Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

“He was running interference for us, taking on the evil to redirect.” Just like that Pepper looked about, calm again. Metztli had backed away from all of them, its chair tilting.

“He’s losing blood, gut shot,” John said. He looked back at Jerome. Instead of fury, only a deep sadness masked his face.

Jerome swallowed and looked away. It felt as if cold water had trickled down his back.

“Get over there.” Pepper turned around and grabbed him hard by the shoulder. He pushed him forward. “Get over there and help your father.”

Pepper spun on Metztli. “You stay calm, this is a human matter.” Metztli’s strange chair had moved him away from their circle. Jerome crawled past an Azteca warrior who lay with his head cocked at an odd angle. Pepper had broken his neck to stop him from killing Jerome.

Blood pooled in the floor around Xippilli, and the man hiccuped blood from his mouth, but couldn’t speak. Jerome wanted to throw up. Instead John ripped his shirt from him with his free hand. “Bundle that up, hold it here.”

John avoided looking at him. Jerome looked down at wet strips of cloth, then John grabbed his hands and pushed them onto Xippilli’s stomach. “Keep the pressure.”

Jerome’s handiwork. Revenge. This is what it felt like. Wet and sticky, sickening. And a man lay in front of him slowly dying.

“You must wrap this up quickly,” Metztli said.

“Shut the fuck up,” John snapped. “Pepper, there are hundreds of Azteca on this ship and we just shot their leader.”

Pepper looked over at the entryway to the control room. “Open the door, Metztli, and you will die.”

“The door will remain closed,” Metztli said.

A strange feeling flitted through Jerome as he watched. As if he were being turned inside out and then back again.

“Transit,” John said to Pepper, as if were the most automatic and normal thing.

“I felt it.” Pepper folded his arms.

“Please,” Metztli said.

“The man on the floor is of no consequence. We need your assistance.”

“Why the hell are you still talking?” John snapped. “Unless you have a first-aid kit lying around, you’re going to need to give us some time.”

“There are no first-aid kits,” Metztli said.

The entire room shivered, distant explosions getting everyone’s attention. A keening sound from the walls threatened to deafen them.

“And that was?” Pepper looked around.

Metztli waved a tentacle. “There are a lot of vehicles out on the other side of this wormhole, human we assume. Someone fired a missile in front of us. We’re broadcasting that we’re no threat, humans are telling us to come in slowly and identify ourselves. We need your services, as I’ve been saying. We need them now.”

“Who’s out there?” John asked, looking up.

“We do not know,” the Teotl said. “But there are ships, everywhere. Some of them match the ship names of ships that once defended your planet several centuries past, so we assume them to be hostile. Do you think they will fire on us next?”

“I don’t know. Do you have any weapons?” Pepper asked. Blood seeped out over Jerome’s fingers. He couldn’t look down. But he could feel Xippilli’s slow, ragged breathing under his hands.

The Teotl looked at them all. “No. The nest has no real weapons to speak of. We’re slowing down as we have been asked.” It leaned forward.

Pepper walked over to a length of screen goop. “Show me who’s knocking and maybe we can start talking.”

“Do you think the Ragamuffins are still waiting out there?” John asked Pepper.

Pepper shrugged. “Why not? We were still on Nanagada, weren’t we?”

The rock under Jerome’s knees shivered again, and Xippilli coughed up more blood and moaned.

This was Ragamuffin home territory: a dim brown dwarf that gave off no life-giving light, a rocky world that the upstream and downstream wormhole orbited, and lots of random dirt and rock for ships to hide in past that.

A desolate area.

Etsudo had caught up to the Shengfen Hao and three more heavy ships as they moved through toward the Ragamuffins.

He’d scattered drones hundreds of miles out in all directions when he’d transited in. Enough scattered drones could put together a detailed image of whatever he wanted. Any one of them wouldn’t have the ability to see the details he wanted, but the whole network could process the light hitting their optics to make a superarray.

The four Hongguo ships chased two smaller Ragamuffin ships, but had stared dumping speed as they’d come through the wormhole. The two wormholes orbited the rocky world in geosynchronous orbit, and now so did Etsudo and the Hongguo. A massive cloud of chaff and mines hung around the wormhole they’d just come through, enclosing it in a massive protective sphere.

The Ragamuffins were well defended against an attack, and Deng had barely stopped the Shengfen Hao from plowing into the mess.

Hongguo drones spread out from all the trapped ships, seeking to gain data about the situation.

Deng hailed him. “What are you doing here? We are not expecting you.”

“I wish nothing more than to assist.” Deng would have trouble believing it. But what could he do about it for right now? Etsudo would get away with it for a while, Deng would hardly have the time to care all that much or shoot him out of the sky unless he posed a threat.

“You have drones out?” Deng asked.

“Of course.”

“Check the downstream wormhole, we don’t have drones to spare. We’re getting radiation readings from it. As if it were open.”

Etsudo started turning his drones that way, opening up other tools to probe at the wormhole trailing almost a thousand miles behind them in orbit.

He waited as the scattered drones stitched together their impressions, losing a few to mines in brief, fiery explosions.

“Deng? There is something you should see.” Etsudo passed along the images as they came. A very large cylinder of rock, like a scaled-down habitat, slowly moved away from the downstream wormhole. “The downstream wormhole is not only reopened, something really big came through from New Anegada.”

Deng looked as if he’d been slapped. “We know roughly how many ships the Ragamuffins have. More ships are moving to flood the area. But this could change things. We’ll need more ships, and need to get some drones down that thing. Hold.”

Etsudo looked back out at the scene, closing his eyes to the cramped cockpit and the faces of the gamma crew staring back at him.

Behind the Takara Bune the Wuxing Hao and Datang Hao transited slowly into orbit with them.

“Our orders are changed.”

“And?” Etsudo asked.

Jiang Deng rubbed his neck. “We’ll first move to destroy that object. The Satrap recognized the design and function of that vehicle, it indicates it has the ability to reopen wormholes. Once destroyed, the Gulong will come to shut down the upstream wormhole. We will seal the Ragamuffins off.”

“I don’t have weapons, but my drones are clear of the mines and chaff, I can provide a good plot through.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Deng said. And in Etsudo’s lamina he could see representations of the three small ships like his moving out. The Chen Yuan, Pao Ming , and Fei Ying . He remembered meeting the captain of the Pao Ming once. A short, stodgy man who kept his hair long. Impractical on a ship.

The three ships fired their engines and dropped their orbit. They hit the first shield of mines.

“Are there people aboard?” Etsudo asked. “It’s suicide.” And then the thought struck him that he might be asked to follow them, and he wished he hadn’t said anything.