Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

As the sun slipped beneath the horizon, John ran a light up the mast. He’d stay the night; he enjoyed the fishing.

He didn’t have any obligations, and he had no worries as Pepper was keeping an eye on Jerome off in Tenochtitlanome. He missed the sea, salt drifting over him, night sky packed with stars. He’d stay. He’d nap. It would be refreshing.

The old wooden boat rocked an easy rhythm, mast swaying, as John leaned back, closed his eyes, and smiled. Almost four hundred years old, and fishing still hadn’t lost its appeal.

But he kept glancing back up at the sky.

As the sun rose, John tied the small fishing boat to one of the low wooden piers in Capitol City’s harbor. Capitol City jutted up out of the peninsula’s tip, a great amphitheater with one edge slouched in the water.

Several hundred years ago the entire city had been grown from scratch, using an experimental and highly illegal form of nanotechnology powered by microwave radiation focused down on the spot from orbit.

Well before humans had come down to settle Nanagada. Well before the Ancient Wars hundreds of years ago, when they were reduced to no technology, scrabbling around on the surface trying to get by.

“Good catch?” someone in a long fishing skiff asked.

John stretched out the several fish whose gills he’d run wire through and held by a foot-long wooden stick. “Not bad.” His accent sounded flat, as even after all his years among the Caribbean descendants of Nanagada he had never picked up the dialect as fully as he would have liked.

“You catch them good, John.”

He smiled. A good catch, but only because the Ma Wi Jung heated up the water below, attracting fish and activity. He’d fry this batch up and enjoy a good breakfast.

John shifted the catch to his right hand and climbed the steps up to the stone cobble of the main waterfront. He waved at a few fishermen scaling fish on stone tables.

The apartment he lived in lay half a mile through the tight alleys and shortcuts John had internalized easily enough. A ghostly series of compasses and lines hung in the air before him that only he could see. It was a talent wired into his brain hundreds of years ago to allow him to plunge ships through wormholes in haste.

John closed his eyes and relied on the internal map still visible to him. He took thirty-seven steps forward, stopped, turned right, and started walking.

A dumb trick. He opened his eyes to avoid tripping on alley trash.

A Toltecan walked toward John, one of the moderate Azteca who spurned human sacrifice and lived in Capitol City. Many had returned and reformed the city of Tenochtitlanome when the government had fallen apart, bankrupt due to the costs of its invasion of Nanagada. Quite a few remained in the city, though. The Toltecan’s fringed hair was brushed down almost over his eyes.

“Morning.” John nodded as they approached one another. With barely room for each to pass, John turned aside to let the man through.

The man, a true Azteca, drew a knife and struck John’s shoulder. It hit bone, and the pain drifted down John’s arm. “Your time is over,” the man hissed, pushing the knife farther in. Waves of dizziness grabbed John. “You now pay for defying the gods.”

John dropped to his knees. A second man grabbed him from behind. John twisted just far enough so that the knife bit into his left lung instead of a kidney.

He tried to scream, despite one punctured lung, and despite the fingers jammed down his mouth as they pushed him down to the ground. The first man yanked the knife free from his shoulder, slick with blood, and John grabbed the next stab with his left hand. The knife impaled the meat of his hand.

All three of them struggled on the dirty, wet alleyway ground.

Deep inside, old technology struggled to maintain his consciousness, suppress pain, and keep him standing. John hadn’t been in combat shape in a long while, though, and only his body’s natural shock prevented him from passing out.

More footsteps. John kicked a kneecap in and struggled to get free, but he just couldn’t draw a breath.

“Hey!” Someone yelled into the alley. “Somebody get help, is a mugging going on!”

John pulled the knife out of his left hand as his attackers looked up. He stabbed it deep into the belly of the man who sat on his chest. The man screamed and stumbled back.

The remaining assassin spun and took off running. John pushed himself onto his hands and knees and looked over at the corner of the alleyway. Something glinted back at him.

A homemade bomb.

John struggled forward out of the alley.

The world roared, shifted, and John flew forward. His back exploded in pain from shards of rock and metal embedded in it.

Face, shoulders, and back streaming blood, nose broken, eyes too bloodshot to see, his head ringing, John crawled out. He felt the larger cobblestones of the road under his hands.

He collapsed into the dirty water of a gutter. Strong arms grabbed him to pull him up. “We need get you to a hospital.” The faces of several Ragamuffins, the city’s policemen, looked down at him.

“No,” John croaked. “Boat.” The men who’d tried to kill him, Azteca spies posing as Tolteca, had done a good job. He was as good as dead unless he got back to the ship.

He pushed them away and dropped to his knees.

“He hit he head too hard,” someone offered.

John turned toward the sound of the voice. He focused down into himself to try to manage the pain. “I’m perfectly clear of mind. If I don’t get out to where I need to go, I’ll die, there’s nothing any doctor here can do for me.”

“But…”

He coughed blood. “Do not argue with me.”

They argued about it, each taking a minute too long, but someone had recognized him and commandeered a small boat with a steam engine still hot. John could smell fish everywhere as they gently moved him into a hammock.

“This ain’t no good,” the captain of the small vessel protested. “You go die if you don’t get help.”

“Will you just trust that I know what I’m doing?” John asked him.

With his eyes closed he could see exactly where they had moved. Each step remained in his mind since they had left the edge of the alley to walk down the docks.

Now at sea he gave them orders, moving them out toward the Ma Wi Jung .

His heart rate dropped, close to failure. “Hurry,” John told them. “Hurry.” The small boiler next to the hammock radiated heat, which made him drowsy. The door clanged as someone fed it wood.

By steamboat it took only a couple hours, though by then John’s eyes started to glaze.

“Stop!” John whispered, and the captain coasted to a stop.

The waves tossed them back and forth, rocking steadily.

John fumbled out of the hammock and felt his way to the rail. His legs protested, but he used every last ounce of strength to walk over and grab hold.

“What you doing?”

Before they could stop him John pitched forward into the cold water. The world fell silent, the distant crash of waves against the hull of the boat nearby becoming the entire world.

He sank, expelling air to speed up.

Ma Wi Jung?

The ship lay hundreds of feet below him. It had the medicinal technology to heal him.

The ship responded as John queried it, asking it to rise and meet him. He swallowed hard as the reply came to him. The ship did not have the ability to rise from the seabed. The water had grown cold.

Far beneath John an air lock slide open and belched massive bubbles.

Already he had fallen a hundred feet, his ears popping as he equalized them. If he could see, the ocean would be inky blackness.

He hadn’t taken in enough air with a collapsed lung to do this.