Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

“The kids facing forward?”

  “Yeah,” Sean said.

  Nashara settled the minigun against her midsection again, wincing. The skin there had bruised. The stratatoi scrabbled in the air as the roar started. All five of them jerked around as Nashara swept the minigun around in a precise cone of fire. Red clouds of blood burst out from the stratatoi. Nashara made a face.

  Again they spiraled out of control. The dim glow of the sunline got closer as they veered toward it.

  “The sunline!”

  “I see it, I see it,” Nashara muttered. She pulled out the small machine gun and fired off in its direction.

  It wasn’t enough. She used the minigun again, and it howled. They changed course, and then Nashara pointed it back at the stratatoi and fired it again. The sunline blurred above them.

  “Moving quick,” Sean said. A bit faster than ninety kilometers an hour, yes. But the nearest stratatoi had been killed. Limp in a spreading cloud of their own blood, they fell behind.

  Nashara relaxed in the crude harness and watched the end cap fade into the inky dark. She listened to the distant burst of gunfire from stratatoi working on catching up. It sounded like popcorn for several minutes, and she used the firefly sparks of the muzzle flashes to track how many and how fast. Several bursts from the light machine gun emptied her clip for another few kilometers per hour added, and she swapped it out.

  Fifteen minutes to go.

  At the balcony, now just a tiny, toy like piece of the end cap, a section of the sunline vented steam and fire, then lit up. The whole end cap reappeared five miles behind them.

  “Kara, is it morning yet?” Nashara shouted. “Because the sunline is turning on.”

  “No, it shouldn’t be doing that yet.”

  Crap. Nashara handed the minigun to Ijjy as another section of the sunline lit up. It silhouetted a new cloud of stratatoi with its brilliance.

  “The Satrap is going to try and burn us out of the sky,” Nashara said. If they moved far enough away from the sunline, the pressure of the moving air inside the habitat would act just like gravity, speeding them up to match the spin and dashing them to the ground.

  And six of the stratatoi were catching up, the dots of black growing in size compared to the general cloud. They had a machine gun in each hand and clips of ammo hanging like necklaces around them.

  Nashara waited for a minute as another section of the sunline vented steam and lit up, then fired a burst with the machine gun. One down, another limp body tumbling through the air. Nashara fired to correct the motion started from that.

  A second burst as they grew in size.

  The four now still alive spun around to face her.

  “How we doing?” Sean asked.

  “They’re getting close.”

  Gunfire cracked past them. Nashara fired again. Three. Again. Two and one. The lone man whipped past them as he replaced the clip in his gun.

  “Ijjy, Sean!”

  Both men fired pistols at the same time as the man fired the machine gun. Kara screamed. “Jared!”

  “Get him?” Nashara asked.

  “Yes,” Sean said. “But he got the little boy.” Kara kept screaming.

  “Easy, easy,” Ijjy whispered. A stream of blood trickled by Nashara’s left. She heard him rip fabric, and the blood stopped trickling by.

  Kara sobbed and both Ijjy and Sean shifted.

  “How bad?” Nashara whispered.

  “Bad enough,” Sean whispered back. “Got it stopped, wrapping it up, but we got to get to that ship quick now.”

  Nashara still looked back at the sunline, lighting up section by section, another cloud of stratatoi popping their way toward them. “Ten minutes.”

  Another section of the sunline vented and lit up. It was going to catch them at the same time as the stratatoi. Tinny, distant screams from stragglers reached them. A third of the habitat was lit up, shadows cast from tall buildings.

  Nashara fired the minigun and felt one of her ribs crack. She ignored the pain and let the gun continue, just another few seconds, then stopped. “That’s as fast as we dare go.” In fact, slightly more.

  “Half the ammo gone?”

  “Yes.” She opened the ammo box floating in the air by her. It had been reduced by half. Smoke from the minigun streamed back as they flew on. The air around the barrels rippled from heat.

  Nashara watched another section of the sunline come on and licked her lips.

  “You gonna slow down soon?”

  “Sunline’s coming for us. Have to wait until the last possible second.” Nashara watched the sunline snort again. Dawn had come to them.

  The next batch of stratatoi would hit them as they came in to the end cap. There might even be stratatoi waiting there.

  “The boy, how is he?”

  Tense, she waited and watched the stratatoi and sunline race each other toward them. Kara twisted and cried, and Jared remained quiet. Sean kept shifting around, no doubt checking the boy. “He got a pulse, still. He got a pulse.”

  The sunline made it hard to see now.

  “We’re coming in fast, Nashara,” Sean said.

  Bullets cracked by them. This time going the opposite way. “I can see the other balcony, a bunch of them men up in there.”

  The Satrap had gotten stratatoi there in time.

  “Give Kara a gun,” Nashara said. “Everyone get ready. This’ll hurt. When the minigun runs out of ammo, Ijjy, cut us loose. If we spread out we’re harder to shoot. Use your guns to slow down the rest of the way. Sean, take Jared with you. Ijjy, show the girl how to fire.”

  Nashara fired a shot to slowly spin them around. The balcony on the other end cap of Agathonosis grew, until she began to make out the windows. More rounds slapped through the air as the stratatoi bettered their aim.

  It didn’t feel as if they were moving through the sky, but that they were falling through a vortex of land and clouds toward the ground of the balcony, Nashara first, with the mass of strapped-on people behind her.

  She shook her head roughly and bit her lip as she aimed the minigun down, psyching herself into pulling the trigger.

  The minigun howled, the pain shot through her whole body. Blood leaked out from around the bruises, then stopped as the gun chewed its way through the skin and hit the armored underlayer of her body.

  Still it howled. Then Nashara let go of the trigger.

  The barrel whirred loudly.

  They still flew toward balcony, only it was a disastrous mess of glass shards and the doors were barely hanging on. They rushed toward it all.

  “Cutting,” Ijjy yelled.

  Nashara burst free of the rope and kicked clear. She had two hundred rounds left. They yanked free of the ammunition box with her.

  Bullets cracked past. Ijjy and Sean returned fire.

  A figure whipped past them, badly burned, but still trying to aim and fire at them. It disappeared ahead of them into the balcony.

  Nashara aimed the minigun at the now rapidly moving cloud of men chasing them and fired the last two hundred rounds in a last three-second scream.

  Without the mass of the others it kicked her back up to fifty kilometers an hour toward the balcony. But judging by the puffs of red, she’d done a lot of damage.

  Nashara tossed the minigun free as she flew toward the balcony, switching to the machine gun to fire at any movement. She struck the entry door and shattered it. Wood splinters pierced Nashara and a bolt struck her in the head.

  Dazed by the impact, she flailed and spun wildly, striking pillars, and the inside wall of the balcony. For a second she hung in the air, assessing damage, then the rest of her group burst in.

  Ijjy was swearing, but sounded alive. She heard crying.

  One of the stratatoi waiting for them survived, somewhat. A moaning echoed around the room.

  “Everyone, get behind a pillar!” Nashara yelled.

  A patter of spent casings began to ping against the inside walls, and then it turned to hail. A loud, wet
smack of a body moving over a hundred kilometers an hour hitting something solid made Nashara wince. And then came another.

  Then burned, shot, or screaming stratatoi rained down for the next two minutes as Nashara huddled in safety with the others. Glass flew, viscera floated by, and Nashara kept counting the impacts as she flashed back to estimates on how many had jumped out after them. The blaze of the sunline filled the room now that the autotinting windows had been destroyed.

  The sound of bodies slowed, the occasional pinging of spent cartridges died off.

  “Okay, let’s get moving.”

  She pushed over to Ijjy, who held Sean by the legs. Ijjy looked up, tears pooling around his eyes and breaking off into the air. Nashara shook her head, but Ijjy nodded. A giant slab of glass protruded from Sean’s chest.

  “He’s bleeding again,” Kara screamed.

  Jared lay still in the air, a bullet hole in his chest still pumping a faint fountain of blood into the air above him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Kara had her face buried in Jared’s chest, her hand pressed against the hole in him, begging the blood to stop spurting. But it kept coming and she kept screaming as it trickled out between her fingers.

  He looked at her. He kept mumbling something to her, but she couldn’t hear him, couldn’t stop screaming, until suddenly strong hands ripped her clear and flung her aside.

  Kara grabbed at empty air and Ijjy caught her.

  Nashara hung over Jared, ripping up a piece of her shirt to use as a bandage. Kara saw Sean and gasped, horrified at the jagged slab of glass that had impaled him.

  A hundred feet away one of the stratatoi kept screaming.

  “Is he going to live?” Kara sobbed.

  “Maybe.” Nashara packed the shirt on. “Ijjy, hold that on him tight.”

  Kara trembled and raised the gun they’d given her to slow herself down. It was still armed, and large in her hands.

  Kara kicked off the pillar hard toward the sound of the moaning man. She bounced against the wall and slid until she found a handhold near him.

  “Kara!” Nashara shouted.

  Kara sighted down the notch above the handle, and the burned face of the man on the wall turned to her.

  She screamed, pulled the trigger, and moved back from the man. She’d missed.

  Nashara slapped into her. “What the hell?”

  “They deserve to die,” Kara yelled. “All of them. They killed Jared.”

  She got spun around by Nashara, who was covered in blood. “That’s a dangerous path you’re aiming for. You sure you want to go down it?”

  Kara grimaced. “The Satrap took their minds. They’re not human.”

  Nashara turned away. “Once you start this, you never really get to go back to the way you were. No matter how hard you try. There’s a lot you can do. You can still help your brother. Understand. Help your brother. Talk to him, keep something on the bleeding, and help Ijjy with him. You don’t have to do this. Let me.”

  She shoved Kara back toward them, taking the gun from her as she did so. Kara watched, then, as Nashara moved over to the mewling stratatoi and fired. She jerked back from a sudden cloud of red and gray matter. The body jerked off the wall and floated away, slowly spinning as it trailed blood.

  Kara threw up.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Toucan Too had been moved out to the rim of the end cap, ready to get flung clear of the habitat. After hanging in the air so long, it felt good to be able to walk around. But Nashara could hardly appreciate that. She almost tore the Toucan Too apart, looking for a medpod, near frustration, tired, bleeding from another damn shot that had winged her on the way down the claustrophobic corridors to the outer-rim docks.

  “Damnit don’t just stand there!”

  Ijjy held the limp boy in one arm, held his chest in another, and the kid would probably die from all the running. Internal bleeding. Clots.

  The Toucan Too was a bullet-shaped capsule mounted on a slender antimatter drive, a long tube with a nozzle. A central shaft with rungs and rails led from the cockpit to the end, rooms radiating out from the core shaft. And Nashara broke into every one of them.

  “They’d be fucking insane if they didn’t have one,” Nashara snapped. Crossing the long distances between wormholes and planets without a medpod was . . . well, she’d already voiced her opinion.

  Kara’s sniffling echoed off the gray metal all around them.

  She forced a door open. There they were, five medical pods, crudely bolted onto the room’s walls.

  Nashara snatched Jared away, pulled the bloody cloth off, and placed him underneath the nearest bright yellow hood. She slapped the thing in place and put her palm to the contact pad.

  They all watched as wires and hoses wriggled into place, seeking out veins, slithering up Jared’s nose with a trickle of blood.

  Three arms snapped into place, dropping an egglike mechanical heart dripping with placement fibers onto his chest. Kara jumped when it latched onto the boy’s chest and his back arced up as the machine whined.

  Defib. Once, twice, three times, four times, and then the beat. A heartbeat.

  “He’s stable,” Nashara said.

  “What does that mean?” Kara looked through her, so sharp.

  “Get him to a Ragamuffin doctor within a week,” Ijjy said. “He go be okay.”

  “Right.” Nashara let go of the panel.

  “So we have to go, we have to find him a doctor.” Kara leaned over the panel. “Please.”

  Nashara looked back down the central shaft. “Ijjy, raise the captain.”

  Ijjy looked up. “I been hailing since we got aboard.”

  They looked at each other.

  “We need to find a doctor,” Kara said again. “We need to get moving.”

  “We’ll get going soon, but we’re waiting for someone right now.” Nashara backed out of the room with Ijjy and shut the door.

  “We could cast off,” Ijjy said. “Jamar said you could fly these things.”

  “We aren’t going anywhere anytime soon,” Nashara said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Jamar lied to you, I can’t fly this thing.”

  She walked into the cockpit and left Ijjy standing in the shaft. Alone, she sat on the floor facing the captain’s chair, hanging from the current top of the cockpit. She folded her arms in front of herself and closed her eyes.

  “Captain Sinjin Smith, where the hell are you?” she asked the empty cockpit, then she closed her eyes and rocked slightly.

  He couldn’t die. It wouldn’t be fair. These people’s lives were not her responsibility. Sean had died. The kid was almost dead. It was all a total fuckup. Jamar was off leading the Hongguo on a chase, but he was probably dead.

  The sound of something smacking against the air lock finally penetrated.

  “I think they trying to get in,” Ijjy said. He held the sides of the round doorway and looked at her.

  “Think he’s coming?” Nashara asked, staring at the floor.

  “Don’t know,” Ijjy said, folding his arms now. “We could end up a sitting duck.”

  Nashara tapped the wrist screen and the Toucan Too shuddered. The air lock groaned and seals hissed.

  “Ditched the umbilicial, should be harder for them to try anything in vacuum,” Nashara said. “Gives us ten minutes before they break out the suits to come for us.”

  “Okay. But you think ten minutes enough?”

  Nashara rested her head in the palms of her hands. “I got us fuel,” she said.

  “You did good.”

  “Not good enough, Ijjy. Not near good enough.”

  “We went up direct against a Satrap,” Ijjy said. “What more you want?”

  Nashara folded her arms. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Ijjy didn’t reply.

  “You have a smoke?” Nashara asked. “I just need a few minutes.”

  Ijjy shook his head.

  “Talk to me about the Raga. If
we are able to get this ship to them, talk to them, what can they do against the Hongguo?” She didn’t want to waste her own life for nothing.

  “You head downstream. This the last of the forty-eight worlds, so we got another fifteen wormholes to go. Got a hot-clouded world you pass through call Chilo, and then three down from there you got the end of the line. We got Morant, a small habitat, maybe ten thousand people in it. Twenty ships left with us.” Ijjy frowned, then corrected himself. “Sixteen since Dragin-Above. Six for defense, ten higgler ships if the Queen alive. Don’t know know how many of the higgler ships go be around, they out trading.”

  “You have family there, don’t you?”

  Ijjy nodded, but didn’t go into details. She silently thanked him for that.

  That was the might of the Raga now, a bunch of refugees huddled around a failed wormhole.

  But with the Satrapy and Hongguo bearing down on them, who else would step forward? It was going to be the closest thing to a home she would find out here. It was worth defending.

  Nashara started strapping herself into the captain’s chair and looked around the ship. It had been a long time since sitting in the center chair.

  “Things could get weird, Ijjy. I’m going to die, but not really.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “How?”

  “I’m not just built to be quick, or to survive vacuum. I have a device in me that will scan my brain, slowly, and as it does that, it will upload into this ship’s lamina. But in order to scan my mind it will destroy the synapses.”

  Ijjy stared at her. “Uploads go insane. Ground-up-built artificial intelligence don’t make no sense, too alien. We been playing in the labs in Morant.”

  “Uploads go insane because your physical body is as much a part of your being as your mind. You can’t divorce the mind from the organism and the environment. But lamina is computer power and a layer matching the environment. If you accept physical tags, your mind will cope.”

  “You seen it done.”

  “Seen it done by my sisters, before they destroyed the ship they were aboard to save my skin.” Nashara pulled out an optical jack and slid it under her skin, felt it connect. Much higher bandwidth connection.