Vehicles, machinery, sheds, cranes, and boulders—all hammered the hull. Railcars liberated from gravity’s pull caromed off the ship, leaving deep dents before they were pulled into the turmoil again. Fuel tanks burst into flames the cyclone fanned into giant, twisted anemones. They lived only a second before it snuffed their lives.
Mags fought the tornado for control of the helm, but it was a mighty foe indeed. It refused to let her have her way. Instead, it chose to spin the Hyades utterly out of control. Even inside the freighter, she and her crew could hear nothing over the tornado’s destructive symphony.
Then the ring on her finger pulsed with warmth, and the hateful roar faded to a hush for no one else but her. Her great-grandmother’s voice came to her with perfect clarity.
Dance with it.
With a silent prayer to the ancient pirate she revered like a goddess, Mags relaxed. Instead of fighting the storm, she listened to it. She let it tell her where it wanted to send the Hyades.
There’s a pattern to it, she thought, like a mathematical dance. Turbulent fluids appear to break into chaos, but there’s an underlying sense to it—a kind of order. A rhythm.
With that, Mags got the groove. She felt the updrafts and downdrafts pulling her nearer then farther away, like a dance partner. She anticipated her partner’s wishes and flowed with them. She steered the ship in harmony with the wind along the path where cool air from the surface forced warm air upwards, faster and faster, in the formation of its monstrous funnels. There, she slipped into a vortex.
The updraft sped the Hyades to the top of the storm and catapulted it out of the clouds. The freighter shot into the upper atmosphere where the crisp, clear sunlight appeared again—and then the stars.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Kaufman and Patches did not enter into one of the gigantic updrafts. Instead of sending them into a funnel, the tornado blew them across Ceres for hundreds of kilometers. A spectacular lightning storm raged around them. White electricity fractured the swirling sky with vessels that split into a billion capillaries. Constant lightning blasts filled the ship’s interior with all the brightness of a flickering sun.
From high above the surface of Ceres, man and cat watched human settlements speed by. How mighty the achievements had appeared to Kaufman when he first stepped foot on the asteroid. Now he saw them obliterated in a moment like dominos in a child’s game. The speeding winds took the ship beyond the edge of settled territory and out over the Ceresian wilderness.
Patches jumped onto the console and stood boldly watching the storm. The shatterproof window caught her reflection and held it between her and the lightning. Patches understood the sky crackled with the same kind of energy that came from the cybernetic creatures Mags and Tarzi had “liberated” the month before. It was the same energy Magbot had stopped her heart with two days ago.
It occurred to her that Mags, with her eels, had controlled this power—this electric force of nature. Patches imagined what that must have felt like. Her friend was not so different from the tornado. She, too, was a force of nature. She, too, could leave a path of unbridled destruction in her wake.
This thought pleased Patches immensely, and she groomed her face with a purr. She loved to watch a storm, and she knew being close to Mags meant plenty of them. Patches had no doubt she would be at the pirate’s side again. As she had told Mags before howling her battle cry and going after Kaufman, nothing in the universe could keep them apart for long.
At last, the ship reached the outer edge of the storm cloud. The wind subsided, and Kaufman gained control. He flew them to the top of the atmosphere and then beyond, and not a single device in the System saw him do it. He was free, as free as a man can be. Yet his heart pulled him back to Vesta.
He wiped the grit from his face, mussed his hair, and shook out a puff of regolith. It fell like filthy snow on the console. He poured water from a bottle into his eyes and flushed out the sand carefully. Clean streaks ran down the sides of his dirty cheeks like tears.
He tried rubbing his aching shoulder, but it hurt too much to touch. The bruise on his forehead throbbed angrily now. With a trembling hand, he turned on the ship’s radio.
A blast of song samples blared into the cabin, signaling a station ID. Without his knowing, Mags had put on her favorite station before she disembarked.
A familiar voice announced, “That was the Donnas with Is That It, and before that, Raining Blood from Slayer. You are now tuned in to the Puma Broadcasting Network, a division of the Feline Liberation Front, so listen the fuck up.
“We have an ‘anonymous caller’ who would like to dedicate this song to his father, whom he loves very much. You lot might remember this one from 2018: the one and only Sterile Skins with a deep, deep album track right here. It’s called Come Back Home Alive. Long live the resistance.”
The horn section kicked in. A guitar skanked furiously. “One-Two-Three-Four!” The bashing drums made Kaufman’s heart swell. He sang with all the strength he could muster.
Ever since the day you went away
I’ve had nothin’, nothin’ left to say
I try to smile and I try to pretend
But all I want is you back again
So get into gear
And put her into overdrive
Make it home
Make it back home alive
Come back, come back!
Oi oi oi oi!
Come back, come back!
The dirt, the pain, and the terror the tornado had pumped into his soul—Kaufman forgot them all. He thought only of Anton.
Patches enjoyed the song, too. She crawled into her new friend’s lap, purring as he pet her.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
As the Hyades swiftly left Ceres far behind, Mags and her crew heard the same broadcast.
“That’s so sweet,” said Celina. “Great song for a dedication, too.”
“Perfect for K-man,” said Fuzz. He held her hand.
While the two of them kissed, Mags tapped the Captain’s wheel with her fingers to the beat of the song. Then it hit her. She knew the man they had captured. She set the ship’s automatic pilot and let it take over.
Stepping up to her seated captive, she said, “Alonso Ramirez.”
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“You can’t shit a shitter, vato. I’d know your sorry mug anywhere! You were lead guitar in Negative Influence on the first two albums, and the drummer for the most kick-ass ska band in North America—the Sterile Skins!”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Fuzzlow exclaimed.
“Wooot,” Celina cheered.
“You’ve got the wrong man, Chief Inspector.”
“For fuck’s sake,” said Mags in exasperation. “Look at me, bro!” She pulled open the snaps on her collar. A crisp row of them down the front of her shirt burst open. All along her naked neck and down into her cleavage, a trail of black star tattoos led Alonso’s eyes.
“Holy fuck,” he said. “Meteor Mags! You almost killed me, diabla loca!”
“You almost killed me first!”
“The hell you doing all dressed up on Ceres?” He held out his fist.
Hers came down on top of it. Then his came down on hers, and they bumped fists together. Their hands clasped.
She pulled him from his seat and into her embrace. With three hearty slaps on his back, she said, “How the hell you been, ese?”
“It’s been a decade!” He thudded her back just as enthusiastically. “After the MFA shut down the Skins, I went into hiding. I came out with a fake ID and some fucking shipping job.”
“And just look at you now!”
“Sí. Waiting to die at the hands of the most wanted criminal in the System.”
“It’s nice to be wanted,” she said.
“Looks like you got chewed up by frags, tía. You want a hand digging that out?”
“First, let’s open a bottle of whatever swill they have on this crate. Then we can play in-flight surgery on my na
ked, bleeding body.”
Donny commented under his breath, “It wouldn’t be an adventure if Mags didn’t expose herself at least once.”
“Kaufman will be thrilled to meet you.” She held Alonso by the shoulders and beamed at her old friend. “He’s your second-biggest fan.”
“I hope to hell he makes it off that rock,” said Fuzzlow. “What a storm!”
Her smile turned as dark as the thunderclouds raging on Ceres. “He will make it,” she replied with icy confidence. “Patches has him.”
★ ○•♥•○ ★
August 2027: Ceres.
More than two years earlier, the rioting outside Kepler Stadium had spread throughout the surrounding mining towns. It began with rumors that the MFA had fatally beaten a young man on his way to the illegal concert at Kepler. True or not, the accusation had fanned the flames of unrest among the thousands of underpaid and overworked residents of Ceres. By the time the band was about to go on, the asteroid settlements had erupted into street fighting and looting.
The Psycho 78s had snuck onto the planetoid that morning by hiding the Queen Anne inside an even larger ship. Released in the lower atmosphere, the ship reached Kepler Stadium with hardly a blip on any radar screen. The crew secured the facility with a minimum of bloodshed and set about spreading the word through the underground.
The Port Authority soon shut off the stadium’s power from the central grid, but the Psycho 78s traveled with their own generators. Outside, a mob gathered. Inside, a mass of bodies pressed together, covered in sweat.
A twelve-show tour had sounded to Mags like the perfect excuse to engage black markets on a dozen planetoids. Her warehouse of stolen cigarettes emptied itself into greedy hands all across the Belt. In return, she facilitated the movement of one rock’s supply to another’s demand. Some things she kept for herself, and only occasionally for sentimental or decorative reasons.
Mags amassed so much wealth on this tour that she was nearly as rich as she had been at the height of her criminal empire on the West Coast of the United States in the 1990s. But considering she practically commanded an entire asteroid of her own now, then her riches were downright astronomical.
People rarely believed her when she said she wasn’t in it for the money. And though that was true, she paid no small amount of attention to her merchandising.
Fuzzlow had gone outside to check on the teenagers selling her posters and albums on the stadium grounds. Mags paid them so well that she made nary a dime on the merchandise. In her view, she was helping young people find rewarding work instead of slaving to death in the mines or prostituting themselves in the grimy alleys and bathrooms of some shit-heel mining town.
Fuzzlow returned from his mission and told her, “They’re fine. I said they could go, and some of them did, but most of them want to stay and see the show.”
“Good,” she said. “Thanks, Fuzz. They’re good kids.”
“Hey. Look at this bootleg comic I found in the parking lot. The X-ventures of Meteorite Maxxx and His Dog, Scratches. It’s a porno rip-off of the band!”
“What?! Give me that.” She tore it from his hand. “Scratches?!”
“Take a look at the centerfold.”
“Oh, my god.” Mr. Blistr embraced Batalla intimately between the pages. The artist had added bulging muscles and forgotten about clothing. “That’s hot,” she said. “Check this out. ‘Join us next issue for The Secret Bio Lab of Doctor Uranus!’ Where do they think of this shit?” She wagged her head. “Fuckin’ Scratches, though. Why they gotta make her a dog?"
“I could do without the dog sex on page twelve. And what’s up with The Nutty 99s? That’s not even clever.”
“Leather Threesome would have been way better. I won’t even say what ‘Felina’ is doing with this furry. Or this one. Wait—is that one furry or two?”
“You know, Maxxx looks like just like you, except for hearts instead of stars.”
“The fuck he does. He’s a square-jawed freak with abs that could crack nuts.”
“He has your winning smile. And your butt cleavage.”
“Will you get the fuck out?” Mags slapped him with the comic book. “I’m totally keeping this. Good plunder, mate.”
“Oh, here’s Doctor Your Anus right now.”
Plutonian stepped out of the shadows. “Did I miss something?”
“Just this rag Fuzznuts found in the parking lot.” She smacked him in the chest with it. “Check it out while you’re recording.”
“Is it go time?” asked the DJ. “I’m all set back here.”
“Are you ready to fuck with law and order?”
“Aye,” said Plutonian. “The signal will be cranked to the max. Are you getting the reports of the riots? What the hell is going on out there?”
Fuzzlow said, “The pigs killed a kid. Mining is bullshit. Let’s fuckin’ riot. You don’t need a sociology degree to work it out.”
“I hear that,” said Celina, arriving from backstage with Blistr and Batalla on her heels. The trio reeked of hashish. “Is the Queen Anne safe out there?”
“Safe as houses,” said Mags. “The automated weapons on her will hold off the MFA. And I got a stone-cold killer working the manual system, too. You guys ready to kill it?”
Her bandmates answered with a hearty, “Aye, aye!”
They took the stage.
Meteor Mags wrapped her fist around the mic. “This one,” she shouted, “is from our mates in Bongripper. It’s called People Mover, and we’d like to send it out to everyone here on Ceres who refuses to be moved. Who refuses the program. Who looks their mine boss in the eye and says, ‘Fuck you! I will not be moved.’”
The deafening cheer drowned out everything.
“But, hey. Hey!” Mags screamed. “It isn’t enough for just one person to refuse. Nothing changes until we all get together, and we organize, and we say, ‘We will not be moved.’ All of us. Together.” With the roar of thousands shouting in her ears, she said, “Take it, Fuzz.”
Her vocal talents would not be needed for a dozen minutes or more, so she stormed off to her electric piano. When she ran it through distortion pedals, she could easily provide the sonic barrage of the second guitar parts while Blistr took the lead.
Mags enjoyed seeing her band take over the full-audio assault. She bared her teeth in a savage smile. With one eyebrow arched, she knew she saw the future.
And the future was revolution.
As the final notes of People Mover reverberated in the stadium, the band raged into their entire album, HyperSonicHatred. It began with Mags’ bashing the piano and shouting, “When I was a little girl, they fucked up my mind!” A man-made earthquake rocked the stadium as thousands of fans jumped up and down.
The band extended the song structures and jammed them out for more than two hours. Using a homemade transmitter backstage, Plutonian broadcast the concert. The signal overrode all communications on Ceres. The MFA, the Port Authority, and local law enforcement struggled to organize their crackdown as the signal wreaked havoc with their systems.
Buildings burned in the Ceresian cities. Crowds filled the streets. Military barricades could not hold them back. For nearly three hours, all of Ceres descended into a state of completely lawless anarchy. Nothing could have made Mags happier.
Mags led the crowd in the chorus of Annihilation Blues, from her solo album. They chanted:
Every person
Every nation
Pray with me for
Annihilation
No one would forget what happened during the closing number: Unending Muthafucka. For a solid twenty-eight minutes, the band jammed the outro into something no one had ever heard before. Fuzzlow sang and used his beatboxing talents to emulate instruments of his own imagination. Batalla freely sampled him, triggering the samples with his drum pads. Blistr adjusted the dials on his horn until it poured out waterfalls of harmony, growing more intense with each minute. Mags pounded her piano with incessant rhythms around the
crashing, bashing, drums and madness.
Inspectors would later declare Kepler Stadium structurally unsound due to the sonic bombardment, and it would require extensive repairs before anyone could play there again. But the Psycho 78s did not care about anything except music, and oblivion through music, and maybe, someday, changing the Belt with music.
At last, over the thundering applause, Mags took center stage again. Blistr stood beside her, holding his electric horn to his lips. He blew the opening lines of Time Travelling Blues by Orange Goblin.
“You all have been great,” said Mags over the music. “But all good things must come to an end.” Boos and catcalls. “Listen up, you ungrateful wankers. Before we go, I’d just like to remind you one thing. We own the sky. And don’t you ever forget it.”
With a drum fill, the band kicked in. Returning to her piano in a spotlight, Meteor Mags sang about seeing sunlight, and the sky, and the future. In a sea whose waves were fueled by volume, people danced with wild abandon. Some hugged strangers next to them as the band played the tune like it was the last song in the Solar System.
But before it was over, the MFA pushed through the front doors and advanced through the crowd. On its way forward, one squadron dished out more beatings than it took, and finally stormed the stage.
Fuzzlow ran to the edge. Still gripping the microphone, he punched an officer in the helmet. He would have to wear bandages on his hand for two weeks. Ignoring the pain, he kicked at them as they climbed up, but there were more than he could handle.
The band’s road crew rushed out from backstage to tackle the squad. As fistfights raged across the stage, the crowd turned to violence, too. It ripped chairs from the floor, destroying the venue bit by bit. Flames burst into light in corners and alcoves.
And there, in her spotlight halo, stage right and just beyond the melee, Meteor Mags kept singing. As far as her eyes could see, Kepler Stadium had burst into cacophony, violence, and bloodshed. It thrilled her to no end. Her nipples grew hard. Sparks burned in her eyes. She loved the destruction and wished it would never stop.
Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition Page 50
