“What was that?”
She meowed and came out to rub Mags’ leg.
“Not good is right! I think that station is in trouble, Patches. And you know what that means.”
Patches mewed inquisitively.
“No, not find another radio station, you dork! Do you know how long it’s been since I found a station I don’t have to physically threaten to play Kyuss? I don’t know who these PBN cats are, but they aren’t going down on my watch.”
Mags sat down and touched the controls lightly, setting up a search. “Maybe we can pinpoint their location from the last known signal.”
Mags could have had a voice-controlled unit if she wanted, one with a name and unique voice who would answer her with programmed but flexible responses. But the last time she had one, she yelled at it so fiercely the system crashed and never came up again. It especially had trouble copulating with itself in the manner she had described. But if anyone asked, Mags just told them she was old-fashioned about some things.
“Whoever it is, they don’t want to be found. I don’t even know how we picked them up in the first place. The signal source is under so many layers of encryption that—oh, wait. I have an idea.”
★ ○•♥•○ ★
The blast knocked him backwards into the wall. The back of his head slammed into a rack of servers, forcing his teeth to clamp on his tongue. “Ow!” He stumbled forward into the cloud of white smoke, raising his shotgun. “Come on, then!” He fired a blast down the hallway, pumped the shotgun, and fired again.
Beams of light penetrated the smoke from the pile of rubble. Only moments ago the rubble had been a steel doorway set into the rough surface of the asteroid. The lights scattered wildly at the shotgun blasts. “Give it up, Plutonian,” a voice shouted through a loudspeaker. “Don’t make it any worse for yourself!”
“Get fucked!” He pumped the shotgun again and fired. The pellets clanged off metal shields, pinging off the tunnel’s rocky walls carved into the asteroid. Plutonian pounded a red button on the wall. A series of three reinforced steel doors dropped into place in front of him. “That will keep them busy for a while. Come on, Tesla!”
The Siamese cat called out from his hiding space on the shelves of records on the back wall. His head poked out from a hole in a cardboard box sandwiched between dozens of Duke Ellington records and a box of 45 rpm singles marked “UK Punk 77–80”. Tesla called out again, pinning his ears back. Above his head, in Sharpie marker, the box read “Tesla’s Bomb Shelter.”
“The coast is clear!” A dull thud on the other side of the steel doors. “For a minute, anyway. Let’s go!”
He spat blood on the floor. Through the smoke-filled room, he made his way to the back wall where Tesla pawed urgently at the bottom of the shelves. “By the time they melt through those doors, we’ll be long gone.”
He pulled the box of punk 45s off the shelf, reached into the space behind it, and grabbed a metal handle set on a circular plate. He cranked the rod and plate 180 degrees to the left. The cat stepped back as the shelf swung into the room like a door. Beyond it stretched another tunnel, a cavern dimly lit by LEDs placed every meter or so on both sides of the rocky, uneven walls.
“If we do this right, we can sneak around front and trap them in here. In fact, let me grab the—” But a red light flashed.
On the monitor on the wall he saw troops swarming around the hidden exit. It was the only other way out of the station, and great care had been taken to make it invisible to the human eye. “No. They’re at the back door already! How did they…”
His voice trailed off. He crouched down to pet Tesla, who rubbed against his hand.
Plutonian felt fear squeeze his heart. It had taken him years to track down all these recordings. Hundreds of hard drives sealed in anti-magnetic containers sat next to open crates of vinyl albums. A pair of original Rick Griffin concert posters hung framed above his broadcast equipment: the servers, the mixing board and patch bay, the boxes and cables sending power and signal to the antennae.
He lingered on the reel-to-reel deck holding master tapes from the Bitches Brew sessions. It glowed warm in the light of a console full of vintage USB drives. They held millions of twentieth-century cat videos and every Negativland album. Skulls floated in a Slayer lava lamp. Its glow, like radioactive blood, spilled across a table cluttered with remixes of all the dubstep revival bands from 2023–2025.
It would all be seized and destroyed. Or worse, the people confiscating it would sell it back to the black market. Then seize it all over again.
Plutonian rose from his crouch, bathing his fear in icy calm. “Over my dead body,” he whispered.
Tesla paced nervously just inside the tunnel, flicking his tail sharply. His blue eyes locked on the man who, opening a fake boxed set of compact discs, flipped a series of switches hidden inside it.
“Sequence one, set,” said a mechanical voice.
“That’s the magnets.” He marched to the shielded case full of hard drives, unlatched the lid, and kicked the whole thing over onto the floor. “They’ll fry all the drives.” Still holding the box of switches, he flipped another series.
“Sequence two, set. Awaiting final approval,” said the little box.
“That will blow the rest of it sky high.” He walked one last time through the shelves, the stacks of books, and boxes. “Damn,” he swore, spitting another mess of blood. “I was just getting to like this little shithole.”
The steel door glowed red behind him. They must have some serious lasers, he thought. He grabbed a handful of shotgun shells from a box, shoving the shells into the pocket of his cargo pants. His hand came to rest on a single compact disc, wrapped in a cardboard sleeve. Its thin plastic wrapper, carefully sliced open, still clung to the sleeve.
“Tesla, they say you can’t take it with you. But I’ll be damned if I’m going anywhere without my Psycho 78s disc.” He stuffed the green and black album into his pocket alongside the shells.
Tesla meowed in agreement. He sprang into the shadowy tunnel and took off.
PART TWO: BURN IT DOWN
Meteor Mags pulled up a display labeled MFA Channels. “See, we don’t need to track the signal at all. If they’re getting shut down, it has to be those MFA idiots. And I have a little surprise for them.”
The Musical Freedoms Act of 2019, or MFA, had created paramilitary squadrons to shut down illegal broadcasts, impound equipment, and imprison anyone suspected of possessing unregistered musical products. Meteor Mags was no fan of the MFA.
“You don’t even want to know what it cost me to get this code cracked. It took me all year to smuggle enough records to pay for it. But totally worth it.”
Within minutes of scanning encrypted MFA channels, she found the unit dispatched to shut down the mysterious PBN. “Listen to this. They are really lighting up the airwaves on this one.” She paused and listened. “And that would be coordinates for their destination.” She smiled wickedly, arching an eyebrow at Patches. “Let’s go teach these fascists a lesson, dear.”
Soon, Mags brought the Queen Anne to the asteroid from the opposite side of the action. She landed out of sight and surveyed the scene with long-range cameras. Artificial gravity allowed the rock to hold a shallow but breathable atmosphere.
“Look at these MFA goons.” She shook her head. “Someone ought to teach ‘em to cover their asses.”
Patches purred in agreement. She rubbed her cheek on the monitor’s corners. The screen showed both the armored vehicle at the pirate radio station’s entrance and a small team working half a kilometer away. Tiny figures swarmed around what was once a hidden exit in a rocky hill, now surrounded with explosives. Body armor and biohazard masks obscured the figures’ faces, though the ship’s sensors read a breathable atmosphere.
“We’ve got enough air out there, assuming they don’t kill the GravGens. But I want you to stay here. No sense getting yourself rescued and killed in the same day, is there?”
Patches whined.
<
br /> “Rescued me, did you? Ha! Why don’t we go halves and call it teamwork?” Mags strode across the deck to the armory. Her cat followed closely behind.
“Sooo sick and tired of these MFA goons. How many more years do I have to put up with this crap?” Mags picked out a pair of modified Desert Eagle handguns from a shelf in the armory and quickly inspected them.
Patches stopped here and there to rub her face on shelf corners and boxes of ammunition.
“It’s been what? Eight years of this nonsense? Radio,” Mags ranted, picking up a fresh ammo belt for the Negev, “has sucked since before you were born.”
A leather band around her right thigh held five extended magazines, each with fourteen .50 caliber shells. She strapped an identical band to her other thigh.
Ever since laser pistols had become as cheap as a phone to manufacture, most body armor had been treated against them. A laser rifle or larger artillery packed a punch, but Mags found her arsenal of twentieth-century weapons even deadlier. As long as she had enough atmosphere for combustion, she preferred good old bullets to laser rounds. She checked her boot knife and tightened the straps, continuing her rant about the state of radio today under the MFA.
But an explosion shattered her tirade.
“They’re not wasting any time, Patches. I’ve gotta go.”
“Mew?”
“You’ll be okay. Don’t go anywhere unless you don’t have a choice about it, okay?” She patted Patches’ hip. Then she grabbed a black bag from the shelf and ran out the door.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
On her missions to “liberate” cargo, Meteor Mags found all sorts of interesting things. Recently, she found a collection of tablet batteries waiting to be broken down and recycled. Mags had thought of a few better uses for them than powering a device.
She approached the MFA squad from behind a series of small hills. Unnoticed, she took up a position on a ridge. It gave her a modest high-ground advantage and a clear line of sight to most of the squad. The rest of them would need encouragement to become targets.
Mags got on her stomach. With her machine gun on its bipod, she strafed the squad until the ammo ran out. Those who did not fall sought what meager cover they could on the barren rock. Mags saw a pair duck behind the rubble created by the explosion.
She dumped the contents of her bag. A dozen spikes and batteries clattered on the stone. She pounded the sharp end of a spike into a battery.
“Ahoy, motherfuckers!” She threw the spike. The battery impaled on its point smoked violently before it even hit the ground. It burst into bright flame. She spiked another and flung it at the squad.
The battery chemicals shot white-hot fire when they mixed, and the flames easily lasted a couple minutes. Two members of the squad ran from outside Mags’ line of sight into her view. Their uniforms had caught fire. They trailed smoke and screamed inside their masks.
Mags drew a Desert Eagle and squeezed off four shots in rapid succession: pop, pop, pop, pop. The bodies fell to the ground. From behind a rock, another soldier returned fire.
Mags spiked another battery and lobbed it at her assailant. She spiked and threw another. Screaming told her one of them had hit the target.
She raised herself up on her elbows and took aim. As the shooter moved to escape the fiery fountain in his hiding spot, he stumbled into her sights. Pop, pop, pop. He went down.
She felt the rumble of the troop vehicle and realized it must be on its way from the front door. Mags picked up the Negev and slung the strap over her shoulder. She pulled out her earplugs and tossed them to the ground. Mags ran down to the bodies, taking advantage of any cover she could in case she had missed anyone. The battery flames sputtered.
The squad had blown a hole in the side of a stone hill. Mags approached it carefully, pistols at the ready. She kicked a still-sparking battery out of her way. Dust settled.
“Hey! PBN?” She shouted into the rough-hewn hallway that led into the asteroid’s interior. “Anybody there? The liberation is at hand!”
She heard a cough and then a man’s voice. “Who’s there?”
“It’s Meteor Mags! Are we taking back the airwaves or what? I don’t have all day!”
Plutonian walked out of the dust and darkness into sight. A stream of blood ran from his mouth into his beard. He lowered his shotgun and coughed again. Asteroid dust rose from his hair and clothes.
“Are you okay? You’re bleeding.”
“Damn near bit my tongue off.” He wiped his beard and smeared blood. “Just got knocked around a bit when they—wait. Meteor Mags?! What are you doing here?”
She laughed. “I heard you on the air getting shut down! Now look sharp. There’s a vehicle on its way from around front. It’ll be here any second. We need to move!”
Tesla emerged from the tunnel to rub the man’s ankle and peer at the scene of destruction. He sniffed the air, disliking the smell of chemicals.
“What a cute cat!”
“Say hi to Tesla, the greatest pirate cat of all time.”
“We’ll see about that. I just signed on a new kitty crew member this morning!” Mags chirped at Tesla and blinked her eyes, smiling when he meowed back. “Now let’s go!”
“Wait. We can’t fight this on two fronts. We’ll have company on our rear if they get through the studio.”
“Just how many of these creeps are there?”
“Too many.” The DJ smiled ruefully. “But anybody not in that transport is undoubtedly in my broadcast booth by now.” He stepped back into the darkness, where Mags heard him click something into place.
A robotic voice announced, “Final sequence approved.”
Plutonian stepped into the light. “Now, we should run like hell. Come on, Tesla!”
“This way,” gestured Mags.
Then their escape fell into ruin.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Sergeant Jack Kuso heard his troops being slaughtered in his earpiece. “B Team, taking fire,” a voice shouted before turning into indistinct screaming. Kuso gripped the steering wheel in a rage.
“B Team is under attack,” he yelled to the squad inside the vehicle with him. “Get ready to kick some ass!”
This bust should have been a cakewalk, he thought. He had a squad through the front door, a squad at the back, and a manned, armored vehicle—all to take down one lousy pirate radio station. Now his troops were dying, and for what? The crap kids listened to these days? They hadn’t made music worth dying for since 1988.
As the transport rumbled across the unforgiving landscape, Kuso focused on a monitor. His troops’ assailants had positioned themselves outside the visible area. But now he adjusted the camera controls and scanned the area. He saw one of his soldiers shooting then bursting into flame. Kuso watched the soldier run a few steps and fall.
Kuso swept the camera in the opposite direction. A lone figure stepped into view. Kuso zoomed in. Star tattoos on her arms came into focus. Across her chest she wore more stars, and the word ANARCHY. Her tail swished behind her as she strode with her weapons through the carnage. “Meteor Mags!”
“What’s that, Sarge?”
“It’s Meteor Mags out there! That filthy slag just wiped out B Team.”
“She gon’ die, Sarge,” Kuso’s squad assured him. “About time we brought dat bitch some justice.”
“You got that right.” Kuso grimaced. He touched the weapons console and brought up a computer-guided missile. The turret on top elevated and swiveled in response. Kuso tapped the screen twice in quick succession to set the target, then fired. “That should soften her up until we get there. Out the door in seventy-five seconds, troops!”
He did not mind obliterating anything associated with criminal activity on this rock. But, he would have preferred to have someone to turn over to the regional attorney, and some “evidence” his troops could move on the black market. Their families needed to eat, and an MFA officer’s salary wasn’t what it used to be. Getting paid for a pro
duct and paid to impound it again made good business sense to the sergeant.
Kuso saw the missile explode on his monitor, and then nothing but dust and smoke.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Mags rolled twice on the ground and sprang up. The blast had thrown her, but she had plenty of experience falling. She coughed, waving her hand in front of her face. It merely stirred thick smoke through the air. “DJ! Tesla! Sound off!”
“Over here!”
Mags made her way toward the voice in the smoke. The missile had struck near the hole into the underground tunnel, burying it in rubble. In the haze, Plutonian stood on the pile of broken stone, bent over, hurling jagged chunks of space rock to one side.
“Tesla,” he called out. “Tesla!”
“We’re outgunned. We need to get to my ship and even the score!”
“Then go,” he shouted at her. “Tesla’s trapped in there.”
“We’ll come back for him.”
“No! The whole fucking studio is about to blow.” He picked up a large stone and tossed it away.
Mags had loved many cats in her long and colorful life. She knew better than to argue with him, because she would have said the same thing. But, she saw no sense in all three of them making an easy target for the MFA’s artillery. “Be quick about it, then! And leave the Mother Fucking Assholes to me.”
The transport came into view. She fired five shots at it to get its attention. Then she ran as fast as she could back to the Queen Anne.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Aboard the ship, Patches enjoyed the view from her seat at the console. She breathed softly, watching moving lights on the screens. Her head turned this way and that as one light then another caught her attention.
Then, Patches saw a small figure on the same screen they had studied earlier. Other figures had stopped moving, or burst into bright light, or both. But this one strode confidently through them. Patches noticed the swishing skirt above star-covered socks, and the tail which lashed the air. She studied the screen, cocking her head.
Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition Page 2
