Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  She broke the necklace off, crushed it to dust between her hands, and let it drift to the floor.

  The human section of Villach, a long, pie-shaped area of the five-mile-wide cupola, reminded her of the reservation. But not as desperate. Tight streets, waterproof paper houses and greenhouses. She found a market packed with several hundred people. It was the first time in two years she’d seen that many people gathered together that weren’t lined up for the food kitchens. As on the reservation, they spoke Anglic here, not human imitations of Gahe’s thumps, growls, and whistles.

  She pulled out the last of her coins and stopped at the nearest toy shop. Several kids behind the table of used equipment smiled at her. The tallest bowed and stepped forward with a flourish of his waxy red robe.

  “Help you?”

  “I need a lamina viewer,” she said. “Got anything?”

  They handed her an oversize, bright green wrist screen. Designed for clumsy kid fingers, it strapped on easily enough, and she tapped it on. A simple point-and-shoot viewer. She pointed a finger at the boy and information popped up for her.

  His name was Peter the One Hundredth, fifteen years old, owner of the stall. Previous customers rated him “competent” on average, with some complaints about equipment breaking down.

  “You like it?”

  Some speculated that the goods were stolen.

  Of course they were.

  Nashara stopped pointing and tapped some more, accessing Villach’s various streams of public information, and checked the habitat’s outbound transportation schedule. She found what she was looking for. The Stenapolaris, due to leave in two hours.

  Cutting it close. But she had a berth reserved, and Stenapolaris would be headed close to New Anegada. Once she was aboard it, the Gahe would be hard-pressed to ever find her.

  “Lady?”

  Nashara looked up. “Yes, I’ll take it.” She threw him the reservation coins from her pocket.

  “We don’t take this,” Peter the One Hundredth protested. “It’s devalued crap.”

  Nashara sighed. She propped her boot up on his table and dug her thumb into her thigh until she broke skin and peeled it back with a grunt. She slid a piece of silver out and wiped the blood off it. “Assay this.”

  She needed the lamina viewer. All around her in the habitat’s information-rich data streams lay important information. Such as directions to get to the docks, or what elevators to take. Whom you were talking to. Layers of it tagged everything, a myriad of ways to view the entire world lay around them.

  Kids ran around the stall seeing virtual monsters they chased and shot with their friends. Merchants quietly passed information among themselves. The station’s public lamina carpeted the sky with up-to-date general information, or provided tags about everything one saw.

  To be unable to view lamina meant being illiterate among those who read to survive.

  Nashara had to use lamina indirectly or the technology built into her head would get out of control. She bit her lip and focused on the transaction in front of her.

  Peter passed the piece of metal to the kid behind him, who walked back into the tent for a moment. Peter’s head snapped up as he heard something inside his own head. “Silver?”

  “Good enough?”

  All three nodded. Nashara turned and walked into a bulky man dressed in trousers and a yellow utility jacket.

  “Nashara Cascabel?” She liked her first name, but always kept the second one changing.

  She looked him over. “Who’s asking?”

  “Steven.” He looked around, dropped his voice. “We’ve been trying to contact you.”

  Nashara held up her wrist and looked at the tag that popped up when she pointed at him. It identified him as Gruther. “I just got access.”

  “Shitsticks,” the man swore. “That explains that.”

  People up here in orbit had the technology implanted behind their eyeballs from late childhood on. Only four-year-olds or the impaired couldn’t wrap their minds around constantly seeing things that weren’t really there.

  “I have my reasons for not plugging directly in,” Nashara said softly. “Your organization and me, we’re done. I’m getting ready to leave. What the hell are you doing bothering me?” She didn’t like this. She glanced around, looking for eyes staring back. This screamed wrong to her.

  “The package you delivered has been discovered,” Steven said, meaning that the Gahe had found the breeder she’d killed. “The recipients are not happy, and they’re looking for the postmaster. They’d like to make an example of you.” Too many people around, Nashara thought, to really deal with Steven.

  “They thinking to look up here yet to express their gratitude?” Nashara stepped back from him and jostled an old man in a ragged suit who swore at her.

  “I’m told they’ll finish their sweep of house’s garden”—that would be Pitt’s Cross—“within the hour.”

  “Steven, or whatever the hell your name is, why is this your problem again? You paid me, I did it. I’m leaving. You’re making yourself traceable. You’re holding me up.”

  Steven swallowed. Nervous, Nashara thought, but about what? “We’re impressed with what you did. They want to help you more. Do you want to see full freedom, do you think humans should be able to exercise all the same rights as the Gahe? Or any other damn alien?”

  “All bullshit aside”—Nashara folded her arms—“what are you trying to offer here? I have a berth to go to. I need to leave.”

  Steven took a deep breath. “You don’t actually have a berth.”

  Nashara stared at him. His neck would break a lot easier that some Gahe’s. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Do you really think that . . . that package delivery was worth the price of a ticket to another world?”

  Nashara shook her head. This wasn’t about the assassination. They’d underestimated her again. “You didn’t think I would make it back out of there.” It wasn’t a question. Just a statement.

  “No one down there has the ability to deliver packages. But we’re working on it, and we’d hoped that what you did would encourage others to try. And if that happened, we would assist them. We’ve been secretly building a network of couriers, and not just here, Nashara,” Steven brimmed with excitement, “all throughout the worlds. We’ve been preparing for decades. We have ships, secret couriers, and lots and lots of packages we want delivered soon.”

  They’d expected a martyr. The League needed someone to strike against the Gahe and die, and then they would help Pitt’s Cross rise against the Gahe. But she had no desire to join. She had a mission of her own.

  Nashara unfolded her arms and tapped his chest. “I’m going to kill you. It’s going to be very slow, very painful, and you’re not going to care about packages,” or any other simple code words.

  “We’re willing to help,” Steven belted out quickly. “Truly. We really need someone with your talent.”

  “That was a onetime thing, Steven. I was a desperate girl in a bad situation.” The toy she’d purchased from the stall couldn’t even be purchased with Pitt’s Cross coin, let alone a trip into orbit. She’d had to do something.

  There. She spotted a simple table knife on a stall table.

  She was so close to getting away from it all. So close. “For a onetime thing, you were very good at it.” Steven sensed her weariness. “We’d like to hire you.”

  The eagle-eyed vendor didn’t spot the snatch, and now Nashara had a weapon. “I have a pressing mission of my own that doesn’t fit in with being a League ‘package deliverer.’ I’m sorry. I need to get to it, Steven, and you’re telling me I’m not going. That’s a problem. And of all people you should understand that when I say I am not for sale, I really mean it.”

  She whipped around him. He jumped, but before he could do anything more, she’d draped one hand around his shoulder and pressed the knife against the small of his back with the other. Bystanders didn’t notice the move, and by keeping herself
pressed close to Steven, no one would notice the knife. They just looked overly chummy.

  The kid behind the stall twitched. He reached under the table, and Nashara raised an eyebrow at him. With a smile the kid stepped back and watched.

  “What are you doing?” Steven asked.

  He tried to pull away, but she yanked him right back and whispered into his ear, “Steven, this is just a table knife, but I’m strong enough that I will begin by puncturing a lung of yours with it. Do you know how much that hurts? After letting you writhe about for a while, I’ll slam this knife into your heart. Of course, you can stop this by giving me what I was promised for doing a very dangerous and dirty job.”

  “We have someone sympathetic to the League,” he said quickly. “The owner of the Daystar. It’s docked here at Villach. We’ll spirit you aboard.”

  Nashara watched as three men in long, green robes picked some items over at a nearby stall while watching the two of them.

  “Headed for?” A pair of grubby women with baskets waited to look at the toys on the table. She was in their way. They looked somewhat impatient.

  “A Freeman colony in orbit around the world Yomi,” he hissed out of the side of his mouth.

  One of the ladies snapped her fingers. “You gonna stand there all day, you two?”

  Yomi lay over fifty wormhole transits downstream and in the right fork, the Thule branch. But it was still fifteen upstream from the dead end of New Anegada. Nashara shook her head. “That’s not as close to the planet I was promised.”

  One of the green-robed men glanced over at the increasingly irate ladies, then at Steven and Nashara.

  “No, but it’s not here, where you’re certain to be taken down by a Gahe hunting pack. We need to leave now. We’ll help you find your way to where you need to be once you’re at the Freeman colony. There’s something we need to tell you about New Anegada anyway.”

  He was being too nice. She was half tempted to snap his arm. And Steven specifically avoided looking in the direction of the men in green.

  “Any Ragamuffin ships at dock?” she asked.

  “They don’t make it this far upstream. You might find one at Yomi though.”

  Nashara leaned closer. “Tell those three men to back way off.”

  “What three men?” Steven looked around.

  She dug the point of her improvised knife into his skin, enough to make her point. “Steven, back them off before things go bad.”

  He looked over at them. They moved back.

  Nashara dug out several bloody pieces of silver and tossed them at Peter. They bounced in a trough of chips and wires. A teenage girl with blond hair and sunburn joined Peter, and the two women in front of Nashara stared at the silver.

  “I have a favor to ask you all,” Nashara said to them.

  “What are you doing?” Steven twisted, shoving his shoulders against her.

  “I’m going to pay a handful of these nice people to walk to the Daystar with us with any friends they can round up, board with me, and then leave once I’m nicely ensconced aboard the ship.”

  He tensed. She’d figured that out as well. With a crowd around them the Villach security programs would keep a close eye on a mob. And for all the rhetoric the League of Human Affairs deployed, she’d bet her life it still preferred to skulk about in the shadows.

  “Now let’s go before Gahe start showing up,” Nashara hissed. Time was running out and things were getting complicated.

  Peter pocketed the silver and tapped the air, and as Nashara stepped forward, kids flowed in toward them, jostling closer as the word spread throughout the lamina that some crazy lady was paying Peter in silver to help walk her over to a ship.

  The Daystar’s cramped quarters made her feel cornered. The grimy passengers bored her. Three indentured workers escaping to the free-zone still dressed in grimy coveralls and casting relieved and yet still suspicious looks around. A human pet with his hair styled in a tall ringed cone and shaved eyebrows, glitter on his cheeks and lips. He didn’t have a name, but he showed her the bar code on his inner thigh. A handful of rich tourists in blue leather. All human. Aliens wouldn’t deign to ride dirty human transports.

  The tourists relaxed, eyes closed, immersed in environments that only they could see. The walls were gray and bare, there was nothing else to do but immerse deep into some personal entertainment lamina. The better part of a day accelerating out from the habitat Villach had already passed. Nashara camped out in the cockpit of the Daystar, a gimballed sphere deep inside the very center of the long, cylindrical ship.

  The portly captain, Danielle, danced from one edge of the cockpit to the other. Her crisp, new emergency gear made Nashara wonder if she was safe aboard the leaky, old tramp ship.

  Danielle admired Nashara, she said. Ever since the moment Nashara had marched aboard her ship surrounded by thirty scruffy stall kids and Steven at knifepoint, waiting with all of them in the cockpit until she could verify that every last League agent had walked off the Daystar. And now Nashara remained in the cockpit with her.

  No doubt the moment Nashara left, the captain could track where Nashara walked, vent a corridor, and leave her exposed to the vacuum. She could survive some of that, but eventually, the captain would win. And if Nashara killed the captain, she could take control of the ship, yes, Nashara had those skills. But once she inserted herself into the ship’s lamina, she would die.

  So Nashara remained in the cockpit, watching the captain, the captain watching her.

  The captain smiled, her belly wobbling in the lack of gravity as they fell away from Villach. “This story I will tell to all my passengers from now on.”

  “That exciting? I thought you were a League sympathizer.”

  Danielle spread her arms. “Whoever my masters will be, I want them all to know that I am loyal to them.”

  Nashara grinned. “Cynical.”

  “Honest.” Danielle tapped the air to give commands. “You are a glorious human being, Nashara. You will die in the most amazing way, someday, and people like me will talk about it for years. Do you believe in the great-person theory?”

  “The what?”

  “There are some people who always sit in the middle of big things. They live large lives. Like you. It is not enough for you to settle into a life in Astragalai and give up, no, you have panache. And I get to sit here in my ship and sail from star to star and watch people like you pass through lives. You’ll make my best dinner anecdote, I think.”

  “It’s hardly great.” Wires snaked all around the cockpit. That couldn’t be safe, could it? “All I want to do is get to my destination in one piece. I’m tired. This is all temporary.”

  At the front of the cockpit Danielle waved her hands, and the cockpit walls faded into screens that showed perspectives of space. Lots of inky darkness. Nothing that really stirred Nashara’s soul. She preferred worlds, not the empty vacuum.

  “The League wanted me to stop and turn you over, you know. I told them you’d kill me. I like my life too much, and they know it. You’re okay aboard my ship.” Danielle chuckled, a bit too high-pitched, as if nervous. “Where are you going?”

  “As close to New Anegada as I can get.”

  “New Anegada?” Danielle shook her head. “Honey, you aren’t going all the way to New Anegada, you know. It’s not only way downstream of here, but it doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Yes, I know.” Nashara sat on the curved floor.

  “The wormhole leading there got cut off. Hundreds of years ago.”

  Nashara turned on Danielle, the sinking, tired feeling in her stomach having nothing to do with the thump and shudder of the ship’s engines. “I’m well aware of it. I just need to get close.”

  Danielle looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. “Why?”

  “It’s none of your damn business.”

  “You’re out of your mind.” Danielle shook her head. “Clean out. Near New Anegada is where the Ragamuffin ships prowl. They’re liab
le to board and shoot up any ship you take out there. Only good thing I see the Hongguo do is patrol against them.”

  Nashara rubbed the side of her temple. “The Ragamuffins, you sure they’re pirates, or do you just hear that they’re pirates?”

  “Seen video of their attacks.” Danielle folded her arms.

  “Sure you have. Ever seen an attack in person, Danielle?”

  “No,” the Daystar captain conceded.

  “Probably because they’re silently docked next to you at habitats, keeping as low a profile as possible. Just a bunch of merchant ships left on the wrong side of the wormhole when Chimson, and then New Anegada, got cut off.” The Black Starliner Corporation had settled both Chimson and New Anegada with islanders and other refugees from Earth, and the Ragamuffins had formed out of necessity. When alien aggression started up, they needed a more militant arm for protection. Humans cheered the Ragamuffins on, until they lost. Then suddenly they were “pirates.”

  “You know a lot about them?”

  Nashara shifted. “Known a few. They used to route between Chimson, Earth, and New Anegada until the Satrapy declared that human ships weren’t allowed to use the wormhole routes or fuel up without licenses. Licenses they refused to grant to New Anegada or Chimson.”

  “You sound annoyed.”

  The Gahe and Nesaru had found humanity through the wormholes and used them. The Satraps dragged the Gahe and Nesaru off their homeworlds into space hundreds of years ago. Humanity was only the latest addition to the benevolent Satrapy. “The aliens don’t know how to make wormholes. But they get to say who uses the wormholes and who doesn’t?”

  “You think the Satrapy doesn’t know how the wormholes work?” Danielle looked sharp and interested, with a half smile.

  “If the Satrapy were that powerful, would they be that scared of human beings running around without supervision?” They could shut down the wormholes to human-occupied worlds that scared them, such as Earth, in agreement for Emancipation. They could do it to stop the nuclear suicide bombers, or to Chimson for trying to gain independence. And Nashara bet that they had also shut down New Anegada for some reason. But Nashara, and many back on Chimson, believed that all the Satrapy could do was shut the wormholes down.