Ragamuffin (13 page)

“Barely.” Nashara blinked as the shivering stopped. The man adjusted himself so that he hung in the air before her.

Another automatic warning filled the cabin: “Lane approach. Acceleration in five minutes.” The world shifted, orientation and gravity falling away from her.

“The captain want see you.” The sound of the New Anegadan dialect relaxed her. At least one thing about Ragamuffins hadn’t changed.

Nashara pushed off toward him. “Okay.”

The dreadlocked man slapped the doorframe and floated clear. He held a palm-sized gun aimed at her. And he kept at least ten feet clear of her.

Tension. Even in friendly territory.

He directed her downshaft. Or at least Nashara assumed so. Even, vertical shafts; odd, horizontal. Assuming the cylindrical body of the ship accelerated along a lengthwise axis.

Nashara held up her wrist screen, but nothing appeared. She’d been shut of the ship’s lamina. Odd.

“What’s your name?” Nashara kept the comfortable double body-length between them for his comfort. She looked back at her toes. “I can’t access any ship information.”

He flipped a lone dreadlock out of the way and kept the pistol aimed dead at her. His hazel-brown eyes waited for any sudden movement. “Ijjy.”

“Ijjy?”

“Ian Johnson if you looking up official records. Ijjy to me friend them.”

“Okay, Ijjy.”

“Lady, you ain’t no friend.” Nothing in those eyes for her. Not annoyance, hatred, friendliness.

Nashara turned back around to face the direction they coasted in. “Okay, Ian.”

They passed on in silence. The
Mohmbasa
’s corridors here screamed age. Warped bulkheads with airtight doors that didn’t even shut properly. Bits of corroded metal flaked off and floated in the air near faded lettering. Access panels with hastily patched fiber optics and conductives remained open, exposing the ship’s guts.

But the next section’s damage wasn’t age. Fresh emergency sealant. Corridor after corridor saw great gobs of the gooey, gray stuff that had hardened just after being pulled this way and that by gloved hands of some emergency crew. They had attempted to get the ship airtight again as the expanding goop solidified. The ship had suffered a major disaster to have sealant patching almost every hullside wall for the past several hundred feet.

She realized why the silence bothered her.

“Where is everyone?” A ship like the
Mohmbasa
had several hundred living aboard it. If it was Raga, whole families lived aboard.

Ijjy looked over at the hasty repairs. “That the least of what all happen. The other side the ship even worse. Only ten percent of the
Queen
airtight. The rest . . .” He shrugged.

“Survivors?”

The tired brown eyes again. Not patient, or waiting for her to move. Something far more hollow. “Gone. Just three now.”

Nashara looked back at the tortured goop. “What in the hell have I got myself into?”

“A whole lot more shit than what you running from.”

The
Queen Mohmbasa
’s captain was cyborged out and looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. Or maybe longer. Extra head-casing gleamed in the dull light of the cockpit, high-bandwidth optical jacks ran up the side of his left arm. No doubt he was as much a mechanical human as an organic human. The type
of captain that only a ship could slowly create over the decades, influencing him to keep adding more and more features to himself to become more a part of what he controlled.

He looked her over with one dilated eye; the other remained half-closed and reflecting tiny images bounced off the back of the retina. Nashara would bet that this man never left the confines of the ship’s immediate lamina. Getting cut off from the cloud of data that filled and brimmed out of the ship would be like losing half his mind.

But the rest of him was mahogany, and if not for the head casing, he would have had beautiful curled hair.

“Hello, Nashara,” he said. Just in those words she could hear a strong upper-Anglic accent, smooth, but still with traces of the standard Raga dialect. “You say you are Raga?”

“You took a DNA sample off me, you tell me.” They faced each other in the spherical cockpit of the
Mohmbasa
, deep within the center of the ship. The captain’s chair hung from the top of the cockpit. “So you know who I am. Who are you?”

Nashara hung off one of the rails crisscrossing through the cockpit chamber. Wood trim decorated several of the four stations arranged equidistantly from the captain. An incredible luxury if real, and Nashara suspected that it was. The Ragamuffins remembered the islands on Earth that they came from.

The captain smiled. He palmed a small vial from the pocket of his black overalls and nudged it through the air at her. “I am the Captain Jamar Sinjin Smith of
Queen Mohmbasa
.”

“Pleased.” Nashara snagged the vial out of the air and pocketed it. “Thanks for giving me my DNA back.”

Jamar held out his hand and twisted it to let the light catch the optical jacks. Green flesh rotted between implant and skin. “Aboard ship one doesn’t get much exposure to infectious environments, particularly if you’re born into it. The ship’s pharma was destroyed, and we’re out of vitamin supplements, plasma, super antibiotics, and antifungals. Half an hour more and we would have had those aboard thanks to sympathizers in that habitat. But more importantly,” and each of his words became a calm whipcrack, “and I hope you understand this, your intrusion represents an even more fundamental problem for us in that we were never able to refuel.” He crossed his arms and regarded her.

Nashara returned the gaze just as calmly. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Why are they after you? What have you done?” Jamar twisted and leaned in closer to her. “And what do you want out of us?”

Nashara nodded. “No dancing around with you. Yes, I am Blood. I could order you around. I could take your ship. But I don’t want your ship. I’d rather not cause any trouble with you, but I had to make some kind of choice. I’m dodging the Hongguo. If we outrun them, drop me at the next station. I’ll melt right back into the crowd. If we can’t outrun them, you can toss me out the air lock and make a getaway.”

He sat and thought about the latter, she could tell. She sped her heart up and felt the fizzing rush of oxygen burst through her again. She sucked in a deep breath of air and calmed herself down. “If we dock again, I can even get you some of the medicines you need again.”

“It isn’t that simple.” Jamar shook his head. “They’re after us too. More than likely if we shove you out the air lock, they’ll still come after the ship first, then go back for you. Or they’d split up.”

“Split up?” Nashara looked back at him with newfound respect. “More than one Hongguo ship’s chasing you?”

Jamar nodded. “Four or five midsized ships downstream. I’d feel accurate in guessing that more are coming down our way from Thule. It’s a logical choke point, but we can’t be sure since the blackout. We gave the others a black eye. They didn’t expect our maneuverability. The
Shengfen Hao
, the fellows you got to deal with, is more savvy. That ship’s still with us.”

“What have you done?” Petty smuggling got Port Authority or individual habitat security forces after you. Maybe even bounty hunters. Hongguo only got involved in development issues. “Passing on very illegal technology outside the Satrap’s control?”

“Your DNA indicates that you are not just Raga, but Blood, Nashara.” Upper-class Raga, descended from the great founder of the Black Starliner Corporation, yes, Nashara thought. And a bit more than just descendant. Direct clone of the founder as well, with all the baggage that came with that. More baggage she didn’t want from the men who had single-handedly created Chimson and New Anegada. But it got their attention, which was just what Nashara’s creators wanted.

Jamar waved his hand, and her wrist screen lit up. She’d been let into the ship’s world. “This is just a higgler ship. Traders and sellers. We have no weapons. Since Chimson and New Anegada’s wormholes got cut off, we’ve just been scraping by out in space. No base of operations, really. Ragamuffins?
All we are is a habitat and some ships. Mostly we are left alone if we stay quiet. So understand the importance of this: the Hongguo hunt my ship because they’re hunting all Ragamuffins now. I’m pretty sure the Satrapy wants us wiped out.”

Ragamuffin ships smuggled anything black market, as well as a shitload of illegal tech. Nothing new there.

The Hongguo had kept tabs on the creaky old merchanters of the Black Starliner Corporation ever since it had been founded, back when it helped ship islanders out from Earth by the hundreds of thousands. Enough that the company disbanded, each ship claiming now to be an independent owner and operator.

Even closer attention had been paid when the corporation started to defend its newly settled worlds. The mercenary arm called itself Ragamuffins. A ragtag group of ships armed to fight against outside threats to New Anegada and Chimson.

So now the Black Starliner Corporation didn’t exist. The Ragamuffins and the Hongguo now played tag, and finder’s keepers. But since Chimson and New Anegada had collapsed, only three ships had been destroyed in the deep dark between habitats.

Usually the Hongguo put up a stink just outside legal lane areas, boarded a ship, and combed it thoroughly. Punishment involved heavy fines, loss of visa privileges to a given system, or even occasional “recruitment” of crew to the zhen cha.

Ragamuffin ships conceded the boarding if maneuvered into an awkward hole—or ran like hell.

No one got hurt. A spaceship was an investment in the billions. Neither Hongguo nor Ragamuffin wanted ship damage.

But Jamar Sinjin Smith’s story played out different. A convoy of five Raga ships set out for Dragin, just plain higglers looking to trade for bottled antimatter at a friendly habitat.

“They were waiting,” Jamar said. His voice repeated what he had just said from the speakers in the cockpit around Nashara. “The
Windseeker
kept thinking they detected something out in the dust three wormholes downstream of Dragin. We got pretty jittery, decided to keep close.

“They hit us the moment we transited. Two ships, destroyed, in four minutes.”

“Two whole ships?”

“They boosted right in after us and we scattered. We were terrified, not thinking straight. No one ever saw anything like this. Not since New Anegada. And that was the wrong move. They blocked the downstream wormhole we’d just come through, and they had the upstream one blocked as well. And for Dragin, that’s it. No more choices. They’d trapped us.

“They hunted the
Windseeker
down first. Aliyah X kept calling out over every single frequency, pleading. She said she would let them board. She said she hadn’t done anything illegal. And then, just static.” Jamar’s reflective eyes drilled into Nashara’s as he continued, his sentences clipped short, his tone breathless. “Instead of running and being rounded up, I headed like hell right at the upstream wormhole, taking missile hits and energy beams the whole way, damage crew working constantly to keep us up and running. Everyone suited up against vacuum.”

“That’s insane.” Nashara leaned forward. “You had families aboard.”

“They would have hunted us down.” Jamar folded his legs into a lotus position and rotated forward toward her. “That was their plan. We threw drones, wastewater, garbage, spare parts, anything we could think of, ahead of the ship. Rotated on our tail to fire the engines right at them before transit. And that’s when the cockpit crew noticed Dragin’s habitat was gone.”

“Gone?”

“Dragin-Above, when we swept the area, all we got pings back on was debris.”

“They destroyed a habitat.” And all the thousands aboard it. Nashara swallowed. Something was going horribly wrong out there. “It’s like living back in the days when Chimson declared independence and the Satrapy ordered it put down.”

“In more ways than you think,” Jamar said. “We saw the Gulong there, before we transited upstream.”

“I’ve seen the
Gulong
before,” Nashara whispered. A five-mile-long, slender, mirrored needle of a machine. It was not just the Hongguo flagship. The mile-long needled spike at the front had a function. “When it shut the wormhole down to Chimson.”

Jamar looked through her and sighed. “I’ve seen it once now. I hope to never see it again. Nashara, why are you here?”

“Hospitality. Help. Place to run to.” Until the Hongguo caught up with them.

“Nashara, we actually need your help,” Jamar said. “Scanning you when
you came aboard, we can tell you can meld with the ship. You have the neural prosthetics. I need you to captain the
Queen
with me. I haven’t slept in two weeks.” He was close to collapse. Probably been cycling different sides of his brain’s hemispheres eight hours each.

Damn. They’d been seeing their captain dog-tired, nerves frayed. Then they’d see him left-brained and creative, totally disorganized and touchy-feely, and then anal and orderly and constrained. Cycling over and over every day as he struggled to remain one with his ship and bring them all through in one piece. With no sleep as he tried to remain alert at every second.

He was a hero, and she was turning him down. “I can’t.”

Jamar folded in on himself and cradled his head. “I only have two crew left,” he murmured through his fingers. “Hanging by a thread. All I want to do is sleep. Sleep forever and just stop this all, goddamnit.”

“I can’t do that, Jamar.”

“
I order you
.”

She stared him back. Predatory, muscles tensed, every minute cell calculating the distance and time involved. “No.” A calm, single word.

He was dead already, he just didn’t know it. He wouldn’t push her that far, and if she had to take the ship, he’d never get it back. She’d never get
herself
back. She wasn’t sure if that was worse than dying, but they weren’t in enough danger for her to risk plugging directly into the ship.

Maybe as the Hongguo got closer. In a day or two. If it really remained her only chance of survival. Yes. But until then: “I swear to you. If there’s anything else I can do, I’ll do it.”