Mags grabbed the front of his uniform and pulled him to her so fiercely the snaps on his shirt popped open. “It’s a bloody tornado, Kaufman! Get the hell out of here! We’ll handle the Hyades!”
A claxon shrieked. Then another, like a string of firecrackers until a whole network of claxons blared their warning across von Zach.
“Meet us on Vesta!” Mags hollered over the din.
Even the screaming sirens were overcome by the roar which came next. Kaufman gawked at the sky for two seconds before returning his eyes to Mags for one terrified instant. He wheeled about and ran for his vessel. On the edge of the landing zone, the sky swirled into filthy violence full of regolith the meso-cyclone had stripped from the Ceresian surface.
Meteor Mags would never admit that in some cavern of her animalistic soul, the tornado’s roar ignited a fear so primal, so urgent, that she would have almost rather died than endure it one second more. The roar kicked up like a hundred thousand freight trains, and every hair on her body stood on end.
But Mags did not cower. She glared into the black, billowing clouds, and her lips curled into a vicious, adrenaline-fueled smile. Here’s our ticket off this fucking rock, she thought.
She shouted into the unyielding racket, “Patches! Get to the Hyades!”
But her cat was more than one step ahead of her. Patches’ calico coat became a coffee-and-chocolate blur. She ran as fast as her legs could carry her, pinning her ears down against the volume.
Mags took off behind her. The tornado’s howl registered only as tumultuous crescendos of noise upon noise. It knocked her to the ground.
The abuse made her unreasonably angry. She was, like a cat, accustomed to landing on her feet or all fours when she fell.
But this tempest cared nothing for her skills or reflexes. It regarded her as less than a speck of sand, if it regarded her at all. It was too busy wrenching vehicles into its angry maw. Windows burst in warehouses, spraying like glass fountains, and the metal support towers of the electric railway flexed as if they might snap in half. Out of the Ceresian wilderness, the storm chewed a path of destruction onto the landing zone and toward the Hyades.
Mags’ ears popped. She found her feet and forced them forward through the gale. Darkness overtook her, and hailstones the size of golf balls assailed her. An updraft shot the hail back into the air, only to meet a downdraft that battered the frozen stones against the Hyades’ hull.
The wind picked her up and bashed her against the forklift Donny had commanded. Bouncing off it like a pinball struck by a bumper, she was flung helplessly through the air. She drew in her arms and legs as the gusts spun her about. They smashed her onto the ramp of the Hyades.
Patches called to her, but the smuggler heard only the cyclone’s deafening chorus. In a matter of minutes, the storm had reached ten kilometers in height. Along its flank, updrafts rushed with increasing speed until they gathered into a funnel. First one funnel, then another, and another. The tornado swelled until it dwarfed any seen on Earth.
Hand over hand, Mags pulled herself along the ramp on her belly. She gripped steel wires and guidelines, and her muscles, now covered in bruises, strained to carry her forward. Something struck the back of her head and sailed into the defiant turbulence which cared nothing for the tears it ripped from her face.
Goddess help me, she prayed.
She reached the top of the ramp, and the Hyades’ hull mercifully blocked the worst of the wind. “Bloody fuck!” She rolled onto her back and coughed. Blood and saliva burst into the air as a wet mist. It nearly rained back down on her—but it was torn away. “That is one hell of a tornado.”
Patches appeared at her side, and the only calico cat in the Solar System with a warrant for her execution had something special for her vindictive and foul-tempered friend.
A kiss.
PART FOUR: THE CONCERT
“What are you doing?” Sarah asked. She stood holding Anton’s hand. The young women of Club Assteroid hauled off rubble from the mess the cyborg had made of Mags’ bandshell.
“Oh, nothing,” said Plutonian. He sat away from the bustle of the clean-up crews, thoroughly absorbed in something while his cat Tesla napped under his chair. His shotgun rested on the table beside him. He looked up from his tablet. “Is this our newest crew member?”
“His name’s Anton,” said Sarah.
“Plutonian,” said the man. He held out his hand to the boy, who accepted it, though hesitantly. “I think we met, sort of. Sorry about pulling a shotgun on you and your old man.”
Anton looked to the ground, then back up. “Mags told me things have been pretty crazy here.”
“That’s a good lad,” Plutonian said with a smile. “And yes, they have. Just look at this mess!” He swept his hand in a casual gesture. “I can’t leave this place for twenty-four hours without everything going berserk.”
Hyo-Sonn stepped up. “So that’s why you’re stuck here watching us?”
“Aye,” said Plutonian. “Someone’s got to keep an eye on you lot. Any trouble?”
Hyo-Sonn shook her head. “Just coming over to meet the new kid.” Without asking for a name or handshake, Hyo-Sonn said, “Do you want to give us a hand? Yeah? Follow me then. We’ll take all the help we can get.” For a moment she eyed Plutonian disapprovingly. He appeared utterly disinterested in moving rubble into wheelbarrows and carting it outside the club. With the faintest huff of exasperation, the serious young lady marched off with Anton close behind.
Sarah stared at the DJ. His attention had returned to his tablet. His fingers moved over the touch screen. “Are you writing something?”
Plutonian glanced up. He looked embarrassed for a moment, but then he gave Sarah a wry smile. “Just a poem. I’ll come help you when I’m done.”
“Can I hear it?”
He chuckled. “Aren’t you the curious one?”
“It’s about Mags, isn’t it?”
Plutonian’s eyes wandered over her face, inquisitively. “It is. How did you know that, Sarah?”
She shrugged. Her curly black pig-tails bounced over her shoulders. “I just know things, sometimes. Mags said I might be psychic when we went with Patches to see the ladder of life.”
“When you did what now?”
“I sang to Mags and Patches while you were gone. And we all turned into angels and saw the ladder of life. It’s how Mags killed the robot.”
Plutonian thought this over. Mags had told him the short version of what happened, but clearly he did not get all the details. “I see.”
“So can I hear it?”
Plutonian flicked his finger over the screen to scroll up. “Okay,” he said. “And then we go help with this disaster area.”
“Okay.” Sarah stepped in closer to the DJ until she stood right up against him. She looked into his eyes and watched them move back and forth as he read.
“It’s named after one of Mags’ favorite things,” he said. “Volume.” In a quiet voice, he read to her.
Can’t this thing go any louder?
When you ride a wave
the sun drops out of the sky
and you only ask for more.
I know a place
where every secret
ever spoken finds its fate
at unreasonable volume.
Do you have any idea
what you do to me?
How the way you speak
and move and breathe
destroys me?
Press your lips to mine.
Demand an outrage.
Dig in your claws and
lead me to the exit, or
deeper into the maze.
The center waits for us
but I don’t care if we ever find it.
Sarah said softly, “Mags will love that. She wrote one for you, too. I saw it in a dream.” Then she trotted off to join the clean-up crew, leaving him to wonder what she meant.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
A surge of adrenalin
e tricked Kaufman into believing he could make it to his ship. But when he was a dozen meters from the craft, the storm dispensed with its opening act and launched its first brutal tune. Wind speed suddenly exceeded 150 kilometers per hour, and it gained intensity with each passing second.
Kaufman struggled to keep his footing. He pressed into the storm, and if he had simply held out his arms and let go, he would not have fallen. He feared the force would snatch him up like a kite and shoot him into the air. But his right hand closed on a handle on the ship’s hull. He pulled himself closer to it with all his might.
As his fingers fumbled with the coded latch on the door, the cloud of debris overtook him. A girder collided with his right shoulder and beat him against the hull. A second savage blow sent him to the ground. Shoved by the tornado’s wind, he slid on his back across the landing zone, away from his ship and toward the central hub.
Purely human eyes could not have seen the motion, but it caught Mags’ and Patches’ attention.
“Kaufman!”
From their vantage point at the rim of the Hyades’ cargo hold, the murderous pair of felines saw his body pushed past them like a doll trapped in the growing darkness.
Mags did not think of Kaufman’s value to her illegal enterprise. Nor did she envision the son who waited for him on Vesta. Only her sense of friendship with the man moved her to shout, “We can’t leave him!”
Then Patches said something her friend would never forget, not for all the days of the century she had left to keep the cold specter of death at bay.
Meteor Mags would often remember Patches’ words when she felt sad or hopeless in the difficult years ahead, and they would comfort her. With a smile that burned like the blue fire of a neutron star, she replied, “Goddamn right about that, baby kitten.”
Before the storm had even torn the words from Mags’ lips, Patches howled a furious battle cry. Without hesitation, the criminal calico launched her bushy body into the gale.
“I love you!” Mags’ fist smashed a red emergency button on the wall, and the ramp lifted from the tarmac to rise into place. In seconds, it would seal the ship completely. She ran to the bridge of the Hyades, where Fuzzlow and Celina waited for her.
“Mags,” Celina yelled, “fly us off this fucking rock right now!”
Fuzzlow had pulled open a panel on the wall and made short work of the circuitry inside. “Tracking system is toast! Let’s get the hell out!”
“Where’s Patches?”
Mags left the question unanswered until she took her seat in the Captain’s chair. “She’ll meet me,” was all she said, and she snapped her safety harness closed.
“She’ll meet you?! Mags—”
The pirate raised her fist with only her index finger pointing in the air, like the number one. Slowly, with emphasis on each word, she said, “She will meet me.”
Donny appeared in the entryway to the cabin. He had before him, at gunpoint, a member of the Hyades’ crew, now stripped of his weapons. “We got a stowaway! Cornered him in the cargo hold.”
Mags glanced over her shoulder at the captive for a split second then returned her focus to the controls. “Cuff him and stuff him,” she shouted. “We’re taking off!”
Donny had no time to comply. A tanker truck flew through the air and smashed into the bridge. It filled the crew’s eyes with a ball of flame that twisted into tendrils and got sucked up into the storm.
“Hang on!” The engines fired, and Mags punched the thrusters. The freighter began its lift-off against the tornado’s unfettered rage.
Outside, the wind shoved Kaufman against a broken concrete barricade. He came to a painful stop, sprawled on the ground. In the gritty darkness, something stung him. He could barely make out the attacker: the severed end of one of the power cables from the electric railway.
The cable snapped like a whip in the tempest. Kaufman shrank against the obstacle at his back to evade the strikes. The cable’s tip lashed out at him again and again like the head of an angry viper. Kaufman cried out, but the tornado sucked his voice into its cacophony.
Beyond the steely serpent’s coils, a determined calico skidded across the tarmac. Her extended claws carved gouges into the crushed rock. Patches let the storm blow her to Kaufman. Her legs splayed wildly, and her belly scraped the surface. Suddenly, she crashed into Kaufman’s chest. He might have wrapped his arms around her, had she not knocked the wind from his lungs.
But she did not want or need his protection. The opaque cloud of dirt and wreckage could not lacerate her eyes. She focused on the cable, tracking the path of its threatening dance. She sprang.
Her prey proved too quick for her. It snapped away from the attack. As Patches’ paws met the tarmac again, the cable struck her. Once it bit her. Twice!
But not three times. Patches met the final attack with her teeth, and her indestructible fangs sank into copper. She had caught it!
The cable whipped her into the air and bashed her into the ground. Then up again and—smash! Into the ground. But Patches had a hold now, and not even this tornado was going to tell her what to do.
As the cable pulled her into the air again, Patches sank her claws into the wall behind Kaufman. She held her grip until he grabbed her. The cable submitted to his added weight, as man and cat formed a living anchor.
That was the easy part of Patches’ plan. But how could she make the administrator realize the significance of her catch?
At that moment, Mags fired the Hyades’ thrusters for lift-off. Their brilliant light pierced the storm like a sun giving birth on the ground. In the luminous flood, through the merciless hail and particulates which cut his face, Kaufman got one good look at the full length of the cable.
Its far end attached to a support tower for the rail system. The tornado had yanked the structure from the ground and wedged it into the landing gear of his ship. Patches had secured a guidewire for him, and he knew then, as surely as she, that it was his only hope of leaving this rock alive.
Kaufman’s right hand released Patches and shot out to grip the cable. Then his left hand. He had it! Against the bludgeoning force of the storm, he pulled himself hand-over-hand along the guideline.
The fury swept his feet out from under him, and the ground beat his body. The tornado slid him along the tarmac. The surface tore open the back of his shirt and grated his skin into a raw, wet mess. Still, he held on and dragged himself ever closer to his escape, one hand at a time.
Had he not been in such overwhelming distress, he would have noticed the sharp points of Patches’ claws digging through his boot leather until his calves bled from puncture wounds. The durable feline, whose presence on this mission had seemed laughable to Kaufman only hours earlier, held on as the winds of hell sought to devour them.
An updraft lifted them, and the cable shuddered. The two outlaws slammed into the ship’s hull.
Kaufman screamed. The whip snapped, and they pounded against the hull again. He bruised his hand searching for a hold, but he found it. Patches abandoned her grip on his leg to pull herself by her claws across the hull to the door, leaving marks in the metal.
The door fell open. It struck the man’s cheek and the side of his head, and in a daze he tumbled into the vessel.
Patches flung herself through the opening. She rolled across the deck and sprang to her feet. As Kaufman struggled to pull himself up to close the door, she looked out into the maelstrom.
Until just a few weeks ago, she had all but forgotten this terrible noise. Only when she and Mags met the mother octopus in the pit did Patches remember. For nearly three years, her first memory had been a night filled with fire and crawling away from the shrieking wreckage of a train. That night, she met the feline goddess of death and watched her spectral mouth devour the souls of dead cats rising from the train. Then Patches had received death’s kiss, like a blessing.
But before that had come the storm. Only when the telepathic kraken opened the memories of her entire life did Patches reali
ze what wrecked that train: a tornado. The funnel had touched earth, crossed the tracks, and torn the train to pieces. Some of those pieces landed kilometers away.
The tornado had screamed so loudly in her little ears that all Patches remembered was fear, an inescapable terror that set her every cell on edge. She was so scared, that for years she couldn’t recall anything before that moment. Now here it was again.
As the door closed, she licked her lips and glared into the tempest. Fear, she thought. All it was, was noise. All my life I thought I was scared. But it was just this bloody noise.
She listened to its annihilating song and dared it to make her feel small or scared. But it couldn’t. Fuck you, tornado, she thought. Fuck you. You aren’t anything at all. Nothing but noise and bullshit. Now come and get me.
The storm accepted her dare. It picked up the ship and threw it end-over-end across the landing zone and straight for the buildings Spassky had come from. Patches bounced off the walls of the cabin as the vessel tumbled.
Kaufman had hardly slipped one arm into his safety harness before the ship hurtled out of control. He gripped the wheel in desperation. Thrashing back and forth, he smashed the back of his head into his chair and then his forehead into the wheel. He almost blacked out, but the pain brought the engine controls into sharp focus. His right hand peeled away from the wheel and slapped down on them.
The engines came to life. The looming buildings filled Kaufman’s view, but they were upside-down. Then right side up. Then upside-down. The horizon spun before him like a screw boring into the lid of his coffin.
At the last moment, he pulled out of the spin. The ship cleared the building by a centimeter, only to be snatched up by the twister and whipped into the dark depths of its madness.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Aboard the Hyades, Mags had problems of her own. The freighter’s mass made it harder for the storm to toss it about, but its box-like shape meant more surface area to catch the wind. Its size made an easy target for the debris which now filled the center of the tornado.
Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition Page 49
