Once on the other side of the concrete rampart, the child had disappeared. All that was left of him were blood spots lost in one of the muddy trenches surrounding the huge cylindrical edifice covered with greenery. From the bottom to the top, the building had no visible windows. Our hemoglobin trail faded shortly afterwards at the entrance of a tunnel. There, miniature footprints took over; leading us to a moisture-ridden conduit.

“He survived,” Braun affirmed.

“You’re fucking Sherlock Holmes,” Ali said.

“The kid’s a berserker. You wouldn’t want to draft him for your incoming war around Saturn?” I teased him.

“Shut up. Both of you..”

The Soviet removed the scope from his rifle and equipped it with an assault clip. He was the first to get into the duct with Ali on his heels. The ventilation tunnel’s atmosphere was sticky. Like in a jungle, humidity and heat reached suffocating levels. I had to take my courage in both paws to lead the group once it became too dark.

“Stop!” I whispered to the G.I. Joe who was right behind me.

“Do you see something?” my partner asked, closing the line.

We overlooked a huge square room bathed in a greenish halo coming from large canopies invisible from the outside as they were covered with mutant honeysuckle. The floors, rusty metal mezzanines, had almost completely caved.

The air duct recently collapsed and we could drop to the basement on the slide. The fall was more dangerous than expected and my clumsy human slumped in front of two half globes of dirty plastic the size of a taxicab. These transparent domes numbered in dozens and occupied the entire room on eight levels.

“Is that a clone tank?” my nosey bounty hunter asked.

Braun didn’t say a word. As if the Marine’s clone hives were common knowledge, it’s the kind of “mistakes” humans liked to sweep under the rug.

“The children would be clones?” Ali pursued, tapping the spheroid with her index finger.

Curiously, the surface appeared to be soft. A bubble escaped from the base and slid against its wall, bringing up a partially decomposed corpse swollen by humidity. Its white skin grazed the globe’s envelope, depositing brownish mucus along the way.

Ali let out a muffled scream. I had to retreat in disgust and Braun broke his silence: “It’s now a grave.” The Marine was slaloming between the clone incubation units, gun raised and his finger now on the trigger.

“Gag me with a spoon!” my partner reacted as she joined him.

The soldier finally expressed his full resentment: “To hell with them! They haven’t emptied anything at all! They left everything… everyone. They have no decency!”

It was the first time I saw an officer questioning the Corps. Braun was harboring a huge bitterness. Who wouldn’t? It’s not like the army hasn’t been involved in hundreds of unethical operations. The failed Paperclip, Big Itch, Holmesburg, SHAD, the Eros’s experiment, the Metal Rain and the Contras… Well, you got the picture.

“You alright, Ali?” I asked while jumping on her right shoulder.

For a moment, I had forgotten my long-time partner was born that way. In those inhuman tanks. Assembled and grown from raw genetic materials by genocidal maniacs for another vile purpose than being a soldier. But that’s another twisted tale for another time.

“That doesn’t bring back cheerful memories but I’ll be fine,” she answered walking on small cracking dog tags.

“I think this nightmare fuel undoubtedly stinks,” I said. “Alas, we still don’t know how bad!”

And it wasn’t long before we found out. Behind the large incubator stood a cluttered corridor, always accessible, leading to what seemed to be a mad scientist’s laboratory. Between the mummified corpses welded to the floor and the walls, piled up anarchic columns of computers in operation. On the shelves, sizzling monochrome screens showed a multitude of cyan-colored graphics through the dust. Plastic tiles appeared in places when they weren’t covered with a thick layer of garbage and rotten 192-column punched cards. The smell was also horrible. We were exposed to an exquisite mixture of mold, sweat and…

“Crap?” Ali completed.

“It’s unlikely to find a charnel house like that on Ceres. We’re a few dozen meters from one of the belt’s most active ports!” I murmured while inspecting a body before Braun once again imposed silence.

A collapsed desk occupied the center of the room. It has become the receptacle for a stream of decaying water running down from the upper floor. Mold had grown on the old wood. But the worst was behind. Next to a mountain of rubbish stood an ancient medical bed. Its monitors glowed in the darkness, and we could hear the agony of a respirator.

“Braun?” Ali said.

I heard the soldier swallow. “Yes,” he replied as we approached the bed.

“There’s a freaking dude.”

“I know,” the MP reacted again, then at the foot of the mattress.

Under the dirty off-white sheets covered with moisture and bedbugs, lay an old man. His eyes were welded together by dust and a purple mycosis and his skin was a shroud ready to break at the slightest pressure. We could discern every blood vessel, every tendon and every bone that drew his limbs and his dead face. He was the sticky version of Anakin Skywalker at the end of The Return of the Jedi.

“Professor Herbert Poppendick…” he said.

“Funny name. An acquaintance?” Ali asked him as she kept a handkerchief over her nostrils and mouth.

“The former Surgeon General and Director of the TMC cloning program…” Taking him off his ventilator was a gamble. Most of the epidermis remained welded to the nose, a simple warped cartilage. The long plastic tube crumbled in the hand of the Marine.

“They forgot him here? Not cool!” pursued my copilot. “Poor guy looks like he’s at least two thousands years old…”

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

I thought Braun had just smiled for the first time, but the lighting had played a trick on me. The poor MP tried somehow to hide a mixture of disgust and hatred. “Close enough. This bastard fought in the Somme.”

The individual spasmed unexpectedly, making us jump. “My little ones…” he mumbled.

Horror! The corpse had spoken. He had even slightly straightened up. Ali gagged, almost dropping her weapon into a pile of blood-soaked clothes.

“Professor? Can you hear us?” Braun’s voice was barely audible. With his mouth and nose behind his elbow, he was inspecting the instruments as they were getting excited. They were very outdated with their apparent memory chip the size of a cigarette pack.

“My little ones…” Poppendick croaked again.

His single line of dialogue looped like those Mattel toys with a string in the back. He couldn’t whisper anything more. His voice became weaker and weaker with each iteration. His now natural breathing evolved into a hoarse cough. His rib cage was crushing his lungs.

“We’ll never be able to get him out of here,” Ali said. “Look at him, he’s fused with the springs!”

“This guy is the least of our worries now,” Braun mumbled.

Horrified by Professor Poppendick’s discovery, we had silently allowed ourselves to be encircled in the shadows. All around us were about twenty children akin to the one we had chased a few minutes earlier, laughing at us. Like insects, they were crawling out of mountains of garbage or cracks in the walls. The way these children moved in the dark was terrifying. There was no glow in their eyes. It looked like we were dealing with puppets. Puppets with old ZeG machine guns.

“Do you have a plan, Captain?” Ali coughed. Raised by our enemies, spores and dust entered our throat.

“I’m thinking about it. Give me a minute.”

Braun wasn’t reassuring. With his semi-automatic weapon, he could quickly zero half a dozen of them, but then? My feline eyes were seeing more and more of them.

“Can’t you ponder faster, useless sapiens?” I asked as I witnessed the foul spectacle. “Because I don’t want to die tonight…”

“To-night!” my human yelled.

She had thrown herself at Braun, causing him to startle. The goblins took the opportunity to rush to us.

“What are you doing?” Braun reacted.

Ali ordered us to close our eyes. The Soviet and I complied immediately. A second later, there was a bang near my tail and a second one slightly further down the hall. My partner had detonated the two flash grenades hanging on the Marine, blinding these creatures of the night. It was brilliant. In every way.

“Take cover!” Braun yelled.

The next moment, a rain of lead warmed the hairs on my back. Their first line mowed down like ripe wheat by the MP and Ali, the wild children immediately returned to their hiding places.

“Well done! What’s next?” cried Braun in an inadequate monotonous tone given the gravity of the situation. I did believe that guy had seen his share of desperate situations.

“Fly, you fool!” I shouted as I perceived movements again, among the rubble.

“And Poppendick? We must bring him to justice!”

“Fuck him!” Ali answered.

Braun was hard to convince, but a new onslaught of psycho-children made him change his mind. As a result, we had never dashed so fast before. Bullets were fired from everywhere, bursting most of the globes. A yellow liquid with a strong smell of over-fermented alcohol spread over the ground.

“Almost out!” I yelled, the red exit doors in sight.

“Good! I’m running short on ammo,” my partner said.

“Last clip too!” Braun informed us. But right after the last alley of globes, the Marine slipped on the floor, ready to be devoured on the spot by our pursuers. “Shit!” he shouted while reloading his weapon; courageously facing his incoming end. “Just run! I’ll— ”

“This ain’t no place to be a fucking hero, Rasputin!” Ali cut him off as she had immediately came back, punching her way through two rotten monstrosities until one deeply bit her thigh.

“Ali!” I panicked.

My favorite bounty hunter proceeded to smash one homicidal little girl straight to the ground with her gun’s grip. She then stomped on the abomination’s neck, multiple times—as she may have solved her dilemma issue from earlier. My sapiens finally grabbed Braun by his vest’s collar, dragging him to the rusted steel frame of the emergency doors while he was shooting at a new wave of assailants.

“Thanks!” said the Marine, his prominent muscles covered in mud and gore.

“Keep your ‘thanks’, Matrix! We have a situation here. The gates are sealed!” I uttered.

“Unseal them, dummy!” my partner ordered while giving me access to the corroded distribution board up her head.

We heard a roar. Behind us, Braun had spent his last bullets and was, under a greenish halo of light, fighting hand-to-hand with the last twisted vanguard clone as more were coming in the distance. That was… gruesomely Homeric.

“Lee!” Ali insisted, bringing my wandering mind back to reality.

“Alright! Alright!” The right switches off, the doors slid up abruptly. It was a classic. I learned that in action movies. “Here we go!”

“Well done!” the blood-covered Soviet congratulated me, before eyeballing my partner. “Now, do you want to be true to your reputation?”

Ali immediately curled her lips before pursuing: “I don’t know what naughty stuff you heard about me, dude, but this isn’t th—” But Braun handed her a white phosphorus grenade. A Balrog. “Oh Captain, my Captain!” Ali moaned before biting her lips.

That Soviet-boy knew how to talk to psychotic ladies as she instantly exchanged me for the incendiary device. I couldn’t blame her. It was a fair deal. My partner smiled while she threw the explosive apparatus into the closest globe. Three seconds later, the whole first level was on fire.

“We’re done here!” Braun concluded.

Once outside, the hidden factory was nothing but a huge inferno spewing sprays of flames through its canopies. Poppendick had disappeared with his Morlocks. Good riddance!

Despite my supervision, my Pop Tart jumped out of the Milton toaster. It tried to commit suicide a few centimeters further against the microwave, and this useless armless F.A.B. was unable to catch it.

Blossom Child’s one-hit wonder gave way to a brief info-ads segment on the Blaupunkt. Seconds after, the hold’s speakers vibrated to the frenzied beat of Footloose. Luckily, this was more in line with my morning mood.

I cursed as I pulled a mutant fly off the cream cheese before Ali jumped from the cockpit to sit next to me in the small kitchen of the hold.

“Make room for a tabloid superstar!” she said, handing me her wrist where I could glance at the front page of the day appearing on her implant. “Check this out, furry ball!”

“Let me see… ‘Two twits blow up the Police’s coolant reserves of Ceres18’,” I read on the screen. “That’s undoubtedly us! And nothing about the base?”

She snorted while turning on Benàn’s old VR set she had put on her head. “Jack shit! Rasputin had to cover it up.” She stopped to loudly blow into her game’s cartridge. “The Corps doesn’t want to make the headlines with Poppendick as a méchoui.”

“At least Al-Dhedi has canceled all our debts,” I concluded by putting things into perspective.

The automatic pilot brought us closer to the center of Ceres City by the inner ring highway restricted to spaceships. Glancing through the airlock’s tiny window, I could see the residential grid of the suburbs, stretching on either side until the curved horizon. It differed from the emptiness of the universe. The underground capital of the belt was one of the biggest metropolises in the system. And on its smoggy streets, the hunt for contracts never stopped.

Back to business!