Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Deng looked as if he’d been slapped. “We know roughly how many ships the Ragamuffins have. More ships are moving to flood the area. But this could change things. We’ll need more ships, and need to get some drones down that thing. Hold.”

  Etsudo looked back out at the scene, closing his eyes to the cramped cockpit and the faces of the gamma crew staring back at him.

  Behind the Takara Bune the Wuxing Hao and Datang Hao transited slowly into orbit with them.

  “Our orders are changed.”

  “And?” Etsudo asked.

  Jiang Deng rubbed his neck. “We’ll first move to destroy that object. The Satrap recognized the design and function of that vehicle, it indicates it has the ability to reopen wormholes. Once destroyed, the Gulong will come to shut down the upstream wormhole. We will seal the Ragamuffins off.”

  “I don’t have weapons, but my drones are clear of the mines and chaff, I can provide a good plot through.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Deng said. And in Etsudo’s lamina he could see representations of the three small ships like his moving out. The Chen Yuan, Pao Ming, and Fei Ying. He remembered meeting the captain of the Pao Ming once. A short, stodgy man who kept his hair long. Impractical on a ship.

  The three ships fired their engines and dropped their orbit. They hit the first shield of mines.

  “Are there people aboard?” Etsudo asked. “It’s suicide.” And then the thought struck him that he might be asked to follow them, and he wished he hadn’t said anything.

  “Everything is in a good state.” Deng coughed. “It is for the greater stability, the Satrapy agrees.”

  Agreed or not, Etsudo stared as the burning hulks of the ships cleared a major hole downward and at an angle backward through the shield.

  And even for Deng, the man was behaving strangely.

  “Is everything okay, Deng?” Etsudo asked.

  Deng didn’t reply. “The Wuxing Hao and I are moving against that vehicle. You will follow and coordinate drone reconnaissance as we go.”

  And maybe be commanded to ram something.

  The Hongguo had now become a military arm for the Satrapy, entirely, and this was nothing but a war, Etsudo thought.

  “Imagine a world where any interdicted system could come back into the Benevolent Satrapy,” Deng said. “Earth terrorists and Chimson fighters would all pour into our worlds and ignite a war to end all wars throughout the forty-eight worlds. It would be our end. We would be wiped out in response.”

  Etsudo rubbed his forehead as the Shengfen Hao moved its orbit lower and through the gap in the shield. As it slowed, the downstream wormhole would catch up to it. The Wuxing Hao followed, and Etsudo swept away visions of lamina to look at his crew.

  Bahul and Brandon cocked their heads as the Takara Bune’s engines fired. They were patched into the navigation lamina, which gave them a crude simulation of the outside world. Enough to have seen the three-ship suicide run.

  “We’re following them down and out to the downstream wormhole, it’s open again, and we’re destroying whatever came through.”

  “We have no weapons,” Fabiyan said.

  “I know that,” Etsudo snapped. “But you saw the other three, didn’t you?”

  “They can’t ask us to kill ourselves to protect those ships,” Bahul said.

  “They haven’t,” Etsudo said. “Yet.” They all paused to listen to the pattering of chaff and other debris against the Takara Bune’s hull.

  “The Ragamuffins will attack us,” Brandon said. “It’s us or them.”

  Maybe. Hongguo called themselves the guardians of humanity. And the Ragamuffins on the run had kept trying to insinuate that the Satrapy had begun a pogrom against humans.

  And what if it was true?

  “Brandon, Michiko?” Etsudo opened his eyes. “Go to zeta and alpha crew, help them rig up their rooms as alternate cockpits. We’re going to be on alert, no shifts.”

  “What are you doing?” Brandon asked.

  “I am following orders,” Etsudo said. Brandon’s conditioning was weakening here. His desire to serve the Hongguo without question would begin to buckle as Etsudo looked more and more like a free agent.

  There was no time to fix that.

  And he was still keeping Nashara’s secret to himself, not warning Deng about it. He had a gut feeling that if he revealed his small treason, he would be ordered aboard one of the ships. There his mind would be stripped free of its moorings and he would be remade into a subservient soldier.

  Much as he suspected Jiang Deng’s mind had been altered somehow by the Satraps. And all the other Jiang serving in the Hongguo.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Nashara watched the three Hongguo ships burst through the bottom of the Ragamuffin security cloud and tumble out with a cloud of debris.

  “Do you think there were people aboard those?” Cascabel asked, appearing only to Nashara.

  She suspected so.

  Cascabel nodded. “I tried to hail them, to see if I could get into their ships and spread. You?”

  “Destroyed before I could do anything.” The desire to multiply out into fresh, virgin lamina made Nashara shudder. A sad waste.

  “A waste,” Cascabel whispered. “The other three ships, one of them is the Takara Bune. I’m trying for them.”

  Nashara knew. “He followed us here. Something doesn’t add up with him.”

  “I know. I have this odd feeling. But I trust him.” Cascabel shrugged and faded away from inside the cockpit.

  The Xamayca Pride had dropped down and managed to get into a geosynchronous orbit several hundred miles above them. Holding the high ground and ready to power out of orbit and run for it if needed.

  Nashara had pulled the Toucan Too through the shield and lay in front of and just above it, and both the Starfunk Ayatollah and Chistopher Malik’s Magadog had followed a similar path. Neither could get back to the trailing wormhole anytime soon, only the Xamayca Pride could.

  These ships were heavily armed Ragamuffins, weaponry bolted on from the days when New Anegada and Chimson faced constant alien threat. The Ragamuffins had retreated far into the unexplored areas of this wormhole stop, but all the old ships were still here.

  No doubt all the higgler ships such as the Queen Mohmbasa had been bringing in the necessities, stuff they needed to survive all these hundreds of years holed up out here.

  She’d forced them out of hiding.

  “Kaalid, here.” Monifa appeared to them all in the cockpit. “Got this damn time lag: everyone out there and all of we down here.”

  Ijjy twisted. “See those two big Hongguo ship?”

  “Yeah, I can’t take them with just the Pride, seen? Ain’t go risk just my ship against them Hongguo. I can’t talk to whatever coming through, the Hongguo jamming the area already.”

  Nashara cocked her head. “And if they’re from New Anegada? We’re leaving our friends standing alone in the middle of an attack.”

  “Cudjo and Duppy Conqueror coming down to back all of we up.” There was a pause as Monifa tapped more people into the discussion. “Don Andery, Ras Malik, you there?”

  “Magadog here.” Christopher Malik appeared.

  “Starfunk Ayatollah.” Andery frowned. “Why I seeing you double, Nashara?”

  Nashara looked over at Cascabel, who’d joined the conversation. “Don’t worry about that just yet.”

  Cascabel disappeared, but Nashara could feel her nearby, listening in.

  “The Hongguo jamming me out something bad,” Monifa said. “I can’t talk to whatever just came through that hole back to New Anegada.” She said the name fast enough that it sounded more like Nanagada to Nashara.

  “But if we can talk to them, we have five ships to them three. It worth moving toward it?” Andery asked.

  “If we raise them, yes,” Monifa said. “I don’t have no reply from the Dread Council, but I running this show and I say I want know for sure these people friendly before we rush in. That
thing don’t look like any ship I ever seen.”

  “I can stop the jamming, with a little help,” Nashara said. “I need a string of communications drones, or buoys, whatever you have. The highest bandwidth you have.”

  “What you go do?” Christopher Malik asked.

  Nashara paused for a moment. She was so used to keeping this deep within her. But this was why she’d been sent, and what she should be doing.

  Cascabel appeared beside her with a smile. “You’re not seeing double,” she said. And Nashara explained what they were seeing.

  “She ain’t telling no lie,” Ijjy said softly from behind her when she finished, and the captains of the other ships stared.

  “Do I get drones?”

  “Dropping them down now,” Monifa said.

  Nashara waved her hand. Now she stood on the hull of the Toucan Too with Cascabel and watched a shimmering line leap up toward the direction of the Xamayca Pride.

  “Pretty nice visuals,” Cascabel said with a smile, and clapped her hands. For a moment they both hung beside a large silver ball, then another, and a third, jumping along the chain of high bandwidth laser to the final destination.

  It was a workable model for what they were doing, a metaphor Cascabel had whipped up as the process began. It was, Nashara thought, helpful. Or else the process would have been mysterious, scary, somewhat uncontrolled.

  The final buoy played laser light across the hulls of the ships.

  “I can’t get into this Shengfen Hao at all,” Cascabel muttered.

  They flicked over to the other ship, Wuxing Hao. Nashara smiled, and shivered. She began to split down the middle, a ghostly image of herself moving down the laser light toward the moving ship.

  And then it firmed up. “They don’t know it yet,” the newest Nashara said, “but I’m in.”

  “And?” Cascabel and Nashara asked.

  “Call me Piper.”

  “Piper?”

  “It works with the damn theme. What now?”

  Cascabel shivered, shook, and split into two. The second one smiled. “Got the Takara Bune. Two out of three, not bad.”

  “Snag all the drones and let’s talk,” Piper said. “Takara Bune, what’s your handle?”

  “Please don’t ever call me by the ship’s name, it feels crass, don’t you think?” the newest iteration of herself said.

  “We’re making this shit up as we go along,” Nashara said, getting impatient with herself.

  “Cayenne, call me Cayenne. Etsudo’s ship seems to have the most drones, I’m getting it.”

  A moment later they had it. Everything but the Shengfen Hao.

  Now Nashara could focus on the strange new craft. She found its signal a few seconds later.

  A man’s face appeared looping a message. A familiar face.

  “It’s Pepper,” Nashara said, shocked. Cascabel, Piper, and Cayenne repeated the same thing with her.

  Cascabel passed it on, and a window to Monifa appeared in the air between them. “It’s Raga, they’re Raga on that.”

  Monifa looked at the four copies. “You spreading?”

  “Get down there,” Nashara snapped.

  “Of course.” Monifa shook herself.

  Nashara checked another window in her lamina to see the Xamayca Pride dropping down in orbit, several missiles already streaking their way toward the downstream wormhole.

  “Piper, Cayenne, see what you can do about the Shengfen Hao.”

  Far above them all, the Cudjo and Duppy Conqueror struggled to drop down fast enough. Pepper, the very founder of the Ragamuffins, was aboard that alien ship. It was no surprise, Nashara thought, that Raga made all possible haste to save him.

  “Tell her to watch out for the Wuxing Hao and Takara Bune now,” Nashara warned them.

  “On it.”

  “Give them hell.” Nashara smiled. She felt unleashed. And it was a good feeling.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Etsudo felt it: the ghostlike presence of something else flitting throughout his ship’s lamina. Something had smashed through their security and several of Etsudo’s purposefully flimsy firewalls.

  And then all the lamina fell away in shards, leaving Etsudo strapped in, blinking, and staring around at the gunmetal gray of the cockpit.

  His world, usually carefully laid out to the patterns of feng shui, now looked like the inside of an industrial spaceship.

  “Hello, Nashara,” he said.

  Bahul blinked and looked around, probably also confused about his lack of lamina.

  “Etsudo? You figured out what I was very quickly. And you are no simple trader, you are Hongguo, aren’t you?” Nashara appeared before him in the cockpit. Both Bahul and Fabiyan stared. Etsudo had not warned them in the least, they’d just been stuck wondering why he’d spent so much time in his quarters with so little sleep.

  “Yes, I am Hongguo,” Etsudo said. Nashara’s projection wore military-gray slacks and had her hair shaved down the sides in streaks. She looked annoyed. “I was part of an arm that sought to control human activities through less violent methods.”

  “Looks like that’s all falling apart,” Nashara said.

  “You’re an emulated mind. This is remarkable,” Etsudo said, changing the subject.

  “And very illegal,” Bahul said.

  “Look, I know this is all new and interesting, but I’m taking over your ship,” Nashara said. “Any attempts to mess with me and I turn you all into toothpaste. See where I’m coming from?”

  “All the experiments we’ve seen, all the patents I’ve helped purchase and freeze, with all these the experiments in taking the human mind and digitizing it fail spectacularly. We are more than just brains locked away in mechanical bodies.” Etsudo waved at the ship. “We are influenced by our environment, our reactions, our physicalities.”

  “Lamina,” Nashara said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Lamina. If you can emulate a human body within lamina, it can pretend it is still a physical organism in the physical environment the lamina sits overtop and maps to. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fuzzy here, but just real enough I’m happy.”

  “Okay, Nashara.” Etsudo bowed his head. “What now?”

  “Well.” The lamina Nashara closed her eyes. “We’re going to bump your craft a little bit closer to this big, big thing that apparently reopens wormholes. We have some friends on it that would like us not to bomb them. I’d also like to go home, Etsudo. It’s been a long time since I’ve been home, when you bastards cut it off.”

  Etsudo nodded. “I apologize.”

  “The Shengfen Hao is attacking the alien craft my friends are aboard. The thing is spewing atmosphere, breaches all over the place. The hull looks like the far side of a moon, cratered everywhere. How long do you think they can keep that up?”

  “What are you hoping to get from all this?” he asked.

  “At first? Just wanted to get back to Chimson.” Nashara sat down in an empty chair between him and Bahul as if it were real. “Now, the Satrapy is attempting to rub our race out, and I wonder if reopening Chimson is a good idea. I might be endangering them.”

  “The Satrapy is not trying to commit genocide,” Etsudo said.

  “Really?” Nashara tilted her head at him. “You that sure, Etsudo? Because there’s starting to be quite a bit of evidence stacked against you. Lots of dead ships and dead habitats lying around lately.”

  “They have engaged in illegal activities.”

  Nashara leaned close. “Some of them. But all of them? There’s a girl aboard the ship I flew in here that says her habitat’s Satrap said it was over for the species, we’re being exterminated.”

  Etsudo licked his lips. “That’s a child speaking.”

  “Maybe. But then again, the Raga are being exterminated, and they’re just a motley bunch of creaky old ships. They’re harmless.”

  “Well-armed creaky old ships.”

  “But not engaged in vastly advanced technological research,
my friend. They’re only crime is arming themselves for defense. Why doesn’t the Satrapy like that?”

  “You can’t arm yourself and say you are harmless at the same time,” Etsudo said.

  “When it comes to genocide, the unarmed are always at a disadvantage,”Nashara said. “I’ll fight here and now rather than suffer a peaceful death later.”

  “You’re a hostile individual.”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “You know, I liked you Etsudo. Now . . . not so much. Sit tight, I’ll be doing my best not to harm any of you.”

  “Nashara, please try to move the ship.” Etsudo vibrated with excitement.

  Nashara frowned. “Oh, shit.” She was trapped in what felt like a bubble. A tiny artificial lamina deep in the ship. She’d been too fast, too cocky, too confident in her unique new form.

  “You rage on as if it were a simple thing, Nashara. But who will pay for the fuel for my spaceship? Who will maintain it? If we toss out the Satrapy, it all collapses. For all your rhetoric, you can’t just get rid of them. There is an entire civilization that revolves around them, and they around us.” The Satrapy cracked antimatter in its habitats to support the entire ecosytem of ships and travel, at levels humans could not gain access to.

  “The Satrapy has a monopoly on the technology. Give us time and we’ll produce,” Nashara said. “We managed on Chimson after you shut us out.”

  And even if it was true, the Satrapy was surely not going to destroy the Hongguo? No, this was targeted at anti-Satrapic elements. Dangerous humans. Angry humans. Troublesome humans.

  The Hongguo and the habitats who worked with the Satrapy would continue on, as always . . .

  He had won. He had a copy of her. Once he had a copy, he could work with it, maybe even to the point of getting it to help him against any other copies out there.

  Backup lamina now surged into being.

  “How the hell?” Nashara, audio only, sounded annoyed even through the fuzz of extremely low bandwidth connections. “Nothing but audio. You sealed me off.”