Life on the Danaë wasn’t so sweet after all. As Meera explained to us in a secluded alleyway, a trio of criminals had come to threaten her a few days earlier after finding she was a bodacious driver. They were preparing a heist in one of the flying city’s fifty casinos. Trapped, the young woman was ready to pay the price to settle the case and avoid any retaliation.
“What’s your opinion about the whole situation?” I asked Ali, once in our room, a small yet cozy suite whose glass walls overlooked the vacuum of space.
“Meera said she’ll provide us with more details tomorrow.” After dropping her stained jacket into our personal laundry chute, my human applied a brownish ointment on her bump which disappeared soon after, leaving only a slight pinkish hematoma. “However, if she ponies up the cash, I don’t see why we’d refuse. We ain’t mercs but these three musketeers must have a bounty on their heads. Gotta do our job, right?
“Indeed…” All we had to do was wait for more instructions.
Fortunately, it had been months since we had been able to take days off except on miserable gas stations full of drug addicts, implant scavengers and prostitutes. After another morning of shopping, Ali paid a visit to the thalassotherapy center of the neighboring hotel. Her main occupation? Overeating sushi made by nutrigel 3D-printing while getting massages like a Martian idler!
As for me, I couldn’t bask under the false sun of the next-door lakeside resort and get my belly stroked. Like a good captain, I dropped by the maintenance dock to fix the Kitty’s numerous damages. As always, the bill would be higher than expected. Everything was orchestrated so we would never hold a positive balance in this corrupted system. We had to chain contract after contract.
But Meera’s gig didn’t sound right. There was something I didn’t like and I couldn’t fathom it yet. All my cat senses were in the red. Unfortunately, the bounty hunter’s ones wanted to taste the green bills.
Don’t you dare judge me!
The young taxicab driver had finally contacted Ali again by holoconference in the early afternoon, shortly before I joined my partner at the exit of the pool’s tanning booths—or as I called them: human toasters.
“Are you done roasting like a Thanksgiving turkey?” I asked her as she plunged into the icy water of the adjacent basin; all that under the lustful gaze of a group of cadets from the Marine Academy.
“Meera will pick us up with a new taxicab in the hotel parking lot,” she whispered once back to me. “Alongside her, we will meet two of the criminals at the burglary location. Shortly before midnight.”
“Go on.”
“We zero those guys then we catch up with the last one—the leader, in the hangar reserved for the ship’s logistics. Below the final rotating ring.”
Stark naked, Ali came out of the basin, not without deliberately drenching me. The water had a nasty chemical taste from being filtered day after day.
“Do you have any intelligence on these jokers?” I insisted while lighting a cigarette from another drone as she sat on the ledge.
My partner splashed her feet to demonstrate her eagerness to head back swimming. “The Broadway Gang. Three siblings. C$45,000 for the trio. We will also be able to recover at least C$10,000 of Techno-federal tax on their ship depending on its condition. Easy cash with the dollar-credits that Meera promises us.”
“Excellent! This will pay for the maintenance and allow us to save some money on our way to the belt.”
“Whatever... Can I go now, Monsieur?” she asked, slowly sliding back into the water.
“You may,” I concluded before seeing her leave for her absurd wanderings that would fill her afternoon.
I found myself very busy making eyes at the wealthy guests of the hotel restaurant to glean a few pieces of Peking duck or juicy crabs. They were real farm animals from Mars. Not nutrigel. It was worth abandoning a little dignity aside. With my stomach full, I decided to join Ali in the middle of the evening. Dragging my paws was a chore and I had to request the hotel’s staff to carry me on a luggage cart—like a king; not an impotent worm, as the nuance was primordial. The glass elevator shortly took me to my floor where a moving walkway slowly escorted me to the right corridor, then our suite. There, I crossed the group of cadets noticed near the swimming pool as they took their leave.
“Ali? Are you ready?” I said as I walked through the half-open bedroom door.
My partner’s bathrobe had been nonchalantly thrown on the carpeting, near the mattress which was no longer on the bedstead. Her gun and badge were resting on the knock-down nightstand against a giant emptied bottle of Koala Springs soda and a pyramid of little Yoyo Mints. To be honest, I expected a bigger mess.
“Gimme five minutes,” she replied from the shower.
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An hour later, we met Meera in the staff parking lot behind the recycling stations. Without further discussion, we joined the expressway in the taxicab. Between two noisy info-ads, the radio played Sweet Transvestite before the rest of the mythical Rocky Horror soundtrack.
Afterwards, the Tropicana casino and its tacky frontage were in sight. But once on the forecourt illuminated by the gold and silver bulbs, we heard gunshots and screams. My partner and I quickly realized a violent robbery substituted the modest heist.
“What the fuck, Meera?” Ali asked, turning to the porthole that separated us from the cockpit. There was a hint of irritation in her voice as the cyborg remained mute, her hands on the wheel and her gaze forward. In the rear-view mirror the young woman looked anxious.
The right gull-wing door of the vehicle suddenly opened, and two men sat down in front of us. They were wearing theater masks: the first was Melpomene, the sad grimace of tragedy; the second, Thalia, the twisted smile of comedy. Each brigand carried a huge metal block under his arm; drawers that were sure to be full of cash. On the other hand, they held their still-smoking ZeG-4 machine guns even more firmly.
When they saw us, they both gasped: “What the fuck, Meera?”
No time to waste! One—two. One—two. Four holes in their faded tuxedo. Four bullets as big as a cat’s eye that silenced them forever, before slowly repainting the bench in red. My ears were buzzing. There was nothing louder than a gun fired inside an armored car.
“What was that? You killed them?” Meera shouted through the tinnitus as she turned around while starting the electric engine. Her voice was quivering. She was no longer worried, but angry. “You had tasers at your disposal, you psychos!”
The tasers must have slipped between the seats because I hadn’t noticed them. My partner raised her eyebrows and it made me realize that their use had never been in mind. “We’re bounty hunters, babe. Not 9 to 5 social workers!” Ali pointed out, the tip of her left middle finger furiously massaging her tragus. “Now, you gotta motor! Or the cops will fry our ass on the spot before we could even meet the third dude!”
Meera immediately put her foot on the pedal and one could almost hear the noise of the thrusters melting the white asphalt.
“I can perceive the sirens, Ali,” I concluded before the taxicab entered the ring’s external road reserved for logistic transport.
We then had the shortest car chase we had taken part in. The Danaë security forces may not have had the best elements in the system, but Meera’s talents didn’t give them a chance. We had crossed half a dozen rotary bridges to the rhythm of Take on Me, zigzagging between expressways and maintenance tunnels to arrive before the song ended at the deserted logistics hangar.
“Take cover so their boss won’t see you!” Meera angrily ordered as the sliding gates opened. “Now!”
That didn’t stop me from having a gander. The ship house was similar to a huge supermarket with honeycombed shelves. Each of these garages, dimly illuminated by red LEDs, sheltered a delivery or transport vessel. The most impressive civilian fleet I had ever seen paraded in front of my snoot: Martian yachts, Mercurian-made Chryslers frigates, colorful Ford Family Space-Vans… There was even a renovated Oldsmobile’s Starwagon with a brand-new Baltimore-XX twin turbines! Still not as elegant as the Kitty, though.
In the darker area, where we headed, stood a Swift-0 scout with wings spread from Peugeot Corp. between a set of clamps. The Swifts were small and very high-end single-seaters. They could be modified to integrate weapons systems, but their primary characteristics were velocity and evasion. Leaning on the flank of the monoturbine, the last of the three criminals, a tall blond man with a “Chevy Chase” prominent chin was looking down on the approaching taxicab.
“Were they planning to escape on that ship? The three of them?” I remarked when the vehicle stopped a few meters from the small vessel.
But Meera ignored me. “Hand me the money,” she demanded as we stopped. “I’m going out. That was the agreement.”
The porthole opened at its base, allowing us to pass the steel cash drawers. Once the taxicab’s ignition was turned off, only their holographic serial numbers glowed in the dark.
“It’s all over if his cronies don’t stick their noses out of the car,” Ali replied, giving the second drawer away. “He’s gonna figure out it went south. He’ll kill you!”
Outside, the man grew impatient. Blinded by the still-running headlights of the taxicab, he came closer before exclaiming: “Zéphyr, are you there? Where are my brothers? Security is closing all the departure chambers. We will be stuck here, for fuck’s sake!” He waved a machine gun identical to those of his companions currently bathed in their blood, nailed to the seats.
“Zéphyr? Wait… I know that name!” I meowed.
ns 15.158.61.21da2Sweet Transvestite by Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 20th Century Fox, 1975)
Take On Me by A-ha (Warner Bros., 1984)
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