Ragamuffin

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “I’m sympathetic,” Nashara said.

  “But it’s just not something we can allow,” Cascabel finished.

  “Do you think you are my parents?” Kara snapped. “No one here can tell me what to do.”

  “Okay.” And Nashara saw a message pop up in her lamina. Cayenne was back.

  Nashara could, of course, physically force Kara out onto one of the outgoing Ragamuffin shuttles.

  Screw it. Cayenne was back and needed her, Nashara had more important things to care about.

  “Okay,” Nashara said. “Stay. It’ll be dangerous. You’ll help with wounded. We’ll have Azteca and Raga aboard, and medical pods for the wounded. You’re able to interface with lamina, so you’ll be able to talk to the pods and authorize whatever medical treatment they want to give. Now I need a moment for an important conference.”

  Maybe seeing the chewed-up bodies that would come from all this would temper Kara’s thirst for vengeance.

  Nashara waved Kara out of the cockpit, and Cayenne and Cascabel appeared.

  “Cayenne, what the hell happened on the Takara Bune?”

  “Etsudo isn’t all he seems,” Cayenne muttered, then caught them up.

  Nashara rocked back, as did Cascabel. “He what?”

  “Altered our minds.”

  Cascabel looked at Nashara. “I don’t feel it, I don’t feel different, do you?”

  Would they even know?

  “Think about it,” Cayenne said. “If this happened on Astragalai, would we even have stopped to consider whether his live was worth saving?”

  “I would have flushed him out into the vacuum the moment I had the ship back then; right now, I’m not so outraged,” Cascabel said, and Nashara nodded.

  “I know,” Cayenne said. “And I can’t. That’s a problem.”

  “Shit,” Cascabel and Nashara said. “Can we still function?”

  “I’m ready to face Hongguo. But we have to be careful with Etsudo, you know?”

  Fair enough. That was done. There was Piper to deal with. She was getting the shit kicked out of her, the Wuxing Hao suffering enough damage it didn’t look as if it would even get through the wormhole in one piece.

  Cayenne was the closest, and she was able to get a tight beam through to Piper, who showed up in their midst looking wan.

  “I know I’m virtual to you guys, a spin-off, but to me this is damn real. The ship is falling apart, and I’m losing processing power with it. I’m dying. For real. I’m not going to make it.”

  None of them knew what to say. Nashara reached a hand out.

  Piper smiled. “Look, I’m going to try and get through one of the communications buoys, but it’s a far shot, and I don’t think I can. They’re shut down, and I can’t crack them.”

  Nashara, Cascabel, and Cayenne watched her fade out, all flinching as the connection died.

  “We’re gearing up for the attack on the Hongguo,” Cascabel whispered. “I’ll catch you up later, Cayenne.”

  And they all turned away from each other.

  Nashara knocked on the bulkhead before rolling the door open. John blinked back at her as she drifted in.

  The door shut.

  “What’s going on with the girl?”

  “The girl wants to stay.” Nashara kept drifting until she snagged a footloop under one of the bunk bed’s rims. “I can’t change her mind unless I drag her out myself.”

  John cleared his throat. “She’s what, early teens? Good luck with that. Who is she?”

  “Girl we found aboard a habitat, one of the last survivors. The Satrap had taken over, used them all as extensions of its mind.”

  “Plucky.”

  “Very.”

  “Reminds you of yourself, no doubt.” John rubbed his eyes. He grabbed her hand and looked at her directly, pleading. “You are risking her life keeping her here.”

  Nashara looked down and pulled her hand away.

  “Maybe. A little.” Nashara rubbed her palms together. “I’m going to let her stay.”

  “If she means anything to you, you’ll regret that.”

  “She is right, you know. I’m not her mother.” Nor did she want to be. “And she’s seen a lot. I think she should be allowed to make her choice.”

  John deflated. “I’m too tired to fight about something like this.”

  Nashara grabbed his collar and pulled him closer, oddly nervous.

  He jerked back. “I’ve been through too much.”

  “I’m not trying to sleep with you.” She let go. He’d just loaded his dead son into the cargo hold of the ship. “But do I make you uncomfortable, being Pepper’s clone?”

  She was keyed up, overfocused and overconfused.

  “I just need to sleep right now.”

  “I’ve been running, and running for years, alone. And I just watched myself die, I think,” Nashara said. “And I want to be next to a human being right now. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he whispered, and unsnapped enough for her to crawl in next to him.

  They awkwardly lay there, until Nashara turned around and put one arm around his stomach.

  He fell asleep within several minutes, and Nashara just lay there. She wasn’t a monster, or a robot, just an very oddly configured human. This was what humans sought, and she still had it in her.

  She could see what John couldn’t: Cascabel right there in the lamina with her, unable to touch John but trying.

  Azteca and Raga fighters came aboard, and Cascabel left to guide them into the ship and show them where to stow their equipment.

  It only seemed like seconds later that Cascabel woke her up. “We think it’s started, Hongguo communications traffic just leapt off the scale and they’re moving.”

  Nashara carefully pulled herself away. “And?”

  “Everyone is evacuated here, it’s time to punch out and do this.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Etsudo looked up, surprised as Cayenne allowed a limited amount of access to the ship’s lamina.

  “We’re not allowed in, we’re going to hover in the periphery. Any movement and we’ll be reclassified as enemy combatants,” Cayenne told them. She sounded annoyed. “We get the privelege of watching this battle from a distance. Which means you two will be getting into a pod and leaving here, I can’t take the risk of you trying to trap me again. And believe me, I’m being nice, I should have vented the air locks on you.”

  Leave and go where? Etsudo wondered. “You sound eager to get into the fray,” he said.

  “Piper just died.” Cayenne looked around. “She took the Wuxing Hao, now it’s just debris.”

  “One ship against the Hongguo, what were you thinking?” Etsudo asked.

  “Trying to run the blockade,” Cayenne said with a sad smile. “Trying to warn the humans out in the forty-eight worlds that the Satrapy was heading to exterminate us all.”

  Etsudo looked at her. “That’s a big assumption.”

  “They’re destroying the only armed human force they know of, they’ve completely taken over the Hongguo for their own needs. Look out there Etsudo, this isn’t a normal Hongguo operation.”

  She was right. And in the lamina Etsudo watched the battle develop slowly.

  Hongguo drones poured out through the security shield around the wormhole and madly accelerated out, hundreds of them destroyed as they smacked into new layers of chaff or mines the Ragamuffins had added to the shield.

  Ragamuffin drones and mines whirled after their Hongguo counterparts. That dance went on for almost an hour.

  Next up came a series of explosions beyond the upstream wormhole: a ring of low-yield nuclear bombs, blossoming flowers of fluorescing colors that expanded out in irregular balls of destruction and generating massive electromagnetic pulses. Communications and feeds dropped resolution, fuzzing out and consumed in static for several minutes before recovering. The next round a little farther out. The Hongguo were clearing the area.

  A long, silver needle poked throug
h the wormhole, crackling with massive bursts of static electricity that raced up and down the spire.

  “The Gulong.”

  Small, flattened Hongguo fighters squeezed in past the needle of the Hongguo machine.

  “To the races,” Cayenne said.

  Ragamuffin ships moved, seven or eight of them, engines adjusting their orbits to fall down toward the upstream wormhole from their higher orbits.

  Another nuclear explosion blossomed in front of one of the Ragamuffin ships.

  “They got the Magadog . . .” Cayenne was talking about the Ragamuffin ship that had overtaken the Takara Bune. The husk of the ship continued to drop toward the upstream wormhole, internal explosions ripping through it and bursting through its skin, debris raining off to form a cloud around it.

  Another nuclear hit. Pieces scattered out into different trajectories.

  Whatever happened, Etsudo was going to remain aboard his ship, and Cayenne was the ship now. He couldn’t take it back.

  “Cayenne.” Etsudo licked his lips nervously. “I want to make a deal. If I can help you, can I remain aboard? Permanently?”

  “I’m listening.” And so was Brandon. He cocked his head and looked at Etsudo intently.

  “You need to communicate out, and I can give you that. I can get you access to the communications buoys if you can get a drone through to the other side of the upstream wormhole.”

  Cayenne moved closer. “The communications buoys, really?”

  “Yes.” Etsudo nodded. “I can get you into them.”

  “No, you can’t,” Brandon said.

  Etsudo looked over. Brandon had a gun out. “You are a traitor, Etsudo.”

  “I know,” Etsudo said. “But to whom? Humanity, or the Hongguo?”

  “The Hongguo serves humanity,” Brandon said, and Etsudo gritted his teeth. He didn’t believe that anymore, not really. Not after seeing Agathonosis ripped apart just to move a Satrap.

  “You’re the losing side,” Brandon said to Cayenne. “And I don’t think, Etsudo, that you are truly my fried. You both antagonize the Satrapy, demonstrate their worse suspicions about humankind: that we’re unable to control ourselves, unable to coexist with them. This woman and her allies have caused a great deal of trouble because they’re unable to work with something to better things, you feel obliged to completely oppose, even if it means complete destruction.

  “You’ve not only made things worse for yourselves, but the greater part of the race as well.”

  “We’re already lesser citizens, Brandon,” Cayenne said. “Arguing how much lesser we’re going to become, that’s hardly an attractive way of arguing for your masters.”

  Brandon took a slow breath. “The Hongguo alone have kept humanity from being destroyed by the Satrapy for almost two centuries now.”

  “The Hongguo alone have kept humanity in their place for two centuries.” Cayenne drifted in front of Brandon, who was still firmly strapped in so that she couldn’t dislodge him by using the ship’s acceleration. She usually walked as if there were gravity: this was new. Etsudo carefully flipped his straps off, but left them lying against him so that Brandon didn’t notice. “You should have seen Chimson grow after we were cut off. We did great things.”

  And Etsudo believed her.

  She floated between the two of them now. Etsudo launched himself at Brandon, passing through her. Brandon blinked for that critical second, and Etsudo smacked into his arm. The Takara Bune fired its engines at the same instant.

  Etsudo grabbed hold of the gun and held on to it for all he was worth.

  “Shoot it, shoot it,” Cayenne yelled, floating over both of them. “Empty the chamber.” Etsudo pulled the trigger and kept it down. A deafening stream of bullets struck the cockpit wall.

  The moment Brandon wrapped his arms around Etsudo’s neck and choked him, he knew this had been a stupid idea. Brandon was feng, Etsudo could not beat him physically.

  Already Brandon began to break free as Etsudo gagged.

  But the accelerating continued and the gun was empty. Etsudo felt three, four, seven times his weight pressing down on Brandon’s arm.

  “Give it up,” Etsudo hissed.

  Brandon did not reply, but sank his teeth into Etsudo’s neck. Etsudo strained to pull free and rolled off Brandon, clutching the gun. The engines cut off the moment he fell. He struck another acceleration chair and still felt bones break. He groaned.

  “Snap in,” Cayenne murmered into his ear as Brandon burst free of his straps.

  It hurt like hell, but Etsudo had never strapped in this quick. Brandon froze and had enough time to get one single strap back on before Cayenne smiled.

  Etsudo had never pushed his ship as hard as Cayenne did for that second. The strap snapped, and Brandon fell farther than Etsudo had to a cockpit wall with a loud smack.

  Then Cayenne decelerated, and Brandon flew across the cockpit to the other wall. And then she accelerated again, and blood splattered against the metal. He didn’t scream, but Etsudo did. Cayenne kept doing it until Brandon hung limp, and quite dead, in the middle of the cockpit.

  “Let’s get those codes, Etsudo. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  Etsudo painfully twisted to look at the ghostlike form. He wasn’t sure which was scarier: Cayenne or the Hongguo ships out there.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Nashara ignored her cockpit. She sat in a model of the space between the two wormholes watching as the attack on the Hongguo proceeded. The five Ragamuffin ships dodged their way through their own security cloud and the Hongguo with only the Gulong in their sights. The Hongguo were running silent. It meant Nashara couldn’t get into their lamina, but it also meant they were having trouble coordinating their defense.

  The Datang Hao’s Satrap was a formidable enemy.

  But within the next twenty minutes they’d transit and strike the Gulong, and then the real mess would begin.

  Cayenne appeared. “I’ve got codes,” she hissed.

  “Codes?”

  “The buoys. The Hongguo buoys.”

  Cascabel appeared, and all three of them nodded. “We send the message out.”

  “I’m on it,” Cascabel said. The model shifted. Nashara and Cayenne watched Cascabel bounce information from the Toucan Too out through a chain of drones through to the Duppy Conqueror, which had just transited.

  They could see visuals that Cascabel sent back to them of the Ragamuffin ship as it approached the Gulong. But Nashara didn’t pay attention, she focused on the schematics as Cascabel cast her search out using the link through the Duppy Conqueror to boost the signal.

  “Got it,” Cascabel hissed.

  And it lit up, a straight connection out, and with Hongguo overrides it was fast.

  Cascabel shivered, blurred, and began to fade. “I’ve found lamina,” she said.

  And Nashara pulled back. Cascabel had been sucked clean out of the Toucan Too. Several minutes passed. “Cascabel?”

  “I’m okay,” a grainy Cascabel reported. “I’m spreading, multiplying. Happier hunting grounds here, and I’ve found something you’d like.”

  A laggy connection, timed out and slow due to the sheer distances involved, came in. A small video window.

  “Nashara,” Danielle of the Daystar said with a sly smile. She had to be just four or five transits upstream.

  “You followed us?”

  “You’re the kind of person to keep tabs on. You know what I think about you. My superiors ordered me to follow you in. And then it looks like almost every Hongguo ship ever started moving in this direction. We’re intrigued. We’ve never seen movement like this. It presents an opportunity. All through the League of Human Affairs we’re opening our communications buoys, arguing about what to do next. Take advantage of this moment to launch our revolution, or just stay very close to watch and learn.”

  Danielle would be all about opportunity.

  “The Satrapy is on the move to wipe us all out,” Cascabel said. “The war has begu
n here. If they finish with us, they’ll start on all humanity next. It’s a now-or-never sort of thing.”

  The connection fuzzed out as an electromagnetic pulse washed over the drones Nashara was using to keep the link open. Danielle appeared again, her arms folded over her belly. “Tell you what, forty-two hours my force of five ships can get to you.”

  Nashara nodded. But there was going to be a catch.

  Danielle continued, “Shortly after that, more will come. I’m going to make the first strike, and the rest of the League can come with me or not. It’s beginning now. If you have the Gulong, we will fight with you. With the Gulong the League could fight back, we could turn the tables.”

  There it was.

  With a smile Danielle leaned forward. “It’ll be good to see you in person again, Nashara.”

  And then the connection winked out as several drones were slagged.

  Nashara opened the eyes of her body and looked around the cockpit. “John, get the Ragamuffins and Azteca in the cockpit. We’re going in at the Gulong.”

  Every little bit was going to help, and if the League was coming, she had a gut instinct they needed to have control of the Gulong.

  Danielle would see that as another opportunity.

  League help offered a solid chance at overwhelming the Hongguo. This was looking more and more likely, as long as they managed to hold on to the Gulong for forty-two hours.

  “We’re going in?” John asked.

  “There might be some help on its way, and we need to keep the Hongguo from using the Gulong until then. I haven’t been able to hack into that ship, and I’m thinking, as well, if we can get in there in person, maybe I can take over its lamina for us.”

  Nashara began adjusting the ship’s course, getting ready to join the fray.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  John swallowed as something clanged off the side of the ship and alarms indicated air pressure loss.

  The cockpit remained secure.

  Fifteen Azteca Jaguar scouts sat against the cockpit’s inner wall. They carried their rifles and their clubs with metal studs hanging from their hips, still in full finery with feathers and cotton armor dirty and sweaty. Mongoose-men with machine guns sat on the other side.