Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

Ijjy and Sean walked forward out of her reach before she could say anything. Nashara caught up and whispered, “Jamar, this discussion encrypted?”

“Yeah,” Jamar replied, even as she heard feet behind her. Cutting them off.

She didn’t dare turn and look. She did her damn best to ignore the slack faces alongside the walls. All of them not even ten feet away from her on either side.

Shit. Shit.

“You all have artificial retinas, don’t you, to access lamina?” she whispered.

Jamar’s answer disappeared under a wash of static.

The door behind them shuddered back shut on its own. Ijjy turned around. “It should stay open.”

“Fail-safes,” Sean said. “Dangerously close to an air lock just to remain constantly open.”

He could have been right, except that Nashara could see the man in black standing by the door controls, and the handful of other men with him blocking their way back to the ship.

“Sean, send that map to my wrist screen,” Nashara said. She held it up as the lines faded in and looked at it, then back up at the men around them.

As long as these eerie people believed them blind, they might let Nashara’s group walk just a little bit farther. And whatever was in control was clearly interested in determining who they were, what they were, maybe even interested in capturing them alive.

“Okay,” Nashara said to Ijjy as she looked down at the map. “You were right.”

Fuel was the least of their worries now.

He turned back to look at her, confused. “Right about what?”

“We need to see this girl right away.” She walked past the two of them and glanced at the sides of the corridor. Fifty people on each side before the corridor jagged, all with out-of-control beards, long, raggedy hair, and dirty faces.

Goddamn creepy.

“Why the change of heart?”

“I’ve seen the light,” she lied through clenched teeth. “That poor girl, all alone in a room, scared, hoping we’ll help.”

Although, how the hell had the girl survived alone in here? Nashara and her new friends were already trapped, just a few minutes into this.

“Right…” Ijjy frowned and looked at her, and Nashara stared back.

Sean grinned. “Maybe she’s human after all.”

“Shut up and lead us to her, Ijjy.”

Nashara held up her wrist, blanked the flexible screen embedded in it, and used it as a mirror to see the crowd forming behind them.

They had handguns, although three carried a massive minigun on a bipod between them.

Ijjy dogged them out into a new direction, and suddenly they were just in empty corridors again, out of the gauntlet.

Nashara realized she hadn’t been breathing, her pores had shut down, and that she’d quadrupled her heart rate. She reset her internal fight responses and took a deep breath.

“Will you trust me on something, Ijjy?” she whispered. He turned back to look at her.

“What?”

“Don’t fucking look back at me,” she hissed. He turned away.

“What?” he called over his shoulder.

“When I say run, both of you run like hell.”

“Why?” Sean asked. Too loud.

“Because I think we’re going to die if you don’t. Trust me. I see something.”

Nashara used her wrist screen as a mirror again. The crowd behind them edging after them at a safe distance, but looking somewhat tense. They moved as one in a creepy, duplicated fashion, every step mirrored by the others.

Ijjy turned a corner.

“Run!” Nashara sprinted. They broke into a run with her.

The next corridor in front of them stretched four hundred feet long. The door at the end rolled shut.

Nashara spun back to the edge of the corner behind her and whipped a knife free from its ankle strap. She held it in her left hand and allowed the machine gun to drop to her side.

“What going on?” Ijjy turned to look at her.

Choices. Kill first, or see whether they were really friendly, though she doubted that. No one carried a damn minigun to a meeting unless they expected to use it.

But they hadn’t attacked. Nashara’s hand quivered slightly. All instincts screamed to start picking them off sooner, but something else held her back.

She took a deep breath, remembering cramped corridors in ships and fire-fights she’d scraped through. Thought of blood-slicked floors and shook her head. Now was not the time for doubts.

The first man around the corner didn’t spot her at first. He just skidded across the floor and fired at Sean.

That answered the dilemna, it was kill or be killed. Nashara shot him between the eyes and dove around the corner. The group didn’t expect to see her come screaming straight at them.

Arms grabbed her, several shots were fired, but the screams as bullets thudded and burst into flesh weren’t hers.

The three men around the minigun she aimed for didn’t have time to react. Nashara killed the first with the knife, the second with a kick to the head, and the third she flung clear.

She yanked the massive fifty-pound gun up, flicked the safety, and pulled the trigger down to within a hair of firing. “Drop your damn weapons.” She dragged the large ammunition box with her. A chain of bullets led back into it with more carefully coiled inside. A good thirty seconds of high-rate firing, she estimated.

As if one organism, they pulled back from her, boots all thudding to the ground at once. Guns hit the floor and Nashara backed away from them.

The entire group spoke to her, every single mouth opening at once. “If you pull the trigger, the recoil will knock you over,” they chorused.

Chills ran down Nashara’s back. “Maybe. Or maybe you’re really underestimating me.”

She kept stepping back, and the crowd melted away from around her. She faced them all and kept thinking about Ijjy and mind-controlling Satraps. If she was smart, she’d pull the trigger and obliterate this faceless mass of mindless people.

Her arm shook as Ijjy and Sean ran around the corner to her.

“I think I owe you an apology,” Nashara hissed at Sean. But he wasn’t looking at the crowd in front of them, just at all the blood on her hands.

“Nashara, what the hell is going on?”

“What do you see?” she demanded.

“A lot of blood.”

She felt faint now, dizzy. An afteraffect of the animal fight-or-flight response and some neurological changes happening as her body came out of combat readiness and into postaction relief. She rode a wave of endorphins.

“You’re going to have to turn off your eyes and your lamina. They’ve been hacked into so you can’t see things. Now come on, I’ll cover us, but we need to get to that girl, and quickly.”

“But then I can’t navigate without lamina.”

“I’ve got the map on my wrist screen. Kill your damn eyes. Do it!” Nashara said. “Do it now!”

Ijjy gasped. “Where the hell did you get that gun?” He’d shut down lamina, then. Then he looked down the corridor for the first time and jerked.

Sean looked over as well.

“They’re more back there,” Nashara said.

“They could be herding us.” Sean pulled out a pistol.

“True that,” Ijjy agreed.

Ijjy looked nervous. “We should get back to the Queen .”

“Then we still have no fuel,” Nashara snapped. “We go to the kid. You two want to try and turn back, be my guest. I’m going on.”

“She got a good point,” Sean said.

Nashara looked behind her. “Can you force the manual locks on that door, Ijjy?”

“Yeah.”

“Then do it.”

She kept the minigun trained on the black-uniformed crowd. But just barely. Even for her, amped up and designed for combat, the fifty pounds refused to be held steadily unless she let it rest against her hip.