Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Nashara nodded, pulling slightly at the scarves. “Only one problem, buddy. I have no crimes to confess.”

  “We know for sure you killed the Gahe breeder.”

  “Yes. I did that.”

  Etsudo cradled his chest. “You don’t think that was a crime?”

  “I’m under orders. It wasn’t a crime, it was a mission.” Nashara rested back into the chair. “I’m not a criminal, I’m a damn POW.”

  A mission? “Who are you on a mission for?” Etsudo asked.

  “Chimson mongoose-men. Nashara Capsicum is the name I used there. Do you knock out all the girls you bring back here? Will I end up being your willing sex slave?” Her eyes glittered, and Etsudo wondered at what point even his artistic tweaks would fall apart. There was a coiled, snakelike danger here.

  “I would never do that. What’s a mongoose-man?”

  “Think feng, but more deadly. We work for the Ragamuffins. They used to protect Chimson and New Anegada, before you took them off-line.” Nashara twisted. Scoping out the room.

  “What is your mission?”

  “Deliver myself to the New Anegada Ragamuffins, if they are still working for the benefit of humanity. If they’re not still worthy, then I’m to cause as much trouble as I can by myself. I’m a virus, for the Satrapic lamina.” She smiled.

  Etsudo’s mouth dried up. “A virus.”

  “What were you going to do with me, Etsudo?”

  He crumpled a bit. “I was going to try and keep you. You’d be my prize on this ship. The most dangerous yet. Now I think I’ll leave you to Deng.”

  Unleash her to Deng.

  “You want to destroy the Hongguo then? Is that it?” Nashara raised an eyebrow.

  “Destroy?” Everything fell apart again, but instead of the instigator being Deng, it was this woman.

  “Chimson knows about Honggou mindwipes. After a mindwipe I will reboot and slip into the lamina, just bereft of all my recent memories since I left Chimson. I eat lamina processing resources up and reproduce my mind over and over again until there is nothing left. Then the real fun starts.”

  Gods. What had he gotten into? Etsudo looked down at his feet. “My whole crew is like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “I believe what my father put in my mind, what he believed, which is that the Hongguo help humanity keep its balance with the Satrapy. That we will lead our race to stand shoulder to shoulder with the other client races.”

  “You really believe it?”

  Etsudo looked up and sighed. “I would have loved to have known you as a crewmember.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” Nashara looked at him, a steady gaze. “Look at me, Etsudo, don’t even try to lie.”

  “No.” And he wasn’t. If he lied now or entertained the thought, she would see it. It would break that loyalty. She’d find a way right now to rip clear and kill him. He knew that with a certainty that shook him.

  “Okay.” Nashara relaxed. “I trust you. You’re going to patch me up so I don’t remember this and send me back out. Détente?”

  Etsudo nodded, still staring directly at her. He snapped his fingers, and Nashara slumped.

  When he woke her up, several hours later, he did it by walking through the door to the cabin with a full tea set.

  “Sorry I forget the pot noodles in the galley,” he said. Nashara nodded, looking around the cabin. He’d pulled her to the floor and left her cross-legged, sitting with her back against the wall. She’d gotten up and moved to the center of the room.

  He let her eat, and when she put the chopsticks down, leaned across. “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.”

  It was a peace offering, one that if she was ever somehow able to reaccess these memories he’d buried, she’d maybe understand.

  She leaned forward. “Etsudo, we do not always choose to make enemies. Sometimes they come whether we create them or not.”

  He couldn’t argue with that. He barely remembered what else they discussed. He grabbed his chest as they stood with a tiny gasp, then escorted her out.

  Let Deng take her. Let her escape. He just wanted the danger she represented off his ship. She wasn’t the order he wanted. She was chaos.

  Etsudo all but limped back to his cabin. Once a place of refuge, it seemed a little more bare, a little more empty. He took several painkillers and checked with the cockpit.

  “Sabir here,” the pilot said.

  “I’m taking a nap,” Etsudo said. “Stall Deng, tell him the woman was too dangerous to try and knock out. We’ll try later, under better conditions. Tell him to stay well clear of her.” The last thing they needed was Deng setting her off.

  If Deng tracked her, found when she was next taking a shuttle off the habitat, it would be worth lives to take her out.

  Maybe. But how would Etsudo explain that?

  If he gave her time, maybe she would escape Deng. Or maybe he wanted the Hongguo to deal with her unawares and fail. Had he let her go because of that?

  Etsudo washed his face and hung his head under the flowing tap while he tried to wrap his mind around what had just happened. Running water, always an intermittent luxury for spacers.

  He curled up by the vacuum sink. The painkillers kicked in. Etsudo pressed the back of his head against the wall and started to drift toward sleep as he turned things over in his mind. Where did his loyalty lie? The Hongguo, or humanity, or himself? What trumped what? How could he tell what to do? His father had buried the Hongguo oath into him: service to mankind. But then he’d buried loyalty to the Hongguo into him as well. It felt as if he could rip himself in two. And always, always was the knowledge that he needed fuel. The Satraps controlled the fuel, and without that, he was nothing.

  It was Sabir who woke him up, an insistent whisper in his right ear from the cockpit.

  “Captain! Deng wants to talk to you, right now! Etsudo!”

  Waking up felt like climbing out of a pit. “What? What does he want?”

  “The woman, Deng tried to capture her.”

  Etsudo pulled himself up. “What happened?”

  “They tried to capture her and she escaped. There are dead zhen cha and feng all over the place.”

  Etsudo rubbed his face, clearing the artificial sleep away. “I’m on my way. Unconnect us from the habitat. Get ready to leave.” If Deng was going to take it out on him, they’d have to run. He wasn’t sure, but the more time went by, the more the idea of running appealed. If there were people like Nashara out there, then maybe there could be room for him.

  Maybe.

  So many maybes.

  Etsudo let Deng’s request for a live session trickle through. He braced himself.

  “She escaped,” Deng said. A simple statement. “Did your sensors detect that she was equipped to handle exposure to vacuum.”

  Yes, they had. “My sensors picked up nothing like that. She seemed well trained and dangerous, too dangerous for me to pick up.”

  Deng nodded. “A wise move. I’m sorry to have doubted your analysis. I had thought it would be an easy pickup while we covered the area to get ready for the pirates.”

  “And?”

  “She fled to them. There seems to be a connection of some sort. The Ragamuffin ship just blew its dock seals and is clear of the habitat, they have the drop on us.”

  “Why didn’t you destroy it?”

  “Near a habitat? Etsudo, I’m not putting lives at risk. These people haven’t disobeyed any Satrapic edicts we know of. If the ship flees in open space, we’ll fight it. At dock, we’ll use feng. We won’t fire on it at dock.”

  “Okay, but where ca
n they go?” Etsudo heard the hissing and clanging of his ship disconnecting from the lifelines of the habitat. They were on their own power and air again.

  “Not upstream,” Deng said. “Fifty ships are coming down from Thule towards us. Nowhere to run upstream. With the buoys out they’ll probably guess this. I think they will try and turn back downstream, avoiding the handful of ships around, and get warnings to the others at their home base, but they didn’t get a chance to fuel up here.”

  “So?” The Takara Bune shivered as the habitat’s clamps released her. Several sirens squawked, letting him know that the antimatter heart of the ship had come online.

  “You’re going to have to keep up with them again, Etsudo. Help us close this net, help us end the pirates and gain the good grace of the Satrapy. Do that and we promote you to Jiang. Do that and we know where your loyalties lie.”

  “So they are in doubt?” Etsudo asked.

  “You ply upstream, downstream, wherever you feel. You are part of an older generation that is obsolete within the current Hongguo. But you are good, Etsudo. Very good. And we need you. You are right, I can’t order you to do anything. But your actions will mean a lot.”

  Jiang Etsudo. Etsudo rolled the idea around in his head. “Sabir, where do we stand?”

  “Free and clear.”

  Etsudo looked back at Deng. “We’ll pursue. You follow.” Nashara would be less a threat dead out in the cold vacuum. Whether he chose to run or not, that would be the truth. If she really was a virus, she could destroy the communications systems between the forty-eight worlds. Even if the Hongguo and Satrapy controlled them, they were a lifeline to civilization.

  Jiang Etsudo . . .

  Deng flickered away. Etsudo reached the cockpit, floating now. Inside it, Sabir, Todd, and Raul looked at him as he entered. “Where’s Brandon?”

  “He’s in his cabin, he wasn’t sure how to break shifts with you,” Sabir said.

  “Get him in here,” Etsudo said. “We’ll both be in the cockpit for this. Sound acceleration alarms, everyone needs to be strapped in and secure.”

  “The ship is the same one we saw earlier,” Sabir said. “The pirate ship. It used the name Queen Mohmbasa when it docked.”

  “We’ll use that to identify her.” Etsudo added the tag. The cockpit dripped with lamina, screens, trajectories, notes from the Port Authority demanding to know why they were leaving dock without formal permission.

  Etsudo swept it all away.

  Time to focus on one thing for now, keeping up with the Queen Mohmbasa. Because the Hongguo would not mindwipe a helpful ally in its new war, nor deny him fuel for his ship.

  They might even promote him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kara and her brother watched the slow sunset. The inside of Agathonosis curved up on either side of them. The patchy green farmlands rose until they met far up above them. Agathonosis was shaped like a can, with the brilliant fusion-powered thread of the sunline running right through the weightless center to provide the light the crops so desperately needed.

  Night began slowly at the far end of the cylinder, a dark bead that appeared on the line as it came out of the haze and then began to grow. The line slowly turned off, a half-mile section at a time slowly dimming, until flickering out. It had started at the far end cap of Agathonosis, almost ten miles away from them. It would continue until it reached the other end, ten more miles farther behind them.

  On the walls of Agathonosis you could walk and feel heavy, but near the sunline at the center of Agathonosis, you could fly. As long as you didn’t get close enough to the sunline to burn. The sunline mainly provided light and the right kind of it, not heat. Heat came from the ground in vents or warm pools of water.

  Then came the sound, carrying in the approaching twilight. Mortar fire?

  Kara stopped and turned, trying to locate where the sound had come from. A puff of smoke drifted over a muddy hill. She grabbed her brother, Jared, and pulled him down to the ground, then used the zoom function in her eyes to peek out from behind a false decorative rock that shifted as she pushed against it.

  Several hundred yards down the drying trickle of the Parvati River, fifteen self-styled “hopolites” broke cover. Green strips of ripped cloth hung from their skeletal bodies.

  Kara thought she recognized a few faces in the group. Maybe one of them had sold her an ice cream cone once or bumped into her on a public trail somewhere. Maybe it was a cousin of hers, or an uncle, running down to the edge of the muddy water.

  They carried their weapon with them, slipping and sliding in the mud as they crossed over to the opposite bank. The mortar looked homemade: several pieces of scrap welded to the bottom of a tube to create a makeshift tripod. Maybe it had been someone’s potato gun at one time, or a teenager’s launch tube for a model gyroplane. Now it was a weapon of desperation.

  The hopolites settled behind the ruins of what had once been a boat dock near the bank of the Parvati. Jared sat up slightly and Kara put her arm on his shoulder. “No,” she whispered.

  She remained focused and zoomed on the muddy river.

  A series of footprints appeared near the far edge, as if by magic, slowly tracking toward the hopolites as they loaded their homemade mortar. A long-haired man in nothing but trousers sighted and gave the thumbs-up.

  The mortar thunked. The projectile arced upward leaving a slight trail of smoke. Up, up, Kara and her brother craned their necks looking straight above them to watch until it dwindled into a small dot against the great brown patches that curved far over their heads. The other side of their world right above their heads. It made Kara shiver, thinking of explosions and weaponry being fired all throughout the habitat. Already the air seemed hard to breathe. She wondered if that was due to the great machinery in the depths of Agathonosis failing, or if war had broken the world’s skin. She’d never seen the Outside of Agathonosis nor been inside the world’s skin, but she could imagine the cruel midnight of vacuum shoving its airless emptiness through the cracks of the world, curling into the sky to snatch the air away from them all.

  One of the hopolites carried a telescope, she saw. He looked through it intently, then shouted. Kara thought she saw a small flash, a tiny orange ball of flame, on the land far over her head.

  A hushed cheer erupted. Yet there was nothing happy in the sound. It was a vindictive-sounding group whoop, cut short by several small spitting sounds. A second pair of invisible feet splashed through the mud.

  Kara dug her fingers into Jared’s bony shoulders and stared past him at the chaos behind him. “Oww . . .”

  “Quiet, it’s the stratatoi,” she hissed.

  The hopolites scattered and ran. Four of them fell to the ground, one of them writhing and screaming. Bright red splotches of blood dripped from his forehead.

  Oh, no. One of them zigzagged, running straight toward her. She unzoomed her lenses, looked around.

  “Come on.” She pulled Jared along, slowly, very slowly, backing into the dried-up remains of an oak tree that had toppled over. This had once been a gravity-defying copse of oaks. It was now a tortured, surreal nightmare of dead trunks and burned stumps gathered around a failing river. Stomach acid burned at Kara as fear and hunger ate its way up out of her.

  “In here again?” Jared complained. They sat underneath the bleached, twisted branches and looked out. Jared hugged their knapsack to his chest, though his bony arms offered it little protection.

  The hopolite staggered on, coated in mud. He panted, arms flailing to keep balance. Jared squirmed, but Kara pushed him down and kept him from looking out.

  Branches slapped them in the face as something jumped and ran down the length of the trunk. Jared whimpered, and Kara covered his mouth as a mud-covered ghost grabbed the hopolite, threw him to the ground.

  Kara strained the lenses over her eyes at the ghost. Despite the Catastrophe, despite the famine, the world of Agathonosis itself still responded to her. The air sang information. Kara could still choose
to augment anything she saw with her actual, organic eyes with information overlaid onto them with her implants. The standard public lamina appeared to her: a small triangular tag popped into her vision every time she looked at the tree. Information scrolled at her.

  Oak tree 23. Planted the third year of the Evthria’s [the “eastern” side of Agathonosis, click for more] founding by the first human president under the benevolent Satrapy. Commemoration . . . It would have scrolled more information, but Kara killed the blather with a mental wave of the hand.

  Any moron youngster in Agathonosis with a pair of data contacts or a wrist screen could see that particular lamina.

  She had something else in mind: her own augmented reality. It would let her tap into a private lamina. It was something darker, more useful, encrypted and never spoken about because it was forbidden, as was any human addition or tinkering with the Satrapic Information Systems.

  “Remember,” her mother had said before the stratatoi came for her and Dad. She’d crouched by Kara and run her fingers through Kara’s hair. “Things might get better. This might be temporary. So you only use this if it is an emergency!”

  Kara had nodded. “I understand.”

  “Take Jared with you if that happens, and don’t talk to anyone. You know the drill, we’ve gone over it enough. We’ll be back. We’ll see what the Satrap says about this. We have to try to petition it. We can’t let this go on.”

  Her parents had been archaeologists. They’d studied the lamina, sometimes illegally, digging back down into the tiniest bits that talked and made it work. They were the most known lamina explorers in Agathonosis, well respected. They’d hoped their position would help influence the Satrap to fix the world and stop the stratatoi.

  But they’d never come back.

  And things had gotten worse. And worse.