Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “Then we need to give up now, we really need to give up.”

  Kara sniffed, just as frightened as he was. But she couldn’t show it. “Be quiet, Jared. Let me think.” She bit her lip so hard she tasted salty blood. Then she stabbed at the console. “If you are the Satrap, then why did it all go bad?” she demanded, her voice cracking and wavering. “Why are so many dead, and the world not working? The world is under your command, why isn’t it working?”

  The man’s mouth worked some more in silence. Kara tapped the console. “The sound only works one way, from me to you. You’ll still need to use the pad.”

  It looked down, then raised the pad toward them again.

  The world does not work because I wish it not to. Humans have been warned to keep their population in check, but have failed. Humans have been warned to not meddle with the systems of the Satrapy, but cannot refrain from tinkering. Humans want more freedom to self-organize, travel, and consume, and the resources of all the Satrapic worlds cannot sustain these abuses. The Satrapy has come to the decision that there is to be a population reduction. Humans are incapable of managing this themselves. Only thralls will be left to do our work. The Emancipation of humanity has been revoked.

  Words did not come. Kara’s mouth was dry, her heart sped. They were no longer free?

  “We may no longer be free in the Satrapy, but we can still flee,” she said. There were others out there. Kara’s people had little contact with outsiders, trapped in the other Satrapic worlds. But she knew there were other Satraps in other worlds, and that the Satraps ruled all worlds. Humans had been taken from somewhere, and there had to be more . . . there had to be somewhere safe.

  But now Kara understood why people had been rounded up by the stratatoi, and why the starving few adults left fought to the death. Those who didn’t fight were no longer human, but now extensions to the Satrap’s mind. Including her parents.

  She imagined other Satrapic worlds, far away outside in a vacuum of their own, where this same battle was being fought.

  The pad’s words shifted again. Fleeing is pointless. Humanity’s status as a protected race has been revoked throughout the Benevolent Satrapy. But I have a deal for you if you surrender the control room now. You are obviously intelligent and quick to have done this. I would offer you a prime position among the stratatoi, a position of leadership, free cognition, and very little Thrall. Very few will get this status.

  Why was the Satrap bothering to confront her? Kara leaned in closer to the image, trying to see if the body of the man was blocking something, and looked deeper into the Satrap’s eyes. They were blinking. The reflected light in them wavered somehow.

  No. They transmitted light.

  Kara slapped the console off. She spun around the room, threw open links to check everything around her, desperately hoping she hadn’t given it enough time. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “What’s going on?” Jared asked.

  Most of the status glyphs hanging in the air came back green. Even after probing several levels deep, she couldn’t discern anything.

  “Kara? Why’d you shut him off?”

  “He tried to hack in. Some kind of light code, using his eyes.” The Satrap wanted them dead quicker than he could starve them of oxygen. Why?

  The only thing Kara could think of was communications. She’d sent a general message out into the Void. Was that what had spooked the Satrap about her?

  It felt right.

  She created another link to the system she’d used before. But instead of making a link that would skip outward beyond them, it bounced back from a point several hundred miles outside the world.

  Repeater buoy closed to all outgoing traffic, the denial read.

  But she could still call out to anything near the world. Maybe that worried the Satrap, that someone would check out her previous message, and that she could still talk to them.

  Kara was still mulling it over when she noticed a lack of noise. Jared walked with her over to a vent.

  “How long can we last without fresh air?” he asked.

  “Two days.” A wild guess at best.

  “Are we going to give up now?”

  “Do you want become thrall to the Satrap, just one of his many mental hands? A thing?” The Satrap’s offer didn’t give her hope. It had to be a lie. And if it wasn’t . . . she couldn’t imagine living to see the next age of Thrall.

  Jared looked down at the floor, eyes watering. “No, but I don’t want to die either.”

  “I know, Jared. I know.” Neither did she.

  When she next checked the outside, the screen showed only an empty corridor.

  Empty of air as well, no doubt.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The bulkhead doors throughout Queen Mohmbasa all thudded shut simultaneously.

  “Commence departure prep,” a toneless warning protocol advised the entire ship.

  Nashara stirred. The orientation of the walls shifted, the floor ceased being, and all sense of up and down floated away. She twisted around and put a foot to the blue wall on her left.

  The ship’s engine groaned. The walls vibrated, the air around her hummed, and the inside of Nashara’s head pounded. Gently the blue wall became the new floor as the ship accelerated.

  She stood and looked around, still a bit wobbly.

  The door hissed open.

  “You up?” the man at the door said. He stood five feet eight, with lithe musculature under well-fitting industrial-templated paper coveralls. Graying dreads hung around his head and the tangle of his beard. Two polished sticks hung from either side of a brown belt.

  “Barely.” Nashara blinked as the shivering stopped. The man adjusted himself so that he hung in the air before her.

  Another automatic warning filled the cabin: “Lane approach. Acceleration in five minutes.” The world shifted, orientation and gravity falling away from her.

  “The captain want see you.” The sound of the New Anegadan dialect relaxed her. At least one thing about Ragamuffins hadn’t changed.

  Nashara pushed off toward him. “Okay.”

  The dreadlocked man slapped the doorframe and floated clear. He held a palm-sized gun aimed at her. And he kept at least ten feet clear of her.

  Tension. Even in friendly territory.

  He directed her downshaft. Or at least Nashara assumed so. Even, vertical shafts; odd, horizontal. Assuming the cylindrical body of the ship accelerated along a lengthwise axis.

  Nashara held up her wrist screen, but nothing appeared. She’d been shut of the ship’s lamina. Odd.

  “What’s your name?” Nashara kept the comfortable double body-length between them for his comfort. She looked back at her toes. “I can’t access any ship information.”

  He flipped a lone dreadlock out of the way and kept the pistol aimed dead at her. His hazel-brown eyes waited for any sudden movement. “Ijjy.”

  “Ijjy?”

  “Ian Johnson if you looking up official records. Ijjy to me friend them.”

  “Okay, Ijjy.”

  “Lady, you ain’t no friend.” Nothing in those eyes for her. Not annoyance, hatred, friendliness.

  Nashara turned back around to face the direction they coasted in. “Okay, Ian.”

  They passed on in silence. The Mohmbasa’s corridors here screamed age. Warped bulkheads with airtight doors that didn’t even shut properly. Bits of corroded metal flaked off and floated in the air near faded lettering. Access panels with hastily patched fiber optics and conductives remained open, exposing the ship’s guts.

  But the next section’s damage wasn’t age. Fresh emergency sealant. Corridor after corridor saw great gobs of the gooey, gray stuff that had hardened just after being pulled this way and that by gloved hands of some emergency crew. They had attempted to get the ship airtight again as the expanding goop solidified. The ship had suffered a major disaster to have sealant patching almost every hullside wall for the past several hundred feet.

  She realized why the s
ilence bothered her.

  “Where is everyone?” A ship like the Mohmbasa had several hundred living aboard it. If it was Raga, whole families lived aboard.

  Ijjy looked over at the hasty repairs. “That the least of what all happen. The other side the ship even worse. Only ten percent of the Queen airtight. The rest . . .” He shrugged.

  “Survivors?”

  The tired brown eyes again. Not patient, or waiting for her to move. Something far more hollow. “Gone. Just three now.”

  Nashara looked back at the tortured goop. “What in the hell have I got myself into?”

  “A whole lot more shit than what you running from.”

  The Queen Mohmbasa’s captain was cyborged out and looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. Or maybe longer. Extra head-casing gleamed in the dull light of the cockpit, high-bandwidth optical jacks ran up the side of his left arm. No doubt he was as much a mechanical human as an organic human. The type of captain that only a ship could slowly create over the decades, influencing him to keep adding more and more features to himself to become more a part of what he controlled.

  He looked her over with one dilated eye; the other remained half-closed and reflecting tiny images bounced off the back of the retina. Nashara would bet that this man never left the confines of the ship’s immediate lamina. Getting cut off from the cloud of data that filled and brimmed out of the ship would be like losing half his mind.

  But the rest of him was mahogany, and if not for the head casing, he would have had beautiful curled hair.

  “Hello, Nashara,” he said. Just in those words she could hear a strong upper-Anglic accent, smooth, but still with traces of the standard Raga dialect. “You say you are Raga?”

  “You took a DNA sample off me, you tell me.” They faced each other in the spherical cockpit of the Mohmbasa, deep within the center of the ship. The captain’s chair hung from the top of the cockpit. “So you know who I am. Who are you?”

  Nashara hung off one of the rails crisscrossing through the cockpit chamber. Wood trim decorated several of the four stations arranged equidistantly from the captain. An incredible luxury if real, and Nashara suspected that it was. The Ragamuffins remembered the islands on Earth that they came from.

  The captain smiled. He palmed a small vial from the pocket of his black overalls and nudged it through the air at her. “I am the Captain Jamar Sinjin Smith of Queen Mohmbasa.”

  “Pleased.” Nashara snagged the vial out of the air and pocketed it. “Thanks for giving me my DNA back.”

  Jamar held out his hand and twisted it to let the light catch the optical jacks. Green flesh rotted between implant and skin. “Aboard ship one doesn’t get much exposure to infectious environments, particularly if you’re born into it. The ship’s pharma was destroyed, and we’re out of vitamin supplements, plasma, super antibiotics, and antifungals. Half an hour more and we would have had those aboard thanks to sympathizers in that habitat. But more importantly,” and each of his words became a calm whipcrack, “and I hope you understand this, your intrusion represents an even more fundamental problem for us in that we were never able to refuel.” He crossed his arms and regarded her.

  Nashara returned the gaze just as calmly. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “Why are they after you? What have you done?” Jamar twisted and leaned in closer to her. “And what do you want out of us?”

  Nashara nodded. “No dancing around with you. Yes, I am Blood. I could order you around. I could take your ship. But I don’t want your ship. I’d rather not cause any trouble with you, but I had to make some kind of choice. I’m dodging the Hongguo. If we outrun them, drop me at the next station. I’ll melt right back into the crowd. If we can’t outrun them, you can toss me out the air lock and make a getaway.”

  He sat and thought about the latter, she could tell. She sped her heart up and felt the fizzing rush of oxygen burst through her again. She sucked in a deep breath of air and calmed herself down. “If we dock again, I can even get you some of the medicines you need again.”

  “It isn’t that simple.” Jamar shook his head. “They’re after us too. More than likely if we shove you out the air lock, they’ll still come after the ship first, then go back for you. Or they’d split up.”

  “Split up?” Nashara looked back at him with newfound respect. “More than one Hongguo ship’s chasing you?”

  Jamar nodded. “Four or five midsized ships downstream. I’d feel accurate in guessing that more are coming down our way from Thule. It’s a logical choke point, but we can’t be sure since the blackout. We gave the others a black eye. They didn’t expect our maneuverability. The Shengfen Hao, the fellows you got to deal with, is more savvy. That ship’s still with us.”

  “What have you done?” Petty smuggling got Port Authority or individual habitat security forces after you. Maybe even bounty hunters. Hongguo only got involved in development issues. “Passing on very illegal technology outside the Satrap’s control?”

  “Your DNA indicates that you are not just Raga, but Blood, Nashara.” Upper-class Raga, descended from the great founder of the Black Starliner Corporation, yes, Nashara thought. And a bit more than just descendant. Direct clone of the founder as well, with all the baggage that came with that. More baggage she didn’t want from the men who had single-handedly created Chimson and New Anegada. But it got their attention, which was just what Nashara’s creators wanted.

  Jamar waved his hand, and her wrist screen lit up. She’d been let into the ship’s world. “This is just a higgler ship. Traders and sellers. We have no weapons. Since Chimson and New Anegada’s wormholes got cut off, we’ve just been scraping by out in space. No base of operations, really. Ragamuffins? All we are is a habitat and some ships. Mostly we are left alone if we stay quiet. So understand the importance of this: the Hongguo hunt my ship because they’re hunting all Ragamuffins now. I’m pretty sure the Satrapy wants us wiped out.”

  Ragamuffin ships smuggled anything black market, as well as a shitload of illegal tech. Nothing new there.

  The Hongguo had kept tabs on the creaky old merchanters of the Black Starliner Corporation ever since it had been founded, back when it helped ship islanders out from Earth by the hundreds of thousands. Enough that the company disbanded, each ship claiming now to be an independent owner and operator.

  Even closer attention had been paid when the corporation started to defend its newly settled worlds. The mercenary arm called itself Ragamuffins. A ragtag group of ships armed to fight against outside threats to New Anegada and Chimson.

  So now the Black Starliner Corporation didn’t exist. The Ragamuffins and the Hongguo now played tag, and finder’s keepers. But since Chimson and New Anegada had collapsed, only three ships had been destroyed in the deep dark between habitats.

  Usually the Hongguo put up a stink just outside legal lane areas, boarded a ship, and combed it thoroughly. Punishment involved heavy fines, loss of visa privileges to a given system, or even occasional “recruitment” of crew to the zhen cha.

  Ragamuffin ships conceded the boarding if maneuvered into an awkward hole—or ran like hell.

  No one got hurt. A spaceship was an investment in the billions. Neither Hongguo nor Ragamuffin wanted ship damage.

  But Jamar Sinjin Smith’s story played out different. A convoy of five Raga ships set out for Dragin, just plain higglers looking to trade for bottled antimatter at a friendly habitat.

  “They were waiting,” Jamar said. His voice repeated what he had just said from the speakers in the cockpit around Nashara. “The Windseeker kept thinking they detected something out in the dust three wormholes downstream of Dragin. We got pretty jittery, decided to keep close.

  “They hit us the moment we transited. Two ships, destroyed, in four minutes.”

  “Two whole ships?”

  “They boosted right in after us and we scattered. We were terrified, not thinking straight. No one ever saw anything like this. Not since New Anegada. And that was the wr
ong move. They blocked the downstream wormhole we’d just come through, and they had the upstream one blocked as well. And for Dragin, that’s it. No more choices. They’d trapped us.

  “They hunted the Windseeker down first. Aliyah X kept calling out over every single frequency, pleading. She said she would let them board. She said she hadn’t done anything illegal. And then, just static.” Jamar’s reflective eyes drilled into Nashara’s as he continued, his sentences clipped short, his tone breathless. “Instead of running and being rounded up, I headed like hell right at the upstream wormhole, taking missile hits and energy beams the whole way, damage crew working constantly to keep us up and running. Everyone suited up against vacuum.”

  “That’s insane.” Nashara leaned forward. “You had families aboard.”

  “They would have hunted us down.” Jamar folded his legs into a lotus position and rotated forward toward her. “That was their plan. We threw drones, wastewater, garbage, spare parts, anything we could think of, ahead of the ship. Rotated on our tail to fire the engines right at them before transit. And that’s when the cockpit crew noticed Dragin’s habitat was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Dragin-Above, when we swept the area, all we got pings back on was debris.”

  “They destroyed a habitat.” And all the thousands aboard it. Nashara swallowed. Something was going horribly wrong out there. “It’s like living back in the days when Chimson declared independence and the Satrapy ordered it put down.”

  “In more ways than you think,” Jamar said. “We saw the Gulong there, before we transited upstream.”

  “I’ve seen the Gulong before,” Nashara whispered. A five-mile-long, slender, mirrored needle of a machine. It was not just the Hongguo flagship. The mile-long needled spike at the front had a function. “When it shut the wormhole down to Chimson.”

  Jamar looked through her and sighed. “I’ve seen it once now. I hope to never see it again. Nashara, why are you here?”