Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

Just as long as the League hadn’t told the Hongguo to find her aboard the Daystar , she’d be okay. Hopefully they needed their sympathetic captain Danielle’s goodwill more than they wanted Nashara dead.

Hopefully.

Six days and eleven wormhole transits later Nashara lowered her guard and took the luxury of a quick sponge bath as the Daystar passed between a trio of wormholes spaced a thousand miles apart. They trailed each other in geostationary orbit around a massive gas giant. Several massive storms near the equator stared down on the speck of a ship as it slowly drifted from one wormhole to the next over several hours.

They were downstream of Astragalai and getting close to Harpin now. Certainly moving in the right direction, Nashara thought, although Harpin was a habitable world with a Satrap living in a habitat in orbit over it. And maybe a Hongguo ship or two. Not somewhere to loiter.

Danielle hung just outside, keeping a hand on the top of the opaque curtain so that Nashara knew where she was.

“What would you do if I just kicked off for the cockpit right now?” she asked.

“I’d kill you.” Nashara pulled her leathers back on. She’d added an assortment of blades fashioned from parts found loose in the cockpit. She’d had a lot of time floating around to make shivs.

The rest of the Daystar didn’t really exist for her. Only the nearby bathroom and the cockpit’s sphere. And Danielle. Two more weeks to Yomi. So far no Hongguo ships had caught up with them and demanded a boarding.

She played for time now. But then she’d been doing that for five years now. Keeping her head low, trying to meander her way toward New Anegada.

Danielle looked Nashara over. “So what’s your whole story?”

“You really want that dinner-story prize, don’t you?” Nashara stared back. “Or maybe you just want to sell the information to your League friends. Your new masters.”

“Would the League of Human Affairs be any worse than having the Satraps, and the Hongguo doing their dirty work? Who cares who’s in charge?”

Nashara shrugged. A point. But anyone crazy enough to set off a nuclear bomb in a habitat wasn’t fit to be in charge of anything.

“Seriously, where the hell did you come from?”

Tired of evasions, Nashara looked at Danielle. “If I tell you, will you level with me on something?”

Danielle shrugged. “If I can.”

“You got a copy of that message from Steven. You’re a lot more than just a League sympathizer, aren’t you?” She was probably Steven’s superior.

“Somewhat, yes.” Danielle smiled. “It’s a very loose organization, and I have things that the League needs. They pay close attention. But trust me when I say I’m no threat to you. If anything, I can be an ally. I’m already diverting my ship somewhat to help you out, because I would like to help rebuild your relationship with the League. Besides, you’re interesting.”

An ally. Nashara hadn’t had an ally in a long time. “I’m from Chimson,” she said.

“That’s old history,” Danielle said. Chimson had been cut out of the wormhole network hundreds of years ago. Just after Earth and before New Anegada.

“I’m very old,” Nashara said. “You have some closely regulated antiaging technologies around. Chimson excelled at them and I’m a product of that. One of the reasons the Satrapy had the Chimson wormhole shut down was that fear that we would make it cheap and spread it.”

“Hundreds of years old?” Danielle fidgeted in the middle of the bathroom doorway.

“Hundreds, yes. I was there, for the final battle at the wormhole, trying to keep the Hongguo back.” The Ragamuffins were not just New Anegada’s mercenary protection, Chimson had its own as well. Nashara smiled. “I was with the Ragamuffins when we killed the Satrap in orbit around our planet.”

“I’ve heard that rumor,” Danielle said.

“We took Chimson from them with our bare hands,” Nashara said. “And even though they shut us away from the rest of humanity, it was still a glorious thing.” Here in the Satrapy communication was monitored, and there were only millions of humans scattered around among the aliens. Monitored. Tagged. Herded. They put up with delayed messages being passed through the buoys for no reason. But on Chimson… “You should see what ideas and people flourished as we all jammed together. It must have been like Earth before the pacification, with all those billions of minds so close together.” She stopped.

Danielle just hung there, listening. “And?”

“It didn’t stop, after we were cut off. We grew. And we decided to give something back to everyone out here. I volunteered to come back. I was packed away with nine others in a vehicle flung out to the nearest working wormhole, almost a light-year away. Took many decades to get back into the wormhole system, get back into the forty-eight worlds.”

“But why in hell’s name would you do that?”

“You’ve seen me in action. There were ten cloned and rebuilt like me, my sisters. We were sent back here.” But not as mere soldiers. Their bodies were just containers, a delivery mechanism. But she wasn’t going to be talking to Danielle about that. She crossed her arms. “A Hongguo ship captured us and we woke up in interrogation cells. My nine sisters wreaked a particular hell on them before they died, and only I got out. Five years ago. We were supposed to offer our services to New Anegada, but it didn’t take long to find out they didn’t exist.” And hearing that a free human society lived in Pitt’s Cross had led to a two-year mistake. Pitt’s Cross didn’t have the tools to even begin to wrap their minds around her particular talent.

“And now?”

“Now I’m just looking for a quiet place, run by humans. That’s all. I need a home, Danielle. I just want to stop and be home.”

Another wormhole approached. The conversation ended as Danielle moved them into the cockpit.

Three more transits. Danielle smiled and turned to look at Nashara.

“What?” Nashara heard something skitter through a tray of hoses and wires wrapped around the equator of the cockpit.

“They’re waiting for you on Yomi.”

“Hongguo? Or your buddies?”

“Hongguo. The last buoy forwarded a warning.”

Nashara took a deep breath. She would have to roam around the Daystar and see if she could cobble together what she needed for a showdown. Anything explosive, anything sharp. And of course, at Yomi she’d be near a powerful and massive lamina.

She’d probably die at Yomi. But the havoc she would wreak would never be forgotten by the Hongguo.

Nashara’s mind was the real weapon. The moment she made a direct nueral connection, it would rip free through lamina, spawning copies of itself and infiltrating every corner of the environment.

Chimson scientists had told her she needed monitors and machines to help her infiltrate and infect the lamina properly. At Yomi she would have none of that help. Just as her sisters had had none of that help when they’d awoken in the Hongguo interrogation cells. Like them, she’d burn her own mind out in the process.

“Do you think others could do the same?” Danielle asked. She slipped out a sharp knife from the belt of tools around her waist and looked over at the mess of conduit.

“What do you mean?”

“Govern themselves like you described. Without Hongguo, or Satraps, or League freedom fighters? Could we spread out?” Lightning-quick Danielle stabbed at a pile of wires that sparked. She pulled out a six-inch-long cockroach. Its feelers twitched as it squirmed to get free of the needlelike knife spearing its thorax.

“I’ve been in it,” Nashara said. “It’s messy, but it’s all ours.”