Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “Was it someone you loved? Or a family member?”

  Danielle looked at Nashara. “Someone I loved. Dearly. In one of their antitechnology shutdowns. And they didn’t kill them. Just wiped their mind clean, put them to work for the Hongguo.”

  And that’s why she wouldn’t hand Nashara over to the Hongguo.

  “Fair enough,” Nashara said. “I’ll take your help.”

  Danielle looked at her. “You’re still paying. Consider it a donation to the upcoming fight. I’m buried in deep with the League, but I’m no idiot. Handing you off to the Hongguo is how they work often enough, and that irks me, but who else is there but the League? We’ll need everyone to stand up after the Satrapy is hit, and the League will lead them. I’ll give you my help now, because I know we’ll need your help later. We’ll need people like you who’ve actually fought back.”

  Danielle shut the storage container. Now they understood each other. Good enough. And Nashara knew where to find the nukes if the ship was boarded. That made her feel a little bit better.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Four weeks later Nashara stood in the corner of a clear plastic observation bubble and stared at the panorama of glints from free-floating dockyards and shipping lanes. The industrious hive-ishness of civilization in orbit.

  The pearl orb of the planet Bujantjor hid behind girders, half-assembled ships, docking ports, and whatever else floated in between those structures. The distant star it orbited glittered blue from behind a series of oval mirrors floating in orbits nearby.

  Nashara jerked out of the trance, looked at the time. Had she spent two hours staring out at that? With her Nefertiti-like face reflected back at her from behind the plastic’s scratches, she lit a cigarette and allowed her eyes to film over. Her heart sped up to clear out toxins.

  A few people passing by scrunched their faces up in disgust.

  “What’s she doing?”

  She ignored them. Looked down at a hologram ghosting over the inside of her forearm on the screen.

  Three hundred cubic feet of oxygen debt and accumulating. Danielle had cost her everything, and now Nashara was broke. At five hundred cubic feet of debt they would toss her into an ecocell and boost her toward the location of her choice. In perfect equilibrium she’d eat single-cell proteins and recycle her own wastes for years, floating out in space as her own unique ecosphere.

  It beat being simply pushed out an air lock. Small habitats were brutal. You pulled your own weight. No one had time for dilettantes. Still, this all beat the hell out of Pitt’s Cross. And League people playing games with her.

  “Be careful,” Danielle had told her, before shutting the lock door to leave. “The Hongguo will come across you if you slow down and sit still.”

  “I’ll be looking for work aboard a ship. I need to get to New Anegada.”

  “Right.” Danielle grabbed her shoulder. “Listen, if you really want a place in the League, contact me. It may take a week more, you know how throttled buoy traffic is, but I’ll help you. They need your skills, your experience. Just contact me when you simmer down, okay?”

  “I thought you weren’t League?” Nashara raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m not.” Danielle smiled. “Not at all.” And then she’d shut the air lock.

  Nashara took another drag from the cigarette, watching the tiny numbers at the far right of the display tick up. It flicked over. New dockings.

  Takara Bune. On its way into dock. What was that? Some freighter, run by Buddhists out of Avak Samarah. They had docked a long way from home, but were headed downstream toward Ys. That could put her closer to New Anegada.

  Heart of India, a Nova Terra–bound ship. There was a long journey upstream for you. All the way up to the spot where a wormhole used to lead to Earth. Nashara took a final long drag from the cigarette and rubbed it out between her fingers.

  Shengfen Hao. Hongguo. Her heart skipped a beat. The Hongguo were here. But hopefully not for her. They would have shut down the station and issued warrants already. It would have been loud by now. So far they’d only shut down the outgoing buoys so that no message traffic came in or out, standard Hongguo protocol before docking at a station, though it made everyone here nervous and on edge. Rumors had been percolating about a full communications lockdown throughout dozens of worlds. Just jittery rumors.

  And the Queen Mohmbasa. Just docked within the last several hours. That old name that triggered a flicker of memory. Ragamuffin ship? Maybe. If her memory wasn’t tricking her. It was worth a shot. She would have to talk to them and see if they were what she suspected before they left port tomorrow.

  But for now she already an appointment with the Takara Bune she meant to keep. Even if Takara Bune worked out and she didn’t check with the Queen, she could flit from system to system and take her time on the other, figure out what to do next without pressure. It sounded appealing.

  Nashara flicked the images away and looked over to see a teenager in greasy paper overalls. Pale face. She could almost see the veins under his skin.

  “Hey, station boy.” He quit staring, eyes flicking aside, embarrassed at being caught. “What you looking at?”

  “That a cigarette?” he asked.

  Nashara held up the brown cylinder, end stumped off. “If it isn’t, someone ripped me off.”

  He cracked a smile and his posture eased. “A sinful decadence in these closed quarters.”

  Nashara looked up at the metal bulkheads slowly curving away overhead. Corroded metal merged into stroid dirt and then turned over to large, distant patches of sustainable greenery.

  Mankind came into space to become farmers, she thought.

  “I think the ecosphere can handle me,” she said.

  “Maybe the ecosphere can,” he said. “But I don’t know about the citizenry. They may be freedmen, but they’re awful uptight.”

  Nashara laughed and threw him the cigarette.

  He caught it. Looked at her in surprise.

  “Not many indulgences in a place like this,” she said.

  He pocketed it, and Nashara smiled and walked past him, reached out and ran a finger down his cheek. He pivoted with it, his eyes fixed down her hand to her neck.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Out of your league, deckboy.”

  She took an access tunnel out of the Commons and down toward the docks. But the quick flirt had put a nice spin on the day cycle. The corners of her lips lifted.

  Now all she had to do was get moving again.

  On the Takara Bune the ship’s captain introduced himself as Etsudo. He treated Nashara to pot noodles and some tiny sugar cookies with decorations of smiling animals traced out in the glaze. It was evening on ship, lights dimmed and slowly fading as she made her way through.

  They met in his cabin, looked down on by pictures of his family in formal mounted frames.

  He chattered with her about their ship, his face flickeringly lit by a pair of candles in ceramic bowls. A nuclear engine ran down the center of the ship, and a small pebble bed reactor gave it power. Cargo bays ran along the interior of the ship’s short but cyclindrical body, and the Takara Bune usually spun up to one-third a standard gravity. More if the cargo demanded it. They ran on a standard twenty-four-hour cycle with the usual four-hour crew shifts, alpha, gamma, and zeta, though Nashara saw no crew out anywhere. Just Etsudo in a plain, gray jumper.

  Nashara settled in for interview, but once she put down her pair of chopsticks, he clasped his wiry hands together and leaned forward.

  “While I always enjoy the pleasure of an interesting guest, I will be honest and tell you we have no positions for a person of the, um, skills that you forwarded to me.” He held out his hands, showing her rough calluses. “We work hard and are just a small crew. A ship’s bodyguard, or security force, as you call yourself, is unnecessary to us.” He smiled. “You must realize the Takara Bune is not in the habit of making enemies. That is not our way.”

  Nashara also leaned
forward, placing her hands on her folded legs. “Etsudo, we do not always choose to make enemies. Sometimes they come whether we create them or not.”

  Etsudo rocked back slightly. “I won’t argue that. However, it is simply not the desire of me, or the crew, to do this. We are comfortable in our practices and will take the chance of ill will against the desire to follow certain peaceful precepts.”

  Nashara folded her arms. “Then why am I here, Etsudo?” Her voice dropped an octave.

  Etsudo spread his arms. “Reading the information you forwarded, and looking at you, I’m sure you have a skill we need. Our secondary pilot left. We are short someone with the ability to pilot a ship, access our lamina.”

  “No.” Nashara said. “I don’t do that.”

  “But you are built for this? My ship’s scanners show an amazing buildup of machinery in your cortex and spine for interfacing with advanced lamina.”

  Nashara breathed deeply. He shouldn’t have been able to see past her skin so easily. Something wasn’t quite right with this.

  “I don’t access lamina via straight neural interfaces anymore.”

  “If you have had past experiences that trouble you, we can teach coping mechanisms. I am a teacher. I am good with people’s minds.”

  “Etsudo, I have my reasons.” Nashara unfolded her legs and stood up. “I would say, if you are truly a wise man, you would find ways to also lessen your dependence on such things like that.”

  Etsudo stood up with her. He groaned and held the side of his chest as he did so. “I could hardly call myself a teacher if I did not offer such cautions myself,” he said. “Can you really live here while you wait for another ship out?”

  Nashara shrugged. “I’ve managed.”

  He smiled. “So far. Yes.” He helped her back through the ship to the air lock, guiding her by an elbow, and paused at the entry back out onto the docks.

  Nashara blinked as the door opened into full light. A blazing station high noon with full-spectrum lights glowed all up and down the curved corridor.

  “Well, good luck,” Etsudo said. “If you change your mind in the next eight hours, please contact me.”

  “You leave that quick?”

  “There is nothing in the warrens of this small habitat for us. In the quiet of space we have the time to meditate, studies to attend to. Goods to deliver.”

  Nashara smiled. She liked Etsudo. He was straightforward enough. “Thank you for your time, Etsudo. I wish you the best.”

  “I’m truly very sorry this didn’t work. The best to you as well.” Etsudo smiled sadly and the air lock hissed shut.

  Damn.

  Double damn, she thought, walking past an empty air lock between the Takara Bune and the Hongguo ship not too far down from it.

  She paused outside the ship, shaking an odd feeling of dislocation. Something that kept evading her, like a blind spot, the more she thought about it. Several feng walked out into the dock bays. Smooth-moving, like oiled machines, human warriors bred back for far too many generations, then trained in the martial algorithmic arts of the Hongguo. Nashara watched them melt out into the crowd dressed in khaki overcoats. Overcoats: an oddity on a weather- and temperature-regulated station.

  What weaponry were they packing? It made her nervous. She needed off this habitat. Soon. She must have spotted them out of the corner of her eye and gotten the jitters.

  She turned back the other way, putting distance between the Hongguo’s trained killers and herself. Next she needed to talk to the Queen Mohmbasa.

  “You what?”

  Her roommate, Len, sputtered the words. Danielle’s cousin had balked at splitting a room, but Nashara had come with a message from Danielle and some fresh Villach produce from the Daystar to guarantee a place and some time to get things in order.

  He raised his hands in frustration.

  “Turned them down,” Nashara said. She tossed him a plastic pack of body sponges. He reeked of the shitfarm. The whole room did. He hardly noticed it. And sponging off didn’t cut it for him, he needed disinfected and run through a sterilizing chamber.

  He’d come in the door several hours earlier than she’d expected. First thing, he’d asked her about her visit aboard Takara Bune, and she’d just laughed and asked him if he paid the dock gossips for their chatter.

  No smile. He asked her if she’d gotten anything.

  And Nashara told him.

  Len looked down at the packet, kneaded it, then looked back up at her. His baby-face looks, earnest brown eyes, curly hair, strong arms, all of that melted away. Just anger now.

  “I can’t fucking believe you.” He threw the body sponges down. “You’re ruining me. I put you up for three weeks since you ran out of money, and you’ve been lurking around the docks, smoking up your debt, and you finally get an offer and you turn it down. I agreed to help Danielle out, but that’s bullshit.”

  “Look,” Nashara said.

  “No. I have no debt to you. I have been nice. Now I know you’re just taking advantage of me.” He quivered as he shouted at her.

  Nashara bit her lip. She owed him, but this was getting annoying. He’d been nice enough before, thinking he had an attractive roommate. No doubt some sliver of hope about that had let her get three weeks of rooming off him. “They wanted me to interface with their ship, pilot it.”

  Len squatted and picked up the packet. “You know, there are some who could only dream of being given an offer like that.”

  Nashara looked down at him. Stained boots, dirty fingernails, waterproof waders.

  “I can’t do that . . .” Her existence in this room rubbed his face in his status. Len worked deep in the almost literal bowels of the station in recycling, monitoring the bacteria levels in giant pools of sludge percolating around the waste-disposal points.

  In his view, she had some psychological hang-up not to make more in a few months than he would ever see in his life. She could go anywhere, do almost anything.

  He would spend his life here.

  Nashara was doing anything she could to get out of this as-yet-unnamed, still-under-construction orbiting pit of a tin can.

  She just couldn’t allow a direct neural access with the lamina. She couldn’t afford to unleash herself on it. Chimson had created her as a weapon. She’d watched her nine sisters let loose on lamina, out there in the cold space. Watched them rip apart an entire ship as they took it over.

  It was her secret. Her burden.

  “Len. You know I owe you. Big.”

  That was all that kept her here. He knew that she had more opportunities than he did, that she could repay him. Big. And damnit, she would.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t look too excited about it.

  The door chimed.

  Len looked even less excited about that.

  Nashara nodded at it. “Who’s that?”

  “No one.”

  He walked around her to it, pulled it open, and revealed four Honggua. Their black-and-white leather uniforms identified them as zhen cha: station scouts for the Hongguo. Had it been Hongguo feng, she wouldn’t have had time to worry about uniform design.

  All across the habitat alarms sounded, doors locked. The Hongguo had shut the place down. They’d just been waiting, cautious, biding their time.

  “They paid you,” Nashara said.

  Len looked down at his dirty boots. Avoiding her eyes.

  Three zhen cha remained guarding the door, one of them covering the corridor with his eyes, hand near his belt. The first one, a pair of gold pips on his tight collar indicating he led the group, stepped in front of Nashara.

  He pulled out a Geiger counter with a flourish, ran it over Nashara’s chest, arms, then stomach. It blipped, gave a reading, and satisfied, the man snapped it back onto his belt.

  “You are under arrest for technological progress violations under the Benevolent Satrapy. Do you have anything to say?”

  Nashara shook her head.

  They cuffed her while she stood there gl
aring at Len. Moron. He had no idea what he was turning her over to. And for all his hatred of antihuman Hongguo, Len had rolled over quick for a large reward.

  Stupid, she chided herself. But then she knew almost nothing about lying low or settling down.

  She did know, however, that she did not want to end up as a brainwashed foot soldier for the Hongguo.

  “Len.” He looked up at her, face uncertain. No doubt hovering somewhere between happiness at finally seeing a drain to his financial security gone, and guilt at turning over a family member’s friend. “You know what the Hongguo do, right?”

  “You’ll be given a fair chance to explain yourself,” the zhen cha cuffing her said.

  Nashara shook her head. “Did you and Danielle set this up when she dropped me off? A little extra profit off the whole experience?”

  Len shook his head. “No. It’s just me.”

  “You lousy shitfarmer—” One of the zhen cha put a patch over her mouth to shut her up.

  “If you’ve done nothing wrong,” Len said, “then it should not be a problem. They’ll get your DNA sample, give you your documentation back. They’ll prove you didn’t set off a nuclear bomb on Villach. I gave them the records from Danielle’s ship proving you were aboard and couldn’t have done it. You can open a formal line of credit. It’ll be okay. Everything will be fine.” He still stared at the ground miserably.

  Nashara’s eyes narrowed.

  He was hunting for ways to sleep at night now.

  Full of shit.

  She walked past him, looking straight ahead.

  Best of luck to you, Len, she thought. He’d need it if she ever ran into him again. She should have roomed with one of the human pets that got off the Daystar, she could have kept him intimidated and quiet.

  Enough remorse. She focused on figuring out how to get out of this, wondered how she’d make him pay for this.

  Of course, the way things really worked, there was a good chance she’d be brain-wiped before he saw her again and all hell would have broken loose.