Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

A leathery-faced man with grayed dreadlocks appeared before them all. “I Don Samuel Andery, captain of Starfunk Ayatollah . Who you is?”

“Mr. Andery, my name is Nashara. This is Ian Johnson, of the Queen Mohmbasa . We need to talk, and quick.”

“Ijjy?” Andery frowned. “Where the Queen ?”

Ijjy swallowed. “Gone. The Hongguo attacked.”

“The Hongguo? For real?”

“They also had attack the other higglers we was with,” Ijjy said. And then he launched into a recap, answering Andery’s questions as the conversation grew heated.

“I find all that hard to believe. Hongguo enforce the rule of the Satrap, but this?”

“Believe it,” Nashara said. “Why else do you have armed ships? Why else do you cluster around a dead wormhole instead of trying to integrate with the rest of the worlds? The Satrapy doesn’t have our best interests at heart.”

Andery looked at her. “That true, sister, true, but we can’t just take you word for it. You go have to come in, call a grounation with the Dread Council to talk. Then they can send out some ship to check all this.”

“You think you have the time for that?” Nashara waved in the air to display an image of the upstream wormhole. A Hongguo ship breached the wormhole, cautious, tasting the air ahead of itself with a score of drones that swarmed out tossing chaff and bleeping random static across frequencies. Nashara shook her head. No way back through, Hongguo would be piling up on the other side of the hole any moment now.

Another ship followed it. Then a second. Then a third.

“Taking us a bit more seriously now?” Nashara asked. It surprised her the Ragamuffins only had one ship out patrolling.

Andery looked serious. “Get you self moving, we right behind.” He looked away from them, then nodded. “The Magadog coming in.”

A new face appeared, scarred with short-cropped hair. “ Toucan Too , this Magadog , Ras Christopher Malik here. Been listening to what all you saying. Don Andery got the right of it, head downstream, we sending back explanation, mobilizing.”

“You have preparations for such an event?” Cascabel asked. A Ras ranked higher than a Don; this captain would know more about Ragamuffin emergency plans.

Ras Malik nodded. “Morant being towed out system, deep space. Worse come to worse we keep going, head out into them Oort cloud, hide out deep, forget the wormhole them, hunker down. We already an hour into it, you’ll find out what happen when you get in system. Just be careful, we all jumpy, seen?”

Nashara saw a blip moving out from beside the downstream wormhole now. The Magadog . The two ships played chicken for a few brief minutes, until Magadog curved out of the way.

“Good luck,” Nashara said.

“You too,” Ras Malik said. “Thanks for the heads-up. Make sure to drop all you speed coming out the wormhole, it mined.”

Magadog whipped past them, mere thousands of miles apart. Cascabel upped acceleration, and the Toucan Too hit the downstream wormhole toward the Ragamuffin home territory.

Sweeps of the area around lit up their displays. Ships, shuttles, drones, chaff.

“Shit, Malik wasn’t kidding.” Cascabel dumped velocity, spinning them on end to fire the main engines and bleed tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.

The two wormholes orbited a rocky world, and that in turn hung out near a brown dwarf. Nothing of interest to the Satrapy here.

“ Toucan Too , this the Xamayca Pride .” An audio-only connection of a woman’s voice. A cautious choice. Nashara respected that. “Ras Monifa Kaalid here, we sending you a path through the mines hanging all around you.”

Cascabel nodded. “It’s here.” The Toucan Too puffed, adjusting orbit to sink down into the cloud of mines.

The round face of Ras Kaalid appeared, her dreadlocks floating loose around her face. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Things really getting hectic here and everything on a full stand-up. We already getting Morant towed out.”

“You knew about the Hongguo?” Nashara asked.

Ras Kaalid shook her head. “The downstream wormhole to New Anegada reopened. Everything upside down.”

Nashara and Cascabel stared at each other, and Ijjy leaned forward. “That even possible?” Ijjy asked.

“Apparently,” Ras Kaalid said. “Now we have to find out what coming up through from there, and what coming down on all of we with the Hongguo.”

Nashara looked at Cascabel. “We have to get there. We have to find out what has happened.”

“Maybe, but it ain’t big enough. We waiting to see what coming through.”

“Make sure we’re there too,” Nashara told Cascabel. She had to see what lay on the other side of the wormhole, what had happened to New Anegada.

Her long quest might almost be over.

And they might have a new ally in the coming fight against the Hongguo.

Pepper wrapped his oilskin duster around himself tighter as the wind kicked up through the trees and water cascaded down on his dreadlocks and behind his collar. He shivered.

He needed a new duster. He’d bulked out too much over the last few years. Good food, a free schedule. It sounded good. Nice planet, New Anegada. Or Nanagada, as the Caribbean descendants here had taken to calling it sometime in the last few hundred years. Only, somewhat annoyingly, the locals called their land on the other side of the mountains Nanagada, just like the planet.

He still wanted to get off the damn planet and see if it was possible to get back to the rest of the worlds. The destructive dying spams of the war against the Teotl the Black Starliner Corporation had raged in space had left the planet with no wormholes out anywhere and with the destruction of technology. It was hard to step back from centuries of progress and not miss it, and Pepper found each year grated harder at him.

A branch snapped.

Someone sniffed.

Pepper’s gray eyes flashed back a bit of moonlight, like a cat’s. He flipped back an edge of his coat and pulled out a long hunting knife.

Five days in this dirty, muddy, humid, sticky-leafed outskirts of the Azteca city Tenochtitlanome.

It was something to do.

The warrior-priest he’d been stalking stepped around the large banyan tree and Pepper picked him off the ground by his throat. He tossed the sniper’s rifle the man carried off into the bush.

“ Niltze ,” Pepper said. Hello. Pepper had been practicing his Nahautl.

He flashed the knife in front of the man, who whispered, “Pepper,” and wet himself.

Word apparently got around.

Pepper shoved the man down onto his back. Mud exploded outward as the flat of the warrior-priest’s back slapped against the sloppy ground.

“I die gladly for my gods,” the priest choked.

“That’s nice.” Pepper leaned forward. “I have a question. Which one of your gods is giving you the orders to try and kill delegates from Nanagada?” The Azteca’s gods, the Teotl, couldn’t leave well enough alone since their defeat and the overthrow of their priests. They still tried to manipulate things here in Tenochtitlanome from the shadows.

“I’ll die a thousand lives before giving you any information,” the priest spat.

“I can do that,” Pepper growled. A twig snapped nearby. “But you’re lucky today.”

“Pepper?”

“You’re late, Xippilli.” Pepper looked over at the Azteca nobleman who stepped off the muddy path toward them. “Told you I’d catch one skulking around here.”

Several Jaguar warriors in yellow-and-red capes stepped forward, rifles aimed at the warrior-priest on the ground.