Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

Yes, they had. “My sensors picked up nothing like that. She seemed well trained and dangerous, too dangerous for me to pick up.”

Deng nodded. “A wise move. I’m sorry to have doubted your analysis. I had thought it would be an easy pickup while we covered the area to get ready for the pirates.”

“And?”

“She fled to them. There seems to be a connection of some sort. The Ragamuffin ship just blew its dock seals and is clear of the habitat, they have the drop on us.”

“Why didn’t you destroy it?”

“Near a habitat? Etsudo, I’m not putting lives at risk. These people haven’t disobeyed any Satrapic edicts we know of. If the ship flees in open space, we’ll fight it. At dock, we’ll use feng. We won’t fire on it at dock.”

“Okay, but where can they go?” Etsudo heard the hissing and clanging of his ship disconnecting from the lifelines of the habitat. They were on their own power and air again.

“Not upstream,” Deng said. “Fifty ships are coming down from Thule towards us. Nowhere to run upstream. With the buoys out they’ll probably guess this. I think they will try and turn back downstream, avoiding the handful of ships around, and get warnings to the others at their home base, but they didn’t get a chance to fuel up here.”

“So?” The Takara Bune shivered as the habitat’s clamps released her. Several sirens squawked, letting him know that the antimatter heart of the ship had come online.

“You’re going to have to keep up with them again, Etsudo. Help us close this net, help us end the pirates and gain the good grace of the Satrapy. Do that and we promote you to Jiang. Do that and we know where your loyalties lie.”

“So they are in doubt?” Etsudo asked.

“You ply upstream, downstream, wherever you feel. You are part of an older generation that is obsolete within the current Hongguo. But you are good, Etsudo. Very good. And we need you. You are right, I can’t order you to do anything. But your actions will mean a lot.”

Jiang Etsudo. Etsudo rolled the idea around in his head. “Sabir, where do we stand?”

“Free and clear.”

Etsudo looked back at Deng. “We’ll pursue. You follow.” Nashara would be less a threat dead out in the cold vacuum. Whether he chose to run or not, that would be the truth. If she really was a virus, she could destroy the communications systems between the forty-eight worlds. Even if the Hongguo and Satrapy controlled them, they were a lifeline to civilization.

Jiang Etsudo…

Deng flickered away. Etsudo reached the cockpit, floating now. Inside it, Sabir, Todd, and Raul looked at him as he entered. “Where’s Brandon?”

“He’s in his cabin, he wasn’t sure how to break shifts with you,” Sabir said.

“Get him in here,” Etsudo said. “We’ll both be in the cockpit for this. Sound acceleration alarms, everyone needs to be strapped in and secure.”

“The ship is the same one we saw earlier,” Sabir said. “The pirate ship. It used the name Queen Mohmbasa when it docked.”

“We’ll use that to identify her.” Etsudo added the tag. The cockpit dripped with lamina, screens, trajectories, notes from the Port Authority demanding to know why they were leaving dock without formal permission.

Etsudo swept it all away.

Time to focus on one thing for now, keeping up with the Queen Mohmbasa . Because the Hongguo would not mindwipe a helpful ally in its new war, nor deny him fuel for his ship.

They might even promote him.

Kara and her brother watched the slow sunset. The inside of Agathonosis curved up on either side of them. The patchy green farmlands rose until they met far up above them. Agathonosis was shaped like a can, with the brilliant fusion-powered thread of the sunline running right through the weightless center to provide the light the crops so desperately needed.

Night began slowly at the far end of the cylinder, a dark bead that appeared on the line as it came out of the haze and then began to grow. The line slowly turned off, a half-mile section at a time slowly dimming, until flickering out. It had started at the far end cap of Agathonosis, almost ten miles away from them. It would continue until it reached the other end, ten more miles farther behind them.

On the walls of Agathonosis you could walk and feel heavy, but near the sunline at the center of Agathonosis, you could fly. As long as you didn’t get close enough to the sunline to burn. The sunline mainly provided light and the right kind of it, not heat. Heat came from the ground in vents or warm pools of water.

Then came the sound, carrying in the approaching twilight. Mortar fire?

Kara stopped and turned, trying to locate where the sound had come from. A puff of smoke drifted over a muddy hill. She grabbed her brother, Jared, and pulled him down to the ground, then used the zoom function in her eyes to peek out from behind a false decorative rock that shifted as she pushed against it.

Several hundred yards down the drying trickle of the Parvati River, fifteen self-styled “hopolites” broke cover. Green strips of ripped cloth hung from their skeletal bodies.

Kara thought she recognized a few faces in the group. Maybe one of them had sold her an ice cream cone once or bumped into her on a public trail somewhere. Maybe it was a cousin of hers, or an uncle, running down to the edge of the muddy water.

They carried their weapon with them, slipping and sliding in the mud as they crossed over to the opposite bank. The mortar looked homemade: several pieces of scrap welded to the bottom of a tube to create a makeshift tripod. Maybe it had been someone’s potato gun at one time, or a teenager’s launch tube for a model gyroplane. Now it was a weapon of desperation.

The hopolites settled behind the ruins of what had once been a boat dock near the bank of the Parvati. Jared sat up slightly and Kara put her arm on his shoulder. “No,” she whispered.

She remained focused and zoomed on the muddy river.

A series of footprints appeared near the far edge, as if by magic, slowly tracking toward the hopolites as they loaded their homemade mortar. A long-haired man in nothing but trousers sighted and gave the thumbs-up.

The mortar thunked. The projectile arced upward leaving a slight trail of smoke. Up, up, Kara and her brother craned their necks looking straight above them to watch until it dwindled into a small dot against the great brown patches that curved far over their heads. The other side of their world right above their heads. It made Kara shiver, thinking of explosions and weaponry being fired all throughout the habitat. Already the air seemed hard to breathe. She wondered if that was due to the great machinery in the depths of Agathonosis failing, or if war had broken the world’s skin. She’d never seen the Outside of Agathonosis nor been inside the world’s skin, but she could imagine the cruel midnight of vacuum shoving its airless emptiness through the cracks of the world, curling into the sky to snatch the air away from them all.

One of the hopolites carried a telescope, she saw. He looked through it intently, then shouted. Kara thought she saw a small flash, a tiny orange ball of flame, on the land far over her head.

A hushed cheer erupted. Yet there was nothing happy in the sound. It was a vindictive-sounding group whoop, cut short by several small spitting sounds. A second pair of invisible feet splashed through the mud.

Kara dug her fingers into Jared’s bony shoulders and stared past him at the chaos behind him. “Oww…”

“Quiet, it’s the stratatoi,” she hissed.

The hopolites scattered and ran. Four of them fell to the ground, one of them writhing and screaming. Bright red splotches of blood dripped from his forehead.