Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition
Page 59
1733–1739. From Magdalena’s Memoirs.
With the small fortune I liberated, I assembled a crew to accompany me on a voyage both lucrative and suicidal. Those who survived sailed away filthy rich, though such wealth proves temporary to a freebooter. Those who couldn’t sail away will be mourned by no one but their shipmates.
Over the next three years, my crew absorbed hundreds of new members from the ships we encountered. Those who wished to sail with us under the flag of no nation, we welcomed. Those who did not were free to go. We became more feared for our attractive proposition to sailors than for our cannons.
Though we saw battle many times and welcomed it, our typical conquest drew no blood. The average sailor of that day did not fear a pyrate and rarely raised arms against one. He welcomed the black flag as a rescue from intolerable conditions aboard the ships of merchants, navies, and slavers. And where we found such slaves, we bid them join us.
A number of publications in Europe and the colonies sensationalized what reports of my crew made it back to high society. Perhaps because I was a woman, the accounts grew increasingly lurid. They called me “Mad Dog Mags” in stories depicting me as conquering several oceans with my breasts bared and dripping with the blood of innocents.
Concerning the accounts of my “hundreds” of murders, I note the correct tally has four digits, not three. To the tales of my blood-spattered breasts, no blood upon them was ever innocent. And as for the stories of my “madness”, I found them useful, and added to their legend at every opportunity.
Never did I flog a captain to death without arranging for at least one member of his crew to witness it and tell others, and never did I kill a man without making sure my mates would tell a tale ten times worse to the next crew we impressed into our service.
Several of the men closest to me, loyal after two years’ service and presented with extra rations of rum, took it upon themselves to spread the most severe and horrifying rumors about me in every port and tavern they encountered, on both sides of the Atlantic.
In truth, I am not especially fond of torture, and I soon forbade it within my fleet. I believe that as humans we reach our highest dignity when we preserve the dignity of others. Threats and torture diminish that dignity.
If an enemy must die, so be it. But aside from acts of personal vengeance, an executioner should abstain from taking too much pleasure in her actions. Swiftness and finality were my guides, regardless of the rumors I encouraged.
By the dawn of our fourth year, we secured a chain of islands off the east coast of Africa with a fleet of the most dangerous ships to ever sail, ships we had stolen, modified, and staffed with an astounding group of sailors perfectly willing to kill in the service of their emancipation.
In our fifth year, merchant commerce steered completely clear of our rogue nation. But by then, we had resources to play a bigger game than attacking single ships or storming one fortification at a time.
In our sixth year, money flowed in, our home was secure, and we had all the business we desired. Nations courted us to provide escort to their shipments and add to their naval might in wartime, which was all the time.
I refused to help the slavers and imperialists of Europe or anywhere else. But my crews accepted generous tributes to leave certain fleets to their business. No one who wanted to survive interfered with us, and we smuggled by simply sailing where we pleased.
It was then I desired to visit my father.
1740: The South Seas.
At the sight of her in the entrance to his hut, McTavish pulled himself upright from his sprawl on the disheveled bed. Rays of afternoon sunlight penetrated the wooden slats that tried and failed to be solid walls. A score of empty bottles and mugs littered a bedside table and the floor around it. “My little Maggie. Just look at ya. I hear ya done quite well for yerself.”
She took in the squalor with an imperious gaze. People called her arrogant, though she perceived herself as confidently judgmental. When she looked at things, she considered both their worth and what it would take to destroy them.
Everything she surveyed was assessed as a potential threat or a potential conquest. When she found something that pleased her, her gaze was no less strong, but shone with approval. “We make do as we can on the account.”
“Will ya come in?”
She did, without a word, and stood by his bed. She held out her hand.
Taking it, he rose to his feet. The girl he took to sea eighteen years earlier now stood eye-to-eye with him. “Maggie.” He sought for words and could not find them, so he settled for throwing his arms around her.
The familiar stink of sweat and alcohol offered strange comfort, and she held her adopted father tightly. The feel of his large, rough hands on her back and the nearness of her oldest friend moved her to tears, and she did not let go.
The sun’s rays lowered their angle before he spoke again. “Forgive me.”
Magdalena relaxed her embrace so she could hold him by the shoulders and look into his eyes. “Your sins are many, but not so great you couldn’t offer your daughter a drink.”
“What happened to me manners?” From the bedside table, he took an unopened bottle, pulled the cork, and presented it to her. He opened one for himself.
“Cheers, Father.”
“Cheers.” He enjoyed the sip, but he more enjoyed being addressed as Father. Magdalena took a seat on the bed, and he joined her. “Everyone knows your name now.”
She laughed and took a long pull from the bottle. “Not everyone. But they will.”
He offered another apology. “I’m a drunken bastard who dragged ya through seven kinds of hell.”
“Bastard you may be, and a drunk, no question. But you dragged me nowhere against my will. I demanded the sea, and to the sea you took me.”
“Did ya find them, Maggie?”
“My parents’ killers?” She sighed, and as breath left her body, her face revealed the toll the years had taken. Then ice filled her veins and restored the steel to her countenance. “I did. And it brought me no comfort. One died five years before I found his grave. Another was a hobbled man, out of his mind with drink, and worth less than the price of a bullet to end his miserable life.”
“Ya showed him mercy then.”
“Mercy?” She raised one eyebrow in a malicious arc. “I beat him with a hammer until he stopped screaming, and I threw him into the sea.”
“An’ that’s the end of it.”
“Indeed.” She offered her bottle in salute, and he clinked it with his. “And how have you been keeping yourself?” She knew, as little business in the sea was unknown to her, but she enjoyed hearing him tell the tale.
They exchanged stories of seafaring slaughter and mayhem until the sun had set and the constellations of the southern skies appeared above the ocean.
“Father,” she said, “will you sing to me?”
He wet his whistle with the last of the bottled beer. “Hang my body from the pier,” he sang, and she joined him. Their voices carried out of the hut and down the beach to where the surf crashed and gilded its crests with moonlight. Then there were stars, and whispers.
As she stepped to the doorway to leave, she faced him one last time. “To a merry life.”
“Aye,” the old man replied. “An’ a short one.”
1740. From Magdalena’s Memoirs.
I never saw Father again. Cholera claimed his life that year. By the time I heard of his illness and set sail, nothing remained for me but his grave.
The island where he spent his final hour had little acreage for dead bodies. Cemeteries only make sense on continents. But, assured of my gratitude, the locals found a suitably undisturbed and permanent plot for Father. They marked the site with a cross so I could find it, if two sticks knotted with twine can be called a cross.
I was tempted to make his resting place more elaborate. But on the whole, it suited him: simple, unadorned, and in the sun—forever, or at least as close as we may get on Earth.
The unassuming mound made a far kinder resting place than an iron cage swinging above a pier, and the only birds to attend his death were the brightly colored tropical species singing and chattering in the forest. Serenading, not scavenging.
Still, I brought him something. Sunlight glinted on the brass frame of the compass in my hand. Into the brass I had engraved To find your way in this life and any other. Father and I may have been thieves, but I saw no sense attracting more by leaving shiny objects lying about. I dug a hole and buried the compass, too.
True to the pyrate’s code, Father lived a merry life—though not as merry as it should have been, and entirely too short for my taste. He lasted a long time for a sailor in an era that destroyed people early.
As the sun’s rays lengthened, cooled, and turned to peach and lavender and finally a brilliant red, I considered we would always be the slaves of history until we could afford the time to study it, to understand how we got here, to gain the perspective to chart a new course, and seize the power to impose that course upon the world. Before wishing a final fair winds and following seas to the man who raised me, I resolved to do everything in my power to add more years to my life.
But that is a tale for another day.
2029.
Meteor Mags clenched her fist. Her great-grandmother’s ring glowed on her finger. She sang the second verse, and a cold flame enveloped Alonso’s heart. It burned a brilliant white, the color of Mags’ boundless rage at anything which opposed her. A blue like Earth’s oceans seen from space defined its edges.
Beyond the edges stretched a black and heartless void where dreams ended and no one sang at all.
Hang our bodies by the waves
Iron cages for our graves
And this message we will send
Men of fortune to the end
Hang my body on the pier
Hang my body on the pier
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Howard was cleared of all charges related to the uprising on Gelnikov 14. Passport Command subsequently reinstated his license for interplanetary travel. Later investigations revealed he served as the Chief Minister of Propaganda for Margareta’s Alliance for Gravitational Studies from 2014 to 2017.
He failed to report for census following the passage of the Musical Freedoms Act. He remains on the list of suspected fugitives in the Asteroid Belt, possibly using several aliases which are under current investigation by the Port Authority.
Please see his complete file for a list of identifying marks, prior residences, and known associates.
[1] Based on source documents provided by Margareta’s Alliance for Gravitational Studies. Magdalena compiled various memoirs in the 1800s, many of which were all or partially destroyed when La Plaza Margareta was bombed in WWII.