Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

“Turn on the Satraps? Nah.” Ijjy shook his head. “They loyal to them.”

“I agree,” said Nashara. “Could be the humans in this habitat revolted, like at Chimson.”

“But they would at least hail us,” Jamar said.

“Are you getting anyone?” Nashara asked. “Even the girl?”

Jamar shook his head. “Nothing. Static and more static. I want to dock us, not a shuttle. We’ll be harder to spot, someone would have to visually check the habitat with drones, and since this habitat is all silent, it won’t pass out a docking list to the Hongguo when they come.”

“I’m game,” Nashara said.

Jamar cocked his head. “Yes, a docking would be good after tossing out some garbage to confuse things.”

“Still think we’re being followed?”

“Maybe. It isn’t a large Hongguo ship if it is, not a warship, something smaller. Just odd reflective scatter.” Jamar sounded annoyed.

“Forty minutes,” Sean muttered.

“Let’s saddle up,” Nashara said.

Fifteen minutes to dock.

Nashara, Sean, and Ijjy stood outside the main air lock, with Nashara leaning comfortably against the round seal. Jamar had been angling them around the entire cylindrical mass of Agathonosis toward the far end-cap docks. Occasionally the ship vibrated and shook them around slightly as Jamar changed course.

“You hear from that child?” Ijjy asked.

“Not happening,” Jamar said.

This close to a habitat, space should have been singing with information and communication.

“You bringing everything?” Sean asked, pointing at the duffel bag.

“No sense in wasting options.” Nashara tapped the duffel with her foot.

“The Satrap got you running scared.”

“You know what a Satrap looks like?” Nashara asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

“When we hit the habitat in Chimson to hunt down the Satrap, I helped out. They look like giant trilobites.” Nashara held out her hand, palm out toward Sean. She wiggled her fingers. “Creepy crawlies. They found it deep at the center of its habitat in a giant pool, big fucker, several hundred feet long.”

“And they control minds,” Ijjy added.

“Rumors,” Nashara snorted. “Chimson’s Satrap didn’t control shit. It’s mounted and shellacked in a museum. Kids visit it on school trips.”

“Still…” Ijjy shrugged. “How you think the Hongguo get the ability to wipe minds?”

The Queen shook again, then something outside clanged. Pumps thrummed and air hissed, motors whined as locks engaged.

“Contact,” Jamar said throughout the ship.

The air lock opened with a hiss. Nashara patted the small machine gun slung by a strap on her hip and the extra ammo clips in her vest pockets. She could feel the two knives with ankle holsters. Good.

She looked over at Sean. “What’s with the rope?”

Sean looked down at his waist and the coiled rope hanging from it. “In case we need to tie anything up.”

“Fair enough.”

“Always useful,” he muttered. “You coming or what?”

Ijjy and Sean stepped in and Nashara followed. They stood and waited as the air lock sealed behind them. All three faced the metal door leading out.

Sean adjusted his belt, moving a pair of cutlasses with polished wooden hilts to a more comfortable place on either side, and rested his left hand on the hilt of a barker gun strapped above his crotch. His baggy pants and shirt covered the armor that could seal up in case of vacuum or handle small-arms fire. Protective plastic gave his face, neck, and hair a reflective sheen. It would give him half an hour’s protection from vacuum, but gave him dark circles under his eyes. Nashara laughed.

“What now?” He turned, annoyed. He tapped the plastic coating. “It save my life the first time the Queen got hit.”

Ijjy had applied the same stuff.

“You look like fucking pirates,” Nashara said as the air-lock door groaned open.

From the claustrophobic corridors of the ship into the claustrophic corridors of a habitat’s outer skin.

The habitat had been a twenty-mile-long, potato-shaped asteroid once. Then the Satrap had it baked by solar mirrors, or high-powered lasers, while spinning slowly to create a cylindrical shape. Miners would have bored into it with drills while the center was baked out. And that gave them an immense, livable cylinder that could remain spinning to provide gravity. In several places massive clear diamond patches had been installed so that the habitat’s denizens could look out into space and see the stars when the habitat shut down the sunline to create night.

How many human lives building the habitat had cost, Nashara didn’t want to think about.

Inside, the docking area looked like more of the same. Gun-gray metal.

She tapped the small earpiece as Jamar whispered to her, trying to seat it properly. “I got the girl,” Jamar told them all.

“Good for you.” Nashara dashed across the mouth of an open corridor to cover and waited for her vision to catch up so she could analyze what she’d seen.

A brief flash of black. A uniform? “Ask her where we might find some fuel and she could be useful,” Nashara said.

“You’re cold,” Ijjy jumped in behind her.

“Don’t mind her.” Sean looked around at the signs on the wall. “Habitat customs is down this corridor. Let’s see what we can find.”

“I saw something at the end.” Nashara looked at the two of them. “Black uniform.”

“Could be security,” Sean said. If standard Satrapic design held true, this tunnel out from the air lock led down to another set of reinforced doors that usually housed a booth with a customs agent.

“Mmmm.” Nashara ducked her head and looked down the tunnel. Nothing now. Clear, she nodded to Sean.

“From what I remember passing through a few times, Agathonosis is a real insular place.” Sean checked the corridor also, then walked out into it. “The Satrap keep the habitat locked down something serious.”

“Not a fan of Emancipation?”

Sean shrugged. “Different places interpret it differently, right?”

They turned toward the customs booth. A short man in black, utilitarian pants and a similarly colored shirt stood near the wall watching them. He held no weapon. He stood rigid, shaved head beading sweat, staring at them.

Nashara almost hailed the man, then realized neither Sean nor Ijjy saw him.

Jamar’s voice crackled in her earpiece. “The girl says she can guide us to fuel. Says she knows a lot about Agathonosis. But she says she’s in a lot of danger, barricaded up in a room that’s running out of air in this end cap. It’s depressurized around her as well. She’s not all that far away. She’s got a location and maps for us. I can send them.”

“Okay, hook me up with that,” Ijjy replied, tapping his temple. “We can get by she place, see if we can help. Sean and I both got vacuum-protection plastic sprayed on, should be good for a quick exposure.”

Nashara couldn’t care less. “You guys, uh, see anything strange?” Her hand lay on the machine gun, ready to pull it free. The man in black stared even more intently at the three of them.

“Nothing,” Sean said, looking around the corridor. “Where the hell is everyone? Inside the habitat itself, not in the skin?” He walked up and looked into the empty customs booth. He tapped the glass a few times.

Ijjy tapped the control pad of the door leading out of the corridor. The door shuddered open, rolling aside, and the two men stepped forward.

Nashara swallowed. They’d stepped out into a larger hallway. Black-uniformed men lined the walls for several hundred feet.

They weren’t all unarmed. The first had been a test.