They should have left him on the planet, but even then, the chance was high Jerome would have been hunted down by some Azteca and sacrificed.
Pepper looked down at the Teotl.
When the time was right, being half-blind would be the least of this particular creature’s troubles. That he vowed. That he would not forget, this moment, these feelings.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Nashara used drones and ships to create a detailed update to the world around them as she approached the crippled craft hanging a third of the way between the two wormholes.
“That one Hongguo ship is still just sitting still outside the upstream wormhole,” Cascabel said.
“The Datang Hao.” Nashara looked down at the scale model of their environment. The tiny tube hung nestled deep in the Ragamuffin shield. “Something important’s on it.”
“Something that could force a large, military ship like the Shengfen Hao to . . .” Cascabel waved and a ghostlike image of the gutted destruction appeared in the lamina before them. A long trail of debris hung out behind the alien craft, spewing out from large gashes in the hull. “Like it did the people aboard that habitat.”
The image faded away. “There must be a Satrap there.”
Piper joined them. Each version of herself was taking to wearing different clothes. And hairstyles as well: Cascabel had dreadlocks. Piper had kept a close-cropped military fade. “Most of my occupants are sealed within the bay docks, they’re trying to negotiate with me now, rather than try to shut the Wuxing Hao down.”
Nashara hadn’t thought about that. Piper had been firing on the Shengfen Hao and also trying to fight the Hongguo from within.
“I’m worried about Cayenne on the Takara Bune,” Piper said. They all were, but Piper had accelerated the Wuxing Hao up above them to try to catch up to the upstream wormhole since the engagement.
The acceleration had also served to pin her crew down until they’d agreed to cease their attempts to shut the lamina down and kill Piper in the process. Tidy.
Hell hath no fury like a Nashara, Nashara thought.
“The warning didn’t say anything much,” Piper said. “We’re not sure if she’s fighting with the crew, or dead, or captured. If captured, I’d hate to think of what is happening. I like Etsudo, but something about this is making me feel really uncomfortable.”
“I agree.” Cascabel nodded. “But Magadog is moving to help out with the Duppy Conqueror close behind, and we can use either ship’s communications as a relay point to help Cayenne once they do their work. Joining in, that’s a waste of a powerful ship.”
Piper considered that for a second. There was one last thing left that Nashara wanted to try. Would her twinned self want to do it as well? “Then I want to try for the upstream wormhole. There are going to be a lot of Hongguo coming through, maybe more Satraps. If we get cut off, or destroyed, my being on the other side may help send warning to other humans. The girl did say this was a genocide, not just Raga-cide.”
Nashara nodded. She’d come to the same conclusion. The word had to get out before Hongguo poured out of the wormhole. “Get everyone off your ship.”
“I’m working on it,” Piper said.
The Wuxing Hao began to speed up, moving into higher, faster orbit to overtake the upstream wormhole. An almost suicidal run, but if anyone could do it, she could.
Cascabel and Nashara turned back to each other as the Toucan Too slowly tapped the massive curve of hull before them.
Nashara popped her request for a mobile device with a high bandwidth communications array and lamina projection out to the Ragamuffins.
They replied that they would be able to set something up for her particular needs.
A large tender, the Cornell West, had made several stops at the large Ragamuffin ships patrolling the wormhole. There had been just a few terse messages back and forth with the ancient Ragamuffins aboard the alien craft. The cylindrical bulks of the Starfunk Ayatollah and Xamayca Pride already jutted from the docking bays.
A grounation would be held aboard the alien craft. And there would be enough Ragamuffin troops to solve any problems that might arise.
Nashara followed the Cornell West in and docked. She watched the outer cameras as muscular organic clams rose out of the walls to hold the ship in place.
Then waited for the bay to seal itself and pressurize.
Several Raga waited outside for her. They towed with them a large, silver, oblong sphere on oversize wheels for gravity and acceleration situations, tiny jets on the side for weightless areas.
They had large guns. Recoilless.
Nashara smiled and dumped a piece of lamina into the mobile unit. Several dishes and a whip antenna rose up as she began to test it. It puffed jets of air to move forward.
“Thank you,” she said. Her physical body didn’t have the raw signal power and bandwidth between the ship and itself once too far from the Toucan Too. With the mobile unit she could bridge that gap and use her body outside.
Without the mobile unit, her body would stop. Without careful adjustments, her heart rate would flutter wildly, until it died. And Nashara would remain in the ship, wondering what had happened.
“It’s good,” Nashara said. “I’m ready.” At the center of the alien craft they all hung in the air. The two Ragamuffins turned and pushed their way off down a long shaft, and Nashara followed them. They moved along the center for several hundred yards, until finally they stopped. A massive plug or rock rolled aside, and Nashara stepped into a room of captains and strangers.
She recognized Don Andery floating above the table and shook his hand. Monifa Kaalid nodded. A handful of what looked like other highly placed Raga had come in with the Cornell West. Enough to make any decisions at this grounation stand for the all the Raga involved in this.
Twenty mongoose-men from Ragamuffin ships hung in a circle around the room, guarding exits and looking wary.
She moved in front of the other man she recognized. The gray eyes and the dreads. Yes. Nashara held out a hand. This was Pepper. It was like an electric shock, shaking his hand.
“And you are?”
“Nashara. Nashara Capsicum.” She shook his hand, watching the frown at her name. “It’s good to meet you finally, Grandpa.”
In the pin-drop silence that followed, Nashara smiled and moved on, looking down at a man who crouched next to a body of a young man, maybe just over twenty.
A loss and a shame.
And next to him one of the alien Teotl floated. It had a slashed trunklike face and was missing a tentacle. “What’s with this one?”
“He speaks for the Teotl,” Pepper said. The grounation began to form a ball of people, all facing each other in the air. He moved closer to her, long dreadlocks floating above the collar of a cumbersome trench coat. “Are you really my granddaughter? Wouldn’t I have to have had a daughter to have had a granddaughter?”
“I’m a second removed clone of you.” Nashara twisted to look at him.
“Female though. When the Raga lost you behind the wormhole to New Anegada, they created several clones of you.”
“Why?”
“You have something of a reputation,” she told Pepper. “But mostly it was for your DNA. My superiors cloned me and several brothers and sisters. We were fitted with technology dangerous to the Satrapy and sent to get back to New Anegada and give it to you all for your use. Our DNA profile would be something the Raga here would know about and know that were truly what we claimed to be.”
“The Satrapy?” Pepper seemed hung up on that. “The Gahe and Nesaru used that term to describe their alliance, but you all seem to use it differently now.”
“You went and hid deep in the wormholes, well out of contact to create New Anegada. We know there was little communication, just a small bit of trade. The Satrapy hid deep behind the Gahe and Nesaru; even now it still tries to hide behind the Hongguo. But they were there. We are all just their puppets, except for Earth, New Anegada, and Chimson.”<
br />
“Three hundred years.” Pepper shrugged.
Nashara grabbed his arm. “Exactly. Look, the main reason I’m here now is because the Teotl know how to reopen wormholes. I want to go back home, to Chimson, and I’ll do whatever I can to help if that’s something we think can be done. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been back to my home.”
“I can understand that.” Pepper still stared at her with a bemused expression.
She turned to face the mass of people. It was time to start this thing. “I have a couple questions. For one, does this thing really reopen wormholes, and two, what do we do next?”
“Good questions,” Pepper said. “Ask the Teotl about the first.”
The alien twisted slowly. “Yes,” it whispered. “But we need more power sources, more antimatter fuel, in order to achieve such results. It is a very expensive process, and we will not share it with you unless we have some guarantees about our safety first. Particularly since this nest is about to fall apart.”
“Teotl,” snorted an older, yellow-skinned captain who’d come in on the Cornell West. “We had fight you long enough back in the day, and now we got you. You go take what we give you, and it go be fair.”
“Seen,” a pair of Ragamuffins over in the corner said. “
Do not trust the Teotl,” the man against the wall with the dead body growled. “Be very careful of their promises.”
And so the grounation began as the Ragamuffin leaders deliberated what to do next.
Cascabel appeared, but only to Nashara. “Nashara, Piper wanted me to pass something on to you.”
Nashara paused and peered into a new model of the area around the upstream wormhole. The Datang Hao had started to retreat back through the wormhole.
But other Hongguo ships were coming through.
The grounation would have to hurry up. The clock was ticking.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Pepper watched the grounation struggle toward a consensus.
“It insane,” Ras Malik snapped. “After all the Teotl gone and done here, and they want protection?” Pepper was content to feel for people’s positions. He racked his memory for faces, trying to remember the opinions and beliefs and experiences.
“We go need they technology,” Don Andery pointed out.
“We take it,” Ras Malik said.
They wanted to move the Ragamuffins into Nanagada. They wanted control of the Teotl technology. They weren’t interested in helping the Teotl. But much of the Ragamuffin home base in this system relied on mines drilled into asteroids, a single cobbled-together habitat, and docks for the ships. Those couldn’t be moved to Nanagada, and there was no guarantee that the Hongguo would shut down the upstream wormhole only. If they pushed the Ragamuffins back and shut down the downstream wormhole, everyone would be split again.
Pepper pointed out that still left them at risk. The New Anegada downstream wormhole had Teotl’s former masters on the other side, masters that sounded awfully like the mind-controlling Satraps Nashara had described in an aside.
Pepper looked up as a far-off explosion echoed down through the ship.
“We die while you argue.” Metztli shook a plain tentacle in frustration. Pepper had taken all the tips off. The Teotl insisted on being a part of the grounation, speaking for its people.
It wasn’t out of nobility. Pepper suspected that Metztli was in bad shape and hanging on by a thread, and that Metztli was the only specialized type left that could speak for the whole nest. The others had probably died in the impact. Pepper felt an even deeper hint of desperation from the alien.
And the creature was right. Pepper looked over at John, quiet and huddled near the wall, still grieving.
“Well, we can’t stand against all them Hongguo that coming down to that upstream wormhole,” Dread Caine said. He’d arrived on the Cornell West, and his soft voice drew attention to him as effectively as raising his voice could. “So fighting to stay here ain’t go work. I agree, we evacuate and let them push we back into New Anegada, and we take these Teotl on all the ship. With them technology, we might hold New Anegada against whatever go come through or maybe reopen this wormhole again.”
Pepper twitched. He wasn’t going to be trapped again for centuries more.
“Hey.” One of the Raga pulled a machine gun up and flicked the safety.
Pepper pushed over, and in the doorway floated one of the Azteca warriors, next to a Teotl like Metztli, tentacles wrapped around the doorjamb.
A bipedal Teotl floated behind them.
“There are one hundred and fifty-seven Azteca with us, five of us,” the new Teotl said.
“As I said,” Metztli announced from behind Pepper. “We want assurances.”
The Raga could take them. Recoilless rifles and more experience in zero gravity than the Azteca. Modern mongoose-men versus Azteca with rifles here in orbit.
But the Teotl might even that out. It would be bloody, Pepper decided.
Another dim explosion.
The alien craft was going to rip itself apart as they argued. Safeties clicked off all throughout the room.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The Azteca had stormed in and surrounded the conference room. The new Teotl shouted demands for written contracts and promises. The aliens’ world was falling apart, and so had John’s.
He’d been staying out of it, waiting to leave it all with his son’s body. Ready to run and let Pepper do his thing, be in his element.
For Pepper, John would wait to kill Metztli. He owed him that much.
The woman, Nashara, stiffened. “Incoming! Everyone,” she shouted, her voice amplified and booming from the mobile unit next to her. “Everyone grab something!”
The world exploded in debris around John. Thundering filled his whole world that screamed up and down his range of hearing until something popped and went silent. Hot white light filled the doorway and then faded away.
He drifted, watching silent screams until a large piece of rock smacked him in the head and he spun away from the wall, bleeding.
Nashara grabbed him using a mechanical claw on the mobile unit. It puffed its way through air to her dragging him with it.
“You okay?” Her lips didn’t move. “Your eardrums are blown.”
“I’m okay.” John looked around, dazed. “How am I hearing you?”
“I’m talking to you through the lamina.”
“Lamina?”John mouthed. “You mean data overlays?”
“Yes. I’m drilling straight in. I’ll let you listen in through the mobile unit if you want.”
He looked at her, impressed.
“Air’s getting low.” Nashara left him and grabbed Metztli from the middle of the air. “Can you fix the leaks?”
“Fix? Fix? The nest is falling apart,” the Teotl screamed.
Jerome’s body had floated free, eyes staring out at nothing. John gritted his teeth and turned. “Who the hell did this?”
Nashara looked over the mobile unit at him, face pulled into a grimace. Blood hung in the air in globules, leaking from scratches as people were flung into walls. “We’ve got Hongguo ships coming out of the upstream wormhole, looks like one of them snuck a missile or two through at us.”
John looked at the captains. “None of your ships caught that?”
“It won’t happen again,” one of them said. “We see how they jam it.”
John looked at Nashara, some of the things she’d been explaining to the grounation coming back through the haze. “And you saw it because you’re in the lamina, spreading out through other ships, wherever you can grab processing power, right?”
“I’ve taken over a Hongguo ship, the Wuxing Hao. That version of me picked up on the trick and passed back a warning.”
They had a ship of the enemy’s. “What are you doing with that ship?”
“Trying to run the Hongguo blockade. Warn the rest of humanity.” Nashara shrugged. “They deserve a chance to fight back as well.”
Figh
t back. Nashara looked frustrated sitting around waiting. They’d been talking about running for Nanagada. Cutting losses. Even Pepper had joined in, looking resigned to the idea but annoyed.
John looked around at bleeding Ragamuffins, still facing off against the Azteca despite the disruption.
Fuck running.
“Metztli tells us this ‘nest’ is unsalvageable.” John faced the alien. “You can try and force us around with the Azteca here and we rip each other apart and you become extinct. Or you can work with us and live.”
“You lie to us, you betray us,” Metztli said. “How can we trust you?”
“It cuts both ways,” Pepper said, before John could snap something else out. “You have to start somewhere. Besides, you and I both know you won’t make it out alive if you fire the first shot, and I’m pretty sure I will walk out of here alive no matter what choice you make.”
Metztli seemed to droop in the air. It waved a tentacle, and the other Teotl barked something out in Nahautl. The Azteca pointed their rifles away, many of them looking relieved.
“These Hongguo are coming through, but how are they going to close the wormhole?” John asked.
“A machine, the Gulong,” Nashara told him.
“So we’ve lost the Teotl machine, we’re threatened by the Hongguo, we need to take the offensive and capture the Gulong and hold it to keep the Hongguo away. Then we can negotiate. Until then we’re going to be showing them our backs as we try to organize a fighting retreat? That is how people die, they’ll hunt us down and scatter us. No. I’m not interested in that. How many of these ships do they have?”
“Just the one.”
Pepper moved over to John and put a hand on his shoulder. “We go for the Hongguo? We hold that wormhole and that ship while Raga evacuate to Nanagada, and if we lose that position, we fall back to this wormhole.”
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