“Has it begun?” Brandon asked.
Etsudo regarded the man. “What?”
“Removing the Ragmuffins.” Brandon swallowed. “The Satraps ordered the destruction of the pirates. We’ve been keeping records and collating activity of all the ships coming out from where New Anegada used to be. We start upstream, begin working our way downstream. If they don’t allow boarding, we destroy them.”
“That’s a whole-scale war,” Etsudo said. “Since when have we been the Satrapy’s direct enforcers?” The Maatan could do this. They’d dropped asteroids on Earth during the pacification and destroyed Earth attempts to strike back. Why the Hongguo?
“But look at what it means.” Brandon had an eager smile. “For all these years we tried to prove to the Satraps that humans were trustworthy. We kept technology in check, surgically killed off the worst elements. We’re proved our worth, we’re standing at their right hand now, and since we have access to all those technologies anyway, we’ll be like monks after a dark age. We’ll be able to slowly introduce things again. The Hongguo will stand at the front of humanity.”
“I don’t know,” Etsudo muttered. “We were doing well at our job before.”
“Let me tell you something personal though, old friend.” Brandon leaned over. “You want to know why we should really help Deng any way we can? There are damaged ships out there, big ships whose captains have screwed up, Etsudo. Do well now, you and I could get a bigger ship, more crew. You could get off this small trading ship and into bigger things.”
Etsudo stared down at the smooth table. He missed the days Kenji had told him about. The days when the Hongguo was just a company paid to explore the wormholes and map out all the forks and streams connecting the various worlds, just a trading company.
And what of his ship when this was all done? Etsudo looked around. What would become of him, and all his memories as the Hongguo changed into something else at the Satrapy’s bidding?
Etsudo folded his arms around himself, feeling alone in the heart of his ship. He stared at Brandon as he sipped his tea. He wasn’t sure what was going to come next. For all his loyalty, and the loyalty his father had instilled in him to the Hongguo, Etsudo would hardly give up his ship and his own mind without a fight.
To Thule then. Alarms sounded as his ship prepared to transit another wormhole on its path upstream.
And now it was also time to introduce Brandon to the rest of the crew. The murderers, rapists, and criminals that Etsudo’s life depended on. Brandon now the latest in his set of odd acquisitions.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Do you believe in redemption?” Etsudo asked Brandon as he entered the cockpit.
“Redemption?”
“Yes, redemption.” The cockpit sat nestled deep in the heart of the ship. Acceleration chairs dotted the tight confines of the smooth blue cocoon. The cockpit door sealed itself behind them. In emergencies the cockpit would refilter its own air and use its own tiny nuclear reactor to run everything on the Takara Bune except its antimatter engines.
“I’m not religious,” Brandon said.
“You don’t have to believe in religion to believe in redemption.” Etsudo looked around at the gamma crew. “Bahul, the pilot for this shift, he fired a nuclear bomb into the heart of a habitat from a shuttle. He did that for the League of Human Affairs.”
Brandon looked over at Bahul, who nodded back at him from the pilot’s couch. Strapped in, brown eyes glazed, he stared back at Brandon.
Etsudo turned and pointed at the sallow-skinned man with green eyes and emaciated face. “And this is Fabiyan, our mechanic. He cut three men’s heads off. Kept them as trophies.”
Fabiyan nodded and smiled.
One more for the gamma crew. “Michiko.” Etsudo nodded his head. “Gamma’s deckhand.”
“What did she do?”
“A very bad bar fight.” All three of gamma crew’s shaved heads gleamed in the cockpit light.
“Welcome aboard, Brandon.” Michiko smiled.
“Redemption.” Etsudo grabbed Brandon’s shoulder. “They all remember their crimes. Michiko remembers stabbing her best friend in the heart, Fabiyan remembers cutting the heads of three innocent victims off, and Bahul lives with knowledge that he killed thousands. The alpha and zeta crew are the same. This is my crew, I cull them. These are my friends.”
Nine crew, three on each shift, and him the captain. Ten made for a nice number. Brandon upset that nice symmetry.
Brandon wiped his face with a sleeve. “Usually we recondition all memories, don’t we? This is unorthodox.”
Etsudo chuckled. “Welcome to my world, Brandon. Are you ready to be in charge of them all?”
Brandon looked at Michiko, Fabiyan, and then Bahul. “Did I . . . do something? Is that why I’m here?”
“Jiang Deng and you conspired against me. But only because he altered your mind. I’ve liberated you from those changes Deng made.”
“We’re friends?”
“Oh, yes,” Etsudo lied. He squeezed Brandon’s shoulder and let go. “We’re longtime friends.” And for now Brandon had no ability to access anything outside the ship’s lamina. For Brandon, anything Etsudo said became reality.
Brandon wouldn’t be leaving the ship either, not until he’d earned his redemption. Not until Etsudo knew exactly what was going on out there with the Hongguo.
“Fabiyan, Jiang Deng just sent orders. We’re speeding up and getting ready to keep pace with the pirate coming upstream towards us. They’re thinking it’s going to dock at Bujantjor. That’s where they’ll try and stage a raid to get into it. They want the ship in one piece, and the pirates as well.”
“Pirates?” Fabiyan raised an eyebrow. “Ragamuffins?”
“Yes, them.” Etsudo showed Brandon a spare acceleration chair. “We may have to drop our cargo.”
“Do you think we’ll need acceleration chairs?” Brandon asked.
Michiko twisted in her restraints. “It’s never hurt. But if you’re not willing to strap in, please leave the cockpit. I’d rather not get my neck snapped by your flying body if we have to accelerate in a hurry. Captain.”
Brandon sat and let the chair’s fingers reach up around him.
“Pinging buoys up the stream,” Bahul reported. “They’ve been shutting down. People will be flying blind through wormholes, they’ll be jumpy.”
Etsudo let his chair wrap itself around him. “But we still have access to the buoys. We know what’s on the other side, we can dodge.” The price of drones would be going up from Thule on downstream. Trade wouldn’t stop because of a buoy outage. They might serve as both repeaters and traffic advisers, but commerce went on. Ships would just be more cautious, using drones to poke ahead and make sure they wouldn’t hit anything on the other side after transit.
Speaking of which. His stomach flipped as they passed through the next wormhole. The ship shook as Bahul let the ship drift several feet clear of exact center. Waves of gravity tore at the sides of the Takara Bune, unbalancing the ship.
Etsudo opened a window in the lamina before him, using the ship’s cameras to create a vision of where they coasted now. They moved between a pair of wormholes that hung in the black emptiness, far from life-nourishing suns.
“I imagine our Ragamuffin friends will be here soon.” Etsudo looked over at the gamma-shift pilot. “Get us out of the way.” Etsudo used the lamina to drop three of Takara Bune’s drones behind. From their viewpoints he could see the lines of light beamed into the wormholes all flicker out.
Bahul accelerated the creaking Takara Bune farther away from the flight path between the two wormholes. There were no planets to worry about, no orbital wells. These wormholes just drifted in the dark of a heavy cloud of dust.
“There,” Michiko said, piggybacking on one of the drones. “Drones.”
A trio of yellow-and-green drones flew through the downstream wormhole. Chemical rockets flared as they adjusted their course. The downstream wormhole dumped ships out a
few degrees off course. An arrangement the Satrapy liked as it kept any one ship from being able to move through the forty-eight worlds in short notice. Coming out of each wormhole usually required wasting fuel to adjust course.
The drones hit the upstream wormhole and disappeared.
“Incoming,” Bahul said, breaking the quiet in the cockpit as everyone watched along. “No identifying marks on it.”
The cylindrical ship adjusted its course, following the drones at fifteen thousand kilometers an hour. The entire ship rotated sideways and fired its engines. A long, fiery plume of chemical boosters jerked the Ragamuffin ship for a fast course-correction change. Then it twisted back around to plunge through the upstream wormhole headfirst.
Bahul shook his head. “Don’t know if I’d have the steel to take a ship in at a wormhole at that speed.”
Etsudo silently agreed. Bahul wobbled too much. That was why Etsudo remained the best on the ship. And alpha’s pilot, Sabir, got nervous with every transit, while zeta’s Anjelica never transited above five thousand kilometers an hour.
But they were a good crew. They were his crew. He had made them that way.
“Power up!” Etsudo snapped. “But don’t ditch the cargo just yet, let’s see if we can keep up.”
“There’s a five-thousand-kilometer-per-hour deficit,” Brandon noted. “We’ll never catch them.”
“We don’t have to,” Etsudo said. “They’re not getting past Thule. Deng will catch up and block their rear escape, we’re just making sure they don’t escape the net.”
But since the Emancipation the Satrapy only worried about technological violations. Why all this? The pirates mainly purchased antimatter fuel off the black market.
Change bugged Etsudo.
“Where do you think they’ll end up?” Brandon asked.
“Bujantjor,” Etsudo said. “There are Freeman colonies in orbit there, they’ll be sympathetic, they’ll let them dock and try and fuel them.”
“If we catch them, the Jiang will reward us well. Your name is well-known, your father was a good man among the Hongguo. We’ll rise far.”
Etsudo didn’t say anything. The Satrapy would win this battle against the Ragamuffins. A handful of armed trade ships against the money sunk into Hongguo ships and weapons by the Satrapy. No contest.
He was going to have to adapt. The Satrapy had entered a new stage of its existence with humans. If Etsudo could gain a ship like Deng’s, then he could hardly be at the mercy of one like the Jiang. He leaned forward. “Catch up to that ship, Bahul. Drop cargo as you need.”
Would it be worth trying to please his masters for a bigger ship? He wasn’t sure. Brandon had been imprinted with it before he boarded the Takara Bune, no doubt to pass that on to Etsudo. The Jiang thought this was what Etsudo wanted, they were trying to co-opt him. But what did Etsudo want?
Etsudo bit his lip. Another message from Deng arrived, only five minutes ping time behind them. What was that? Five wormholes?
“I’ve got another task for you, Etsudo. This ship is likely to dock at Bujantjor.” Deng waved his left hand and a grainy image appeared of a woman standing in a busy market area.
“Who’s that?” Etsudo wondered out loud, even as Deng continued on with his recording.
“This is a very dangerous woman, Etsudo. She uses the first name Nashara, but the last one changes. We know for sure that she killed a Gahe breeder on Astragalai. She may have also set off a nuclear bomb inside Villach. There may be some League of Human Affairs connection, we’re not sure. She was last seen heading downstream towards us. Keep close to that pirate for now, but if they head past Bujantjor to Thule, let them go, we’ll continue the chase. You stay in Bujantjor. Someone turned her in for reward money, a Len Smith. See if you can get her aboard your ship. You claim to be good at this. We want her for questioning and reconditioning if you can. If not, we’ll assist.”
Etsudo looked at the picture.
“A nuclear bomb?” he whispered, impressed. Right in the heart of Gahe territory. She made Bahul look like a kitten.
He wanted her for his crew. Oh, yes. She’d make a pilot. Maybe even another captain, to balance Brandon. That would bring symmetry back. Three captains, three pilots, and so on. Twelve crew.
Etsudo rubbed the back of his hand. A bit of order could be dragged back into his chaotic world. That appealed to him.
CHAPTER NINE
The pirates bled speed coming out of the wormhole into Bujantjor, Etsudo shadowing them and reporting back on their movements. They did not move on to Thule, they docked at the new Freeman habitat. A mess of girder and metal, primitive by Satrapic standards, and one of the handfuls of human-only habitats starting to spring up throughout the forty-eight worlds.
“Lock down?” Anjelica asked, once they had docked. She hadn’t shaved her head in a few days; the stubble covered her head roughly. She hadn’t been sleeping.
“You know the routine. We can’t risk the ship being compromised.” Only Etsudo walked off or on. Redemption. One day they’d be allowed off, when they’d worked off their debt to humanity. Etsudo would see to that. But for now, they remained in their rooms.
They didn’t complain.
They already had a request from Nashara to interview before even getting connected to the habitat. She offered her security services. Etsudo granted the interview.
“She’ll be aboard soon,” Etsudo said. “Is my cabin ready?”
“It is set for tea,” Lee said. He bobbed his head down. “I laid out mats and a proper kettle.”
Etsudo nodded back at him. “Thank you.”
Excitement strummed through Etsudo. He almost hopped his way up through the ship to the docking air lock to wait. Deng might know him too well, giving this to him.
Was it a trap?
That made him pause. Maybe Brandon hadn’t accomplished what Deng had hoped for, and this woman was here to finish the job.
Too far-fetched, he thought. But when she arrived and he opened the outer door, he still held his breath as she crossed through the air lock. He almost didn’t let her in.
Underneath the epidermis the woman was more machine than man. Far from legal, and into theoretical-research territory. Did he detect a whiff of radiation? She had a tiny reactor buried somewhere deep in her body.
Etsudo couldn’t help himself, he opened the air lock and stood there.
“Etsudo Hajiwara?”
He nodded. “Nashara.” He didn’t use the fake last name she’d supplied. He shook her hand. She had a dry, firm grip.
Those hands could break him in half, he realized with a smile.
“Would you care to have tea with me?” he asked. “And we will talk about your offer.”
She nodded, dark eyes studying him. “Tea. Sure.”
“Come.” Etsudo led her toward the cabin. “It’s just this way.” His hands shook when he entered the room.
She followed him in. “Are you okay Etsudo? You don’t seem together.”
Of course, she was trained to spot lies. Trained to spot odd responses. “I don’t let many people into my cabin, and I’m just a peaceful trader. You offer us your skills as a mercenary, but you make me nervous.”
She cocked her head and frowned. No doubt something seemed off to her. So many dangerous people had walked into this room. Some of them were knocked out in the air lock, but Etsudo preferred the unmonitored cabin. The sooner the criminal was in the chair and bound, the safer he felt.
Etsudo waved her over. “I want to show you a picture of my father. The man who basically gave me this ship.”
Nashara walked over. “Hajiwara? That’s a Hongguo family name.”
Etsudo gave the command via lamina to scramble her mind, and Nashara slumped forward. He tried to catch her, but pitched forward. She weighed two or three times as much as he expected. All the machinery laced throughout her.
Gods. Etsudo dragged her to the chair and wrapped her wrists and legs to the chair using the monofilament scarves.
She started to wake up as he did it. She head-butted his chest, knocking the air out of his lungs as he fell back. He gave the mental command to disrupt her neural activity before he even hit the mat behind him and she slumped back into the chair.
Etsudo sat back with a groan of triumph, holding his bruised chest and feeling a broken rib, and looked at the greatest mass murderer he’d trapped yet.
She was beautiful.
“Nashara, wake up.” Etsudo kept his distance, pacing in front of her. Sweat beaded his forehead, and he’d ignored Deng’s requests to talk about how he was going to capture her. He didn’t want to share this. Deng might want her handed over. But if he did that, Etsudo would lose her when the Satraps used whatever tools they used to wipe minds to mold Nashara into another simple foot soldier. That would be a waste.
This was an interesting dilemma. He could talk Deng into letting him take her to a reconditioning facility. He could forge her reconditioning certificates. This was a risk, but a good one.
First he had to find out if she was another weapon Deng had sent against him like Brandon.
“Wake up,” Etsudo repeated.
The dark eyes snapped open. “What did you do to me, Etsudo?”
“Do you trust me, Nashara?” Etsudo asked, his face honest, open. “Implicitly, fully? You’ll answer just about anything I ask?” Of course she would. She was like any of his crew now.
“Yes.” She looked annoyed and thoughtful. “But why?”
“Do you believe in redemption, Nashara?”
“I don’t have much use for theology.” She looked around the room, then down at the silk bonds. “Filament?”
“Yes. Don’t move about.” Etsudo crossed his legs on the floor before her. “Did Deng send you?”
“I don’t know who the fuck Deng is.”
“Are you sure?”
She looked at him with contempt. “Yes, I’m quite sure. What is going on?”
“I have a machine in this room that reprograms you. It’s like what we do to get the zhen cha, I know that is no secret. But me and my machine are more subtle. I want you to stay you, with all your memories. I just change . . . some things. Make a better you. One that wants you to pay for your crimes, Nashara. Like the deaths of all those people on Villach.”
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