Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Danielle shrugged. “Who knows? Look, Nashara, how long are you going to remain in my cockpit? We’re approaching the first wormhole on our little journey downstream towards Yomi. We have a lot of wormholes and miles to cross before we get there. You going to camp out in here for three weeks?”

  “If need be.”

  Danielle laughed. “Nashara, if I’m going to kill you, or dump you out the air lock, or whatever you think I’m going to do, there isn’t much you can do about it unless you plan on having all your meals in here.”

  Nashara did not laugh. She had found a spare set of acceleration webbing and pulled the retractable ribbons from their recessed spots. She wove the fabric around herself. “That offer sounds good. You have a jump seat here. I’m happy to ride with you. Where’s the catheter?”

  “My best dinner story . . . ,” Danielle muttered. She turned and got into the soft chair hanging dead center in the cockpit and strapped herself in. “The League will be waiting for you on Yomi. They’ll kill you there.”

  “Of course.”

  Danielle raised a finger and closed her eyes. She settled into her chair, and the thump of the engines changed. By now the Daystar had climbed high out of Astragalai’s gravity well, almost enough to break free of the planet. The Gahe choose to keep their wormholes far out from the clustered near-planet orbits.

  On the screens Danielle provided, Nashara saw a cloud of communications buoys as large as their own ship. They pulsed a riot of laser light at the blank piece of inky dark in front of them. Buoys on the other side would snag the light, parse it, then pass it on. Forty-eight worlds ruled by the secretive alien Satraps, connected through thousands of wormholes strung throughout almost random parts of the galaxy, held together by threads of light. It sounded tenuous, but the Satrapy ruled strongly enough through its surrogates.

  It took attention to thread this needle. Anything less than true center and the ship risked tearing itself into debris against the sides of the wormhole. Meanwhile, Nashara was sure Danielle had to listen to the chatter of traffic control, contending with other ships in line to transit.

  Nashara stared into the round plate of nothingness on the screens until it swallowed them and the lines of flickering laser light all along their sides. A tunnel of light illuminated by stellar dust. Her stomach flip-flopped, her brain trying to process something that it couldn’t understand.

  Now the screens showed more buoys and the remains of a half-processed chunk of rock. Girders and docking tubes thrust out from the side.

  “Transit number one,” Danielle said, and reopened her eyes. “Of many more to go.”

  The Daystar coasted toward the debris. No planets existed out here. A light-year away from Astragalai, the planet’s sun just a pinprick from here. The next wormhole lay on the other side of the rock, a few thousand miles away. A smart captain such as Danielle wouldn’t waste much fuel speeding up to it but coast toward it with a few adjustments.

  Nashara’s wrist screen chirped. She looked down. A simple text message from Steven: “You are now a wanted criminal in all forty-eight worlds of the Satrapy for the detonation of a nuclear bomb in the Gahe section of Villach. Happy travels.”

  Nashara deleted it.

  “Congratulations,” Danielle said, revealing that she’d gotten a copy of the message. “My best story yet. And a wonderful move on their part, pointing the finger your way.”

  “They’re insane,” Nashara said, and Danielle frowned. “A nuke?” They probably killed more humans at Villach than aliens.

  “They said the Hongguo will be hunting you,” Danielle said. “Your name and DNA profile will be on every ship of theirs. Now you’ve made enemies of both the League and the Hongguo. Dangerous.”

  Nashara sighed. “Every move I dig myself in deeper.”

  “You hungry?” Danielle asked. “I can have one of my guys bring something over before the next transit here. It’s squeezy stuff, right, but I’m hungry, for one.”

  Nashara stared at her. “And then when I use the bathroom in a couple hours, you have the ship lock me in, suck the air out, turn me into a mummy?”

  “You’re paranoid.” Danielle shook her head.

  “Everyone has been out to get me of late,” Nashara snorted. “I feel it’s justified.”

  Danielle laughed. “If you have to use the shitter, I’ll come with you, I swear.”

  Nashara wanted to like her. Wondered if she’d have to kill her eventually. It would be a waste to get cornered into a losing situation like that.

  Besides, the Daystar would stand no chance of outrunning any Hongguo ship if they decided she was worth the trouble of looking for. And now that the League assholes had sicced them on her, she only had to worry about them. The League would stand clear and just watch.

  Just as long as the League hadn’t told the Hongguo to find her aboard the Daystar, she’d be okay. Hopefully they needed their sympathetic captain Danielle’s goodwill more than they wanted Nashara dead.

  Hopefully.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Six days and eleven wormhole transits later Nashara lowered her guard and took the luxury of a quick sponge bath as the Daystar passed between a trio of wormholes spaced a thousand miles apart. They trailed each other in geostationary orbit around a massive gas giant. Several massive storms near the equator stared down on the speck of a ship as it slowly drifted from one wormhole to the next over several hours.

  They were downstream of Astragalai and getting close to Harpin now. Certainly moving in the right direction, Nashara thought, although Harpin was a habitable world with a Satrap living in a habitat in orbit over it. And maybe a Hongguo ship or two. Not somewhere to loiter.

  Danielle hung just outside, keeping a hand on the top of the opaque curtain so that Nashara knew where she was.

  “What would you do if I just kicked off for the cockpit right now?” she asked.

  “I’d kill you.” Nashara pulled her leathers back on. She’d added an assortment of blades fashioned from parts found loose in the cockpit. She’d had a lot of time floating around to make shivs.

  The rest of the Daystar didn’t really exist for her. Only the nearby bathroom and the cockpit’s sphere. And Danielle. Two more weeks to Yomi. So far no Hongguo ships had caught up with them and demanded a boarding.

  She played for time now. But then she’d been doing that for five years now. Keeping her head low, trying to meander her way toward New Anegada.

  Danielle looked Nashara over. “So what’s your whole story?”

  “You really want that dinner-story prize, don’t you?” Nashara stared back. “Or maybe you just want to sell the information to your League friends. Your new masters.”

  “Would the League of Human Affairs be any worse than having the Satraps, and the Hongguo doing their dirty work? Who cares who’s in charge?”

  Nashara shrugged. A point. But anyone crazy enough to set off a nuclear bomb in a habitat wasn’t fit to be in charge of anything.

  “Seriously, where the hell did you come from?”

  Tired of evasions, Nashara looked at Danielle. “If I tell you, will you level with me on something?”

  Danielle shrugged. “If I can.”

  “You got a copy of that message from Steven. You’re a lot more than just a League sympathizer, aren’t you?” She was probably Steven’s superior.

  “Somewhat, yes.” Danielle smiled. “It’s a very loose organization, and I have things that the League needs. They pay close attention. But trust me when I say I’m no threat to you. If anything, I can be an ally. I’m already diverting my ship somewhat to help you out, because I would like to help rebuild your relationship with the League. Besides, you’re interesting.”

  An ally. Nashara hadn’t had an ally in a long time. “I’m from Chimson,” she said.

  “That’s old history,” Danielle said. Chimson had been cut out of the wormhole network hundreds of years ago. Just after Earth and before New Anegada.

  “I’m very old,”
Nashara said. “You have some closely regulated antiaging technologies around. Chimson excelled at them and I’m a product of that. One of the reasons the Satrapy had the Chimson wormhole shut down was that fear that we would make it cheap and spread it.”

  “Hundreds of years old?” Danielle fidgeted in the middle of the bathroom doorway.

  “Hundreds, yes. I was there, for the final battle at the wormhole, trying to keep the Hongguo back.” The Ragamuffins were not just New Anegada’s mercenary protection, Chimson had its own as well. Nashara smiled. “I was with the Ragamuffins when we killed the Satrap in orbit around our planet.”

  “I’ve heard that rumor,” Danielle said.

  “We took Chimson from them with our bare hands,” Nashara said. “And even though they shut us away from the rest of humanity, it was still a glorious thing.” Here in the Satrapy communication was monitored, and there were only millions of humans scattered around among the aliens. Monitored. Tagged. Herded. They put up with delayed messages being passed through the buoys for no reason. But on Chimson . . . “You should see what ideas and people flourished as we all jammed together. It must have been like Earth before the pacification, with all those billions of minds so close together.” She stopped.

  Danielle just hung there, listening. “And?”

  “It didn’t stop, after we were cut off. We grew. And we decided to give something back to everyone out here. I volunteered to come back. I was packed away with nine others in a vehicle flung out to the nearest working wormhole, almost a light-year away. Took many decades to get back into the wormhole system, get back into the forty-eight worlds.”

  “But why in hell’s name would you do that?”

  “You’ve seen me in action. There were ten cloned and rebuilt like me, my sisters. We were sent back here.” But not as mere soldiers. Their bodies were just containers, a delivery mechanism. But she wasn’t going to be talking to Danielle about that. She crossed her arms. “A Hongguo ship captured us and we woke up in interrogation cells. My nine sisters wreaked a particular hell on them before they died, and only I got out. Five years ago. We were supposed to offer our services to New Anegada, but it didn’t take long to find out they didn’t exist.” And hearing that a free human society lived in Pitt’s Cross had led to a two-year mistake. Pitt’s Cross didn’t have the tools to even begin to wrap their minds around her particular talent.

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m just looking for a quiet place, run by humans. That’s all. I need a home, Danielle. I just want to stop and be home.”

  Another wormhole approached. The conversation ended as Danielle moved them into the cockpit.

  Three more transits. Danielle smiled and turned to look at Nashara.

  “What?” Nashara heard something skitter through a tray of hoses and wires wrapped around the equator of the cockpit.

  “They’re waiting for you on Yomi.”

  “Hongguo? Or your buddies?”

  “Hongguo. The last buoy forwarded a warning.”

  Nashara took a deep breath. She would have to roam around the Daystar and see if she could cobble together what she needed for a showdown. Anything explosive, anything sharp. And of course, at Yomi she’d be near a powerful and massive lamina.

  She’d probably die at Yomi. But the havoc she would wreak would never be forgotten by the Hongguo.

  Nashara’s mind was the real weapon. The moment she made a direct nueral connection, it would rip free through lamina, spawning copies of itself and infiltrating every corner of the environment.

  Chimson scientists had told her she needed monitors and machines to help her infiltrate and infect the lamina properly. At Yomi she would have none of that help. Just as her sisters had had none of that help when they’d awoken in the Hongguo interrogation cells. Like them, she’d burn her own mind out in the process.

  “Do you think others could do the same?” Danielle asked. She slipped out a sharp knife from the belt of tools around her waist and looked over at the mess of conduit.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Govern themselves like you described. Without Hongguo, or Satraps, or League freedom fighters? Could we spread out?” Lightning-quick Danielle stabbed at a pile of wires that sparked. She pulled out a six-inch-long cockroach. Its feelers twitched as it squirmed to get free of the needlelike knife spearing its thorax.

  “I’ve been in it,” Nashara said. “It’s messy, but it’s all ours.”

  “I’d like to see that someday.” Danielle looked away from the dying insect and reached in the pocket of her flight suit. She tossed a piece of plastic at Nashara.

  “What’s this?”

  “We’re making a quick stop to drop off some cargo. An original painting from Earth, the Moaning Lisa I think. Another priceless trinket that only the aliens get to own. The habitat orbits a rock called Bujantjor, two habitable worlds upstream of Yomi. I have a cousin there. I assume you have some more precious metals on you?”

  Nashara nodded. “Yes.”

  “That’s your pass in.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Nashara frowned.

  “You tell a good tale. Besides, this won’t be free. I want all those pieces of silver or gold you stole off that alien you killed on Astragalai. You can find a job on Bujantjor, we’ll give you a fake identity.”

  Nashara didn’t budge. Danielle had tipped her hand. “How did you know where the silver and gold came from?”

  Danielle smiled. “It was my idea to kill that Gahe breeder. The League needs a spark for their revolution; we have so much ready and waiting to strike against the Satrapy. They wanted to use the nuke, but I suggested the martyr approach. It seems to work for us humans so well. But you lived, the nuke got used, and here we are.”

  “And yet you claim you’re not really League. You could be handing me off to anything or anyone out there.”

  “Look, have I done anything to endanger you? No. I’ll walk with you into Bujantjor.”

  “Right by my side?” Nashara laughed.

  “Just like you and that League page boy you dragged aboard. If I’m lying, you get to slit my throat. And we’ll call it even.”

  Nashara thought about it. She brushed her hand over the tiny healed scars all over her thighs. “Give me a sharp knife, a proper knife.”

  Danielle tossed Nashara the knife with the dead insect on the end. She pointed at it. “Do you believe we’re just roaches swarming around in the edifices of greater beings than ourselves? Hitchhiking our way around?”

  Nashara looked down at the massive cockroach. “Obviously not. I’ve seen different.”

  “Then consider that I want to see that for all of us, which is why I help the League, and why I’ll help you.”

  Nashara reached down and tapped the gold leaf taped to her inner thighs. “You make yourself out to be an altruist, but you’re going to gain a lot here.”

  Danielle laughed. “Of course. I know that.”

  Nashara would miss her. She slid the dead roach off the knife. “Without that gold and silver I’m dead in the water.”

  “You still don’t trust me?” Danielle asked.

  Nashara decided to see how far she could push. “I think you’re an opportunist. You talk about wanting self-determination, but like all others, you’ll keep doing what you do in comfort, siding with the winners as you see fit.”

  “Oh.” Danielle raised her eyebrows. “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Cargo hold.” Danielle spun. Nashara paused a moment, then followed her through the ship past the passengers and their sections and out to the edges of the ship via corridors and air locks where the cold made their breath hang in the air.

  Nashara could feel the vacuum leaking through shoddy joints and bad seals. One failure and they could be blown out into space with failed equipment. She could live through that. Danielle couldn’t.

  Danielle opened a door leading into one of the containers along the hull of her ship. Frost rimmed the metal. Too
much longer in here and Danielle would damage herself. Nashara could see that the captain’s fingers shook. She hadn’t dressed warmly enough to be out here.

  “This is a sealed storage unit.” Danielle grinned, her teeth chattering. “If anyone official checks, I can’t access it. I have no idea what I’m carrying.”

  “But you can open it nonetheless.”

  Danielle nodded. She walked over and tapped one of the boxes. It heaved open and lit up. “Small-yield nuclear warheads, and other such arms for ships like mine.” She closed it. Then waved her hand at another part of the hold. “Cloaked comms buoys. We’ve been setting up our own alternative communications array to link the League together when the time is right. We laid some of the first ones nine years ago. The League has the will, Nashara. When the time comes, it’ll wipe out every last one of them.”

  Nashara actually felt the tug of a smile starting. She stopped it. “And you contribute to this, or just ferry it?”

  “I contribute damnit. I’m rich, extraordinarily rich, Nashara. I worked for the Satrapy. Spent years exploring the wormhole network. From upstream Nova Terra all the way downstream to Farhaven, and a lot of the forks along the main routes. And now I’m atoning for my sin, for working for them. Their rewards to me will fund their own destruction.”

  “You’re bitter,” Nashara said.

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” Danielle snapped.

  Nashara floated closer, reading the heat in Danielle’s face and looking at her body language. “Who did they kill that you loved so much to turn on them?”

  “It’s none of your fucking business. We’ll kill them for what they’ve done to all of us. That was the problem with the Emancipation, the Earth fighters, they wouldn’t go all the way. Backed off for the promise of a closed wormhole and being left alone. They left the rest of us to twist out here. We won’t make the same mistakes.”