Tobias Buckell - Ragamuffin

He looked back into the hole and threw the body through and followed it to take the next section of corridor.

One by fucking one, each hundred-foot section, until they would make the control center. Pepper did what he did best and kept on moving, the mongoose-men struggling to keep up.

It was going to take five hours to reach the center if it kept taking five minutes to take each section. Pepper wanted to be there in two. Two was a blitzkrieg the Hongguo would have trouble recovering from. Pepper could keep up this pace for two.

More than that and he’d drop from exhaustion. More than that and they wouldn’t have the time to take control and force the Hongguo back. They would get bogged down in the corridors fighting for the last minutes of their lives.

Three hours of hand-to-hand corridor fighting later, John and his two Teotl, three Azteca, and two mongoose-men blew the last bulkhead out. No return fire.

The eight of them ducked around the corner and out into a grand cavity deep in the center of the ship filled with hundreds of strangely quiet people who were shackled to desks on all the walls.

“Each of you take a door,” John ordered. He tapped his earpiece. “Nashara, send the mobile unit, you stay in the ship.”

She came back, slightly fuzzy. “I need more repeaters, they made it almost impossible to get a link in. I still can’t detect any lamina in this ship, they’re hiding it well.”

John whistled at one of the Teotl. “You head back, bring her machine with you, and lay down more repeaters.”

Now that he had a moment, John looked closer at the tired, vacant-looking people. Their heads had been shaved and they wore paper overalls.

None of them had even blinked. But someone at the far end of the chamber moaned, and the noise spread, until it filled the entire room.

The drone grew, modulating up and down. Then fingers all reached for beads on strings built into the desks in front of them. Clattering spread around the room, and the people moaned, noise spreading in patterns throughout the rows. And then the beads would clatter again.

Their eyes were constantly vacant. John shuddered.

“John, this is why I can’t find any lamina,” Nashara said. “This is how they run the ship. They’re human calculators.”

“You say the Satraps can control minds. The Teotl told me they were like parasites that attached to intelligent races. This… makes sense if you think about how a creature like that would think. Data overlays, or um, lamina, would be too unreliable, too hackable. This is a bulletproof way to protect an asset.”

“Yes, but they also can control the ship somehow. Look for desks with controls. Something has to control the minds.”

He wanted to keep the doors guarded, so John kicked out to the center of the room, spinning slowly and trying to find something like that.

There. A cluster of desks, like an eye in the orb of all the desks. An oval around a central seat.

John hit the other side of the room, then kicked off for it.

He landed in their midst and grabbed a desk. All men at these desks. All vacant-eyed.

Maybe.

They all pulled out guns. John licked his lips. “I wouldn’t…”

But they hadn’t even noticed him. They each turned their guns to the side to the person next to them to make a complete circle and then pulled the triggers.

The entire oval of controllers hung limp and dead, their brains blown out into the air.

John couldn’t even find a response. He just stared.

In their center, a man in a blue uniform already lay dead, a shot through the bottom of his jaw up into his head.

John tapped his earpiece. “They just all killed themselves, Nashara.” Too shaken even to be horrified, he just kicked away.

One of the doors blew in. Pepper and a horde of mongoose-men poured in.

“Pepper!” John shouted.

Pepper kicked off to join him. The man dripped blood in a trail behind him, and it dislodged from him as he hit the floor and grabbed a desk.

“What the hell is this?” Pepper looked around.

“A human guidance computer.”

“No, I mean, this is the second one we encountered.” Pepper pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face off. “We have two-thirds the ship. The last third toward the front of the ship, the Hongguo still have that. Right before Magadog went out, they said there were Hongguo ships docking on the end to pour reinforcements through.”

“That’s true,” Nashara’s voice said. The silver ovoid of her mobile unit puffed through, then paused next to them.

“Can you control the Gulong ?” Pepper asked.

“Give me time, yes,” Nashara said. “I think I could. If we figure out where the manual controls are and substitue some our people, with me giving directions and running simulations here in the lamina. It’s feasible. But it’ll take time to figure out.”

“Time we may not have,” Pepper said. “We have no Ragamuffin ships left near the Gulong . It’s just us on foot inside this ship and the Toucan Too . If we can’t get the Gulong moving, then we have to ask more Ragamuffin ships to come down to this orbit and fight.” Right now those Ragamuffin ships were watching a careful evacuation of Ragamuffin tenders and higgler ships out the downstream wormhole toward Nanagada.

“We need thirty-nine hours,” Nashara said. “There are human ships coming to our aid. And most of the Ragamuffin ships should be done evacuating to New Anegada and can adjust this way.”

“Thirty-nine hours?” Pepper waved one of the mongoose-men over, and he pulled a crate the size of a casket with him. “Maybe. It’ll be dicey.”

John helped a pair of mongoose-men crowbar the crate open. He peered inside at a missile with radioactive symbols painted on the tip. Someone had jury-rigged a control box on its top.

Pepper pointed at Nashara’s mobile unit. “Is there visual on that?”

“Yes.” A lens irised open.

“Let’s broadcast a little something to the Hongguo.”

“They are keeping shut down or I would have been able to take their ships,” Nashara pointed out.

“Yeah, but I bet you they’re doing some passive listening.” Pepper tapped on the screen of the control box and pressed a bloody thumb on it.

The screen brightened, and Pepper tapped some more to bring a timer up on it. He set it to ten minutes, triggered the countdown, and faced the camera.

“Hongguo leaders. Hi, I’m Pepper, and I’m currently talking for the Ragamuffins. Behind me is a small nuclear device of several megatons. It’s on a timer. Maybe your feng will push back into here, but I promise you, if they do”—Pepper made a popping sound with his mouth—“we will destroy the Gulong . If attempts to break up towards our section of the Gulong do not cease, we will destroy the Gulong .”

Pepper made a cutting motion with his hand. Then he turned around and stopped the countdown.

“And how long do you think that will hold them back?” John asked.

“I think that that should get us at least ten hours, don’t you?” Pepper said.

“The Hongguo on the ship are stepping down,” Nashara reported. “It’s a cease-fire for now.”

“Breathing room.” Pepper smiled.

“But the Hongguo ships have us surrounded,” Nashara said.

“And you can’t infect them?” Pepper asked.

“They’ve figured something is infecting ships using high-bandwidth communications. They’ll listen to voice, but they’re isolating and firewalling it, I’m not getting through. It’s all about time, now. And, Pepper, Cayenne from the Takara Bune says there’s a second chamber of human computers.”