Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

But now Kara understood why people had been rounded up by the stratatoi, and why the starving few adults left fought to the death. Those who didn’t fight were no longer human, but now extensions to the Satrap’s mind. Including her parents.

She imagined other Satrapic worlds, far away outside in a vacuum of their own, where this same battle was being fought.

The pad’s words shifted again. Fleeing is pointless. Humanity’s status as a protected race has been revoked throughout the Benevolent Satrapy. But I have a deal for you if you surrender the control room now. You are obviously intelligent and quick to have done this. I would offer you a prime position among the stratatoi, a position of leadership, free cognition, and very little Thrall. Very few will get this status .

Why was the Satrap bothering to confront her? Kara leaned in closer to the image, trying to see if the body of the man was blocking something, and looked deeper into the Satrap’s eyes. They were blinking. The reflected light in them wavered somehow.

No. They transmitted light.

Kara slapped the console off. She spun around the room, threw open links to check everything around her, desperately hoping she hadn’t given it enough time. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“What’s going on?” Jared asked.

Most of the status glyphs hanging in the air came back green. Even after probing several levels deep, she couldn’t discern anything.

“Kara? Why’d you shut him off?”

“He tried to hack in. Some kind of light code, using his eyes.” The Satrap wanted them dead quicker than he could starve them of oxygen. Why?

The only thing Kara could think of was communications. She’d sent a general message out into the Void. Was that what had spooked the Satrap about her?

It felt right.

She created another link to the system she’d used before. But instead of making a link that would skip outward beyond them, it bounced back from a point several hundred miles outside the world.

Repeater buoy closed to all outgoing traffic, the denial read.

But she could still call out to anything near the world. Maybe that worried the Satrap, that someone would check out her previous message, and that she could still talk to them.

Kara was still mulling it over when she noticed a lack of noise. Jared walked with her over to a vent.

“How long can we last without fresh air?” he asked.

“Two days.” A wild guess at best.

“Are we going to give up now?”

“Do you want become thrall to the Satrap, just one of his many mental hands? A thing?” The Satrap’s offer didn’t give her hope. It had to be a lie. And if it wasn’t… she couldn’t imagine living to see the next age of Thrall.

Jared looked down at the floor, eyes watering. “No, but I don’t want to die either.”

“I know, Jared. I know.” Neither did she.

When she next checked the outside, the screen showed only an empty corridor.

Empty of air as well, no doubt.

The bulkhead doors throughout Queen Mohmbasa all thudded shut simultaneously.

“Commence departure prep,” a toneless warning protocol advised the entire ship.

Nashara stirred. The orientation of the walls shifted, the floor ceased being, and all sense of up and down floated away. She twisted around and put a foot to the blue wall on her left.

The ship’s engine groaned. The walls vibrated, the air around her hummed, and the inside of Nashara’s head pounded. Gently the blue wall became the new floor as the ship accelerated.

She stood and looked around, still a bit wobbly.

The door hissed open.

“You up?” the man at the door said. He stood five feet eight, with lithe musculature under well-fitting industrial-templated paper coveralls. Graying dreads hung around his head and the tangle of his beard. Two polished sticks hung from either side of a brown belt.

“Barely.” Nashara blinked as the shivering stopped. The man adjusted himself so that he hung in the air before her.

Another automatic warning filled the cabin: “Lane approach. Acceleration in five minutes.” The world shifted, orientation and gravity falling away from her.

“The captain want see you.” The sound of the New Anegadan dialect relaxed her. At least one thing about Ragamuffins hadn’t changed.

Nashara pushed off toward him. “Okay.”

The dreadlocked man slapped the doorframe and floated clear. He held a palm-sized gun aimed at her. And he kept at least ten feet clear of her.

Tension. Even in friendly territory.

He directed her downshaft. Or at least Nashara assumed so. Even, vertical shafts; odd, horizontal. Assuming the cylindrical body of the ship accelerated along a lengthwise axis.

Nashara held up her wrist screen, but nothing appeared. She’d been shut of the ship’s lamina. Odd.

“What’s your name?” Nashara kept the comfortable double body-length between them for his comfort. She looked back at her toes. “I can’t access any ship information.”

He flipped a lone dreadlock out of the way and kept the pistol aimed dead at her. His hazel-brown eyes waited for any sudden movement. “Ijjy.”

“Ijjy?”

“Ian Johnson if you looking up official records. Ijjy to me friend them.”

“Okay, Ijjy.”

“Lady, you ain’t no friend.” Nothing in those eyes for her. Not annoyance, hatred, friendliness.

Nashara turned back around to face the direction they coasted in. “Okay, Ian.”

They passed on in silence. The Mohmbasa ’s corridors here screamed age. Warped bulkheads with airtight doors that didn’t even shut properly. Bits of corroded metal flaked off and floated in the air near faded lettering. Access panels with hastily patched fiber optics and conductives remained open, exposing the ship’s guts.

But the next section’s damage wasn’t age. Fresh emergency sealant. Corridor after corridor saw great gobs of the gooey, gray stuff that had hardened just after being pulled this way and that by gloved hands of some emergency crew. They had attempted to get the ship airtight again as the expanding goop solidified. The ship had suffered a major disaster to have sealant patching almost every hullside wall for the past several hundred feet.

She realized why the silence bothered her.

“Where is everyone?” A ship like the Mohmbasa had several hundred living aboard it. If it was Raga, whole families lived aboard.

Ijjy looked over at the hasty repairs. “That the least of what all happen. The other side the ship even worse. Only ten percent of the Queen airtight. The rest…” He shrugged.

“Survivors?”

The tired brown eyes again. Not patient, or waiting for her to move. Something far more hollow. “Gone. Just three now.”

Nashara looked back at the tortured goop. “What in the hell have I got myself into?”

“A whole lot more shit than what you running from.”

The Queen Mohmbasa ’s captain was cyborged out and looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. Or maybe longer. Extra head-casing gleamed in the dull light of the cockpit, high-bandwidth optical jacks ran up the side of his left arm. No doubt he was as much a mechanical human as an organic human. The type of captain that only a ship could slowly create over the decades, influencing him to keep adding more and more features to himself to become more a part of what he controlled.

He looked her over with one dilated eye; the other remained half-closed and reflecting tiny images bounced off the back of the retina. Nashara would bet that this man never left the confines of the ship’s immediate lamina. Getting cut off from the cloud of data that filled and brimmed out of the ship would be like losing half his mind.