Ragamuffin (16 page)

“I’m game,” Nashara said.

Jamar cocked his head. “Yes, a docking would be good after tossing out some garbage to confuse things.”

“Still think we’re being followed?”

“Maybe. It isn’t a large Hongguo ship if it is, not a warship, something smaller. Just odd reflective scatter.” Jamar sounded annoyed.

“Forty minutes,” Sean muttered.

“Let’s saddle up,” Nashara said.

Fifteen minutes to dock.

Nashara, Sean, and Ijjy stood outside the main air lock, with Nashara leaning comfortably against the round seal. Jamar had been angling them around the entire cylindrical mass of Agathonosis toward the far end-cap docks. Occasionally the ship vibrated and shook them around slightly as Jamar changed course.

“You hear from that child?” Ijjy asked.

“Not happening,” Jamar said.

This close to a habitat, space should have been singing with information and communication.

“You bringing everything?” Sean asked, pointing at the duffel bag.

“No sense in wasting options.” Nashara tapped the duffel with her foot.

“The Satrap got you running scared.”

“You know what a Satrap looks like?” Nashara asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

“When we hit the habitat in Chimson to hunt down the Satrap, I helped out. They look like giant trilobites.” Nashara held out her hand, palm out toward Sean. She wiggled her fingers. “Creepy crawlies. They found it deep at the center of its habitat in a giant pool, big fucker, several hundred feet long.”

“And they control minds,” Ijjy added.

“Rumors,” Nashara snorted. “Chimson’s Satrap didn’t control shit. It’s mounted and shellacked in a museum. Kids visit it on school trips.”

“Still . . .” Ijjy shrugged. “How you think the Hongguo get the ability to wipe minds?”

The
Queen
shook again, then something outside clanged. Pumps thrummed and air hissed, motors whined as locks engaged.

“Contact,” Jamar said throughout the ship.

The air lock opened with a hiss. Nashara patted the small machine gun slung by a strap on her hip and the extra ammo clips in her vest pockets. She could feel the two knives with ankle holsters. Good.

She looked over at Sean. “What’s with the rope?”

Sean looked down at his waist and the coiled rope hanging from it. “In case we need to tie anything up.”

“Fair enough.”

“Always useful,” he muttered. “You coming or what?”

Ijjy and Sean stepped in and Nashara followed. They stood and waited as the air lock sealed behind them. All three faced the metal door leading out.

Sean adjusted his belt, moving a pair of cutlasses with polished wooden hilts to a more comfortable place on either side, and rested his left hand on the hilt of a barker gun strapped above his crotch. His baggy pants and shirt covered the armor that could seal up in case of vacuum or handle small-arms fire. Protective plastic gave his face, neck, and hair a reflective sheen. It would give him half an hour’s protection from vacuum, but gave him dark circles under his eyes. Nashara laughed.

“What now?” He turned, annoyed. He tapped the plastic coating. “It save my life the first time the
Queen
got hit.”

Ijjy had applied the same stuff.

“You look like fucking pirates,” Nashara said as the air-lock door groaned open.

From the claustrophobic corridors of the ship into the claustrophic corridors of a habitat’s outer skin.

The habitat had been a twenty-mile-long, potato-shaped asteroid once. Then the Satrap had it baked by solar mirrors, or high-powered lasers, while spinning slowly to create a cylindrical shape. Miners would have bored into it with drills while the center was baked out. And that gave them an immense, livable cylinder that could remain spinning to provide gravity. In several places massive clear diamond patches had been installed so that the habitat’s denizens could look out into space and see the stars when the habitat shut down the sunline to create night.

How many human lives building the habitat had cost, Nashara didn’t want to think about.

Inside, the docking area looked like more of the same. Gun-gray metal.

She tapped the small earpiece as Jamar whispered to her, trying to seat it properly. “I got the girl,” Jamar told them all.

“Good for you.” Nashara dashed across the mouth of an open corridor to cover and waited for her vision to catch up so she could analyze what she’d seen.

A brief flash of black. A uniform? “Ask her where we might find some fuel and she could be useful,” Nashara said.

“You’re cold,” Ijjy jumped in behind her.

“Don’t mind her.” Sean looked around at the signs on the wall. “Habitat customs is down this corridor. Let’s see what we can find.”

“I saw something at the end.” Nashara looked at the two of them. “Black uniform.”

“Could be security,” Sean said. If standard Satrapic design held true, this tunnel out from the air lock led down to another set of reinforced doors that usually housed a booth with a customs agent.

“Mmmm.” Nashara ducked her head and looked down the tunnel. Nothing now. Clear, she nodded to Sean.

“From what I remember passing through a few times, Agathonosis is a real insular place.” Sean checked the corridor also, then walked out into it. “The Satrap keep the habitat locked down something serious.”

“Not a fan of Emancipation?”

Sean shrugged. “Different places interpret it differently, right?”

They turned toward the customs booth. A short man in black, utilitarian pants and a similarly colored shirt stood near the wall watching them. He held no weapon. He stood rigid, shaved head beading sweat, staring at them.

Nashara almost hailed the man, then realized neither Sean nor Ijjy saw him.

Jamar’s voice crackled in her earpiece. “The girl says she can guide us to fuel. Says she knows a lot about Agathonosis. But she says she’s in a lot of danger, barricaded up in a room that’s running out of air in this end cap. It’s depressurized around her as well. She’s not all that far away. She’s got a location and maps for us. I can send them.”

“Okay, hook me up with that,” Ijjy replied, tapping his temple. “We can get by she place, see if we can help. Sean and I both got vacuum-protection plastic sprayed on, should be good for a quick exposure.”

Nashara couldn’t care less. “You guys, uh, see anything strange?” Her hand lay on the machine gun, ready to pull it free. The man in black stared even more intently at the three of them.

“Nothing,” Sean said, looking around the corridor. “Where the hell
is
everyone? Inside the habitat itself, not in the skin?” He walked up and looked into the empty customs booth. He tapped the glass a few times.

Ijjy tapped the control pad of the door leading out of the corridor. The door shuddered open, rolling aside, and the two men stepped forward.

Nashara swallowed. They’d stepped out into a larger hallway. Black-uniformed men lined the walls for several hundred feet.

They weren’t all unarmed. The first had been a test.

Ijjy and Sean walked forward out of her reach before she could say anything. Nashara caught up and whispered, “Jamar, this discussion encrypted?”

“Yeah,” Jamar replied, even as she heard feet behind her. Cutting them off.

She didn’t dare turn and look. She did her damn best to ignore the slack faces alongside the walls. All of them not even ten feet away from her on either side.

Shit. Shit.

“You all have artificial retinas, don’t you, to access lamina?” she whispered.

Jamar’s answer disappeared under a wash of static.

The door behind them shuddered back shut on its own. Ijjy turned around. “It should stay open.”

“Fail-safes,” Sean said. “Dangerously close to an air lock just to remain constantly open.”

He could have been right, except that Nashara could see the man in black standing by the door controls, and the handful of other men with him blocking their way back to the ship.

“Sean, send that map to my wrist screen,” Nashara said. She held it up as the lines faded in and looked at it, then back up at the men around them.

As long as these eerie people believed them blind, they might let Nashara’s group walk just a little bit farther. And whatever was in control was clearly interested in determining who they were, what they were, maybe even interested in capturing them alive.

“Okay,” Nashara said to Ijjy as she looked down at the map. “You were right.”

Fuel was the least of their worries now.

He turned back to look at her, confused. “Right about what?”

“We need to see this girl right away.” She walked past the two of them and glanced at the sides of the corridor. Fifty people on each side before the corridor jagged, all with out-of-control beards, long, raggedy hair, and dirty faces.

Goddamn creepy.

“Why the change of heart?”

“I’ve seen the light,” she lied through clenched teeth. “That poor girl, all alone in a room, scared, hoping we’ll help.”

Although, how the hell had the girl survived alone in here? Nashara and her new friends were already trapped, just a few minutes into this.

“Right . . .” Ijjy frowned and looked at her, and Nashara stared back.

Sean grinned. “Maybe she’s human after all.”

“Shut up and lead us to her, Ijjy.”

Nashara held up her wrist, blanked the flexible screen embedded in it, and used it as a mirror to see the crowd forming behind them.

They had handguns, although three carried a massive minigun on a bipod between them.

Ijjy dogged them out into a new direction, and suddenly they were just in empty corridors again, out of the gauntlet.

Nashara realized she hadn’t been breathing, her pores had shut down, and that she’d quadrupled her heart rate. She reset her internal fight responses and took a deep breath.

“Will you trust me on something, Ijjy?” she whispered. He turned back to look at her.

“What?”

“Don’t fucking look back at me,” she hissed. He turned away.

“What?” he called over his shoulder.

“When I say run, both of you run like hell.”

“Why?” Sean asked. Too loud.

“Because I think we’re going to die if you don’t. Trust me. I see something.”

Nashara used her wrist screen as a mirror again. The crowd behind them edging after them at a safe distance, but looking somewhat tense. They moved as one in a creepy, duplicated fashion, every step mirrored by the others.

Ijjy turned a corner.

“Run!” Nashara sprinted. They broke into a run with her.

The next corridor in front of them stretched four hundred feet long. The door at the end rolled shut.

Nashara spun back to the edge of the corner behind her and whipped a knife free from its ankle strap. She held it in her left hand and allowed the machine gun to drop to her side.

“What going on?” Ijjy turned to look at her.

Choices. Kill first, or see whether they were really friendly, though she doubted that. No one carried a damn minigun to a meeting unless they expected to use it.

But they hadn’t attacked. Nashara’s hand quivered slightly. All instincts screamed to start picking them off sooner, but something else held her back.

She took a deep breath, remembering cramped corridors in ships and fire-fights she’d scraped through. Thought of blood-slicked floors and shook her head. Now was not the time for doubts.

The first man around the corner didn’t spot her at first. He just skidded across the floor and fired at Sean.

That answered the dilemna, it was kill or be killed. Nashara shot him between the eyes and dove around the corner. The group didn’t expect to see her come screaming straight at them.

Arms grabbed her, several shots were fired, but the screams as bullets thudded and burst into flesh weren’t hers.

The three men around the minigun she aimed for didn’t have time to react. Nashara killed the first with the knife, the second with a kick to the head, and the third she flung clear.

She yanked the massive fifty-pound gun up, flicked the safety, and pulled the trigger down to within a hair of firing. “Drop your damn weapons.” She dragged the large ammunition box with her. A chain of bullets led back into it with more carefully coiled inside. A good thirty seconds of high-rate firing, she estimated.

As if one organism, they pulled back from her, boots all thudding to the ground at once. Guns hit the floor and Nashara backed away from them.

The entire group spoke to her, every single mouth opening at once. “If you pull the trigger, the recoil will knock you over,” they chorused.

Chills ran down Nashara’s back. “Maybe. Or maybe you’re really underestimating me.”

She kept stepping back, and the crowd melted away from around her. She faced them all and kept thinking about Ijjy and mind-controlling Satraps. If she was smart, she’d pull the trigger and obliterate this faceless mass of mindless people.

Her arm shook as Ijjy and Sean ran around the corner to her.

“I think I owe you an apology,” Nashara hissed at Sean. But he wasn’t looking at the crowd in front of them, just at all the blood on her hands.

“Nashara, what the hell is going on?”

“What do you see?” she demanded.

“A lot of blood.”

She felt faint now, dizzy. An afteraffect of the animal fight-or-flight response and some neurological changes happening as her body came out of combat readiness and into postaction relief. She rode a wave of endorphins.

“You’re going to have to turn off your eyes and your lamina. They’ve been hacked into so you can’t see things. Now come on, I’ll cover us, but we need to get to that girl, and quickly.”

“But then I can’t navigate without lamina.”

“I’ve got the map on my wrist screen. Kill your damn eyes. Do it!” Nashara said. “Do it now!”

Ijjy gasped. “Where the hell did you get that gun?” He’d shut down lamina, then. Then he looked down the corridor for the first time and jerked.

Sean looked over as well.

“They’re more back there,” Nashara said.

“They could be herding us.” Sean pulled out a pistol.

“True that,” Ijjy agreed.