess. “Fuck you, Nora…”

“Ali! Don’t!” I meowed before taking cover.

There was the terrible sound of an electric shock followed by the most frightening screams I had ever heard. A shower of lightning bolts came out of the hatch and bounced into the hold and the cockpit, pulverizing the last electronic equipment that had miraculously reactivated itself. A great blue flash finally concluded the chaotic ballet of destruction.

 

A silence of death had seized the Kitty which seemed strangely immobile. Against all expectations, there was even a weak gravity that brought the debris to the ground. I didn’t know where we had ended up. Because through the armored windows of the cockpit, no star shone anymore.

A terrible feeling of weariness suddenly came over me as I came back to my senses. I heard Ali’s footsteps on the rungs. She was climbing back from the hatch. Irradiated and mortally wounded, my partner lay down on the bed below; without saying a word. Struggling to get on her side before rolling into a ball, she spilled our precious Betamax from our last evening with Yossef without paying attention.

“I’m coming…” I whispered without her being able to hear me.

With her eyes closed, my sapiens was holding her left arm, burned to the elbow by the Baltimore’s electric arcs. Tears of sadness, not pain, falling onto our single white pillow, she made room for me to nestle against her chest.

“We won’t have enough oxygen for a trip back to Sedna or any other known world,” I explained, resting my chin against her wet cheek.

She only answered me with a kiss on the nose.

“And the engine is beyond repair.”

“Will it hurt?” she asked. Her voice was very weak.

“No more than putting your arm through a nuclear reactor.”

“I’m sorry,” she managed to enunciate.

“I’m not,” I admitted, hugging the little girl from Titan.

“Love you, furry ball.”

“I know.”

Facing the end, I couldn’t help myself but quoting The Empire Strikes Back. It would have been better to keep it quiet. Because even if I had been around the dark and cold cosmos for quite a long time, the recent events almost made me forget how pleasant the silence could be.

It was so easy to fall asleep there.

One last time.