Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition

by Matthew Howard

  “You like it? Slim did it a couple nights ago. It’s cute, but I’m thinking of going back to white for my birthday. Or black. I can’t make up my mind.” Her tail, a matching red, flicked indecisively across the tabletop.

  Alonso rummaged through lockers as she chatted about her hair and a long list of outfits under consideration for her birthday performance. He made polite noises and pretended to listen. His own stage dress was limited to boots, black pants, and whichever band t-shirt smelled the least rancid on the night of the show.

  The amount of thought behind an exotic dancer’s wardrobe was lost on him, though he certainly enjoyed seeing the final product in action. By the time Mags was debating with herself on which boots went best with purple leopard-print stockings, he located something which concerned him far more.

  “A-ha! Found it.” He proudly held up a bottle of spiced black rum.

  “Mixed with procaine? Are you nuts?”

  “Oye, tía. This ain’t for you.” He unscrewed the cap. “This is for Doctor Lonso!” He gulped enough to fill three shot glasses. “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

  Mags held out her hand and waved her fingers, beckoning the bottle.

  Alonso took another swig. “Now who’s crazy?”

  “You are, if you keep bogarting the party favors.”

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and waved the bottle at her. “You want me to sterilize the wounds?”

  “Pour that rum on me, and you’ll have your own wounds to worry about.”

  “Same old tía.” Alonso handed over the bottle. Its label displayed a giant kraken wrapping its tentacles around a helpless freighter.

  “Aye,” she said. “Older than fuckin’ dirt.” She took one swig from the bottle, then another. For a moment, her eyes looked heavy, and her face drooped. She sat close enough to Alonso that he could hear her sigh, but she might as well have been in another galaxy.

  The twinkle returned to her eyes. “You’re coming to the party, right?”

  “The party?”

  “My birthday!”

  “Is there a choice? You just kidnapped me!”

  “If you want to go back to your stupid shipping job, just say so.”

  “Maybe you need a guitarist?”

  She smiled. “Like I need a hole in the head. Bloody prima donnas! Don’t you want to bash a kit with the Psycho 78s?”

  “I’m a little rusty,” he confessed. He took a seat on the stool next to her and picked up the pliers. “I’ve been writing some new stuff on guitar.”

  “For real?” Mags took another pull from the bottle. “You gotta play it for me!”

  “First, we play doctor.”

  “Knock yourself out, doc. I can’t feel my leg anymore. Or anything else.” She studied the rum’s label, and an idea took shape.

  A kraken. A ship. Together. She had the perfect solution right in front of her.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Patches recognized the ship as it grew nearer. Two months earlier, she and Mags had boarded a dragon warship of the same class. With the help of Tarzi’s cybernetic seahorse, Mags electrocuted every last reptile inside it. Patches purred at the memory.

  Kaufman did not share her pleasure. “We have to get out of here.” He scrambled for his seat. As his hands hovered over the console, he realized his predicament. If he drew attention to his ship by making a hasty exit, the larger ship might track and destroy it. Though invisible to electronic systems, Kaufman’s miniscule vessel was as good as dead if a gunner could spot it with his eyes, be they human or reptile.

  As the two ships approached their fateful intersection, Kaufman took a chance. He had been coasting on the invisible propulsion his GravGens provided, but now he fired small bursts from thrusters along the ship’s two wings. The propellants made faint white puffs in the vacuum. Kaufman counted on their being too unremarkable to notice.

  They nudged the ship toward an asteroid only four times as large. The stone drifted lazily in the void, bereft of gravity and companionship. If it welcomed the tether Kaufman fired to anchor to the rock, it gave no sign.

  This asteroid had once been part of a planet between Mars and Jupiter, but a collision left nothing but fragments. Humans hypothesized about this ancient planet without ever unlocking its secret history, a majestic epoch billions of years old, now all but forgotten by the lonely stone Kaufman pulled closer.

  Patches’ pupils expanded until the green rings of her irises nearly disappeared. She smelled Kaufman’s fear, and his racing heartbeat thundered in her ears. Even when the warship’s shadow covered them and filled the cabin with a starless void, she could see his trembling hands. He was, as Mags would say, totally freaking out.

  With a scowl, Patches stepped down into the copilot’s chair and tapped her paws on the tablet again. She meowed at Kaufman, baring her little fangs.

  He picked up the device, wondering about her strange obsession with it, but nothing prepared him for what he saw on the screen. His earnest companion had typed one simple sentence: be cool nigga.

  Her ability to type bewildered him, and her choice of words wrinkled his brow into a map of confusion. But like an ice-cold bath, it granted him clarity. With a hint of steel in his voice, he told her, “We must not be seen out here, Patches. But do you know what?”

  She mewed softly.

  “In space, no one can hear you hoo bangin’.” He turned up the music, and the speakers blared the deep hip-hop groove of Ice Cube’s Hoo Bangin’. Kaufman cupped his crotch with one hand and swayed his shoulders back and forth.

  Patches bobbed her head in a dance, quite pleased with this turn of events. Kaufman seemed like a square when they first met, but he was pretty hip when it came to tunes.

  Their mood would have been more subdued if they could see inside the floating city obscuring the stars like a wave of black oil spilling across the sky. Patches had fought in the docking bay on a ship of this class, but she had never explored an entire vessel.

  Beyond the bay lived a military colony. The soldiers survived on stores of food and what they could grow aboard the ship; both animal and vegetable. An engineering and maintenance crew devoted all its waking hours to the propulsion system. The ship’s functions and the crew’s lives were the same thing.

  Such an operation could not survive indefinitely. It needed restocking, either from ports in the outer planets or the high council’s mega-ship. And the number of these warships had been in steady decline since 2027.

  Meteor Mags had destroyed two of them, and one remained unaccounted for. The smuggler and her crew had put a serious dent in Commander Cragg’s plans of conquest. If he were to succeed in taking Earth, she would need to be destroyed, and he would need help from the Earth people who hated her.

  She was one of two females on Cragg’s mind as he prowled the hallways of the interplanetary fortress: Mags, and the slumbering dragon at the end of the hall.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Dekarna awoke. Her nictitating membranes rolled away from her eyes, and her pupils contracted in the light. They rolled up and forward to gaze at her commander, now standing before her.

  “Major,” he rumbled.

  Dekarna’s heart was lightened by his presence, but the reptilian affection inside her found no corresponding feeling on the outside of her body. She sprawled on her belly on a bed not unlike a gymnast’s horse, and when she tried to raise her arms, they were restrained—like her legs and tail—by belts. “Commander. I live.”

  “Indeed,” said the old reptile, “but your wounds are extreme. You’ve been restrained so you wouldn’t hurt yourself any further in your sleep.”

  “Was our mating successful?”

  “The surgeons verified it was.”

  Dekarna breathed a sigh of relief, but the air escaping her nostrils gave her no sensation. “I can’t feel anything. Why can’t I feel my body?”

  Cragg’s tail stirred, and its tip waved slowly back and forth. “You suffered
a trauma to your spine. Do you remember?”

  “Yes. That bitch Caldic tried to sever it.”

  “She nearly did. The nerve damage was significant, though not as severe as what you did to her. Relish your triumph, Major. Few survive the ritual.”

  Dekarna took a moment to recall the end of the combat ritual. Her foes had fallen to the ground, and then she had, too, before Cragg moved over her collapsed form and entered her. But where she should have felt a savage joy and the glow of budding eggs inside her womb, she felt nothing. Not emptiness, not numbness, not anything at all. “Will it heal?”

  “Oh yes,” said her commander, and the words slithered off his tongue. “You will do more than heal. You will be stronger and more fearsome than ever. To counteract the nerve damage, I approved an experimental procedure.”

  Dekarna growled and tried to shift her body, but the belts held her.

  “Be still, Major. You’ll be able to move in a couple days.”

  “In time for the invasion of Vesta?”

  Cragg’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a mockery of a smile. “Yes. You will be at my side when we crush the smuggler.”

  “I was born for war, not for lounging in a recovery room. What was the procedure?”

  “The surgeons implanted a device in your spine. It disrupts the flow of pain signals from your body to your brain. You will never hurt again.”

  Dekarna’s eyes widened with surprise. “Is that why I feel nothing? What of my other sensations? What of pleasure?”

  “They may never return. Regrettable, but necessary.” Cragg felt no unease at this bald-faced lie. In truth, the surgeons had advised him against the procedure. The mammals they had tested it on, driven mad by the lack of sensory information, had injured themselves. One gnawed off a forepaw. One tore out its eye. All had died from self-inflicted traumas. The surgeons told Cragg all this, and they suggested gene therapy to heal Dekarna.

  Cragg declined their advice. Instead, he envisioned Dekarna’s future as an unstoppable killing machine, one who could not be dissuaded from her wrath by such a simple thing as pain. Successfully transforming his second-in-command into the most brutal warrior his species had ever known would validate his intentions to transform all his soldiers. Dekarna’s consent to the experiment was of no concern.

  “I will never feel the touch of our offspring.” A pool formed in her eye. The surface tension broke, releasing a single tear. It traced the ridges of her scales, travelling down her insensate face to fall to the floor.

  “Don’t let it trouble you, Major. The warriors you give birth to will be raised in the shadow of your legend. They will carve our new empire in blood on that blue speck called Earth by the mammals we will rule together. What more could a mother ask?”

  Dekarna pondered the price of her species’ future. A crimson stream of hatred coursed through her veins: hate for the mammals who possessed the planet that was rightfully hers, hate for the elder soldiers who wounded her before dying, and hate for the senseless voyage her kin had endured so long to reclaim this solar system.

  The emotion gave her strength and focus, something her senses could no longer grant. “We will rule them,” she growled. “And they will serve us.”

  “That they will, Major. That, they most definitely will.” He left her chamber. His tail snaked along behind him until it vanished from sight, and then she was alone.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  “You see,” said Celina, “Mags isn’t like some people you know.” She tapped the end of her stolen cigarette against the mouth of an empty beer bottle plundered from the Hyades’ larder. The glass caught the red and yellow of the cherry’s smoldering coal, the green and red of the ship’s interior lights, and flecks of stars scattered in splashes of nebulae. “She never learned how to fear.”

  Accents from the console’s glow highlighted the creamy brown of Celina’s skin. Her hair, so dark that many people thought it black, draped across her face in a few casual locks, only to be swept into the magnificent up-do she improvised for the ride home. “There’s never a second when she isn’t ready to fight you to the death.”

  Donny popped off another bottle cap. “She did hold a gun to my head and say how nice my brains would look splattered all over my ride. But I might’ve deserved it.”

  “I see how you can say that,” said Fuzzlow, “but she wouldn’t actually kill me. Or you, baby.” He sipped his beer. “Maybe Donny, but not—”

  “Oh, fuck you,” said Donny, laughing. “No, she would totally murder me. And I think she likes me!”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” said Celina. “She does like you, mate. Or else you’d be dead.” She snapped her fingers playfully at Fuzzlow. “Hellooo. Pass it!”

  “Yeah, nah,” said Fuzzlow. “They don’t grow shit like this across the ditch. I don’t think you could handle it.”

  “Imma handle you later, baby. But for now, let the point stand. She might be wrong. Someday, it might even get her killed. But there’s no room in her heart for surrender.”

  “I had a cat like that once,” said Donny. “She was a real pretty cat. She had this long, grey hair tipped with white. And these blue eyes.” He took a sip and swirled the contents of the bottle for a moment. “She thought she could take on anything.”

  “What happened to her?” After much delay, Fuzzlow finally passed to Celina. He enjoyed her threatening scowl.

  “I don’t know,” said Donny. “I saw her fight a hawk. He decided she wasn’t worth losing any more feathers. She outran a coyote. One dog, she chased into traffic and got him killed. I never saw a cat quite like her.” He took a swig. “Until I met Mags.”

  “But what happened to her?”

  “I wish I knew. I guess one day, she met her match. She never came back. But I do know this. If you follow Mags, you follow her to the death. She won’t stop for anything.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Celina purred.

  “To Mags,” said Fuzzlow, holding up his drink. His fellow criminals answered him with hearty agreements, clinking their bottles together before draining them.

  “I’m just bein’ real with y’all,” said Fuzzlow. “Mags ain’t the one who scares me. That cat of hers has a hundred percent of Mags’ attitude. But I don’t think anything short of a nuke would slow her down.”

  “Maybe not even that,” said Celina.

  Donny scoffed. “Are you guys fucking kidding me? Patches is the reasonable one!”

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  Lulled by the music, Patches curled up on her shredded seat and napped as peacefully as an angel. She appeared unconcerned with the passage of the dragon warship, but she had considered her worst case: the reptiles would see them and blow Kaufman and his ship to smithereens.

  Unscathed, Patches would drift into the orbit of Jupiter or perhaps fall into the sun, and who knew what would happen then? In the meantime, she dreamed of a field of catnip where cicadas buzzed and fluttered in her teeth. When she batted the insects, they flittered here and there until she stomped them.

  Forty-eight hours had passed since Kaufman last visited Phobos. The small moon only partially eclipsed the sun when seen from his former office on Mars, which it did twice a day. He supposed he might not live long enough to regret giving up that view.

  But though he was not so hardened as Mags and her crew, Kaufman possessed his own style of pluck and courage. All of Mars might have his wanted poster now, but the dragon’s warship had not detected him. Perhaps he could return to his hideout unseen, to the one place he knew he could repair himself before facing his son: Phobos.

  He raised his hand to speak, but when he saw Patches sleeping, he could not say a word. Kaufman picked up the tablet which had frustrated her so much, and he snapped her photograph.

  There, he thought. When they could safely broadcast again, Mags would enjoy seeing this moment.

  He set the ship on a course for Phobos and a hot shower.

  ★ ○•♥•○ �
�

  Once upon a time on Phobos, there lived a pack of rogue space miners, abandoned by crews who had long since left that dull and disappointing moon.

  Years ago, gold, silver, and diamonds all showed up in surface samples retrieved from Phobos. They fueled a prospecting boom on the tiny rock. It orbited Mars, which by 2024 hosted the first fully-staffed port in the Belt and a thriving construction industry. Suddenly, an entire planet of investors, engineers, and cheap labor discovered Phobos was rich with precious metals and gemstones.

  Speculative mining companies sprang up overnight. The first wave of settlements followed GravCorp’s cooperation. The company agreed to install GravGens in exchange for fifteen percent of the market value of all extracted resources. In 2025, Asteroid Underground reported GravCorp owned three dozen of those mining companies, their vendors, and their venture capital firms. The company had its finger in every piece of the Phobosian pie.

  The boom turned out to be a boondoggle. Phobos never had precious metals. The analysts at the laboratory shaved atoms from their wedding rings and contaminated the samples. The deception made the analysts wealthy by driving up the value of their GravCorp stock.

  But sudden wealth is rarely accompanied by sudden sense. It more often leads to debauch. After a four-day amphetamine binge and a fifth of bourbon, one of the analysts spilled the beans.

  When the truth became public, everyone wanted out—even GravCorp. Knowing the miniature moon’s exploitation would not return any of the expected profit, the company abandoned it and ordered all crews off the rock.

  In the hasty exit, mining operations left behind functional transports, fuel reserves, pre-packaged food, and weapons. Every day the workers delayed packing was a multi-billion-dollar loss on GravCorp’s books, and crews were encouraged to leave in a rapid yet orderly fashion.

  The encouragement proved a bit too severe to some. They did not enjoy being chained, beaten, mutilated, shot, or dragged across the rugged surface by their wrists. A few workers with otherwise impeccable service records now could be charged with murder and treason, and they had compelling reason to hide on Phobos—to watch their comrades leave the moon and take the ships with them.