#05 LORD OF THE TANKS
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Let’s be honest, folks. Between civilized life forms, we can discuss the matter openly, right? Humankind, early modern humans, Homo sapiens… they weren’t actually worth all the fuss.
In a desperate attempt to distance themselves from their grotesque ancestors born on Earth, they had gone as far as pathetically rebranding their entire kind Homo novus; the men of the stars. This schism was, of course, only a masquerade. We were still dealing with the same brainless apes throwing bones at a black monolith.
Let’s take a look at their “modern” anatomy, shall we? Plump skin, no claws to defend themselves, not enough hair to keep them warm or hold their stench, vision affected by sugar... Their original anatomy is beyond pitiable!
Yet, there was something even more pitiful than a human adult in the person of his offspring. Have you ever cradled a sapiens’ toddler in your arms? Well, I haven’t, obviously. But I’ve seen mutant melanomas more useful than these noisy drooling things.
Nevertheless, there were the youngsters: nobler, braver and more honest; an interesting intermediate phase full of hopes and dreams. I kind of liked children. They were clay figures, ready to be shaped with new ideals… which would be violently destroyed once they reached adulthood; once they totally succumbed to the true nature of their kind. Or filled their taxes.
But we could even be fooled by these little monkeys. And this had been confirmed to Ali and I during our short stop on one of the belt’s biggest dwarf planets’ eighteenth port. The main gate to the Outer System and the New Worlds: Ceres18.
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The pungent smells of Saturnian gunpowder and hot steel floated in the air. Unfortunately, that night, there wasn’t anything pleasant about it.
“We’re facing a moral dilemma,” Ali announced while calmly reloading the magazine of her Desert Eagle decorated with iridescent reflections.
“Do you think now is the time?” I replied by giving her the last .50 caliber ammunition, as big as my paw.
A new ZeG-2 machine gun’s burst passed within a few centimeters of my human’s scalp, reducing the red lid of the metal box that sheltered us to smithereens.
“It’s still a fucking kid…”
“Language!” I meowed. “And you seem to forget that jumpy child flatlined half a dozen people in five days—after nibbling their guts out.” That was our target. A psycho-child on a murdering spree. We had previously dislodged the youngster from the local recycling facility then pursued him through the cargo port. “But I reckon that, at that age, you should be watching The Wuzzles or ThunderCats this early in the morning!”
We smelled like rotten fish and I was exhausted. I wanted a bath and a nice breakfast with real Uncle Buck’s pancakes, crispy bacon and maple syrup. It was time to finish the job.
My partner glanced through the nearest bullet hole. According to her, the shooter was a few meters behind an out-of-order black and yellow power loader. He was taking advantage of the darkness provided by the artificial night. Those nights maintained an illusion of time cycles on inhabitable stations such as Ceres. But, frankly, it was as useless as the “g” in lasagna.
“What is the cavalry doing?” Ali shouted when we heard the child cocking his machine gun.
He had left his hiding place and stood on the top of the giant exoskeleton, his foot on the orange flashing light; the only glow in this improvised night. I could see him for the first time and a shiver went down my spine. His skin and teeth’s colors were ranging between khakis and brown. Moss and mushrooms had grown on his shoulders before getting lost in his bushy hair. A look that testified to a whole life in the sewers. And yet he knew how to perfectly handle a semi-automatic weapon.
“Hell! That’s an ugly one.”
“Yep! You see those aluminum convectors over there?” Ali calmly asked me, clipping on her magazine. With her chin, she pointed to a set of spare parts by the huge compactor whose menacing shadow loomed in the distance. “Run there as fast as you can, Sonic.”
I gulped. “Are you setting up the same trick as on Neosterdam? Would you want me dead, dear?”
The child suddenly screeched, bursting his lungs. There wasn’t anything human about his cry. It sounded like the crunching of a blade on a stone. I was tetanized.
“I said run, furry ball!”
“Sacrebleu!”
My body finally obeyed me once my sapiens kicked me in the buttocks. I will always remember the lead fragments and the pieces of concrete, knocked out at each impact, pecking at my legs; the crackling every time the projectiles broke the sound barrier before getting lost above my scalp; and the cloud of dust burning my eyes and throat.
My heroic diversion made the desired effect. Our target was running short on ammunition when Ali retaliated: a first bullet ripped off his left ear and a second hit him right in the shoulder. He finally fell to the ground in the middle of his own melted plastic cases. Despite the low gravity, his head violently smashed the dusty floor and he remained unconscious until the Ceres18 police arrived several minutes later.
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High on adrenaline, which had almost blown up my sensitive little four-legged mammal heart, I came back to reality once safe in the local commissioner’s office.
“Ali? Don’t tell anyone but I think I nearly wet myself.”
“You did piss yourself.”
“Liar!” I objected hollowly.
“Pussy.”
She then scratched me between my ears. I was still shaking and had trouble holding my mint tea carton between my paws. But when the C18 commissioner entered, my limbs regained their forgotten strength. It was a matter of putting on a good show to renegotiate the agreement we had made with the private police.
“We have a fucking problem!” the man said, sinking into his chair made of synthetic leather and blowing a cloud of dust into the air. His flowing purple eyelids, shaggy black mustache, and crumpled beige uniform indicated that this charming person, the Commissioner Al-Dhedi, hadn’t slept for days.
Remember when I told you that the night cycles on Ceres were useless? No. You just recall the lasagna joke. Admit it.
The police officer’s fingers tapped for a few seconds on an invisible keyboard, activating a diode as large as a penny over his temporal implant. He then promptly turned the cathodic monitor of his computer station in our direction before a remote surveillance’s video slowly loaded on the CRT screen. It showed our previous target, this child with a wild look, murdering a Marine with a rifle stock before devouring what was left of his pixelated head.
“Charming…” Ali acknowledged, slumped on her shaky chair.
“It’s the brothels’ avenue—running along the port from the former military base to the recycling facility,” the commissioner explained, freezing the audio-visual flow with a hand movement like he was ousting an invisible fly.
“C18 is definitely a small village of character with folkloric customs,” I teased him.
A grunt made me understand that Al-Dhedi wasn’t in the mood to listen to my jests. To be honest, this spiritual son of Frank Burns and Donald Duck was never really in the mood for anything—especially in our presence.
“A seventh homicide, so what?” Ali said while playing with the very loud pencil sharpener’s crank.
“Yes. What about our agreement?” I insisted.
Al-Dhedi looked up at the speckled ceiling before pointing the wobbly digits at the bottom of the screen. “This gruesome footage was captured less than two hours ago. You were in the ambulance—covered in piss. Your quarry tied up in an armored van—what’s left of his arm folded in a separate ice crate!”
That was odd. Yet the child on the video clip strangely resembled our psycho in absorbent panties: same skeletal build, moldy skin and anthropophagous tendencies. “Aren’t they twins? We can’t say anything for sure because we don’t have any FID to scan,” I uttered as I watched the police officer nervously scratching his.
“So, if we catch him too… will we get our reward this time?”
At the question of my sapiens, the face of Commissioner Al-Dhedi became vermeil. “Bollocks! You’re the most covetous bounty hunters in the system!” he bellowed shortly before grabbing his spiral notebook and a pencil from a creaking drawer. “But let’s go over the expenses once again: C$32,000 for the satellite dish, C$41,000 for the burnt down McDonald’s, C$54,000 for damage to people…” Hell! His audiocassette was still stuck on this story. “You can forget the agreement we’ve made. But if you help us catch this one, I may override the impoundment!”
“I beg your pardon?” I protested, leaping on his plastic laminated top desk, next to the empty ashtray. “Retrieving the Kitty was part of the arrangement. You can’t alter a contract that way!”
“That’s cheating!” Ali added before breaking the sharpener.
“Our deal only covered your previous car chase in the bay,” Al-Dhedi resumed, snatching the broken handle from my sapiens’ hands. “Your last week’s misadventure will cost a fortune to the taxpayers of all the external stations!” Of Ceres City’s eighteen ports and twelve districts, we had to come across this nitpicker of Al-Dhedi again. Thankfully, his daily nervous breakdown was suddenly interrupted by a call from his secretary. “—what now, Jacob?” the commissioner barked after smashing the glowing telltale on his push button telephone.
The door slid up and entered a man with square shoulders and jaw, in the impeccable blue uniform of a Technocratic Marine senior officer. With his neatly trimmed salt and pepper hair and piercing green eyes staring at us like we were cockroaches bathing in his Corn Flakes, the Marine didn’t seem too thrilled to find two bounty hunters here. Or maybe it was Ali’s position, head down and legs on the back of her chair, inhaling glue directly from the tiny blue bottle she snatched on Al-Dhedi’s desk that didn’t appeal to him.
“The municipal budget isn’t set up to cover the pranks of hotdoggers!” said the man. “Maniacs who don’t care about the consequences of their actions!”
“Oh yeah… about that.” The commissioner got up painfully to welcome this newcomer and put a name on Grinch#2. “This is Captain Yossef Braun Kamirov. Since the latest victim is a Marine, the military police are now involved in the civil case.”
“And these wild daredevils of yours are no longer concerned, Commissioner,” declared Braun Kamirov who had remained in the door frame. The Marine stood so straight I thought he was going to dust-off right into space like a Saturn V rocket.
“I’m sorry, but they stay on the case,” Al-Dhedi proclaimed, grabbing a nicotine gum package in one of his pockets. “They may be ‘psycho-arsonists’, yet the chase they orchestrated allowed us to close the book on the mob controlling the port. Forever.”
Suck it, uniform. We’re heroes here. That bloody manipulator of Al-Dhedi hated us as much as he admired us. He wasn’t an unpleasant grouch. Thirty years on Ceres18—the gloomiest and disgusting creek of the planet, had left his mood darkened.
“You can’t do that,” protested the clueless Braun.
“The Technocracy may have power on the Inner, Medium and Outer systems… well partially,” Al-Dhedi started, “but here we’re on C18. Since the Red Uprising, our police force has been a private Lunar company. And therefore, I’m the law.”
Braun winced and gave us a nasty glance. Again. Right after he asked Judge Al-Dreddi for the entire content of the file on a diskette, he turned around and left without saying goodbye.
“What a bore,” I sighed. The front paws on the backrest, I watched the captain leave.
“Looked bad to the bone, though,” Ali answered, a finger scrubbing her inner right nostril. “He was so tight I thought he’d lay a diamond, but I could almost feel the testosterone coming out of his sexy breath.”
“Ali, you need to see a psychiatrist.”
“A woman has her needs, spoilsport!”
“You sure need to get the hell out of my office now,” an exhausted Al-Dhedi concluded, a soft pack of cigarettes in hand.
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