The Martian Revolution: Part 4 of 4

Tags

Cat, Mars, martian revolution, meteor mags, Patches, rosalia, science fiction, self publishing, shondra, tarzi, writing

Continued from Part 3.

Part Four: End Game

The Rendezvous

Mags and Patches arrived at the hub to find it locked down. Between the two of them, they made short work of the lobby door, ignoring the alarms they set off and the dead bodies they encountered. When they found the elevator required a code, Mags put a couple dents in it with her stolen steel-toed boots.

The criminals destroyed a different door and took the stairs instead. With pauses to catch her breath and clutch her ribs, Mags grumbled the whole way.

When they arrived at the entry to the room Tarzi had invaded, gunshots greeted them. Mags stopped beside the door and took cover behind its frame. She said, “Take the point, tough girl.”

Patches burst into the room. She leapt onto the helmeted face of one of Rosalia’s goons who was shooting at Tarzi. She howled as she destroyed him.

Mags stepped in. Her bullets sent the last of the grey-clad enemies to their graves.

Tarzi shouted, “Mags! Patches!”

The smuggler ejected a magazine and slammed a fresh one into place. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” He paused to observe her blood-soaked, shredded Port Authority uniform. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Nothing a little murder can’t solve. Jesus tapdancing christ. Is that Rosie?”

“Yeah,” said Tarzi. “Mags, I didn’t—”

“You traitorous bitch!” Mags knelt beside the corpse. She gripped it by the collar of Rosalia’s uniform and pulled the lifeless, shattered face close to hers. “Don’t you ever fuck with my cat!” A cascade of vulgarities went unnoticed by the single ear still attached to Rosalia’s head.

Mags released the collar and let Rosalia fall to the floor with a thud. “Where the hell is Shondra? When I get my hands on her—”

“What do you mean? The last I knew, she was on her way to set you free.”

“What?!”

Tarzi filled her in on the events of his imprisonment and release.

“Holy crap,” said Mags. “If she didn’t make it to my cell, then where is she?”

“Couldn’t say.”

Mags considered the new information for half a minute, pacing back and forth and cursing under her breath. “Alright, T-man. Let’s put this high-tech hub to use and call her.”

Mags no longer had her phone, but she was not one to forget anything numeric. She switched on a console and entered Shondra’s private number.

☠️

The Treaty

Shondra’s face filled a two-meter-wide screen with a pleasant smile. “Hello, kitten.” Her eyes drifted over Mags’ shoulder to Tarzi, then past him and around the room. “Looks like you have it all under control. The hub is secure? Are we plugged in and ready to take control?”

Mags slammed her fist on the console. “Goddamnit, Shondra! You told Tarzi I was delusional! A psychotically delusional bitch from hell!”

“Are you disputing that fact?”

Mags frowned. “You could have said it more nicely.”

“I’m sorry, Maggie. You are an astoundingly beautiful and musically gifted… totally delusional, psychotic hell beast! You’re practically feral!”

Mags purred. “That’s more like it.”

“Where’s Rosie?”

While Mags and Tarzi focused on the video call, Patches wiggled her butt and leapt onto a machine in the corner. Quietly tapping its screen, she set up an encrypted group message that included Celina, the Dumpster Kittens, and anyone else’s address she remembered. An extended claw softly clacked on the glass while one paw pad typed a message.

sup niggaaaz. chillin lika villin on marz. Patches snapped a photo of her fuzzy face in extreme close-up, framed by blood-smeared walls and corpses behind her. how u like me now. She tapped “send”.[1]

Patches sprawled before the monitor as dozens of messages lit up.

sall good, she typed. back n da crib soon. xox. Despite the flurry of replies, she rested her chin on one paw and closed her eyes. Her whiskers twitched as she listened, with her mind half asleep, to the call with Shondra. Patches liked her human friends, but people failed to understand the importance of frequent napping. They were all so busy. Except maybe Donny.

“Listen,” said Shondra. “That’s how it needs to be. You don’t get to pay the cost to be the boss. I already paid it. What you get is a friend on Mars who agrees that Earth can fuck right off.” Her eyes followed a few flicks of Mags’ tail. “You and I need to work together, not against each other.”

Mags stamped her foot. “Everyone gets access to the free-energy system. But we keep the K Drive between you and me. No one else gets that tech.”

“Agreed.”

“And I can come and go as I please on Mars without fake passports and all this sneaking around like a common criminal! I want a full pardon from the New Martian Coalition. That goes for my whole crew, too.” She swept her arm as if they were all there with her.

“Mags.” Shondra leaned in. The camera went out of focus for a second before she snapped into place as sharp as ever. “Don’t think so small. I’m prepared to sign a treaty with Ceres and officially recognize whatever weird social experiment you have going on there. Now will you quit fucking around and go install the rest of your system? If we want to light up this planet, let’s not take all goddamn day!”

Mags shouted, “Fine, Shondra! I’ll do it! Fuck!”

“That’s great. We need to put out a broadcast about it. How long will it take?”

“It takes as long as it takes! We’ve gotta go halfway around the twatting planet!”

“Call me when you’re done, then. I’ve got places to go. People to execute.”

“You took my phone!” Mags kicked a rack of servers so hard that sparks flew. Shondra’s face flickered. “Me voy a mear en los hoyos![2] You’re lucky I have a backup on my ship! Four hours,” said Mags. “Four fucking hours! Then I’ll call you.”

“My favorite words.” Shondra leaned closer to press a button, and the screen went black.

Mags put her hands on her hips. “I swear, Tarzi, that woman will be the death of me. Let’s hope she doesn’t run this planet like a dominatrix.”

Tarzi said, “Didn’t you do that for a while?”

Mags waved one hand in the air with too much energy to be convincingly dismissive. “Lies! All of it lies.”

“What about Madame Meteor’s House of Humiliation?”

“That comic book was completely unauthorized!”[3]

“The art was pretty good.”

Mags broke her rage to smile. “The art was stellar. So were the outfits.” She racked a bullet into the chamber and holstered her stolen pistol. “Come on, Patches! Time to go.” Mags could not see where Patches was napping, but she followed her nose. “Wake up, lazy butt! We’ve got a planet to power!”

Patches opened one eye halfway. Her nictitating membrane covered most of it.

Mags saw the messages on the monitor. “Oh, shit!” She scrolled up to glance through them all. “Everyone at home is freaking out!”

Home, thought Tarzi. Funny she should use that word for Ceres. As Mags’ fingers flew across the touchscreen Patches had used, Tarzi said, “Please tell me she encrypted that message.”

Mags snapped at him. “She’s not stupid! Even if her spelling sucks.”

“I think she does it on purpose. How many people did she call ‘nigga’?”

“Fucking everyone!”

“Good girl, Patches.” Tarzi rubbed one tuft-filled ear between a thumb and finger.

Patches purred and slowly swept the tip of her tail across her throne.

“You are such a bad influence on her.” Mags finished an update to everyone on the calico’s distribution list. A parade of celebratory emojis marched up the screen as replies came in. Donny sent an eggplant and a trio of water droplets.

Mags slapped her forehead. “We have the most advanced extraterrestrial communication system in history at our fingertips—and Donny is sending icons about ejaculating!”

“At least he seems happy.”

“If he were any happier,” said Mags, “I’d have him euthanized.” She drew herself to her full height. “Let Shondra’s people clean up this mess. Are you two ready to go?”

☠️

The Installation

Tarzi.

Aboard the Bêlit, on the way to the installation site, Mags changed outfits. She stripped off her ragged, filthy Port Authority uniform and tossed it aside. “I need a skirt,” she said. “Here’s the problem. The Martian north and south poles are covered in ice caps, and we’ve got reason to believe there’s a massive subterranean lake under the south.”

She rifled through drawers and flipped through clothes on racks in her trio of closets. “If we install a SlimRod there, we potentially interfere with water-mining in the region. Or the miners might break the damn thing. We don’t want to mess with all that. Besides manufacturing, water mining is the next big moneymaker. Ceres is back to making trillions, but we haven’t even come close to tapping the full market potential.”[4]

Without deciding on an ensemble, Mags returned to the console to bring up a pair of digital maps. She swept a hand across them. “Point is, Shondra found two other permanent locations that can work. One of her crews installed the first unit to the north. That leaves the second for us. We’re en route to the Leibnitz mountains on the rim of the Aitken base—far enough from the glacial ice to relax for a few years, but close enough that the math wasn’t total brain surgery.”

I was typing a message to Hyo-Sonn. “That’s nice.” I didn’t give a donkey’s fuck about where we were going. I just wanted the day to be over.

Mags found legwear to match her skirt and plopped on the edge of her bunk to pull on her stockings. “Tarzi, we’re talking about the oldest known meteorite impact in the history of the entire solar system! Aren’t you even the least bit excited?”

I set my tablet in my lap. “Thrilled.”

Mags picked up a mirror from her bedside and started fixing her makeup. “I know this isn’t how you planned to spend your birthday. Shit, my b-day last year sucked so fucking much I can’t even believe it. How many of our friends were killed? And they died on my watch.”

She slammed down her eyeliner and applied black and bright-red lipsticks until the center of her colorful pout was accentuated in scarlet. “I promise I will make it up to you. Someday, a few years from now, you’ll realize this was one of your most important birthdays. We’re in the center of it all, making it happen. Or trying to, at least.” She stood and swished her tail. “Let’s make history.”[5]

“I’m sorry to be a downer. This is all just so fucked up.”

Mags set a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry about Rosie. She was my friend, too.”

I never could stay mad at Mags for long. How many times had she nearly gotten me killed? But there we were. I set my hand on hers. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“I know,” she said. “But you did have a choice. And you made the right one.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Being right doesn’t make life any easier. But it’s better than being dead wrong.”

When I didn’t answer, she reclined in the captain’s chair and fidgeted with the straps and buckles on her thigh-high boots like I wasn’t even there. I loved that about Mags. She had a way of letting me know she’d always be there for me, but she would totally fuck off if I needed time to myself.

“So,” I said, “tell me more about this bloody awesome mountain range. Sounds like it’s freezing.”

No matter that I’d been on Mars for half a year and studied files on every crack and crevice of its known geography. Patches jumped into my lap and purred. I pet her while Mags told me what I already knew.

Sometimes it’s just nice to be with friends.

We ended up outside on the ice, and I can’t even tell you how cold that mountain was, or how insane Mags was for wearing a skirt. The wind was like a frozen steel blade cutting me from every direction.

Not that it mattered to Patches. She frolicked like we’d been dropped onto Tahiti or something. I love Patches, but how does she do that? Meanwhile, my bollocks were clinking together like ice cubes in a cocktail, and my cocktail was rapidly shrinking to a shot glass.

Mags hammered her SlimRod into place, shooting sparks in every direction across the snowy iron dust all around us. I knew the song she sang to keep a beat while hammering, but I never thought I’d see a planet liberated to it.[6]

When Mags finished, she invited Patches to step up and turn it on. The fate of a planet—maybe the entire solar system—relied on a single cat’s decision to interrupt her winter wonderland and flip a switch.

Patches yawned. She stretched in the snow. Her fluffy paws allowed her to walk on the surface like a lynx. She sniffed the SlimRod and bobbed her head up and down, never quite touching the object. Patches wrinkled her cheeks and held her mouth open slightly, pondering the scent with the Jacobson’s organ in the roof of her mouth.

Springing onto her hindlegs, Patches gripped the switch in her forepaws and pulled it toward the ground. She activated a system that changed Martian history forever. The planet broke its ochre silence and hummed an unfamiliar tune.

Mags shouted, “Hang on, Tarzi,” with no indication of what I should hang on to. The hum built to a roar. A shockwave smacked the planet. All three of us fell into the snow.

Like an orchestra tuning up before a performance, the shockwaves aligned on the perfect pitch—the perfect note to power a planet.

Two seconds later, I didn’t hear it at all. The note propagated through Mars and became a part of it, an invisible character in the background. A ghost.

A ghost that would power everything.

Mags got to her feet and snapped a photo of Patches sprawling on the ice and flecks of red stone at the base of the SlimRod. She sent it to Shondra. Mags spoke a message for the voice-to-text translator. “All plugged in here. Just in time for your little speech.”

She put the phone up her skirt. A flash went off. I did not even want to know. A second later, she said, “Let’s go watch her on the big screen.”

☠️

The Broadcast

Tarzi.

Aboard the Bêlit, I dropped into the co-pilot’s chair. Patches filled my lap. Mags switched on the pair of meter-wide monitors atop the console and adjusted the volume.

Two identical portraits of Shondra filled the screens. Mags handed me a beer, cracked open one for herself, and kicked back in the captain’s chair.

“People of Mars,” Shondra began. “My fellow Martians. Today is the end of history and the beginning of a new era. From now on, Mars will govern itself. Our laws will be our own. Our economy will be our own. Our pride as the number-one extraterrestrial producer of goods will be our own. We will be one planet. One people. One victory.”

Mags adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose. “Good slogan.”

“Forces,” Shondra continued, “loyal to corporations on Earth, butchered some of the leaders of our revolution. Those forces have been dealt with, and we will no longer tolerate such interference from Earth, nor from her corporations. But I beg you to learn to live in peace with your neighbors, regardless of former loyalties. Now is the time for Mars to become one planet. One people.”

“And,” I said, “one hell of an energy source.”

Mags said, “She’ll get to that.”

“We are not,” said a pair of massive Shondra faces, “merely equal as Martian citizens. We are equal in power. Within twenty-four hours, the new administration will begin distributing a new technology. This tech is a simple piece of electronics you can install in your house or on your land, and it taps into a global energy system you can access for no cost. It can power a home or a farm or a mine, using an open-source converter.

“Our government will provide hands-on support for both personal, home installations and larger commercial applications. But make no mistake. We intend to bring free energy to everyone on our planet, and our projections show this is an achievable goal within half a Martian year.[7]

“The local offices of the Port Authority and the Passport Command are now under the control of the New Martian Coalition.”

Shondra’s eyes went up and to the right, as if she were trying to remember. I’m sure it was unconscious that she licked her lips while thinking.

“Oh. My name’s Shondra. You might know me from the shipyards. I’ll be in touch every twenty-four hours until we get this sorted.” Her playful smile disappeared, and she raised a fist. “Long live the resistance.”

The broadcast ended. The screens went black.

Mags laughed and shook me by the shoulder. “Is that it? No love for the brave defender of freedom and his felonious feline friends?”

She stood before I thought of a comeback. “What a fucking rip-off!” Mags faced the blank monitors with her hands folded behind her back, and her tail whipped everything in its reach. Eventually, the whip settled, and her fingertips rested on the console. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Tarzi, I’ve got a two-room suite booked in a hotel that Shondra doesn’t know about. They’ll cook us anything we want, even late. I mean anything. Are you hungry?”

I said, “Starving! I could eat a slow-roasted maggot off a whale dick.”

“It might be on the menu. How about fish and chips?”

“That,” I said, “sounds perfect. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

☠️

Epilogue: The Cake

5 July 2030.

“Happy birthday, T-man!” Mags strolled into the master suite with a chocolate-swirled cheesecake in a chocolate crust on a platter. Lines of caramel glaze and walnut pieces adorned the top. “I heard this was your favorite.”

“Oh, fuck yes,” said Tarzi. “How did you get that at three in the morning?”

“Get it? I fucking baked it for you!” She set it on a table between two chairs.

“Yeah, right.”

“I have friends in the kitchen.”

“Where are the candles?”

Mags laughed. “You are so demanding! Check this out.” From a pocket on her skirt, she pulled three joints. “Why blow out candles when you can light one up?” She gave him a doob. “Make a wish on that, motherfucker. One for Patches, too.”

Patches leapt onto the table, snatched up a joint in her fuzzy jaws, and jumped to the floor. She ripped into the spliff and chomped with wild abandon, rolling on her back in the debris and trapping green flecks in her tri-colored fur.

Mags pulled something else from her pocket. “Forks!” She stabbed hers into the cake. “To Mars and her stupid revolution, I say ‘Fork you, bitch.’”

Tarzi plunged four plastic tines into the cake. “This whole forking planet sucks.”

“You don’t like it here?” Mags held out a lighter and lit his joint, then hers.

“Fuck no.” Tarzi took a deep inhale, held it, and released it. “Oh, that’s some good shit.”

“Have I ever given you anything that wasn’t?”

“Not even once. But Mars can sod off. I am so sick of paperwork. I want to go home.”

“To Earth?”

“Not Earth. It hasn’t been home since my parents died. I did talk to their lawyer, though. Signed some papers. I own the property and the rights to their publications, and they had a solid life insurance policy.[8] That’s nice, don’t get me wrong. But do you know what I want?”

Mags leaned in. “Tell me.”

“I want to be closer to Hyo-Sonn.”

Patches shredded the carpet.

“And you and Patches, too! I mean, thank you for setting me up on Mars. It definitely helped me get my head together after all the shit that happened last year. But my future isn’t here. It’s with you and my friends.”

Mags sat back in her chair and flicked ash on the carpet where it charred a black scar then burnt out. “Tarzi, you and I have a lot in common. We both had to grow up way too soon and deal with shit no kid should ever deal with. But you know what?” She took a puff.

“What’s that?”

“You dealt with it. I’m proud of you, little man. But I don’t think it’s nearly as proud as I could be.” She scooped a chunk of cake and paused before shoveling it into her mouth. “This is just the beginning. Happy birthday.”

Tarzi lifted a mountain of sugary calories. “Does that mean you’ll take me back to Ceres?”

Mags swallowed her mouthful and stabbed the dessert again. “Tarzi, I will take you to Ceres or anywhere else you need to be, and I will stand by your side as far as you want to go in this life. May the goddess have mercy on anyone who gets in our way. You’ve kicked more arse than anyone your age should need to, and I love you for it. Always have.”

“Thanks for saying that, Mags. I love you, too.” Tarzi took a bite. “Oh, fuck, that’s good. Did you bring any rum?”

---

[1] Patches has been a huge fan of gangsta rap ever since she merged minds with Mags in Red Metal at Dawn. She also loves texting her friends—especially Tarzi—since no one but Mags can understand her when she talks.

[2] Spanish for, “I will piss in your eye holes!”

[3] Madame Meteor’s House of Humiliation first appeared in print in the Asteroid Belt in 2026. Mags publicly disavowed any involvement with its production.

[4] One of the main Ceresian exports is water extracted from the pockets of its sub-surface ocean, purified, and sold to various interests in the system. The 2029 super-tornado destroyed many of the water-mining facilities, but the reconstruction of Ceres in 2030 restored most of them to capacity.

[5] Mags quotes the 2004 song Let’s Make History by The (International) Noise Conspiracy. On her favorite album, Armed Love. Örebro, Sweden: Burning Heart Records.

[6] Mags likes to sing John Henry when she installs the SlimRods. The first verse is:

John Henry, when he was a baby

sittin’ on his mama’s knee,

picked up that hammer in his little right hand,

said, “Hammer’ll be the death of me, me, me.

Hammer’ll be the death of me.”

The song is a traditional ballad about the U.S. folk hero John Henry, a railroad steel-driving man who challenged an early steam drill to a contest and won—but died in the process.

[7] A Martian solar year is 687 Earth days. Shondra is promising planet-wide access to the new energy system in roughly one Earth year.

[8] Tarzi was contacted about his late parents’ estate via voice mail by their lawyer in Hunted to Extinction.

The Martian Revolution: Part 3 of 4

Tags

Cat, Mars, martian revolution, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, self publishing, tarzi, writing

Continued from Part 2.

Part Three: Sacrifices

The Cell

Meteor Mags awoke in pitch blackness and felt herself for injuries. She discovered every item of her clothing had been removed. The tape around her ribs was gone. She touched one ear lobe then clasped a hand to her chest, just below the neckline. Her fist closed on nothing. Even her jewelry was gone.

“Son of a bitch!”

Reflexively, she put one finger to the bridge of her nose to adjust her glasses. They were gone, too.

“Fuck me dead.”

The phone stashed in her bra, the knives strapped to her calves and forearms, three small-caliber pistols hidden along her curves, and the circuitry in her jewelry—all of it gone. No way to contact Tarzi, no way to summon her ship. No way to—

“Where the hell is Patches?!”

Mags comforted herself by turning her ring around her finger, then holding it in place. “The only way they’d take you is by chopping off my goddamn finger.” She considered the fact. “Shondra must have strip-searched me. Rosie would have definitely chopped the finger. That fucking whore.”

Mags cradled her forehead in one palm and shook her head. “I can’t believe I trusted that cow!” She sobbed once, and again, then filed away the emotion to be reviewed later—or maybe never. Mags pulled herself to her feet and slumped against a brick wall that offered all the warmth of a glacier. “Shondra,” she said, “what’s your game?”

She smacked the wall with her open palm, made a fist, and shook it in the darkness. “You cunts! If you hurt Tarzi, I will end you! Do you fucking hear me?!”

No one answered.

In a darkness where not even her catlike eyes could gather light, Mags began running her fingers over every centimeter of the enclosure. She pressed her nose to within a millimeter of the surface, seeking any scent she could find. At first, the only sounds her ears picked up were the pulse of her heart, the flow of her breath, and the barely perceptible padding of the balls of her feet as she made her way around the room. Beyond that, past the edge of human hearing, the electromagnetic hum of her prison whispered to her above the dull roar of the city.

She felt her way around the frame of the only exit. Her side of the door held no hinges and no hint of the locking mechanism. Just a slab.

By her estimation, to claw through the miniscule crevice around the edge of the door and pry it open might take two-hundred years—assuming they fed her enough calcium to keep her nails growing.

If they didn’t give her food or water at all? No more than ninety-six hours before total, catastrophic organ failure. For cats, at least.

“Fuck.” Mags abandoned her probing and sat cross-legged on the floor. She pressed her palms together and the tip of each finger to its opposite. She tried to focus on Sarah. “Angel, can you hear me?”

She reached only silence.

“Octos? Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Pick up!”

Still nothing.

“Unreliable sons of bitches!”

Immediately, she felt bad for saying it. She was, after all, one of their three mothers.[1] No one understood more than Mags that sometimes a person, or a fucked-up mutant cat hybrid type of person, or even a cephalopodic groupmind needed to wander off for a bit without being disturbed. “Sorry, babies. But if you get this message, call me. Shit just hit the fan on Mars.”

While she waited, Mags cursed the unresponsive door until she was hoarse. Then, like any sensible feline, she curled in the corner for a nap. Her stream of consciousness became non-verbal. Something like a movie made of emotions, memories, and fantasies played in her mind.

One eye remained half open. In her sleep, her ears twitched, alert as radar dishes—searching, hoping for a signal.

☠️

The Basement

Through a pair of metal doors, Shondra burst into the garage below the ground level of Tarzi’s prison. She ran down a concrete ramp. “Get ready to roll!”

Twelve of her elite awaited her. They snapped to attention and disappeared, four at a time, into three armored vehicles arranged in a line like a convoy. Only Shondra’s driver remained outside her vehicle, saluting.

Shondra shouted, “Let’s go!”

“We got a problem, boss!” Despite her warning, the driver obeyed Shondra’s command, climbing into her seat and starting the engine.

“Make it quick!”

“All the blocks from here to prisoner extradition are a fucking war zone. The radio’s lit up with reports of fires and buildings collapsing in the streets. There’s no guarantee we can get through.”

“Fine,” said Shondra. “We do it anyway. We have a political prisoner to free, and a couple of flaming speedbumps are the least of our worries. Move out!”

The driver gave the order.

Powerful engines built in the finest shipyard in the solar system roared to life. The convoy sped to the garage exit. The wide metal door, half a meter thick, raised at a coded electronic signal from Shondra’s driver.

Here we come, kitty. Shondra opened a panel on the dashboard, found a box of ammunition, and began refilling her empty magazines. Hang on.

As Shondra’s vehicle reached the exit, a blast with the light of the sun pulverized the wall above the garage door. Stone and cinder block pelted the transport in a torrential sheet so dense it stopped the forward motion and buried Shondra alive, along with everyone else inside.

She gripped her driver by the shoulder and shook the senseless body. Blood ran from its forehead. “Damn it!” Shondra lowered the window on her side. An avalanche of dust and rubble poured into her face, onto her lap, and down around her feet.

Shondra choked and coughed. To the survivors in the back seat, she shouted, “What the hell are you waiting for? Dig!”

Sunset came to Mars. It gilded the stone above Shondra’s crew with a fiery glow before vanishing into blackness. By the time the crew got free and dug out the lead vehicle, Shondra was far too late to save Mags.

☠️

The Captain

“Passengers of Tycho Airlines, flight two thirty-six, this is your captain speaking. Thank you for joining us this evening. We’re on the final approach to the city of Hevelius. Please stow all carry-on items in the overhead bins or beneath your seats and return your seats to their upright positions.

“We’ll be encountering a bit of social unrest on the ground. We have reports of mass looting, urban riots, and armed insurrection. I see—fires. Fires everywhere. What the—

“Folks, we don’t know for sure what’s happening, but please remain calm. Flight attendants will come by in just a second to collect your—

“What the fuck? Is that a rocket from the surface? It’s coming right at us! Mayday! Mayday! Two thirty-six to tower, requesting emergency—

“Get the hell off me and fly, motherfucker! Mayday!

“What? My mic is still on?”

☠️

The Station

Oblivious to her trajectory, an unconscious Patches smashed into an airplane. Her body punctured the hull, and the collision killed everyone aboard—some upon impact, some who were sucked out of the plane into the sky, and others when the wreckage screamed down to the ground and exploded.

Members of Patches’ human crew had called her a living weapon. But they had never seen her become a lifeless projectile, nor imagined the damage she could do in that state.

Patches would never know about the plane, but it slowed her ascent. She reached the apex of a graceful arc, fell under the spell of artificial Martian gravity, and rocketed back to the surface.

Hevelius was the largest city on Mars. Where Patches landed was a matter of luck. She could have crashed into multi-family housing, or the commercial district, or a park. Instead, she plummeted into a power station.

The force of impact shattered the generators’ metal housings and sent a fiery sphere of shrapnel expanding in every direction. It destroyed a city block and shut off the power to dozens of neighborhoods.

In the crater, a web of electrical wires still connected to subterranean backup generators cradled Patches. Where the explosion severed them, arcs of lightning sprang to life, crackling white, outlined in blue. The energy leapt across her fur, overcame its carbon-based resistance, and lit up the calico cat from the inside.

The surrounding neighborhood was fortunate that annihilation came first, because the caterwaul Patches unleashed would have made a grown person wish for death. Nothing of its kind had been heard on Mars nor anywhere else in the solar system.

A ball of lightning held Patches in its center. Her body levitated as she screamed, and all her mental faculties and her heartbeat clawed at the door of oblivion. Her neurons fired erratic signals. She convulsed in the air with her eyes as wide as two black planets in twin halos of green, and her limbs thrashed like swords in a cyclone without sense or reason.

Circuit breakers kicked in. The lightning ended. Patches fell through the cables and tumbled into the crater’s dark heart.

She landed on her feet.

From Patches’ point of view, Rosalia’s betrayal took place only a second before. Fresh hate filled her heart. Patches scrambled to the surface, leaping from one dead wire to the next, sinking her claws into plastic sheathing, relentless and unstoppable.

When she got to the surface, she ran a paw twice over one ear. For a golden moment, she allowed the sunset to grace her whiskers. Then she broke into a run.

The fading sun cast a rusty orange glow in the final moments before dusk. It drew a cat-shaped shadow on the streets. The shadow turned into a blur and vanished into the complex crevices of Hevelius.

☠️

The Subway

Patches rubbed her cheeks against a building’s corner—first one cheek then the other with increasing intensity until the flesh beneath her fluff smashed into the brick. To an outside observer, the ritual would have looked painful, but Patches loved it.

Pain had not troubled Patches since July 2029. Back then, on the brink of death, she awoke in a tank of bubbling energy that channeled the entire power of a planet-sized moon into her.[2]

She had neither requested nor desired that fate, but it was hers, and she accepted it. What did any cat need to deal with but the present moment?

She never mourned the absence of pain. If Patches had been born as any mammal except a cat, she might have found a reason to be thankful she could still feel pleasure.

But rather than feel grateful, Patches assumed that pleasure was her due, that objects and sentients who brought her pleasure simply did what the universe had declared to be her birthright, and no one should take those pleasures from her.

Patches worked herself into a frenzy, biting the spot she scented with the glands in her face, standing on her hind legs to carve long gouges with her foreclaws. All around her, war blossomed into being.

Looters plundered Hevelius. A rocket launcher turned a storefront into a fireball. Lights and gunfire and propeller noise from overhead battled small-arms fire, Molotov cocktails, and chanting, surging crowds. Bodies in Port Authority uniforms, ship-builder’s gear, and makeshift guerilla outfits fell from windows and dropped from aircraft. Mutilated corpses littered the streets.

No matter.

War, as far as Patches could discern, was humanity’s natural state. She assessed the tableau of destruction and suffering. She might as well have been observing a cloud or the erratic motions of a butterfly in the wind. They were not things she could affect nor cared to, merely natural objects to be avoided on the way to her purpose.

Patches folded back her ears and ran at top speed through the chaos. The buses had stopped running, but many trains still ran. Patches followed the signs to a platform underground. She had only three seconds to study the subterranean maps before an explosion from above shook the station.

Chunks of the collapsing ceiling fell around her. The dust rendered everything invisible—everything but the light of an oncoming train.

Seeing the station falling to pieces, the train’s engineer decided to skip it and keep moving. The train smashed debris to the sides, denting its hull and sending up a shower of sparks and flame as metal and stone crashed together against the sides of the tunnel.

Patches waited at the edge of the platform, but the train did not stop. Her eyes narrowed to slits in the incoherent light and murky dust clouds. As the train sped past, she launched herself, dug her claws into its metal exterior, and held on.

The tunnel walls slammed past her. She pulled herself closer to the hull. In the narrowest of passages, her indestructible hair and spine carved a groove into the concrete wall. Darkness swallowed her and the steel monster she rode, but she held fast.

Unseen from her underground vantage point, towers sprang onto the horizon: the Port Authority building where she had been captured, the surrounding structures which made up its prisons, and—though Patches did not yet know it—the communications hub that would be Tarzi’s destination.

Once the train passed the obliteration of the station where Patches boarded, she focused on the station markers. The train stopped at none of them and continued its frightful course without regard for a schedule. Patches chattered. The wind whipped away her voice. When she saw the stop for the Port Authority buildings approaching, she prepared to jump.

She hit the ground on all fours, but the momentum rolled her head-over-heels until she smashed into a monolith. Upon its surface were engraved three large words: Port Authority Administration. Patches arched her back, bared her teeth, and hissed.

She sniffed the ground for Mags’ scent in an ever-widening circle until she picked up the trail. She picked up Tarzi’s, too.

Patches had never known the love of biological brothers and sisters. At birth, she was separated from the other kittens in her litter. But to the extent that she realized Mags thought of her as a cub, then Tarzi must also be Mags’ cub. That meant they were nestmates, cubs from the same litter.

She lost his trail. It led away from the Port Authority building then vanished into the unknown.

But Mags’ scent was as plain as day.

Patches licked a paw between each of its claws. She weighed Tarzi’s life against every living being—human or otherwise—on Mars. Three times, she ran the paw over one ear.

She made her decision. If anything bad had happened to Tarzi, Patches intended to soak the red planet in the blood of her enemies until it drowned.

Some sins could never be forgiven. Some things broke so badly they could never be fixed. But Patches anticipated some small satisfaction to be gleaned from murdering every last person who had fucked things up.

She knew Mags would feel the same way.

Such were the thoughts of a rather large and fluffy calico cat as she followed her best friend’s trail and pondered the fate of a faithless planet.

☠️

The Door

Mags’ captors had not imprisoned her in the same building as Tarzi. Her impregnable cell occupied a ten-story monolith near the spaceport favored by visiting officials from Earth. It was a convenient location for the Port Authority to hold those prisoners who required extradition to Earth for legal or political reasons.

The criminals inside could only hope for one of two ways out: deportation or death. No one had ever broken into the prison. No one had ever escaped.

No one had ever told Patches.

All through the prison’s hallways, alarms blared like klaxons and flashed lights from their perches on the walls. Along one path through the facility, a stream of blood spread until it met the walls and pooled at their edges. At the head of the crimson river ran an especially purposeful cat.

Mags awoke to the screech of tortured metal. She sprang to her feet. Every hair on her body stood straight up.

Like nails on a steel chalkboard, Patches’ claws tore at the cell’s metal door from the outside.

After the initial shock, Mags pounded on the door. She could not see nor smell her kitten, but she knew. She shouted, “Patches!”

A howling whirlwind scaled the door and ripped apart its lock and hinges. They fell like dead birds to the prison floor. Their gleaming reflections caught Patches’ eyes, and she pounced on them.

She sprang away as the steel slab flew from its frame, over her head, and down the hallway. It slammed to a stop against a wall. From the empty doorway, Mags’ naked left leg extended, parallel to the floor.

“Motherfuckers!”

Patches sauntered to Mags’ side, rubbed against the leg planted firmly on the floor, and arched her tail. She sought Mags’ eyes and mewed.

“Baby kitty!” Mags scooped her calico into the cradle of her arms and rubbed her face into mounds of fluff. She listened as Patches rapidly chattered about her adventures across the Martian landscape.

“You did great, kitten. Where’s Tarzi?”

Patches told everything she knew.

“I have an idea where he’s headed. Did you kill anyone my size?”

Carrying her cat, Mags followed the trail of blood that led to her cell. She inspected the leaking bodies one-by-one until she found a reasonable match. She set down Patches and stripped clothing from a corpse. “One thing I love about the Port Authority,” she said. “They hire a lot of women. This one’s almost my size.”

Mags dressed in a dead woman’s clothes and tugged them into place where they didn’t quite cover her generous curves. Blood and gashes ripped by Patches’ claws marred the grey, woolen cloth. Mags struck a pose. “How do I look?”

She purred at the response. “Then it’s just you and me.” Mags plundered the dead for weapons and ammo. Racking a bullet into a stolen pistol’s chamber, she said, “That’s more like it. Let’s descend into the maelstrom.” [3]

They set off to find Tarzi and racked up a double-digit body count along the way. Thirty minutes later, smudged with soot and rust-colored dust, splattered with blood and bits of strangers’ organs, they arrived at the base of the communications hub.

Tarzi’s scent told them they had found the right destination.

☠️

The Bargain

Tarzi hoped to meet Mags at the hub. Instead, he confronted Rosie and her elite personal bodyguards, all heavily armed. The young man withdrew around the doorframe and shouted. “Don’t shoot! It’s me, Tarzi!”

They shot anyway.

“Will you bloody stop and listen for a minute? Rosie!”

She shouted back. “What do you want?!”

“I want to help,” said Tarzi. “I want to help you take over Mars.”

“I already have. Get lost!”

“Not even close. You need me. I’ve been on the streets, and this whole thing is turning into a disaster! It’s a disaster I can help you with. But,” said Tarzi, “the whole deal is contingent on freeing Mags.”

Rosie said, “Not a chance.”

“You can’t send Mags to her death and expect any of this to work. The riots aren’t shit. You’re asking for all-out war with Ceres and every outlaw in the Belt—without much help from Earth.”

“We can handle a few pirates.”

“Not these ones. And definitely not Patches.”

Rosie shouted, “Your little cat is gone! Don’t be stupid.”

“If you think you got rid of Patches that easily, you’re so fucked in the head that your IQ might go up when she eats your skull. You should be crapping your pants right now, wondering how soon it will be until she—”

“Tarzi! If I set Mags free, the first thing she would do is come to kill me. She isn’t one to forgive and forget.”

“She’ll never do either. She’ll never agree with you about your deal with Earth. She will hate you ’til the day she dies.”

“That makes me feel a whole lot better. She stays locked up.”

“Rosie, Mags hates the idea on principle. She likes to talk real loud and make a scene about her ideals. But if you show her a profit opportunity, all that goes out the window. You will never have her love. But you can appeal to her greed.”

“Why would I give her anything?”

“The free-energy system. She wants it. You need it. It’s a bargain.”

“I’ll get Shondra to make it.”

“The fuck you will,” said Tarzi. “Who do you think let me out of my cell?”

“What?”

“Shondra hates your fucking guts. She sent me here! Shondra plans to kill you and take over. If you want the energy system, you need Mags.”

Rosie pondered.

Tarzi pounced on the silence. “You want the economic boost from trading with Earth. But if you can provide free, unlimited power to any rock you want, think what that means for the future of mining and manufacturing! If you let Mags do this one little thing she really, really wants to do, then you create a space-based economy with unlimited resource potential. Do you want to rule Mars, or do you want to rule the entire bloody solar system?”

“She’ll still want to kill me.”

“Undoubtedly.”

Rosie said, “Will you talk to her?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you! What do you plan to say to Mags to convince her to go along with this plan of yours?”

Tarzi paused. “Let me think for a minute.”

He seized the lull in conversation. Tarzi slowed his breathing and imagined his favorite Swans album playing at top volume.[4] The brutal rhythms calmed him. Time stretched out. In what would look like a blur to the human eye, he stepped into the room with his pistol raised and put a bullet into the helmet of the nearest guard.

The guard’s head snapped back in slow motion. Individual bits of shrapnel and drops of blood began to break away from the helmet. The fragments and splatters barely expanded before Tarzi fixed the next guard in his sights. He fired again. A bullet pierced the second guard’s faceplate. Tarzi shot a third time.

Rosalia and her remaining guards pulled their triggers. Millimeter by millimeter, fingers squeezed. Bullets entered the air and slowly, deliberately, advanced on paths to where Tarzi no longer stood.

He dove for cover, but not before he sent one more bullet to its destination.

---

[1] The octopuses’ biological mother was an octopus also, but because Mags and Patches were present for their birth and merged minds with them and their mother, the octopuses consider the felonious felines to also be their mothers.

[2] In Patches the Immortal.

[3] Mags quotes a song title that belongs to both Radio Birdman and Wo Fat.

[4] The Glowing Man, by Swans.

The Martian Revolution: Part 2 of 4

Tags

Mars, martian revolution, meteor mags, science fiction, self publishing, shondra, tarzi, writing

Continued from Part 1.

Part Two: Knight’s Journey

The Torture

Tarzi.

Handcuffs bound me. Two goons in grey shoved me down and shackled my ankles to a metal chair that was bolted to the floor below a single incandescent bulb. The room smelled like piss and puke. A single vent the size of a postcard near the ceiling had given up on moving the air. Blotches and splatters of dried blood decorated the walls. To one side, a stainless-steel tool chest with a dozen drawers held contents I preferred not to imagine.

Shondra dismissed the soldiers with orders to guard the thick metal door, shut it behind them, and rested her bum against the tool chest. She raised one eyebrow as if my silent glare amused her. “This is one of the places where the Port Authority deals with pirates.” She lit up a smoke, took a drag, and held it out to me. “Have you met any pirates?”

The offered cig repulsed me. Not the smell of smoke. Just the offering. I spat on the floor. “Mags will fucking kill you.”

Shondra threw back her head and laughed. “She might!” Then she leaned in closer. Her eyes drilled into me. “Your precious Mags is a psychotic bitch from hell.[1] A murderous ball of boundless rage. And you know what?” Shondra ran a hand between her thighs and shivered. “It’s one of the things about her that turns me on. Not to mention that frisky tail. The way she paints her lips in red and black. Maybe she’ll smother me to death in her massive titties. Would that make you happy?”

“Sod off, slag. You are sick in the head.”

“Tarzi, you don’t know the half of it. Take this fag before I smoke it myself.”

What the hell. If I was about to die, I might as well have a smoke.

No sooner did I have it in my cuffed hands than she lit another. She said, “You don’t like me very much.”

“Fuck no I don’t. I’ll like you less when you’re torturing me to death. So let’s get it over with, you scab-faced, knob-gobbling, herpes magnet!”

Shondra looked around the room as if she were noticing it for the first time. “Is that why you think you’re here?”

I blew smoke at her. “Fuck you.”

She brushed ebony curls away from her face. “Such fire! No wonder Mags likes you. She tells me wonderful things about her favorite nephew, did you know that?”

When I didn’t answer, she continued. “Have it your way, then. I will show you the implement of pain I’m about to use on you. And I promise you, Tarzi, after the twisted shit I do to you with it, you will beg to cooperate.”

I expected her to open the drawers of the torture toolbox. Instead, she slid her hand into her pocket and withdrew a single object.

“This key,” she said, “unlocks those cuffs and leg irons.” She rested her other hand on the pistol at her hip. “And this nine-millimeter will send you to an early grave if you try to fight me. I suggest you relax. There are some things you don’t know, and we need to have a little chat. A meeting of the minds. Got it?”

“Not in the slightest,” I said. “You want to let me go?”

“Not until you listen to me. But I think you’d be more inclined to listen if you weren’t chained to that goddamn chair.”

I held up my hands. “Fine.” Maybe I could have tried to meditate deep enough in that moment to slow my perception and grab her pistol, then put it to her head before she realized what was happening. But that solution left me with a locked door and guards on the other side, and no clue about the building’s entrances and exits. I decided to listen.

Shondra unlocked the shackles then the cuffs, though she held her pistol to my temple for the latter. She stepped away, out of range of my fists, and holstered it.

I let the fag dangle from my lips while I rubbed my wrists. “What’s this all about, then?”

“Rosie’s got big plans for Mars. I’ve played along to protect my interests. But the truth is: Mags is right. Fuck Earth and fuck the mega-corps. I hate them all. We don’t need them sinking their fangs any deeper here. We need to cut them off. Stake them in their goddamn hearts like vampires. Now is the time for a truly independent Mars. Don’t you agree?”

I dropped the fag end on the floor and ground it out with my heel. “I do. Keep talking.”

“Rosie’s been good to you, and she’s been good to me. She’s been good to Mags, too, in her own way—at least until today. But that sly cunt will be good to anyone so long as it advances her goals. When they’ve outlived their usefulness, they can kiss their arses goodbye.”

“You’re trying to tell me you’re any different?”

“Tarzi, Tarzi, Tarzi. Do you think Mags is any different?”

We locked eyes. As angry as I was with Shondra, I could see what Mags found attractive about her. Not just on the surface, but the way her eyes glistened with amusement and a savage confidence that the entire universe, including me, was her plaything—a toy to bring her pleasure. It was a quality I’d seen a million times in Mags’ eyes, and Patches’, too. A feline view of life.

I said, “Mags is different. She has an agenda, but it isn’t all about her. It’s about her friends.”

Shondra applauded. “You are so perceptive for a little boy!”

“I’m not a little boy, you fucking hose-beast, and you know what? This is the shittiest way I can think of to spend my sixteenth birthday. Get to the point!”

Shondra laughed. “Happy Birthday!” She looked me up and down like a piece of meat in a market. “Mags would never forgive me if I gave you birthday spankings. But come see me in a couple years, and I might blow out your candle.”

She set her hands on one arm of my chair and leaned in until her face almost touched mine. Her perfume smelled like sandalwood and tobacco. Underneath ran her natural scent, a hint of sweat and engine oil. I could have counted her eyelashes and the flecks of green and brown dancing in her hazel irises. She was way too close.

“The point is,” said Shondra, “we’ve all got goals, and we all use people to the extent we can get away with. You, me, everyone. In this case, Mags’ goals and mine converge. The person who has outlived her usefulness is Rosie. She just hasn’t realized it yet.”

I gestured for another smoke. “Great ethics lesson. What does all this have to do with me?”

“Everything, Tarzi. You’ll help me take down Rosie and do it in such a way that she becomes a martyr to the cause of Martian liberation—the kind of liberation both Mags and I want. And, I suspect, that you want, too.”

“Rosie has the entire Martian Resistance behind her. You want to take on all of them?”

“Just a few. Rosie, her bodyguards, her inner circle. All in a way that implicates Port Authority loyalists in her death, so that when I step up and take her place, the movement will rally around me. Instead of Rosie assuming control of Mars—” She pantomimed a curtsey with a nonexistent skirt. “I will.”

“Just like that?”

“We’ll have a bit of bloodshed first. Right now, all over Mars, my people are responding to Rosie’s little coup.”

“You were right there in her office! You could have stopped her!”

“Right,” said Shondra. “And I could have had my hide perforated by bullets or wound up in chains like you and Mags. No thank you. But when the dust settles, I need propaganda. A touch of disinformation. The important thing is unifying the people and the Resistance behind something they already want and are willing to fight for: our liberation. With Rosie gone, the movement will gravitate toward a natural leader.”

“Mags plans on being that leader.”

Shondra cackled. “Mags is fucking delusional! Listen to me, boy. She’s bitten off more than she can chew. She has her hands full with Ceres, and there’s no way she can control Mars, too.”

“You can?”

“Tarzi, I absolutely can. As head of the shipyards, I am the most powerful industrialist on this godforsaken rock. I have political connections and powerful friends, and I’ve treated my workers well. They would go to war for me, and they are proving that right now, from the major cities to the settlements. No one knows Mars better than me, and no one else—not even Mags—has the resources and cash to make this happen.”

I hated to admit it, but Shondra was making a hell of a lot of sense. I shrugged it off. “Great, then. You’ve got it all sewn it up. What do you need me for?”

Shondra licked her lips. “I thought you’d never ask.”

☠️

The Exit

Tarzi.

After she finished explaining, Shondra knocked on the door with a rhythm that must have been a code. When the door opened, a guard stood to each side. She shot one in the face. Before the second could react, she shot him, too.

Shondra handed me the nine-millimeter. It felt good in my hands. Perfectly balanced. A comfortable grip. It didn’t surprise me that a builder of her caliber would have great taste in firearms. She’d probably made Mags’ custom Desert Eagles.

Shondra pulled two magazines from her belt. “Armor piercing. You’ll need these.”

My shirt pocket held a copy of the map she’d given me, which she had not drawn herself. It was a printout of the facility’s fire evacuation plan. She’d highlighted a path in bright yellow. It began about halfway up the fifty-story building and snaked through a series of corridors, through fire doors and stairwells, and ended outside at ground level.

I’d already memorized it—a task that should have taken ten minutes but, when Shondra shut up and let me concentrate, took ten seconds.

I pocketed the magazines in my cargo pants. “You need to free Mags. Where the hell is Patches?”

“I don’t know, but she’s—”

At the thump of heavy, running footfalls in the hall around the corner, Shondra pulled a second pistol from a shoulder holster.

Three guards. The first one who came into view, Shondra dropped with a headshot. She missed the second, but I put two rounds into his torso. The third guard halted just out of sight around the corner. I fired three shots through the edge of the wall.

A scream, and the body fell into view, lifeless on the floor.

Shondra said, “You should conserve your ammo.”

“You should aim for center mass.”

She blew nonexistent smoke from the barrel of her pistol.

The gesture brought a smile to my face. “You’re as crazy as Mags.”

“I doubt that.” Shondra stepped over the bodies and advanced around the corner, keeping watch while I worked. “Hurry up! You need to go. Go!”

I raided the corpses for extra firearms and magazines. “Promise me you’ll set her free.”

Shondra said, “If you think anything can keep me from seeing my kitten again, you’re insane. Now get out of here.”

I did. In my wake, a series of explosions belonged to Shondra, creating a diversion. The fire alarm went off. It bought me time to get to the ground floor, and I only had to shoot six people to do it. At the bottom of the stairs, I sprinted for the exit door.

I hit it so hard I bounced off.

I stumbled and spun and was lucky I didn’t fall on my face. The goddamn thing was supposed to be open!

Several floors above me: shouts and footfalls. I tried the door again. Nothing. Had the system malfunctioned? I heard explosions outside. Was the door blocked by debris?

I didn’t have a clue. But the last place I needed to be was trapped between a sealed exit and an angry mob of guards and prisoners.

I ran back up the stairs to the floor above.

☠️

The Yard

Tarzi.

The door on the second story opened to reveal a courtyard full of prisoners and dozens of guards, bounded on one side by the building and surrounded on the remaining three sides by a two-story fence. On the two corners farthest from me, sentry towers held more guards and swivel-mounted machine guns that could sweep the entire enclosure.

Those guns were, for the moment, silent, despite intermittent bursts from semi-automatic rifles in the towers. I supposed the sentries didn’t want to strafe the crowd with so many of their own caught in it, fighting for their lives in hand-to-hand combat.

I needed to get through the chaos before the tools in the towers changed their minds, and before the crowd in the interior stairwell reached the door at my back. The gate in the fence between the towers seemed like the best escape route. Judging from the surging tempest of bodies already there, a cluster of inmates had reached the same conclusion.

I ran down the concrete stairs and into the melee. So much for a clean getaway.

I pushed my way through, trying to take advantage of any brief opening in the mob, dodging the fights around me as best I could.

It wasn’t good enough. I caught a fist in the side of my head, and the force nearly broke my neck. I stumbled and fell against a guard, only recognizable from his uniform’s rough, grey wool. I clawed at the fabric and struggled to remain on my feet. What I saw of his face before he shoved me away was a red, misshapen disaster missing half its teeth.

I would have fallen again, but the bodies pressed even closer. The people in the stairwell joined the crowd as their fight spilled out of the building, through the door I’d taken, and down into the yard. In every direction, a mosh pit without music lost any semblance of sanity and became a violent blur.

God, the stench of it. Even the rusty Martian wind couldn’t sweep away the fermented sweat, the breath from mouths full of rotting teeth, the piss-stained prison uniforms that hadn’t been cleaned in years and barely held on by their last synthetic threads. I pressed toward the gate, clambering up and over people where I could—people hardly recognizable as individuals but one seething blob of muscle and hate.[2]

In the moments where my head bobbed above the crowd, casual slaughter confirmed my decision to go through it instead of attempting to scale the fence. All along the iron perimeter, prisoners began to climb the bars. Many of them had no choice. People at the edges were being crushed against the enclosure.

Climb or die.

The tattered rags of their orange uniforms hardly clinging to their bodies didn’t surprise me. In my months of snooping through Port Authority files when I was supposed to be working for Rosie, I learned that a PA prison was just about the last place in the system where you want to be held. Torture was common. Food and hygiene were not.

Those orange rags scaling the fence made easy targets for the men in the towers. The machine gunners, freed from the fear of killing their fellow guards on the ground, swept the fence with abandon. Bullets shredded the prisoners. Some held on by one hand, grasping an iron bar as their last breaths left their bodies. Their flaps of skin snapped like tattered flags in the dusk before falling to the ground.

The killing cowered no one. It only fueled the rage of the living.

They were no longer alone. Outside the gate, a second crowd gathered and also appeared to be trying to destroy the barrier. Between the chaos, gunfire, and the setting sun, I caught only glimpses as the mob alternately swallowed me and spit me up.

I could perceive this much: The crowd outside wasn’t the grey of a PA uniform. It lacked any uniformity at all, and that told me it was either part of the underground resistance or Shondra’s people. Or both.

It hit me just how meaningless those distinctions had become. What the hell had Rosie and Shondra done?

Rosie held one of the highest positions in the Port Authority, but she was also a leader in the resistance. Shondra had organized her workers into a separate fighting force, but her shipyards worked hand-in-hand with the Port Authority while covertly supplying the resistance and making things for Mags.

Many people from those different factions worked side-by-side and lived in the same neighborhoods. The only differences were the colors of their uniforms and who signed their paychecks. But few of them were happy with the way things were run on Mars, and who was running them, and all those pent-up tensions had been set off like a bomb.

It all came to me in a flash I had no time to ponder. A sentry tower exploded, showering the scene with iron shrapnel. I caught a piece in the shoulder, and it sliced me open. The riot drowned my cry. Before I knew it, strangers crushed me against the gate.

At least I’d made it that far. Someone’s hand covered half my face, but through one open eye I saw a man outside reloading an RPG, presumably to take out the second tower. If that tower went down, I could climb the fence—as long as I wasn’t smashed into a puree against it.

I drew my pistol. Without much room to aim, I shot the man behind me. His hand fell from my face and gave me space. I shot the guy behind him in the head. A grey-clad fist from beside me landed in my stomach.

Since I’d met Mags on that fateful night exactly two years before, I’d been hit, strangled, captured, shot at, bombed, crashed, toppled from cliffs, set on fire, and landed in more than my fair share of fights. But I had never been punched as hard as that guard hit me.

Three bullets in the torso were his reward. I couldn’t even breathe.

But I could climb.

No sooner had I gripped a vertical bar in the iron fence than the second tower burst into a ball of fire and metal shards. It was louder and closer than the first one. The blast hit so hard that everything around me faded to a muffled, indistinct blur. The cuts and bruises from the explosion didn’t register at the time. I was so amped on adrenaline that I don’t even remember climbing the fence.

The next thing I knew, I hit the ground on the other side. All around me, people shouted and pumped their fists in the air. I was the first over the fence, but not the last. Bodies landed beside me, some on their feet. I stumbled forward, and someone caught me.

I couldn’t hear what she said, but her lips formed the words, “You’re a free man, comrade!”

I raised my fist in salute. “Long live the resistance!”

Someone went for my pistol. I swung my fist blindly to the side and throat-punched my assailant. That crowd was no safer for me than the last. I pushed forward, away from the gate and the yard, into the streets of Hevelius.

Night fell on Mars.

☠️

The Hub

Tarzi.

Approaching the hub, I ejected a magazine and replaced it. Mags was nowhere in sight. I put the thoughts of the people I’d killed far from my mind and took a second to appreciate the island of calm around the hub. Few if any of the average citizens knew the true function of the tower disguised as an agricultural administration building.

Shondra certainly knew, and she knew my PA clearance would give me access, assuming Rosie had been so busy setting off a revolution that she had not yet changed the codes. According to Shondra, Rosie intended to use the hub to control all Martian media broadcasts for propaganda purposes. Shondra wanted that power for herself. Whichever one of them could control the hub would command the flow of information for the entire planet.

Mags’ idle conversation at brunch seemed a lot more prescient to me then.

I typed a code on the panel beside the ground-level entrance and pressed my right palm onto a flat sensor.

I was in.

I passed an automated retina scan in the lobby, but no one guarded the metal detector. I climbed over a railing and went around it. From the other side, I saw dead bodies crammed underneath the reception desk. I didn’t recognize their faces, but the PA uniforms marked them as lobby staff and security.

Sucked to be them. I hoped I wouldn’t end up the same way.

An elevator took me to the top floor. The whole way up, I crouched in a corner, pistol drawn, ready to blast anyone that appeared on the other side of the door. But no one did.

I crept down the hall until I came to the main room. Inside awaited wall-to-wall racks of servers and consoles that could assume control of all Martian communications and media, from the radio towers at spaceports to the streaming news channels and satellite data.

Shondra had warned me. I knew I’d find Rosie there.

---

[1] Shondra has in mind the 2004 Horrorpops song Psychobitches Outta Hell. On Hell Yeah!, Los Angeles, CA: Hellcat Records.

[2] Tarzi lifted the phrase “muscle and hate” from Nitzer Ebb’s 1987 song, Join in the Chant. On That Total Age, Mute Records (UK) and Geffen/Warner Brothers (US).

The Martian Revolution: Part 1 of 4

Tags

Cat, Mars, martian revolution, meteor mags, Patches, rosalia, science fiction, self publishing, shondra, tarzi, writing

Here is the first part of my pre-publication draft for a new Meteor Mags story.

METEOR MAGS: THE MARTIAN REVOLUTION
Episode 29 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.
© 2021 Matthew Howard. All Rights Reserved.
16K words. Science Fiction > Action > Adventure.

Torn between conflicting factions in the Martian Resistance, Mags’ unofficially adopted nephew Tarzi spends his sixteenth birthday in a struggle to survive. Betrayed and imprisoned on Mars by people they once thought were friends, Mags and Patches vow to soak the red planet in blood if that’s what it takes to rescue Tarzi and change the political structure of the solar system. But not everyone is who they pretend to be.

☠️

Though my soul may set in darkness,
it will rise in perfect light.

I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.

—Sarah Williams; The Old Astronomer to His Pupil, 1936.

☠️

Prologue: Sixteen Bullets

4 July 2030. Tarzi.

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, dear Tarzi. Happy birthday—

You know, some small part of me hoped for a cake with sixteen candles. Maybe a chocolate cheesecake. A pineapple upside-down with cherries. Even a lousy white cake with cream-cheese frosting would do.

Instead, I got a nine-millimeter pistol with fifteen armor-piercing rounds in an extended magazine.

The sixteenth bullet waited in the chamber when I slammed a fresh magazine into place, but not anymore. It took out the first guard. I think I got two more. Then there’s the round lodged firmly inside the skull of my former boss, Rosalia—unless it exited the back of her head.

It’s hard to say for sure. She fell behind a server rack, and I can’t see much from here.

That was one hell of a lucky shot.

It helps that I can slow time. It does not help that half a dozen rough motherfuckers keep shooting at me with semi-automatic rifles. I hug the ground and listen. They don’t seem to mind wasting ammo. If they aren’t careful, they’ll shoot this room to bits. Then we’re all fucked.

I count the bursts of rifle fire and try to anticipate when they pause to reload. The console I’m hiding behind should buy me a few seconds.

After that?

Probably the end of my last birthday.

Fuck this noise. I can take a few of the bastards with me.

To a merry life, then.

And a short one.

☠️

Part One: Opening Moves

The Arrival

3 July 2030.

Meteor Mags and Patches arrived on Mars in the Bêlit. The Puma Broadcasting Network played Jerk of All Trades by Lunachicks.[1] Mags said, “That’s my jam!” She raised one hand to make the sign of the devil and danced beside the captain’s chair until the song finished.

Patches sprawled on one side in front of the exit. Her eyes narrowed to slits. Her bushy torso rose and fell in a rapid rhythm.

Mags said, “Are you excited to visit the birthday boy? He’ll be happy to see you.” She adjusted her hair and touched up her makeup in a mirror. “Can’t have Shondra seeing me looking like a dog’s breakfast.”[2]

But no amount of makeup could hide the bruises from her failed mission to Earth, nor the stapled laceration that ran through one eyebrow and past her hairline. She squirted liquid morphine on her tongue to dull the ache in her cracked ribs.[3] A slow warmth crept through her veins.

Patches mewed.

“Whatever, baby. Not all of us are invincible, and that shit hurts.”[4] Mags knelt beside Patches and scratched both sides of the fuzzy calico face. “Let’s go meet Shondra. It’s the middle of the bloody night here, but we’ll have lunch with Tarzi tomorrow. Maybe we can get some kisses before bedtime.”

Mags grabbed a passport for Margaret Reid and tucked it into a zippered pocket on her military-issue tactical pants.[5] They weren’t the sexiest thing to meet Shondra in, but they were comfortable and functional. After getting nearly blown to bits in Africa twenty-four hours earlier, Mags craved comfort.

The pair of feline adventurers locked down the ship and went to find their hostess in the Martian shipyards. Patches scampered ahead, sniffing here and there, chasing bugs and clawing a few pieces of Shondra’s property that would never recover. She looked over her shoulder to see if Mags was keeping up, then bolted to the other side of the street.

“Wait up!” Mags paused and held an arm against her ribs. “Goddamnit, I’m getting old. Wait up!”[6]

☠️

The Sleepover

As the owner of the Martian shipyards, Shondra easily afforded several apartments on Mars. Some she used to entertain customers. Some she kept secret between her and various lovers. Some were quiet places to get away from it all, purchased under aliases and known only to her. None of them was quite so luxurious as her private quarters within the shipyard.

Mags held a rocks glass filled with rum and settled onto a red velvet chaise lounge. Patches jumped up beside her. “Shondra, you live like a queen! Sorry about the cat hair.”

Shondra said, “Patches doesn’t shed half as bad as you. Every time you come around waving that tail of yours, it takes the maids an entire day to vacuum.”

Mags patted the lounge beside her. “That’s not even true. Come sit with me.”

Shondra finished at the mini-bar, and her silhouette strode across the massive windows overlooking the shipyards. For a silent moment, she turned her back to Mags and took a sip while enjoying the view of her empire. Below, the nightshift workers toiled in sprays of sparks from arc welders and the glow of halogen lamps. Above, the gleaming stars.

Eventually, she sat on the edge of the lounge and clinked her glass against Mags’. “To empires.”

“So long as they belong to us.”

Shondra took a sip. “Do you like it on Ceres?”

“Shondra, I love it! It sucked so bad when the old place on Vesta got wrecked, but my girls are doing amazing things on Ceres. It’s a dream come true.”

“I’m happy for you.” Shondra ran her fingertips up and down Mags’ thigh.

“What about you? It seems like you’ve got it all on Mars.”

Shondra’s eyes sparkled in candlelight thrown from the end table next to the lounge. “Not everything. There’s a certain kitty I wish would visit more often. But I make do. I’m a firm believer that you can have it all in life. You just can’t have it all at the same time.”

“Words to live by.” Mags took a gulp and laid back on the lounge, balancing her drink in her lap between her crossed legs. “Something is missing, though, isn’t it? I can tell just by looking at you.”

“Can’t sneak anything past those bright green eyes of yours.” Shondra took a drink. “The truth is, Mars is my dream come true. But the dream is tainted. I’m sick of our laws and government being controlled by Earth. Mars can govern itself. I won’t be happy until she does.”

“Cheers,” said Mags.

“Cheers.”

Mags said, “I’m here for Tarzi’s birthday tomorrow, but you know I am down with the Martian liberation. It’s been on my mind a lot this year. It’s the next big step to system-wide freedom from Earth’s interference. Let’s make it happen. You and me. Rosie can help.”

Shondra held out one hand. When Mags set hers in it, Shondra ran the backs of her nails over Mags’ wrist. “Are you ready for a revolution?”

Mags shivered. She smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Do you remember that Danko Jones song? Revolution—and Then We Make Love.”[7]

Shondra slid onto Mags. “Why wait?” She kissed the smuggler’s neck.

Mags winced. “Take it easy! I fucked up my ribs yesterday. Look, they’re all taped up.”

“I’ll be gentle,” said Shondra.

Mags set her drink on the end table. “Alright, then.”

Patches leapt off the lounge. She sauntered into the kitchen where Shondra had set out a pair of bowls. She was well-fed and napping on the bed for two hours before Mags and Shondra finally snuggled under the sheets and went to sleep.

Sunrise came early.

☠️

The Lunch

4 July 2030.

Kepler Mall sprawled across the Martian landscape. It shared one border with the rest of Hevelius, and the Port Authority considered it to be legally within city limits. But the three sides jutting from the city’s eastern-most boundary drew on the map a jagged explosion of commerce the local government struggled to keep up with.

Shoppers relied on global positioning data from the Martian Satellite Network to navigate the labyrinth of shops rising two hundred and fifty stories into the sky at its highest point. Wrapped around the peak in loops and dips, a roller coaster offered Mars’ bravest tourists a ride they never forgot.

In 2029, shopping in the mall without MSN data became a fad. After three months of people dying of starvation and thirst in obscure corridors, the Port Authority put a brutal end to that past-time. Much of the video was suppressed, and many of the bodies were never found. Within two weeks of the crackdown, the mall once again became a cheerful place that pleased its shareholders.

Mags and Patches met Tarzi on the scenic balcony of the Crimson Crane, a restaurant on the top floor serving breakfast twenty-five hours a day. Even after the installation of artificial gravity and a manufactured atmosphere, Mars retained its red tint. The planet’s iron burnished the underbellies of clouds, blazed on mountains in the sun, and frothed in ice-cold rivers running from the polar ice caps into once-forgotten stream beds.

Mags switched off her satellite connection and stuffed her phone into the pocket inside her bra. “They’re tracking us.”

Across the table, Tarzi slid a palm-sized disc onto the surface between them. “They were.”

“Nice.” She leaned back in her café chair and relaxed. “Did you ever think about what it would take to assume control of a massive building like this?”

“I always think about that over breakfast,” Tarzi lied. “But control what? The perimeter so no one can get in or out? The people inside so chaos won’t erupt? Buying the politicians and corporations who really control the thing?”

Mags purred. “Now you’re asking the important questions.” She lowered her voice as their waitress approached for the second time. “Don’t forget about the flow of information. In a system like this, data and media are your main weapons. If you control communication—”

The waitress sidled up to the table with three plates and a smile for Mags. “You had four eggs over easy and three slices of raw ham?”

Mags took one plate. “Thank you, dear. The dish of liver, you can set on the floor. It’s for my cat.”

Tarzi claimed the third plate of beans, bangers, eggs, and toast. His black cup of coffee stood in contrast to the sugary beast Mags ordered, topped with a mountain of whipped cream and cinnamon. When the waitress was out of earshot, he said, “Probably a plant.”

“Definitely a plant.” Mags sipped the hot espresso and wiped the whipped cream from her upper lip with the back of one hand. “Every business owner and employee in this mall is Port Authority, whether directly employed or financially backed. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“I was wondering,” said Tarzi, “if Patches could make eating liver sound any more disgusting. What is she doing?”

“She isn’t rolling in it, is she?” Mags checked. “Liver’s gross, but it has massive nutrients. Along with the heart, it’s one of the first organs a cat eats when she takes down prey.”

“Right,” said Tarzi. He eyed the chunk of sausage on the end of his fork, then set it down.

“Happy birthday,” said Mags. She raised her cup. “To my favorite nephew.”

Their glasses clinked together. “I thought Anton was your favorite.”

“He’s definitely Sarah’s. Do you remember what it was like to be his age?”

“Sure,” said Tarzi. “The day I turned fourteen, I met a homicidal pirate who whisked me away on a series of random space adventures. Ever since then, it’s been a blur.”[8] He savored a sip. “Great kids, though. The stuff they’re doing in Dumpster Kittens totally slays.”

“Did you hear the Toilet Gator single?”

“Dunny Croc,” he quoted, “lives in a secret place.”

“It’s the kind of place that you can’t escape!”[9]

“Hell no, it isn’t. You need to market that. If I can’t have a Dunny Croc t-shirt by next week, then what the fuck are we even doing out here?”

“That’s what I’m saying!” Mags shoveled an entire slice of ham into her face, chewed three times, and swallowed it nearly whole. She sat back and crossed her arms behind her head. “You wouldn’t want to manage the entire publishing catalog of Two Black Roses Records, would you?”

Tarzi laughed. “Not in a billion years! Who is your second choice?”

Before Mags could reply, a drone interrupted. Like a miniature helicopter, it flew up and over the balcony railing and zoomed straight for the table.

Mags drew a pistol from inside her leather jacket before Tarzi even moved. But before she pulled the trigger, a familiar voice stopped her.

“Hi!” said Rosalia. “Happy birthday!”

Tarzi said, “Thanks, boss. How are things?”

“Great,” Rosalia replied from kilometers away. Her voice came through the drone’s speakers, and the drone’s camera sent video to her of Mags and Tarzi. “Listen, I hate to bother you, but can you come to the office for a minute?”

Mags holstered her pistol. “Give it up, Rosie. It’s the kid’s birthday!”

“I’m really sorry,” said Rosalia, “but I have a gift for you, and I want you to have it before I go away. Something’s come up, and I need to leave the planet in an hour. If you come in for a few minutes, you can have the whole rest of the week off!”

Mags frowned.

Tarzi said, “You drive a hard bargain. We’ll be over on the next shuttle from the mall. Alright?”

“See you soon.” The drone disappeared over the edge of the balcony.

Mags said, “She’s got some nerve, calling you in on your day off. We had plans!”

“Relax,” said Tarzi. “She’s awesome to work for, and she’s giving me a week off. It’s like five minutes from here on the shuttle.”

“Fine,” said Mags. “Let’s go visit the wicked witch!” She shoved another slice of ham and a couple eggs into her mouth and washed them down with half of the sugary, caffeinated monster on the other side of her plate. She tossed a wad of cash onto the table and waved to their waitress on the way out.

On the way to the shuttle, Mags and Tarzi cracked sarcastic jokes and laughed at recollections of their adventures over the past two years: the first time they met Donny and he tried to kill them, the time they fell into a cavern full of octopus eggs, the time Tarzi made fun of Mags and she repaid him by pretending to be permanently disfigured.[10]

Settling into her seat, Mags said, “Good times.” Patches crawled into her lap.

☠️

The Conspiracy

Rosalia’s office on the forty-fifth floor of the Port Authority Administration building had expanded since 2029. Back then, in a government post Mags’ bribes had helped her acquire, she was the secretary to the Chief Administrator, and she reported directly to Kaufman. But after Kaufman abandoned his post to join Mags’ pirate crew—an endeavor Rosalia assisted—a much more pliable man replaced him.[11]

That was no surprise to Rosalia. She had planned on it for years, played no small role in making it happen, and exploited it to her every advantage. Besides manipulating the Port Authority to the benefit of the underground resistance, besides leaking whatever information she felt would be useful to her for Mags to know, Rosalia redecorated. She knocked out walls between offices until she had the space of half a dozen rooms to herself on one corner of the forty-fifth floor. To maintain the new Chief’s feeling of superiority, she had his office re-done the same way, but with twice as much space.

The palatial results were an obvious waste of the PA’s budget. But who was there for anyone to complain to? Certainly not the Chief and his right-hand woman who had a knack for keeping him fat and happy with the spoils of power. And the government on Earth? In 2030, humanity’s home planet had enough troubles of its own, and a few hundred million dollars siphoned by corruption was the least of its worries.

When Mags arrived with Tarzi and Patches, they stepped into the second most opulent office in the Martian government.

“Damn, Rosie! I love what you’ve done with the place!” Mags admired the oil paintings on the walls of the foyer, any one of which could have paid a miner’s pension for generations, and the largest of which cost more than the gross domestic product of some Earth nations.

Rosalia hugged her. “Are you sure I can’t convince you to sell me Blue Poles?”

Mags laughed. “Not a chance. That piece has sentimental value. I can get you a good deal on a Monet, though. What’s with the goon squad?”[12]

Half a dozen guards stood silent, three on each side of the doorway.

“Don’t mind them,” said Rosalia. “Something’s come up, and I could use the extra security. Tarzi! Happy birthday!”

“Thanks, boss.” He held out his fist for a bump, and she met it. “How’d you find us at the mall? I had a signal blocker with me.”

Rosalia raised a finger in a fake scold. “That’s illegal.”

“What isn’t?”

“True enough. I sent my drone to the floor where there was a signal void. Your sitting on the balcony was luck.”

Mags said, “We like to dine in style. Is Shondra here?”

Rosalia’s amiable façade cracked for a fraction of a second. “How did you—”

“She has a unique scent. Now I know something is up. Why don’t you tell us what’s really happening?”

Rosalia said, “Follow me.” She led them from the foyer to the corner of the building, where a rosewood desk bigger than a coffin awaited. Behind it, two walls of windows overlooked Hevelius.

Near the far corner of the desk, Shondra reclined in a chair. She filed her nails with an emery board as if she had not a care in the world. Her face lit up. “Maggie!”

“Long time.” Mags gave her a peck on the cheek. “Do you mind telling me what’s so important that you had to interrupt my breakfast?”

Rosalia sat behind her desk and clacked her painted nails on its lacquered top in a staccato rhythm. “The Chief Administrator is dead.”

“Dead?” Tarzi stopped behind a seat. “What happened?”

Rosalia said, “You want to sit down for this.”

Mags sat directly across the desk from Rosalia, with Shondra on her right and Tarzi taking the spot on her left.

Patches rubbed her cheeks on the corner of a cardboard box on the carpet below one window. Satisfied with the packaging, she climbed in and made herself at home. She curled into a nap. Her fuzzy tail covered her nose.

Rosalia said, “An hour ago, I killed him. The body’s still in the office, but let’s just say the Chief isn’t taking any calls right now.” She relished a rare pause where both Mags and Tarzi were stunned into silence. “In other news, I’ll be moving into a bigger office.”

Mags broke into laughter. “Rosie, what the hell were you thinking? Hahaha! Don’t get me wrong. I thought about taking him out myself. But to what end? There’s no guarantee that you get promoted into his position. Not with the old-boys network in the PA.”

Rosalia rested her elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’ve gained the support of people in high places. The resistance will take care of any local opposition. A majority of the Martian people want me in that position, and Earth’s authorities will back me up.”

Shondra said, “Rosie’s been busy.”

“I guess so,” said Mags. “Still, I’m a bit peeved that all this happened without talking to me first.” She lit a stolen cigarette. “Any deal with Earth is probably fucked. The last thing they want is the Martian independence we’ve been working on for years.”

“No, they’re on board with the plan,” said Rosalia. “Earth is prepared to sign a new trade agreement with Mars once I take over.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Mags. “You’re not making a treaty with them, are you?”

Rosalia said, “That’s exactly what I’m doing. Earth will retain control over some things. Shipping. Trade. Interplanetary policy.”

“Fuck,” said Mags. “Basically everything? Fuck those arseholes! Earth needs to stay the hell away from Mars! You can’t trust any of those warmongering, baby-raping idiots! What are you—”

Shondra interrupted. “Mags, relax. This deal means a hell of a lot more money.”

“Fuck that,” said Mags. “If we want to get rich, then we put a boot in Earth’s arse and do things ourselves!”

Rosalia’s smile disappeared. “I knew you’d feel that way. That is why you’ve been chosen to be our representative to Earth. Our negotiator.”

Mags choked on a puff of smoke. “What? I’m the most wanted felon on Earth! They only want me dead or in chains.”

Rosalia said, “Precisely. But I solved that, too.”

“How? With a pardon?”

“Not quite,” said Rosalia. “Let me show you.”

In later years, Meteor Mags could never put her finger on exactly what prompted her to spring into motion. Was it, she wondered, something about Rosalia’s scent or inflection? The unexplained presence of the guards? The interruption of her meal? Sheer instinct?

Mags was out of her chair and lunging over the desktop toward Rosalia when the first tranquilizer dart hit her. Fired by a guard behind her, its metal tip sank into her backside and spit poison into her veins.

In the same moment, Rosalia’s fist smashed a button atop her desk. It sprang a trap for Patches. Two halves of a transparent sphere erupted from the floor, supported by metal arms that slammed the halves together, enclosing the calico’s cardboard box.

Mags’ hands went for Rosalia’s throat.

Rosalia kicked her chair backward. On her way to the ground, she fired a second dart that caught Mags in the meat below her collarbone. The back of the chair smacked into the floor. Mags’ trajectory took her over Rosalia to smash into the window behind her.

Mags struck the glass but landed on her feet. The sedative made her stumble. Before she could resume her attack, the office lit up like a lightning storm.

Inside the transparent sphere around Patches, a fury of electric current seized the cat with tendrils of white outlined in blue. Patches swung her claws until they shredded the remnants of the box trapped with her. Levitating in the center of the sphere, she could not reach its perimeter to destroy it.

Her feline howls drowned out all but the roar from Mags’ throat. The smuggler pounced on Rosalia.

Tarzi tried to leap to his feet, but he was tackled by a guard and taken to the ground. A stranglehold ended his shouting.

Mags straddled Rosalia and swung her fists. The blows fell without her typical strength. “I will kill you!” She took punches from Rosalia to her stomach. Though her eyes flashed with fire, Mags’ body betrayed her. She slumped forward and fell face-first onto her opponent.

Rosalia rolled the body to one side, cursing with the effort. She gripped a fistful of Mags’ hair and held the brigand’s head to the light surrounding Patches.

Spit streamed from the sides of Mags’ mouth and down her chin. Her eyes blazed, but she could not move or shout.

Rosalia said, “Thank your so-called nephew for this. He told me how Patches got deactivated last year by electricity.” [13]

Patches contorted within the ball of energy. Her legs struck out at unnatural angles. Her hair stood on end. Patches’ scream made Mags’ blood run cold in her veins.

Light and shadow performed a twisted ballet across Rosalia’s face, mirrored on Mags’ pale skin. “You should have joined us. You should have taken the deal.” She held Mags’ head firmly in her grip and forced the pirate’s green eyes to meet hers through the tears. “You brought this on yourself.”

Patches’ struggling came to an abrupt stop. A cylinder rose from the floor and swallowed the transparent glass bubble around her. Rosalia released Mags and assumed a place at the window, which she opened with the touch of a button.

The cylinder shot Patches into the sky.

“So much for your familiar,” said Rosalia. “She’ll soon be in orbit—far, far away. And you will be on Earth. A price for peace.”

Tears ran down Mags’ cheeks. She could not curse Rosalia, but Tarzi did. The young man wished unspeakable things upon Rosalia and her ancestors—until a soldier choked the sound out of him.

“Strip-search her.” Rosalia indicated one of her guards with her finger.

“I’ll do it.” Shondra set down her emery board on the arm of her chair for the first time since the confrontation. “I know her tricks. You do not want to try to disarm that bitch, even passed out.”

On the floor, before Tarzi’s eyes, Shondra removed all of Mags’ clothes and her hidden weapons. She said, “Let me take the boy. He knows things about her crew that can help us.”

Rosalia said, “You can have him. Get me something useful.”

Both Tarzi and Mags were carted off in chains—one struggling the whole way, and one completely unconscious.

Patches was nowhere to be found.

---

[1] From their 1995 album of the same name on Go-Kart Records: New York.

[2] “Dog’s breakfast” is Australian slang for an absolute mess.

[3] Mags was injured in Antipodes, which took place on 2 July 2030.

[4] Patches became indestructible in 2029, in Patches the Immortal.

[5] Mags has a huge collection of fake passports under aliases that are variations on her name in several languages. Mags’ great-gramma often used this same alias.

[6] Mags turned 106 years old in November 2029. Due to her magic ring, her expected (though not guaranteed) lifespan is 200 years. When she says she is getting old, she means really frickin’ old.

[7] On Wildcat. 2017, AFM Records: Schwalmstadt, Germany.

[8] Tarzi’s fourteenth birthday is the first scene in Old Enough.

[9] The complete lyric to Toilet Gator, which Mags and Tarzi quote here, appears in Small Flowers.

[10] These events were chronicled in Old Enough and Red Metal at Dawn.

[11] See The Lost Crew of the Volya IX for details of Kaufman’s desertion and Rosalia’s assistance in his escape.

[12] Mags’ ownership of and sentimental attachment to Jackson Pollack’s Blue Poles appears in The Ryderium Caper. It was a favorite of Gramma Margareta’s, and the poles inspired Mags’ free-energy system.

[13] As told in Daughter of Lightning.

Retrofuturistic Topps Space Cards from 1958

Tags

1958, fried eggs, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, meteor, Moon, outer space, planets, topps, trading cards, vintage space art

Space travel ain’t what it used to be! Technology, design, and planetary knowledge have evolved since these beautiful Topps trading cards came out in 1958. But if you are like me and easily amused by vintage space art, these cards are worth checking out.

Below is a slideshow featuring a few dozen of my favorites. You can find a complete collection, including scans of the text on the back of the cards, at http://www1.coe.neu.edu/~dan/tsc/go.html

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Meteor Peril! Isn’t space travel exciting?! The only thing that could make it more fun is fried eggs.

mars

Tags

gustav holst, Mars, planets, poems, poetry, war

mars

you and i have unfinished business

you taught me destruction
a skill for leaving trails
of unmarked graves and broken spears

your path leads nowhere but down

stone is your only element
you bask in the sun for millennia
and only learn what it means to burn

you serve neither love nor justice
but conquest as its own reward
its prize a thread of wounds and ash

what words could you offer for redemption

how dare you speak them
over the eulogy of rain
and falling earth

Do Not Panic!

Tags

Mars, Martian, Steve Ditko, Strange Tales

This great Steve Ditko short story comes from Strange Tales #95. Steve’s splash pages for these stories just rock our world. What great posters they would make!

 

Race for the Moon: The Face on Mars!

Tags

Al Williamson, Face on Mars, golden age, Harvey Comics, Jack Kirby, Mars, Race for the Moon

What do you get when you cross Jack Kirby and Al Williamson? The coolest science fiction comics of the golden age! Thanks to our friends at the Digital Comic Museum, we’d like to share with you some stories from 1958’s Race for the Moon. Buckle up your space suit and get ready to rock!

Collector’s Guide:

It can be tough to find the original Race to the Moon comic books (Harvey, 1958). But in 2014, a Kindle version of Race for the Moon became available. It has all three issues, formatted just for Kindle.

Issue #1 features artwork by Bob Powell.
#2-3 feature Jack Kirby and Al Williamson.

Life on Other Worlds – MARS!

Tags

golden age, Life on Other Worlds, Mars, Planet Comics

In the future, women will not wear much clothing. But they will be in awe of man’s ability to ride ferocious beasts and kill really ugly monsters. In other words, it will end up being a lot like the past… At least that’s what we got from reading Planet Comics!

From 1948-1950, Planet Comics included one and two-page features called “Life On Other Worlds.”

A little bit of science and a whole lot of fantasy, they still make for fun reading – and some of the rocket ships and aliens are outta sight! This month, we share with you the complete “Life On Other Worlds” features. So strap on your space helmet – and remind your girlfriend to undress before departure!

Life on Other Worlds appeared in Planet Comics #49-51, #54-61, and #64.