Mags holstered her pistol. “Patches,” she shouted. “Get the fuck down!” Mags brought her shotgun up with both hands. She blasted the dragon in the side with the last round in it. The slug tore into his lungs. He spewed blood from his mouth all over Patches, who leapt to the floor.
Mags walked up to the co-pilot and shot him five times in the face with her second Desert Eagle. “Punk-ass bitch!” She kicked him in the shoulder. His body fell over the side of his chair and crumpled on the floor. “Don’t you ever touch my fucking cat!”
Patches rubbed against her boot, leaving a bloody smear. Then she dashed over to the pen.
Klaxons blared throughout the larger ship, and Mags knew trouble was on its way. But through the sirens, she heard her name.
“Meteor Mags!” Sarah’s tiny hands gripped the bars of the pen. She pressed her face to them. “I can’t believe you’re here!”
Sarah’s smile warmed the pirate’s heart like a desert sunrise. Mags recognized her voice immediately. She knelt down before the pen. “Believe it, darling. I heard you singing. I don’t know how, but I did.”
“They left me in a cage to die,” whispered the little girl, quoting Mags’ song.
Mags covered Sarah’s hand with her own. “None could hear my screams.” She squeezed the girl’s hand. “But I heard you. What’s your name?”
“Sarah. And this is Kala, and Hyo-Sonn, and Suzi, and—”
“Let’s save the introductions for later. More of those lizards are on the way. Let’s get you out of there. Stand back now, dear. All of you.”
The girls in the pen moved to the back. Mags produced a small laser torch and began slicing through the bars.
Kala took Sarah’s hand. “What did she mean? She heard you singing?”
“I never thought she’d really come,” said Sarah. “But she did.” She hugged her friend.
Mags worked quickly, but she stole glances at the girls. They all wore the same outfit, some kind of bland uniform she would expect to see in a hospital. It looked like they had been dragged through dirt. Mags noticed the blood splatters, but none of them seemed hurt. Just scared. They reminded her of girls she had known in Spain more than ninety years before, and the refugees after World War II. She smelled the fresh pool of blood on the ground outside the cage. It was not merely dragon blood. Mags could only guess what horror they had been forced to witness on board this ship.
As the bars fell to the deck, Hyo-Sonn stepped through first. She held out her hand to help the next girl. Suzi reached out, hesitantly at first, and then took a firm grip. She joined Hyo-Sonn in helping the other girls to their feet.
“Hyo-Sonn,” she said. “I just wanted to say—sorry for what I called you. I was just—” She met Hyo-Sonn’s eyes briefly then looked away.
Hyo-Sonn smiled. “Me too, Suzi. Me too. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
“Great idea,” said Mags. “Follow me.” She led the way, running out the jump ship’s door with the girls close behind. Patches raced by her and up into the Queen Anne.
Across the expanse of the landing bay, double doors slid open. Dragons charged through. In the doorway of the Queen Anne, Tarzi blasted away with a laser rifle into the mass of attackers. “Get in,” he shouted over the klaxons.
Mags and her entourage wasted no time doing just that. The door snapped shut behind them. Laser shot peppered the hull. The pirate headed straight for the armory and pulled the largest Faraday suit from the pile. “Tarzi, get ready to take her up!”
“Up? Don’t you mean out?”
“Up. As in, lift her off the deck by a good five or six meters! We’re not ready to leave just yet.” She squeezed her ample curves and her tail into a suit clearly made for a man, tugging here and adjusting there. “And get your seahorse ready for a repeat performance. Only this time, we’re taking out this whole fucking ship!”
“Christ, Auntie!” He slipped the ring on his finger. Sparky rose from the pillow and glowed, circling obediently around the young man. “I don’t know if he’s got enough power for that.”
“That’s why we’re giving him a boost.” Mags wrapped a holster around her waist and picked up fresh clips for her Desert Eagles. She strapped a knife to her thigh and loaded eight more shells into her shotgun. “Me and those goddamn lizards are going to make a circuit with all the juice he can handle. Listen for me on the ship’s radio, okay?” Mags pulled the helmet of the Faraday suit over her head and sealed it. “Testing, testing. Can you hear me, Tarzi?”
He dialed in the ship’s receiver, locking on her frequency. Her voice came over the speakers. “Loud and clear.”
“You send Sparky out after me, close the door, and take the Queen Anne into the air. When I give you the word, you tell that little seahorse to turn the juice all the way up, and don’t stop for anything! Got it?”
“Got it!”
Hyo-Sonn put her hand on the smuggler’s arm. “Mags,” she said. “Be careful.”
Mags smiled inside her mask. “Don’t you worry about me, dear.” She put her hand on Hyo-Sonn’s cheek. “I’ll be just fine!”
But in her mind, Mags said a silent prayer. “Great-gramma. If you were ever looking out for me, please look out for me now.”
Mags leapt out, with Sparky right behind her. She rolled to avoid the hail of laser fire. She came to her feet face-to-face with the oncoming horde. Behind her, the Queen Anne rose from the deck.
Meteor Mags had often fought for peace: peace for herself; peace for the young women in her care in Spain, at La Plaza Margareta, and on Vesta 4; peace for those close to her, like her nephew and Celina and her grandmother.
But Mags had a secret, passionate love beyond all of that. Mags loved war. And though she hated her enemies with every fiber of her soul, she could not help but love them just as deeply.
As she tore into the dragons with unmatched rage, she loved each and every one of them. She loved them for being unequivocally evil. She loved them for threatening Tarzi, Patches, and the girls. She loved the way they fought her, and she reveled in the way they died at her hands. Their blood splatters on her suit were an ecstasy. Their screams of rage sounded in her ears like the sweetest orchestra imaginable.
For Mags was no ordinary human. The same freak forces of genetics that had formed her tail, her sensitive ears, her eyes that penetrated darkness, her bones and muscles that met danger like a cat’s—those same forces had made her into something none of her friends could ever fully understand.
Though she had enjoyed unheard-of quantities of intoxicants in her long and colorful life, Mags’ one true drug of choice was the adrenaline that pumped through her veins and organs in battle. It flooded her brain. It flooded her tissues. It gave her the highest high of anything. She could not help but love it.
As the shotgun kicked in her hands and the slugs tore gaping holes in the dragons and their armor, Mags smiled wickedly inside her mask. Teeth bared, eyebrows arched, her lips glistening wet with hatred, she felt truly alive. When one of the dragons closed in on her, she pulled her knife and plunged it into his neck again and again. She rejoiced in its rancid sprays of blood.
She spun and kicked the beast in its belly. It flew backwards. She whipped around and continued blasting the shotgun. In her heart, Mags wished they would never stop coming. She wished she could kill until she could live to kill no more. Let them come. Let them all come. Let their unquenchable fire burn before her eyes forever.
Then the mass of dragons overcame her, and she knew it was time. “Tarzi,” she cried. “Time to turn on the juice, motherfucker!”
A dragon slammed into her. It crushed her to the deck. Her fingers clamped around its electric staff.
Another dragon clambered on top of her and thrust its staff. She parried the strike with her free hand. Her arm whipped around the weapon like a python catching a rodent. She pulled.
The first dragon’s teeth snapped with the force of a steel trap a centimeter from her face. Mags kicked the sole of her bo
ot into its chest, not releasing her grip on its weapon.
Then she strained. Her muscles felt like they would rip the tendons right off her bones, but she only pulled harder. The tips of the two weapons came closer together, lovers who despised each other but could not resist touching anyway. “Tarzi,” she shouted again.
In response, a ball of green lightning appeared above the thrashing bodies pressing her to the floor. The flash constricted Mags’ pupils to pinpoints. A sphere of electromagnetic whips, it burned and tore the air around her, ripping electrons from their atoms like a hurricane tears trees from the ground. Mags let loose an ungodly yell like continents crashing into each other. In her grip, the dragons’ electric weapons at last came together.
Sensing the completed circuit, Sparky’s lightning stretched out its fingers to the weapons. Sparky crackled with energy in the middle of the electric ball. His little tail flexed. The current surged. Bolts of electricity exploded from the connection. They leapt from dragon to dragon, igniting the power sources in their laser rifles, setting them off like a chain of firecrackers, connecting each electric staff to the next in one giant circuit.
The dragons on Mags burned. Smoke poured out of their body armor as their skin cooked. She thrived on the awful sounds they made, and she kicked them away.
Their hands still clenched the rods. Mags smashed her heel into their faces; first one, then the other. Their bodies jerked like a madman’s puppets on strings of current. A terrible, stark light filled the landing bay: flickering, crackling, coruscating light. The rods jerked free from their hands.
Mags kept the rods pressed together. She found her footing and raised the weapons above her head, crossing them like two sides of a brutal triangle. Electricity wrapped around her from head to toe. Then she screamed and screamed and screamed.
Sparky’s ball of lightning grew larger. It spread from the dozens of dragons near Mags to the rest of the gathered soldiers. It devoured them all, one by one. Hundreds of reptiles danced helplessly to its merciless demand. The bolts of energy leapt from one to the next, destroying them.
Next, the lightning bolts permeated the ship itself. Every circuit they met only amplified their power. Lights exploded in their fixtures, beginning in the bay and then throughout the rest of the ship. The communications system gave up its ghosts. Resistors melted. Transistors fused from one end of the ship to the other.
Sparky’s green glow turned a fiery red. His metal panels burned with electric heat. Every dragon in contact with the ship’s surfaces incinerated where it stood. They twisted and spasmed out of control. Lightning blazed, and the brilliant red seahorse flexed its tail. In the center of the unimaginable heat, Sparky poured out amp after amp after amp. A ball of light formed at its core, surrounded it, and finally burst.
The force knocked Mags to the deck. Then she saw nothing.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
The Queen Anne hovered in darkness save for the glow from its engines. Tarzi activated the lights along her side and set her down gently onto the deck of the landing bay. “Everybody, just keep calm!” He lowered the door and looked out.
Meteor Mags’ body lay sprawled atop a pile of blackened reptile corpses. Tendrils of smoke drifted up from them, twisting and turning in the ship’s stark lights. The young man ran out to her, with Patches right beside him. A few of the girls cautiously watched from the doorway.
“Mags! Auntie!” Tarzi feared the worst.
Then her body rolled to the side. She pushed herself up into a crouch and held out her arm to him.
Tarzi took her hand, helping her rise to her feet. “Are you alright? Say something!”
Suddenly she gripped his shoulders. A painful howl came from inside the Faraday suit. She flung her hands to her head and screamed. Grasping the sides of her head, she turned away and thrashed violently. Her high-pitched yells, like the death noises of a wounded animal, chilled Tarzi to the bone.
“Oh, my god! Mags! Mags, what is it?”
She ripped open the helmet of the Faraday suit and flung her arms into the air. Like a magician, she announced, “Ta-da!” Mags laughed and laughed. “Holy shit, you should have seen the look on your face!”
“Auntie, what the—”
“Laugh at me for getting shocked, will you? Ahahahaha! I warned you I’d get you back for that!”
He snorted and could not keep from laughing, too. He threw his arms around her. “Goddamnit, Auntie. You are so fucked up sometimes!”
Mags held him tightly as they shook with laughter. She leaned back and looked into his eyes. “You did great, Tarzi. Just perfect. And so did your little sea—oh, no. Where’s Sparky?”
They tore away from each other.
“Sparky!” Tarzi touched his ring, but none of the menus came up. “Sparky!”
They quickly looked around, but Patches found it first. Mags crouched down next to her on the deck. At her feet lay the fractured remains of Tarzi’s pet. Fragments of his tail and fins still glowed red with heat. Half of his head lay there, broken, with burnt wires protruding from the cybernetic skull. Nothing was left of him but scrap metal.
Tarzi knelt beside her. “Oh, no. No.” He tried to pick up the pieces, but they burned his fingers.
“Here. Let me do it, dear.” With her hands protected by her mesh suit, Mags scooped the seahorse fragments into a pile. “Hand me your cap.” She placed the pieces into his hat and handed it back.
The young man wiped his eyes. Then he quietly walked back to the ship. Mags and Patches followed.
Aboard the Queen Anne, the pirate instructed everyone to take a seat. She turned the ship’s cannons on the landing bay’s exit door and opened fire. She punched holes in it until she had enough room to fly through, and then they began their journey home to Vesta 4.
Hyo-Sonn and Kala took charge of finding something for the girls to eat and making sure everyone was okay. Patches followed the two of them around, sensing how upset some of their friends were. None of them could resist petting Patches when she mewed at them, and even the saddest of them was cheered up by the carefree little calico sprawling next to them for belly rubs.
All of them, that is, except Tarzi. He had gladly given up his bed so they could sit. In the armory at the back of the ship, he sat alone on a bench, staring at the floor. His cap held Sparky’s fragments.
Eventually, Hyo-Sonn approached him with a bottle of water. “Would you like something to drink?”
He looked up without smiling, but he took the bottle of water. “Thanks,” he said quietly.
“My name’s Hyo-Sonn. I’m sorry about your friend.”
Tarzi said nothing, returning his gaze to the floor.
“I lost a friend today, too,” said the young woman.
Tarzi looked up at her again. He scooted over to make room for her on the bench. “Here. Have a seat.”
They sat in silence, thinking over the day’s events. But the silence did not last very long. Sarah had taken a seat by Mags, and the two of them pounded noisily on the keyboard. Mags yelled something about Kennedy’s head and concrete. Sarah laughed loudly and smacked the keys.
“What the hell is she doing?” Hyo-Sonn asked.
Tarzi’s somber frown relaxed into a grin. “It’s just a Misfits song.”
“A what?”
“It’s uh—It’s a song about a political assassination. It’s called Bullet.”
“And she’s singing it to a little girl?”
Tarzi laughed and shook his head. “That’s Auntie for you. She believes rage is a path to liberation. Or something.”
“Is she really your aunt? She seems kind of—mentally unstable maybe?”
Tarzi found this hysterical. His sides shook. “Are you calling my auntie crazy?”
She looked away, embarrassed.
“She is kind of crazy,” he said. “She's violent, reckless, hot-tempered, and downright homicidal sometimes. But you know what? She's way more fun than anyone I ever met before. And she's got great taste
in music. And if Mags likes you at all, she would storm the gates of hell if she thought you needed help.” He turned up his palms and shrugged. “That's just how she is.”
Hyo-Sonn assessed the young man with her eyes. “Sarah certainly likes her. It’s nice to hear her laugh, after what we’ve been through.”
Tarzi thought of something. “Do you like fossils?”
“I do! I used to have a little collection of them from the creek by my parents’ house.”
“Really? I have a gift for you then. Something Mags and I picked up earlier today.” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out the pair of trilobites he had cut free from the asteroid rock. He gave it to her.
“Wow.” She took the rock in her hand. She ran her fingers over the ridges in the shells of the two trilobites, forever swimming, locked in stone. “It’s beautiful. Where did you get this?”
“Can I tell you about it?”
The two of them talked all the way back to Vesta 4.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Two days later, Meteor Mags awoke from a dream. She had been prowling through the dense underbrush in a forest on Earth. Fragments of sunlight and shadow formed a quilt around her. Her calico fur blended seamlessly with the quilted forest. A bird captured her focus. She stalked it slowly, picking up one paw at a time, setting it down with silent determination. Then something startled the bird. Its wings beat the air like thunder and took it out of sight into the branches overhead. There the dream ended, and she opened her eyes.
Mags yawned. She raised her paw to her face and licked it. Then she held it out before her, studying it, as if she had never seen it before. She suddenly sat up.
“What in the hell?”
She walked into her loo and flicked the light on. Her reflection in the mirror showed nothing unusual. Skin and star tattoos covered her, not calico fur. She pressed a hand, not a paw, to the mirror. “Maggie,” she said to her reflection. “Get a grip, you old sod!” She washed her face and brushed her long, white hair.
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