Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

She whipped around him. He jumped, but before he could do anything more, she’d draped one hand around his shoulder and pressed the knife against the small of his back with the other. Bystanders didn’t notice the move, and by keeping herself pressed close to Steven, no one would notice the knife. They just looked overly chummy.

The kid behind the stall twitched. He reached under the table, and Nashara raised an eyebrow at him. With a smile the kid stepped back and watched.

“What are you doing?” Steven asked.

He tried to pull away, but she yanked him right back and whispered into his ear, “Steven, this is just a table knife, but I’m strong enough that I will begin by puncturing a lung of yours with it. Do you know how much that hurts? After letting you writhe about for a while, I’ll slam this knife into your heart. Of course, you can stop this by giving me what I was promised for doing a very dangerous and dirty job.”

“We have someone sympathetic to the League,” he said quickly. “The owner of the Daystar . It’s docked here at Villach. We’ll spirit you aboard.”

Nashara watched as three men in long, green robes picked some items over at a nearby stall while watching the two of them.

“Headed for?” A pair of grubby women with baskets waited to look at the toys on the table. She was in their way. They looked somewhat impatient.

“A Freeman colony in orbit around the world Yomi,” he hissed out of the side of his mouth.

One of the ladies snapped her fingers. “You gonna stand there all day, you two?”

Yomi lay over fifty wormhole transits downstream and in the right fork, the Thule branch. But it was still fifteen upstream from the dead end of New Anegada. Nashara shook her head. “That’s not as close to the planet I was promised.”

One of the green-robed men glanced over at the increasingly irate ladies, then at Steven and Nashara.

“No, but it’s not here, where you’re certain to be taken down by a Gahe hunting pack. We need to leave now. We’ll help you find your way to where you need to be once you’re at the Freeman colony. There’s something we need to tell you about New Anegada anyway.”

He was being too nice. She was half tempted to snap his arm. And Steven specifically avoided looking in the direction of the men in green.

“Any Ragamuffin ships at dock?” she asked.

“They don’t make it this far upstream. You might find one at Yomi though.”

Nashara leaned closer. “Tell those three men to back way off.”

“What three men?” Steven looked around.

She dug the point of her improvised knife into his skin, enough to make her point. “Steven, back them off before things go bad.”

He looked over at them. They moved back.

Nashara dug out several bloody pieces of silver and tossed them at Peter. They bounced in a trough of chips and wires. A teenage girl with blond hair and sunburn joined Peter, and the two women in front of Nashara stared at the silver.

“I have a favor to ask you all,” Nashara said to them.

“What are you doing?” Steven twisted, shoving his shoulders against her.

“I’m going to pay a handful of these nice people to walk to the Daystar with us with any friends they can round up, board with me, and then leave once I’m nicely ensconced aboard the ship.”

He tensed. She’d figured that out as well. With a crowd around them the Villach security programs would keep a close eye on a mob. And for all the rhetoric the League of Human Affairs deployed, she’d bet her life it still preferred to skulk about in the shadows.

“Now let’s go before Gahe start showing up,” Nashara hissed. Time was running out and things were getting complicated.

Peter pocketed the silver and tapped the air, and as Nashara stepped forward, kids flowed in toward them, jostling closer as the word spread throughout the lamina that some crazy lady was paying Peter in silver to help walk her over to a ship.

The Daystar ’s cramped quarters made her feel cornered. The grimy passengers bored her. Three indentured workers escaping to the free-zone still dressed in grimy coveralls and casting relieved and yet still suspicious looks around. A human pet with his hair styled in a tall ringed cone and shaved eyebrows, glitter on his cheeks and lips. He didn’t have a name, but he showed her the bar code on his inner thigh. A handful of rich tourists in blue leather. All human. Aliens wouldn’t deign to ride dirty human transports.

The tourists relaxed, eyes closed, immersed in environments that only they could see. The walls were gray and bare, there was nothing else to do but immerse deep into some personal entertainment lamina. The better part of a day accelerating out from the habitat Villach had already passed. Nashara camped out in the cockpit of the Daystar , a gimballed sphere deep inside the very center of the long, cylindrical ship.

The portly captain, Danielle, danced from one edge of the cockpit to the other. Her crisp, new emergency gear made Nashara wonder if she was safe aboard the leaky, old tramp ship.

Danielle admired Nashara, she said. Ever since the moment Nashara had marched aboard her ship surrounded by thirty scruffy stall kids and Steven at knifepoint, waiting with all of them in the cockpit until she could verify that every last League agent had walked off the Daystar . And now Nashara remained in the cockpit with her.

No doubt the moment Nashara left, the captain could track where Nashara walked, vent a corridor, and leave her exposed to the vacuum. She could survive some of that, but eventually, the captain would win. And if Nashara killed the captain, she could take control of the ship, yes, Nashara had those skills. But once she inserted herself into the ship’s lamina, she would die.

So Nashara remained in the cockpit, watching the captain, the captain watching her.

The captain smiled, her belly wobbling in the lack of gravity as they fell away from Villach. “This story I will tell to all my passengers from now on.”

“That exciting? I thought you were a League sympathizer.”

Danielle spread her arms. “Whoever my masters will be, I want them all to know that I am loyal to them.”

Nashara grinned. “Cynical.”

“Honest.” Danielle tapped the air to give commands. “You are a glorious human being, Nashara. You will die in the most amazing way, someday, and people like me will talk about it for years. Do you believe in the great-person theory?”

“The what?”

“There are some people who always sit in the middle of big things. They live large lives. Like you. It is not enough for you to settle into a life in Astragalai and give up, no, you have panache. And I get to sit here in my ship and sail from star to star and watch people like you pass through lives. You’ll make my best dinner anecdote, I think.”

“It’s hardly great.” Wires snaked all around the cockpit. That couldn’t be safe, could it? “All I want to do is get to my destination in one piece. I’m tired. This is all temporary.”

At the front of the cockpit Danielle waved her hands, and the cockpit walls faded into screens that showed perspectives of space. Lots of inky darkness. Nothing that really stirred Nashara’s soul. She preferred worlds, not the empty vacuum.

“The League wanted me to stop and turn you over, you know. I told them you’d kill me. I like my life too much, and they know it. You’re okay aboard my ship.” Danielle chuckled, a bit too high-pitched, as if nervous. “Where are you going?”

“As close to New Anegada as I can get.”

“New Anegada?” Danielle shook her head. “Honey, you aren’t going all the way to New Anegada, you know. It’s not only way downstream of here, but it doesn’t exist anymore.”