She pressed a button on her piano, and her final riff played on a loop. She gave a hearty, UK-style, “fuck you” salute to no one and everyone, then made her way through the combat. She pulled an MFA officer away from one of the roadies and tossed him off the stage. Mags advanced like this, gathering up her mates until she reached the edge of stage left and stormed off.
As Mags and her crew disappeared offstage, Celina and Plutonian appeared on their flank. Celina held an AK-47, and Plutonian his Remington double-barreled shotgun. They blasted into the ranks of the officers who dared pursue the band. Bodies became a swath of carnage strewn across the stage.
The two criminals locked eyes.
“Go!” Celina shouted. They took off after Mags.
She stood at an open door of the exit out the back of Kepler Stadium, at the front of her assembled crew. She held up a hand, palm flat, signaling for them to stop. Then she waved to someone beyond the door and shouted, “Ahoy!”
Outside, two dozen meters from the building, sat the Queen Anne. Despite the riots, a wide circle remained clear around Mags’ ship.
At the edge of the circle lay MFA troops who would never move again. Rubber bullets from the ship’s guns had pummeled everyone who tried to approach it. Anyone not discouraged by them encountered deadlier rounds.
Suddenly, the ship’s side door opened and lowered to the ground like a ramp. Mags and her crew ran aboard.
“Patches!”
The calico leapt down from the console. Only moments before, she had been furiously tapping her paws at targets which popped up on the touch screen. She scampered over with a cheerful meow.
Mags scooped her into the air. “Good kitten! You held off a bloody army out here!”
Patches purred in her arms.
Celina could not believe it. “You mean all this time, the stone-cold killer guarding our ride off this rock was—Patches?”
Mags looked her best friend in the eye. “I told you she was one smart kitty!”
Plutonian added, “It wouldn’t be the first time she saved the day from the MFA.”
“Damn right,” said Mags. “Now strap in! We’re getting out before the whole shithouse burns down.”
“What about our equipment?” Blistr whined. “Our amps and gear and—”
“Blistr,” said Mags. “Will you relax? We made so much cash we can buy the whole fucking lot of gear a hundred times over.”
Fuzzlow cradled his injured hand. “We’ll need it, Mags. There’ll be hell to pay for this.”
As the ship rose above Ceres into the star-splattered sky between planets, Mags lit a stolen cigarette and smiled. “Don’t you worry, dear. I’ve got a generous line of credit there. And I know the guy who runs the place.”
Asteroid Underground Interview:
The Psycho 78s (2028)
Psycho 78s, welcome to the Underground.
Fuzzlow: Thanks, man.
Batalla: Dude, we are the underground.
Mr. Blistr: We’re so far underground, we’re in a sea of lava.
Sounds hot down there! Guys, the Ceres concert is already a legend. Can you tell us what it was like on stage at the end?
Fuzzlow: Yeah, that thing got weird. And super heavy. But the crowd was into it, so we just kept going. Batalla was live-sampling me as I beatboxed, so he would trigger loops of the samples with his drum kit. And he’s got this crushing beat going on the toms. And then Blistr here, see he does this thing on his horn. See how he—yeah, look.
Mr. Blistr: I have all the effects built into a module here on the bell of the horn. I control them in real-time with these keys, which can also be dialed. And that’s where that crazy harmony comes from, like what you heard over the polyrhythms.
That looks like a lot of extra keys for you.
Fuzzlow: That’s why they call him Blisters. Cause he’s always working those fingers over something!
Batalla: Either that, or his genital condition.
Mr. Blistr: Batalla, shut the fuck up.
Batalla: Easy, bro. Relax.
Mr. Blistr: No, I’m not gonna “relax”. This is just like you to talk shit about me in an interview. Everywhere we go. Oh, look at me—I’m such a funny drummer who bangs on things, I can be a pig’s arse to the horn player!
Batalla: Seriously, I was just kidding.
Mr. Blistr: You’re always kidding. That’s the problem. Grow the fuck up, you two. Yeah, you too, harmonica rapper guy. I put my heart and soul into this band. Enough is enough.
Fuzzlow: You know they’re recording this, right?
Mr. Blistr: That’s my point! Oh, for the love of fuck, would you shut that thing off? Yes, you! Turn off the bloody recording! I’ve had it with—
The PSYCHO 78s: HyperSonicHatred
Back Cover
PSYCHO LOUDNESS:
1. Something to Destroy (feat. Meteor Mags)
2. Two Tears for Sister Moon
3. Someone Ate My Face Off
4. Me and the System Blues
5. Onto the Blazing Pyre
6. One of Them Was Destroyed
7. Hypersonic Love Dub
8. Unending Muthafucka
PSYCHO GUILT:
FUZZLOW: beatbox, harmonica, vocals
BATALLA: kit drums, glockenspiel, percussion
MR. BLISTR: tenor horn and effects
Produced by Meteor Mags for Two Black Roses Records.
PSYCHO GRATITUDE: To prove our undying love, we will not incriminate you by printing your name here. You know we know who you are. See you at the shows!
PSYCHO MANIFESTO: Steal this album. Post it to darkweb. Hell, you can even pay for it if you want. Just don’t get caught. The system is not your friend. The system is not your friend! We have come for your subsonics, your supersonics, and your hypersonic hatred.
And then comes the storm.
The PSYCHO 78s ~ 2027 A.D.
14
Voyage of the Calico Tigress
Crest after endless foamy crest arose, rolled along her rusty flanks, and was lost in the narrowing wake astern. All waters were alike to the Wanderer. Every last one was made to be split and rolled back along rusty hulls. All you needed was the power to do the splitting and, so far as the Wanderer was concerned, that flowed from her engines with the fidelity of the tides.
—Delos W. Lovelace; King Kong, 1932.
PROLOGUE: THE AFTERMATH
November 2029.
It was a dark and stormy night on Ceres. Though four and a half billion years had passed since its violent formation, the planetoid had never hosted such a monumental downpour. Compared to the rampaging whirlwinds of Jupiter, this tempest was a small and transient affair, certainly not the boiling cauldrons that churned for centuries on the gas giants. But for Ceres, tonight’s symphony of destruction had set the bar for darkness and storminess to an all-time high.
The monstrous tornado had destroyed much more than the landing zone and administrative buildings of von Zach Division. Relentlessly advancing beyond the warehousing district, it assaulted the Ceresian water-processing facilities.
The asteroid’s once-icy surface and the frozen reserves below its mantle had become the single greatest source of water for human consumption in the Belt. The water also served as radiation shielding and propellant for spacecraft, making it one of Ceres’ chief exports and a centerpiece of the extraterrestrial economy.
But no more. The mega-cyclone pulled the processing stations apart. Their contents spewed into its savage funnels and past the upper atmosphere where, once again, the water crystallized into the solid form it had enjoyed for a million centuries before humanity’s interference. Within a few days, Ceres’ artificial gravity would draw the ice crystals into rings like those of Saturn, peppered here and there with human remains.
The carnage encircling the planet from above paled in comparison to the suffering below. In the driving rain, thousands of Ceresian citizens clambered through the wreckage of their homes, their possessions, and their lives. On
ce-orderly streets became paths of ragged rubble filled with cries of loss and mourning long after the tornado had exhausted its fury and ebbed into mere turbulence.
Despite the fresh devastation scarring its stony hide, Ceres maintained a cool detachment well-suited to its unimaginably long existence. If Ceres felt anything as it observed the affliction and geologic catastrophe the tornado created, it was a kinship with the tiny cat who had just left the asteroid—a calico who, like Ceres, was destined to outlive every other being who had survived that night.
Immortals, after all, so rarely cross paths.
PART ONE: RADIANT GRAVES
Patches pawed furiously at Kaufman’s tablet. In one of the four passenger seats aboard the man’s tiny stealth spacecraft, she stood over the device and batted at the screen. Its glow illuminated the ragged tufts of fur she had yet to groom since braving the tornado to rescue him.
But instead of responding to her touch, the tablet displayed a cartoon face. Below the icon’s lopsided frown flashed the words: Sorry, we cannot connect right now. Please try again soon.
Patches howled her displeasure at the administrator hunched over the ship’s console. Kaufman held his head in his hands. When he glanced over his shoulder and turned away, her rage redoubled. The sound which issued from her throat shot his heart as full of fear as the sudden scream of a child.
“Patches!” Kaufman shouted. “What is it?” He spun his seat around to face her, searching his soul for the power to stand.
Patches beheld the human wreckage before her. Being blown across the tarmac had transmuted Kaufman’s impeccably groomed uniform into a thing of rags and wisps of thread that wished for anything to hold. Blood soaked the remnants of its blue-gray fabric, staining the tatters a deep maroon of damage and pain. Over this damp mantle laid a crust of regolith and filth the storm had abused him with. Bruises covered his exposed skin and face.
None of it bought him any mercy from another howl. The disgruntled calico hunched her back and raked her claws across the seat again and again. Its cloth and stuffing offered no resistance. They piled up on the tablet as Patches single-mindedly buried it.
Kaufman sighed. The meaning of her gesture was clear, even to someone who lacked Mags’ facility with feline language. The device had proven as useful as a turd to the patchwork princess, and it would be buried like one. But what use could a cat possibly have for a tablet? “Bad kitty, Patches!”
She scowled at his scolding and hissed a warning. Lowering her head, she dug the hole in the seat with even more intensity.
“Patches!” Kaufman pleaded. He pushed himself up from his seat with one arm and reached for the tablet.
Her eyes blazed at him with wild fury.
“Just let me see it, okay?”
She considered his offer before sitting back and licking her paw.
He seized the device. Its apologetic display left him unsurprised. Signals could only enter or exit the ship with his authorization when it was in full stealth mode. Seeing no reason why this should matter to a cat, he set the tablet on the copilot’s chair.
In frustration, Patches leapt onto the console. She peered through the window at the specks of fire burning in the vastness. They shone like radiant graves. Filled with enough mass, they could eventually drag time itself into their gravity and never release it.
Yet they were the furnaces responsible for creating all the matter that composed her body. In their light, Patches saw the beginning and end of everything. It suggested that despite her recently acquired durability, even she might be destroyed by stellar forces.
She had no wish to test the idea. She only wanted to send a message to her companion in all things adventurous: Meteor Mags. Like most cats, Patches had zero patience for anything which denied her will.
Kaufman, too, considered his mortality. His dirty crust formed cement which relieved him, for the moment, of the peril of bleeding to death. But he had wounds he could neither reach nor see, all of which needed cleaning. Some required more serious attention. “This is not what I had in mind for a holiday.”
When she mewed kindly at him, he found the strength to smile with the corner of his mouth—grimly, but with a spark of determination in his eye. He rose and opened the medical locker on the cabin’s wall. “So, Patches. The life of a criminal, is it?”
Her reply sounded so much like an aye from Mags that the administrator almost believed she could understand him.
Patches purred and swished her tail. She more than understood Kaufman. She was thrilled he had mentioned one of her favorite songs: Life of a Criminal by MC Pooh. Since meeting the octopus, she had developed a keen interest in gangster rap, the result of sharing Mags’ memories of the West Coast. Maybe when Kaufman got cleaned up, she thought, he would take her to a bar. Spinning records at the last one had been so much fun.
Kaufman gulped a pair of pain pills from a bottle. He stared at the label, but the letters blurred and smeared together. Disregarding the unreadable warning, he swallowed another pill and drained a canteen of its water. Exhausted by the task, he steadied himself against the wall with one hand, hung his head, and took a deep breath.
Ice packs next, he thought. Keep the swelling down. Might have to elevate the foot. Ow. Definitely the foot. Something’s broken.
They would not reach Vesta for hours, so the man slowly undressed. Wincing, he tugged at his ragged shirt. It peeled away from his body, ripping open freshly forming scabs one-by-one. The cloth fibers embedded in his skin gripped his flesh and pulled it away from the meat. The skin lifted in the shape of a row of tents, staked to the ground yet swelling from an unexpected wind.
Kaufman shuddered. With a groan he made no effort to suppress, he ripped off the remainder of his shirt in a single motion. The pain gave rise to the beast in Kaufman’s soul. Clenching his fists, he lifted his head and roared.
Patches purred with approval. She flicked her ears this way and that at the uncivilized primate song filling the cabin. A movement in the distance caught her eye. Her head bobbed inquisitively, pointing her nose to different spots on the window glass. She saw only a moving speck in the unpatrolled darkness of the Belt. But it grew larger.
Kaufman responded to her plaintive mew. It called him back from a time before fire and language, an era of apes who faced pain not with pills but with naked, animal rage. He hurt, but he felt strong. “What’s wrong now?”
Claws sheathed, she pawed at the window.
Kaufman wished Mags was with him. He thought of the bright red lock of hair that had fallen across her face when she grabbed him by the shirt. It framed her eye and set off its color: a fierce green that reminded him of burning copper. Blazing under thick lashes and her uncompromising black eyeliner, her irises held obsidian stones in place of pupils. Kaufman was certain they were not windows to her soul but to all things deep and black and relentless: the heart of space itself, of night and ocean depths.
He joined her cat at the console. He leaned over the controls and pressed his grimy hand to the window. “We have to be sure no one gets a visual. Warping light is one of the few things this ship can’t do. But the odds of seeing anyone out here—oh, why am I explaining this to a cat?” He looked to Patches, who met his eyes and blinked.
Returning her stare to space, Patches pressed her paw to the window in a gesture identical to his. She meowed insistently.
“You are a handful, aren’t you?” Then he saw it, too. “Shit!” He scrambled away. Stumbling on his injured foot midway to the wall, he smashed into the locker doors. His hand found the dial for the lights and dimmed them until they faded completely. He whispered, “What is that?”
★ ○•♥•○ ★
While her crew remained on the bridge, Mags joined Alonso in the operating room aboard the Hyades. Freighters of its class had space for well-stocked medical facilities, plus the crew’s living quarters and a rec room. While the interior of Mags’ Queen Anne felt intimate, like a flying clubhouse, the Hyades more closely resembl
ed a multi-family dwelling.
Mags sat on a padded, bed-length table. She wore only a black bikini bottom and spatters of fresh blood. She had stripped and showered and, despite having been caught in the tornado like Kaufman, presented a far less frightening visage.
“Give me that.” She snatched the bottle from Alonso’s hand. “That, too.”
He passed her the syringe. “Sorry, tía.”
“Don’t be.” She jabbed the syringe through the top of the bottle into the liquid inside. She pulled back the plunger, and the needle filled with epinephrine.
“Easy there. You don’t need to inject so much.”
“Who said anything about injections?” She pulled the syringe free and squirted a stream of pure adrenaline onto her tongue. She shook her head rapidly, frowning and wrinkling her nose. “Holy shit-fire, that’s good. Want some?”
“Nah, ese. Tryin’ to quit. Here’s a chaser.”
She took a bottle of procaine from him, and soon the syringe held a mixture of the chemicals. Mags injected herself multiple times, moving the needle down the line of frag wounds on her ribcage, hip, and thigh. First she stabbed to one side of each wound, then the other. In the worst places, she poked the needle into the center of shredded masses of meat, still bleeding. “Will you get my shoulder?”
Alonso obliged then prepared a needle and thread. “Give it ten minutes.” He set them down by the pliers on a metal tray. “Then we’ll dig out the shrapnel. When did you dye your hair red?”
Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition Page 51
