Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

The pockets of air released from the air lock buffeted him.

He fell faster now, arrowing down, long seconds passing, the water getting even colder. John started shivering as his body’s core temperature dropped.

Behind his eyelids he could see the last fifty feet through the ship’s datasphere. The ship had spotted him. It lit the area up, and what it saw, John also saw. He could see himself, trailing blood, shivering, falling down toward the ship.

Just a little left, and John struck the hull headfirst. He dragged himself the last few feet into the air lock.

The lock shut. It slowly drained away the water until John floated faceup in air he could breathe. The pumps failed at that point, unused to the strain of pumping in enough air to force the water out.

John burst inside the ship along with hundreds of gallons of water as the inner lock opened.

He lay on the floor as it absorbed the water.

The medical pod lay inside a room ten feet away, and for John, gasping like a fish, it may have been twenty miles away.

He closed his eyes and curled up in a ball of pain on the floor, then straightened out. Foot by foot he crawled until he could pull himself into the medical pod and close it.

John woke up with a pounding headache, aches, and scars all over. A meal sounded good, but there was nothing on the ship but the nutrient drip the medical pod had retracted from his arm several hours ago. He checked the time. Three days. Three days ensconced in here. The boat above had left, no doubt assuming he was dead.

The inside of the ship looked a lot better since the last time he’d visited, when it still bore smoke and fire damage.

An alert pinged patiently from the cockpit, as well as in the back of his head. The Ma Wi Jung needed him to take care of something.

John sat down and tapped a panel, looked down at the series of readouts that appeared in the air.

Radio signals.

They’d started while he was in the medical pod, coming from the vicinity of the Spindle, and moving their way from the geosynchronous orbit of that wormhole into a low orbit.

John felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. The wormhole had reopened. Which meant that the energies pouring through what had once been a tiny hole in the sky to create the always visible Spindle and force the hole back open would soon fade away, and the whole world would know it.

Teotl would be coming through. Tenochtitlanome was going to become the most dangerous place to be on the whole planet.

John checked the ship’s inventory, looking for an escape raft. None, and it would take too long for the ship to create one for him. But it did have an inflatable vest and a flare gun.

That would have to do.

That evening, as the fishing steamers were returning toward Capitol City, John burst out of the air lock toward the surface.

After his first deep breath of salty, cold air, he fired a flare. Three flares later a bewildered fishing crew hauled John up onto their deck.

“You dead,” they said.

John ignored them as they wrapped him up with blankets and took him into the engine room near the giant boiler to keep him warm. He lay in the warmth thinking of his son in the heart of Azteca land unaware that everything was on the cusp of changing for the worse.

Before he left the fishing boat, he borrowed some heavy-weather gear, flipping the hood up to obscure his face.

He fought his way back through the crowds of Capitol City. Everything seemed normal in the fading light and inside the great walls of the city. Crowds of people, from dark to light brown and even a few white, filled the streets. All manner of accents filled the air. It was a bit packed for this late. Although the city’s electric lights would be on, most people in the city had candles. They left for home at sunset. But now vendors shouted at each other as John got on one of the street buses running down the center of the city. Several people stood over large bundles.

The whip antenna sparked and slapped the metal grid overhead. The bus accelerated toward the next stop.

John had been happy to move out from Brungstun, the town he’d lived in almost thirty years and raised his son in. Too many memories there, most of them of Shanta, his wife.

Capitol City felt safer than the small town right beside the Wicked High Mountains, the first place overrun during the Great War. He still had nightmares about waking up to find Azteca rooting through his house, binding his wrists, and dragging him off to be a sacrifice.

Better to remain in Capitol City, behind the solid walls, with hundreds of miles between the mountains and him.

The bus stopped near the red-painted stone building John lived in. He got out and jogged up the outer steps to his apartment, almost knocking himself out on a clothesline as he couldn’t see much above eye level with the hood up.

The door was unlocked. It swung open and a pair of mongoose-men stepped out from the shadows to grab him and pull him in.

“Who you is?” they demanded. One yanked the hood down, and they both froze. “John deBrun?”

John nodded.

“Yes. What are you doing in here?” he demanded.

The two soldiers looked abashed. “We was sent to guard the place, see if anyone showed up. General Haidan hear you was dead.”

“He angry,” the other mongoose-man said.

“After all the years we’ve known each other, I’m glad to hear that.” John walked over to a chest under the small table in his cramped kitchen. “Someone did try to kill me. Azteca spies here in the city.”

He pulled out a handful of gold coins, a change of clothes, and a pistol.

“You in a hurry to leave, Mr. deBrun, but where you going, sir, Haidan go want to know.”

“Tenochtitlanome.”

“Is dangerous for you. The Azteca go want catch you and torture you, they want to know where to find you ship, how to get into it.”

“I know, it doesn’t matter now. Now look, time is short.” John stood up and looked at the two mongoose-men in their beige uniforms. “You need to tell Haidan the Teotl have come from the Spindle, and that the wormhole is open again. He needs to make preparations. Tell him as soon as possible.”

The two men glanced at each other. “We already know.”

John stopped. “How?”

They threw open the wooden shutters on the north side of his apartment. “Look up, above the jungle.”

John walked over. Above the clotheslines outside, the alleyway and bubble of conversation and street noise, above the great wall of Capitol City, was a band that stood over it all. And a large black dot hovered in place in the distance, visible just over the lip of the wall. Hood up, lost in his own worries, he hadn’t looked up to see what everyone else in the city had already seen.

That was why so many people were out this late.

“A ship?” John asked.

“Just hanging there,” they confirmed. “Although rumors is that one of them drop off Azteca near the center of the city, near the gardens. We ain’t see it, but things getting crazy already.”

There would be no outgoing airships, or probably even trains. John grabbed the peeling windowsill with both hands and hung his head.

In the distance a siren sounded. The city’s air shelters would be filling up, civil defense officials moving out onto the street, and the whole population getting ready for a new war.

Only this one would feature attackers from above.

They could not win it, John knew.

Outside the door, when John walked out with the two mongoose-men, an old lady with her hair in a bun held up a hand.

They all paused. “Mother Elene?”

“No, I am Sister Agathy,” the lady whispered. “But Mother Elene sent me. John deBrun, the Loa need to see you.”