The Cosmic Hum often made my nights a misery. Humans had already encountered this phenomenon on Earth without discovering its origin. Speculations were numerous: from spontaneous otoacoustic emissions to tectonic plates' movements. Space was supposed to put an end to it. Alas, a low-pitched droning continued to drive crazy the most sensitive among us.
"Let's see what we picked up last night," I grumbled while taking place into my pilot seat.
I inserted the cassette tape into the radio player to make an analysis of the phenomenon's ultimate recording. My equipment had been perfected over the years. By adjusting it on the right frequency, it was possible to impeccably isolate this unpleasant noise which had never been as powerful as near the main belt. The volume turned up to the extreme, my feline ears could perceive the slightest harmonic of this evil melody. And after a while, there was a murmur; a squeak the computer could identify as mineral origin. It was the result of a tremble.
"An asteroid vibration? I knew it."
With my new measurements, my hypothesis was very close to be confirmed. In my opinion, this celestial hum was a magnetic resurgence coming from the main belt. In other words, something inside the asteroids was singing in the night. And it warbled very badly.
"I need to—" A shadow interrupted my train of thought. "What's going on?" Zéphyr's face passed by in front of me, behind the cockpit's windows. Someone had printed a wanted poster before sticking it on an old nutrigel can. "Ali?" I asked after grabbing my microphone. "Are you done with your silly antics?"
As an answer to my question, the metal box suddenly exploded into pieces and the Data Maiden's identikit was turned into smithereens before the bullet ricocheted off of the Kitty's armor. Outside, Ali was improving her shooting skills in her white and pink spacesuit. This weirdo had designed an actual floating range. Its clay pigeons were the effigies of Zéphyr, Hemingwest or the fembots slaver that we had come across shortly after the first asteroids clusters.
Standing still on the drifting rock's dusty surface on which we had anchored the Kitty, my partner pulled her trigger again. There was no sound, just a sphere of smoke emanating from her cannon's end. The bullet demolished her new target as the young woman was gently propelled backwards. My human let loose blow after blow, waltzing in the void, before she finally returned to the ship.
She didn't resume the conversation until she took off her suit out of the airlock. "What's up, Doc?" she asked before removing her sweat-soaked shirt.
"The origin of the Hum does seem mineralogical: asteroids vibrating and producing sound," I replied as she was climbing the ladder. "It's rather odd."
This caught her attention and she moved closer to the screens. My partner quickly analyzed the information I had obtained while undressing. "And how do you perceive that noise here in the ship? It's impossible because of the vacuum."
The remark was pertinent and the explanation not very complex: "Not a clue."
She pouted. The rest of the results were unclear, even to me. I had to wait a few hours more for the computer to scrutinize the megabytes of data and finally be able to determine a potential point of origin of the "song" I heard while sleeping.
"Anyway! Enough with your homework, furry ball!" she ultimately said as she gently pushed me out of my pilot's chair and escorted me downstairs to the hold. "It's shower time!"
"Ugh!" I hated bathing. But even worse, I despised licking myself. Nutrigel had the well-known effect of acidifying the saliva. For a cat, this meant taking the risk of ending up as bald as Captain Picard.
"I'll go after you," she pursued while heading back to the cockpit. "And watch your buttocks if there are any hairs left behind. I don't wanna pull a Critter out of the drain again!"
"I concede this time. But in exchange, don't leave your underwear—" A rubber band snapped and I saw her dirty underpants nestling on the levers of the panel. "—lying around up there…" I began to understand why no mate lingered very long in her gravitational field. This human was wild. Impossible to tame.
A few minutes later, I could hear the control computer emit an audible alarm as I came out of the bath module. It hadn't finalized its analysis, but had completed updating the Alliance database; a weekly routine. My cat-size towel on the neck, I was back in the cockpit. Ali floated naked towards the Blaupunkt, turning off the Go-Go's. After finishing her mug of melted marshmallows with an inch of hot chocolate, she handed me my own sugar rush in my favorite Family Ties cup.
"Any interesting new contracts?" I asked.
Several names lit up on the lateral screen Ali turned on, but the first one was double underlined. It was a special gig. Our organization was offering gifts and vouchers for the capture. "Cixi Mixcoatl a.k.a. Thunder Sword. A lovely little ass worth C$200,000," she explained to me. "A super-bonus-mega-death contract, because she was scanned by CCTV on an unoccupied asteroid in the heart of the belt: Yoyodyne84."
I grunted loudly, my chops loaded with a multicolored sweet foam. "If the premium is another discount at Rogers Video…"
"What do you have against Rogers? It's a decent renter."
"They lease VHS!" I yelled while getting angry at this blasphemy to the sacrosanct Betamax. "This standard belongs to the past—what do you think I am? An Amish?" My rant done, I could focus on the contract again: "You talked about Yoyodyne. It sounds like a mining platform, doesn't it?"
The computer beeped anew. It had just finished my calculations on the origin of the Hum emissions much faster than expected.
"Abandoned," replied Ali before consulting the result on the central monitor. "But apparently in the large area isolated by the computer as one of the hum's sources. It's near Eunomia."
"Perfect. We could kill two birds with one stone. Let's go!"
"Aye, aye, sir!"
We immediately throttled back in the heart of the belt. Ceres City and its eighteen ports needed to wait a week or two until we have a few thousand credits to spend on bowling and milkshakes.
It took two long days to hit Yoyodyne84 because of EMIs and dozens of vessels, of all sizes and appearances, were already pressed against the parking cells occupying one of the croissant-shaped asteroid's faces.
"It's kinda crowded for an abandoned mine," Ali remarked as she helped the Kitty tie down to the steel pontoon.
The foldable bridge of the station had finally reached our airlock, and my human could put her magnetic boots on. Immediately outside the Swallow, we were greeted by gynoid hostesses analogous to vacuum cleaners from the beginning of the Atomic Era. Between the incessant welcome formalities in multiple languages, they invited us to follow them to the station's old refectory as we were the tsar's ambassadors. Shortly afterwards, we entered a huge hall segmented in several levels. It looked like the bleachers of a giant boxing arena. Each of them was occupied by food and drink stalls that rose from the floor between the tables and chairs. The air smelled of festivities and grilled meat.
"A C$200,000 bonus wouldn't hide on such a busy station, would it?" Ali whispered to me, fleeting worried glances over her shoulder.
This improvised party was swarming with people. According to the multitude of palladium badges with silvery reflections, all were bounty hunters within the Alliance.
"And so close to Ceres and Eunomia?" I replied. "Such a reward attracted all the belt's auxiliaries here. There must be a hundred of our lovely colleagues!"
In this heterogeneous crowd, I could discern some great names of the Alliance's register. At a table in front of us, gobbling a salt-saturated hot dog, sat Dicklan Hemingwest. The former TMC sniper was one of Nigel's—the bounty hunter we met on Yggdrasil—seven half-brothers. Leaving the unisex toilets, the grim Beverly B. Bones and her crew of zombies were dragging their bare feet to join the Pack of Knives; the Freak-wolf of Amalthea leading a regiment of mutant auxiliaries. There was also Ahmed Sheik, a tall bearded man covered with weaving neon tattoos under his fishnet crop top. He was dozing near the 3D-pinball machine with Debbie N'Guyen, the Butcher of Tiananmen Station, still wearing her red communist uniform.
Even if most of the others were unknown to me, some stood out like a samurai in traditional dress with a large straw hat and white pearl bracelet.
"It's a circus!" I cried while stealing a bent cigarette from a random stranger's pack lying on a foldable table. "Have we stumbled upon a Billy Idol concert? For the second time this month?"
"Lee?" Ali asked, looking down at the center of the room. "I now believe Mixcoatl was on this station."
She lifted me up on her right shoulder and I could glance at what she was pointing at. Behind the safety railings made of empty Budweiser kegs and a crowded bar stood a pyre several meters high. On a stake and devoured by ethanol flames had been impaled the gutted corpse of a young woman. There wasn't much Cixi Mixcoatl left except its macuahuitl, a giant magnesium alloy sword or pie spade, stuck through her charred chest.
"Hell!" I cursed. "Without this hum story, we'd have come for nothing!"
"Yeah… I'll get us a drink…"
On our way to a soda fountain, a jingle suddenly came from the loudspeakers hanging on the four corners of the room. A candid pre-recorded female voice was requesting a quietness difficult to obtain. When the last spoilsports were violently silenced by Beverly B. Bones, a new robotic voice could be immediately heard. The mysterious orator finally began his announcement. "Greetings and welcome to Yoyodyne84, chums!" he said with a metallic tone. "We're deeply honored by your presence." The statement was welcomed by a few shouts from some elements of the audience who were rather too drunk. "Calm down! Be quiet!" But nobody was listening. "Come on, shut the fuck up!" thundered the voice. "First, let me introduce myself. I'm the Dungeon Master, an Alliance AI. And we're gathered here today to celebrate the fall of Thunder Sword." A group of mutants with a heavy arsenal shouted a cry of victory just behind us. They immediately stopped once the accesses to the main pontoon locked while the other routes to the heart of the station remained open. "As well as many of you. Sadly."
A deathly silence instantly invaded the room. The audience stood still, except for the samurai. The mysterious warrior gently slid towards an exit from the refectory.
"Behold as we present you the Purge!" exclaimed this Dungeon Master. "Being now confined to the station, unable to go back to the docks, here are the rules of this amazing event. And they're rather simple: only one Auxiliary of Justice, and I say only fucking one, will be able to leave Yoyodyne84 alive. Got that, chums?"
"The—fuck?" stammered my partner.