“Not a fan of Emancipation?”
Sean shrugged. “Different places interpret it differently, right?”
They turned toward the customs booth. A short man in black, utilitarian pants and a similarly colored shirt stood near the wall watching them. He held no weapon. He stood rigid, shaved head beading sweat, staring at them.
Nashara almost hailed the man, then realized neither Sean nor Ijjy saw him.
Jamar’s voice crackled in her earpiece. “The girl says she can guide us to fuel. Says she knows a lot about Agathonosis. But she says she’s in a lot of danger, barricaded up in a room that’s running out of air in this end cap. It’s depressurized around her as well. She’s not all that far away. She’s got a location and maps for us. I can send them.”
“Okay, hook me up with that,” Ijjy replied, tapping his temple. “We can get by she place, see if we can help. Sean and I both got vacuum-protection plastic sprayed on, should be good for a quick exposure.”
Nashara couldn’t care less. “You guys, uh, see anything strange?” Her hand lay on the machine gun, ready to pull it free. The man in black stared even more intently at the three of them.
“Nothing,” Sean said, looking around the corridor. “Where the hell is everyone? Inside the habitat itself, not in the skin?” He walked up and looked into the empty customs booth. He tapped the glass a few times.
Ijjy tapped the control pad of the door leading out of the corridor. The door shuddered open, rolling aside, and the two men stepped forward.
Nashara swallowed. They’d stepped out into a larger hallway. Black-uniformed men lined the walls for several hundred feet.
They weren’t all unarmed. The first had been a test.
Ijjy and Sean walked forward out of her reach before she could say anything. Nashara caught up and whispered, “Jamar, this discussion encrypted?”
“Yeah,” Jamar replied, even as she heard feet behind her. Cutting them off.
She didn’t dare turn and look. She did her damn best to ignore the slack faces alongside the walls. All of them not even ten feet away from her on either side.
Shit. Shit.
“You all have artificial retinas, don’t you, to access lamina?” she whispered.
Jamar’s answer disappeared under a wash of static.
The door behind them shuddered back shut on its own. Ijjy turned around. “It should stay open.”
“Fail-safes,” Sean said. “Dangerously close to an air lock just to remain constantly open.”
He could have been right, except that Nashara could see the man in black standing by the door controls, and the handful of other men with him blocking their way back to the ship.
“Sean, send that map to my wrist screen,” Nashara said. She held it up as the lines faded in and looked at it, then back up at the men around them.
As long as these eerie people believed them blind, they might let Nashara’s group walk just a little bit farther. And whatever was in control was clearly interested in determining who they were, what they were, maybe even interested in capturing them alive.
“Okay,” Nashara said to Ijjy as she looked down at the map. “You were right.”
Fuel was the least of their worries now.
He turned back to look at her, confused. “Right about what?”
“We need to see this girl right away.” She walked past the two of them and glanced at the sides of the corridor. Fifty people on each side before the corridor jagged, all with out-of-control beards, long, raggedy hair, and dirty faces.
Goddamn creepy.
“Why the change of heart?”
“I’ve seen the light,” she lied through clenched teeth. “That poor girl, all alone in a room, scared, hoping we’ll help.”
Although, how the hell had the girl survived alone in here? Nashara and her new friends were already trapped, just a few minutes into this.
“Right . . .” Ijjy frowned and looked at her, and Nashara stared back.
Sean grinned. “Maybe she’s human after all.”
“Shut up and lead us to her, Ijjy.”
Nashara held up her wrist, blanked the flexible screen embedded in it, and used it as a mirror to see the crowd forming behind them.
They had handguns, although three carried a massive minigun on a bipod between them.
Ijjy dogged them out into a new direction, and suddenly they were just in empty corridors again, out of the gauntlet.
Nashara realized she hadn’t been breathing, her pores had shut down, and that she’d quadrupled her heart rate. She reset her internal fight responses and took a deep breath.
“Will you trust me on something, Ijjy?” she whispered. He turned back to look at her.
“What?”
“Don’t fucking look back at me,” she hissed. He turned away.
“What?” he called over his shoulder.
“When I say run, both of you run like hell.”
“Why?” Sean asked. Too loud.
“Because I think we’re going to die if you don’t. Trust me. I see something.”
Nashara used her wrist screen as a mirror again. The crowd behind them edging after them at a safe distance, but looking somewhat tense. They moved as one in a creepy, duplicated fashion, every step mirrored by the others.
Ijjy turned a corner.
“Run!” Nashara sprinted. They broke into a run with her.
The next corridor in front of them stretched four hundred feet long. The door at the end rolled shut.
Nashara spun back to the edge of the corner behind her and whipped a knife free from its ankle strap. She held it in her left hand and allowed the machine gun to drop to her side.
“What going on?” Ijjy turned to look at her.
Choices. Kill first, or see whether they were really friendly, though she doubted that. No one carried a damn minigun to a meeting unless they expected to use it.
But they hadn’t attacked. Nashara’s hand quivered slightly. All instincts screamed to start picking them off sooner, but something else held her back.
She took a deep breath, remembering cramped corridors in ships and fire-fights she’d scraped through. Thought of blood-slicked floors and shook her head. Now was not the time for doubts.
The first man around the corner didn’t spot her at first. He just skidded across the floor and fired at Sean.
That answered the dilemna, it was kill or be killed. Nashara shot him between the eyes and dove around the corner. The group didn’t expect to see her come screaming straight at them.
Arms grabbed her, several shots were fired, but the screams as bullets thudded and burst into flesh weren’t hers.
The three men around the minigun she aimed for didn’t have time to react. Nashara killed the first with the knife, the second with a kick to the head, and the third she flung clear.
She yanked the massive fifty-pound gun up, flicked the safety, and pulled the trigger down to within a hair of firing. “Drop your damn weapons.” She dragged the large ammunition box with her. A chain of bullets led back into it with more carefully coiled inside. A good thirty seconds of high-rate firing, she estimated.
As if one organism, they pulled back from her, boots all thudding to the ground at once. Guns hit the floor and Nashara backed away from them.
The entire group spoke to her, every single mouth opening at once. “If you pull the trigger, the recoil will knock you over,” they chorused.
Chills ran down Nashara’s back. “Maybe. Or maybe you’re really underestimating me.”
She kept stepping back, and the crowd melted away from around her. She faced them all and kept thinking about Ijjy and mind-controlling Satraps. If she was smart, she’d pull the trigger and obliterate this faceless mass of mindless people.
Her arm shook as Ijjy and Sean ran around the corner to her.
“I think I owe you an apology,” Nashara hissed at Sean. But he wasn’t looking at the crowd in front of them, just at all the blood on her hands.
“Nashara, what the h
ell is going on?”
“What do you see?” she demanded.
“A lot of blood.”
She felt faint now, dizzy. An afteraffect of the animal fight-or-flight response and some neurological changes happening as her body came out of combat readiness and into postaction relief. She rode a wave of endorphins.
“You’re going to have to turn off your eyes and your lamina. They’ve been hacked into so you can’t see things. Now come on, I’ll cover us, but we need to get to that girl, and quickly.”
“But then I can’t navigate without lamina.”
“I’ve got the map on my wrist screen. Kill your damn eyes. Do it!” Nashara said. “Do it now!”
Ijjy gasped. “Where the hell did you get that gun?” He’d shut down lamina, then. Then he looked down the corridor for the first time and jerked.
Sean looked over as well.
“They’re more back there,” Nashara said.
“They could be herding us.” Sean pulled out a pistol.
“True that,” Ijjy agreed.
Ijjy looked nervous. “We should get back to the Queen.”
“Then we still have no fuel,” Nashara snapped. “We go to the kid. You two want to try and turn back, be my guest. I’m going on.”
“She got a good point,” Sean said.
Nashara looked behind her. “Can you force the manual locks on that door, Ijjy?”
“Yeah.”
“Then do it.”
She kept the minigun trained on the black-uniformed crowd. But just barely. Even for her, amped up and designed for combat, the fifty pounds refused to be held steadily unless she let it rest against her hip.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Kara jumped up as the face of the man who’d talked to her earlier appeared. His eyes glowed as he looked at her, but behind that, he looked like a tired, old man.
“I am sorry about that, our earlier connection got cut.” He spoke in Anglic, just as some of Kara’s oldest family had. Even Kara’s parents had once insisted she learn it; it was, they’d said, a fairly common tongue among the rest of humanity.
She’d practiced it enough that her grammar was proper, but she was sure she had a horrible accent just listening to the way the man pronounced his words.
“Will you still help us though? And what is your name?” She looked over at Jared, sleeping by the door, his arm curled around the cloth doll. She felt slightly dizzy.
“I’m Jamar Sinjin Smith, captain of the Queen Mohmbasa.” He sighed. “I’m sorry about the signal quality, there is a lot of jamming going on.”
“The Satrap does not want anyone hearing anything,” Kara said. “It said Emancipation was revoked.”
Jamar frowned. “Humans are still mostly Emancipated out there.”
He didn’t understand. “The Satrap says all humans are no longer free, all Satraps will be doing this.”
“That can’t be true,” Jamar said calmly.
The universe suddenly seemed better. An outside human, talking calmly to her. Things weren’t like that elsewhere. Kara dried her watering eyes. “I think we only have hours of air left.”
Jamar grimaced. “Three people went in looking for fuel, and to get to you, but I’ve lost contact with them. I think they’re still trying to get to you, though.”
Kara hugged herself and crumpled down to the floor. “The three men, do you think they can fight well?” She looked up at the face.
“At least one of them can.” The distant man faded for a second, then solidified. “I wouldn’t give up yet, Kara. Let’s give them some time and see what they come up with.”
Jared shifted, opened his eyes. “Are we being rescued?” He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Okay,” Kara told Jamar, then turned to Jared. “This is Jamar. He’s on a ship outside of the world. He says someone might be able to come to us.”
A big smile broke out, and it was slightly infectious, despite the complete flips in hope and despair she’d just been run through. Kara stood up. “I’ll monitor the outside for them,” she said. “Jared, try going back to sleep. Sleeping conserves air.”
Jared nodded, wide-eyed, and shut his eyes and hugged the doll tight to himself. He took a deep breath and coughed. The stench was unbearable now that they’d been forced to use the bathroom’s floor. Her lungs hurt.
But she remained standing, waving a virtual window into existence that looked down at the outside of their prison.
Please, please make it, Kara silently appealed to the empty window. Jared shouldn’t have to choke to death because she’d made a mistake. It wasn’t his fault. He was just a kid brother.
“Listen,” Jamar said. “Make sure to tell the people who show up that I’m pretty sure a fully fuelled ship called the Toucan Too on the other end cap’s docking bay. It’s a small transport, I didn’t see it when I swept the habitat coming in, but I think I have a read on it. I’m getting more jamming, I’ll try to deploy—” Jamar Sinjin Smith winked out of existence in a haze of fuzz.
Kara touched the space where he’d just hung, then turned away to wait.
She’d almost fallen asleep standing and watching video of the outside when she noticed the movement. Two helmeted figures standing by the outer door.
Then a third, a woman walking backward, carrying the largest gun Kara had ever seen.
Jamar Sinjin Smith hadn’t returned to talk to her yet. But who else could these people be? Kara triggered the outer door to open.
The nearest man looked around, then ducked in. He waved the rest of them on. The woman with the gun backed in.
Kara sealed them in. Jared stirred.
Then she opened a window into the area between the two doors. There would still be no air in there, but she saw the woman slump against the wall and leave smears of blood on it.
Kara looked back at the space where Jamar’s head had appeared. He had said three. This couldn’t be a coincidence. Still, she remained cautious and cracked the inner door just slightly. Her ears popped and she could feel the air shift as it filled in the empty area. Jared jerked awake.
“If you are from the ship on the outside,” Kara yelled at the half-inch crack she’d allowed, “then what is your captain’s name?” The man with the long, bunchy hair turned and walked to the crack.
“Jamar Sinjin Smith, you talk to him?”
“Yes.” Kara released the door. It rolled halfway open. “But then we lost each other.”
There were now five of them sucking up the air, the three adults using more than Jared or her. Where they stuck in here too now?
The very black woman stepped forward. “We’ll want to wait here as long as we can to see if we can reconnect with him before making a try to get back out.” She turned to look down at Kara. “You understand it’s bad out there? Dangerous?”
Kara nodded again. She’d known that for a long time. “Your captain, he said I had to tell you there was a fueled ship at the other end cap. What’s your name?”
“Nashara. Ijjy has the long hair. The other is Sean.” She sat down with her back against a wall. “I could really use a nap.”
“We don’t have much air,” Kara protested. “We should leave as quickly as possible.”
The woman, Nashara, waved at Sean. “See if she can help you talk to Jamar. If not, we’ll move out to that ship.”
Jared darted between the two men to Kara’s side and stared back at them, not sure what to make of them. “She’s scary,” he whispered too loudly, and pointed at Nashara.
“Not now, Jared.” Kara turned to the one with the short hair and tight curls. “Let me help you with it, I know a lot about them.”
“Thanks, you never find me turning down extra help.” Sean walked over to her side.
Kara watched out of the corner of her eye as Nashara pulled Ijjy aside and whispered to him. She couldn’t hear it all, just the word kids and a nod toward Jared, then her.
“We’ll make do,” Ijjy told her, breaking out of the whispering, catching Kara’
s glances at them.
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea to bring them into a firefight.”
“We’ve been caught in enough of them already,” Kara said, turning her back to Nashara. “He won’t cause you any problems.”
Sean tapped her shoulder. “It’s okay, don’t worry about her.”
Nashara snorted from behind them both as Kara focused on trying to find a signal from the outside.
Jamar reappeared, though the video kept dropping until Sean froze the image of his captain’s head over the panel, and Jamar’s voice filtered out from unmoving lips.
“I’m glad to hear you all,” Jamar said. Everyone crowded near. Both the men were sweaty from running, and Kara found herself edged out behind them. “I was worried about you all.”
“We okay. How you doing?”
“I’m undocked. I have a small surprise for you,” Jamar said. “I found the Toucan Too. It’s fueled. They aren’t responding to me, but the ship responds to me, and diagnostics report to me that she’s got fuel. All we need to do is get there.”
“The girl told us.”
“We go meet you there?” Ijjy asked.
“That’s completely on the other side of the habitat,” Nashara said. “Twenty miles of hostiles?”
“It’s what you’re going to have to do. I’m sorry. I’ll try to meet you there,” Jamar said.
“Try?”
“I think there is a Hongguo ship in the area for sure, I’m going to try and draw it off.”
“Be careful, Jamar.” Ijjy walked closer to the frozen image of the Queen’s captain. He looked a bit shaken.
“I’ll be canny like Anansi,” Jamar said. “We’ll take that ship, but if we don’t, Nashara, remember—” The link died.
“Heavier jamming,” Kara said. She looked at them and shrugged. The three adults didn’t say anything, but looked at each other. Nashara stared at the floor.
“How we going get there from this side the habitat,” Ijjy finally asked.
Both men looked at the big gun by Nashara and she frowned. “Not like that. I won’t have that much blood on my hands. I’m not psychotic.”
“You the soldier.”
Nashara looked down at a screen on her wrist. “I will fight if I have to, but I’m not going to slaughter those people just because the Satrap has their minds.” But Kara saw her continue to stare at the gun. The woman was thinking about something.
Ragamuffin Page 13
