Naiad was only two hours away from Byblos Gates and by the time Ali’s enhanced clone body purged the alcohol poisoning from her atrophied brain but hypertrophied liver, the residential hutch ARM19690720 was in sight. The sad station, nicknamed Liriope, was a slum; a khaki concrete block the size of a supercargo drifting more than circling through the Verrier Ring. Two hundred of them welcomed the unemployed workers from the recently fully automated ice refineries surrounding Neptune.

“Who’s the guy?” my partner asked after she flew back to the cockpit, backcombing her long ponytail—a hard task in 0G.

“Our guy is a girl,” I explained. “She escaped from the old super-penitentiary ship named Attica. This is her third getaway—meaning the electric chair.”

“Shocking. Let’s see what she looks like,” my human went on before loading our target’s profile onto the side monochrome monitor.

The features of a very young teenager with rounded bangs were drawn to the rhythm of the white lines dancing from left to right. As I pointed out after, this gangster responsible for several murders was named Lutka Ionescù. Despite her youthful appearance due to Turner’s syndrome, the years of imprisonment had removed any spark of joy and innocence from her eyes.

“In there, tracking Ionescù on foot would be like looking for a needle in a haystack,” I said as I moored the Swallow. “The hunt will be digital, by quickly hacking what’s left of the surveillance network.”

“Eazy Peasy Lemon Squeezy,” Ali acknowledged confidently.

But as she opened the airlock, we startled at the sight of the welcoming committee. A Freak with brown waving skin stared at us behind the glass of his custom round helmet. Through its cephalopod epidermis, it was possible to distinguish microchips and a network of stretchable fibers floating in its gelatinous flesh.

“Welcome to… Liriope,” summarily translated the speaker of the man’s transcriber hanging beneath his shoulder, just above his auxiliary badge. Right after, the bounty hunter handed us a tentacle.

“Thanks…” Ali replied as she squeezed the sticky appendix and avoid any offense.

Inflating his octopus siphons, the hunter introduced himself: “My name is… Karl Kousteau.” Every two or three words, he had to take a break to breathe.

“What does this welcome mean, Karl?” asked my partner. Like me, she was trying to guess which part of the mutant’s body was human under the rest of this suit mimicking the color fluctuations of his skin.

The octopus and its clothes turned from brown to gray while black ocellus subsided. “Are you … looking for… Lutka Ionescù?” he asked. Bubbles broke out of his tentacle beard, before climbing on his hollow cheeks to get lost over his transparent skull. “Don’t worry. I have already… put the sucker… on her!”

Ali, rightfully suspicious, took the words out of my mouth: “Yet the contract is valid and I don’t see her handcuffed by your side.”

Kousteau compressed the orthogonal photoreceptors of his eyes, transforming them into thin lines full of anger. Judging by the red color of his skin, this answer didn’t suit him. “I know… this station… like the tip of my tentacles,” spat the transcriber. “I wanted… to save you… some time… because… it is obvious… that… I will find her… before you!” The entitled Freak immediately turned his back to head for the lifts. Behind the water bottles of his suit, we saw his eight different firearms. All seemed adapted to a certain type of situation.

“A very curious poser, this walking takoyaki!” I whispered to my sapiens.

My partner didn’t take her eyes off him until he disappeared behind the elevator’s metal doors. She then answered me by unsheathing her Desert Eagle: “Something’s fishy. Let’s keep an eye out.”

I agreed. “We need to access the nearest web terminal.”

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find an information hub without the monitor being broken, the keys missing and the electronic parts stolen. Tired of walking through the cold concrete floors covered with graffiti, my partner decided to connect her wrist-terminal directly on the network.

“Let’s try not to catch a worm this time,” she said, by delicately plugging in on a ransacked station near the public toilets.

“May I?” I asked when I saw the interface appear on her monochrome micro-monitor.

Ali gave me the green light to tap on the tiny keys of her forearm. The few barriers of the data-core jumped quickly. The last the system was updated, Elton John’s sexuality was still arguable. A few minutes later, I could access the various secondary functions of the station.

“Geography question from Trivial Pursuit: half a million people inhabit on this prison-like station. Did you know?” I asked me to pass the time while loading the FID identification program.

“It’s nuts!” reacted my human. “How many live in these closet-like units? Ten? Maybe fifteen? I don’t understand why Ionescù came here!”

I got the answer by opening the table summarizing the inhabitants’ record. I immediately notified Ali, busy watching the comings and goings of the smelly bathroom: “Plausibly because a dwelling is registered to Esmeralda Ionescù on the 22nd level. You think it’s her sister? Her mother perhaps?”

“What does the FID program say?” asked Ali, contracting her arm’s muscle as typing was tickling her. “Is the tracker ready?”

“There are tens of kilobits of information,” I replied when I saw the loading green bar stagnating at 8%. “Let’s go for a walk while we get access. I can connect you to the wireless network, but you’re gonna have to pull out the radio antenna. Because the signal’s pretty weak through all this reinforced concrete.”

“Bogus!” My partner snooped into a skin crease around her terminal and unfolded a conductive rod. “I hate that!”

We went down the steps of the ten floors separating us from Esmeralda Ionescù’s apartments. The families of the lucky workers who could leave every morning for the rare refineries still ran by humans were piled up in the hallways and the open houses. The lack of natural light and undernourishment all made them look mortified; like ghouls in a humid crypt.

“Miss Ionescù?” asked Ali, knocking on the dark iron shutter.

A man with amputated arms and his four children welcomed us. Wearing an old pilot’s uniform, he must have served in the Marine. He spoke a local dialect, but tried to articulate in Solarian: “What is about? Ionescù passed away two weeks ago.”

“Esmeralda Ionescù? She died?” I insisted.

“Yes. The poor woman survived with the few dollars the neighbors gave her. But it didn’t cover the treatment—the medication that could have stopped her lung cancer.”

“Lung cancer? Treatment?” I meowed. “Hell! You can have new lungs for less than C$20,000 around Jupiter.”

“We’re not around Jupiter, here…” the man sighed. He scratched his swell up earlobes before resuming: “Are you related to her?”

“No. We’re looking for… his daughter? Lutka?” Ali said.

The individual shrugged his shoulders, unable to help us more. His wife, who returned from the market with cans of nutrigel and bricks of decontaminated water, couldn’t tell us more than her husband.

Ali sighed. “Crap! Shall we—” The terminal on her wrist suddenly rang. The identification and tracking system had completed its loading. “I’m picking up FID footprints from the contract near the 21st level,” she said after glancing at it.

“Can you tell us where is Karl Kousteau?” I asked.

“He just left the upper parking lot where his ship is docked. He must ignore that you can crack such a station’s security, and therefore expect us to get lost doing door to door.”

“Kousteau underestimates the power of the feline intellect.”

We reached the 21st floor by jumping from the gaping hole that closed the current walkway. Below, there were no longer long corridors dotted with shabby apartments, but a large space overloaded with electric launderettes and abandoned sports equipment. Where a few minutes ago the terminal drawn red sphere symbolizing Ionescù’s FID, an improvised oval cricket field took place. On the latter, between piles of moldy laundry, played a group of children.

Picking his nose, a miniature batsman accosted Ali by pulling the bottom of her pink jacket: “Looking for Miss Luty?”

“Miss Luty?” I asked. “You mean Lutka Ionescù?”

The child nodded before sneezing in his sleeve. He then inquired us a strange question: “Are you also friends of Octo-Man?” Ali and I looked at each other in the corner while the boy kept spinning his cricket bat between his fingers. “You have the same badge as Octo-Man. You’re a hunter as well?”

“Big time,” replied my human. “Does this ‘Octo-Man’ often come here?”

“He came a couple of times to see us play!” the child explained before showing us two mucus-covered fingers. “He nice. All the orphans like him.”