Observers of the Middle System had named the comet Rosetta. This newcomer had started its long dance within Solaris beyond the dwarf planet of Eris, in the Kuiper belt. Its veil of ice had amazed many despite the disastrous consequences. For Rosetta had crossed the highway's section linking Mars to the main belt, wreaking havoc throughout the area. Its marbles, sometimes the size of a basketball, hit several ships at a prodigious speed, turning them into smithereens. And guess who was in the middle of this chaos? Me, the Kitty and to get lost in the details: Ali.
"We're gonna die!" she shouted as the sound alerts from our radar tore my eardrums apart. "Look at the screens! We're gonna fucking die!"
The control computer calculated the best trajectory. After a beep, the report flashing up on the central CRT warned us it was unable to find a path secure enough to lead the ship to safety through the tail of the comet. The news made Ali curse even more. And she possessed an outstanding talent for that.
"Full steam ahead, Kitty!" I roared as the first impacts could be heard on the armor.
The cockpit windows cracked under the shocks. We had to fold up the metal flaps and continue blind. At the speed we were flying, it didn't make much difference anyway. It was like a winter night; listening to the rain falling on the roof. Except that we weren't warm under the quilt; it wasn't rainfall; and yes, we were certainly going to perish pulverized!
A long quarter of an hour followed before a more violent impact suddenly shook the cockpit. The dashboard abruptly turned off and a few sparks came out of the control panel along with the life support systems. Shortly afterwards, a slight hissing sound of depressurization escaped from the cargo bay behind our inclined seats.
"Hold on, Kitty! I trust you, darling!" I prayed before everything suddenly stopped. According to the computer, the Swallow had passed through Rosetta's trail. Miraculously, we were still breathing.
"Are we alive?" Ali asked, patting my back to grab my tail.
"For the moment, we are. But not for very long." On the central polychrome monitor of the dashboard, the control computer was listing the damages by order of seriousness. Without emergency intervention on the shutdown drive or the air filters of the LSS, we were doomed. "What's the nearest station?" I asked.
Her harness unstrapped, my human opened the system map on her side CRT while I was trying to restart the Baltimore reactor despite the numerous leaks of Blue. A column of azure bubbles escaped from the hold and floated across the cabin. The liquid was penetrating through the electronic instruments. Cleaning the cooler off her blond hair, Ali answered me between two very distinguished swear words: "Yggdrasil! A few hours away from here… fairly isolated from the celestial highway."
Yggdrasil? This name hadn't been heard for a long time. Once, it was a simple M-type asteroid that escaped from the main belt. It had been used as a base of exploration before setting up colonies on Ceres, Vesta and Pallas then quickly abandoned. It was the fate of many of those dead worlds when the new generations of post-nuclear engines, developed by Lucie Baltimore and her engineers, flooded the market. At the peak of its glory, Yggdrasil had transformed itself into a station in its own right, where even real earth had been brought back from the original Blue Planet. It is said that the first settler families had grown a wonderful tree in the heart of the gardens. This tree would have quickly become gigantic thanks to the reduced gravity.
"Do you think it's still inhabited? It's no longer a registered port," Ali pointed out.
"That's because it doesn't belong to any corporation…"
Yggdrasil was more than busy. Once in range a couple of days later, we could make out an asteroid teeming with life. The station had been dug into the pure ore which became an indestructible shell with numerous cylindrical windows dotting its surface. On the other side, lush gardens mottled the rock walls. It was like a gigantic celestial terrarium of nickel and armored glass.
The most impressive was indeed this titanic tree that occupied the entire planetoid in its height. Contrasting with the graceful emerald forest that covered its roots, the trunk and the leaves were perfectly white.
"I think it's the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long time," Ali said.
Yet it was just a simple tree, dirt and tons of mutagenic green moss. Humans were so melancholic about our home planet that I couldn't understand why they had ravaged Earth in this way.
The station was even more impressive once inside. People lived all over the inner surface in round burrows and anchored nests covered by vegetation. There were no taxicabs, nor any traffic for that matter. One could only take comfort from the birds' singing and the whirling of the wind turbines ensuring the air's good circulation. This piece of cosmic heaven had nothing to do with the foul shipyard of yesteryear.
We clamped the Kitty in one of Yggdrasil's few pods. They were run by a Lilliputian with shoulders so broad that one would have thought she was a dwarf from ancient tales if her beard had been bushier. Alas, Aulë's offspring announced a huge bill for the realization of her art. But it was unfortunately justified. Rosetta had ravaged our only means of transport.
My beautiful Swallow…
"All we have to do now is find a small job!" Ali had confessed to me while I was verifying one by one the expenses on the receipt in recycled bark.
"A small job? I doubt that there is an interesting contract under this thick foliage."
I was right, and the following days were nothing but disillusionment. There was work on Yggdrasil yet no one wanted to entrust it to two marauding bounty hunters. This was the case in most stations and towns in the system. The Alliance wasn't a respected institution. Auxiliaries were more hated than the F musical note.
"Scratch again, I spotted something in the green smear!" my sapiens ordered me. She had refused to dive to the bottom of the reeking dumpster herself. I had to submit to the search for out-of-date nutrigel residues floating in the hazardous gravity.
"There's nothing, Ali! All we have to do is eat moss!"
I came up to the surface to find her crouched in the grass, a hairy caterpillar in hand. The opaline bryophyte and its fauna were once again going to be our evening meal when a young boy landed barefoot in our organic banquet.
"Can I ask what ye, scummy bounty hunters, are doin'?" he questioned us as he snapped one of the multicolored slap bracelets on his skinny arms.
This killjoy with a torn-up Vicky the Viking t-shirt introduced himself under the name of Benàn. He was the son of Yggdrasil's main gardener whom we met shortly afterwards when the teenager invited us to his house for a real dinner. His family lived in a gigantic sclerotic tinder mushroom against the metal wall of the ancient asteroid. We accessed it thanks to a spiral ramp made of pine wood and blue polypropylene ropes.
"May ye forgive the folks here," his father, Alàn, apologized with the same Nordic accent as his son. "Isolation has made them bitter and abundance stingy!" He was a little man with a wide neck and sparkling yet tired eyes. Very jovial, he didn't care that we were Auxiliaries. His mustache and braided coppery beard jumped at every word. Despite his wife's efforts to wash him, his face was constantly stained with brown mud. "Hold op, Diligua! Would ye want to stop?" he cried.
Diligua scolded him, unhappy with her husband's marshy appearance in front of her guests. Benàn's mother was Alàn's opposite: tall, fine and elegant. And without clods of dirt in her blond hair with icy tones. She was wearing them twisted and braided in a bun on the back of her head, as expected to be in a micro-g environment.
Alàn was at first reluctant, but soon entrusted us with the simplest work in exchange for a roof and a good daily meal. We finally had enough to survive in this Smurf Village. As for our invoice, Diligua had gone to negotiate with the dwarf of the hangar to obtain an amendment. She was the chief engineer in charge of the wind turbines and often had spare parts to trade for services.
"Decent people here," Ali said to me at the end of our first day of work, while resting in our private room in the giant family mushroom's attic.
"For a change…" I replied.