Asteroid Underground published a series of profiles on these traitors. The magazine argued the rebels had protected themselves, and their human rights had been violated. The Underground called for sanctions and the dissolution of GravCorp, as if any ruling authority would consider lifting a finger against the mega-corporation.
The company’s counter-propaganda featured a dozen criminals thought to be at large on Phobos. These, GravCorp replied, were the so-called labor heroes: a rogue’s gallery of cruel and demented killers who escaped their confines in the rush to shut down operations.
Both sides of the argument held some truth, as both types of people were left behind in the exodus. Most of the Underground’s “heroes” had been killed by the escaped criminals—and, according to some unsubstantiated accounts, eaten. The same was true of the other escapees. Thirty-two people found themselves abandoned on that grey and godforsaken rock in 2025.
Now, only five remained.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
Mars hung heavy in the Phobosian sky, not tiny and remote as the Moon appears from Earth, but oppressively close. It rolled across the jagged horizon like a bulldozer, making mountains look like pebbles. It sank its lower edge into the ground.
Gravel crunched below, in the treads of six wheels, each a meter tall. They kicked up a cloud of regolith as a utility vehicle pulled to a stop. Wind at the crater’s rim blew dust across the topless transport. Built like a monstrous Jeep, it was robust enough to pull heavy loads and mining machinery.
It held a driver and four passengers—all sick to death of seeing the red planet fill the sky. They indulged in their third-favorite pastime, the only thing they liked as much as drinking and poker: intellectual discourse.
Harper set the brake. “If I told you once, I told you a hundred fuckin’ times. Africa ain’t a bloody country.” He pushed himself up to stand in his seat and survey the sky. A hunting knife hung from his belt, and a bandolier crossed the front of his vomit-colored shirt. “Why are you up my arse about it, anyway? Ask Abdi.”
“Fine. Hooker.” Sokulsky slouched on one of two bench seats facing each other in the back. Over her faded black t-shirt, an X-shaped pair of straps displayed a dozen sheathed daggers and throwing knives.
Pipenko curled up against her like a malicious pet, with one leg thrown over Sokulsky’s, running her hands along those blades and anywhere else she pleased. She sucked an ear lobe and tongued it.
Sokulsky kicked Abdi’s boot. “Hey, prick. Where you from again?”
Opaque glasses veiled his eyes. “I’m from three miles west of fuck you.” He sat like a rock, arms folded across his bare chest, with a sawed-off shotgun in his lap.
“Does anybody there take showers?” Lee was on her feet, leaning into the roll bar. It had been modified to hold an MK48. The rusted hardware securing the gun in place matched the hue of her tank top. “Oi! There it is again!”
“I see it.” Harper raised his binoculars. “That’s the same one I saw two days ago. Small. Can’t be more than a six-seater.” He tracked a white vapor trail across the cloudless sky. “No visible guns.”
“Sounds like a suicide box.” The contrail faded from Lee’s sight.
“Fuckin’ tin can with wings.” Abdi spat over the side. “Why didn’t you just jack it last time?”
“Cause he was already jackin’ it.” Pipenko performed a lewd gesture with her left hand. Sokulsky made a similar one in the direction of her mouth.
“Fuck off,” said Harper. “It was kilometers over the horizon. Not like now.” He dropped into the driver’s seat.
On Phobos, no two points were ever far apart—by air. But over its pockmarked surface, cracked everywhere by tidal forces and scarred by thousands of craters, short distances became arduous hikes.
The fastest routes were along the honeycomb network of crater rims, a twisting, turning pathway smashed together by millennia of random impacts. To navigate Phobos in a hurry required a map of these interconnected rims.
With four years of time to kill, Harper created that map and entertained himself driving his six-wheeled beast along the ridges as fast as it would go. “I’ll have us on the rim of Stickney in a minute. Then we’ll see what keeps this arsehole comin’ back.”
Abdi rested his arms on the shotgun. “Maybe he wants a piece of our lesbos.”
Sokulsky grabbed her crotch. “Maybe he gets a Somali bitch boy.”
“Imma stick this boot so far up your—”
Harper revved the engine. “Shut up and hang on!”
The vehicle’s roar swallowed their retorts.
★ ○•♥•○ ★
The Limtoc crater sat in the side of the sloping interior of the greatest crater on Phobos: Stickney. Limtoc’s basin, sunk into the larger one, provided the secrecy Kaufman craved.
When the Phobosian boom turned into a bust, Kaufman’s power at the Port Authority served him well. He shipped the components of his hideaway to Phobos, masking their true identity and destroying all the paperwork. Under his orders, one of the last crews to leave the moon constructed the small home deep into Limtoc’s wall.
When the workers returned to Mars, they promptly disappeared. Kaufman also erased every record they had ever been there. It was a clean, thorough cover-up, and Kaufman liked things tidy.
Martian telescopes never spotted the hideout. Its featureless metal door was recessed a half meter into the stone, and the panel to unlock it was hidden in that recess. The sole architectural adornment was a step whose only purpose was firm footing at the entrance.
Twenty meters from it, Kaufman lowered his spacecraft onto the rubble-strewn surface. The ship’s door fell open like a ramp and sent up a dusty cloud. Boot heels trundled down the stairs.
A bushy calico made her way beside them, stopping to rub her face on the freshly exposed metal. She stepped onto Phobos for the first time.
Before Patches could mark the moon as hers, a mechanical growl and crunching gravel caught her attention. Her ears twitched this way and that. She scanned the crater’s rim.
Two seconds later, Kaufman heard it, too.
As the utility vehicle shot over Limtoc’s edge, it lifted into the air. It hung in the sky, suspended in a moment stretched by Kaufman’s fear into an eternity between heartbeats. Then the wheels hit the ground and brought the five felons racing toward him.
Kaufman instinctively ran back to the ship, but his injured foot betrayed him. He fell, colliding with the ramp’s handrail and striking the ground with his face.
Before he could get up, the MK48 strafed the scene. In Lee’s hands, it made a convincing argument to hug the dirt. “Stay on the fuckin’ ground,” she shouted. Behind her, Abdi brandished his shotgun. Sokulsky and Pipenko fired Ak-47s into the sky, enjoying the noise.
Patches could do nothing to get her friend aboard his ship, but she was far from helpless. She scampered up its ramp, leapt onto a wing, and jumped to the top. She howled at the rogues, curling her mouth into a snarl that showed her teeth.
Lee kept the big gun covering Kaufman, but her mates in the back opened fire on the caterwauling calico.
The bullets pummeled her. Patches dug her claws into the spaceship. Twice the shotgun blast struck her, plus a countless stream of battering from the AK-47. As each hit shoved her backwards, her claws raked gouges in the hull. It shrieked its metallic agony through the clang, clang, clang of ricochets.
Harper yelled over the gunfire, “Hit that fucking cat!”
Abdi and Sokulsky shouted at once, “I did!”
Patches wriggled her hind quarters and revved up. Crouching and pointing her nose, she took aim.
She struck Abdi like a bolt of leonine lightning. She thought only of his damnable hand, and its finger on the trigger. In a rage, her teeth found that hand and extracted revenge.
Abdi’s bones crunched in her mouth. Patches snapped her head to one side. Cartilage and tendons tore from bone. The feline had her prize: a severed finger.
She did
not stop to play with it, though the taste of meat made her heart race even faster. Up his arm, she stormed like a cyclone full of knives, so quickly the trail of puncture wounds she left had no time to bleed before she was on his throat. Into the tender meat, she sank her teeth.
A scream filled her ears. A spray filled her mouth. Tighter she clamped her jaws and pulled. Skin and fat ripped free from the neck, and the exposed artery spurted liquid jets into the air.
Patches pounced on her next target. Behind her, Abdi grasped his throat and fell out of the transport.
Harper dove from the driver’s side and rolled on the ground. Whatever demon just landed in his transport, he wanted none of it. The man she accompanied was the key. The cowering stranger could get Harper inside that ship, or the metal door in the crater’s side. Anywhere the demon could not follow was good enough.
“Get up!” Harper grabbed Kaufman’s arm and a handful of his thinning hair. “Get the fuck up!”
Kaufman screamed in pain. As Harper pulled him to his feet, the former Chief Administrator lashed out with an uppercut. It caught Harper directly under the chin.
The rogue’s teeth snapped shut on his tongue and severed it. He stumbled backward.
Kaufman, with none too stable footing of his own, threw himself on his attacker.
Not a single bullet assailed him from the MK48. For in the back of the transport, Patches assailed Lee with gusto.
“Eyaaa,” the gunner wailed, “Get it off me!” Her hands sought a grip on the furry devil, but Patches’ claws tore through her eyes and lacerated her face.
Pipenko responded to the threat in her own direct way. She blasted Patches with her AK. “Fucking die!”
Lee obeyed the order. Patches did not.
The roll bar propped up Lee’s corpse against the hail of bullets. When the clip ran out, the dead rogue dropped into the bed of the transport.
Patches landed beside the body and sank her teeth into Pipenko’s ankle. Biting through boot leather, she found the Achilles tendon and penetrated it.
Tearing through the tendon, Patches dropped the Ukrainian. On the way down, Pipenko’s face caught the corner of a bench seat. It snapped her head to the side with a savage crack.
Patches made short work of Sokulsky. Despite her tough talk, the felon’s blades were no match for the cat’s indestructible hide and the five sets of blades in her paws and mouth. Sokulsky’s stream of curses turned to gurgling, and then silence.
Carrying a chunk of the woman’s larynx in her teeth, Patches bounded from the back of the transport, over the driver’s seat, and onto the hood. She wound herself up to spring to Kaufman’s side. But one look convinced her he no longer needed help.
Kaufman’s lunge had taken him and his opponent to the ground. The father’s right hand closed on a chunk of rubble. He swung it at Harper’s head. The man blocked him with one arm.
With his left hand, Kaufman stabbed his fingers into Harper’s right eye. Shoved back into its socket, the eyeball burst like a balloon filled with warm jelly.
Kaufman’s rocky weapon came down again. This time it struck Harper’s temple. Then again. And again.
Soon, the man’s arms fell away from his face, but that did not stop Kaufman. Nothing could stop him now. He did not realize he was screaming. The stone came down like a slow-motion jackhammer, smashing the side of Harper’s skull until the brain showed through, pink and pulsating. Kaufman still did not realize he was screaming when bone and scalp and fat which once could think became an indistinct pâté in the dirt.
Then he was no longer screaming, but hunched over Harper’s body, heaving and gasping for air. His whole frame sagged. The rock fell from his hand. He slumped forward onto his elbows.
Patches’ inquisitive meow brought him back from the brink. He wiped bone fragments and brains off his face with the back of his forearm. Mustering his strength, he raised his head away from his blood-spattered hands and the carnage they contained.
Patches stood two meters away. Her victims’ scarlet torrents had covered her calico coat, revealing only her gleaming green eyes. Behind her lay the bodies of her foes. They would never again raise a hand against her friend. Proud of her kill, she bared her small white fangs to Kaufman.
He panted for breath. “Patches,” he whispered, “remind me to never piss you off.” He knew from her purring that she understood. “You saved my life—again. No wonder Mags refuses to sail without you.”
With the grace belonging to her kind since prehistoric times, Patches approached him. She pressed her fur-covered skull against Kaufman’s hand, scenting it with the glands on the side of her face. She licked blood from his hands, and her durable tongue rasped his flesh.
He jerked his fingers away and shook them. “Ow! I appreciate the thought.” Kaufman pulled himself to his feet above the mangled cadaver of his enemy.
His ship stood nearby, and he went to it. For the first time in his life, the former Chief Administrator understood the rage coursing through the veins of Mags and every member of her crew. He would kill to survive, and he would obliterate anyone who stood in the way of reuniting with his son.
Upon the hull of his ship, he smeared his blood-soaked fingers until the face of a tigress appeared. Finishing the final stripe, he stepped back. “In your honor, Patches, without whom I would surely be as dead as all the stones in the godforsaken Belt, I christen this ship the Calico Tigress.”
Patches purred and rubbed against his boot. She plopped down on the doorstep to his secret dwelling, grooming herself and licking away the gore before it could dry in her fur.
Kaufman unlocked the door and entered his hideout. The familiar surroundings comforted him. Here he escaped the constant scrutiny from false friends and known enemies in the transparent “crystal palace” his life had become.
In the corner, his son’s guitar rested against a table bearing a framed photograph of Kaufman’s late wife. He had left them behind in the rush to gather only the bare necessities for escape in the tiny stealth spacecraft. Now he picked them up and set them by the door.
He went to the loo and started the shower. As the water reached a comfortable temperature, he opened drawers and cabinets to take stock of his medical supplies. He lacked a splint, but he could bind his fractured foot with bandages and save the real job for later.
He set a pair of scissors on the back of the toilet, along with tubes of antibiotic ointments and rolls of gauze and adhesives. A bottle of pain pills joined them. The bottle of liquid disinfectant, he set inside the shower stall on a ledge beside a bar of soap.
Tendrils of steam rose from the streaming water. They undulated like the tentacles of an ancient sea monster. Kaufman frowned. This part would not be fun. It would only be preferable to leaving the wounds uncleaned. He clenched his teeth and stepped in.
Twenty minutes later, the water grew cold. He shut it off and stepped out, favoring his injured foot. Fresh blood drained from his lacerations and swaths of torn skin. He craved the comfort of narcotics but would not take them before piloting his ship again.
Another twenty minutes passed while he dressed his wounds. He went to the bachelor pad’s single bedroom for a fresh change of clothes. He could do little to disguise the cuts and bruises on his face, but at least a clean outfit would hide from his son the worst of the damage.
On the nightstand by the bed, a single red light flashed on the telephone. Only his secretary had the emergency number that dialed a different device, routed the encrypted signal through server after server until it could not be traced, and arrived here. Kaufman pressed a button, and what he heard next forced him to sit on the bed and hold his head in his hands.
“Chief Administrator, sir. It’s Rosalia. I know you’re leaving for holiday, but I thought there might be a chance you would check the emergency line while you were away. There’s something you need to know. Stay away from Ceres. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I don’t know what your plans are, and I’m concerned for your safety. I—”
She paused. “I’ve uncovered a plot to sabotage the atmosphere cleaners on Ceres tomorrow. The exact results are unpredictable, but it could result in a major atmospheric disturbance. The resistance will take credit for the action in a few days. So please, sir. Whatever you do, don’t visit that asteroid.”
To replay this message, press 1. To delete it, press—
“Fuck!” Kaufman’s fist smashed down on the phone. He pressed his fingers to his eyes. “Mags will kill me.” Of all the places he could have led the smuggler and her crew, of all the ports where he could have re-routed the rail gun shipment, he had chosen the one location where death and destruction were inevitable. Was there nothing he could do right?
He rubbed his chin. How could Rosalia uncover an underground plot, unless she was part of it? She mentioned the resistance on Mars, and she had undoubtedly been the shooter who saved his life before he left that wretched planet. Saved it—and then, if she was involved in the action on Ceres, doomed it.
Fortunately, Patches had stayed outside. If she was as bright as he now suspected, there was no telling what she might have understood of that message, and later conveyed to Mags. And if Meteor Mags ever found out—
He dared not complete the thought. Instead, he pushed himself to his feet. With the air of a man sentenced to execution, he dressed. For now, the message remained his secret.
Moments later, he left the hideout carrying Anton’s guitar and a satchel of personal effects. Patches, now squeaky clean, lay curled in a ball on the doorstep, napping without a care in the world. She stirred at his arrival and mewed softly.
Kaufman’s collar felt as tight as a noose, but his diplomatic training kept him cooler than a late autumn breeze. “Patches,” he said with a nod, “shall we get on with it?”
Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition Page 53
