Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

Kara’s sniffling echoed off the gray metal all around them.

She forced a door open. There they were, five medical pods, crudely bolted onto the room’s walls.

Nashara snatched Jared away, pulled the bloody cloth off, and placed him underneath the nearest bright yellow hood. She slapped the thing in place and put her palm to the contact pad.

They all watched as wires and hoses wriggled into place, seeking out veins, slithering up Jared’s nose with a trickle of blood.

Three arms snapped into place, dropping an egglike mechanical heart dripping with placement fibers onto his chest. Kara jumped when it latched onto the boy’s chest and his back arced up as the machine whined.

Defib. Once, twice, three times, four times, and then the beat. A heartbeat.

“He’s stable,” Nashara said.

“What does that mean?” Kara looked through her, so sharp.

“Get him to a Ragamuffin doctor within a week,” Ijjy said. “He go be okay.”

“Right.” Nashara let go of the panel.

“So we have to go, we have to find him a doctor.” Kara leaned over the panel. “Please.”

Nashara looked back down the central shaft. “Ijjy, raise the captain.”

Ijjy looked up. “I been hailing since we got aboard.”

They looked at each other.

“We need to find a doctor,” Kara said again. “We need to get moving.”

“We’ll get going soon, but we’re waiting for someone right now.” Nashara backed out of the room with Ijjy and shut the door.

“We could cast off,” Ijjy said. “Jamar said you could fly these things.”

“We aren’t going anywhere anytime soon,” Nashara said.

“Why not?”

“Because Jamar lied to you, I can’t fly this thing.”

She walked into the cockpit and left Ijjy standing in the shaft. Alone, she sat on the floor facing the captain’s chair, hanging from the current top of the cockpit. She folded her arms in front of herself and closed her eyes.

“Captain Sinjin Smith, where the hell are you?” she asked the empty cockpit, then she closed her eyes and rocked slightly.

He couldn’t die. It wouldn’t be fair. These people’s lives were not her responsibility. Sean had died. The kid was almost dead. It was all a total fuckup. Jamar was off leading the Hongguo on a chase, but he was probably dead.

The sound of something smacking against the air lock finally penetrated.

“I think they trying to get in,” Ijjy said. He held the sides of the round doorway and looked at her.

“Think he’s coming?” Nashara asked, staring at the floor.

“Don’t know,” Ijjy said, folding his arms now. “We could end up a sitting duck.”

Nashara tapped the wrist screen and the Toucan Too shuddered. The air lock groaned and seals hissed.

“Ditched the umbilicial, should be harder for them to try anything in vacuum,” Nashara said. “Gives us ten minutes before they break out the suits to come for us.”

“Okay. But you think ten minutes enough?”

Nashara rested her head in the palms of her hands. “I got us fuel,” she said.

“You did good.”

“Not good enough, Ijjy. Not near good enough.”

“We went up direct against a Satrap,” Ijjy said. “What more you want?”

Nashara folded her arms. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Ijjy didn’t reply.

“You have a smoke?” Nashara asked. “I just need a few minutes.”

Ijjy shook his head.

“Talk to me about the Raga. If we are able to get this ship to them, talk to them, what can they do against the Hongguo?” She didn’t want to waste her own life for nothing.

“You head downstream. This the last of the forty-eight worlds, so we got another fifteen wormholes to go. Got a hot-clouded world you pass through call Chilo, and then three down from there you got the end of the line. We got Morant, a small habitat, maybe ten thousand people in it. Twenty ships left with us.” Ijjy frowned, then corrected himself. “Sixteen since Dragin-Above. Six for defense, ten higgler ships if the Queen alive. Don’t know know how many of the higgler ships go be around, they out trading.”

“You have family there, don’t you?”

Ijjy nodded, but didn’t go into details. She silently thanked him for that.

That was the might of the Raga now, a bunch of refugees huddled around a failed wormhole.

But with the Satrapy and Hongguo bearing down on them, who else would step forward? It was going to be the closest thing to a home she would find out here. It was worth defending.

Nashara started strapping herself into the captain’s chair and looked around the ship. It had been a long time since sitting in the center chair.

“Things could get weird, Ijjy. I’m going to die, but not really.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How?”

“I’m not just built to be quick, or to survive vacuum. I have a device in me that will scan my brain, slowly, and as it does that, it will upload into this ship’s lamina. But in order to scan my mind it will destroy the synapses.”

Ijjy stared at her. “Uploads go insane. Ground-up-built artificial intelligence don’t make no sense, too alien. We been playing in the labs in Morant.”

“Uploads go insane because your physical body is as much a part of your being as your mind. You can’t divorce the mind from the organism and the environment. But lamina is computer power and a layer matching the environment. If you accept physical tags, your mind will cope.”

“You seen it done.”

“Seen it done by my sisters, before they destroyed the ship they were aboard to save my skin.” Nashara pulled out an optical jack and slid it under her skin, felt it connect. Much higher bandwidth connection.

“Nashara.” Ijjy grabbed her shoulder. “We should wait.”

She looked back at him. “If Jamar hasn’t responded yet, you know he’s dead or unable to help us. Prepare for acceleration.”

Nashara initiated a link to the ship’s lamina. The backs of her eyes filled with information as she accessed everything directly. The machines inside her sensed the connection and leapt into action.

She felt dizzy, then tired. Sedatives flooded her system. She closed her eyes.

Nashara felt swept out on a brief tide of information, then opened her eyes again. She could see herself slumped in the cockpit chair through a handful of sensors. Classic out-of-body. Disorienting, not safe.

She reached in and restarted her heart, checked her vitals. Everything still worked. She wasn’t in her body, but she could use it the way she’d use a drone.

Nashara opened her eyes again.

“You alive,” Ijjy said. A single second had passed.

“In a manner of speaking.” Nashara struggled to maintain the old point of view. This was her body, this was where her mind resided.

That hadn’t been too hard, she thought.

“Hey, little lady.”

Nashara jerked up and faced a mirror. “What?”

A perfect copy of her stood in front of the captain’s chair. “There’s enough processing power in the ship’s lamina for the both of us,” the second Nashara said. “Been trying to wrap my head around it, took a microsecond longer than you, so I missed getting my body back.”

Nashara stared at herself. “Oh, shit.”

“What did you expect? We’re supposed to spread out.” The mirror image held out her hands. “Freaky, huh?”

“You have no idea…” Nashara paused. “Well, you know.”

She smiled at herself. “We have immediate problems.”

“Which are?”

“Who’s in charge and who’s called what? Do we time-share our body? And what do we do next with our new ship, here?”

Both of them pondered that for a few microseconds. Nashara twisted her fingers and reached out through her new twin, just to make sure. “I know you feel like the real copy, just like I do. But since I snagged the body first, I’m going to take dibs on Nashara and the body.”