Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  She hoped he’d at least lose some sleep over it all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Random passersby stared, then cleared out of the way, as the zhen cha marched Nashara down the corridor. Fear fluttered through the air. The Hungguo bagged someone, check it out.

  Glad it isn’t me.

  Nashara didn’t see a chance to break free of the zhen cha just yet. And then she spotted several feng dressed in dockside paper overalls, mixing with the crowd, eyeing her.

  Run now and they wouldn’t give her the courtesy of living.

  Head down, shoulders slumped in defeat, Nashara shuffled along, watching, waiting. It took fifteen minutes to get to the docking locks. They passed the berth to Takara Bune, and Nashara looked over at the locked air lock with a wistful gaze. She continued to shuffle on.

  The berth for Shengfen Hao came into view around the curve of docksides. Black-and-white leather uniforms mingled outside the open maw leading into the ship.

  One lock to go before they had her in their vise.

  One empty lock.

  Forget lying low. Forget being nice. Time to move. Time to be herself again.

  Nashara tried to smile underneath the patch, but couldn’t. She snorted with annoyance. Using the slightest of movements, brushing too close to the zhen cha on her right, she started subtly herding the whole group closer to the empty lock.

  Closer.

  Maybe fifteen feet.

  The zhen cha pushing her along frowned and started to move them back away, adjusting the direction of his gait.

  Nashara stepped forward and head-butted the zhen cha next to her, spun around him, kicked the next one in the chin while she dislocated her shoulders with a popping shrug.

  The zhen cha holding her turned. Good. Nashara stepped backward over her bound hands, holding them up in front of her, and shook her shoulders back into place. She kicked the stun prod out of the man’s hands and into her own.

  She grabbed him by the hair, holding the prod at his skull and raising her eyebrows at the remaining zhen cha.

  He stayed frozen, not sure what to do next.

  Three feng moved out of the crowd, disguises dropped and their guns raised. They ran at her, cutting off escape vectors.

  Goddamn, they moved fast: half the docking bay in three easy loping strides.

  But they weren’t thinking quite like her yet.

  Nashara kept dragging the struggling zhen cha with her until she backed up against the massive docking lock. She cracked the prod against the control panel, listened to it short out.

  She grabbed the emergency handle and yanked as the zhen cha pounded uselessly against her. He made a good temporary human shield in case anyone started shooting.

  The internal motors whined loudly as the inner air-lock door, five inches thick, ten feet tall, began to split open with a puff of stale, grease-smelling air. One, two, three seconds, the feng stopped and frowned.

  Yeah, watch this. Nashara hit the zhen cha over the head with her cuffed hands and slid sideways through the opening as he slumped. She stood inside a massive chamber facing the outer set of air-lock doors. There was no attached ship beyond them.

  The inner doors continued their slow crawl open. The feng would wait until they’d opened farther before exploding in after her.

  She waited behind the door to jump them anyway, standing right next to the emergency ship-release lever. First though, she flexed her arms using clasped hands as a lever point. She watched as the cuffs bit into her skin until they hit the stratum basale and stopped against something infinitely harder than skin.

  Then she pushed harder, watching the metal warp until it snapped. She threw the cuffs aside and took another step backward to compensate for the still-opening lock doors.

  Okay.

  She looked down at her inner forearm, tapped a few menus, made a call.

  “I am Nashara Cascabel.” She was pretty sure she’d used that last name before with New Anegadans before both Chimson and New Anegada were cut off from the Satrapic worlds. “I think, I think I remember your ship. You are Raga. I am Raga also, from Chimson. I will be at your air lock in five minutes and I need shelter and protection.”

  The only kind of gambles left were the big ones. Time to suck it up. She was going to have to hurt someone, fight to make it out.

  She hyperventilated, supercharging and oxygenating her blood until spots danced in front of her eyes. Orifices clamped closed with triggered muscle, clear dark membranes shuttered her eyes.

  She yanked the emergency ship-release lever.

  The docking clamps on either side of the bay rolled open into release mode and the outer air-lock doors blew open. Klaxons blared, so loud they buzzed through her despite the closed ears.

  With another series of shudders the inner lock doors reversed their direction to stop the massive gale of air rushing out of the station. Another few seconds and it would just be Nashara in an airless air lock.

  The first feng somersaulted in high, paper overalls crinkling and giving her a split-second warning. Nashara plucked him out of the air and grabbed his chin to snap his neck. Like a cat falling out of a tree he twisted around and grabbed her forearm.

  It didn’t snap.

  His eyes only registered a moment’s dismay. He punched her neck as he landed on his two feet.

  His fingertips splintered.

  Nashara kicked him in the stomach. Threw him against the lock doors. Grabbed his head and slammed it against the five-inch-thick metal and felt it give in. Instant lobotomy; crushed frontal lobe.

  One feng down.

  She unlocked her nostrils and started hyperventilating again. The doors had five inches to go.

  Another feng slipped through. He took her rib-shattering kick, sprang up, and ran to the other side of the lock. He looked back at the lock doors as they sealed.

  The outer doors, what felt like the gravity-determined “floor” of the lock, opened in an explosion of escaping air.

  Nashara ran toward the crack and jumped through.

  The feng, insanely quick for his packed muscular frame, jumped with her. He exhaled all his breath in fog of crystals. Smart, his lungs wouldn’t explode. He had a slight chance. Nashara ignored his grip. She caught the lip of the lock and jerked to a jarring stop.

  He wrapped his legs around her waist and squeezed. Nashara twisted, trying to hold on to the door and dislodge him. If she let go, they would both be spun clear of the station.

  They wriggled around each other like a pair of greased eels, trying to gain a hold on one another, until the feng began to bloat. Ice formed around his eyes.

  An inhumanly skilled fighter, true, but just a human in a vacuum.

  He began to forget his training, his centered warrior calm. He scratched at her skin, ripping lengths of it off in his fingernails.

  Nashara turned and faced him. He froze. A midnight-black face with whole midnight-black eyes was what Nashara knew he would see. A demoness.

  Convulsions began.

  She kicked him free. Watched him drop down away from her, pitched out into space.

  The wrestling left her heart rate up. Nashara forced it down in the sixties, a third of what it had been. The adjustment dizzied her.

  Then she moved along the outer docks. Hanging from ladders where she could, using crevices, cracks, and anything else she could hang on in other places. The station’s rotation made this feel as if she were hanging above a very, very long fall into an abyss.

  She kept in the camouflage of the constantly moving shadows of spinning station’s curved outer wall, eyes searching for a particular dock number. Outer skin flaked off in the vacuum. Her hair broke off and fell away from her.

  Fifteen minutes later. She almost doubted she could make it. But here it was. The Queen Mohmbasa. Ragamuffin. Maybe. She prayed for it.

  Nashara struggled along the hull of the long, cylindrical ship to find a small service air lock. She hit open, banged on it, and kept banging and banging until it open
ed and she swung in.

  By the time the air cycled in and pressurized, she was on her hands and knees, barely able to see from oxygen deprivation.

  The first breath, when she ripped the patch off her mouth and sucked it in, was insanely sweet and cloyingly fresh.

  “I’m Raga,” she croaked when two fuzzy, but seemingly armed, forms appeared at the door. The membrane over her eyes refused to open, frozen shut. She couldn’t focus.

  A pair of hands grabbed her, pulled her out of the lock, and laid her on a cold metal grating. “Grab some tissue for a look at her DNA. Run it, get that back to me as soon as possible.”

  The nearest shape reached down, pricked her arm.

  “Broke the syringe.” The shape rustled around, then Nashara felt a swab scraping the inside of her cheek. “She modified to survive vacuum.”

  “You think?”

  “Get ready to burn out the dock if the Hongguo twitch. Throw her in one of the empty rooms.”

  Nashara remained limp, regathering strength as she was picked up onto someone’s shoulder. They walked her down through a corridor, hitting her head against a bulkhead, and then into a room.

  Nashara leaned against the wall, shivering from heat loss and burned-off energy reserves. She stood there, unable to pass out thanks to her combat-enabled body, experiencing every wave of pain, every severed, screaming nerve.

  “Don’t know the hell you is,” one of the two blobs said. “But you gone and pick the wrong ship to get aboard. The moment we try to blow out this station, the Hongguo go come hard for we tail. Blow us out the sky, you too. We dead, and now you is too.”

  The door shut. Locks clicked. Nashara slumped to the floor facedown.

  Triple damn it, she was alive. Fuck if the pain wasn’t somewhat sweet because of that.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Four days before his ship had arrived at Bujantjor and before meeting Nashara, Etsudo Hajiwara had watched the destruction of an entire habitat once home to tens of thousands inside its protective shell. His stomach churned slightly as fifteen low-yield nuclear charges detonated three hundred kilometers away, each a tiny blinding flash of light. The windows before him darkened as the flash grew. The habitat Dragin-Above ceased to exist.

  “Magnify that,” Etsudo ordered. A bald acolyte near the periphery of the semicircular room, his crimson robes hanging in the air around him, spun dials until the window in front of Etsudo visibly flexed. Its width and curvature changed, and the great globes of the destroyed habitat jumped into focus. Etsudo watched as they split apart in a fiery mass of debris.

  The men beside him watched from the curved windows and safety of the five-mile-long Hongguo flagship Gulong. They shook their heads.

  “A waste,” one whispered. “They were warned.”

  A thousand had refused to hand themselves over to the Hongguo for reconditioning. Just a handful, really, of the millions scattered throughout habitats and some of the forty-eight worlds of the Benevolent Satrapy. But still . . . Etsudo swallowed. He’d come to this habitat once three years ago. They talked freely to him about building artificial intelligences, and Etsudo had done his best to buy their patents to do nothing with. He’d even used shell companies to hire their best neuroprogrammers away. It hadn’t been enough to stop this.

  A losing battle. So often, despite his best efforts.

  One of the Jiang shifted closer to him. Deng. Always following behind Etsudo to suppress that which Etsudo failed to keep in check. Like today.

  “They knew their options.” Jiang Deng folded his arms.

  “Memory wipes and servitude to us, or death.” Etsudo shook his head.

  “Artificial intelligence is an illegal technological path. You sympathize with them?” Deng’s eyes narrowed in on Etsudo. The other Jiang, the generals of the Hongguo, looked over.

  “It’s my job,” Etsudo said, looking at the debris. He used nondestructive means to control illegal technologies. Deng used destructive ones.

  “You are passing some sort of judgment on me?”

  “No.” Etsudo looked back at the eleven Jiang who hung in the air around him. They wore tightly fitted ceramic body armor, many of them with the long-tailed-dragon sigil originally used by the Hongguo founders. “The Satrapy doesn’t stand certain technology. We keep emancipation alive. We’re all free as long as Hongguo are around to keep research carefully directed.” The words were rote and etched in his memory. And too true.

  “Indeed,” Jiang Deng said. Etsudo, looking to avoid conflict, stared back out toward the destroyed habitat. Behind the debris the orange orb of the planet Dragin stared back at Etsudo, reproaching him, he imagined. The windows closed. Five-inch-thick blast doors slid down as the debris field from what had once been the habitat Dragin-Above, home to five thousand families, pattered against the thick hull of the Gulong.

  Maybe humans would orbit the planet Dragin again in a few decades, Etsudo thought as he turned away from the control center and followed the Jiang out toward the docking bays to return to their respective ships.

  “We have someone new for your crew,” Jiang Deng told him as everyone coasted along one of the corridors of the Gulong. “We’re beginning something new. The Satrapy needs us, Etsudo. Do you understand?”

  Etsudo did. They didn’t trust him any longer. Now they would be appointing a second captain to ride along with Etsudo. He’d been expecting this for several years now. “This new crew, he’ll split the captainship with me, won’t he?”

  “Yes,” Deng said. “The Satrapy is sending us out with new tasks, new missions. Brandon will be there to help you during this transition. We’ll be stepping up our enforcement activity.”

  They would say handling a whole ship on his own for so long was too much. It would be for Etsudo’s own benefit to share the burden. It would be a polite farce.

  Etsudo knew there used to be more Hongguo ships with the same charter as his. Trading ships. All disguised suppressors of advanced technology. All endowed with massive budgets, seeking to keep things in check.

  Now he was one of a handful. Transition indeed. He was being phased out.

  He didn’t dare question it. Some tradition, a momentum, that kept him in his place as the captain and ruler of the Takara Bune. Etsudo did not want to lose that.

  “This is Brandon Saxwere.” Jiang Deng introduced him to a tall man with a shaved scalp, green eyes, and pinched face. Brandon waited politely by a crux in one of the corridors, obviously expecting them. He wore a simple gray robe, the fringe clipped to his ankles for zero gravity.

  “Good to meet you.” Brandon smiled a warm, honest smile and Etsudo hated him.

  Etsudo snagged the railing to come to a stop and bowed his head. “And you.”

  This was the beginning of the end of his life. He should have felt more anger about it. Etsudo turned to one of the windows along the corridor and looked into a vast cavern. The walls teemed with an orderly nest of people. All with shaved heads, blank eyes, and wearing crimson paper robes carefully clipped to their ankles as well. They sat at rows of plastic desks, strapped in with acceleration webbing.

  Each one worked on a small calculation using an abacus on the desk in front of them. The result was passed on to a station in the next concentric ring, or if the instructions on the card passed to them dictated, to one of their sides. Waves of human-computed math rolled up and down the sides of the massive ball of humanity. And Etsudo could see through spokes into smaller and smaller spheres of humanity, all the way to the center of the sphere where the central controllers sat, staring outward at their machine.

  No computer virus would ever take this ship. Only slide rules and abacus could compute orbits, or calculate the speed of the Gulong, or position the slender needle of the ship’s nose into the heart of a wormhole to destroy it. A gift from the Satrapy after it was used to cut Earth away from the wormhole network, to keep the rest of the race in check.

  When Etsudo looked back from the human computers, Jiang Deng excused himself.
“I must head to the Stage Two briefing.”

  “Stage Two?” Etsudo had heard nothing of a briefing, or of a second component to the shutdown of Dragin-Above.

  “It’s a military operation.” Deng smiled. “Destruction-oriented, not of interest to you.”

  He left. Brandon hovered in the air and looked in at the chamber of human calculators.

  “It’s a test chamber for the Dragin-Above refugees.” Brandon said. “The main processing chamber for the Gulong is closer to the heart of the ship. They’re just checking here to make sure the reconditioning is holding and that the new training is working.”

  “We’re not tools,” Etsudo muttered. “We’re not just things to be used. We’re unique creatures, thinkers, inventors, believers. When we stop remembering that, we are no longer human, are we?”

  “Better than death.” Brandon bowed his head as he said this.

  “Are you sure about that? What is your last memory?”

  “I’m as mentally pure as you.” Brandon folded his arms. “And what is your critique? The crew of the Takara Bune are reconditioned, aren’t they? Don’t they serve you well enough?”

  They served Etsudo well. But not because he allowed Hongguo to recondition their minds. Etsudo changed the topic. “Why are you really coming aboard my ship?”

  “You’ve held your own ship together long enough. I’m your second-shift captain, your night captain.” Brandon raised his hands. “I don’t know how you’ve managed alone with just a reconditioned crew for so long.”

  Maybe Brandon was really coming to help, and not to take over Etsudo’s ship. But Etsudo doubted it.

  On the shuttle ride back to the Takara Bune Etsudo leaned over to Brandon. “You question my ability to run my ship, which I have done smoothly for years. There are nine crew aboard my ship and one captain. How exactly do you fit into this?”

  Brandon did not reply. He stared straight ahead.

  Etsudo knew about men who didn’t need to prove themselves. They were dangerous. As the long seconds dragged on he watched the foot straps, lost in thought, until the shuttle jerked to a stop.