Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

The missiles shot past the Takara Bune and on toward the pod.

They found their target and lit up the space outside the habitat in a brilliant explosion. Etsudo flinched and zoomed in on the mess to see debris slap against the side of the habitat.

A ship and its crew, all dead. Did that make him no better than his crew had been?

Everything fell back into the dark again.

Etsudo shook his head and turned the ship’s external cameras away from the wreckage. Such a waste. They would have made good Hongguo, he would have made sure of it.

The elevator shot toward the center of the habitat, and Nashara could feel that the minigun now weighed a fraction of what it had when she’d picked it up. She bled from her arm, a chance shot when she’d turned a corner.

Several of Kara’s stratatoi had done their best to slow them down, but it had been easy enough to disable them. The Satrap had not been expecting them to head this way but either back toward the docks or toward the inside of the habitat.

It had been expecting an all-out firefight as they tried to force their way through the habitat.

“You sure the Satrap can’t shut this down?” Nashara asked. She stood face-to-face with Sean in the corner.

“Pretty sure,” Kara said.

“Pretty?” Nashara twisted to look at her. How old was this girl? Late teens? Their lives rode on her ability to manipulate the lamina the way the Satrap had and she was pretty sure?

“It can cut the power, but then how does it send the stratatoi after us?” Kara said.

She was right. The elevator shuddered after several more minutes, slowing down, then gently slid to a stop. Nashara pushed everyone aside and braced her now weightless self in front of the doors. She aimed the minigun ahead, just in case, and flicked the box of ammunition free so that the long belt floated free in the air.

Nothing waited for them out there.

She coiled the ammunition feed into a large spiral and let it float off the forearm holding the gun.

They floated out onto a large half circle of a floor that hung out over this side’s end cap. Ten-foot-tall windows curved around the edge, and a large set of oak doors with hand-carved images of triangular gliders flitting about in the air led out into the air above the sunline. The world of Agathonosis lay in dark night all around them. Shadows curving up on all sides and stretching off into the distance. A dark, menacing blackness broken only by random patches of lights and orange fires raging throughout the habitat’s interior.

“People used to use the balconies to launch their flyers from, until a month ago they were banned.” Kara twisted in the air, unused to weightlessness. Clumsy.

“Time till the sunline comes on?” Nashara asked.

“Not for another hour,” Kara said. “The windows will turn dark and the doors will shut ten minutes before. You’re not allowed to try and fly when the sun’s on. You have to be out there and away from it already.”

The elevator chimed. Another car coming their way. Filled with stratatoi, no doubt.

“Sean, your rope.”

He tossed it to her, and Nashara began to create loops. They stared at her, still not catching on.

“We’re going to cross to the other side.” She threw the end at Sean. “Start strapping in.”

They looked at her as if she were insane. “Nashara,” Ijjy said, but she cut him off.

“We have a minigun and enough ammunition to fire it for maybe thirty seconds. It’s not much use in an actual battle. We’re outnumbered. This is no different than flying a ship. It’s basic physics.”

“Basic physics?” Sean yelled.

Nashara tapped the ammunition box. “Each bullet has mass. Every time you fire one off, there is recoil. How many bullets do you think are in this box, Sean?”

“Couple thousand,” he whispered. Nine or ten grams each exiting the gun at a thousand meters per second. Nashara eyed the group and guessed they massed four hundred kilograms total.

“A thousand-shot burst from this gun would leave us going ninety kilometers per hour,” Nashara said. “We get to the other side of this habitat in just under thirty minutes. Unless the gun jams. In which case…” She shrugged.

They were spacers who flew from world to world, but Sean looked out toward the darkness. “I am no ship. No gun my rocket.”

“The only difference is the method of propulsion and the surroundings. We’re in zero gravity just the same. Just don’t look… anywhere.”

Kara walked over to her brother. “Jared.”

His face had gone white. “I can’t.”

Nashara continued roping herself up, then tightened the knot so that it zipped Sean right up to her hip. “Move yourself so you’re sitting on my back,” she told him. She wobbled as he did so, then spun in the air until Ijjy, his dreadlocks floating up around him like some wild Medusa, grabbed them and pulled them to a filigreed pillar.

“Ijjy, strap yourself to my back, but facing Sean,” Nashara said, and then waved Kara and Jared over.

Sean and Ijjy lashed the rope over Nashara’s midsection in a crosswise pattern, lashing their folded legs to her. “This go hurt,” Ijjy said.

“Kara, Jared, sit with your legs wrapped around each other on their legs, but like you’re in a circle. Hold Ijjy and Sean’s shoulders while they lash you all in and each other around your waists and shoulders.”

“Barely got enough rope,” Sean reported from over her shoulder.

“Make it work.”

Nashara held on to the pillar with one hand, the other holding the minigun, as the acrobatic structure of the five of them wobbled.

It was madness. She was faking her cool. The sunline still glowed with enough ambient heat from its fusion-powered light to scorch their skin if they bumped it, and controlling their flight would be a bitch.

“Elevator’s almost here,” Kara called out.

“Everyone strapped in?”

“Best we can,” Ijjy said.

Nashara kicked off from the pillar toward the nearest window. They all wobbled and started to spin.

“This is not going to work.” Sean shook the group as he shifted.

“Don’t move,” Nashara snapped as they gently struck the window. The minigun smacked the window hard enough to cause a crack. The ropes pulled at her stomach and, even more uncomfortably, rode right up under breasts and pulled at them.

She swore and kicked them toward the doors.

They struck those with more tumbling, and Nashara grabbed the handles of the doors and threw them open.

The motion pushed them back away from the opening doors, slowly. Nashara reached for the small machine gun with her free hand and fired three single shots to rotate herself to face the interior of the balcony.

Three shots to stop the rotation. The shots buried themselves in the floor nearby, kicking up plastic shavings.

Then she aimed the machine gun at the wall and fired for a full three seconds. The oak doors slowly slid past them on either side, and Sean swore.

“Don’t look around,” Kara said. “She told you that.”

“Damn, that chafes,” Ijjy said as the ropes shifted with another burst of machine-gun fire. Twenty feet lay between them and the lip of the balcony. Nashara glanced “up” to the slightly glowing sunline, then back at the balcony.

An excruciatingly slow departure. But controlled.

She let the machine gun drift on its strap and held the minigun against her stomach.

The elevator opened and ten stratatoi flew out in a star pattern. They spotted Nashara, and the star pattern shifted as they spread out for windows.

“Oh, fuck.” Nashara tensed and pulled the trigger on the minigun. The barrel spun up, then the howling scream of the minigun deafened them.