Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  A leathery-faced man with grayed dreadlocks appeared before them all. “I Don Samuel Andery, captain of Starfunk Ayatollah. Who you is?”

  “Mr. Andery, my name is Nashara. This is Ian Johnson, of the Queen Mohmbasa. We need to talk, and quick.”

  “Ijjy?” Andery frowned. “Where the Queen?”

  Ijjy swallowed. “Gone. The Hongguo attacked.”

  “The Hongguo? For real?”

  “They also had attack the other higglers we was with,” Ijjy said. And then he launched into a recap, answering Andery’s questions as the conversation grew heated.

  “I find all that hard to believe. Hongguo enforce the rule of the Satrap, but this?”

  “Believe it,” Nashara said. “Why else do you have armed ships? Why else do you cluster around a dead wormhole instead of trying to integrate with the rest of the worlds? The Satrapy doesn’t have our best interests at heart.”

  Andery looked at her. “That true, sister, true, but we can’t just take you word for it. You go have to come in, call a grounation with the Dread Council to talk. Then they can send out some ship to check all this.”

  “You think you have the time for that?” Nashara waved in the air to display an image of the upstream wormhole. A Hongguo ship breached the wormhole, cautious, tasting the air ahead of itself with a score of drones that swarmed out tossing chaff and bleeping random static across frequencies. Nashara shook her head. No way back through, Hongguo would be piling up on the other side of the hole any moment now.

  Another ship followed it. Then a second. Then a third.

  “Taking us a bit more seriously now?” Nashara asked. It surprised her the Ragamuffins only had one ship out patrolling.

  Andery looked serious. “Get you self moving, we right behind.” He looked away from them, then nodded. “The Magadog coming in.”

  A new face appeared, scarred with short-cropped hair. “Toucan Too, this Magadog, Ras Christopher Malik here. Been listening to what all you saying. Don Andery got the right of it, head downstream, we sending back explanation, mobilizing.”

  “You have preparations for such an event?” Cascabel asked. A Ras ranked higher than a Don; this captain would know more about Ragamuffin emergency plans.

  Ras Malik nodded. “Morant being towed out system, deep space. Worse come to worse we keep going, head out into them Oort cloud, hide out deep, forget the wormhole them, hunker down. We already an hour into it, you’ll find out what happen when you get in system. Just be careful, we all jumpy, seen?”

  Nashara saw a blip moving out from beside the downstream wormhole now. The Magadog. The two ships played chicken for a few brief minutes, until Magadog curved out of the way.

  “Good luck,” Nashara said.

  “You too,” Ras Malik said. “Thanks for the heads-up. Make sure to drop all you speed coming out the wormhole, it mined.”

  Magadog whipped past them, mere thousands of miles apart. Cascabel upped acceleration, and the Toucan Too hit the downstream wormhole toward the Ragamuffin home territory.

  Sweeps of the area around lit up their displays. Ships, shuttles, drones, chaff.

  “Shit, Malik wasn’t kidding.” Cascabel dumped velocity, spinning them on end to fire the main engines and bleed tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.

  The two wormholes orbited a rocky world, and that in turn hung out near a brown dwarf. Nothing of interest to the Satrapy here.

  “Toucan Too, this the Xamayca Pride.” An audio-only connection of a woman’s voice. A cautious choice. Nashara respected that. “Ras Monifa Kaalid here, we sending you a path through the mines hanging all around you.”

  Cascabel nodded. “It’s here.” The Toucan Too puffed, adjusting orbit to sink down into the cloud of mines.

  The round face of Ras Kaalid appeared, her dreadlocks floating loose around her face. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Things really getting hectic here and everything on a full stand-up. We already getting Morant towed out.”

  “You knew about the Hongguo?” Nashara asked.

  Ras Kaalid shook her head. “The downstream wormhole to New Anegada reopened. Everything upside down.”

  Nashara and Cascabel stared at each other, and Ijjy leaned forward. “That even possible?” Ijjy asked.

  “Apparently,” Ras Kaalid said. “Now we have to find out what coming up through from there, and what coming down on all of we with the Hongguo.”

  Nashara looked at Cascabel. “We have to get there. We have to find out what has happened.”

  “Maybe, but it ain’t big enough. We waiting to see what coming through.”

  “Make sure we’re there too,” Nashara told Cascabel. She had to see what lay on the other side of the wormhole, what had happened to New Anegada.

  Her long quest might almost be over.

  And they might have a new ally in the coming fight against the Hongguo.

  PART TWO

  THE RETURN OF THE GODS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Pepper wrapped his oilskin duster around himself tighter as the wind kicked up through the trees and water cascaded down on his dreadlocks and behind his collar. He shivered.

  He needed a new duster. He’d bulked out too much over the last few years. Good food, a free schedule. It sounded good. Nice planet, New Anegada. Or Nanagada, as the Caribbean descendants here had taken to calling it sometime in the last few hundred years. Only, somewhat annoyingly, the locals called their land on the other side of the mountains Nanagada, just like the planet.

  He still wanted to get off the damn planet and see if it was possible to get back to the rest of the worlds. The destructive dying spams of the war against the Teotl the Black Starliner Corporation had raged in space had left the planet with no wormholes out anywhere and with the destruction of technology. It was hard to step back from centuries of progress and not miss it, and Pepper found each year grated harder at him.

  A branch snapped.

  Someone sniffed.

  Pepper’s gray eyes flashed back a bit of moonlight, like a cat’s. He flipped back an edge of his coat and pulled out a long hunting knife.

  Five days in this dirty, muddy, humid, sticky-leafed outskirts of the Azteca city Tenochtitlanome.

  It was something to do.

  The warrior-priest he’d been stalking stepped around the large banyan tree and Pepper picked him off the ground by his throat. He tossed the sniper’s rifle the man carried off into the bush.

  “Niltze,” Pepper said. Hello. Pepper had been practicing his Nahautl.

  He flashed the knife in front of the man, who whispered, “Pepper,” and wet himself.

  Word apparently got around.

  Pepper shoved the man down onto his back. Mud exploded outward as the flat of the warrior-priest’s back slapped against the sloppy ground.

  “I die gladly for my gods,” the priest choked.

  “That’s nice.” Pepper leaned forward. “I have a question. Which one of your gods is giving you the orders to try and kill delegates from Nanagada?” The Azteca’s gods, the Teotl, couldn’t leave well enough alone since their defeat and the overthrow of their priests. They still tried to manipulate things here in Tenochtitlanome from the shadows.

  “I’ll die a thousand lives before giving you any information,” the priest spat.

  “I can do that,” Pepper growled. A twig snapped nearby. “But you’re lucky today.”

  “Pepper?”

  “You’re late, Xippilli.” Pepper looked over at the Azteca nobleman who stepped off the muddy path toward them. “Told you I’d catch one skulking around here.”

  Several Jaguar warriors in yellow-and-red capes stepped forward, rifles aimed at the warrior-priest on the ground.

  “Take him for interrogation,” Xippilli ordered. The Jaguar scouts ran forward and bound the warrior-priest’s hands with leather thongs and carried him away.

  Xippilli stood with Pepper in the rain, looking through the foliage toward the pyramids rising over the top of the jungle.
Tenochtitlanome, the capital of Aztlan, was home to tens of thousands of Azteca. And home to a small delegation of Nanagadans, their housing not too far away from the copse they stood in.

  “It’s a good thing I’m here,” Pepper said. “Or some of them would be dead by now.”

  “The old priesthood despise the moderates and preach against the new leadership,” Xippilli said. “They can’t accept the outcome of the Great War. They think if we had fought harder, a little bit longer, that we would be the masters of Nanagada. It’s not surprising they’re still out trying to affect things.”

  “I should have come out earlier, cracked some heads, sent a message.” Pepper pulled his collar up and shook his head.

  “Does the boy mean that much to you?” Xippilli asked.

  Pepper looked over. “I asked John deBrun for a favor. In return, he wants me to keep an eye on his son right now. Yeah, it’s babysitting, but who better?” He didn’t agree with the delegation. Opening the Wicked High Mountains, such a perfect barrier to the Azteca, seemed stupid.

  But he wasn’t in charge, and no one had asked him. Instead John had come to ask him to keep a close eye on Jerome, as many Azteca would welcome striking back against one of the main people who’d helped end the Great War.

  “Indeed,” Xippilli said. “Who better?” Both men stood in the rain for a moment, then Xippilli walked over to the road.

  A few moments later a steam-powered car slowly chuffed down toward them. Red-and-yellow-caped Azteca hung from the sides, watching the road. Pepper moved back into the brush and watched it go by.

  “How are things going with the delegation?”

  Xippilli shrugged. “They’re still touring the city, seeing the sights. The cocoa plantations today were the main event.”

  Pepper watched the steam car creak off into the city. “I think I feel worse for the boy in there.”

  “Politics do drag on,” Xippilli said. “But they run the world.”

  “Flapping mouths.”

  “They might bring our two cultures together.” But of course, Xippilli had a strong interest in all this. Since leaving Capitol City politics, Xipilli had turned to trade. His knowledge of Azteca and Capitol City customs and people let him build airships and trade routes over the Wicked High Mountains. And he wanted the two connected more permanently. More profit lay there. “That’s worth all this, don’t you think?”

  “I’m just fulfilling my side of a bargain.” Pepper brushed past leaves to step up onto the road. The rain paused, a break in the dark clouds showing the light blue sky.

  “What was this favor you asked of John?”

  “Checking to see if that damn spaceship of his is healed up yet.”

  “Eager to leave us?” Xippilli asked.

  “You have no idea.” Pepper looked up into the sky at a small, bulging twinkle. The Spindle. Legend said that it would one day disgorge the Azteca’s gods in vast numbers.

  Unlike most legends, Pepper knew this one was true. At some point the energies that leaked out to create the always visible Spindle would force the wormhole back open. When the alien Teotl returned in force, all hell would break lose. Been there, done that, Pepper thought. And he didn’t want to be around for it the second time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Agaudy airship with a bloated gasbag and peeling red paint floated high over the walls of Capitol City, propellers churning as it fought the sea-breeze headwinds that kicked up in the evening.

  An Azteca airship.

  Once it would have made John deBrun nervous. Today it was just another trader. A lot had changed in the last decade, particularly in the last seven years since the fall of the old Azteca leadership to more moderate rulers. Airships moved back and forth over the almost impassable mountains that separated the Azteca from the Nanagadans. Trade boomed in Capitol City and the land recovered from the Great War. The Teotl had led the Azteca to the city walls, but had been dealt a blow in that war that toppled the old leadership and sent them back over the mountains.

  Nanagada’s masterful specialist fighters, the mongoose-men, had built up their numbers along the Wicked Highs to prevent a repeat anyway. It was a secure, stable, and prosperous time for Nanagada.

  The airship slowly dropped into the heart of the city, disappearing behind the massive walls perched on the peninsula’s tip.

  John watched the spray drift up from waves constantly smacking into the rocks at the city’s seawall base. It would be a salty day if one stood on the wall walkway.

  A larger steamer churned by John’s small fishing skiff, giant nets hanging from long metal arms off either side. The men on the deck waved.

  The fishing fleet steamed farther and farther out these days. Water currents changed, the ocean had slightly cooled.

  It would keep cooling as Nanagada failed to get enough sun. The orbital mirrors keeping the planet warm had fallen two hundred years ago. Ice had crept over the northern continent, and fishermen reported icebergs hindering the fishing grounds.

  The technological proficiency needed to keep a terraformed planet going had been lost in the war with the Teotl. Electromagnetic pulses from nuclear weapons and the destroyed wormhole leading back to the Teotl had left the whole planet shattered, only just now reacquiring the tools it needed. But, John knew, not soon enough to countereffect the cooling of the planet.

  Before Pepper got to use the Ma Wi Jung to try to bridge the depths of the stars to the next wormhole, a centuries-long journey, John needed the still-working spaceship to help Nanagada. That would be an interesting conflict when the time came.

  John sailed on, letting Capitol City dwindle until it felt as if he were all that sat at sea. A tiny speck of a boat bobbing out in the ocean.

  He knew exactly where he was. John could close his eyes and see a map of the area, complete with his exact location, the city, and the spaceship he looked for.

  He dropped the sails and threw the anchor over. He walked back to the bench by the mast and sat down.

  Beneath his boat John could feel the presence of the spaceship Ma Wi Jung. Deep beneath the waves, sucking nutrients and metals out of the water, it slowly repaired itself. One day it would fly again, lift itself into the air and spring for space.

  Maybe.

  John queried the ship, feeling his mind connect with it like a snake burrowing down into a hole. Images floated over his eyes as he accessed the ship’s datasphere.

  Status?

  The answer impressed itself somewhere deep in the back of his head. Another fifteen years. The starship’s self-repair mechanisms were working at double the speed they’d been designed for, a little hack thanks to John.

  He glanced overhead. The Spindle hung in the sky. Its geosynchronous orbit kept it at the same spot, day or night. An omen for many, a worry for the few who knew what it really was.

  John sighed. The Spindle was the remains of a wormhole, and when that wormhole reopened, something he hadn’t known was even possible when he’d helped try to destroy it, there was going to be a world of hurt. Nanagada’s old enemies would come through.

  And the other wormhole in orbit around Nanagada, the one that had once led out to allies and that John had come through to get to Nanagada, that one didn’t seem to be reopening. It was invisible.

  They were alone.

  He pulled a lure out of the tackle box beneath him, rigged a pole, and cast over the side of the boat.

  As the sun slipped beneath the horizon, John ran a light up the mast. He’d stay the night; he enjoyed the fishing.

  He didn’t have any obligations, and he had no worries as Pepper was keeping an eye on Jerome off in Tenochtitlanome. He missed the sea, salt drifting over him, night sky packed with stars. He’d stay. He’d nap. It would be refreshing.

  The old wooden boat rocked an easy rhythm, mast swaying, as John leaned back, closed his eyes, and smiled. Almost four hundred years old, and fishing still hadn’t lost its appeal.

  But he kept glancing back up at the sky.
>
  As the sun rose, John tied the small fishing boat to one of the low wooden piers in Capitol City’s harbor. Capitol City jutted up out of the peninsula’s tip, a great amphitheater with one edge slouched in the water.

  Several hundred years ago the entire city had been grown from scratch, using an experimental and highly illegal form of nanotechnology powered by microwave radiation focused down on the spot from orbit.

  Well before humans had come down to settle Nanagada. Well before the Ancient Wars hundreds of years ago, when they were reduced to no technology, scrabbling around on the surface trying to get by.

  “Good catch?” someone in a long fishing skiff asked.

  John stretched out the several fish whose gills he’d run wire through and held by a foot-long wooden stick. “Not bad.” His accent sounded flat, as even after all his years among the Caribbean descendants of Nanagada he had never picked up the dialect as fully as he would have liked.

  “You catch them good, John.”

  He smiled. A good catch, but only because the Ma Wi Jung heated up the water below, attracting fish and activity. He’d fry this batch up and enjoy a good breakfast.

  John shifted the catch to his right hand and climbed the steps up to the stone cobble of the main waterfront. He waved at a few fishermen scaling fish on stone tables.

  The apartment he lived in lay half a mile through the tight alleys and shortcuts John had internalized easily enough. A ghostly series of compasses and lines hung in the air before him that only he could see. It was a talent wired into his brain hundreds of years ago to allow him to plunge ships through wormholes in haste.

  John closed his eyes and relied on the internal map still visible to him. He took thirty-seven steps forward, stopped, turned right, and started walking.

  A dumb trick. He opened his eyes to avoid tripping on alley trash.

  A Toltecan walked toward John, one of the moderate Azteca who spurned human sacrifice and lived in Capitol City. Many had returned and reformed the city of Tenochtitlanome when the government had fallen apart, bankrupt due to the costs of its invasion of Nanagada. Quite a few remained in the city, though. The Toltecan’s fringed hair was brushed down almost over his eyes.