“Hospitality. Help. Place to run to.” Until the Hongguo caught up with them.
“Nashara, we actually need your help,” Jamar said. “Scanning you when you came aboard, we can tell you can meld with the ship. You have the neural prosthetics. I need you to captain the Queen with me. I haven’t slept in two weeks.” He was close to collapse. Probably been cycling different sides of his brain’s hemispheres eight hours each.
Damn. They’d been seeing their captain dog-tired, nerves frayed. Then they’d see him left-brained and creative, totally disorganized and touchy-feely, and then anal and orderly and constrained. Cycling over and over every day as he struggled to remain one with his ship and bring them all through in one piece. With no sleep as he tried to remain alert at every second.
He was a hero, and she was turning him down. “I can’t.”
Jamar folded in on himself and cradled his head. “I only have two crew left,” he murmured through his fingers. “Hanging by a thread. All I want to do is sleep. Sleep forever and just stop this all, goddamnit.”
“I can’t do that, Jamar.”
“I order you.”
She stared him back. Predatory, muscles tensed, every minute cell calculating the distance and time involved. “No.” A calm, single word.
He was dead already, he just didn’t know it. He wouldn’t push her that far, and if she had to take the ship, he’d never get it back. She’d never get herself back. She wasn’t sure if that was worse than dying, but they weren’t in enough danger for her to risk plugging directly into the ship.
Maybe as the Hongguo got closer. In a day or two. If it really remained her only chance of survival. Yes. But until then: “I swear to you. If there’s anything else I can do, I’ll do it.”
He must have seen something in her eyes. She willed him to understand it, and he shivered as she stared at him. He backed off the subject.
“Fuel.” Jamar’s shoulders shook. “We can run if we have fuel. Every off-angled wormhole transit we have to adjust for costs, every maneuver when the Hongguo ships get close costs. We can keep running. We’re that much faster than them. But we don’t have the fuel.”
He was crying. Nashara stared at a spot of wood trim behind the captain’s shoulder, trying to pretend it wasn’t happening. For both of them. “Swear, they were all so beautiful. Each tiny life, gone. Fireflies in the night, snuffed out by a foul wind of those sick creatures that dare call themselves human beings. Hongguo.” He spit the name out.
Then the tears stopped. Jamar straightened up. Ramrod. His eyes glittered again. He was cycling hemispheres, right there. Not on eight-hour runs, but randomly, as his brain gave out in sheer exhaustion.
“Captain Sinjin Smith?”
“Fuel,” he grated the word out. “Find me fuel. Antimatter. You have access to the whole ship; we use the Ragalamina aboard here, not the Satrapy standard. So adjust your little wrist trinket accordingly if you won’t access directly. At one standard g we have exactly one hundred minutes and forty seconds of acceleration left. Without the fuel we were to get we are unable to escape the Hongguo, and they’ve been jamming our attempts to forward messages. We have to get away, head downstream, and pass the message on to the other Ragamuffin ships before the Hongguo attack them as well. You understand?”
Nashara nodded carefully.
“Welcome aboard the Queen Mohmbasa, then.”
“Thank you.”
She had jumped out of the pan and into the fire.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Free to float through the ship, Nashara shot her way back to the room she’d come from. Ijjy still kept his distance from her, but he showed her back through the corridors.
As they coasted, Nashara tapped the wrist screen. She got it synced in with the ship’s network. The Ragalamina probably creaked through a neural interface, but it worked well on a wrist screen. Very two-dimensional, used to taps and menus. It had been developed out of a several-hundred-year-old set of cobbled-together human software systems. Legacy of a time when humans tried to make everything themselves. It was nice to be back in familiar environs.
The Queen Mohmbasa’s lights flickered off and everything fell into pitch black. Emergency luminescent strips ran along parts of the corridor, but emergency sealant over the damaged sections left huge swathes of the area a dark pit. Nashara slammed into a hard lump of the stuff and grabbed hold.
“Should I be worried?” Nashara asked the dark as she tried to access her wrist display. Nothing. Must have been an electromagnetic-pulse weapon that hit them.
“Only if the backup system don’t come on.” Ijjy’s voice came from farther down the corridor. “Feel the engine still running?”
Nashara closed her eyes and focused on her fingertips. “Yes.” It thrummed through the sealant, the vibration reaching everywhere.
“Got no need to panic just yet, then.”
A set of emergency lights flickered back on. The wrist screen lit up and error-checked itself.
“Come. The room you in for visitors,” Ijjy said. “Whole lot of the other room free closer by the cockpit. Captain say you could take one of them.”
“Thanks, but no.” She knew if she took a former crewmember’s room Ijjy would be annoyed. And she was probably not welcome in the cockpit until she had helped find a solution for the fuel problem.
Nashara paused outside the door. “I’ve met you, and the captain of the ship. You said three survivors. Who’s left?”
“Sean. Out working on fixing things.”
“The captain wants me to help find a way to get fuel. Are there any other Raga-friendly habitats downstream of here?”
“Dragin-Above,” Ijjy said.
“But they don’t exist anymore.”
“Seen.” Ijjy brushed a dreadlock aside.
“You given up?”
He straightened in the air. “You ain’t seen half the shit we seen, I tired, not whipped, hear?”
Good. Nashara turned back into the room without further comment.
The guest room’s walls turned to screens. Nashara used them to display information coming from the Queen’s tactical updates. Sensor maps of the area, trajectory projections, colored the walls with long, curving lines with dots moving along them.
The Queen Mohmbasa pushed the legal lane speed from the habitat and climbed into a higher and higher orbit, racking up fines and complaints from a distant Port Authority. Camera shots of the hull drove home the tattered condition of the ship. It was blind dumb luck that Nashara had pulled herself aboard in an untouched area of the ship. These areas she roamed through now featured gaping rips and tears in the hull that hardened, shapeless foam pushed out of. Black streaks and craters everywhere. She shook her head.
Jamar edged them just a little bit higher and ahead every second. The Hongguo were holding back on attacking them in such a public space.
The two wormholes here orbited high above Bujantjor and followed each other closely. The leading one led upstream to Thule via several more wormholes. The trailing wormhole led downstream to a nexus, giving one the choice of Tsushima or forking over to Yomi. Either way eventually lead to Ys, and from there downstream was the dead wormhole to New Anegada.
Though most of the parties around Bujantjor chose to keep their distance from the wormholes, a few small structures cluttered nearby to offer ship repair or depot services.
A few security drones fired thrusters to lower their orbits and move to intercept. Satellites and other ships cluttered the map.
Nashara strapped herself into the acceleration chair as warnings kicked on. Jamar broke all lane-speed limits, three gravities of acceleration pushing Nashara hard against her restraints as alarms still blared.
“We’ll never be welcome here again,” Ijjy muttered over the ship’s open channel.
A third voice, Sean’s, chuckled back. “If we get home, I ain’t coming here.”
Oscillations shook the ship. Jamar added another half g to the acceleration and dumped what looke
d like a cloud of chaff in a carefully plotted arc right by the mouthes of the wormholes. Wastewater and garbage, Jamar had told her.
Radar stabbed out from the Hongguo behind them.
The Queen rose too quickly as they caught up to the wormholes, they were going to overshoot. Garbage filled the display, washing out everything. Then the Queen Mohmbasa spun itself around and the drives fired. Three, four, then five g’s of acceleration.
The ship dived for the wormhole, covered by a jettisoned cloud of confusion. Any mistake now while accelerating, adjusting, not putting them dead center through the wormhole would see them coming out the other side of the wormhole in pieces.
Jamar would be one with his ship, a hivemind of shipwide calculations ripping through his head as they hit the wormhole at the blink of an eye.
Nashara smiled just before she felt her stomach flip, the world turn inside out and then back, and a chime sounded.
“Wormhole transition complete.”
Bull’s-eye. Jamar appeared on her wrist screen. “We beat them here, so they’ll come through slow and cautious, drones first, looking for surprises.” They had the jump, just not the fuel to continue. Jamar drew the new figure into the air. They’d eaten up a fifth of their stored fuel in that little activity. “We need to find fuel. Ijjy’s hunting down leads as well.”
“I’ll find your fuel.” Ys lay downstream, the last of the tightly controlled Satrapic worlds. If she got them fuel, she might also find a way to get off this hunted ship. Get into one of the shipping depots and find a way to get out of this mess.
Nashara started querying the Queen Mohmbasa’s databases for what resources lay out there.
Possibilities. The buoys around the wormholes held the latest info about fuel prices, maps, and passed on information of interest to ships like this. The blackout froze them, but Nashara had all the previous pieces of information to sift through from before it fell.
Several minutes of searching turned up only dispiriting findings. Fuel ran expensive right now. Several waves of price shocks and inflationary pressures putting the quantities they’d need for running and fighting out of the ship’s reach. The Queen Mohmbasa had no formal credit accounts. What gold or silver they had aboard was not going to be enough.
They could, Nashara thought, just take it. Everyone labeled the Ragamuffins pirates anyway.
She perked up and reset her filters and found something odd enough to catch her attention. A distress call from the carefully controlled confines of Ys. From the habitat the Satrap there inhabited.
This far downstream, Ys was a distant frontier for a Satrap. Most Satraps dwelled past Thule, except this notoriously silent and withdrawn one.
The Hongguo wouldn’t expect the Queen to run straight into the arms of a Satrap, now would they?
Nashara leaned back and let her breath out. Her duty was to hand herself over to the Ragamuffins. But to this doomed ship? Would it make it all the way back so she could hand herself over to the Ragamuffin council leaders? And what were the Raga now but a sorry group of tattered merchant ships huddling on the other end of a burnt-out wormhole, harried and harassed by the rest of the worlds. How would she help them?
There was no Earth, no Chimson, no New Anegada for her to go to. Just humanity scuttling around underfoot of their alien superiors. She had no home. Any future would involve running.
Nashara leaned forward, tired. If Jamar was right that the Hongguo were out to destroy the Ragamuffins, then hiding out wouldn’t help them any. She needed to help any way she could right now.
And it was better to run while well fueled, she thought.
Three hours later Nashara met Sean outside the cockpit. Covered in grease, cut up, and his eyes wary, he sized her up. She returned the critical gaze: a built man, but not natural muscle, she could tell just by the way he held himself. She spotted one pistol holstered by the ankle, another under his left shoulder, and a two-foot-long, varnished stick hung from his belt. Well armed. She liked that in a man.
“Nashara.” He shook her hand.
“You’re Sean?”
A nod. Nashara squeezed past him into the cockpit and looked back. “Nice wood.”
He blinked and looked down at his hip. “Thanks. It’s from Earth.” He pulled the stick free and handed it to her. Confident.
“Kalinda?” It was a stick-fighting martial art common among the Ragamuffins.
“Yeah. You fight?”
“Capoeira,” Nashara said. “Usually with machetes. You?” She rolled up the sleeve of her shirt.
“You a mongoose?” That broke the ice. Sean rolled up his sleeve to reveal the same tattoo Nashara had. Among the Ragamuffins the mongoose-men were an elite set of fighting specialists, the wickedest tools in the Ragamuffin arsenal.
Ijjy appeared and Nashara noticed the two sticks in his belt again. Kalinda as well? Ijjy wobbled through the air at them and tossed her a covered cup and a pouch. “Real food.” He grinned.
Nashara caught them and looked at them. Ginger beer, and some stew in the pouch. Homemade. “What is it?”
“Peas and dumplings,” Sean said. “Need to use it up before it go bad. Made it back when we could still cook.”
Nashara twisted the top and squirted. The ginger beer triggered memories of sitting around with friends before armoring up and heading out to fly wormhole patrols.
The back of her head prickled. Didn’t need those memories. She pocketed the ginger beer and stew. “Thanks, I’ll eat these later.” She floated into the cockpit, over to a screen, and tapped her wrist to bring up what she needed.
“You have something for us?” Jamar opened a single eye.
“Yes.” Nashara faced them and tapped the screen.
“This is Kara, from Agathonosis,” the screen vibrated. “We’re starving. They’re killing each other inside.
“Please send help, whoever hears this. We only have days left. Oh, shit. Stratatoi have found us.”
“What the hell a stratatoi?” Ijjy asked.
Nashara shrugged. “Maybe station security? Don’t know, not important. What is important is that this was passed on by a ship called Toucan Too that was going to swing by the habitat to see what was going on. The habitat this little girl is caling from seems to be in crisis, and it’s just hanging in empty space near the upstream wormhole at Ys. The habitat Agathonosis will be the last place anyone expects us, and I will bet has fuel.”
Ijjy was already shaking his head. “No way, man.”
“This is a Satrap’s habitat,” Jamar said softly. The Satraps hunkered in their forty-eight habitats ruling from deep inside the massive structures they had built around them. The Satrapy may have emancipated humans, but in a Satrap’s own habitat no one had much in the way of freedom.
“True.” Nashara tugged at her collar. “But the Satraps rely on the Hongguo to police humans, and similar organizations for the other aliens. They don’t do their own dirty work, making Agathonosis a safe place for us because the Hongguo wouldn’t think to look for us there. It’s close to the downstream wormhole out of Ys.”
Jamar looked at his two remaining crewmembers. “What do you think?”
“Idiocy,” Sean growled. “I say we need keep running.”
“We simply don’t have the fuel.” Jamar closed his eye.
Ijjy looked at Nashara. “No one else closer?”
“Not with fuel you can afford.”
“People in them habitats with the Satraps,” Ijjy snapped, “they hardly more than slaves. We never get involve with that.”
“I know.” Nashara felt tired. “But as it is, if the Hongguo start catching up, we’ll barely make to Ys ahead of them, right, Jamar?”
“Yes.”
Nashara pushed off into the center of the cockpit. “Agathonosis is our only hope to warn the rest of the Ragamuffins that the Hongguo are after you,” and herself. “It’s risky, but so is getting destroyed in the dead of space. I say we see if we can buy or steal the fuel.”
They still looked dubious.
“Hey.” Nashara looked at them all. “I’m good at that sort of thing. If there’s fuel to get, one way or another, I’m your gal.”
Jamar sighed. “Prepare for acceleration. Fifteen-minute count. Secure the ship.”
“Damnit, Jamar, this go be a huge mistake.” Ijjy spun around and leapt out of the cockpit, bouncing off toward the rooms.
Sean turned to follow, but Jamar raised a hand. “I haven’t committed to anything yet, understand? Just giving us the option to stop at Agathonosis.”
“Don’t spend too much time listening to what all she say,” Sean said. “Don’t forget, she ain’t seen half what we already gone through.”
He left with a single angry push.
“Looks like I’m not so popular,” Nashara observed.
Jamar opened his bloodshot eyes. “You go easy on them,” he warned.
“We’re all edgy. It’s almost a suicide mission, right?”
He unstrapped himself. Nashara bumped over to his chair as the gentle rumble of engines started up. She sank slowly toward one of the curved walls. He grabbed her hands. “Come, I want to show you something.”
She hesitated. There was a lot of prep to be done. But she could see he needed something, badly, and she couldn’t turn him down.
He hobbled slowly with her for a long time, past the galley, past crew rooms and niches. And finally he stopped, much farther forward.
“See that?” He pointed out a small brass plaque mounted behind glass into the side of the corridor. “My great-grandfather put that on the Queen himself, the day the Black Starliner Corporation first met. All four broken-down ships were there, leaking air, barely able to make a few wormholes before breaking down.”
The plaque, green with age, declared the Queen Mohmbasa a BSC founding ship.
“You should be Blood,” Nashara said. She hadn’t realized the ship was hundreds of years old; no doubt hardly an original part existed on it anymore. “Your family was there when it all started.” The exodus from Earth, trying to find worlds to call their own and finding them all occupied. The terraforming, the attacks by aliens opposed to seeing free humans docking at their habitats.
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