Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

“Thank you.” It leaned against the wall again and looked up at the ceiling.

Jerome sat down and pulled an apple out of the pile. He used a penknife to cut it into sections and core out the seeds.

“What is your name?” the Teotl asked.

“Why?” Jerome bit into a quarter of an apple. It tasted sweet. He hadn’t eaten all night.

“Every bit of civility in such situations is needed,” it gasped.

The creature was, Jerome decided, too calm despite all this. It made him more suspicious. “I prefer you scared.”

“My name is Metztli.”

“I don’t care.” He cut another piece of apple, removed the skin with three careful jabs of the knife.

The Teotl continued, “You are called Jerome.”

Jerome looked over at it. “So?”

“So now we know who we are.” The Teotl had stopped bleeding. It looked down at its bandaged stump.

“You heal quick.” Jerome pocketed the knife.

“One of our many gifts. And weaknesses.” It sighed again.

Jerome cocked his head to the left. “Weakness?” Unusual that it would admit to anything like that.

“Maybe.” Two sets of eyelids, the inner moist and transparent, flicked. “We specialize. Specialization offers many benefits, but during cataclysmic events renders a species vulnerable, and we are vulnerable, Jerome. Very vulnerable.”

“You specialize in what?” Despite himself Jerome was curious.

The Teotl stirred. “Look at my current form. I’m useless, captured so easily, utterly unable to defend myself.”

“If you had had a gun you could have shoot back.”

“My only useful function is an ability to communicate.”

“That it?”

The Teotl twisted the fat mass of its translucent head. Jerome saw small metal plugs glint. “That is all.”

A life plugged into machines to feed itself, working only to learn languages and how they worked.

Then Jerome nodded. “You the most dangerous.” This one in particular, talking to them. Its words were its weapons. Just because it could not physically attack him didn’t mean it couldn’t cause harm in other manners.

It cradled its arm and shrank. “What do you mean?”

“You manipulate me. Try to get me understanding you side of the story, get inside me head.” Jerome held up the remote to the necklace on the creature’s neck. “You go shut up now.”

“But—”

Jerome threw the pocketknife at it. The Teotl flinched as the knife struck the side of the wall and clattered back toward Jerome.

“Shut up.” Jerome stood up. “You poisoning me head with you ‘communication.’ Language you weapon. I see you now, Metztli, I see you now.”

He paced the room. Working up that deep anger, thinking about his mother’s bones lying in an anonymous Azteca mass grave somewhere outside Brungstun.

Here he was standing next to the very thing that had commanded the Azteca. “From now,” he shouted, “I go ask the questions, you tell me the answer. That all.”

Deep breaths, he told himself. Pepper needed him. Needed him to keep his calm and pull this all off. For Pepper.

“What you doing here?” Jerome asked the Metztli.

“You need the history if you are to understand,” it complained. “You need grounded.”

“Get on with it all,” Jerome warned.

Metztli looked at him, eyelids flickering up, breathing heavily. “This was supposed to be where we gained our independence. Instead, your kind came as well.”

“Why again?” Jerome crouched and stared across at it with fire in his eyes. “What you doing this time?”

“We run from our parasitic masters. We run from destruction of our entire race. We need your help. If we did strange things before, it was because we were arrogant enough to assume this planet would be ours. We no longer want it, we’re refugees, running for our lives. If we do anything strange now, it is out of desperation.”

They stared at each other.

John watched the fluid lines of the Teotls’ shuttle with an outwardly disinterested eye. He’d been taken there almost straightaway.

The curves reminded him of the Ma Wi Jung , still lying under the water, resting easy on the rocky bottom several miles from the city’s walls.

They shared a history. Somewhere, long ago, maybe even a line of design. The Ma Wi Jung had been a collaborative project between the Loa and the brightest minds in Nanagada’s orbit so many hundreds of years past.

A chance, John had thought at that time, for humanity to leapfrog itself into a strong technological position.

A Teotl, bred for military prowess, cartilage-ribbed and edged razor sharp, stared him down. Fifty Azteca warriors with rifles casually cradled in their arms stood by, waiting for any trouble.

“We absolutely refuse.” The pilot, plugged into a massive life-support sedan, ichor dripping around the edges of tubes that pulsed liquid life into its body, regarded him with milky eyecaps. It spit as it spoke. “You cannot expect a position of trust to be formed by kidnappers and terrorists like yourselves.” The words, as usual, issued from somewhere deep in the Teotl’s throat, but not from its mouth. A mechanical voice box.

Five warrior Teotl formed a guard between the pilot and John. All of them held long, large, deadly looking weapons aimed unerringly at him.

John held out one of the pamphlets from the Teotl that claimed they needed human emissaries. “You do not need us anymore?”

“We choose how this conversation flies on, not you,” the pilot said after a long pause.

John would bet anything by the way it waited so long before each sentence that something, somewhere in orbit, was whispering translations into the pilot’s head. He had someone else in on the conversation. And that suggested that translators were in short supply.

Pepper had chosen his prey well.

“That’s true, but have you looked at the DNA of the specimen I carried with me?” John leaned forward. The hologram over the pilot’s belly fluttered slightly. Loss of concentration on its part?

It hissed at him. John felt something flicker in the back of his mind. The Teotl was testing to see if his personal implants could be hacked. His navigation senses tapped directly into the cortex. They could have themselves a zombie to play with.

If they were good enough. John’s ability to tie into lamina had been hand-rolled by Nanagadans in orbit; it was unfamiliar enough that the Teotl should have trouble. The Teotl, much to everyone’s amazement, used the same protocols for mind-computer interfaces as the Gahe, and Maatan. It seemed as if a standard piece of technology got passed around. And only the humans were usually obstinate enough to try to reinvent the wheel.

“So you know we have a valuable resource of yours.” John ignored the chills going up and down his spine, the tiny tremors.

“Yes. Does it remain alive?”

“Yes.”

More waiting. “What is your price?”

“We want you to repair a ship of our own.”

“It will be considered.”

“Thank you.” John folded his arms and stared straight ahead. The attempts to hack into his very mind finally stopped, frustrated by the nonstandard equipment in John’s head.

The pilot labored itself into a semi-sitting postion. “You are accepted within us. Your role will be laid out in contract. That is your preferred form?”

“Yes.”

The pilot shifted and the divan slowly raised itself on a single flowing leg that oozed out from under the rim and turned toward the flowing-teardrop-shaped shuttle.

“We make for orbit in one hour,” the pilot boomed back at him. “Bring the translator to us with yourselves by then.”

That soon?