Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

“This is a Satrap’s habitat,” Jamar said softly. The Satraps hunkered in their forty-eight habitats ruling from deep inside the massive structures they had built around them. The Satrapy may have emancipated humans, but in a Satrap’s own habitat no one had much in the way of freedom.

“True.” Nashara tugged at her collar. “But the Satraps rely on the Hongguo to police humans, and similar organizations for the other aliens. They don’t do their own dirty work, making Agathonosis a safe place for us because the Hongguo wouldn’t think to look for us there. It’s close to the downstream wormhole out of Ys.”

Jamar looked at his two remaining crewmembers. “What do you think?”

“Idiocy,” Sean growled. “I say we need keep running.”

“We simply don’t have the fuel.” Jamar closed his eye.

Ijjy looked at Nashara. “No one else closer?”

“Not with fuel you can afford.”

“People in them habitats with the Satraps,” Ijjy snapped, “they hardly more than slaves. We never get involve with that.”

“I know.” Nashara felt tired. “But as it is, if the Hongguo start catching up, we’ll barely make to Ys ahead of them, right, Jamar?”

“Yes.”

Nashara pushed off into the center of the cockpit. “Agathonosis is our only hope to warn the rest of the Ragamuffins that the Hongguo are after you,” and herself. “It’s risky, but so is getting destroyed in the dead of space. I say we see if we can buy or steal the fuel.”

They still looked dubious.

“Hey.” Nashara looked at them all. “I’m good at that sort of thing. If there’s fuel to get, one way or another, I’m your gal.”

Jamar sighed. “Prepare for acceleration. Fifteen-minute count. Secure the ship.”

“Damnit, Jamar, this go be a huge mistake.” Ijjy spun around and leapt out of the cockpit, bouncing off toward the rooms.

Sean turned to follow, but Jamar raised a hand. “I haven’t committed to anything yet, understand? Just giving us the option to stop at Agathonosis.”

“Don’t spend too much time listening to what all she say,” Sean said. “Don’t forget, she ain’t seen half what we already gone through.”

He left with a single angry push.

“Looks like I’m not so popular,” Nashara observed.

Jamar opened his bloodshot eyes. “You go easy on them,” he warned.

“We’re all edgy. It’s almost a suicide mission, right?”

He unstrapped himself. Nashara bumped over to his chair as the gentle rumble of engines started up. She sank slowly toward one of the curved walls. He grabbed her hands. “Come, I want to show you something.”

She hesitated. There was a lot of prep to be done. But she could see he needed something, badly, and she couldn’t turn him down.

He hobbled slowly with her for a long time, past the galley, past crew rooms and niches. And finally he stopped, much farther forward.

“See that?” He pointed out a small brass plaque mounted behind glass into the side of the corridor. “My great-grandfather put that on the Queen himself, the day the Black Starliner Corporation first met. All four broken-down ships were there, leaking air, barely able to make a few wormholes before breaking down.”

The plaque, green with age, declared the Queen Mohmbasa a BSC founding ship.

“You should be Blood,” Nashara said. She hadn’t realized the ship was hundreds of years old; no doubt hardly an original part existed on it anymore. “Your family was there when it all started.” The exodus from Earth, trying to find worlds to call their own and finding them all occupied. The terraforming, the attacks by aliens opposed to seeing free humans docking at their habitats.

Jamar shrugged. “Grandpa Jamal was never a leading type. Just wanted to deliver people to a promised land. He lived on Earth, before they cut themselves off. He told me how things were like back then, our nations still struggling, still ceding to the other larger nations. He believed just one planet of our own and we could break all that to start anew.”

“Sad, if you think about it,” Nashara said.

Jamar turned. “Sad?”

“Sad. Sad that they agreed to do the old superpowers a favor and keep working on illegal technologies while hunkering down in their little planetary reservations,” Nashara spat. “We were fall guys.”

Jamar looked startled. “That’s harsh.”

Nashara snorted. “Sure they’d give us a planet, while they kept orbitals overhead and control of the wormholes. We were their goddamned little experiments, Jamar, and they all should have guessed that from the beginning. And if it all went wrong, well, no need for the Hongguo to come, they’d start the job from up on high so that they didn’t get discovered.”

Jamar pulled himself closer to her. “You come from New Anegada or Chimson?”

“Chimson.” She missed it. Missed beaches and swimming and the skies and the dark red forests.

“My grandparents were in Chimson,” Jamar said.

Nashara looked at the aged plaque. Jamar deserved to know her little secret. “After the Hongguo destroyed the wormhole, Chimson built a starship. A true starship, not one of these little things that pops around using the wormholes. They loaded it with ten of us who could live long enough to reach the nearest wormhole, and each of us had a weapon we were to bring to New Anegada, to help them.”

“Does this have something to do with why you won’t help me pilot my ship?” His breath brushed her cheek. It smelled of protein bars and juice.

“Yes,” she whispered.

Jamar sighed and let go of her. Nashara stepped back. “All ten of us were women, Jamar. We gave up our wombs and in return were fitted with quantum computers running intrusion devices that can overpower lamina and make it extensions of our minds. It would be like being one with your ship, but anywhere. Your mind replicates, copying itself endlessly until you have control of all it is in contact with.”

He looked at her, face pained. “Your wombs?”

“I saw what happened to the other nine when they attacked the Hongguo who intercepted our ship. They destroyed the Hongguo ship, but their bodies died as they took over the Hongguo ship’s lamina. It’s a bomb. You can’t unexplode it, and when it happens, you are that lamina. You’re no longer human.”

“Ragalamina isn’t Satrapic lamina.”

“Which could make it worse.”

“Or better.”

“There’s only one way to find out, Jamar, and I’m not willing to do that right now. I want to deliver this thing inside me to someone who can study it. I don’t want to pull a trigger on something that’s wired right into my head. So I’m going to have to stick with you and help you survive so I can do that.”

“You know, even with your weapon, you couldn’t help New Anegada. I was there in the closing moments.” Jamar tapped the plaque.

“And?”

“The battles were all but lost, the planet being bombarded. The aliens had cloned human assassins and soldiers as ground troops. We kept a lot of this stuff quiet; many wouldn’t know that the Hongguo didn’t shut the wormhole leading to New Anegada down. We did. And the wave of electromagnetic energy that hit everything left the Queen , even on the other side of the wormhole, dead until we got towed. Whoever is left on New Anegada is probably living in the Stone Age. The Teotl no doubt suffered the same fate.”

“Teotl? Is that what they called themselves?” Nashara asked.

“No, that was us. The first time we saw a Teotl warrior with a flayed human skin as a cape… it’s the Azteca name for god, and it was a comment that stuck.”

“You think we’re destined to drift between the wormholes, dodging about underfoot everything else?”