I lay down against an empty napkin dispenser resting on top of the bench covered with dusty forgotten gum wrappers, just behind where my human took place.
"Wait a sec'!" she mumbled to me as she was holding one of the last, now cold, slices in her mouth. "I'm checking the register." My partner was secretly typing on her wrist terminal, a tiny rectangular console inlaid in the flesh of her left forearm she had connected to the table's network outlet by a red-wired 3-millimeter diamond-shaped plug. Lines of cyan squared characters flashed up on the black monochrome monitor among poorly rendered pictures. I could hear the processor cramming megabytes of data from the intraweb.
I thought the man must have phonic implants because he immediately rotated his head towards us, raising an eyebrow. "Hey! You!" he fumed, jumping from the bar as my heart stopped for a second. He quickly made his way through the room, scraping the chairs and the tables against the floor. Luckily for us, Ali had finished her research before he could reach us and it turned out he was just trying to pass the time while the waitress was filling a large metal box with cash: "I note that someone here don't lose her appetite while traveling across the void! How do they call you, blondie?"
This airhead had that smug, intrusive tone, making this clumsy, old-fashioned approach even more awry. Even worse! He had ignored me. Me, the cutest face in the system. Lying on top of the back of the bench, hadn't he noticed me? Or was that a challenge? Of course, it was. I had to intervene. It was a matter of ancestral feline honor. "Who do you think you're talking to? Can't you see you're bothering my partner, low-rank human?"
The troublemaker opened his eyes wide. Obviously, he had never heard a cat speak so eloquently. Perhaps he had never heard a cat speak at all. "Come again, irritating little rodent. Human… of rank what?"
"Irritating? Rodent? What insolence!" I meowed. With my ears back, I was fuming. "I happen to be a Maine Coon, Monsieur. I'm only one gene away from the ruthless cougar!"
He laughed as his wrist blade shone under the pale ceiling lights. From the tip of it, he was going to steal the leftovers of our meal. "Listen, mutant. I'm chatting with the chick who looks like trouble. Not with her flea-covered Teddy Ruxpin with a French accent, capishe?" he pursued.
Or rather, he concluded. For his lame tough-hearted speech was interrupted by a crash and the sweet scent of Saturnian gunpowder. The synthetic copper bullet had gone from Ali's gun through the laminated table and plastic plate so fast that the last piece of pizza resting on it had barely shaken. It had penetrated through his Adam's apple then continued to the junction of the spine and the base of the skull before entering it. The ballistic behind this was amazing yet disappointing. There was no large sheaf of blood repainting the restaurant's decrepit walls; no screaming; no backward jump as you see in those bad direct-to-video movies. Hollywood truly lied to us.
The thief was barely conscious when he collapsed to the ground, complying to the gentle law of gravity; even if artificial. A few spasms and a muffled hiccup followed the fall. George Orwell wrote: you have nothing, except the few cubic centimeters of your skull. That was literally true. At least until that dipstick Ali just shot emptied his jammy cortex onto the turquoise tiles flooring before giving up his final breath.
"That's not clever!" I exclaimed as I jumped to the ground. "Look at the mess you made!"
I landed a few centimeters away from a chunk of tongue and a pool of purple liquid with a dead-fish smell. The gaze of the last customers who hadn't seized the opportunity to rush through the utility room or the motel, had turned towards our table. Once again, my sapiens, as I sometimes liked to call her, offered a pitiful spectacle of our profession.
"This fucker wanted to pinch my slice," Ali strongly defended herself while picking up the shiny expelled shell from her massive iridescent Desert Eagle .50 AE caliber. "So, I plead like, you know… self-defense?"
"Nonsense!" I replied.
Our sixth spat of the day was immediately interrupted by the cook's arrival. Judging by the sleep lines on his puffy face, this fat man with a bull neck must have been slumbering in the scullery. He had finally summoned up his meager courage to intervene once the threat had been averted. "Excuse me, Madam…" he began by replacing the safety catch on his old Remington. My partner lifted her jacket to put her gun in the leather holster under her left armpit. By doing so, she revealed the badge on her left lapel: a discreet gold-rimmed palladium plaque the size of a quarter. "Madam the bounty hunter…"
"We prefer the term 'Auxiliary of Justice'," I replied before my human, graciously leaping back to the table where the bills were still lying in the dried sauce. "Way more PR, you see."
Ali hushed me with a harmless slap on the head. She was the only person authorized to do so. And by "authorized", I mean I endorsed this behavior with minor diplomatic repercussions.
The cook started again while scratching his dreadfully shaved throat: "Certainly. Could you please hurry up and retrieve his identifier? We'd like to dispose of the body. It's pretty bad for business."
"Alright… alright!" Ali replied politely, her ragged once-white sneakers bathed in the blood which began to clot. "We just need his FID."
The identifier, or FID for Finger IDentification, was a small visible ring that replaced the first phalanx of the right annular. This implant made of plastic and metal contained your administrative, banking, medical and other boring information. Not fully trustable, it was usually retrieved by bounty hunters to prove a contract's fulfillment; always more enjoyable than flying through the cosmos with a swelling severed head in an ice tray. Well… I mean… from a sapiens' point of view.
My partner summarily cut off our target's finger with her right heel, and we got a match. She had quickly found on her wrist terminal that the robber's name was Joey Neill. And Joey should have run today. But who cares? He was a wastoid and murderer wanted for C$10,000 on Phoebe. Ten thousand dollar-credits. That's all we needed to know.
"Phoebe…" Ali mumbled after sweeping the device with her computer's optic for the second time.
The dark moon S IX Phoebe was where we had to head for our reward. As reported before, the finalization of an Outer System's contract had to be done in person: no mailing, no identifier scanning or holo-conferencing. We kept the Wild West spirit beyond the asteroid belt.
"I can already hear you ranting about making such an excursion back to Saturn," I said to my human as she placed the FID in a special metal box shaped like a hip flask. "You regret your intervention, don't you?"
"It's so far away! Why can't the Outer System work like the Middle or Inner Planets? It's so lame! I fucking hate road trips!"
"Take a chill pill!" I reacted. "Thus, I think it's time to go back to the Rings anyway." I then climbed again on her shoulder as we decided to leave the restaurant for good. "By the way, did you give another gracious gratuity for the pool of hemoglobin on the floor? And the huge smoking hole in the table?"
"I hate tipping! It's such an outdated custom!" My partner proceeded to kick the door, which the corrosive gum kept closed, off its hinges. The violence of the blow knocked down the adjacent ashtray and its contents poured onto the asphalt sidewalk. Miraculously, the sashes returned to slam against the twisted jamb, but the Plexiglas pane split in two. "God! The Middle System sucks too!" she resumed. As always, Ali was turning into an acerbic teenager when thwarted.
"Are you for real?" I cursed her as the Open/Close holo-sign slowly fell down behind us. "Yet another establishment where I won't be able to come back!"
She snickered. "You know what? That's fine! I'm getting tired of pizzas."
I let out a gasp, ears up. "Are you going mad?" I meowed as I put one of my paws on her temple. My pad didn't detect a fever. She was very serious. "Anyway… you'll change your mind in less than twenty-five hours. As usual."
"Whatever."
We proceeded down the narrowed spiral staircase leading to the main concourse. There, as evidenced by the green LED on the circular station's airlocks, the parking lot was almost empty and peaceful. But it would soon fill up. On the other side of the ceiling only armored window the size of a baseball field, a dozen luminous purple and blue dots appeared. These were flashing in the infinite night. It was certainly a convoy of supercargos on its way, like us, to Ceres. They would rest here for a few hours or a couple of days.
Space travel could be long and consumed a lot of energy for both crews and ships. Lack of sunshine and confinement could overcome even the most robust of minds. Ali and I had found our escape: greasy fast food and the relatable Betamax. Franchises like Pizza'n'Droid or Blockbuster lined up on the invisible highway's space stations and attracted local and transiting wildlife as well as criminals. The great distances had sparked a new boom in the age of smuggling and piracy. Good for us, right?
"Is the coolant full?" Ali asked the snoring red-haired boy sleeping in a shiny vinyl bean bag chair next to the maintenance hangar we were facing once finishing crossing the silent hall.
His head against one of the huge heat pumps, he finally opened his eyes before taking his Walkman's headphones off and turning down the volume. "Huh? Yeah! Full l—load of Blue, Madam," he stammered before clumsily rising and dusting off his green pine coverall. "Quite a museum piece you got here, eh?" He then fixed his gaze on Ali. Under his pimples, his skin turned bright red.
It was the same everywhere my sapiens went. Rotational gravity gently floated her golden hair and her silk-light jacket, giving her a fairy-tale air, or at least a supernatural presence making people's head spin. Or maybe it was her freckles, shaped like the Milky Way. You wouldn't picture how many bottoms I had to bite to brush humans off her bed every morning after we stopped on inhabited worlds.
From crimson these lovers usually turned to the palest white when she lifted her top to reveal her silvery badge and her much too large holster to grab her outrageously kitsch pink furry wallet.
"Y—you're a police officer? A darned Techno-cop?" the young attendant stuttered while ordering a robot to open the garage door, cash in hand. "No wait!" He smiled, proud of his synaptic performance. "An Auxiliary of Justice?"
"Damn right," replied my human who, like me, noted here the correct use of the term.
"Dang! You got to hunt the worst criminals to be able to afford such a rad beauty!" the boy concluded.
The dusty spotlights turned on, the interior of the garage was flooded with a pale blue glow, revealing on the lobby's walls a vast and creepy collection of Molly Ringwald's posters. But that wasn't the most important as the Kitty vertically stood in the center of the more substantial workshop. This marvel at the confluence of design and technology was a Swallow-2 military starfighter of the former United Nations converted into a lone frigate. Twelve tons of alloys and ceramics with flaked coral paint, the legacy of a triumphant past; a 3.5 by 10 meters beauty of Earthen-armored hull in the shape of the eponymous bird, with a long-forked tail surrounding the turbine of a real next-generation post-nuclear Baltimore-IV engine from sixteen generations ago. The vintage class like these bald monkeys no longer did. Weapons inventory: no laser beams certainly, nor fancy electronic toys, but good 40 mm machine guns at the front and a non-registered railgun under the belly. Rusty, yet effective! And I will spare you the details about the control computer and the power of its IBM 16x bits 50 MHz data-core processor. Quantum upgraded. Time Magazine's Man of the Year.
"The rust really ties the ship together, eh?" joked the young boy. As you can see, he was abusing sarcasm on this splendor of times sadly gone by. "How fast can Grandma Swallow push at full cycle up there?"
"This pimply asteroid-faced uncouth is mocking my vessel!" I muttered between my lips so only my partner could hear it.
"Dunno…" she replied to him while he guided us on the footbridge leading to the left flank's octagonal airlock. "I don't fly it. Lee does."
"Yes! I'm the pilot!" I hurled, ears on airplane mode.
Ali stopped me by taking me in her arms. This scoundrel was saved because I almost made canned dolphins out of him. Too bad. This pump attendant would never know how a cat could maneuver a medium starfighter. He would remain ignorant until the end of his pathetic existence shortened by the radiation from nuclear reactors.
"Easy there, furry ball," Ali whispered as the airlock's rotary shutters hissed. But the chin scratching that was supposed to soothe me was promptly interrupted by a message's alarm. It appeared on my partner's terminal which had just synchronized with the ship's computer IR module then in range.
"New contracts? At last!" I asked as the attendant left, loudly dragging his untied sneakers.
My sapiens opened the body of the announcement and frowned. "Just one. It's a gig in the belt. It's on our way, but no homicide allowed. Capture only."
We both let out a groan of disappointment.
"As we're heading for the external stations of Ceres, we'll check for other jobs in the area," I said as Ali had already thrown the contract in the virtual bin. "And whether we can gather new information about this miserable pirate of Oswald Avery."
We boarded our beloved Kitty. Crossing the hold renovated to combine a cozy bedroom, a fully equipped kitchen and a one-person bath module, we reached the wall ladder leading to the cockpit facing the garage's roof. Once there, I jumped on my comfy pilot seat as my sapiens stretched up before settling on her own inclined chair on my right.
The encrypted key in the ignition, the dashboard's rainbow LEDs lit up. The control computer greeted us with a smiley ideogram on the main polychrome monitor. On the two other CRT lateral screens flashed up the ship's check-up results and the updated regional map. As the reactor started its cycle, I made the rear cooling pumps roar.
"Ready?" I asked.
Ali inserted a cassette into the Blaupunkt. Pressing the faded Play button, she simply nodded while lying back. Soon after, Desireless's Martian accent arose, making the speakers vibrate to the sound of Voyage Voyage. My paws on the control sticks, we took off towards the starry sky, plus loin que la nuit et le jour.
Back to business!