Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition

by Matthew Howard

  “Just one,” said Celina. “But she’s a doozy! Fuzzlow and I attacked her, but we got our arses kicked.”

  “Her? Who is she? I thought you said it was a robot?”

  “It is a robot! Or some kind of cyborg. Mags, it’s one of those eels of yours! We checked in your room, and one of them was missing.”

  “You went in my room?”

  “Yes! We had to get those suits! And that’s when we found one of the eels was missing.”

  “You went in my closet?”

  “Goddamnit, wagtail! No one gives a rat’s arse about your three-year-old pile of dirty socks! We’re under attack here! But something’s gone wrong. That thing isn’t an eel anymore. It’s got electricity and armor and shit like your eels, but—but it looks just like you!”

  “It what now, mate?”

  “It looks like you! It’s—Mags, it has your face. It attacked the girls. Then we found it trying to play piano in the bandshell. It damn near killed me! Fuzz blasted it with Frag-12s, caved the whole sodding wall down on it, and the fucking thing still got up and walked away!”

  “Fuzz blew up my fucking concert hall?”

  “We didn’t have any choice! It was shooting out bolts of lightning and bloody choking me to death!”

  Mags sighed. “Are you okay, dear?”

  “I’m fine now, thanks.”

  “Good. You clear everyone off the landing area in the hangar. I’ll open it from the ship once we make sure there’s no hostiles outside. Okay?”

  “Sounds like a plan. Love you.”

  “Love you too, ya blasted convict. Now try not to blow up any more concert halls until we get there!”

  Soon, Mags brought the ship into the hangar. She strode down the ramp from the Queen Anne. Patches scampered past her to the group of young women, bumping her side against their legs one by one. Donny followed behind.

  Sarah ran up to her. “Mags,” she cried out, throwing her arms around the space pirate.

  Mags’ face lit up. She scruffed the girl’s thick black curls with a gloved hand. “Heya, kiddo. You doing okay?”

  “There’s a monster on the loose!”

  Mags picked her up and carried her with one arm. Sarah’s arms wrapped around her neck.

  “Don’t be scared, baby.” She kissed Sarah’s cheek. “Your sweet auntie Mags is gonna bring down total hellfire on that thing. Celina!”

  “Over here! We’re tracking the cyborg on the surface.”

  Mags had a bad a feeling about all this. She recalled her intimate dream with the eels. She had written it off as a pleasant dream, nothing more. But now this had happened. Could it have been more than a dream? Could her eels have really spawned some kind of hideous monster using her DNA? “Does anybody have a clue how we can take this thing down short of a bleedin’ atom bomb?”

  “No, but check it out,” said Fuzzlow. He pulled the piece of cyborg from his pocket. “I got a chunk of the Magbot.”

  Mags stared at the scrap of blood-soaked, sticky machinery. “A chunk of the what?”

  “The Magbot! The thing that’s—”

  She snatched it from his hand. “I bloody heard you the first time! What the fuck is wrong with you? You named it after me?”

  “We could call it RoboMags. Or Maggotron, but—”

  “Stick it up your arse, Fuzz! I can’t believe this shit.” Mags eyed the chunk in her hand. “Named it after me, you twisted son of a bitch.” She stormed over to the panel of video feeds, cursing a blue streak.

  “At least the fire’s out,” said Celina.

  On one monitor, Mags could see the fire in the bandshell had been snuffed out by the rubble from Fuzzlow’s grenade launcher attack. On another screen, the cyborg moved across the plains of Vesta 4.

  “We could open the hangar,” Celina suggested, “and use the Queen Anne’s missiles on her. But if she could survive sixteen grenade rounds, I don’t really know if that would do any good.”

  “Let her go. Better to have her out there than wreaking havoc in the club. Besides, I have an idea. Patches!”

  The calico cat’s ears perked up. She came trotting over.

  Mags set Sarah down and knelt before her cat. “This is serious, Patches. Do you remember that nice octopus we met?”

  Patches rubbed the side of her face against Mags’ hand.

  “Mhm. And do you remember what we learned there?”

  “Mew.”

  “Now it’s time to put it to work. Come with me, dear. Sarah? We could use your help, too.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s right. Now the rest of you, keep an eye on that sodding cyborg. Sarah, Patches—come with me.”

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Inside the armory of the Queen Anne, Mags opened a panel on the wall. She pulled out a massive black case, sliding it on its wheels into the room. She lifted the lid to reveal the portable genetics lab she and Tarzi had plundered the month before.

  “You see,” she explained, “when Patches and I got our minds merged with the octopus, we were exposed to everything she knew. And what she knew included everything she’d picked up from the minds of the eggheads who created her. And that means Patches and I ought to be bloody geneticists by now. But let’s just say it was all a bit much to assimilate at one time. That’s why you’re here, Sarah.”

  The young woman stared at the components in the case. “What do you want me to do?”

  Mags set the sticky chunk of cyborg in the case. “Do you remember when I heard you singing? And came to rescue you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you think that happened, Sarah?”

  “I don’t know. I just sang. In my mind. As hard as I could.”

  “Mhm.” Mags bent down and placed a hand on Sarah’s cheek. “I think you have a gift, Sarah. A very special gift.”

  “I do?”

  “That’s right. Now, maybe it was just because I was fresh from bonding with that kraken. Maybe I was just on the right wavelength or something. But I think your mind can reach out and touch other minds.”

  “Like a psychic?”

  “Whatever you want to call it. So, I’m hoping you can help me and Patches sort something.”

  “I’d do anything for you, Mags.”

  Mags hugged her. “Help me remember. Patches will be there with us.”

  She pulled equipment out of the case and set it up. “This bloody thing will sequence the gene. And I’m pretty sure this is the other gizmo we need. Patches?”

  Patches rubbed on the machinery. It looked like the bastard son of a microscope and a centrifuge, with plastic tubes protruding from it, wrapping around and through it, and down into plastic reservoirs.

  “Mhm. I thought so, too.” Mags lifted a computer from the case and plugged both pieces of equipment into it. She pulled out her boot knife and sliced off the thinnest piece she could from the chunk of cyborg. She placed it in the gene sequencer and turned it on.

  “Come sit with me, Sarah.” Mags sat cross-legged on the floor. Patches crawled into her lap, turned around several times, and made herself comfortable. Sarah took Mags’ hand and sat next to her. “Now, just focus on me and Patches together. And sing.”

  “Sing?”

  “Sing the way you sang that day when I first heard you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Mags placed her hands on Patches, closed her eyes, and tried to recall anything she could about ubiquitin.

  Mags had mastered advanced mathematics at a fairly young age, devoting her free time to studying it after moving to the States nearly a century ago. Much of genetics, however, remained uncharted waters for her. This much she knew: When the body decided it was time for a cell to die, enzymes attached a protein called ubiquitin to proteins in that cell. Mags had already decided it was time for that cybernetic monstrosity to die. Now, she needed to know how to synthesize an enzyme that would attach ubiquitin to the synthetic proteins which made up half the DNA of the cybernetic sea creatures she and Tarzi had d
iscovered.

  Mags relaxed and focused on Patches, who had been exposed to all this information in the octopus’ mind, too. She hoped that linking their minds again would increase their processing power on this problem, much like computers on a network can contribute processing power to each other. She hoped she had correctly judged Sarah’s talents, and that the young woman could facilitate this mental networking.

  Mags heard a beep from the lab equipment. She opened her eyes and marveled at what she saw on the screen. The computer had sequenced the cyborg’s entire genome. Like a forgotten memory returning from a distant time, an understanding of the sequence dawned on Mags. Alongside the four nucleotide bases of adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, four synthetic bases designed by the original researchers attached in a cybernetic double helix. Mags just needed to know how to attack them.

  She heard Sarah singing in her mind. With Sarah, she felt Patches, too. Maybe this idea really was crazy, she thought, but she had been called crazy before. And here she was, still alive, outliving her detractors, and ready to rock. Mags surrendered to the white light of Sarah’s song.

  On the mental plane, they stood in a circle, joining hands and paws. Sarah’s song held them aloft, like a prayer rising up to heaven. A pair of wings grew from the young woman’s back. Then Patches sprouted a pair of wings, and Mags felt wings grow from her own shoulders. “Sing it, Sarah.”

  Mags saw her great-grandmother’s ring hovering above them in the white space, but it was much larger than life-size, meters wide. The ring unfolded into a double helix.

  On angels’ wings, the three of them flew up into it. Like a giant spiral ladder, it stretched upwards as far as they could see. Patches met Mags’ eyes and meowed. “That’s right, dear. Remember.” They sped into the blank oblivion above them, surrounded by the helix.

  Suddenly, Mags understood how to engineer the enzyme she needed. She perceived its atomic structure and its folded proteins. She saw them in the white space all around her, attaching to the double helix. They attacked the synthetic nucleotides, unlatching them from their bonds in the genome.

  Then the twisted ladder of genetics began to unravel all around her. From top to bottom, it collapsed and fell apart. Gigantic, broken proteins fell from above like girders falling from a shattered crane.

  “Keep singing, dear. That’s it. That’s what we need!” Mags opened her eyes. Her fingers flew over the keyboard of the geneticists’ computer. She told it exactly what she needed the enzyme to do, and how to do it. The equipment hummed in response, singing its own mechanical song. Numbers and letters raced up the monitor faster than anyone could read. “Got it!” She squeezed Sarah’s hand.

  Sarah opened her eyes. “Did it work?”

  “On a wing and a bloody prayer, beautiful. You did great.”

  “What was that? It was like a ladder to heaven!”

  “That,” said Mags, “was the basic blueprint of all life. And we were inside it.”

  Patches meowed incessantly and pawed at Sarah’s leg.

  “Patches wants to destroy something, too,” said Mags. She produced a length of string for Sarah. “Here. Play with her. And give me a moment, dear. Auntie Mags needs to find some decent artillery to deliver our love note to that sodding cyborg.”

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Soon, Mags strolled out of the Queen Anne. In one hand, she held her trusty Benelli shotgun. She had a pouch slung across her shoulder like a purse. In her other hand, she held Sarah’s. “Go on, dear. Join your friends.”

  Sarah ran down the ramp. “Kala! I saw the ladder of life!”

  Kala hugged her friend. “You saw what?”

  “Listen up,” said Mags to the assembled crowd. “I just want to say you all did a bang-up job. Now you know why we run emergency evacuation drills! This could have been a whole lot worse. And hats off to Celina and Fuzz for leading the charge. Now I want you to do one more thing for me. Just stay here and keep your cool. I got a little surprise for that cast-iron robot bitch, and she ain’t gonna like it one bit.”

  “You’re going to take her on all by yourself? She damn near killed me and Fuzz!”

  “Yeah, Mags. At least let us help.”

  “If you want to help, hand me that Faraday suit,” said Mags. “And then get the bloody fuck out of my way. That monster came out of my uterus, so I’m gonna be the one to send it to straight to hell!”

  And with that, Meteor Mags and Patches left the hangar to hunt.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  “There she is, Patches.” Mags set her binoculars down. She lay on her stomach on a low ridge overlooking her shooting range.

  Below and a hundred meters away, with her back to them, Magbot tore jagged shards of metal from the various household appliances Mags used as targets. The cyborg shoved the scraps into her mouth. Her teeth sparked as she chewed and swallowed. Her body used the metal to heal from the earlier attack.

  Patches meowed softly.

  “Yeah. Bitch thinks she’s bad as fuck, eating a laundry machine. I got something else for her to chew on.” Mags wore the Faraday suit with the helmet open, hanging down the back of her neck. Celina had described to her the cyborg’s reaction to the suit’s mental controls. Mags realized she would only be warning the beast of her presence if she tried approaching while wearing the helmet.

  She quietly brought the Benelli up to a firing position. “This is just going to piss her off, sweetie. But we need to get up close and personal to finish this. Cover your ears.”

  Patches laid her head down on the rock. She placed her paws over her ears.

  Mags brought the cyborg into her sights. The Benelli roared like thunder. Within seconds, eight three-inch Magnum slugs pounded into Magbot’s center mass.

  She fell forward into a dilapidated water heater. The bullets hammered her relentlessly. Every time she tried to move, another slug beat her down. Her respite came after the eighth round. She made a blood-curdling howl. A web of lightning bolts erupted from her metallic skin.

  Mags beat her own personal speed record for reloading the Benelli. “Gotta have a soft spot in that armor somewhere, you bloody cunt. Come and get some!” As Magbot advanced toward the ridge, Mags aimed for her chest.

  Again the shotgun blasted round after round. Finally, a slug caught the cyborg in her mouth. Magbot stumbled, gushing oily blood into the air. She screamed. Electric tendrils raced along the ground up to the ridge.

  “If it can bleed, it can die.” Mags pulled the helmet over her face and sealed it. She reloaded the Benelli and squeezed off another eight rounds, and then the lightning was upon her. Mags dropped the shotgun and tossed the rest of her shells far away from her. Magbot charged the ridge at full speed.

  Where Celina had failed by trying to impose her will on the cyborg, Mags simply encouraged her rage. “Atta girl,” she said. “Come and get me!” As Magbot reached the base of the ridge, Mags leapt into the air. Lightning crackled up to meet her, blazing along the exterior of her suit. The sky burned.

  “Raaawwrrr!” Mags landed full force on top of her foe. They tumbled to the ground together. Wrestling, they rolled over and over each other. Magbot came out on top. She poured waves of current at the object of her hatred.

  From the pouch she had slung across the Faraday suit, Mags pulled out a capsule full of enzymes. She popped the top off with her thumb.

  The cyborg’s hands closed around her throat. Magbot shook her violently. Mags’ head struck the asteroid’s unforgiving surface. Then again. The pain blinded her for a second. She gasped for breath but could not draw any air.

  Patches leapt onto Magbot’s face. With her invincible claws, she tore at the cyborg’s eyes.

  Magbot howled. She let go of Mags to clutch the calico demon with both hands. She tried to crush the cat, but failed. Patches swung her claws furiously. They dug long scratches in Magbot’s metal face. The cyborg clamped its razor-sharp teeth on the cat’s head, but Patches bit back.

  Mags saw her
opening. She pulled another capsule from her pouch, popped the top, and grabbed a fistful of cybernetic hair with her free hand. Holding tight, she jammed the capsule into Magbot’s open mouth and slammed the flat of her hand into the cyborg’s face as hard as she could.

  Magbot screamed. She fell off Mags, then scrambled to her feet. She held Patches prisoner with one hand.

  Mags sprung up. She landed a roundhouse kick on Magbot’s ribcage. “Take your meds, bitch!”

  Then Magbot unleashed the storm. As the eels had done in their trial run, she generated a massive field. The ground below her fused into glass.

  Patches wailed a high-pitched feline scream. Her body thrashed wildly in Magbot’s grip.

  “Patches!” Mags dove at the cyborg, tackling her, and took her to the ground. Metal squealed against rock as they slid across the expanding field of glass.

  The blow loosened Magbot’s grip. Patches’ body skidded across the asteroid, spasming out of control.

  Magbot’s hands closed on Mags again, but their grip was weaker now. Mags pulled them away. She picked up a chunk of space rock and bashed Magbot in the face. The cyborg convulsed. The enzymes did their work, destroying it from the inside, on the cellular level.

  “Not so tough now, are you?” Mags grabbed her by the hair. She took the jagged point of the rock and drove it into the side of Magbot’s throat.

  A thick substance like blood and motor oil burst from the cyborg’s eyes and mouth. The tremors of a thousand earthquakes ran through her body. Her limbs flailed helplessly.

  “Teach you to threaten my fucking friends!” Mags stomped the cyborg’s head in a rage, again and again.

  Then the lightning vanished. The trembling ended.

  Mags stepped away. She peeled back the helmet of her suit. “Right on, Patches. That’s how you take down a—Patches? Oh, no!”

  Patches lay as still and silent as a corpse on the barren rock of Vesta 4.

  “Oh, baby.” Mags knelt beside her calico cat and cried. She ran her hands over Patches, but she felt not a sign of life. Mags scooped up the still body and cradled it in her arms, rocking it gently back and forth. She looked up to the stars and said a silent prayer.