“Do you smell that?” I asked. In the air floated a curious waft of grilled circuit, but also a scent of toilet-bowl lavender—a very strange cocktail. Ali was about to take out her gun, yet I made her understand the corridor was full of security cameras. “I don’t like that. Maybe we should have waited for Braun’s agent…”
Without further ado and as the door fully slid aside, I entered the empty and impersonal office—a prison cell of dark concrete. On our right, the door leading to the Senator’s bathroom was also opened. Getting around the marble office and the tufted chair, my partner cocked her gun under her t-shirt. But she wouldn’t need to use it, because slouched on the bowl, Balladur was already…
“Baked!” Ali whispered as she tiptoed over to him. “His head looks like popcorn!” Still steaming, the Techno-Senator’s skull has been wide opened from the nose to the vertebrae. A pair of pliers and other grim instruments used to remove the metal extensions were plunged in the tank. “A skilled ripper dock dismantled his neural implants and used the tank’s water to cool the drill.”
“I hope for his sake that his life was taken away before,” I opined as I came back to search the office dimly lit by the reflection of Phobos appearing behind the one and only window.
“From the impacts decorating his fat gut, I think so,” Ali pointed out.
Indeed. Bullets had gone through the massive chair’s back before studding the Formica cabinet. However, there was nothing left of the projectiles. Instead laser-like burn marks could be found.
“Is Braun and the DIA involved in this hit?” I grumbled. “This story definitely smells bad…”
“Whatever…” Ali continued. “We won’t locate Nora today. We gotta dip—uh? Heard that?”
Yes. Already, heavy mechanical footsteps echoed down the corridor. The MKs of the Gendarmerie were about to catch us the hand in the cookie jar.
“How’s the view?” my human asked as she swung a shelf over the sliding door before realizing the futility of it.
“The René Coty Dam and Olympus’s reservoir,” I replied after peeking through the window. “But we’re too—what are you doing?” My partner had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. “Ali! Please, no! No!”
Too late. After firing at the rubber seals, she jumped through the shattering glass as I hadn’t had time to specify that the water was a hundred meters below. My copilot cursed her overconfidence and the whole city must have heard her swear, sliding on the pyramid’s polished face until we violently smashed a zinc gutter a minute later. When the chlorinated water hit, everything faded to black.
“Are you okay?” a woman’s voice asked as I thought I was regurgitating the equivalent of a Ceres market’s fish tank. I felt the foul taste of chlorine pass through my tar-clogged alveoli. When I opened my eyes, I was lying on a hospital bed.
“Am I dead?” I inquired, breathing in filtered air. “If I am, please, accept one of my remaining lives to save my stupid partner too.”
“You’re both alive and well,” answered my rescuer whose features began to take shape despite the opaque filter caused by a possible concussion. So far, I could only distinguish her glimmering golden eyes. “And your kitten lives are safe.”
“Good! Ali didn’t deserve it anyway.”
My vision was blurred, but I could make out my sapiens sitting on the adjacent bed. Her blond hair had tipped me off. So did her exasperated tone: “Aren’t you tired of being a grouch twenty-four hours a day?”
“Twenty-five…” I corrected her, wincing in pain. I could hardly rise up. “There are twenty-five hours on Mars…”
“Always nitpicking. Can you see what I’ve been through all these years, Nora?”
The mist lifted, the shy brown-haired girl of my memories stood in front of me. Although two decades had passed since the picture recovered on Félix’s tomb, her overall appearance hadn’t changed a bit despite her black dress that made her look more distinguished than my wild girl. The numerous symmetrical scarifications running over her temples, neck and shoulder, like golden veins, apprised of the presence of top state-of-the-art cybernetic enhancements.
“Nora? Nora! A—Ali!” I cried, alternating from one to the other before a pain in my neck paralyzed me. “It’s Nora!”
“Dummy…” my prickly partner answered. “I know that. You’re the only one here who’s been in a coma for three rotations… we could celebrate ten times. You missed the crunks.”
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“Three days?” I yelped as I collapsed into the white sheets smelling like iodine. “Where are we? But more importantly, is there any cake left?”
“We’re on the Ark,” intervened Rasputin, who had just joined us with the ship’s insectoid doctor. “On Deimos’s orbit.”
My heart sank. “What happened at the Black Haven?” I asked once I had sorted out my thoughts and memories.
“We almost got caught by the governmental security,” Nora explained, straightening. “It’s a good thing the Major showed up on the lake’s shoreline before you got trapped by a turbine…”
“We? Caught? That was a gruesome setup!”
“Not really,” Ali commented as Braun came over to sit next to me and hand me a piece of sprinkled red velvet cake and a hot cocoa. “It was just a matter of timing…”
“I was already on my way to give the alarm after I found a soft-boiled Balladur,” Nora explained. “When I came back with the Gendarmerie, I saw you jump… and I couldn’t believe my eyes!”
“Why did you go to Balladur’s office?”
“I’m the operative you were supposed to meet. I worked at the Black Haven under an assumed identity for the DIA. Someone managed to get to the senator before us.”
“The operative? Sacrebleu! Braun!” I exclaimed, looking daggers at the Soviet.
The ex-MP shrugged. “How could I have known they were related? They’re the complete opposite!”
As Nora explained afterwards, her path hadn’t been easy. Believing her sister to be dead on Titan, she had fled to the belt and finally joined Mars under a new identity thanks to the Thanatos Cartel. She later entered several intelligence agencies. On this day, her day job as a Techno-Attachée at the heart of the government was just a cover for the Marine’s Defense Intelligence Agency.
“Is that why you never contacted us? To conduct your little investigations in this scorpions’ nest? Because we haven’t been the most discreet bounty hunters in the universe!” My partner grasped me, but the tickle under my chin took away no frustration. “Was your spook life worth it?” I insisted, angered.
“Lee…”
My human silenced me, stroking my back. “Stop.”
Nora’s gaze lost its flame. She held back a sigh, before continuing: “When I first heard about the exploits of a cat and a Cronian fury, I couldn’t believe you guys were alive…” she began, tears in her eyes. “I wanted to contact you, but…” She clenched her fists, reminding me of Ali after the events in King Xiao’s lair. I guessed what such a determined person might have endured while gravitating between the Black Haven and the other Techno-Agencies. “For my revenge against the Moon, I had to stay hidden— in dangerous places with treacherous people. As close to the Metacastes as possible.”
“Sailing in these waters doesn’t do any good,” Braun sighed. “Ask the Techno-Senator.”
“Balladur was weak—and a snitch. If he was involved in the war against the Freedom League, it was inevitable,” Nora explained.
“Someone knew we were on his heels, so he was badly outed. The Technocracy understood what Gaylord and the DIA are up to,” Braun went on. “The one and only reason we’re still alive is because they let us be… and you know who I’m talking about. Donov—”
“Don’t start again, Major…” Nora cut him off.
The central government had almost total immunity. Nevertheless, provoking a full-scaled war should have raised some objections. But if the plotters weren’t concerned, how deep was this corruption? “Who are we dealing with, assassinating a Techno-Senator in his office in broad daylight?” I asked. “The Illuminati? The KGB? The Sinister Six?”
The Soviet laughed before continuing: “According to a blameworthy source, and new informants from Sedna, probably one of the most influential Metacaste in Lunapolis: the Awen.”
My brain, though equipped with imperious feline faculties and enhanced French-made wires, took in this flow of information with difficulty. “The Awen, huh?” I said, turning to my partner. “A Lunar club of hundred-year-old multi-billionaires pulling the strings of a full scale conflict?”
Ali shrugged at this explanation more complex than the plot of a Snorks episode. But I could understand her. Pissing off the Gods wasn’t in our agendas. For she had finally found her sister. And wasn’t that the most important?
“Anyway!” I sighed. “Your stupid war and other sapiens meaningless shenanigans are entertaining enough, but now that the Koviràn Family is back together, we have a business to run and places to go. Don’t you think, dears?”
My partner exchanged a concerned look with both her sister and Braun. “Yea… about that…” she quivered, browsing for something in a carton at the feet of my bed.
“The incident of the Black Haven was made public earlier today,” Nora explained as one of her temporal diodes flashed. Judging by the emptiness of her eyes, she was browsing an invisible interface.
“What does it mean?” I meowed, staring at the original instigator of this disaster, namely Major Rasputin. “What happened?”
“A present from the corrupted Technocracy,” the Soviet sighed. “Or certainly from the Moon for getting too close to their precious asset.”
Hell! I wasn’t interested in political palavers. Were those damned sapiens going to tell me what it was all about?
“Lee? Don’t be mad… but they caught our ride on camera,” Ali confessed, popping a bottle of Champagne. “The Kitty beat another record with a C$2,000,000 bounty on our heads! Crazy right?”
End of Business…