Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition

by Matthew Howard

  “Bitch, get down!” Mags fired a round over his head. The bike wavered like a drunken soldier.

  The secretary dove out of the way. His coffee cup carved a slow-motion path spinning through the air and spilling its contents across the hallway. Before a drop of liquid hit the carpet, Mags put a round into the cup. The bullet continued through the window.

  They crashed through glass again. A thousand broken mirrors pierced the sky, framing Mags and Ryder in a splintered halo.

  “Maaags!” Gripping her torso, Ryder ignored the shards in his hair and the cuts on his face. When he opened his eyes, the street below opened its mouth like a hungry dragon.

  Their tires bashed the concrete surface of another parking structure. They ran a gauntlet of cars parked to either side.

  Mags squeezed the brakes and steadied the bike with her feet. The soles of her boots melted, smearing black arcs on the concrete. They traced twin curves following the path of the cycle’s rear wheel, which slid to one side and around until the bike faced the direction it had come.

  “Motherfuckers.” Mags spat. “I make my own exit!”

  Ryder shouted, “Get to the bloody street before you kill us!”

  They rocketed back down the gauntlet to the exit. But before Mags could turn, gunfire strafed her path. Jagged concrete chunks blasted from the wall.

  Mags swerved away from the exit. Into her field of vision sank a helicopter. A machine gun mounted on its side spewed a stream of cartridge casings into the sky.

  “Fuck me sideways,” said Ryder.

  A second chopper descended beside the first. Below them stretched not more streets but the ice-blue waters of the Chikugo river.

  Mags was not especially fond of being shot at, but in her line of work, it came with the territory. What moved her in that moment was not the sight of the machine guns coming to bear on her and Ryder, but the accursed logo emblazoned on the side of each chopper. “GravCorp,” she hissed. “Hang on!”

  It was fitting. GravCorp’s agents had stolen her and Gramma’s work on gravity control decades before. Now here they were, trying to stop her from stealing someone else’s. Before Gramma’s death in 1999, Mags had promised to not declare war on GravCorp for ten years. Gramma felt enough blood had been shed, and Mags was rarely inclined to refuse her grandmother anything.

  But the statute of limitations had long since expired on that promise.

  Mags hit the gas. Lacking a ramp, she popped a wheelie and kicked the concrete with her feet. The motorcycle jumped over the low wall enclosing the parking structure. Halfway between the building and the chopper, at the peak of the cycle’s final performance, Mags thrust away from it, taking her and Ryder falling to the water below.

  The cycle’s front tire smashed the gunner’s face, and then fire. The second helicopter ascended, dodging the debris from the explosion. Even as she fell with Ryder’s arms locked around her, the smuggler never took her eyes off that second chopper.

  Meteor Mags often thanked her departed ancestors she was not born with pupils exactly like a cat’s. As long as she had her tail tucked into her clothes, you could look her in the eyes and never know she was something extra-human. But those eyes took in every detail with extreme clarity. From the individual hairs in your eye lashes, to the threads in your shirt, few things escaped her.

  This clarity remained over great distances and in dim light. Mags, if she had any interest in accolades and prizes, could have won every sharpshooting award on Earth and become highly regarded in her time. Instead, she had chosen less socially approved activities.

  The tinted glasses she favored had nothing to do with correcting her eyesight. Mags wore them to keep the glare down, and the polarized, shatter-proof lenses protected her sensitive pupils. Sunny days made them especially useful—as did explosions.

  She chose the first target in the surviving helicopter and pulled the trigger. The pilot’s head snapped away in a splash of crimson. Mags focused her rage on the gunner.

  She destroyed him, too.

  Her friends at the club knew the smuggler’s tender side. She was the singer who performed their lullabies, the shoulder they cried on, and the hand which touched their face to let them know everything would be okay. But when Mags had a gunfight on her hands, she carried ice in her heart.

  As she fell from the sky, a strand of bullet holes decorated the chopper like the jewels of a tragic necklace. The perforations in the metal reached the fuel tank. The helicopter exploded in a fireball, shooting parts of people and propellers through the air in great gouts of black smoke.

  “Maaags goddaaammit!” Ryder’s voice blazed a trail towards the river until, at the last moment, he let go of her and sucked in his breath.

  Sp-Splash! Two bodies hit the water. Their momentum carried them down into the river’s frigid embrace. It wanted to devour them, but the criminals kicked with all their might.

  A minute later, Mags broke the surface. The underwater descent had stripped her glasses from her face. She looked this way and that in the two seconds it took Ryder to pop up beside her, gasping for breath.

  Mags swam as hard as she could for the riverbank, and it was all Ryder could do to keep up. The smuggler clambered onto the adjoining parkway running alongside the river. She offered her hand and pulled Ryder to his feet. “This way!”

  He caught up with her in the middle of the road. “There,” he called to her, pointing ahead of them. Ryder ran to the first car at the stoplight. The driver’s side window was down. Ryder’s left hand closed on the driver’s shirt. “Fuck out now! Out! Out!”

  The pistol in his right hand backed up the order. Had Ryder been less amped on adrenaline, he would have heard the driver shouting okay okay Jesus Fucking Christ okay!

  Mags shot out the rear passenger window, reached in, and pulled open the lock on the front door. “Dickface! Get the fuck out!”

  Ryder ripped open the door. The driver lunged onto the pavement. Before Ryder could get in the seat, Mags filled it.

  “I’ll drive!”

  “Fuck!” Ryder scrambled around the front.

  Just before the light changed, Mags stomped the accelerator to the floor.

  “Relax! We lost them already!”

  With a pang of disappointment, she eased off the gas. “Sorry. I got kind of stoked about the carjacking. It’s been a few years.”

  “Stealing spaceships ain’t enough anymore? Oh, look at this.”

  “Whatcha got?”

  “This guy must have been coming home from the store. And he has good taste in beer.” Ryder reached into the back seat, tore open the cardboard top of a twelve-pack, and pulled out a bottle of ale. “Shit’s got like eleven percent alcohol.” He popped the top with a disposable cigarette lighter.

  “I’ll take two.”

  He handed her the open bottle and reached for another. “You get the second if you get us out of this town without another gunfight.”

  Mags took a swig. “Spoilsport. Damn that’s good. How about a fistfight?”

  “Fuck it,” said Ryder. “Kill anyone you want. I’m drinking.”

  “You’re such a lush.” She chugged the rest, keeping one eye on the road. Then she tossed the empty over her shoulder into the back seat. It landed among the groceries that would spoil and fill the car with their stench until the police found the vehicle three days later, eighty-four kilometers away.

  Mags calmly observed traffic laws, and the city faded from sight in the rear-view mirror. Eventually, she pulled off the highway at a scenic view. “It’s about ten minutes to the Queen Anne. Let’s enjoy the sunset.”

  Stretched out before them like a painter’s canvas, the sky dripped orange and red across the horizon. Under the sun, the five volcanic peaks of Mount Aso soaked up the solar pigment until their white plumes of smoke also turned the colors of blood and fire.

  Ryder helped himself to another beer before leaning against the metal handrail at the edge of the vista. “What you intend to do,” he said,
“amounts to declaring war on Earth.”

  Mags lit up. “Darling, you have a keen grasp of the obvious. Would it make you feel better if I name this new element after you?”

  “Sure. Just pin my name on it and let everyone know I’m the bastard they want to hang for your crazy plan.”

  “But ‘ryderium’ has a nice ring to it.”

  “You know? It does. Cheers.” He drained half the bottle. “Listen. I know you’re a scrapper, but do you realize what you’re up against? It’s an entire planet full of twelve billion people.”

  Mags fell silent for a moment. A cold wind swept up from the landscape to make her damp hair twist and spiral with its song. She faced him. “No, you listen, Ryder. Earth might own the Belt now. But they’re about to find out who’s the queen bitch of this solar system—even if a whole lot of them have to eat a bullet first.”

  Mags jerked her thumb at her chest. “My great-gramma ruled the oceans. Gramma owned a continent. But the sky?” She swept her hand across the sunset. “That belongs to me.”

  12

  The Lost Crew of the Volya IX

  И наши тем награждены усилья,

  Что поборов бесправие и тьму,

  Мы отковали пламенные крылья

  Своей

  Стране

  И веку своему!

  And thus rewarded are our toils,

  That having vanquished lawlessness and dark,

  We have forged great flaming wings

  For our

  Nation

  And this age of ours!

  —Monument to the Conquerors of Space, 1964.

  PART ONE: THE ABANDONED MINE

  November 2029: Vesta 4.

  Meteor Mags pulled the blankets angrily. “I’m gonna go out of my friggin’ mind.”

  Patches opened her eyes to a sliver and yawned. She glared at Mags.

  “Sorry, baby kitten.” In her mind, scenes from the evening played over and over: Magbot’s brutal rage as she had stormed the ridge, the sight of Patches’ body skittering across the fused-glass surface of Vesta 4, and the cybernetic eels lying in pieces in their case, sparking before dying. She threw off the covers. “Maybe Slim’s still up.”

  Any other troubled night, she would have gone to play piano in her band shell. But now it lay in ruins, her piano destroyed and the walls caved in. She sent a message to Slim and made up her hair while she waited. “Patches? Do you feel like going out?”

  The indestructible calico licked her paws and bit at the hair on her side until finally a message arrived from Slim.

  Can’t sleep either? Come hang out!

  Even after all these years, Slim still made time for his auntie. Mags thought his father would have been pleased to see how well Slim had done for himself, goddess rest his soul. As she pulled on her boots, Mags lovingly recalled the many adventures they had shared. She would have felt immeasurably sad if she knew that in less than two weeks, Slim would be dead.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Slim handed the joint back to her.

  Mags took a deep puff. “You’re saying this happens no matter how we treat the wave.”

  “Every time.”

  She coughed. “Oh, that’s tasty.”

  “It’s the low-grav grow room. Three hundred and sixty degrees of growth. Nutrient lights and organic feed.” Behind Slim sat a pot-bellied statue of a laughing Buddha wearing an eyepatch.

  Mags had dumped a handful of coins and a pack of cigarettes onto the statue’s bowl for offerings. As the coins spilled across the table and rattled on the floor, she said, “Brought a little something for your pirate buddy.” Then she and Slim sat in his private quarters built onto the back of his restaurant, Below the Belt Strip Club. They reclined on a legless couch set on the floor and padded with pillows. Between them, but in front of the couch, a short table held his notes, a pair of lighters embossed with Jolly Rogers, and an ashtray.

  He spoke again through the haze. “So no matter how we structure the waves, we can’t deliver power across the entire planetoid. It brings us to a point where we have these infinities we can’t solve.”

  Mags rifled through the notes, checking his work. “This wouldn’t be the first time. We had the same problem with the GravGens, you know. Decades ago. When you try to get gravity to work in both relativity theory and quantum mechanics, you end up with all these infinities. And until you get rid of them, you’re buggered.”

  “You must have worked out something. Can you solve these?”

  She puffed again and handed it back. “I’m good for now, thanks. Wow, Slim.”

  “I told you it was good stuff. Now that we can supply it, we need to ask ourselves: Do we want to kill the competition in a price war to the bottom? Or could we all benefit from a little competition in the industry?”

  “Competition keeps prices fair for consumers, after all. Your old man would be proud of you, Slim. You are one stand-up criminal.”

  “We’re about to bring virtually free, unlimited power to entire planetoids. I can make a killing in the more traditional lines of business until then. Which may be forever, if we can’t get the math worked out.”

  She sighed. “Remember when piracy was all about plundering and kicking people in the skull and torching piles of your enemies’ bodies on some stretch of beach where the whole bloody world could see them?”

  “Man. Those were the good old days.”

  She set the notes back on the table. “So these infinities of yours happen because your solutions require you to divide by zero. But the solutions look right to me, aside from that minor, impossible thing. Except it isn’t impossible.”

  “But everybody knows you can’t divide by zero. It’s like the zero negates the whole idea of ‘dividing’ something to begin with. You can’t divide something zero times, because that’s not dividing.”

  “Right, basically. Except there is a point where you can do just that. Where one divided by zero is defined. And it’s defined as infinity.”

  He rubbed his chin. “You’re not seriously talking about a Riemann sphere.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. A Riemann sphere, with a point at infinity. See, if we take a sphere and put one point at the origin of the complex number plane, every other point can be mapped onto that same plane, except for one: the point at infinity.

  “Now look, Slim. The sphere in question is our planet. Or moon. Its south pole is the origin of the complex number plane. And to set up the wave forms we want, waves that can travel the whole planet in a resonant frequency, we need to put up a base at that south pole, and the north pole, too. Slim, where is the north pole?”

  “I get it. It’s at the point at infinity, where I can divide by zero and solve all the equations.”

  “And solve the wireless power problem once and for all. Nikola would be so proud.”

  “But it’s impossible. You can’t map that point. That’s why it’s at infinity.”

  “I don’t think a math problem is ever impossible. Gauss certainly didn’t think so. When he needed the square root of a negative number, and he couldn’t find any numbers to fill the bill, he made up his own bloody numbers. He called them imaginary, because no real number could do the job. Now look at all the ways we use his so-called imaginary numbers to solve real engineering problems. See what I mean? You gotta make your own numbers, kiddo.”

  Slim nodded, and his eyes twinkled. “And what better number than an impossible one to do an impossible mapping problem?”

  “Exactly. We need an impossible number. Maybe a whole lot of them. But we know what job we need them to do, so we can think of some characteristics that would define them. Some fundamental axioms.”

  He sat up from his sprawl on the pillows. “Just imagine it.” He took a lighter from the table. “You could drive a rod into the ground, and it would power your whole building. Enough power to run your atmosphere cleaner. To power a f
arm. To bond hydrogen and oxygen into water. To run electric heating and cooling. All from a safe, open source using virtually no resources, that wouldn’t be owned by anyone.”

  “Not any government,” said Mags, “and not any corporation. Just a big wave, pulsating through the entire planet, that anyone can tap into.”

  “And all we have to do is the impossible.”

  “That’s our specialty, dear. When the going gets impossible, we fuckin’ improvise. Now tell me more about this low-grav grow op of yours, and how it’s going to make your auntie terribly, terribly rich.”

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Elsewhere in the Belt.

  Plutonian brought his ship close to the abandoned asteroid and dialed back the GravGens. He fired up the radial thrusters to take the ship into a spin around its longest axis. The computer determined the speed to match the docking bay on the asteroid.

  This asteroid was something of an anomaly in the Belt, a holdover from the earliest days of asteroid mining. Constructed before GravGens became the norm, the mine extended below the surface into a thick mass of ice reaching deep into the asteroid’s core. Between the docking bay and the asteroid’s surface spun a huge metal torus. A shaft ran from the docking bay through the torus’ center. Inside the asteroid, robots had carved deep chambers which now held living quarters and grow rooms.

  That much was standard practice in the dawn of the asteroid mining age. Standard practice also set the mine’s construction in the swarm of Near-Earth Asteroids, not the Belt. However, gravitational perturbation from Jupiter had unexpectedly pulled this asteroid away from its orbit as an NEA and into a Belt orbit. This lost the mining company millions of dollars—or billions, if one could believe their accountants. The company had moved on. Humans had never settled the rock.

  Plutonian had put it on a list of possible sites for his pirate radio station, nearly three years ago when the lost mine came up on his radar. He thought it would make an excellent place to store his strange discovery, the multi-dimensional object generating music on unusual frequencies. Based on where he found the object, Mags said it must be part of the machine that transformed Patches more than a year ago.