He watched Mags spin around, pumping her arms in the air as if cheering. She broke into a strut, walking a circle as wide as the board on the ground. She pumped her arms in the air again. Tarzi wondered if she was dancing or inciting a riot.
Mags’ tail curled around her. She covered the headphones on her ears with her palms, whipping her head from one side to the other, singing along to Smash It Up by The (International) Noise Conspiracy.
Patches leapt out of the grass. She pounced on her favorite toy birdie and ripped at its feathers. “Meow!”
“Tarzi!”
He looked up from Patches to see Mags waving at him. How does she always know I’m here, he wondered. He pulled his ear buds out, letting them dangle around his neck, and walked into the clearing.
He called out, raising a fist in casual salute. “What did you bring me?”
She squeezed him in a hug. “So much stuff! Come on, come on. We gotta get in the air and get moving. Adventure awaits!”
As Tarzi followed her onto the ship, Mags told him all about the laboratory she planned to raid. “So the guy tells me it’s just up there, and nobody’s even watching it, because no one who should be watching it even knows it exists!”
He checked his laser pistol like he always did, adjusting here and there, polishing nonexistent smudges just to watch it shine. “But he doesn’t know what they were creating? Just bio-cyber something or others?”
“That, and someone in the military thought it might have serious weapons potential. So, I thought since these bloody lizards have big guns, we might as well get some ourselves. They’ll have the Outer Planets completely infested before anyone on Earth realizes how bad it is out there.”
“You could try making people aware, you know. Get the word out to the people.”
Mags laughed and laughed. “The ‘people’ want to have me arrested. Fuck that! Do you want to check this place out or what?”
Tarzi swept back his mohawk with one hand and put his black cap back on his head with the other. Today, it sported a patch showing a skull and crossbones, affixed with Velcro. “I even brought tunes,” he exclaimed, taking his seat. “The new one from Death By Chainsaw!”
“Rock and roll!” Mags plopped into her seat and got comfortable. She brought the Queen Anne up to full power. “Next stop: top secret asteroid bio-lab. Strap in, everybody. Patches, this means you!”
“Mew!”
As they moved into the atmosphere and Earth fell away below them, Tarzi thought he caught a flash of light from the corner of his eye. He looked out the window to see it, but there was nothing. Just the sky, and then suddenly stars.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
That Same Day, and Not Far Away.
Hyo-Sonn stood on a rocky outcrop past the edge of the forest. The sound of a river rose one hundred meters from the gorge below. “Are they ready to go, or what?”
“You’ve got to let them rest for a little bit,” said Kala.
“There’s no time for that.” She stamped her foot.
“Hyo-Sonn, we’ve been on the go since before sunrise. Some of them haven’t eaten since yesterday. Give them a minute, please.”
“If we stop, we’re as good as dead.”
“You know that’s not true,” said Kala. “Nobody at the Clinic knows which direction we went. Relax.”
“Relax? Relax? Don’t you remember what they did to the last girl who tried to escape?”
“Of course I do. She was my friend, too. Or don’t you remember that?”
Hyo-Sonn put her face in her hands, rubbing her eyes and forehead. “I can’t believe what they did to Sarah.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “I can’t believe what they did to any of us.”
“Sarah’s going to be okay. I talked to her. She knows it wasn’t her fault.”
“Do you know what my parents said when I tried to tell them? They told me to stop lying.”
“Mine, too. That’s when the fuckers upped my anti-psychotics. They told Mom and Dad it was just a side effect of my mental illness, making up these wild stories. Hallucinations.”
“What a nightmare. You know they’ve called the police by now. They’ll send out helicopters soon, put our pictures on the web. We have to get to my cousin’s place, Kala. Before everyone in the state is looking for us.”
“And then what?”
Hyo-Sonn kicked a rock over the cliff. It clattered down the side of the gorge. “Damn it! I don’t know!”
“Come here.” Kala put her arms around her friend and held her close. At seventeen, Hyo-Sonn was the oldest of the runaways. Kala, sixteen, was only a few months younger. Together, they had organized the group’s escape from the Clinic.
The Clinic’s brochures called it a rehabilitation center for troubled teens. In reality, the staff combined intimidation, brainwashing, drugs, and abuse to do whatever they wanted to the young people in their care.
Hyo-Sonn stiffened at the sound of a passing helicopter. “Did you hear that?”
“You’re right. We should go. I’ll help you get the girls together.”
“Kala.” Hyo-Sonn took her hand. “Thank you.”
They made their way back into the forest. A group of six girls waited in a small clearing, some lying in the grass, some sitting with their backs against trees. Two of them shared the remains of a sandwich, handing out small bites to the girls next to them. They passed around the last water bottle until it was empty.
“Okay,” began Hyo-Sonn. “We’ve made it to the gorge. We just need to go south. We can stick to the edge of the forest, out of sight, and just follow the—”
“Why don’t you just admit you don’t have a clue what we’re doing?”
“Shut up, Suzi. If you want to go back to the Clinic, then just fucking go.”
“Listen, you chink bitch, you’ve been riding my ass all—”
“Fuck you. I’m not even Chinese. I’m Korean.”
Suzi pushed her. “A chink’s a chink! You wanna do something about it?”
Hyo-Sonn cocked her fist, but Kala stepped between them. “Will you two cut it out? Where’s Sarah?”
The girls looked around.
“I told you to keep an eye on her!”
“I think she had to pee,” said one of the girls in the grass.
“You think? Which way did she go? Sarah,” Kala shouted into the forest. “Sarah!”
Sarah came running into the clearing. At twelve, she was the youngest and smallest of the group. “Kala!” She threw her arms around the older girl, trembling. Welts covered her face where she had run into branches. “Kala, I saw a dragon!”
“Calm down, Sarah. It’s okay. You know there’s no such thing as dragons. You saw a lizard, maybe? Did you see a snake?”
“No! It was a dragon. I swear. It looked right at me.”
“Okay, Sarah. I believe you.” She held the girl close again. Kala looked up to Hyo-Sonn and raised her eyebrows in a silent question.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Suzi. “Now we’re going to play fairy tales? What a bunch of—” She was suddenly knocked to the ground, trapped in a net.
A second net threw Hyo-Sonn to the ground. Her shoulder smashed into the dirt. She heard screams. Struggling, she rolled her head to one side. She saw more girls taken down, one by one.
Kala grabbed Sarah and ran for the forest, but a net flew through the air and caught them, too. They fell.
Four figures stepped into the clearing. Their guttural laughter desecrated Hyo-Sonn’s ears. Their tongues flicked like serpents’, but they stood taller than men. She tried to move, but the net tangled her too tightly. Her shoulder throbbed.
One of them poked her with the muzzle of what looked like a gun. It bent over her, inspecting her with eyes devoid of kindness. The stink of its breath, like a decaying corpse, filled her nostrils. For the first time since she was five years old, Hyo-Sonn believed in dragons.
The four dragons slung a body over each shoulder, with Kala and Sarah still bound in a single
net. The captors carried the girls roughly through the forest, not caring if their captives smacked into trees or bushes. One by one, they boarded a small spacecraft.
And then, for the first time in their lives, the girls left planet Earth far behind.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Soon, Meteor Mags and Tarzi were inside the laboratory. Patches followed them in, stopping to sniff and rub her face on corners.
“See, that didn’t take so long. And we still have a full charge on our pistols.”
“Awesome,” he said unconvincingly. “Do you think it’s safe to smoke in here?”
Mags flipped on the lights. “When is it ever safe to smoke?”
“I don’t see any vats of oozing chemicals or beakers of flammable beaker stuff. So, screw it.” He lit up.
A panel in the wall behind him slid open. The hiss startled him. He drew his pistol instinctively.
A monitor came to life.
He caught Mags’ eye. She, too, had drawn a pistol at the sound. Together, they came up slowly to the monitor.
The man on the screen talked on and on in a language neither of them understood. Tarzi did not find him especially dangerous, nor likeable, nor anything at all. Just that he spoke an unfamiliar language.
“Hey, Mags?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think it’s funny that here we are, in a laboratory, on an asteroid drifting in the Belt, and this guy speaks a language neither of us knows?”
“What’s so funny about that?” She adjusted her socks. “Just about every language on Earth is spoken somewhere in the Belt. If you include Mars, at least.”
“Right.” Tarzi took a puff. “But we went to a moon that’s been dead for how many thousand years, and we got someone’s voice mail in English?”
Mags cocked her head. “You know, you’re right.” Her tail swished back and forth. “I was so worried about Patches. Maybe they were broadcasting on all known languages?”
“Come on, Auntie. Think about it. Who spoke English ten thousand years ago? And why wouldn’t the manual we found be in English, too?”
Other than the monitor in the wall, most every surface looked like stainless steel: clean, smooth, and polished. Sleek cabinets lined the walls and a table stood in the center of the room—all made from the same material. Mags guessed it was plastic, non-conductive, but she hadn’t seen anything like it before.
“Remind me to ask them if we ever go back.” She smiled ruefully. “Oh, wait. We can’t.”
Tarzi laughed. “Yeah. Oh, hi there. We sort of flipped a switch the other day and totally destroyed your entire planet, but it was all a big misunderstanding. Really. So, we meant to ask about your language.”
“That’ll go over great. Hey, let’s see if we can find something useful in here, okay?” She scanned the room.
Patches pawed at a cabinet door set flush with the wall. She pressed her paw in several spots around its sealed edge. It slid open and something flew out.
“What was that?”
The blur came to rest like a hummingbird hovering in the air.
“Wow,” said Tarzi. “Is that a seahorse?”
Patches jumped on the table, lowering her ears and sniffing at the metallic seahorse floating before them.
“Okay, if this is our big weapons find, I am going to throttle the guy who—hey, look.” Mags bent down to pick up a ring from the bottom of the cabinet. She stood up and turned it over in her hand, inspecting it. She saw faint lines etched like circuits into its metallic green surface. “Here, see if this fits you!” She handed it to Tarzi.
“Oh look at that.” He admired the ring on his finger. “It’s a perfect—” The faint lines glowed green, then brighter. “Uh oh.”
The seahorse also lit up with a network of glowing green circuitry. It circled the young man at shoulder height.
“Hey, I think he likes me!”
“Likes you? Tarzi, it’s a robot.”
“You’re a fucking robot!”
Mags laughed. “Will you chill?”
“Check this out. You don’t see the display, do you?”
“The what?”
“Cool! I thought it was a projection at first, but it’s a heads up display. It’s like a menu for the seahorse.”
“I haven’t seen seahorse on the menu since 2016.”
“Not a dinner menu!” Tarzi’s eyes moved this way and that across a display only he could see. Like the circuits of the seahorse and the ring, it showed glowing green lines. Only, they seemed broken up into menus and sub-menus for—what? “I wonder how you access them.”
“They were researching potential weapons here, so maybe this thing has a trigger.”
“The ring! Maybe it acts like a controller for the—”
“Easy there!” Her hand gripped his wrist before he could touch the ring to test his theory. “If that is the trigger, we don’t need it shooting off god-knows-what in this room. Think!”
“Right.” But as she let go of his wrist, he said, “So, the infamous space pirate is scared of a little seahorse?”
“I’m scared of people who don’t know what they’re doing with weapons. But this little guy?” Mags raised her eyebrows and assessed the seahorse. “I don’t think he could hurt a fly.” She shook her head. “He’s kind of cute, though.”
She reached out to pet the seahorse. But the instant her hand made contact, a bright green web of lightning wrapped around her. “Gaaah!” Her white curls stood out straight from her head, crackling with green sparks. Rigid, she rose from the floor then fell to the ground. Breaking contact with the seahorse made the web of green lightning vanish.
They looked at each other, wide-eyed, mouths open.
Then Tarzi laughed and laughed. “You should have seen the look on your face!” He made his arms go rigid. He opened his eyes as far as they could go. “Aaaaa,” he said, shaking with imaginary shocks.
“Hey!” Her stunned look turned sour as she watched his clowning. “Oh, you are so going to pay for that.”
“Seriously, though! Mags! Are you alright?”
She picked herself up from the floor and smoothed her skirt. “Alright enough to kick your—oh, my curls!” Her curls and bangs had all fallen straight when the current stopped. “I just had them done!” She searched in her kit for a hair tie.
Patches didn’t see anything funny about it at all. She stood on the table hissing at the seahorse. It floated in the air before her, bobbing slightly. She angrily pawed the air.
The seahorse darted back to the cabinets on the wall. One opened in front of him, and he flew in.
Mags and Tarzi could not see what he was doing, as the cabinet was above their eye level, but they could hear him rustling around.
“What’s it doing in there?”
It pushed out a stack of dehydrated food in plastic bags that fell to the floor and scattered. The seahorse hovered over one of them and chirped.
Patches looked down from the edge of the tabletop. She sniffed the air, looked at the seahorse, then sniffed again. She jumped down and ripped the plastic bag apart.
“Is that what I think it is?” Mags sniffed the air, too. “I can’t believe it. Beef jerky!”
Patches tore off chunks of jerky and chewed them, dropped them on the floor, and chewed them again noisily with her mouth open.
“Now,” said Tarzi. “What was that you were saying about this cute little guy and a fly?”
“Ow! Yes, he is definitely a public menace. I take it back.”
“Seahorse ain’t nobody’s bitch!”
“Alright, settle down, G-Money. Let’s see what else they have in here.”
The crudely drawn map in her kit showed this room and a much larger room. Between them stretched a network of passageways. Supposedly, there was a main walkway, like a bridge, leading directly to the next, more extensive lab. But Mags knew the person she convinced to draw this map had oversimplified everything. What really lay beyond the next door, she could not say.
<
br /> “I don’t see anything else in here,” said Tarzi. Imitating Patches’ method of pawing around the doors, he discovered how to open them easily. He moved quickly along the walls now. Cabinet doors slid open at his touch.
“Mew.” Quite satisfied with her snack and her truce with the shiny floating seahorse, Patches followed behind him. She sniffed around the open doors and peeked inside.
“Okay then. Get your mask on! I’m going to try the next door. Get your little seahorse ready to go.”
“His name is Sparky.”
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!”
“What? That’s his name.”
“You can’t give a weaponized cybernetic sea creature a puppy dog name.”
“What? You named your cat Patches!”
Mags shrugged and turned up her palms. “What’s wrong with Patches?”
Tarzi threw his hands in the air. “Nothing! That’s my point.”
She sighed. “I’m just glad you aren’t calling him The Shocker. Get your mask on! We’re doing this.”
At the back of the laboratory, a second door led to the next passage. Mags had her hair up now, tied in a bun with a few spikes of bangs framing her cheeks and forehead. She touched the cover of the security panel, and it slid open to reveal an alphanumeric keypad.
Mags fit her modified biohazard mask over her face and secured the straps. It had a pair of filters on the front, like a gasmask, with a headlamp affixed to the forehead. It could accept a small tank of compressed air giving the wearer a thirty-minute supply of breathable atmosphere. With the mask came a handheld meter which fit in her kit and could test the air for chemical and biological contaminants.
She sang as she typed on the keypad. Her fingers moved rhythmically over the keys to the beat of Black Mask by The (International) Noise Conspiracy. She started at the fiftieth decimal of pi and worked her way backwards, swaying a little. Her eyebrows furrowed in concentration.
Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition Page 19
