The androgynous thief put two cold fingers on my snout. I was tempted to bite them had they not been made of metal. "Be quiet, will you!" the Data Maiden uttered discreetly. "It's a good thing I was in the neighborhood. What are you doing here?"
I first pleaded for the release of my two companions and the two raccoons followed us to the exit of the alley. Afterwards, on the way to her hideout, I advised Zéphyr about the events that had almost seen me turn into a spring roll. I told her everything from Hemingwest to the manhunt set up by Braun and the Techno-Police.
"I understand," she said, slamming the door of the yellow taxicab that had just dropped us off. "The Corps didn't appreciate my break-in into Camp MacArthur's archives."
"What archives? What did you steal from them so they had to send Van Damme after you?"
"Information!" sang Zéphyr. "Lots of intelligence worth a lot of dollar-credits! But it's already sold to a data broker near Io and, therefore, ancient history."
Zéphyr had invited me to her luxurious suite overhanging the Belt Exhibition Center; the Angkor Wat of Ceres City. From the patio, I overlooked the Techno-Police station, a real beehive of black vehicles coming and going. Braun, that traitorous Soviet, had mobilized all the town's forces to arrest the Data Maiden and anyone who got in his way.
"What brings you to Tianzhu? What did the belt have to offer you?" I asked, a cashmere paper cigarette on my lips.
Zéphyr had taken off her street clothes and put a Japanese silk robe over her shoulders. She was a beautiful enhanced-human being for sure. That full-metal epidermis should have cost more than a million dollar-credits.
The thief then joined me, a plate of masaladosa in hand. Turning her head, the cyborg pointed to the huge hazel pyramid-shaped cultural complex on the other side. "I came here for a very special auction… an interesting and precious trinket will be put up for sale in three days." The epicene smiled at me and scratched my back, her white gaze lost in the tops of buildings hidden in the smog. This latter formed a round-shaped cloud, trapped by the rotary ring offering artificial gravity to Ceres City. She finally said: "You should know I have no reason to surrender to the feds nor the army, right?"
Imitating the post-human, I had lost myself in contemplation of this brownish landscape. My feelings were mixed. This heavily polluted and boisterous station was surely overcrowded. I missed the emptiness. And my partner. "I guess so. Then, what do we—" When I finally looked back at the cyborg, a totally different person had replaced her: a man with albino fur sparsely clad with silica implants. "—do?"
The punk smiled at me, revealing yellow spiky filed teeth before this new body steamed away; like a mirage. In his place stood a beautiful caramel-skinned woman with a gold ring at the columella. She was covered with black Sanskrit tattoos converging between her meaty thighs. Soon after, a luxurious vermilion sari with orange embroidery was modeled around her naked waist and left shoulder.
"Impressive holosuit," I conceded. "The smell might give you away, though. Even though you're a cyborg."
Holosuits were R&D-tier military grade gear. How did Zéphyr get her hands on one? Was the Data Brokers' Guild that powerful?
"Remarkable tool indeed, with a fair amount of perfume," continued the androgynous cyborg while taking back her proper appearance. "But it consumes as much as a space destroyer. Its IR imprint radiates like a supernova."
"Is it possible to program it to be invisible?" I asked.
"Theoretically, yes. But the process would require megabytes of information. I'll fry on the spot." The cyborg settled on the comfy bed, a portable projector plugged into her hidden wrist computer once the holosuit's sleeve cautiously rolled up. "I have a proposition for you," she said as her ivory eyes flicked and a miniature reproduction of the auction hall appeared all around us in the room.
A shiver ran down my spine. I was already stoked by her idea as long as we avoided a fiasco like in A Cat's Afternoon. Then, we spent the next two days orchestrating our little show.
"Will the limousine be waiting for us so we can leave directly for the police station?" I asked while Zéphyr was getting ready in the bathroom.
The thief came out wearing a flip lacquered haircut, heavy brown eyeliner and a rainbow leopard dress. The cyborg possessed the sassy attitude, fine features and voluptuous curves of a certain Miss Virginia Griffith, a dubious Martian hedge fund's CEO. The real Griffith had been put into an artificial sleep in an opium den as soon as her FID was replicated.
"After the robbery, I will opt for a more common appearance. And we will take a taxicab," she answered while regulating the last small bugs of the holographic costume. "Nobody would come to a police station in a limo. That would betray us." So far, the disguise had a third flaw. The Maiden's voice remained identical and bore no resemblance to the smoky timbre of Miss Griffith. Zéphyr's voice program didn't work properly. She noticed this too, but wanted to reassure me: "I'll work on that. This gorgonian doesn't talk much anyway. And where we're heading, it won't be necessary to engage in conversation. The bourgeois judge each other from a distance so as not to transmit germs with this pandemic around."
Once we arrived at the Exhibit Center, everything went according to plan. In the arms of the cyborg, I was able to go through all the security checks with her. The holographic costume, much too rare to be detected, and the reproduction of the FID worked terrifically.
The auction house was a modern amphitheater with pastoral tapestries. There were no rows of seats, but a succession of small lounges. Between whose, waiter robots slowly navigated, a tray on the top of their metal skull, while dancers with glowering hairs entertained the visitors between the different interludes.
"It's almost too easy!" sighed Zéphyr, overlooking the place from a gallery.
But the Data Maiden had talked too fast. Shielded robots from the federal forces were eyeballing us. A second later, a human officer with a mullet, enormous Ray-Ban sunglasses and a black leather jacket was closing in.
"Zéphyr?" I meowed.
The data thief glanced at them. Her eyes were sparkling again trough her illusionary veil, signs that she was browsing an invisible interface and possibly hacking her way through the premise's data core. Cameras, scanbots, AIDS and radioactive inspections, police lines, candy vending machines… everything fell under her control.
The sloth-like robots suddenly whistled, making the man stop. Yet, the latter kept staring at us through the room's cigarette smoke while taking out a bubble gum from his jacket's left pocket. Fortunately, his mechanical guards chirped again and he headed back to them.
"Close call," whispered Zéphyr, heaving a sigh of relief.
"What happened? Y—you did this?" I stuttered. "You're scary!"
"Watch it for now. We've been lucky here. The Techno-Police is no joke."
After this little adrenaline rush, we headed to the ground level where several members of the Techno-Parliament greeted us from afar once. Just after, a sapiens wearing a yellow turban smiled at us before handing over his chair as close to the stage as possible. There, the art pieces were paraded in the arms of human lackeys. All we had to do was to wait until the Maiden's objective was displayed before moving on to the next phase.
"By the way, I think it's rather commonplace to steal a bracelet," I whispered in Zéphyr's ear as she drank her second cup of Sula wine. "I believed you were more into data traffick—"
My friend motioned me to be quiet because an unpleasant toad-headed figure was levitating towards us. With a crown of diamonds flying over his scalp and his chrome-skinned servants, we were apparently dealing with a God of Lunapolis; a super-rich. A broken soul from the Moon.
My blood boiled. Ali had history with these guys from the Metacastes.
"Well, if it isn't the non-reverence, subhuman Virginia Griffith," growled the toad in a voice from beyond the grave. His chest swelled under the effort of diction. The transparent tubes that fitted his gullet injected a gelatinous mixture into his gray flesh.
Zéphyr bowed graciously, her right hand on the center of her chest. "True-sounding pleasure, Meta-novus," the Data Maiden replied in a satisfactory imitation of Miss Griffith. "To what do we owe your envelope's august visit on Ceres, Arch-Baron Thoth? Tired of the Moon's aseptic Ivory Halls?"
The Heavenly One wet his cobalt lips with the back of his black tongue. He scraped his throat several times. Maintaining the conversation required an immeasurable effort. "Just not-courteous," he grumbled. "The smell of curry makes me nauseous. Excellent bids to your sub-person." Then he let himself slide a little further, towards a group of Marine officers.
"What a hideous Freak," I commented once the Lunar Arch-Baron smelling like iodine was far from us.
"Have you lost your mind? A God could never be a Freak. He's a human," Zéphyr corrected me just after a robot passed by us, offering us real semolina cupcakes. "At least 51% of his genome."
Human? I highly doubted it.
"I was saying—" I continued with my mouth full, "—stealing a bland jewel sounds pretty corny for the Data Maiden."
"Sensitive information is contained on a microfilm inside the bracelet," she finally admitted. "But the ornament's worth its weight in diamonds. Double bonus, my friend!"
A fine reasoning worthy of a bounty hunter. I was beginning to understand why I liked this thief more and more. But I remembered that my job was to put people like her out of business. Life can't be simple, can it?
The meteoritic iron bracelet was finally displayed after a series of classical antics stolen from the communists at the end of the Last War. Zéphyr bid on a cheap trinket to ensure the continuation of the plan and she won some Soviet garbage for C$70,000. Subsequently, different buyers from the moons of the middle planets competed fiercely until a gynoid envoy scored the precious bracelet for C$2,850,000.
"It's silly not to do this on the intraweb," I remarked. "We're living in the data age, aren't we?"
"Yes. But it's just way more fun to show off your wallet with a canapé in your hand," the cyborg confided to me. "Most of the payments are still made through the web. I wouldn't do it, though. This place's firewall is a joke. A kid from Sheba with a TRS-80 would find his way around the ICE."
"Can you spot some webrunners in there?"
"Like ghosts roaming in the data forest. But they won't bother us. They know who I am."
The thief proceeded towards the offstage salesrooms to recover her bid. Meanwhile, the transport assistant in charge of the bracelet, an egg-headed character with a hooked nose and improbable sideburns, had abandoned the podium and paraded in front of us on his way to the back rooms as well. As for the buyer, she was dragging her circuits right behind us.
"It's up to you now!" I murmured while the Maiden was making room for the robot with woman features after the last security checkpoint.
I let myself gently fall to the ground and followed her where the transaction was going to take place: a sales office covered with faux wood paneling and as narrow as a broom closet. There, a second clerk welcomed this robotic buyer with a fake smile. His security puppet, which looked like a frightening mantis, immediately scanned the latter's identification plate. As I stood silently under the injected plastic table, the bracelet assistant entered the room to hand the object to his colleague who examined it with his wired glasses when the egghead left.
"Another one who uses bots for his bidding," grumbled the auctioneer, without realizing that he was the only human here.
All the remaining participants sat down in their respective armchairs. The third phase of the plan was set in motion. The die was cast. It was my time to shine. "Chicka-chick-ah!"
I made the sapiens with the wired glasses startled and checked immediately under the desk. "What is this?" The effort made his cheeks turn pink, and I recognized the man who had brought me F.A.B. at Germaine's restaurant. What a coincidence! "Well, look at that!" he smiled as he struggled to reach me with his hairy hand. "Do I know you, little guy?" Too bad for him, it didn't change anything. I scratched his chin and bit his ear and he started yelling like a little child: "Harami!"
On high alert, the security robot, yet trapped behind its master's chair, tried to catch me. Reaching for my tail, it stuck its arm-blades in the ceiling tiles as the assistant with the sideburns burst in to help.
"Sanjay! Throw that whirling mop out!" the auctioneer hollered while fumbling over the bracelet as it was raining foam and asbestos.
The confusion was total, but I was finally kicked out of the room. Dr. Eggman carried me by the scruff and rushed to the nearest fire exit, spurning the security services. Once we were far away, he put me down on the ground. Then he burst out laughing: "I love it when a plan comes together!"
His three-piece suit vanished into thin air and a blue outfit of an interweb repair woman appeared. The holosuit continued its transformation to reveal Zéphyr's true face at the last moment.
"Were you able to exchange the bracelet with the copy during that little show?" I asked.
The pennyweighter half-opened the Velcro closure of her glitchy uniform to let me catch sight of the iron jewelry against the skin of her hip. A hot wave blinded me. If her epidermis hadn't been metal, our loot would have melted under the intense heat.
"Perfect! We got to motor, now!"
As planned, a taxicab was waiting for us at the end of the driveway and we were able to quickly leave the premises at the exact moment a detachment of police vehicles soared over our heads. The whole city was on DEFCON 5. Braun was about to crush the auction hall's security with his bare hands.
"Damn! News travels fast!" Zéphyr laughed as we passed a toll booth between two purification towers. "This MP needs to chill up!"
"Glad tidings," I remarked. "You'll be able to impersonate him at the police station without any risk…"