Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

Fifteen minutes later. She almost doubted she could make it. But here it was. The Queen Mohmbasa . Ragamuffin. Maybe. She prayed for it.

Nashara struggled along the hull of the long, cylindrical ship to find a small service air lock. She hit open, banged on it, and kept banging and banging until it opened and she swung in.

By the time the air cycled in and pressurized, she was on her hands and knees, barely able to see from oxygen deprivation.

The first breath, when she ripped the patch off her mouth and sucked it in, was insanely sweet and cloyingly fresh.

“I’m Raga,” she croaked when two fuzzy, but seemingly armed, forms appeared at the door. The membrane over her eyes refused to open, frozen shut. She couldn’t focus.

A pair of hands grabbed her, pulled her out of the lock, and laid her on a cold metal grating. “Grab some tissue for a look at her DNA. Run it, get that back to me as soon as possible.”

The nearest shape reached down, pricked her arm.

“Broke the syringe.” The shape rustled around, then Nashara felt a swab scraping the inside of her cheek. “She modified to survive vacuum.”

“You think?”

“Get ready to burn out the dock if the Hongguo twitch. Throw her in one of the empty rooms.”

Nashara remained limp, regathering strength as she was picked up onto someone’s shoulder. They walked her down through a corridor, hitting her head against a bulkhead, and then into a room.

Nashara leaned against the wall, shivering from heat loss and burned-off energy reserves. She stood there, unable to pass out thanks to her combat-enabled body, experiencing every wave of pain, every severed, screaming nerve.

“Don’t know the hell you is,” one of the two blobs said. “But you gone and pick the wrong ship to get aboard. The moment we try to blow out this station, the Hongguo go come hard for we tail. Blow us out the sky, you too. We dead, and now you is too.”

The door shut. Locks clicked. Nashara slumped to the floor facedown.

Triple damn it, she was alive. Fuck if the pain wasn’t somewhat sweet because of that.

Four days before his ship had arrived at Bujantjor and before meeting Nashara, Etsudo Hajiwara had watched the destruction of an entire habitat once home to tens of thousands inside its protective shell. His stomach churned slightly as fifteen low-yield nuclear charges detonated three hundred kilometers away, each a tiny blinding flash of light. The windows before him darkened as the flash grew. The habitat Dragin-Above ceased to exist.

“Magnify that,” Etsudo ordered. A bald acolyte near the periphery of the semicircular room, his crimson robes hanging in the air around him, spun dials until the window in front of Etsudo visibly flexed. Its width and curvature changed, and the great globes of the destroyed habitat jumped into focus. Etsudo watched as they split apart in a fiery mass of debris.

The men beside him watched from the curved windows and safety of the five-mile-long Hongguo flagship Gulong . They shook their heads.

“A waste,” one whispered. “They were warned.”

A thousand had refused to hand themselves over to the Hongguo for reconditioning. Just a handful, really, of the millions scattered throughout habitats and some of the forty-eight worlds of the Benevolent Satrapy. But still… Etsudo swallowed. He’d come to this habitat once three years ago. They talked freely to him about building artificial intelligences, and Etsudo had done his best to buy their patents to do nothing with. He’d even used shell companies to hire their best neuroprogrammers away. It hadn’t been enough to stop this.

A losing battle. So often, despite his best efforts.

One of the Jiang shifted closer to him. Deng. Always following behind Etsudo to suppress that which Etsudo failed to keep in check. Like today.

“They knew their options.” Jiang Deng folded his arms.

“Memory wipes and servitude to us, or death.” Etsudo shook his head.

“Artificial intelligence is an illegal technological path. You sympathize with them?” Deng’s eyes narrowed in on Etsudo. The other Jiang, the generals of the Hongguo, looked over.

“It’s my job,” Etsudo said, looking at the debris. He used nondestructive means to control illegal technologies. Deng used destructive ones.

“You are passing some sort of judgment on me?”

“No.” Etsudo looked back at the eleven Jiang who hung in the air around him. They wore tightly fitted ceramic body armor, many of them with the long-tailed-dragon sigil originally used by the Hongguo founders. “The Satrapy doesn’t stand certain technology. We keep emancipation alive. We’re all free as long as Hongguo are around to keep research carefully directed.” The words were rote and etched in his memory. And too true.

“Indeed,” Jiang Deng said. Etsudo, looking to avoid conflict, stared back out toward the destroyed habitat. Behind the debris the orange orb of the planet Dragin stared back at Etsudo, reproaching him, he imagined. The windows closed. Five-inch-thick blast doors slid down as the debris field from what had once been the habitat Dragin-Above, home to five thousand families, pattered against the thick hull of the Gulong .

Maybe humans would orbit the planet Dragin again in a few decades, Etsudo thought as he turned away from the control center and followed the Jiang out toward the docking bays to return to their respective ships.

“We have someone new for your crew,” Jiang Deng told him as everyone coasted along one of the corridors of the Gulong . “We’re beginning something new. The Satrapy needs us, Etsudo. Do you understand?”

Etsudo did. They didn’t trust him any longer. Now they would be appointing a second captain to ride along with Etsudo. He’d been expecting this for several years now. “This new crew, he’ll split the captainship with me, won’t he?”

“Yes,” Deng said. “The Satrapy is sending us out with new tasks, new missions. Brandon will be there to help you during this transition. We’ll be stepping up our enforcement activity.”

They would say handling a whole ship on his own for so long was too much. It would be for Etsudo’s own benefit to share the burden. It would be a polite farce.

Etsudo knew there used to be more Hongguo ships with the same charter as his. Trading ships. All disguised suppressors of advanced technology. All endowed with massive budgets, seeking to keep things in check.

Now he was one of a handful. Transition indeed. He was being phased out.

He didn’t dare question it. Some tradition, a momentum, that kept him in his place as the captain and ruler of the Takara Bune . Etsudo did not want to lose that.

“This is Brandon Saxwere.” Jiang Deng introduced him to a tall man with a shaved scalp, green eyes, and pinched face. Brandon waited politely by a crux in one of the corridors, obviously expecting them. He wore a simple gray robe, the fringe clipped to his ankles for zero gravity.

“Good to meet you.” Brandon smiled a warm, honest smile and Etsudo hated him.

Etsudo snagged the railing to come to a stop and bowed his head. “And you.”

This was the beginning of the end of his life. He should have felt more anger about it. Etsudo turned to one of the windows along the corridor and looked into a vast cavern. The walls teemed with an orderly nest of people. All with shaved heads, blank eyes, and wearing crimson paper robes carefully clipped to their ankles as well. They sat at rows of plastic desks, strapped in with acceleration webbing.

Each one worked on a small calculation using an abacus on the desk in front of them. The result was passed on to a station in the next concentric ring, or if the instructions on the card passed to them dictated, to one of their sides. Waves of human-computed math rolled up and down the sides of the massive ball of humanity. And Etsudo could see through spokes into smaller and smaller spheres of humanity, all the way to the center of the sphere where the central controllers sat, staring outward at their machine.