Through the shattered windows of the cockpit, I saw my partner already going after the felon. The latter was limping towards the stairs leading to the upper deck. Fast like all the felines, I quickly caught up with her on the first steps as emergency shutters saved us all from being sucked into the void.

“He’s hurt,” she said. Catching her breath, she pointed with her chin at the blue tiles dotted by black glittering blood. “That’s ‘borg’s blood!”

We followed the tracks to a passageway where medical supplies were piled up between four elevators. Because of a malfunction, the doors of one of them were open but the cabin had disappeared. As we saw it thanks to the digital numbers flickering on the top display, von Gebhardt was rushing towards the command deck; where he could probably jump into the remaining emergency monopods.

“The others aren’t responding!” I cleared out after smashing the broken buttons. I started floating because of the low gravity as the ship was losing its acceleration. “He’s getting aw—” The whole frigate brutally drifted, throwing us in the hoistway. Ali caught me up before grabbing a cable. We bounced together against the wall and slowly fell. We were welcomed by the cage, stuck at mid-floor.

“Von fucker?” my copilot asked, bashing to the car’s roof. “Are you—” A blade pierced the plastic, almost shortening her pretty freckles-covered nose. “Found him!” she resumed with a grin, knocking her way down with her weapon’s pommel.

The Chief Engineer and Colonel of the Separatist Army, Fritz von Gebhardt, was on guard, the right hand anchored to the handrail. His torn gray uniform covered with black spots concealed his implants and his thick breastplate of subcutaneous Kevlar. “What is it you want, Major?” he roared after recognizing Ali’s rebel’s jacket. “I arlmost killed you.”

“I will tell you arfter a little assault,” she replied, mocking our enemy.

“I see…” his opponent sighed before tremors shook the cabin. “What are you? A traitor? A Marine? A hunter? Anyway, a fräulein cannot defeat me.”

Von Gebhardt cheekbones red diodes blinked, and he leaped before realizing a lunge my sapiens dodged with ease by jumping against the jammed doors. Reacting to her call, our target started a remise but all his offensives failed. In an elusive counter-attack, my human skinned the cyborg’s overbite as the whole ship made a 180° rotation.

“Rodrigue was right,” Ali sighed while recovering before the ship started rotating again. “People don’t know how to handle their straight razors.”

“He gave you fencing lessons?” I asked, clamped to the ceiling lights as the frigate seemed to dive. “That’s cool!”

“Halt die Klappe!” an apoplectic von Gebhardt screamed as he jumped towards us.

Unfortunately for him, his second intention missed as Ali dodged again before taunting him: “You can’t touch this!” She laughed, before smashing his plastic throat with her foot, throwing him against the sliding doors.

“Hammer time!” I exclaimed while falling on the bigot’s head with the tube lights.

My partner then punched him out, and von Gebhardt clumsily stumbled in an upside-down lobby as the ship rotated for the last time. “Find his FID, Lee,” Ali ordered as we walked towards the defeated colonel. “Otherwise, I pack up all his fatty fingers.”

But we were stopped by a familiar voice making a specialty of interrupting us before the conclusion of a contract: “It would be better if he keeps all his limbs…Hands up, please.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw our expected party crasher. “By the 79 moons of Jupiter! What are you doing here, Braun?” I exclaimed, turning around. “This is getting ridiculous!”

From the nearby stairwell, three black-armored soldiers appeared and held the two fencers at gunpoint with their AR-15 assault rifles. Judging by the three silver tears on their eight-pointed covers, it was the Metal Rain.

“Colonel Fritz von Gebhardt,” Braun began without even greeting us, “according to the Solarian Technocratic laws, you are under arrest for the design, traffic and concealment of illegal implants. And treason, of course.”

“Are you for real?” Ali burst out. Throwing her sword on the roof, she was furious. “It’s our fucking catch!”

“Cool out, Kitty,” the MP uttered. “This pile of manure is the lunatic who conceived the implant that destroyed Belle Sassie’s life. Remember? He’s ours.”

Interesting. Yet, I doubted Braun was employing the right strategy to get my partner off the hook. She swore before pointing her caliber at the cyborg. “No way!” she uttered, disarming the safety catch. “We spent a week in the mud, fought a tank and missed two episodes of Twin Peaks for this mizo—misoguy...mi—”

“Misogynist,” I intervened.

“Whatever!” Ali cut-off.

Getting up, von Gebhardt burst out laughing before jeering his audience: “You’re bragging a lot yet I still don’t have cuffs on my vrists!”

Under Braun’s orders, one of the soldiers advanced towards the felon to pass him the magnetic irons. But the criminal immediately sneezed so loudly that it knocked up the cap of the commando. Ali, like Braun, was caked with snot as the others, including me, felt the cold caress of the filthy drizzle.

“Di—did this mung just spat at me?” stuttered my sapiens with a broken voice.

“My head’s spinning,” I muttered, hovering two meters above the upside-down roof.

“Holy fuck!” I heard Braun react with a curious high-pitched tone. “I have a d—no! What the fuck?”

Taking advantage of the strange confusion, Von Gebhardt seized a firearm and brought down the two soldiers who were covering Braun’s rear in the most complete confusion. A second after, he had disappeared from my sight.

Firm hands rubbed my eyes. Clumsy, they almost blinded me and hit my snout. I could feel them caressing my chin and scalp. I had no more hair except for my flat top fade; no more whiskers and pierced ears at the wrong place. My heart stopped. “God Darwin be damned! I became a human!”

“Ew! I’m a man too!” the Soviet whined.

“Calm down…” Ali intervened, a kneel to the ground, checking the two soldiers who got shot during our hallucination. “This son of a bitch swapped our bodies.” I then heard Braun swore through my partner’s envelope as he found out two of his men were dead.

“He was supposed to be an engineer! Not a Monsters&Mazes’s wizard!” the real Ali squealed before glancing inside Braun’s marine-blue pants.

“We’re still inside our own skull,” Braun went out, taping the broad ferreting hands my copilot controlled. “We probably moved through another pile of bones with short-ranged implants. They must have flown with Gebhardt’s mucous projections to our nasal passages. And swam to our brain.” He then looked at the frightened tuft of hair that had become the last soldier.

“Cool story. Still gross,” Ali reacted as the remaining commando started panicking. “Now, where does this fuck—Hey! Me! Braun, you—Fuck!” Without further ado, the MP had dashed to the staircase as the elevators remained broken. “Keep my fly ass here, Kamirov!” My human tailed him, leaving me behind.

I was the only one who didn’t know how to run on two legs; nor climb upturn steps on a drifting ship. “Hell! I have no balance!” I cried as my ebony envelope collapsed against the handrail.

The soldier who landed in my body performed better than me. Luckily, he chose to stay by my side after another debacle. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Or was he afraid I might break something? Still, he was unable to speak and funnily bite my tongue several times.

At the whim of insurmountable efforts, I managed to reach a terminal on the next level. This Marine ship was nonetheless powered, but as I feared, it was falling straight to the moon. In a few minutes, we would enter the human-made atmosphere and grill like bacon at the weekly brunch.

“You should lock up the rescue monopods,” the squatter struggled to articulate before coughing.

I predicted he’d say that. I also knew his credentials that allowed me to log in; meaning we shared more than just our envelope. “Let it come,” I replied, releasing the emergency capsules one by one. “It’s a ball of hair.”

“What a fiasco!” he declared after ralphing out. “I would have preferred to be in the girl’s body!” Pouting, he then corrected himself: “Sorry. That came out wrong…”

“Believe me, the one I pity the most is the poor Rasputin. With Ali, it will be a miracle if he gets his whole bottom back.” And that was just the tip of the iceberg. I doubted that unwittingly sharing their respective histories was a memorable exercise. There was a chance that Braun could learn about the Gods, the Niku story or even our partnerships with Zéphyr!

“By the way, my name is Winston. Sergeant Winston Bluford,” the soldier introduced himself as he jumped on my shoulder pad. “But you should know it by now. Even if our shared memories are kinda fuzzy.”

“I’m Lee,” I answered while browsing the terminal’s menu. “Thank you for this muscular Wesley Snipes’ body.”

“That’s out of line, man. But I’ll take it as a compliment.”

The monitor suddenly issued a visual alert. Someone had just entered the command deck. Judging by the FID reader before the whole system shut down due to an electric surge, it was von Gebhardt.

“Alright, Winston! Let’s grab a weapon and arrest that protoplasmic pickle!” I cried, realizing that I could hold a machine gun for the first time in my life. But Sergeant Bluford had collapsed to the ground. He was howling in pain before I could calm him down thanks to his flask’s icy water. “What’s happening? Are you all right?” I asked. Behind me, I could hear the elevators rebooting.

“I am alright!” he gasped as his snout turned crimson. “But what about you? What the heck is going on in your head! It’s all wired or what? What the hell happened to you? Your memories are a living nightmare!”

Sacrebleu! Our mind was intertwined deeper than I thought. “Well, to make it short… have you ever heard of Félicette?” I asked, while ordering an elevator.

“The French cosmo-cat? Damn! Is that what occurred to you?”

“Her story took place ages ago. After she flew back from beyond the uncharted belt, scientists killed her to perform a necropsy on her wired brain… I joined the same program years later but I was luckier. I knew the drill and I escaped—or rather deliberately crashed on Titan. Somehow, the half-melted electrodes allow me to speak among other enjoyable perks… like seeing in colors or enjoying the sweet taste of a Marlboro.”

“That’s fucked—argh!” Winston collapsed a second time, shaken by a short seizure as the cabin’s doors opened. “How—how can you still be alive? This hurts so bad—I’d have thrown myself off a cliff!”

I picked my own body up and pressed the command deck’s button on the elevator’s flickering panel. “If I’d kill myself, who would take care of Ali?”

 

When we finally reached the control bridge, Ali and Braun were already there. They had caught up with the defector but were pursuing an improbable dispute triggered by the recent porosity of their consciences.

“You dumped that girl because she called you ‘syrniki’?” my human screamed through Braun’s body. “What the hell is wrong with you, Rasputin? It’s just a damn Soviet pastry! It’s cute!”

“Yeah… about pastries. You should stop Hostess cakes because I can’t breathe with all that sugar in your blood! It’s not healthy!”

“Eat my shorts with your ‘not healthy’! Who are you to say that? You swallow Boyardees at every meal like a broke student!”

Braun frowned, making Ali looked like she was having a stroke. Finally, for the mental health of their ill-fated public, the verbal joust was again based on who was supposed to arrest Fritz von Gebhardt.

“Just take me with you, Kamirov,” the Separatist went on. “My implant knowledge is far too important to the Techno-Marine. I will sign the agreement your Admiral proposed and be reassigned to the Office of Engineers.”

“As if! We ain’t gonna let you run around and hack into the innocent brains like Belle Sassie!” Ali went on, cocking her AR-15.

“Orders are orders! I must bring him back alive!” Rasputin shouted, almost tearing my partner’s delicate lungs. “Do you know what it’s like to follow instructions once in your li—No!”

Too late. The detonation of a firearm resounded across the room. The MP—or rather Ali—had pulled the trigger. Fritz von Gebhardt’s face was split in two and his once-shelled brain was stapled to the shattered main screen. Black blood was dripping on the control computer.

The two Marines swore and Braun glanced at my partner before threatening her with own iridescent caliber. “You—”

“I’m in your head,” Ali said without blinking. “I know that if I didn’t, you would unload my gun the same way.”

Braun lowered his weapon before pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to think. With the sugar-drenched brain of my sapiens, he risked an aneurysm. I could already smell caramel coming out of his ears.

“Not like this…” he grumbled. “How am I going to explain half his skull is repainting the main deck of a fucking medical frigate? That was idiotic!”

Ali wanted to reply before an alarm made us all startle. An alert message was also displayed on the monochrome monitors.

“The ship has just entered the moon’s artificial atmosphere,” I noted, before feeling the room’s temperature rising.

“What do you say we hailed Pingu and get the hell out of here, boss?” Winston suggested, already leaping towards the radio.

“Pingu is here? Mute too?” asked Ali, whose mood had suddenly changed.

“They’re waiting for us in the stealth Interceptor,” Braun declared, cutting off Gebhardt’s FID to place it into Ali’s special box. “Let’s get out of here before we hit the ground.”

As the ship began to be torn apart, the elevators went out of service once again. We rushed down by the stairs to the main hangar as it was about to collapse on itself. There, the two brave Freaks had remained at their post, clearing the Interceptor from the rubble.

Thanks to Pingu’s talents, we managed to abandon the frigate just before entering the mesosphere. Bypassing the orbit where the Techno-Marine and the Separatist League were still fighting, we could reach the usual calm of the sidereal vacuum.

 

Obviously, Rasputin didn’t let us keep von Gebhardt’s FID. But once we landed on a Marine’s secret base inside Hyperion, the MP gave us all the reward besides offering us a free fret back to Daphnis as we had left the Swallow in the Keeler Gap.

“How does it feel to have a fluffy tail again?” Ali asked as she joined me in the Kitty’s cockpit before handing me a Tylenol.

I smiled before swallowing the oversized pill. “Winston was a nice chap. Our little Vice Versa was as uncanny as dangerous. But enjoyable. I saw in his memories than he grew up in Las Pallas. In the same neighborhood Félix used to live.”

My partner sat and stretched up before strapping herself as we were about to depart. “Next step: Titan?”

I nodded. “Then, we catch up with the Maiden.”

“Alright! Let me handle the Swallow, you seem exhausted.”

“Don’t worry. I can fly my own ship,” I reassured her as my ego took over the dissipating migraine.

“Of course, you can, furry ball,” she reacted. “Now, get some rest.”

I yielded and let her take the control stick. The Kitty took off at full speed before throttling across the dust fields, under the giant shadow of Saturn.

 

Back to business!