The news had come faster than a massless photon as we were leaving the narrow Uranian rings. Zéphyr had been arrested in a colonial ship bound for Umbriel. Details were fuzzy, but we learned that the Data Maiden would be deported to Callisto, the Jovian Marine Headquarters of the Outer System. The identity of the bounty hunter responsible for the apprehending was a greater shock itself as Nigel Hemingwest was a name I’d never thought to be heard again. Alas, this mumpsinus was still alive…
The situation was extremely delicate: helping the master thief was obviously against the Technocratic law. Such an act of treason would result in being excluded from the Alliance with an astounding bounty over our heads. Yet, furious and panicked, Ali had grabbed the stick and the Kitty’s post-nuclear reactor alternated cycles at lightning speed across Uranus’s orbit.
But once out of the dust band, my copilot killed the engine.
“Ali? Why do you stop?” I asked, dazed by the erratic deceleration.
My partner was staring at the shy sun rising over the Big Blue Planet. Spectral beams of lights danced in the sad void, lighting up the sleepy ice fields. “We can’t…”
I unlocked my belt and flew to her laps. “I appreciate the fact that you give it a second thought. It’s a sign of maturity,” I confessed, lying down between her arms.
Ali tore our Alliance’s badge off her lapel before showing it to me. “This is all our life. This is what you always wanted.”
Witnessing my distorted reflection on the once bright but since bloodstained surface, I let out a sardonic laugh. “Forget about this gimcrack.” Raising, I spun towards her. “The only thing I will ever care about is you.”
The badge escaped Ali’s trembling fingers and swirled over the buzzing radio. She kissed me on the snoot before strapping me back in my pilot’s seat. “I’m really sorry to drag you into this,” she said.
Reloading the Baltimore’s Blue pumps, I re-entered Umbriel’s coordinates into the control computer. “We’re wasting precious time with your wailing ‘sorry’, dear. Besides, you don’t ‘drag’ me into anything… We are a team, you know? Ali, Zéphyr and Lee. Siegfried, Roy and the white lion!” I went on before facing her. “I am the white lion.”
“Undoubtedly,” Ali answered. “How do you think he survived? I mean... Hemingwest.”
I sighed after gulping the new high-Gs sugary pill my copilot handed me. “Cockroaches can resist a thermonuclear fire. I heard they can even live headless.”
“We’ll see about that,” Ali scoffed as the reactor furiously roared.
The following morning, Umbriel and its dark bluish ice veil were in sight. Under my command, the Swallow dropped from orbit and headed for the most important tholin refinery in the heart of the Wunda crater, near the equator. The Kitty flew over burning discharge valves as a brown mist vomited from the chimneys gradually clogged the cockpit’s windows. Below, the radiolysis fallout slowly piled up in a thick layer on the surrounding residential bunkers.
“I lied to the space traffic controller and told her the Alliance was sending us as reinforcements—to escort the Data Maiden,” I reassured Ali after turning off the radio. “Her answer bodes ill…”
From her seat, my partner gazed with difficulty at the enslaved moon stained by mankind’s industrial imperialism. Molasses had clogged the wipers to the point where they were almost useless. To land, we would have to rely on the aging instruments. “What do you mean?”
“From what I understood, we won’t be the only punks down there. Don’t you forget your girlfriend has one of the system’s biggest bounties. We can expect the local cavalry…”
Ali swore, her fingers anchored in her safety harness as we begin our descent. “We can observe the usual procedure: ram into it, go postal, then advise.”
“That’s our one and only boldiotic strategy, Madame.”
Allowed to enter a hangar overlooked by noisy steam crackers producing benzene, the Swallow slowly landed. Behind the titanium harrows following the base’s gigantic airlock, Hemingwest was about to leave the moon on his Buzzard-17. As we clamped our ship to block the way, we saw our nemesis’s gloom silhouette writhed in his cockpit shaped like a vulture’s beak.
“You again, bimbette?” Hemingwest howled from his opened airlock. The bounty hunter let himself slip on the ground in the low gravity as rungs unfolded themselves along the vertically standing spacecraft. The hunter’s throat and nose had been remodeled, using pink-tainted inorganic grafts. But the techies and surgeons who had looked into his case hadn’t managed to restore his old-fashioned nasal voice.
Ali, who had jumped to the tarmac before the Kitty could even be properly anchored replied, controlling her nerves: “We came to see Zéphyr.”
Hemingwest grinned before accepting, happy to show off his catch to the curious technicians and maintenance androids gathering around us. After the bounty hunter snapped his gloved fingers, heavy mechanical footsteps resounded in his ship’s cargo hold before two MKs of the seventh generation appeared in the airlock. Wearing the Alliance’s colors, these cyclopes were twice as big as MarKus.
“Careful, dear…” I whispered after leaping on my partner’s shoulder. “Don’t be impulsive with these—Sacrebleu!”
Ali startled too as the two colossi of red steel slowly started descending the external ladder. Firmly anchored between their claws, appeared Zéphyr’s remains. Held by the armpits, the only thing left of the Data Maiden was her bludgeoned head, scratched torso and twisted right arm. From the other torn limbs hung rainbow-colored wires and warped metal frames; they were tangled with hoses trickling fine drops of oil and white thermal cooler on the ground.
“What—what did you do to her?” Ali stuttered, disgusted by such a despicable spectacle.
“Don’t tell me you express feelings for a full cyborg, lad!” Hemingwest boasted. “These things are more machines than humans. They can’t feel shit—look.” Hemingwest approached Zéphyr’s surviving remains to tore-off a piece of plastic sub-coat hanging from the right cheek, revealing a stainless steel zygomatic. “See? No bloody reaction. If you can’t endure pain, you’re no human anymore.”
“Stop that, you fucker!” my copilot yelled, clenching her fists to the point she drew blood.
Hemingwest snickered. “Lovely.” After caressing the cyborg’s white hair, he lifted the neck’s fake black skin where a human being would show the carotid artery. Instead was plugged a red wire connecting the augmented-brain interface to a microcomputer in one of the MK7s’ back. “I touched a nerve but not on the good one… You were indeed a lovely couple.”
My sapiens grunted, pulling her .50 caliber to point it at the bounty hunter. Both the MK7 responded to the provocation by drawing their machine gun hidden inside their other forearms. Two small red dots danced on my partner’s forehead, but these didn’t amuse me at all.
Hemingwest smirked, playing with the cable as if it was a guitar string. “I dived into her brain, you know. It was highly secured for sure—but with some help, I went through.”
“Diving into inmates’ mind is forbidden, Hemingwest!” I meowed, jumping on the floor between him and my partner. “You’re a disgrace to the badge you wear.”
“Disgrace?” Laughing out loud, Hemingwest leaned on Zéphyr’s body, wrapping his right arm around her neck. “How about your Jack and Jill parties with criminals—don’t you move dear!” With his left hand, he uncovered his holster as Ali had stepped in his direction. “Don’t get me wrong, I couldn’t care less regarding you getting this data thief’s end away—I always knew you were a deviant weirdo anyway…” he yapped before starting playing with another female plug beneath Zéphyr’s ear. “But the Maiden’ mind-hacking is due to force majeure—and I learned other interesting things. Obviously, this bloody dyke had a lot of dodgy data about everyone. Alive, dead… sometimes both.”
Zéphyr’s body spasmed. Her mouth remained firmly still, but we could hear her word through the synthesizers of the two robots which lowered their trembling armed fist. “Ali—I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have…” The Data Maiden’s whisper echoed behind the anarchic static. “I’ve done too much digging. He knows about your past—Luna, Damocles, Titan… He dived into me—even if it meant destroying whole sections of my conscience…”
“Button it, tranny!” shouted Hemingwest before ordering a MK to silence the captive with a magnetic shock at the risk of grilling the components ensuring the cyborg’s survival.
I didn’t have time to turn to my human. The latter emptied her magazine into Hemingwest’s face, making his new nose pass through his occipital lobe. In a blink of an eye, nothing remained of the bounty hunter’s head except an oozing jelly spreading across the hangar. “Ali! What the—Watch it!” I shouted.
The Alliance’s bodyguards wanted to retaliate, but the arming of their machine-gun came a second too late. The MK7 suffered from the same weakness than the previous models, namely their LED orb. A breeze for a .50 caliber AE in good hands at such a short distance. Insufficiently restrained by weightlessness, the crimson armored carcasses touched down at the same time as the decapitated spasming body of Nigel Hemingwest.
Slipping on the ground, Ali received the remains of the cyborg before she also struck the cold and greasy metal of the hangar.
“Why?” asked Zéphyr, who had regained full control of her envelope.
Immediately disconnecting the red wire, Ali replied: “What a stupid question.”
“Good Lord Darwin! It’s a mess…” I sighed as I joined the two lovebirds. Struggling with gravity, small marbles of blood fluttered from Hemingwest’s neck and landed on my chops. “Is everyone okay?”
“You are the biggest idiots of the entire system,” the Maiden groaned.
“It’s presumably a family trait, yes…” I lamented.
My partner lifted the androgyne’s inert body and took her aboard the Kitty. Meanwhile, I kept at a distance the toothless personnel of the hangar, already greedily looking at the MKs and the Buzzard. They swore to remain silent in exchange for the precious spare parts. Of course, their words were worthless.
“My vision is only static. I freeze and burn at the same time,” Zéphyr murmured as I entered the hold. “This sadist damaged my brain unit…”
“What can we do to get you back on your feet?” Ali asked as she climbed behind me to the cockpit where I ordered the gates’ opening.
“I doubt it is possible for us to find a competent techie on this doomed world,” Zéphyr replied, harnessed into the copilot seat as Ali was unrolling two of the control computer’s cables usually used for her wrist computer. “Our only option is to reach Oberon’s orbit.”
My human firmly held the Maiden during the take-off. In less than a minute, Umbriel disappeared beneath the ice giant.
“What are we going to look for on the black moon?” I asked, configuring the autopilot.
“There is an asteroid in the vicinity that has no electromagnetic or thermal signature, and I will provide you with the latest known coordinates.” Connected by the two wires, Zéphyr transmitted her information about the lost object through the computer. The latter then launched a series of calculations before issuing an alert message as the main monitor displayed an error code in frightening red capitals in digital font.
“This is a Metal Rain warning protocol,” I noticed. “Where are you taking us?” Right after, the map of Uranus IV and its orbit opened on the lateral monochrome terminal.
“To Fairyland…” Zéphyr muttered before her voice, divided between her mouth and Kitty’s speakers, got lost in sizzling.
