Mags put her arm around him and squeezed his shoulder. “Tarzi, did I ever tell you about my great-grandmother?”
“Mad Dog Mags? The pirate?”
“That’s her. I have a box of her personal effects. I should show you sometime. A couple pieces of jewelry. A few notes she made. In that box, she has a single piece of white stationery. It’s a love note from her husband, my great-grandfather. And where he signed it, he wrote mountain lions forever.”
“Mountain lions forever? What the hell does that mean?”
“Fuck if I know! A secret code, maybe? Some inside joke they shared? I don’t know. But when I saw her there, in that cage…”
The cat had finished cleaning. She laid her head on one paw crossed over the other. Her eyes closed until just a sliver of color showed through.
“When I saw her there, that note came to mind. And I just couldn’t leave her. I had to go back.”
Patches ran out from a nearby clump of bushes. She ran up to the Queen Anne and pawed at the door.
“Patches says we’re outta here. Come on, Tarzi. Let’s get you home.”
They lifted off, rose into the sunset, and disappeared on the horizon.
5
Patches the Immortal
Gestaltung, Umgestaltung
Des ewigen Sinnes ewige Unterhaltung.
Umschwebt von Bildern aller Kreatur...
“Formation, transformation
The eternal minds’ eternal recreation.
Images of all creatures float, portrayed...”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe;
—Faust, Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 1831.
PART ONE: IN THE EYE OF DEATH
2026: Earth.
Patches pulled herself from the mangled wreckage. The train burst into flame behind the tiny kitten. The heat singed her fur. Embers fell all around her, charring the grass. She coughed weakly between mews, but no one heard.
The sounds of human screams and the shriek of metal ripping and falling apart meant nothing to her young ears but noise. Noise and hurt. She crawled through the grass to the dark edge of the forest without knowing why. She only knew its cool shelter in contrast to the excruciating noise and the bright, bright burning.
In the gnarled roots of a tree, Patches curled into a trembling ball. For how many hours the screams and the burning lasted, she did not know. Eventually they quieted down, but other sounds and lights arrived in waves. At some point, those also stopped.
Too weak to mew any longer, Patches shivered until she fell asleep. She dreamed she saw the skull of another cat. The skull faded into sight from the moonlit night. It grew until it filled the sky, and the moon sat in place of an eye. Little Patches had no word for death, but she understood the magnitude of what she saw.
The skull cat looked down from the sky at the disaster in the pale moonlight. Its jaw dropped open. From the train’s wreckage, the ghosts of dead cats soared up, up, up into the open mouth. Patches wondered if she knew any of them. From here, she could not tell.
Patches dreamed her own ghost tried to pull free from her body. She struggled to hold onto it. She twisted and shuddered in her sleep. Her limbs struck out wildly. She growled at the monstrous cat skull, and its single lunar eye focused on her.
As the eye of death examined her, Patches shook as if she had been thrown into arctic water. She growled her refusal to relinquish her spirit to this icy, grinning horror. She growled for all she was worth.
The eye of death winked at her. Patches heard a low, rumbling purr, and a raspy tongue combed the side of her face once, then again.
When she woke up alone, she killed and ate the first bug she saw. Ten minutes later, she made a breakfast of a small lizard. Finches in the bushes chirped loudly. Patches did not catch a bird that day. But she would.
She would not give up easily.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
July 2029.
The Queen Anne held a position just outside the orbit of one of many moons around the great ringed planet. Meteor Mags called this moon the Ghost Moon. She had heard rumors of an ancient civilization on its surface.
Tarzi had joined her for a leisurely weekend of hunting for relics, salvage, or anything else they could sell on the black market. They planned to begin exploring the next morning. But first, they had important business to settle.
“Alright, dear, let’s see what you got!” Mags said. “One… Two… Two and a half lol… Three… Go!” As Mags pressed the button on the timer, ka-chak! Ka-chak! Ka-CHAK! Tarzi dismantled the barrel of the laser pistol in three loud snaps.
Mags liked to brag about her personal record. She could field strip, clean, oil, and reassemble a laser pistol in seven and a half seconds. Her nephew refused to acknowledge this record, as they had both been pretty high when it happened. But, Mags had repeatedly shown him in more sober moments an easy twenty-three seconds.
BAM! BAM! BAM! Tarzi dealt out pieces of the pistol like cards, smacking the table top. Along with components resembling the barrel of a semi-automatic handgun, a laser pistol generated its own “rounds” in a series of chambers. These chambers could be disassembled and all their moving parts cleaned.
Mags glared at the timer. “You’ll never beat the record! Give it up! Give it up, poser!” She took an evil satisfaction in the scowl that passed over her nephew’s face. “Don’t get all upset, poser! The battle rages around you! It’s loud! It’s noisy! You can’t even think straight!”
Mags waved her hands in the air. Her black gloves traced paths of imaginary ships and bombs speeding over their heads. Patches jumped on the table where Tarzi dealt out the pistol. She meowed loudly, plaintively, pawing the air. Mags laughed at her and continued her rant.
They faded to less than a whisper in Tarzi’s ears. He only heard his favorite band: Swans. Tarzi imagined Swans bashing a massive, droning chord from their guitars and drums in unison. Over and over again they droned this monstrous chord.
Tarzi had found that by focusing on that pulse, he could slow it down. In his mind, the spaces between the hammering beats grew wider and wider. He practiced speed reading all his schoolbooks in this meditative state, absorbing thousands of pages in a matter of hours. His hands flew over the parts of the pistol.
He sprayed solvent over each component. It came from a small tube that fit in his holster, just like Mags wore on hers. She insisted they have the resources to keep their weapons in perfect condition no matter where they went. Each holster included a small field kit. Tarzi grabbed the bristle brush and ran it through the barrel and pieces. The brush caught and flew out of his hand, rolling meters away from the table.
“Take it easy, poser!” Mags taunted mercilessly.
Tarzi’s hands became a blur. The pieces seemed to fly back together all by themselves. Chak! Chak! Chak! Click, click, click, ka-CHAK! In one swift motion, he brought the pistol up to eye level and set his thumb at the safety. “Go!”
“Whooo hoo!” Mags jumped out of her chair. She had let her hair down, and a sea of white curls spilled across her shoulders and down her back. Her black leather boots smacked onto the deck of the Queen Anne. “Tarzi!” At her nephew’s side, she held up the timer for him to see.
A wide smile formed on his face. Then he squinted. “You totally added that half second on there, cheater.”
“What?! I did not! That’s twenty-three and a half seconds, fair and square!” She scruffed his hair with one black-gloved hand. “You’re almost as good as me, little man. But you’ll never beat my record.”
“Whatever. You are such a cheater. And a poser, too!”
“Hahaha! Now I’m a poser?”
“Auntie,” said Tarzi, holstering the pistol and setting it on the table. “You don’t even know what the name of your own house band means. Total poser.”
“Who? The Psycho 78s? The hell I don’t! It’s from the Misfits! I know all the words to that song.” Mags pulled the bangs down from her white mane of hair into an impromptu devil lock. Then
she sang.
Tarzi pumped his fist in the air and shouted the verses from Too Much Horror Business with her. They thrashed about the deck.
Patches leapt down from the table. She ran in mad circles, howling along with the chorus.
Mags plopped back down in her chair. “Hahahaha! Call me a poser will you?”
“Yeah, but Auntie, you don’t even know what movie that song is based on.”
“A movie? Who’s ever got time to sit still for two hours?”
Suddenly, an impact sent them sprawling across the cabin floor of the Queen Anne. The hull shuddered. They scrambled to regain their seats as a dragon command ship came into view.
Then it fired again.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Three Hours Earlier.
Commander Cragg crushed the tiny mammal in his grip. Its eyes bulged from its head as the reptile choked it. The beast thrashed as best it could, but its life popped like a bubble and vanished. “What it is, Major?”
Dekarna stood at attention before him. “We found her, Commander. And the situation has changed in our favor.”
“Tell me the good news,” he hissed. He tossed the dead mammal into his mouth and gulped it down.
“The pirate has become a military target, sir. With the death of the local shipping magistrate and destruction of his port, the Council upgraded her from a nuisance to a military target. It’s out of shipping’s hands now—and into ours.” Major Dekarna reported this news with pride. She had kept a watchful eye as events unfolded. Dekarna knew her commander obsessed over this pirate, though she did not know why.
Dekarna did not know Cragg had engineered this occasion. Cragg’s spies had taken up positions in that port with the express order to create security gaps. Then he had threatened the head of the Port Authority to deliver the tip about the lax security to Meteor Mags. Cragg calculated that if the dock patrols could not kill her, he would seek her reassignment as a military target. The annoying little pirate had taken care of that herself. Things were going exactly as he had planned.
Cragg’s scaly lips peeled back to display a mouthful of bony blades. “Excellent news, indeed, Major. Let us give those idiots in shipping a lesson in pest control, shall we? Request the assignment for our command ship.”
“Done, sir! And easily enough. We are the closest ship and the best-equipped. The mission is already ours. We have been tracking her and will arrive at her current position in three hours.” Dekarna stood tall. Though harsh and utterly unforgiving, Cragg rewarded those who helped him achieve his ends.
“You please me, Major. I haven’t heard such good news in quite some time. Have the galley bring a crate of these furry little things up to the bridge. All the officers should have time to eat before we intercept her.” He groomed himself as the Major saluted and left the room.
The computer showed Cragg their trajectory. They would approach Meteor Mags’ position from the opposite side of the ringed planet, where she sat unprotected just outside the orbit of one of its moons. They would slip out of the shadow of her blind spot and be on top of her before she knew it. Then, she would die for what she had done.
And Cragg knew so many things she had done.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
The second salvo shook the Queen Anne. A panel exploded inside the cabin. It smashed into Patches, flung her across the room, and pinned her to the wall on the opposite side of the deck.
Tarzi, also flung into a wall by the blast, fell to the floor. “Patches!”
“Patches!” Mags ran across the cabin. She lifted the exploded panel. Her gloves protected her from its sharp edges.
Mags saw her calico lying on the ground. Blood seeped from her ears, nose, and mouth. One of her paws stuck out at the wrong angle. “No!”
Tarzi held a hand to his head and looked out the window. “Fucking fascists! They’re going to fire again!” He leapt into his seat and tried to bring up the main weapons. “Mags! The guns are down!”
Tears streamed from Mags’ eyes. Kneeling on the floor, she picked up Patches’ body and held it to her chest. She could not feel Patches breathe at all. A mask of rage fell over her face. “Motherfuckers!” Setting Patches down, she ran to the hole in the wall where the panel once hung. “Get us out of their line of fire now, Tarzi!”
He had already started pulling the Queen Anne away from the dragon command ship.
Mags stuck her entire arm through a cloud of smoke into the crackling circuits on the wall. She pulled out two cables. She flung open a door on a nearby panel and drew two thick cables from it, too. A flash of light illuminated the cabin as the next shot from the dragons streaked by, just meters from them. “Nice flying, ace! Keep it up!”
“We’re sitting ducks out here, Mags! That thing is huge.” He wiped sweat from his forehead where a bruise blossomed.
“Keep me alive five more seconds, dear.” Blood and tears stained her cheeks. The black smoke from the weapons panel dirtied her hair and the side of her face. She did not recall getting cut, and she did not care.
Mags took two couplers and connected the second pair of cables to the first. She screwed the couplers tight. They cut through the cables’ shielding to splice the wires inside. She sprang to her feet, kicked the cables aside, and pulled two levers in the smoking weapons panel.
“If they hit us again, we’re dead meat, Tarzi.” She slammed down in her chair. “Can you get a lock on them now?”
“But the guns are—”
“Can you get a lock on them now?!” she screamed.
His hands flew over the controls. “Yes! Got ’em.”
“Then strap in! This is for Patches, you sons of bitches!”
Mags slammed her fist down on the panel. A brilliant blue light engulfed the Queen Anne. It shot from the ship’s main cannons, searing the gulf of space between her and the dragons’ vessel.
Tarzi shielded his eyes. He could not see, but the light smashed into the command ship, shearing off a third of it into a mist of shrapnel. The force sent the command ship hurtling away from them into space. It also sent the Queen Anne in the opposite direction, into the gravitational pull of the moon below.
“Take that, you reptilian fucks!”
“What the bloody hell was that? I got nothing here!” Tarzi tried in vain to pilot the ship, but the controls would not respond. His guts churned as they went into freefall. When the moon spun into his view, he forced his lunch back down.
Mags grabbed the front of his shirt. “Keep it together, Tarzi! We just hit them with the GravGens, okay?”
“The GravGens? That’s not even—that shouldn’t be possible.”
“It is possible. It’s just bloody suicide!”
Fear shone in his eyes.
“Listen to me! We’ve got no gravity, no weapons, and no power. Now you’ve got to help me with Patches!” Mags looked into his eyes, watching them flash from confusion, to terror, and, at last, resolve.
The Queen Anne plummeted from the sky.
PART TWO: THE IMMORTALITY MACHINE
In her first year on planet Earth, Patches grew from a tiny, trembling kitten to an agile young huntress. Sunlight gleamed in the luster of her soft white fur, playing between the blotches of coffee and chocolate colors in her calico coat. She had grown large enough to take down a bird from time to time. Anything smaller on the ground was child’s play.
But lately, the birds found less fatal places to eat besides her hunting ground. So, she scouted human campsites.
She smelled meat. Patches had no idea her forest, the same one she had crawled to from the wreckage so long ago, bordered on a state park. But she knew meat when she smelled it. Campers always brought food.
The scent of dogs held Patches low to the ground, and still. The group of humans under her watchful eyes today had all kinds of food. An aromatic feast called to her. Scanning the campsite, she found all the humans gathered at a small fire a few meters past the far side of a picnic table. Between Patches and the picnic table s
tood only a couple meters of flat, grass-covered ground. It looked like an easy run, but for a moment she would be in plain sight and unprotected. She could make it.
She lifted her belly only slightly from the ground, quickly wiggled her hindquarters three times, and shot into the clearing. One meter. Clear. Two meters. Jump! Onto the top of the picnic table she leaped, landed, and skidded to a stop.
So many scents! A plate of raw chicken marinated in lemon and garlic. Stale beer in an open can drew tiny gnats and flies. Patches snapped up an entire package of beef jerky in her teeth. She turned to face the forest again.
At the sound of her skidding on the tabletop, a large dog perked up his ears. Past the humans at their fire, his head shot up from a clump of bushes. His eyes grew wide when the calico cat on the picnic table came into focus. He barked the instant Patches leapt off.
She hit the ground running. The dog bolted past the humans. Patches had a good lead. One meter. Clear. Two meters. Clear! Into the forest she ran as fast as her legs could carry her.
But the hound kept running, too. Patches heard two more barking voices join the fray. The startled human shouts drifted quickly into the distance, but the barks grew closer with every meter.
If Patches had stopped to think, she would have died. But she did not think. She ran. She ran like hell. And then, she almost ran out of forest.
Directly in her path stood a tree. It grew at an angle, like a ramp twenty meters into the air. The tip of its main trunk extended out and over an enormous river running perpendicular to Patches’ path. She could turn either left or right and follow the river. Or, she could stay full speed ahead.
As Patches’ front paws fell to meet the trunk of this questionable escape route, teeth gripped her left back leg and yanked her into the air. BASH! Her head struck the ground. A tooth scraped the bone in her leg. Her claws sunk into something soft and the dog opened his mouth to howl. His two companions had closed in to just a couple of meters.
Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition Page 10
