Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

Several Raga waited outside for her. They towed with them a large, silver, oblong sphere on oversize wheels for gravity and acceleration situations, tiny jets on the side for weightless areas.

They had large guns. Recoilless.

Nashara smiled and dumped a piece of lamina into the mobile unit. Several dishes and a whip antenna rose up as she began to test it. It puffed jets of air to move forward.

“Thank you,” she said. Her physical body didn’t have the raw signal power and bandwidth between the ship and itself once too far from the Toucan Too . With the mobile unit she could bridge that gap and use her body outside.

Without the mobile unit, her body would stop. Without careful adjustments, her heart rate would flutter wildly, until it died. And Nashara would remain in the ship, wondering what had happened.

“It’s good,” Nashara said. “I’m ready.” At the center of the alien craft they all hung in the air. The two Ragamuffins turned and pushed their way off down a long shaft, and Nashara followed them. They moved along the center for several hundred yards, until finally they stopped. A massive plug or rock rolled aside, and Nashara stepped into a room of captains and strangers.

She recognized Don Andery floating above the table and shook his hand. Monifa Kaalid nodded. A handful of what looked like other highly placed Raga had come in with the Cornell West . Enough to make any decisions at this grounation stand for the all the Raga involved in this.

Twenty mongoose-men from Ragamuffin ships hung in a circle around the room, guarding exits and looking wary.

She moved in front of the other man she recognized. The gray eyes and the dreads. Yes. Nashara held out a hand. This was Pepper. It was like an electric shock, shaking his hand.

“And you are?”

“Nashara. Nashara Capsicum.” She shook his hand, watching the frown at her name. “It’s good to meet you finally, Grandpa.”

In the pin-drop silence that followed, Nashara smiled and moved on, looking down at a man who crouched next to a body of a young man, maybe just over twenty.

A loss and a shame.

And next to him one of the alien Teotl floated. It had a slashed trunklike face and was missing a tentacle. “What’s with this one?”

“He speaks for the Teotl,” Pepper said. The grounation began to form a ball of people, all facing each other in the air. He moved closer to her, long dreadlocks floating above the collar of a cumbersome trench coat. “Are you really my granddaughter? Wouldn’t I have to have had a daughter to have had a granddaughter?”

“I’m a second removed clone of you.” Nashara twisted to look at him.

“Female though. When the Raga lost you behind the wormhole to New Anegada, they created several clones of you.”

“Why?”

“You have something of a reputation,” she told Pepper. “But mostly it was for your DNA. My superiors cloned me and several brothers and sisters. We were fitted with technology dangerous to the Satrapy and sent to get back to New Anegada and give it to you all for your use. Our DNA profile would be something the Raga here would know about and know that were truly what we claimed to be.”

“The Satrapy?” Pepper seemed hung up on that. “The Gahe and Nesaru used that term to describe their alliance, but you all seem to use it differently now.”

“You went and hid deep in the wormholes, well out of contact to create New Anegada. We know there was little communication, just a small bit of trade. The Satrapy hid deep behind the Gahe and Nesaru; even now it still tries to hide behind the Hongguo. But they were there. We are all just their puppets, except for Earth, New Anegada, and Chimson.”

“Three hundred years.” Pepper shrugged.

Nashara grabbed his arm. “Exactly. Look, the main reason I’m here now is because the Teotl know how to reopen wormholes. I want to go back home, to Chimson, and I’ll do whatever I can to help if that’s something we think can be done. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been back to my home.”

“I can understand that.” Pepper still stared at her with a bemused expression.

She turned to face the mass of people. It was time to start this thing. “I have a couple questions. For one, does this thing really reopen wormholes, and two, what do we do next?”

“Good questions,” Pepper said. “Ask the Teotl about the first.”

The alien twisted slowly. “Yes,” it whispered. “But we need more power sources, more antimatter fuel, in order to achieve such results. It is a very expensive process, and we will not share it with you unless we have some guarantees about our safety first. Particularly since this nest is about to fall apart.”

“Teotl,” snorted an older, yellow-skinned captain who’d come in on the Cornell West . “We had fight you long enough back in the day, and now we got you. You go take what we give you, and it go be fair.”

“Seen,” a pair of Ragamuffins over in the corner said. “

Do not trust the Teotl,” the man against the wall with the dead body growled. “Be very careful of their promises.”

And so the grounation began as the Ragamuffin leaders deliberated what to do next.

Cascabel appeared, but only to Nashara. “Nashara, Piper wanted me to pass something on to you.”

Nashara paused and peered into a new model of the area around the upstream wormhole. The Datang Hao had started to retreat back through the wormhole.

But other Hongguo ships were coming through.

The grounation would have to hurry up. The clock was ticking.

Pepper watched the grounation struggle toward a consensus.

“It insane,” Ras Malik snapped. “After all the Teotl gone and done here, and they want protection?” Pepper was content to feel for people’s positions. He racked his memory for faces, trying to remember the opinions and beliefs and experiences.

“We go need they technology,” Don Andery pointed out.

“We take it,” Ras Malik said.

They wanted to move the Ragamuffins into Nanagada. They wanted control of the Teotl technology. They weren’t interested in helping the Teotl. But much of the Ragamuffin home base in this system relied on mines drilled into asteroids, a single cobbled-together habitat, and docks for the ships. Those couldn’t be moved to Nanagada, and there was no guarantee that the Hongguo would shut down the upstream wormhole only. If they pushed the Ragamuffins back and shut down the downstream wormhole, everyone would be split again.

Pepper pointed out that still left them at risk. The New Anegada downstream wormhole had Teotl’s former masters on the other side, masters that sounded awfully like the mind-controlling Satraps Nashara had described in an aside.

Pepper looked up as a far-off explosion echoed down through the ship.

“We die while you argue.” Metztli shook a plain tentacle in frustration. Pepper had taken all the tips off. The Teotl insisted on being a part of the grounation, speaking for its people.

It wasn’t out of nobility. Pepper suspected that Metztli was in bad shape and hanging on by a thread, and that Metztli was the only specialized type left that could speak for the whole nest. The others had probably died in the impact. Pepper felt an even deeper hint of desperation from the alien.

And the creature was right. Pepper looked over at John, quiet and huddled near the wall, still grieving.

“Well, we can’t stand against all them Hongguo that coming down to that upstream wormhole,” Dread Caine said. He’d arrived on the Cornell West , and his soft voice drew attention to him as effectively as raising his voice could. “So fighting to stay here ain’t go work. I agree, we evacuate and let them push we back into New Anegada, and we take these Teotl on all the ship. With them technology, we might hold New Anegada against whatever go come through or maybe reopen this wormhole again.”