“We can be trusted without a semi-hostage.” Camaxtli’s usually calm manner disintegrated for a moment as he snapped the words out. Even he felt annoyed at being handed orders by the outsiders.
“Just the same.” Katerina folded her arms. Her silver eye glinted in the dome-filtered early sunlight. “We’ll have one.”
Several of the elders walked out of the courtyard, grumbling in disgust.
But in the end, what else could they do? Camaxtli led the way. Katerina followed after Timas wrapped a long piece of cloth carefully around her head and over her eyes, and then took her hand. It felt smooth and dry, and she squeezed it as he pulled her along with him out through the courtyard, whispering to her to let her know of obstacles coming up.
The group drifted its way away from the atrium and down the roads into the heart of the farm areas.
They had the man imprisoned in a belowground grain silo. Several Jaguar scouts, ex-xocoyotzin who served as the city’s defenders and police, stood outside guarding the doors. They raised long steel macuahuitl with razored spikes, more formal than functional, as they had guns strapped to holsters on their waists. They lowered their weapons when they realized who approached.
“Go on through.”
Down the dimly lit steps and into the central storage room more guards stepped forward, then lowered their macuahuitl and nodded them through.
The man they all sought lay on a cot. Long dreadlocks lay on the pillow. His dark brown face matched the dark blankets.
Timas let go of Katerina’s hand and unwrapped the long piece of cloth that blindfolded her. “Here we are.”
Katerina cocked her head. “Juan Smith?”
The man stirred under blankets. “Yes?” Juan opened his gray eyes and looked at them all. Scarred cheeks crinkled as he grimaced.
He pulled the blanket down with his left hand, revealing his whole other arm to be a recently amputated stump.
“Shit.” Katerina put a hand over her mouth as the word popped out. “Couldn’t his arm be saved?”
“We don’t have the same medical facilities you take for granted.” Camaxtli helped the man sit up. Timas realized that he was missing a leg as well.
The man saw his stare. “What do you expect? I punched through the dome and lived to tell about it. No one had time to move me to a better hospital. I’ve survived worse.”
“Yes, sorry.” Timas looked politely downward. This man before him seemed to be some sort of a proud warrior, like Timas’s own great forefathers from New Anegada.
Juan looked around the room and smiled at Katerina. “A big welcome to the Aeolian crowd. I take it you dragged your sorry ass all the way down here just for me.”
Katerina frowned at the mild insult. “You are wanted for the murders aboard the Sheikh Professional, and endangering cities in the form of a deorbiting projectile. We also want further information about the . . . threat you discussed while deorbiting.”
The pipiltin murmured.
Juan and Katerina faced off against each other in the crowded and warming room. Then the man chuckled. “Fair enough, I should elaborate. I did send only the compressed, quick version.”
“Thank you. Meanwhile, since we’ve identified you, the airship I came in on is being readied for the return trip to Eupatoria. There we’ll bring you to trial. Understand that while you don’t have any formal legal counsel, this isn’t a trial right now, and you are under no obligation to say anything at all.”
“I understand.”
“So, is your name Juan Smith, of Rydr’s World?” Katerina leaned forward, presumably to look at his eyes the same way she had at Timas’s when he slipped up to reveal what he knew about the man.
“No.”
Katerina looked flustered. “No?”
“As I said, no.” The man used his one good arm to move himself around so that his one leg touched the ground. He sat ramrod straight, like an emperor receiving his subjects.
“If that isn’t your name, what is?”
“Pepper.” The man reached out and shook her hand.
Katerina let her arm swing slowly back to her side when he finished. “Pepper. We’re running queries on that.”
“You do that. Look under mongoose-men. New Anegada’s mongoose-men. I’m a Ragamuffin.” Pepper rested his hand on his remaining right thigh with a grimace.
Timas looked over at Ollin. If Pepper was one of the planet New Anegada’s elite military men, the mongoose-men, then something strange was going on. New Anegada allied itself with all the cities in Chilo’s atmosphere; the planet’s peoples had settled Chilo initially. All the cities here depended on the New Anegadans to protect the planet.
Trying this man could complicate a much-needed relationship. Timas saw one of Ollin’s hands curl into a frustrated fist.
“This is an extraordinary claim for us to hear,” Katerina said. “Pepper is someone who goes back a long way.”
Pepper shrugged. “I have no reason to lie.”
“We’re working on voiceprints.”
“I can change those, but you should get some decent matches from all I’ve said so far,” Pepper said. “And I’m going to explain some more things, because I need to catch you all up pretty quickly before some real shit hits the fan.”
Shit hitting the fan. Timas would have to remember that phrase, if nothing else, when he left the room.
Pepper looked around at all of them. “I was coming back from a mission, on the Sheikh Professional. They’d picked me up, and two days in, that’s when the zombies attacked.”
Ollin cleared his throat. “That’s the second time you’ve said that. We’ve kept the Aeolians at a distance from you, you seem agitated about them.”
“What?” Pepper looked at Katerina. “Aeolians are fine, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Zombies,” Ollin repeated. Everyone in the room glanced around with an uncomfortable pause. Hundreds of thousands of Aeolians would be seeing this right now. “We call the Aeolian representatives that visit us ‘zombies,’ you know, because they take orders and move slowly around and take forever to answer questions because they have to vote on it.”
Pepper shook his head. “Hell no, son, that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is groaning, stumbling, dumb-as-fuck, old-school zombies.”
PART TWO
CHAPTER SIX
The shell of the tiny, black vacuumball Pepper sat in hissed and cracked. Only an eggshell’s width lay between him and whatever lay outside. The ball had flown a million miles in three days, with Pepper curled up and festering inside by himself. In a device made only for emergency escapes from destroyed ships.
A welcome sound, the cracking. But it came two days too soon. Pepper tensed as the shell split open with a wet, sticky rip.
“Welcome aboard the Sheikh.” The woman on the other side had her hair pulled back in cornrows and tied off in tight braids. After skulking about the other side of the DMZ, Pepper had to admit he enjoyed hearing a New Anegadan accent again. He relaxed as he heard more New Anegadan voices behind her.
The people aboard the Sheikh came from a piece of the Caribbean that had picked itself up from the mother planet and held together for centuries now. They had made the exodus light-years away to New Anegada, where the members of the Black Starliner Corporation once hoped to silently create a world of their own. But as the BSC faded away into the loose-knit community of Carribean descendants known as Ragamuffins, they found themselves growing into larger players in the greater game.
“We snagged you up to save the original pickup fuel,” the woman said. “The Ragamuffin Dread Council go pay us beaucoup digits for altering course and snagging you instead of them sending a whole ship out just for you.”
The ad hoc representative democracy of the Dread Council guided Ragamuffin security, and they’d sent a safe ship for Pepper. Since humanity rose up against the alien races that once dominated the Forty-Eight worlds they’d gotten more involved in things like this,
with Pepper eagerly offering himself up as one of their nastiest tools.
He looked at the woman. “Glad you picked me up. I once got trapped in one of those balls for longer than I’d care to talk about.”
Pepper pushed past the broken pieces of the vacuumball and took her offered hand. His long trench coat brushed against the edges.
“I heard about that story,” she said. “I’d have gone insane.”
He had. For part of that. Before landing on New Anegada and rededicating himself to action: any action, as long as there was movement and things didn’t get in his way. It was why he volunteered over and over again to pass through the DMZ and get into the League worlds. If he ever slowed down, he would face himself again like he had in that pod, once. Even this last taste of being trapped in one again had pushed him too close to the edge. He had too much blood, too many sins, and too long a history to sit down and consider it. Men like him needed to stay one step ahead of themselves.
Hopefully there would be things to do soon. Upstream among the League worlds ships disappeared, gathering somewhere Pepper couldn’t find, no matter how many heads he cracked. And many of his most reliable informants had also gone to ground.
The last time the League got that organized they’d tried to invade New Anegada and unify the free human race.
Fifty years ago. Craters still dotted New Anegada from that struggle. A lot of leading League officials lay dead by Pepper’s hands as well. A reminder to them that the cost of invading New Anegada wasn’t worth it.
Pepper had a gut feeling that the League needed reminding again as he stepped into the confines of a cargo hold. Typically a tight area, after three days in a vacuumball, it felt like the inside of a cathedral. This cargo hold was a traditional pie-shaped segment of the ship’s cylinder. Number fifteen, according to the large numbers painted on the walls.
It felt like he stood on the bottom of a wide curve, which meant that the ship spun to provide some light gravity for its passengers. If this ship resembled most Ragamuffin higgler ships, from the outside it looked like a giant pen with its end jammed into a larger cylinder of the thrust unit.
“Thank you.” Pepper brushed shell fragments off his forearms. He winced as he walked: a three-day-old bullet wound to the calf. Thanks to his over-mechanized and designed body it was healing up nicely but it still stung.
The woman touched her ear and listened to something. “Cargo all safely retrieved,” she said, responding to a prompt whispered into her ear by someone elsewhere in the ship. She grabbed Pepper’s hand and shook it. “Grenada LeFevre, we all please to meet you. Captain Canden say welcome up in she ship, but not to ever talk or go near her.”
Pepper looked up toward the narrow top of the room and the rows of catwalks with cargo lashed in on the sides. Four men with rifles, well spaced out, all sighted in on him with an unwavering patience that Pepper appreciated.
“Thanks for the hospitality.” Pepper stepped forward, but Grenada moved in front of him.
She held up a hand. “Listen, in order for you leave the hold, we need to get something straight.”
“I’m listening.”
“You name’s Juan Smith.” A slight smirk from her meant she’d probably selected the name from the list of his assumed identies that the Dreads gave her.
“Really?”
“However you want play that, up to you.” She shrugged. “Second, you have to hand over all them weapon underneath that coat.”
Pepper nodded. Fair enough. He slowly reached in. An automatic pistol under the left armpit. The half-size mini-grenade launcher on his right thigh, the shotgun on his left. Explosives strapped to the small of his back. Extra ammunition clips on his chest and ribs.
Two combat daggers, one on a quick-release gel strap on his right wrist, another on his left ankle. Each piece hit the metal grid work under their feet with a clang that echoed through the hold.
“There you are,” he said.
“That last dagger, strap up on you back,” Grenada said.
Pepper reached back. Somewhere between a short sword and a knife with compensation issues, he’d become slightly attached to the piece. “It’s a gift. Not a weapon.”
He kept it for special assignments. Only the most important of the Ragamuffin’s enemies saw the sword just before dying.
“Don’t look like nothing I got hang up on my wall.” Grenada reached out a hand. “I see all that blood near the hilt, right?”
Good eyesight. Almost as good as his. No one else would notice the faint discoloration: Pepper had cleaned it up on the way downstream to the DMZ.
Pepper handed it over. “If anything happens to it I would be quite disturbed.”
Grenada took it and laid it on the pile between their feet. “I take it for you, look after it real good.”
“Thanks.”
“Third, we telling peeps you been hole up in you cabin because you in bad health.” She looked him over. “I see you already done and gone get that memo.”
Pepper’s body had cannibalized fat and muscle during the escape and ensuing journey, burning through immense amounts of energy in a short amount of time. He remained not much more than a tent pole that the overlarge trenchcoat draped over. His clothing covered the scarring and wounding.
The price of doing business sometimes.
“I’ll be eating extra meals for the next few days. High-quality proteins appreciated.”
“I feed you extra, if you tell me how it was all up in a vacuumball getting catapult out from wormhole to wormhole until you got to the DMZ.”
Pepper snorted. “Maybe. I was supposed to get picked up later. Why the change?”
“Well, that there’s a whole mess.” Grenada shook her head.
“Thing is”—Grenada bounced in the lighter gravity of her cubbyhole of a room, closer toward the hub of the ship—“you wasn’t the only one out past the DMZ. The Dread Council got a message. From some League high-ups.”
The council kept a relay system going for open communications between the two. Mostly diplomatic static, but occasionally something useful snuck through. “So they bit?”
“Yeah,” Grenada said. “And they send me and the captain in. Captain say she could turn a nice profit on a run past the DMZ, pick up some rich refugees on the low who want out the League. Add that to big bonuses up on taking diplomats over, at a time when antimatter fuel running higher and higher . . . hard to turn down.”
She opened up a small cupboard, tossed a few packets over her shoulder at Pepper, who caught them out of the air. Emergency meals, high in protein. Just what he needed. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, ship-wide dinner coming up in two or three, but that should hold you up.”
Pepper tore the packaging open and listened to the meal sizzle as it warmed up. A full-course meal’s worth of savory smells filled the room. Orange chicken and rice balls. He pulled the pair of telescoping chop-sticks out of the package sides. “What did the League want?”
Any information to add to his suspicions was helpful. He knew that, based on his suspicions, heavily armed Ragamuffin ships waited around the wormhole leading to New Anegada. They also lurked in orbit around New Anegada. All on high alert.
“Another try to get New Anegada to join the League.” Grenada pulled off her jacket. Pepper noticed the handgun, combat knife, and explosives that lined it.
“They don’t stop,” Pepper said through a mouthful of orange chicken.
Grenada wore an armless T-shirt. Her left arm sported a grinning cartoon mongoose, black ink on her brown skin. She straddled a chair. “Yeah, but this time they was a bit more convincing.”
Pepper nodded at her arm. “You’re a mongoose-man.”
“Well, yeah, mongoose, but don’t be calling me ‘man.’ ”
“Where you been?”
“Got tatted up after the Tangent Run.” Grenada leaned forward. “Nothing like the trouble you been around for, though.”
No, but it meant she’d served ten years as
part of the elite that protected New Anegada. If she volunteered for the near-suicide raid at Tangent Run, deep into League territory, then Pepper could give credit where it was due. The Dread Council trusted her with this ship’s protection. She’d do.
Pepper crushed the remains of the foil wrapper in his hand. Scarfing the meal that quickly: not exactly high manners. But they were soldiers swapping info, not diplomats at a fancy table.
Grenada leaned forward over the chair’s back. “You went out to watch the League kill the last Satrap, didn’t you? That’s the word around the mongoose, that’s what they saying.”
There’d been a lot more than that, but that had been one of Pepper’s little missions. “Yeah. Wasn’t much we could do to stop it.” From rulers of the Forty-Eight worlds to extinct. A long way to fall for the alien Satraps. The revolutionary League of Human Affairs sent out video footage of the execution that took place on Midhaven, the League’s heart, everywhere. For them, proof that humanity had thrown the last traces of Satrap rule off its back, seventy-five years after first taking up arms in the revolution against them.
“Not even you. But why go if you couldn’t do nothing?”
“Because the universe is a fucking hostile place, and I need more usable data,” Pepper said. “For example, you know the Satraps were religious?”
“They believe in gods?”
“Not as such. Those big worms, they lay in their webs of power, they may have ruled us all and the other races in the Forty Eight, but they claimed they were created by another race far away from here. They were created to act as a biological throttle on any developing intelligent creatures that evolved in this area.”
“You believe that shit?” Grenada folded her arms.
Pepper shrugged. “According to the creature that I watched die, who really had no reason to lie, the last several hundred years of struggle, our bondage to the Satraps, that was just a distant race’s form of preventative pest control.”
“A ghost story, just trying to spook the little human.”
“Maybe.” Pepper leaned against the stacked bunks, already getting hungry again. “Think about this, though: on Earth we were just one of a handful of species that developed intelligence as a survival mechanism. Not a lot of competition, back there. But on the galactic level, we’re on the edges of an ecosystem with a multitude of competing intelligences no doubt honed out of a stew of survival of the smartest and most dangerous. What gets culled out of that?”
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