Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

A laggy connection, timed out and slow due to the sheer distances involved, came in. A small video window.

“Nashara,” Danielle of the Daystar said with a sly smile. She had to be just four or five transits upstream.

“You followed us?”

“You’re the kind of person to keep tabs on. You know what I think about you. My superiors ordered me to follow you in. And then it looks like almost every Hongguo ship ever started moving in this direction. We’re intrigued. We’ve never seen movement like this. It presents an opportunity. All through the League of Human Affairs we’re opening our communications buoys, arguing about what to do next. Take advantage of this moment to launch our revolution, or just stay very close to watch and learn.”

Danielle would be all about opportunity.

“The Satrapy is on the move to wipe us all out,” Cascabel said. “The war has begun here. If they finish with us, they’ll start on all humanity next. It’s a now-or-never sort of thing.”

The connection fuzzed out as an electromagnetic pulse washed over the drones Nashara was using to keep the link open. Danielle appeared again, her arms folded over her belly. “Tell you what, forty-two hours my force of five ships can get to you.”

Nashara nodded. But there was going to be a catch.

Danielle continued, “Shortly after that, more will come. I’m going to make the first strike, and the rest of the League can come with me or not. It’s beginning now. If you have the Gulong , we will fight with you. With the Gulong the League could fight back, we could turn the tables.”

There it was.

With a smile Danielle leaned forward. “It’ll be good to see you in person again, Nashara.”

And then the connection winked out as several drones were slagged.

Nashara opened the eyes of her body and looked around the cockpit. “John, get the Ragamuffins and Azteca in the cockpit. We’re going in at the Gulong .”

Every little bit was going to help, and if the League was coming, she had a gut instinct they needed to have control of the Gulong .

Danielle would see that as another opportunity.

League help offered a solid chance at overwhelming the Hongguo. This was looking more and more likely, as long as they managed to hold on to the Gulong for forty-two hours.

“We’re going in?” John asked.

“There might be some help on its way, and we need to keep the Hongguo from using the Gulong until then. I haven’t been able to hack into that ship, and I’m thinking, as well, if we can get in there in person, maybe I can take over its lamina for us.”

Nashara began adjusting the ship’s course, getting ready to join the fray.

John swallowed as something clanged off the side of the ship and alarms indicated air pressure loss.

The cockpit remained secure.

Fifteen Azteca Jaguar scouts sat against the cockpit’s inner wall. They carried their rifles and their clubs with metal studs hanging from their hips, still in full finery with feathers and cotton armor dirty and sweaty. Mongoose-men with machine guns sat on the other side.

Between those two parties sat two Teotl, bipedal with catlike faces and clear cartilage-like skin gleaming in the cockpit emergency lighting.

“They’re randomly detonating nukes all over the fucking place,” Nashara said. “Okay, here we are, hold on.”

The cockpit whirred, acceleration pressed down from behind, then the side, then on top. Then it really rammed down on them, to the point that the Azteca screamed in fear as they slid around the walls.

Done. It lifted off his chest, his stomach feeling as if it were lifting up into his throat. Someone threw up.

Weightless now, except for a few jerks as Nashara thrust them closer.

A series of explosions, but not on them, and then the sound of scraping and shrieking of metal on metal, the sound of the Toucan Too ’s engine thundering as it shoved them into something solid.

They were pushing the Toucan Too ’s nose through the hull of the Gulong , into a large hole created by one of the Ragamuffin ships with a missile, somewhere around the two-mile mark from the Gulong ’s tip. They were a bit late to the party, about twenty minutes behind the other Ragamuffin ships. But they were there.

“Seal it up!” Nashara shouted throughout the whole ship.

The Raga would be heading out, first run, and setting off hull-breach grenades full of emergency sealant.

John unstrapped and the cockpit door rolled open. The Teotl and Azteca followed him out along the corridor, dropping into the bay.

A Ragamuffin hung by the air lock, opening it. His silver eyes flashed back at them. “We ready?”

They nodded. He slapped the control, and the air lock rolled open.

John kicked out. Sealant dripped in long, goopy strings from the jagged tear in the outer hull wall, and he brushed it leaving the Toucan Too .

The Gulong was five miles long but incredibly narrow. It was also divided up by bulkheads with actual manual locks on them. Keys were required to open them. Wheels to spin the doors open.

“Explosives,” John yelled.

Men moved over to the door and slapped five-inch disk along the door’s rim.

“Fire in the hole.” They scattered.

The door blew off. Small-arms fire started as Hongguo feng on the other side began defending their length of the ship.

Azteca warriors leapt through the breach as John moved away from the line of fire.

“Nashara, can you infect the lamina of this ship?” John asked. It would stop the fighting if she had control. At the least she could give directions.

“I can’t find shit.” She sounded annoyed. “As far as I can tell, there is no lamina. You’re going to have to take the Gulong by force.”

By force meant clubs and rifles versus machine guns. John bit his lip and slapped a signal repeater up on the lip of the rim so that he could keep in contact with the Toucan Too , then followed the Ragamuffins and the two Teotl over the lip into the mess.

They didn’t know where the control center was, but presumably it was near the center of the ship. That meant a mile of bulkheads to fight through.

Other Ragamuffin ships in other sections of the Gulong were working their way toward the center as well.

It would be a long mile, John thought, peering through the smoke and chaos in the tight corridor.

Pepper threw a screaming feng back through a ripped hole in the bulkhead. He grabbed a dead one, pulling it around in front of his body as return fire ripped into it.

The Gulong rumbled.

“What was that?” Pepper shouted.

“The Toucan Too , other side of the ship,” one of the mongoose-men shouted from behind him.

The last hundred feet behind Pepper was obscured with misty blood, pooled globules of viscera and awkwardly broken bodies hanging in the air. He’d moved ahead too quickly.

The mongoose-men floated up to him. “The Cudjo destroy,” one of them reported. “Hongguo get through and hit it. Duppy Conqueror the only ship still in one piece out there.” Another tossed a grenade through the open hole. Hongguo feng shouted and scattered.

The explosion scattered shrapnel back through, and the mongoose-men all curled up, holding small shields in front of them. Pepper felt the body in front of him jerk and thud.

“But you still have the backpack nuke?” Pepper asked.

“Several hundred feet back in a crate.”

Pepper nodded. “Keep it back a bit, but I’d rather you get cut off from behind than lose that nuke.”