Thick bulbs of blood welled up from the lacerations in her leg. As she regained her footing, a sudden rush of adrenaline poured into her system. She felt nothing but keenly alert.
The dog lunged again. Her world came into sharp focus. In one jump, she scooped up the bag of stolen beef jerky in her mouth and hit the tree trunk running.
By the time the dog turned around, Patches was meters up the trunk already. Like a white and cocoa blur, she ran until there was no tree left to run, and she leapt into the air.
The river looked up at her from twenty meters down and foamed. It watched her paws kick wildly as if she tried to fly, and it laughed. She hung above it like a cloud for the smallest part of a second. Then the river swallowed her up.
It bashed her into a rock. Patches kicked wildly towards what she hoped was the surface. She gasped a breath of air before plunging down again. She held her breath until stars exploded before her closed eyes. For a moment, before she lost consciousness, she watched this floating light show with a strange detachment.
Then the river spat her up.
Patches floated in the midst of a wide but calm stretch of the river, around the bend and out of earshot from the dogs. Only seconds could have passed, but the river had sped her far, far away. And to her surprise, the bag of beef jerky popped up right beside her on the water. She snapped it up and paddled towards the shore.
Once out of the cold water, the pain in her leg started howling. Limping, she dragged the bag of meat to a small cavern of roots and dirt by the shore. She held the plastic bag down with one paw and ripped it apart with her teeth.
Water. It could kill her. It also carried her away to safety, like some magic power. Patches thought of other things she feared. She wondered if everything scary had some kind of magic power, too.
She had learned to thrive on land. She had dared water and come out on top. What else could one cat possibly conquer on this planet?
Patches lifted her head, and she stared into the boundless blue sky above her.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
As the gravity of the Ghost Moon pulled in the Queen Anne, Meteor Mags kicked free from her seat. “Hang tight,” she shouted from across the cabin where she landed. “You don’t want to slam into something when freefall is over.”
Patches’ body lifted off the ground like a specter. Mags scooped her up. “Take Patches and get ready to bring her to me.”
“Got her.” He held Patches close.
Mags kicked off again, crossing the length of the cabin. She brought her arms together over her head in a diving posture and flew to the armory in the back.
“What the hell do you mean we hit them with the GravGens, anyway?”
The walls of the ship had rails and handholds in strategic places for getting around in zero gravity. They never got used when the GravGens were running. At the door to her armory, Mags gripped one tightly in her left hand.
She pulled open a panel on the wall with her right. Without any power running to the electronic entry, Mags accessed her armory with a manual combination lock. She quickly spun the wheel of the lock first one way and then the other. “They took out our weapons power, so I got more power. And the only place to get it was the GravGens. How do you think they generate the gravitational field on the ship so we’re not always upside down or floating around?” Mags ran the combination through the first ten prime numbers in the repeating decimal of pi.
“We haven’t made it to that chapter yet in Physics, Auntie!”
“When I spliced those cables, we hit them with all the charge in our batteries plus all the gravitational waves the damn things could generate in one pulse. We’re lucky we’re not in the middle of a black hole.” The Queen Anne suddenly accelerated. “Damn it, we’re going into this upside down! Get ready to bring me Patches.”
She pulled open the armory door and pushed away from the wall. Mid-flight, the increasing acceleration slammed her into the back. She slid down the wall toward the inverted ceiling. “Oof! Now or never, Tarzi!” Steadying herself with another handhold, Mags flipped three latches and yanked open a panel on the wall.
“Here we come!” He cradled Patches’ limp body and bolted across the ceiling at his feet. “Let me grab on here,” he said, standing next to Mags. “Oh, my god. Where did you get that?”
“Fuckin’ sweet, isn’t it?” From the open compartment on the wall, she slid out a large chamber on a rack. It looked like an iron lung.
“There’s only twelve people in the system who can afford a stasis unit.” Tarzi had read about them but never seen one in person.
“That’s why I didn’t pay for it! Help me get her in there before we catch fire.” The stasis unit was a cylinder, with half of it opening on a set of hinges on the longest axis. Mags pulled it open by a handle.
“Catch—what? That’s the plan?”
Taking Patches from Tarzi, Mags strapped her in place inside the stasis unit as gently as she could. She stood with her back to him. “I have an emergency backup, but we need to unsplice those wires, hook up the GravGens and the power, and give it about five minutes to charge.”
“All before we turn into a blazing fireball?”
“If not, then we die like dogs.”
“And how’s that?”
“With hate in our eyes and blood in our mouths.”
Tarzi stared at her for a moment. “Mags, did I ever tell you I admire your sensitive way of saying things?”
Her hands tensed on the chamber for a second. “Shut the fuck up, you idiot.” She sniffed and wiped a tear from her eye. It fell from her glove and dropped to the ceiling at her feet.
Tarzi put his hand on her shoulder. “I read these units can keep someone on the edge of death for as long as five years. If there’s anything we can do for her—”
Mags crossed one arm in front of her, resting a hand on Tarzi’s. “I’m sorry, dear, but I haven’t had time to charge this one since I—picked it up off a mean old bastard who won’t be needing it now.” She closed the unit, flipping latches into place all along its side. “She’s got more like five hours.” The chamber, running on its own battery, came to life with the press of a button.
“There,” she said. “Now let’s see if we can get out of this without dying.”
★ ○•♥•○ ★
As Mags and Tarzi rewired her impromptu gravity laser, the dragon crew had its talons full as well.
“Seal off the damage!” Cragg ordered. The blast had spared him and the officers on deck, but decimated the ship. It turned them head over heels, again and again.
Major Dekarna called out, “Commander, it’s more than a third of the ship.” She struggled to read the numbers on the screen as the ship hurtled away from the Ghost Moon end over end. “Safety airlocks engaged, but we have failures in sector—sector—”
“Never mind! Do we have engine power?”
“We have backup power to essential life support! Engine control may have been knocked out. Trying to get them online, sir!”
Cragg seethed. “Damn it!” He dug his talons into his seat. Though his ship spun out of control, he knew he would survive. If they could seal off the damage, the vacuum of space would extinguish the fires. Another ship would come to find them. But Cragg also knew the High Council would not take the loss of his vessel lightly.
“Damn you, Meteor Mags. Damn you and your great-grandmother to hell.”
★ ○•♥•○ ★
The Queen Anne burned.
“Do you have it reconnected?”
The ship’s angle had turned. It hurtled through the upper atmosphere of the Ghost Moon on its side. “I think so!” Tarzi smacked his head into a panel. “Gah! This would be hard enough right-side-up!”
Mags reviewed his attempt to reconnect the power cables in the GravGens. “Looks good! I got the main power lines and weapons spliced back together.” Mags grunted with exertion. She slammed the levers back in place. She wiped the back of her glove across her forehead. “D
amn, it’s hot. Get back in your seat!”
He scrambled for his seat. It jutted out at a forty-five-degree angle above him.
“Let me help you.” Mags got under Tarzi and pushed him up. Out the front window of the Queen Anne, a white-hot fireball blazed. The outer hull screamed through the stratosphere.
“Strapped in!” Tarzi held a hand out for Mags.
She took it, steadied herself, and climbed up to her seat. “Either that backup battery completes a charge cycle, or we cook alive. Let’s hope it’s not the—”
Kzzzt. The ship’s radio crackled.
“What the—” Tarzi turned the volume dial. “We must be picking up something on the passive antenna. Listen!”
Mags shielded her eyes from the blinding flare of fire outside. The acceleration pushed them back into their seats.
“Mags!”
“Four minutes! Hang on!”
Through the static came a voice. “—final record of my li—in my lab—is machine can heal—all manner of—it can end—” Kzzzt.
“What’s it saying?” Mags asked. “There can’t be anybody down there. Who is that?”
The radio buzzed. “—al record of my life—”
“No, listen,” said Tarzi. “It’s like a looped message. He just said that.”
Kzzzt. “—this machine can heal—anners of sickness and disease—” Kzzzt.
“Did you hear that, Tarzi? It’s about some medical machine! Maybe there’s a hospital on the surface with equipment that still works. We have to check it out.”
“Based on someone’s ten thousand-year-old voice mail? Fuck, Auntie. Talk about a long shot.”
Mags grabbed a handful of his shirt. “By the time we pull out of this and get anywhere, that stasis unit is going to run out of time! We have to do anything we can to save Patches! We have to!”
“Okay, okay! Just let me—Ow!” He pulled back his hand from the console. “We’re burning up in here, Mags. I can’t even touch anything!”
“Give me your shirt. Do it!”
He peeled off his shirt and thrust it at her. She wrapped it around the wheel. “There! At least when the engines kick back on, I won’t cook my hands like a steak. Hang on, Patches!”
The Queen Anne carved a blazing trail through the moon’s sky. Had anyone been alive to see it, they might have made a wish on it like a shooting star. But no one at all lived on the Ghost Moon—not even the owner of the distant voice crackling over the radio again and again, repeating its litany about some strange machine.
Tarzi felt an elephant standing on his ribs. The skin on his face pulled into an involuntary grimace. He thought, I am going to die. I am going to die, die, die, die, die.
He fought to close his eyelids against the inferno raging meters from his face. The acceleration intensified, pulling open his eyes. He stared against his will into the heart of a sun. His pupils ached. The speed whipped the tears from his eyes. He screamed back into the face of hell.
KA-CHUNK! The LED’s on the control panel blinked on, then off, then back on. The computerized systems whirred and booted up. Tarzi only heard the sound of his scream. Then he stopped, but the scream kept going.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Behind her tinted glasses, Mags involuntarily stared into the blaze. Her lips stretched back from her teeth in a terrible snarl, the side of her face caked with blood and streaked with tears.
Tarzi realized she was laughing.
Pulling herself forward by her grip on the wheel, Mags leaned over the control panel. She let go with her right hand, flinging it at the lever to bring the ship’s engines up to full power. They roared to life.
Tarzi screamed again. Mags poured on the power, accelerating into their descent. She knew she could never brake in time, so she steered into it. She wrestled the controls to level out the ship. Tarzi collapsed even further into his seat.
The Queen Anne settled into a smooth curve. It slowly pulled up, up, up from its nightmarish descent. Tarzi saw white lights exploding before his eyes.
The next thing he knew, Mags was shaking him gently. “Tarzi. Wake up. Wake up.” She snapped her fingers in his face.
He swatted her hand away. “Ugh. Are we dead yet? I certainly hope so.”
“No,” she laughed. “But you are never going to believe what I found down here. Come have a look.”
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Meteor Mags would never mention to her nephew she had blacked out too, if only for a moment. When she came to, the Queen Anne had settled into a shallow but steady climb. Mags took her up into a gathering of clouds. The heat from the hull scorched the clouds and began to evaporate. Mags slowly cruised through the clouds, cooling the hull, trying to track the radio signal.
The screen on the console showed the source as a blue dot growing closer and closer. Mags brought the Queen Anne down from the clouds. The buildings of the Ghost Moon’s lost cities glowed with a pale, green light. “Someone built a power grid to last,” Mags said to herself. “Maybe it’s solar.”
She landed the ship in a clearing just down the street from a two-story building. Though many buildings along the street had all or partially crumbled, this one held something of its former glory. A dome carved with ornate geometric patterns sat atop the second story. At each of its four corners, a pillar rose from the ground to another story higher in the air. They seemed to be covered in smaller, more detailed carvings. Mags examined them through her sniper scope. It looked a lot like calculus, but she could not make any sense of it.
She checked to make sure Tarzi and Patches were secure before she ventured out. She saw only sparse signs of plant life, and a few insects she did not recognize. No birds, no mammals, and certainly no people.
The building looked abandoned, but she held her pistol ready just in case. A chain wrapped around the door handles would not keep her out. Her pistol’s torch setting could melt through it in seconds. Still, she cautiously approached the side of the building and looked in a smashed-out window. There, she heard the voice from the radio again.
“—well. Thus, I conclude my greatest triumph, sadly, with this final record of my life’s work. Here in my lab stands the immortality machine. It can heal all manners of sickness and disease. It will banish death. And for that, they will come soon to kill me. I leave only this testament, and my regrets. It must fall to someone else to use it for the first and only time it can be used. Farewell. Thus, I conclude my greatest—”
The message began to repeat, but Mags had heard enough. She torched her way into the building and ran through its pale hallways towards the voice. There. Down the hall.
She ran through an open doorway, barely noticing the door sat not on its hinges but on the floor near the opposite wall. Then, Mags stood face-to-face with the speaker of the voice. She looked into the image of his eyes on the monitor set into the wall. His message repeated again.
Machinery filled the room: a battery of microscopes, massive coils of wire, and banks of dimly lit consoles. A tube two and a half meters tall stood vertically, set into one of the console banks at the far end of the room. Darkened splashes that might have once been blood decorated parts of the walls and floor. And there she found, on a small desk, in an utterly incomprehensible language, the operator’s manual.
She ran back to the ship.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Tarzi opened the manual and flipped through a few pages. “This is obviously broken into chapters, and this word repeats in every heading of those chapters. So it probably means ‘chapter’.” He ran his finger down the text on the page. “And see here? This is obviously steps to activate the machine, and the characters in the list also appear in the chapter headings. So, we can safely assume these symbols are numbers in a numbered list.”
“You’re so smart! What else?”
“Okay, look at this word.” Tarzi pointed to the page. “It appears again here. And here. And here.” His finger moved across the pages. “Based on where it appears, I t
hink it functions in the predicate. And if it’s a verb, that means—oh, wait. Wait.”
He sat on the chair behind him and furrowed his brow. He flipped forward a few pages, then back again. “Oh. I see.” Slowly now, he flipped through one page at a time.
Mags tapped her foot. “Well? What do you see? What is it? Does it make any sense? Can you actually—”
“Auntie!” Tarzi said sharply. “Do you mind? I am trying to read over here!”
“Excuse me for living!” She frowned. “Sorry, dear. I am so stressed right now.”
“Me too!” said Tarzi. “So can you keep it down to a dull roar for a minute?! Listen, have you got any cigarettes?
“How can you smoke at a time like this?”
“How can you not smoke at a time like this? Come on, Mags, I’m all out, and I left in a hurry!”
“Alright, but figure out what that book says! I don’t have any on me, but we have like ten cartons on the Queen Anne.”
Tarzi’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Ten cartons? Bring me a couple of those, then! Please?”
“Anything for my nephew, the genius. I’ll be right back. Now figure out what that book says!” She stormed off to her ship, leaving him to sort out the manual.
But Tarzi had already worked out the unfamiliar language. He struggled not with its structure and meaning but with a cold fear that gripped him as he read.
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He had a couple left. Sure, he had lied about being all out. But he knew Mags needed something to do, something to focus on, and he needed to think.
He read the words as easily as you can read this page. He read all about how to operate the machine. But, he did not understand everything the machine could do. That part had been partially ripped out. The torn edges of the missing pages made him wonder why someone would remove them. As he read a description of the fearsome procedure, he wondered how they could possibly risk turning it on.
Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition Page 11
