Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

“Gone?”

“Dragin-Above, when we swept the area, all we got pings back on was debris.”

“They destroyed a habitat.” And all the thousands aboard it. Nashara swallowed. Something was going horribly wrong out there. “It’s like living back in the days when Chimson declared independence and the Satrapy ordered it put down.”

“In more ways than you think,” Jamar said. “We saw the Gulong there, before we transited upstream.”

“I’ve seen the Gulong before,” Nashara whispered. A five-mile-long, slender, mirrored needle of a machine. It was not just the Hongguo flagship. The mile-long needled spike at the front had a function. “When it shut the wormhole down to Chimson.”

Jamar looked through her and sighed. “I’ve seen it once now. I hope to never see it again. Nashara, why are you here?”

“Hospitality. Help. Place to run to.” Until the Hongguo caught up with them.

“Nashara, we actually need your help,” Jamar said. “Scanning you when you came aboard, we can tell you can meld with the ship. You have the neural prosthetics. I need you to captain the Queen with me. I haven’t slept in two weeks.” He was close to collapse. Probably been cycling different sides of his brain’s hemispheres eight hours each.

Damn. They’d been seeing their captain dog-tired, nerves frayed. Then they’d see him left-brained and creative, totally disorganized and touchy-feely, and then anal and orderly and constrained. Cycling over and over every day as he struggled to remain one with his ship and bring them all through in one piece. With no sleep as he tried to remain alert at every second.

He was a hero, and she was turning him down. “I can’t.”

Jamar folded in on himself and cradled his head. “I only have two crew left,” he murmured through his fingers. “Hanging by a thread. All I want to do is sleep. Sleep forever and just stop this all, goddamnit.”

“I can’t do that, Jamar.”

“ I order you .”

She stared him back. Predatory, muscles tensed, every minute cell calculating the distance and time involved. “No.” A calm, single word.

He was dead already, he just didn’t know it. He wouldn’t push her that far, and if she had to take the ship, he’d never get it back. She’d never get herself back. She wasn’t sure if that was worse than dying, but they weren’t in enough danger for her to risk plugging directly into the ship.

Maybe as the Hongguo got closer. In a day or two. If it really remained her only chance of survival. Yes. But until then: “I swear to you. If there’s anything else I can do, I’ll do it.”

He must have seen something in her eyes. She willed him to understand it, and he shivered as she stared at him. He backed off the subject.

“Fuel.” Jamar’s shoulders shook. “We can run if we have fuel. Every off-angled wormhole transit we have to adjust for costs, every maneuver when the Hongguo ships get close costs. We can keep running. We’re that much faster than them. But we don’t have the fuel.”

He was crying. Nashara stared at a spot of wood trim behind the captain’s shoulder, trying to pretend it wasn’t happening. For both of them. “Swear, they were all so beautiful. Each tiny life, gone. Fireflies in the night, snuffed out by a foul wind of those sick creatures that dare call themselves human beings. Hongguo.” He spit the name out.

Then the tears stopped. Jamar straightened up. Ramrod. His eyes glittered again. He was cycling hemispheres, right there. Not on eight-hour runs, but randomly, as his brain gave out in sheer exhaustion.

“Captain Sinjin Smith?”

“Fuel,” he grated the word out. “Find me fuel. Antimatter. You have access to the whole ship; we use the Ragalamina aboard here, not the Satrapy standard. So adjust your little wrist trinket accordingly if you won’t access directly. At one standard g we have exactly one hundred minutes and forty seconds of acceleration left. Without the fuel we were to get we are unable to escape the Hongguo, and they’ve been jamming our attempts to forward messages. We have to get away, head downstream, and pass the message on to the other Ragamuffin ships before the Hongguo attack them as well. You understand?”

Nashara nodded carefully.

“Welcome aboard the Queen Mohmbasa , then.”

“Thank you.”

She had jumped out of the pan and into the fire.

Free to float through the ship, Nashara shot her way back to the room she’d come from. Ijjy still kept his distance from her, but he showed her back through the corridors.

As they coasted, Nashara tapped the wrist screen. She got it synced in with the ship’s network. The Ragalamina probably creaked through a neural interface, but it worked well on a wrist screen. Very two-dimensional, used to taps and menus. It had been developed out of a several-hundred-year-old set of cobbled-together human software systems. Legacy of a time when humans tried to make everything themselves. It was nice to be back in familiar environs.

The Queen Mohmbasa ’s lights flickered off and everything fell into pitch black. Emergency luminescent strips ran along parts of the corridor, but emergency sealant over the damaged sections left huge swathes of the area a dark pit. Nashara slammed into a hard lump of the stuff and grabbed hold.

“Should I be worried?” Nashara asked the dark as she tried to access her wrist display. Nothing. Must have been an electromagnetic-pulse weapon that hit them.

“Only if the backup system don’t come on.” Ijjy’s voice came from farther down the corridor. “Feel the engine still running?”

Nashara closed her eyes and focused on her fingertips. “Yes.” It thrummed through the sealant, the vibration reaching everywhere.

“Got no need to panic just yet, then.”

A set of emergency lights flickered back on. The wrist screen lit up and error-checked itself.

“Come. The room you in for visitors,” Ijjy said. “Whole lot of the other room free closer by the cockpit. Captain say you could take one of them.”

“Thanks, but no.” She knew if she took a former crewmember’s room Ijjy would be annoyed. And she was probably not welcome in the cockpit until she had helped find a solution for the fuel problem.

Nashara paused outside the door. “I’ve met you, and the captain of the ship. You said three survivors. Who’s left?”

“Sean. Out working on fixing things.”

“The captain wants me to help find a way to get fuel. Are there any other Raga-friendly habitats downstream of here?”

“Dragin-Above,” Ijjy said.

“But they don’t exist anymore.”

“Seen.” Ijjy brushed a dreadlock aside.

“You given up?”

He straightened in the air. “You ain’t seen half the shit we seen, I tired, not whipped, hear?”

Good. Nashara turned back into the room without further comment.

The guest room’s walls turned to screens. Nashara used them to display information coming from the Queen ’s tactical updates. Sensor maps of the area, trajectory projections, colored the walls with long, curving lines with dots moving along them.

The Queen Mohmbasa pushed the legal lane speed from the habitat and climbed into a higher and higher orbit, racking up fines and complaints from a distant Port Authority. Camera shots of the hull drove home the tattered condition of the ship. It was blind dumb luck that Nashara had pulled herself aboard in an untouched area of the ship. These areas she roamed through now featured gaping rips and tears in the hull that hardened, shapeless foam pushed out of. Black streaks and craters everywhere. She shook her head.

Jamar edged them just a little bit higher and ahead every second. The Hongguo were holding back on attacking them in such a public space.