Between those two parties sat two Teotl, bipedal with catlike faces and clear cartilage-like skin gleaming in the cockpit emergency lighting.
“They’re randomly detonating nukes all over the fucking place,” Nashara said. “Okay, here we are, hold on.”
The cockpit whirred, acceleration pressed down from behind, then the side, then on top. Then it really rammed down on them, to the point that the Azteca screamed in fear as they slid around the walls.
Done. It lifted off his chest, his stomach feeling as if it were lifting up into his throat. Someone threw up.
Weightless now, except for a few jerks as Nashara thrust them closer.
A series of explosions, but not on them, and then the sound of scraping and shrieking of metal on metal, the sound of the Toucan Too’s engine thundering as it shoved them into something solid.
They were pushing the Toucan Too’s nose through the hull of the Gulong, into a large hole created by one of the Ragamuffin ships with a missile, somewhere around the two-mile mark from the Gulong’s tip. They were a bit late to the party, about twenty minutes behind the other Ragamuffin ships. But they were there.
“Seal it up!” Nashara shouted throughout the whole ship.
The Raga would be heading out, first run, and setting off hull-breach grenades full of emergency sealant.
John unstrapped and the cockpit door rolled open. The Teotl and Azteca followed him out along the corridor, dropping into the bay.
A Ragamuffin hung by the air lock, opening it. His silver eyes flashed back at them. “We ready?”
They nodded. He slapped the control, and the air lock rolled open.
John kicked out. Sealant dripped in long, goopy strings from the jagged tear in the outer hull wall, and he brushed it leaving the Toucan Too.
The Gulong was five miles long but incredibly narrow. It was also divided up by bulkheads with actual manual locks on them. Keys were required to open them. Wheels to spin the doors open.
“Explosives,” John yelled.
Men moved over to the door and slapped five-inch disk along the door’s rim.
“Fire in the hole.” They scattered.
The door blew off. Small-arms fire started as Hongguo feng on the other side began defending their length of the ship.
Azteca warriors leapt through the breach as John moved away from the line of fire.
“Nashara, can you infect the lamina of this ship?” John asked. It would stop the fighting if she had control. At the least she could give directions.
“I can’t find shit.” She sounded annoyed. “As far as I can tell, there is no lamina. You’re going to have to take the Gulong by force.”
By force meant clubs and rifles versus machine guns. John bit his lip and slapped a signal repeater up on the lip of the rim so that he could keep in contact with the Toucan Too, then followed the Ragamuffins and the two Teotl over the lip into the mess.
They didn’t know where the control center was, but presumably it was near the center of the ship. That meant a mile of bulkheads to fight through.
Other Ragamuffin ships in other sections of the Gulong were working their way toward the center as well.
It would be a long mile, John thought, peering through the smoke and chaos in the tight corridor.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Pepper threw a screaming feng back through a ripped hole in the bulkhead. He grabbed a dead one, pulling it around in front of his body as return fire ripped into it.
The Gulong rumbled.
“What was that?” Pepper shouted.
“The Toucan Too, other side of the ship,” one of the mongoose-men shouted from behind him.
The last hundred feet behind Pepper was obscured with misty blood, pooled globules of viscera and awkwardly broken bodies hanging in the air. He’d moved ahead too quickly.
The mongoose-men floated up to him. “The Cudjo destroy,” one of them reported. “Hongguo get through and hit it. Duppy Conqueror the only ship still in one piece out there.” Another tossed a grenade through the open hole. Hongguo feng shouted and scattered.
The explosion scattered shrapnel back through, and the mongoose-men all curled up, holding small shields in front of them. Pepper felt the body in front of him jerk and thud.
“But you still have the backpack nuke?” Pepper asked.
“Several hundred feet back in a crate.”
Pepper nodded. “Keep it back a bit, but I’d rather you get cut off from behind than lose that nuke.”
He looked back into the hole and threw the body through and followed it to take the next section of corridor.
One by fucking one, each hundred-foot section, until they would make the control center. Pepper did what he did best and kept on moving, the mongoose-men struggling to keep up.
It was going to take five hours to reach the center if it kept taking five minutes to take each section. Pepper wanted to be there in two. Two was a blitzkrieg the Hongguo would have trouble recovering from. Pepper could keep up this pace for two.
More than that and he’d drop from exhaustion. More than that and they wouldn’t have the time to take control and force the Hongguo back. They would get bogged down in the corridors fighting for the last minutes of their lives.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Three hours of hand-to-hand corridor fighting later, John and his two Teotl, three Azteca, and two mongoose-men blew the last bulkhead out. No return fire.
The eight of them ducked around the corner and out into a grand cavity deep in the center of the ship filled with hundreds of strangely quiet people who were shackled to desks on all the walls.
“Each of you take a door,” John ordered. He tapped his earpiece. “Nashara, send the mobile unit, you stay in the ship.”
She came back, slightly fuzzy. “I need more repeaters, they made it almost impossible to get a link in. I still can’t detect any lamina in this ship, they’re hiding it well.”
John whistled at one of the Teotl. “You head back, bring her machine with you, and lay down more repeaters.”
Now that he had a moment, John looked closer at the tired, vacant-looking people. Their heads had been shaved and they wore paper overalls.
None of them had even blinked. But someone at the far end of the chamber moaned, and the noise spread, until it filled the entire room.
The drone grew, modulating up and down. Then fingers all reached for beads on strings built into the desks in front of them. Clattering spread around the room, and the people moaned, noise spreading in patterns throughout the rows. And then the beads would clatter again.
Their eyes were constantly vacant. John shuddered.
“John, this is why I can’t find any lamina,” Nashara said. “This is how they run the ship. They’re human calculators.”
“You say the Satraps can control minds. The Teotl told me they were like parasites that attached to intelligent races. This . . . makes sense if you think about how a creature like that would think. Data overlays, or um, lamina, would be too unreliable, too hackable. This is a bulletproof way to protect an asset.”
“Yes, but they also can control the ship somehow. Look for desks with controls. Something has to control the minds.”
He wanted to keep the doors guarded, so John kicked out to the center of the room, spinning slowly and trying to find something like that.
There. A cluster of desks, like an eye in the orb of all the desks. An oval around a central seat.
John hit the other side of the room, then kicked off for it.
He landed in their midst and grabbed a desk. All men at these desks. All vacant-eyed.
Maybe.
They all pulled out guns. John licked his lips. “I wouldn’t . . .”
But they hadn’t even noticed him. They each turned their guns to the side to the person next to them to make a complete circle and then pulled the triggers.
The entire oval of controllers hung limp and dead, their brains blown out into the air.
John couldn
’t even find a response. He just stared.
In their center, a man in a blue uniform already lay dead, a shot through the bottom of his jaw up into his head.
John tapped his earpiece. “They just all killed themselves, Nashara.” Too shaken even to be horrified, he just kicked away.
One of the doors blew in. Pepper and a horde of mongoose-men poured in.
“Pepper!” John shouted.
Pepper kicked off to join him. The man dripped blood in a trail behind him, and it dislodged from him as he hit the floor and grabbed a desk.
“What the hell is this?” Pepper looked around.
“A human guidance computer.”
“No, I mean, this is the second one we encountered.” Pepper pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face off. “We have two-thirds the ship. The last third toward the front of the ship, the Hongguo still have that. Right before Magadog went out, they said there were Hongguo ships docking on the end to pour reinforcements through.”
“That’s true,” Nashara’s voice said. The silver ovoid of her mobile unit puffed through, then paused next to them.
“Can you control the Gulong?” Pepper asked.
“Give me time, yes,” Nashara said. “I think I could. If we figure out where the manual controls are and substitue some our people, with me giving directions and running simulations here in the lamina. It’s feasible. But it’ll take time to figure out.”
“Time we may not have,” Pepper said. “We have no Ragamuffin ships left near the Gulong. It’s just us on foot inside this ship and the Toucan Too. If we can’t get the Gulong moving, then we have to ask more Ragamuffin ships to come down to this orbit and fight.” Right now those Ragamuffin ships were watching a careful evacuation of Ragamuffin tenders and higgler ships out the downstream wormhole toward Nanagada.
“We need thirty-nine hours,” Nashara said. “There are human ships coming to our aid. And most of the Ragamuffin ships should be done evacuating to New Anegada and can adjust this way.”
“Thirty-nine hours?” Pepper waved one of the mongoose-men over, and he pulled a crate the size of a casket with him. “Maybe. It’ll be dicey.”
John helped a pair of mongoose-men crowbar the crate open. He peered inside at a missile with radioactive symbols painted on the tip. Someone had jury-rigged a control box on its top.
Pepper pointed at Nashara’s mobile unit. “Is there visual on that?”
“Yes.” A lens irised open.
“Let’s broadcast a little something to the Hongguo.”
“They are keeping shut down or I would have been able to take their ships,” Nashara pointed out.
“Yeah, but I bet you they’re doing some passive listening.” Pepper tapped on the screen of the control box and pressed a bloody thumb on it.
The screen brightened, and Pepper tapped some more to bring a timer up on it. He set it to ten minutes, triggered the countdown, and faced the camera.
“Hongguo leaders. Hi, I’m Pepper, and I’m currently talking for the Ragamuffins. Behind me is a small nuclear device of several megatons. It’s on a timer. Maybe your feng will push back into here, but I promise you, if they do”—Pepper made a popping sound with his mouth—“we will destroy the Gulong. If attempts to break up towards our section of the Gulong do not cease, we will destroy the Gulong.”
Pepper made a cutting motion with his hand. Then he turned around and stopped the countdown.
“And how long do you think that will hold them back?” John asked.
“I think that that should get us at least ten hours, don’t you?” Pepper said.
“The Hongguo on the ship are stepping down,” Nashara reported. “It’s a cease-fire for now.”
“Breathing room.” Pepper smiled.
“But the Hongguo ships have us surrounded,” Nashara said.
“And you can’t infect them?” Pepper asked.
“They’ve figured something is infecting ships using high-bandwidth communications. They’ll listen to voice, but they’re isolating and firewalling it, I’m not getting through. It’s all about time, now. And, Pepper, Cayenne from the Takara Bune says there’s a second chamber of human computers.”
Pepper nodded. “I saw it coming in. They’re all dead, someone shut the air off to them before we got there.”
They all stood a second, quiet.
“And the cavalry you’ve called in?” John spoke up. “Who are these people?”
“The League of Human Affairs, an assortment of freedom fighters, or terrorists, depends on how you look at them,” Nashara said through the speakers of the ovoid.
“They just want to help us out of the goodness of their hearts?” Pepper asked with a grin.
“They want the Gulong,” Nashara said. “They’ll join the fray if we still have the Gulong.”
“Well, then we better hold it until they get here,” Pepper said.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
John strapped himself into the room and scrubbed his face clean with a wet-cloth, ready to collapse and sleep, but knowing he couldn’t afford to. Thirty hours to go. The Hongguo had remained quiet, a tense détente, presumably listening on a few radio channels. Their ships clustered around the Gulong near the upstream wormhole. A few Raga ships had tried attacks, breaching the security cloud to get to the Gulong, and paid in hull damage and lives for the attempt.
“They’re moving.” Nashara appeared by his side. John jumped and shoved his hand through her, hitting the bulkhead and splitting his knuckles.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to take the time to walk my body down there.”
“Who’s moving?” John rubbed his knuckles over the wetcloth, leaving a streak of blood.
“Five Hongguo ships are trying for the downstream wormhole, three of them stopped by flack and mines; the other two are being chased. They’re headed for New Anegada, John.”
A smart move. Take something they valued and they were going to do the same. Two spaceships could do a lot of damage with missiles and nukes to Nanagada.
“We got to help them.” John spun around and grabbed the door. “How fast can we get the ship ready?”
“We can’t run that Hongguo gauntlet, John. You know that, you’re a pilot.”
“We have to do something. They’re going to hammer the planet,” John replied, but with less authority.
“They can only do so much damage, just two ships.”
“Damnit, these aren’t odds, these are people down there!”
“John, there’s nothing, I mean nothing, for them that you or I can do. The best thing is to hold the Gulong.”
John pushed his head against the mirror. “Thirty hours.”
“Thirty hours,” Nashara said. “It’ll take the Hongguo ten to fifteen to reach New Anegada at their speeds. The Ragamuffin ships there might be able to get to them. They won’t have much time above the planet. They’re using this to force us to talk.”
“I know,” John said. “I know.”
It didn’t make it easier, imagining Hongguo ships appearing far over Nanagada.
Thirty hours.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Kara sat in front of the three medical pods, watching the men inside lie asleep. The readouts all glowed green, and when she queried them, although she didn’t understand the medical terms quickly enough, they reassured her that all was well.
So many others had died. She was almost getting used to it, as if it were part of life to see tortured bodies, from Agathonosis to this ship. A long trail of bodies.
Outside, however, someone was punching the wall and shouting in anger. She kicked out and found John, their newest passenger, huddled up against a wall.
“Are you okay?” She put a hand on his shoulder and he flinched.
“Been better.” He smiled at her. “A lot of people are going to die down on New Anegada.”
“A lot of people have died already,” Kara said. “I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon.”
He cocked his head and looked at her. “That’s truly dark.”
“It’s what I’ve seen.”
“I’m sorry. No child should see death and war.” He cleared his throat.
“These people, they only have one machine like this, right?” Kara asked.
“Yes.”
“So they’re trying to trade with you. This machine for your planet.”
“I know.” John sighed. “But that doesn’t make it any easier, because they’re going to do something to show they’re serious.”
“We must hope it is a small demonstration,” Kara said.
“Yes, but we must also prepare for the worst.”
“Why is that?”
“Because, we aren’t dealing with humans,” John said. “This thing, the Satrap, commands the Hongguo moving to Nanagada.”
Kara nodded. “You’re right. The Satrap doesn’t think like you or me, it’s something else. And destroying a planet might be something it thinks would cow us. Or maybe divide our forces.”
John jerked back and stared at her. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve faced them before,” Kara said. “It’s pretty hopeless, but I’ve made it this far and I don’t want to give up just yet.” Jared was safe out there, being looked at.
“People live under these things, out there now?”
“Our histories say they used to only live among the Gahe and Nesaru,” Kara said. “And I think now that they came out among the forty-eight worlds and built habitats for themselves and some humans to live in so they could study us. Study how to control or destroy us.”
John shook his head. “I’m getting tired of aliens pushing us around.”
“Well, we’re pushing back. That’s hard work.”
And the man suddenly laughed. “Yes, it is. Thank you.”
Kara watched him coast his way down the corridor.
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