Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

“Take him for interrogation,” Xippilli ordered. The Jaguar scouts ran forward and bound the warrior-priest’s hands with leather thongs and carried him away.

Xippilli stood with Pepper in the rain, looking through the foliage toward the pyramids rising over the top of the jungle. Tenochtitlanome, the capital of Aztlan, was home to tens of thousands of Azteca. And home to a small delegation of Nanagadans, their housing not too far away from the copse they stood in.

“It’s a good thing I’m here,” Pepper said. “Or some of them would be dead by now.”

“The old priesthood despise the moderates and preach against the new leadership,” Xippilli said. “They can’t accept the outcome of the Great War. They think if we had fought harder, a little bit longer, that we would be the masters of Nanagada. It’s not surprising they’re still out trying to affect things.”

“I should have come out earlier, cracked some heads, sent a message.” Pepper pulled his collar up and shook his head.

“Does the boy mean that much to you?” Xippilli asked.

Pepper looked over. “I asked John deBrun for a favor. In return, he wants me to keep an eye on his son right now. Yeah, it’s babysitting, but who better?” He didn’t agree with the delegation. Opening the Wicked High Mountains, such a perfect barrier to the Azteca, seemed stupid.

But he wasn’t in charge, and no one had asked him. Instead John had come to ask him to keep a close eye on Jerome, as many Azteca would welcome striking back against one of the main people who’d helped end the Great War.

“Indeed,” Xippilli said. “Who better?” Both men stood in the rain for a moment, then Xippilli walked over to the road.

A few moments later a steam-powered car slowly chuffed down toward them. Red-and-yellow-caped Azteca hung from the sides, watching the road. Pepper moved back into the brush and watched it go by.

“How are things going with the delegation?”

Xippilli shrugged. “They’re still touring the city, seeing the sights. The cocoa plantations today were the main event.”

Pepper watched the steam car creak off into the city. “I think I feel worse for the boy in there.”

“Politics do drag on,” Xippilli said. “But they run the world.”

“Flapping mouths.”

“They might bring our two cultures together.” But of course, Xippilli had a strong interest in all this. Since leaving Capitol City politics, Xipilli had turned to trade. His knowledge of Azteca and Capitol City customs and people let him build airships and trade routes over the Wicked High Mountains. And he wanted the two connected more permanently. More profit lay there. “That’s worth all this, don’t you think?”

“I’m just fulfilling my side of a bargain.” Pepper brushed past leaves to step up onto the road. The rain paused, a break in the dark clouds showing the light blue sky.

“What was this favor you asked of John?”

“Checking to see if that damn spaceship of his is healed up yet.”

“Eager to leave us?” Xippilli asked.

“You have no idea.” Pepper looked up into the sky at a small, bulging twinkle. The Spindle. Legend said that it would one day disgorge the Azteca’s gods in vast numbers.

Unlike most legends, Pepper knew this one was true. At some point the energies that leaked out to create the always visible Spindle would force the wormhole back open. When the alien Teotl returned in force, all hell would break lose. Been there, done that, Pepper thought. And he didn’t want to be around for it the second time.

Agaudy airship with a bloated gasbag and peeling red paint floated high over the walls of Capitol City, propellers churning as it fought the sea-breeze headwinds that kicked up in the evening.

An Azteca airship.

Once it would have made John deBrun nervous. Today it was just another trader. A lot had changed in the last decade, particularly in the last seven years since the fall of the old Azteca leadership to more moderate rulers. Airships moved back and forth over the almost impassable mountains that separated the Azteca from the Nanagadans. Trade boomed in Capitol City and the land recovered from the Great War. The Teotl had led the Azteca to the city walls, but had been dealt a blow in that war that toppled the old leadership and sent them back over the mountains.

Nanagada’s masterful specialist fighters, the mongoose-men, had built up their numbers along the Wicked Highs to prevent a repeat anyway. It was a secure, stable, and prosperous time for Nanagada.

The airship slowly dropped into the heart of the city, disappearing behind the massive walls perched on the peninsula’s tip.

John watched the spray drift up from waves constantly smacking into the rocks at the city’s seawall base. It would be a salty day if one stood on the wall walkway.

A larger steamer churned by John’s small fishing skiff, giant nets hanging from long metal arms off either side. The men on the deck waved.

The fishing fleet steamed farther and farther out these days. Water currents changed, the ocean had slightly cooled.

It would keep cooling as Nanagada failed to get enough sun. The orbital mirrors keeping the planet warm had fallen two hundred years ago. Ice had crept over the northern continent, and fishermen reported icebergs hindering the fishing grounds.

The technological proficiency needed to keep a terraformed planet going had been lost in the war with the Teotl. Electromagnetic pulses from nuclear weapons and the destroyed wormhole leading back to the Teotl had left the whole planet shattered, only just now reacquiring the tools it needed. But, John knew, not soon enough to countereffect the cooling of the planet.

Before Pepper got to use the Ma Wi Jung to try to bridge the depths of the stars to the next wormhole, a centuries-long journey, John needed the still-working spaceship to help Nanagada. That would be an interesting conflict when the time came.

John sailed on, letting Capitol City dwindle until it felt as if he were all that sat at sea. A tiny speck of a boat bobbing out in the ocean.

He knew exactly where he was. John could close his eyes and see a map of the area, complete with his exact location, the city, and the spaceship he looked for.

He dropped the sails and threw the anchor over. He walked back to the bench by the mast and sat down.

Beneath his boat John could feel the presence of the spaceship Ma Wi Jung . Deep beneath the waves, sucking nutrients and metals out of the water, it slowly repaired itself. One day it would fly again, lift itself into the air and spring for space.

Maybe.

John queried the ship, feeling his mind connect with it like a snake burrowing down into a hole. Images floated over his eyes as he accessed the ship’s datasphere.

Status?

The answer impressed itself somewhere deep in the back of his head. Another fifteen years. The starship’s self-repair mechanisms were working at double the speed they’d been designed for, a little hack thanks to John.

He glanced overhead. The Spindle hung in the sky. Its geosynchronous orbit kept it at the same spot, day or night. An omen for many, a worry for the few who knew what it really was.

John sighed. The Spindle was the remains of a wormhole, and when that wormhole reopened, something he hadn’t known was even possible when he’d helped try to destroy it, there was going to be a world of hurt. Nanagada’s old enemies would come through.

And the other wormhole in orbit around Nanagada, the one that had once led out to allies and that John had come through to get to Nanagada, that one didn’t seem to be reopening. It was invisible.

They were alone.

He pulled a lure out of the tackle box beneath him, rigged a pole, and cast over the side of the boat.