Ragamuffin (12 page)

But the great engineers who had designed Agathonosis did so in triplicate.

When Kara convinced the first door to open, her breath caught. The doors were several feet thick, not the standard utility inch that they seemed to be. They groaned loudly, echoing through the corridors as they opened, one after the other.

“In, in, now!”

They ran in, sideways, squeezing themselves into a twenty-by-twenty-foot room. Dusty control panels ringed the entire room, and several chairs with illegal neural jacks sat in a corner.

“Jackpot,” Kara whispered, even as she spoke the riddles and poems to close the two sets of doors behind them. She started crying. “Jackpot.”

She’d been a zombie until now, just focused on getting here, hoping to make it, doing anything to make it.

The doors sealed behind them. She walked over and started waving panels into life. Jared looked at a display that showed the outside corridor.

“When they come for us, we won’t be able to get back out,” he said, furrowing his brow. “There’s only one way out.”

“I know.”

“How long can we stay in here?”

Kara unsealed the knapsack and helped Jared lay out the contents. “A few days,” she said. “That’s long enough. Long enough for someone to reach us.”

The can of beans made her salivate just looking at the picture. She also took out several dried, salted small fish, and some crackers in packets.

And a dirty cloth doll, with red, clumpy hair. Jared snatched it away.

“Can I eat?” Jared stared at the can of beans and licked his lips. His hands trembled.

“The fish.”

Kara handed them to him and packed the crackers and beans away. Jared needed protein right now. But more than anything they were both going to need fruit soon enough. She was pretty sure he was getting scurvy. Or maybe a half dozen other types of malnutrition problems.

Jared took the fish off to a corner and began eating, smacking his lips noisily in a way that, several months ago, she would have hit him for. And the doll, that Raggedy Andy doll, she would have snatched it from him.

But that was all
he
had now, and he clutched the doll protectively under an arm.

She turned to the panel by the door, put her thumb to it, and the corners of her mouth tugged up. When the stratatoi came to the doors, trying to shoot or hack their way in, they’d find she’d locked them shut with some old security codes. Ones that would only allow the doors to open from an inside command.

Then the smile disappeared under a huge mental load of weariness. Oral human history maintained that Agathonosis was a cylindrical, man-made world that flew in circles around several giant holes in the Outside, holes that led to other worlds like Agathonosis, and some vastly larger. So large that they were inside out, with the air lying on the outside of the world. Kara started trying to figure out how to send a message out at the “wormhole” and to someone who could maybe save them.

Several hours later a series of relays around Kara’s small world caught her audio message. The message used hundred-year-old protocols, but the relays still recognized them. They’d been stolen from someone who’d once worked communications for the Satrapy, and the thief had made sure to bury them into the lamina as deeply as he could, in case they were ever needed again.

The relays dutifully started spreading the message forward, until it hit a communications buoy near the wormhole. The message started out spoken in Greek, the language of Agathonosis, and ended in stumbling Anglic:

This is Kara, from Agathonosis
.

We’re starving. They’re killing each other inside
.

Please send help, whoever hears this. We only have days left
.

Oh, shit. Stratatoi have found us. Can they really stop me from . . .

The beacon followed its instructions and kept repeating the message to anything that would listen.

K
ara pressed her fingers against the knapsack’s seal and it puckered open. A single can of beans and half a pack of protein-fortified crackers. She stared at them for a minute, then chose the crackers.

She resealed the sack before Jared could turn around and see how little food was left and slung the knapsack over her back so he couldn’t try to open it. They’d filled several bottles with water from the tap in the small bathroom, but the water had been turned off now, and the stench of the unflushed toilet was getting worse.

Jared still had his back to her. He sat facing the inner door, shivering at the constant high-pitched whine coming through. He jumped slightly every time something clanged against the outer door.

“I hate you,” he said.

He knew they were trapped. He probably suspected they were almost out of food and that the water wouldn’t last that much longer.

Kara sighed, but not loud enough to let him hear. She walked over to a flat console and waved it on. It glowed alive and became a window to the area just outside the door. Fifteen stratatoi in black uniforms struggled to control the massive bulk of a diamond-tipped drillcar. Dusty, corroded, and old, the insectlike machine hailed from the earliest days of Agathonosis’s creation when the habitat was still just a rock in the Outside. The hundreds of counterrotating bits chewed at the door, spitting and sparking metal shavings aside.

Dark gouges ran back along the corridor behind them where they had shoved the drill through, spinning and spitting all the way.

“See,” Jared said. “You were wrong. They’ll get in here soon. We should give up now.”

Kara reached out a hand, then put it back down at her side. “I don’t think they would let us give up.”

Jared bit his lip. “It smells really bad in here. I want to get out.”

There is no out, she wanted to scream at him. Even if we leave, the whole world is like this, another room, just bigger, and everything is broken there too. But she nodded. “I know. Just trust me and be patient, please.”

“I want my eyepieces back. I’m bored just waiting. At least let me play some games.”

Kara shook her head. Jared clenched his fists, opened his mouth, then stopped. The room had fallen silent.

They both looked at the console. The drillcar had been rolled back off to the side and a new entourage of black-uniformed stratatoi walked toward Kara’s screen. Kara could hear the tiny fans and pumps deep inside the vents now that the drilling stopped. The comfortable universal hum of Agathonosis hung around her once more.

A single stratatoi walked all the way forward until he stood just beneath the camera. He filled the entire view, standing up on some platform Kara hadn’t noticed. His eyes gleamed in the reflected light around him.

The man held up a blank white pad. Kara had turned off all outside feeds but this one visual to the outside. When his lips moved no sound came through. But the pad he held up blurred and words formed. The man held the pad up to the camera so Kara could read the words.

Whatever I speak will be written on this pad. I am both this man Nikos and I am the Satrap himself at this moment, as I have taken personal interest in this situation
.

Kara shivered. She’d only heard about such a thing happening in the days of Thrall, when the Satraps used the power of the world to break men’s minds to their will. Men had worked ceaselessly for the Satrapy for generations before they were emancipated, though the Satrap of Agathonosis still carefully ruled its world. Had the days of Thrall returned?

The puppet man’s mouth moved again and the pad shifted to display new words:

Your time is limited. I can cut the air supply to an entire section of this world, the section that includes the line this room taps. But if you open the lock and surrender, you will be treated with mercy. If you wish to negotiate, speak to me within the next thirty seconds
.

The Satrap could use audio to send commands to the inside of the room. Kara knew it could; after all, it was said that the Satraps had created the lamina all around them. They’d created everything that
was
Agathonosis, even if the physical things had been made by the stratatoi in the days of Thrall. Talking to it would be dangerous.

Jared read the note and shouted at her, “They can’t turn off the air, can they? Can they?”

“I don’t know.” Kara listened to the mechanical hum of air being delivered. It had never been held from the people before. Even in the days of
Thrall. But then maybe what she knew of the past was wrong. She leaned against the panel and stared down at the ruler of her entire world and trembled. “It’s the Satrap, and the Satrap can do almost anything, can’t he?”

“Then we need to give up now, we really need to give up.”

Kara sniffed, just as frightened as he was. But she couldn’t show it. “Be quiet, Jared. Let me think.” She bit her lip so hard she tasted salty blood. Then she stabbed at the console. “If you are the Satrap, then why did it all go bad?” she demanded, her voice cracking and wavering. “Why are so many dead, and the world not working? The world is under your command, why isn’t it working?”

The man’s mouth worked some more in silence. Kara tapped the console. “The sound only works one way, from me to you. You’ll still need to use the pad.”

It looked down, then raised the pad toward them again.

The world does not work because I wish it not to. Humans have been warned to keep their population in check, but have failed. Humans have been warned to not meddle with the systems of the Satrapy, but cannot refrain from tinkering. Humans want more freedom to self-organize, travel, and consume, and the resources of all the Satrapic worlds cannot sustain these abuses. The Satrapy has come to the decision that there is to be a population reduction. Humans are incapable of managing this themselves. Only thralls will be left to do our work. The Emancipation of humanity has been revoked
.

Words did not come. Kara’s mouth was dry, her heart sped.
They were no longer free?

“We may no longer be free in the Satrapy, but we can still flee,” she said. There were others out there. Kara’s people had little contact with outsiders, trapped in the other Satrapic worlds. But she knew there were other Satraps in other worlds, and that the Satraps ruled all worlds. Humans had been taken from
somewhere
, and there had to be more . . . there had to be somewhere safe.

But now Kara understood why people had been rounded up by the stratatoi, and why the starving few adults left fought to the death. Those who didn’t fight were no longer human, but now extensions to the Satrap’s mind. Including her parents.

She imagined other Satrapic worlds, far away outside in a vacuum of their own, where this same battle was being fought.

The pad’s words shifted again.
Fleeing is pointless. Humanity’s status as a protected race has been revoked throughout the Benevolent Satrapy. But I have
a deal for you if you surrender the control room now. You are obviously intelligent and quick to have done this. I would offer you a prime position among the stratatoi, a position of leadership, free cognition, and very little Thrall. Very few will get this status
.

Why was the Satrap bothering to confront her? Kara leaned in closer to the image, trying to see if the body of the man was blocking something, and looked deeper into the Satrap’s eyes. They were blinking. The reflected light in them wavered somehow.

No. They transmitted light.

Kara slapped the console off. She spun around the room, threw open links to check everything around her, desperately hoping she hadn’t given it enough time. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“What’s going on?” Jared asked.

Most of the status glyphs hanging in the air came back green. Even after probing several levels deep, she couldn’t discern anything.

“Kara? Why’d you shut him off?”

“He tried to hack in. Some kind of light code, using his eyes.” The Satrap wanted them dead quicker than he could starve them of oxygen. Why?

The only thing Kara could think of was communications. She’d sent a general message out into the Void. Was that what had spooked the Satrap about her?

It felt right.

She created another link to the system she’d used before. But instead of making a link that would skip outward beyond them, it bounced back from a point several hundred miles outside the world.

Repeater buoy closed to all outgoing traffic, the denial read.

But she could still call out to anything near the world. Maybe that worried the Satrap, that someone would check out her previous message, and that she could still talk to them.

Kara was still mulling it over when she noticed a lack of noise. Jared walked with her over to a vent.

“How long can we last without fresh air?” he asked.

“Two days.” A wild guess at best.

“Are we going to give up now?”

“Do you want become thrall to the Satrap, just one of his many mental hands? A thing?” The Satrap’s offer didn’t give her hope. It had to be a lie. And if it wasn’t . . . she couldn’t imagine living to see the next age of Thrall.

Jared looked down at the floor, eyes watering. “No, but I don’t want to die either.”

“I know, Jared. I know.” Neither did she.

When she next checked the outside, the screen showed only an empty corridor.

Empty of air as well, no doubt.

T
he bulkhead doors throughout
Queen Mohmbasa
all thudded shut simultaneously.

“Commence departure prep,” a toneless warning protocol advised the entire ship.

Nashara stirred. The orientation of the walls shifted, the floor ceased being, and all sense of up and down floated away. She twisted around and put a foot to the blue wall on her left.

The ship’s engine groaned. The walls vibrated, the air around her hummed, and the inside of Nashara’s head pounded. Gently the blue wall became the new floor as the ship accelerated.

She stood and looked around, still a bit wobbly.

The door hissed open.

“You up?” the man at the door said. He stood five feet eight, with lithe musculature under well-fitting industrial-templated paper coveralls. Graying dreads hung around his head and the tangle of his beard. Two polished sticks hung from either side of a brown belt.