Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

To Thule then. Alarms sounded as his ship prepared to transit another wormhole on its path upstream.

And now it was also time to introduce Brandon to the rest of the crew. The murderers, rapists, and criminals that Etsudo’s life depended on. Brandon now the latest in his set of odd acquisitions.

Do you believe in redemption?” Etsudo asked Brandon as he entered the cockpit.

“Redemption?”

“Yes, redemption.” The cockpit sat nestled deep in the heart of the ship. Acceleration chairs dotted the tight confines of the smooth blue cocoon. The cockpit door sealed itself behind them. In emergencies the cockpit would refilter its own air and use its own tiny nuclear reactor to run everything on the Takara Bune except its antimatter engines.

“I’m not religious,” Brandon said.

“You don’t have to believe in religion to believe in redemption.” Etsudo looked around at the gamma crew. “Bahul, the pilot for this shift, he fired a nuclear bomb into the heart of a habitat from a shuttle. He did that for the League of Human Affairs.”

Brandon looked over at Bahul, who nodded back at him from the pilot’s couch. Strapped in, brown eyes glazed, he stared back at Brandon.

Etsudo turned and pointed at the sallow-skinned man with green eyes and emaciated face. “And this is Fabiyan, our mechanic. He cut three men’s heads off. Kept them as trophies.”

Fabiyan nodded and smiled.

One more for the gamma crew. “Michiko.” Etsudo nodded his head. “Gamma’s deckhand.”

“What did she do?”

“A very bad bar fight.” All three of gamma crew’s shaved heads gleamed in the cockpit light.

“Welcome aboard, Brandon.” Michiko smiled.

“Redemption.” Etsudo grabbed Brandon’s shoulder. “They all remember their crimes. Michiko remembers stabbing her best friend in the heart, Fabiyan remembers cutting the heads of three innocent victims off, and Bahul lives with knowledge that he killed thousands. The alpha and zeta crew are the same. This is my crew, I cull them. These are my friends.”

Nine crew, three on each shift, and him the captain. Ten made for a nice number. Brandon upset that nice symmetry.

Brandon wiped his face with a sleeve. “Usually we recondition all memories, don’t we? This is unorthodox.”

Etsudo chuckled. “Welcome to my world, Brandon. Are you ready to be in charge of them all?”

Brandon looked at Michiko, Fabiyan, and then Bahul. “Did I… do something? Is that why I’m here?”

“Jiang Deng and you conspired against me. But only because he altered your mind. I’ve liberated you from those changes Deng made.”

“We’re friends?”

“Oh, yes,” Etsudo lied. He squeezed Brandon’s shoulder and let go. “We’re longtime friends.” And for now Brandon had no ability to access anything outside the ship’s lamina. For Brandon, anything Etsudo said became reality.

Brandon wouldn’t be leaving the ship either, not until he’d earned his redemption. Not until Etsudo knew exactly what was going on out there with the Hongguo.

“Fabiyan, Jiang Deng just sent orders. We’re speeding up and getting ready to keep pace with the pirate coming upstream towards us. They’re thinking it’s going to dock at Bujantjor. That’s where they’ll try and stage a raid to get into it. They want the ship in one piece, and the pirates as well.”

“Pirates?” Fabiyan raised an eyebrow. “Ragamuffins?”

“Yes, them.” Etsudo showed Brandon a spare acceleration chair. “We may have to drop our cargo.”

“Do you think we’ll need acceleration chairs?” Brandon asked.

Michiko twisted in her restraints. “It’s never hurt. But if you’re not willing to strap in, please leave the cockpit. I’d rather not get my neck snapped by your flying body if we have to accelerate in a hurry. Captain.”

Brandon sat and let the chair’s fingers reach up around him.

“Pinging buoys up the stream,” Bahul reported. “They’ve been shutting down. People will be flying blind through wormholes, they’ll be jumpy.”

Etsudo let his chair wrap itself around him. “But we still have access to the buoys. We know what’s on the other side, we can dodge.” The price of drones would be going up from Thule on downstream. Trade wouldn’t stop because of a buoy outage. They might serve as both repeaters and traffic advisers, but commerce went on. Ships would just be more cautious, using drones to poke ahead and make sure they wouldn’t hit anything on the other side after transit.

Speaking of which. His stomach flipped as they passed through the next wormhole. The ship shook as Bahul let the ship drift several feet clear of exact center. Waves of gravity tore at the sides of the Takara Bune , unbalancing the ship.

Etsudo opened a window in the lamina before him, using the ship’s cameras to create a vision of where they coasted now. They moved between a pair of wormholes that hung in the black emptiness, far from life-nourishing suns.

“I imagine our Ragamuffin friends will be here soon.” Etsudo looked over at the gamma-shift pilot. “Get us out of the way.” Etsudo used the lamina to drop three of Takara Bune ’s drones behind. From their viewpoints he could see the lines of light beamed into the wormholes all flicker out.

Bahul accelerated the creaking Takara Bune farther away from the flight path between the two wormholes. There were no planets to worry about, no orbital wells. These wormholes just drifted in the dark of a heavy cloud of dust.

“There,” Michiko said, piggybacking on one of the drones. “Drones.”

A trio of yellow-and-green drones flew through the downstream wormhole. Chemical rockets flared as they adjusted their course. The downstream wormhole dumped ships out a few degrees off course. An arrangement the Satrapy liked as it kept any one ship from being able to move through the forty-eight worlds in short notice. Coming out of each wormhole usually required wasting fuel to adjust course.

The drones hit the upstream wormhole and disappeared.

“Incoming,” Bahul said, breaking the quiet in the cockpit as everyone watched along. “No identifying marks on it.”

The cylindrical ship adjusted its course, following the drones at fifteen thousand kilometers an hour. The entire ship rotated sideways and fired its engines. A long, fiery plume of chemical boosters jerked the Ragamuffin ship for a fast course-correction change. Then it twisted back around to plunge through the upstream wormhole headfirst.

Bahul shook his head. “Don’t know if I’d have the steel to take a ship in at a wormhole at that speed.”

Etsudo silently agreed. Bahul wobbled too much. That was why Etsudo remained the best on the ship. And alpha’s pilot, Sabir, got nervous with every transit, while zeta’s Anjelica never transited above five thousand kilometers an hour.

But they were a good crew. They were his crew. He had made them that way.

“Power up!” Etsudo snapped. “But don’t ditch the cargo just yet, let’s see if we can keep up.”

“There’s a five-thousand-kilometer-per-hour deficit,” Brandon noted. “We’ll never catch them.”

“We don’t have to,” Etsudo said. “They’re not getting past Thule. Deng will catch up and block their rear escape, we’re just making sure they don’t escape the net.”

But since the Emancipation the Satrapy only worried about technological violations. Why all this? The pirates mainly purchased antimatter fuel off the black market.

Change bugged Etsudo.

“Where do you think they’ll end up?” Brandon asked.

“Bujantjor,” Etsudo said. “There are Freeman colonies in orbit there, they’ll be sympathetic, they’ll let them dock and try and fuel them.”