Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

“I’d like to see that someday.” Danielle looked away from the dying insect and reached in the pocket of her flight suit. She tossed a piece of plastic at Nashara.

“What’s this?”

“We’re making a quick stop to drop off some cargo. An original painting from Earth, the Moaning Lisa I think. Another priceless trinket that only the aliens get to own. The habitat orbits a rock called Bujantjor, two habitable worlds upstream of Yomi. I have a cousin there. I assume you have some more precious metals on you?”

Nashara nodded. “Yes.”

“That’s your pass in.”

“Why are you doing this?” Nashara frowned.

“You tell a good tale. Besides, this won’t be free. I want all those pieces of silver or gold you stole off that alien you killed on Astragalai. You can find a job on Bujantjor, we’ll give you a fake identity.”

Nashara didn’t budge. Danielle had tipped her hand. “How did you know where the silver and gold came from?”

Danielle smiled. “It was my idea to kill that Gahe breeder. The League needs a spark for their revolution; we have so much ready and waiting to strike against the Satrapy. They wanted to use the nuke, but I suggested the martyr approach. It seems to work for us humans so well. But you lived, the nuke got used, and here we are.”

“And yet you claim you’re not really League. You could be handing me off to anything or anyone out there.”

“Look, have I done anything to endanger you? No. I’ll walk with you into Bujantjor.”

“Right by my side?” Nashara laughed.

“Just like you and that League page boy you dragged aboard. If I’m lying, you get to slit my throat. And we’ll call it even.”

Nashara thought about it. She brushed her hand over the tiny healed scars all over her thighs. “Give me a sharp knife, a proper knife.”

Danielle tossed Nashara the knife with the dead insect on the end. She pointed at it. “Do you believe we’re just roaches swarming around in the edifices of greater beings than ourselves? Hitchhiking our way around?”

Nashara looked down at the massive cockroach. “Obviously not. I’ve seen different.”

“Then consider that I want to see that for all of us, which is why I help the League, and why I’ll help you.”

Nashara reached down and tapped the gold leaf taped to her inner thighs. “You make yourself out to be an altruist, but you’re going to gain a lot here.”

Danielle laughed. “Of course. I know that.”

Nashara would miss her. She slid the dead roach off the knife. “Without that gold and silver I’m dead in the water.”

“You still don’t trust me?” Danielle asked.

Nashara decided to see how far she could push. “I think you’re an opportunist. You talk about wanting self-determination, but like all others, you’ll keep doing what you do in comfort, siding with the winners as you see fit.”

“Oh.” Danielle raised her eyebrows. “Come with me.”

“Where?”

“Cargo hold.” Danielle spun. Nashara paused a moment, then followed her through the ship past the passengers and their sections and out to the edges of the ship via corridors and air locks where the cold made their breath hang in the air.

Nashara could feel the vacuum leaking through shoddy joints and bad seals. One failure and they could be blown out into space with failed equipment. She could live through that. Danielle couldn’t.

Danielle opened a door leading into one of the containers along the hull of her ship. Frost rimmed the metal. Too much longer in here and Danielle would damage herself. Nashara could see that the captain’s fingers shook. She hadn’t dressed warmly enough to be out here.

“This is a sealed storage unit.” Danielle grinned, her teeth chattering. “If anyone official checks, I can’t access it. I have no idea what I’m carrying.”

“But you can open it nonetheless.”

Danielle nodded. She walked over and tapped one of the boxes. It heaved open and lit up. “Small-yield nuclear warheads, and other such arms for ships like mine.” She closed it. Then waved her hand at another part of the hold. “Cloaked comms buoys. We’ve been setting up our own alternative communications array to link the League together when the time is right. We laid some of the first ones nine years ago. The League has the will, Nashara. When the time comes, it’ll wipe out every last one of them.”

Nashara actually felt the tug of a smile starting. She stopped it. “And you contribute to this, or just ferry it?”

“I contribute damnit. I’m rich, extraordinarily rich, Nashara. I worked for the Satrapy. Spent years exploring the wormhole network. From upstream Nova Terra all the way downstream to Farhaven, and a lot of the forks along the main routes. And now I’m atoning for my sin, for working for them. Their rewards to me will fund their own destruction.”

“You’re bitter,” Nashara said.

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Danielle snapped.

Nashara floated closer, reading the heat in Danielle’s face and looking at her body language. “Who did they kill that you loved so much to turn on them?”

“It’s none of your fucking business. We’ll kill them for what they’ve done to all of us. That was the problem with the Emancipation, the Earth fighters, they wouldn’t go all the way. Backed off for the promise of a closed wormhole and being left alone. They left the rest of us to twist out here. We won’t make the same mistakes.”

“Was it someone you loved? Or a family member?”

Danielle looked at Nashara. “Someone I loved. Dearly. In one of their antitechnology shutdowns. And they didn’t kill them. Just wiped their mind clean, put them to work for the Hongguo.”

And that’s why she wouldn’t hand Nashara over to the Hongguo.

“Fair enough,” Nashara said. “I’ll take your help.”

Danielle looked at her. “You’re still paying. Consider it a donation to the upcoming fight. I’m buried in deep with the League, but I’m no idiot. Handing you off to the Hongguo is how they work often enough, and that irks me, but who else is there but the League? We’ll need everyone to stand up after the Satrapy is hit, and the League will lead them. I’ll give you my help now, because I know we’ll need your help later. We’ll need people like you who’ve actually fought back.”

Danielle shut the storage container. Now they understood each other. Good enough. And Nashara knew where to find the nukes if the ship was boarded. That made her feel a little bit better.

Four weeks later Nashara stood in the corner of a clear plastic observation bubble and stared at the panorama of glints from free-floating dockyards and shipping lanes. The industrious hive-ishness of civilization in orbit.

The pearl orb of the planet Bujantjor hid behind girders, half-assembled ships, docking ports, and whatever else floated in between those structures. The distant star it orbited glittered blue from behind a series of oval mirrors floating in orbits nearby.

Nashara jerked out of the trance, looked at the time. Had she spent two hours staring out at that? With her Nefertiti-like face reflected back at her from behind the plastic’s scratches, she lit a cigarette and allowed her eyes to film over. Her heart sped up to clear out toxins.

A few people passing by scrunched their faces up in disgust.

“What’s she doing?”

She ignored them. Looked down at a hologram ghosting over the inside of her forearm on the screen.

Three hundred cubic feet of oxygen debt and accumulating. Danielle had cost her everything, and now Nashara was broke. At five hundred cubic feet of debt they would toss her into an ecocell and boost her toward the location of her choice. In perfect equilibrium she’d eat single-cell proteins and recycle her own wastes for years, floating out in space as her own unique ecosphere.