Ragamuffin (35 page)

“There has to be a cure,” Jerome shouted, as Metztli wrapped its tentacles around Xippilli and rotated in the air, throwing Xippilli and the stretcher against the wall and flying into Jerome while dragging Pepper along in the air like a puppet.

The impact knocked the air out of Jerome.

Metztli wrapped a tentacle around Jerome’s neck while holding onto the doorjamb with another tentacle for leverage.

“Jerome, do not do anything,” John said.

Jerome hung in the air with Pepper, breathing hard. They always looked out for him. His dad and Pepper. Even risking their lives for his mistakes.

Now Pepper was a hostage and at risk, and if the creature could kill Xippilli as casually as it had, it might well kill John for being not as valuable as Pepper.

It was time for Jerome to create an opportunity. Time to right things.

He screamed and twisted, snatching the collar out of the air and opening it. He managed to get around the raised tentacle and pushed the collar hard against Metztli’s face. It cut deep into the Teotl’s flesh and left eye, but as Metztli thrashed, the collar sliced into Jerome’s hand. His thumb floated free with a burst of blood.

Jerome felt a quick, stabbing prick on the side of his neck.

Pepper hit the Teotl in the head, a crunching punch that Jerome could almost feel.

Fire ran down his chest and into his stomach. His eyes blurred from the immediate rush of pain.

“I’m sorry,” Jerome told his dad. “I’m really sorry.”

Metztli hung in the air, knocked out or hopefully dead, tentacles limp, as John grabbed Jerome.

Jerome tried to say something else, but already his jaw had locked, and he could only see his father’s face as John leaned in.

John squeezed Jerome’s hand as he convulsed, looking around in confusion. Tears welled up and drifted free of John’s eyes.

“Pepper, kill that piece of shit.” John looked over to his side. “Kill that thing
now
.”

Jerome wanted to apologize, to hope they’d be okay.

And maybe it would be. People coming out of the wormholes had incredible skills. They might yet save both him and Xippilli, and Jerome would fall asleep and wake up somewhere nice and clean, well rested, fixed, several days from now.

Yes, that would be nice, he thought.

Very nice.

P
epper watched Jerome’s last spasm and bit his tongue until he tasted salty blood.

John looked at him, tears still leaking.

“Not yet,” Pepper said, hating himself. “We need Metztli.”

“Why? What the hell do we need that thing for?”

Being the calm one, eyes on the prize, really stank right now. “Because we need this ship, John.”

“Fuck them.”

“John . . .” Pepper didn’t have words. He moved over, grabbed John’s head, and touched his forehead to his old friend’s. “We bring . . . the body . . . with us. We take care of things, like we always do. Right?”

John nodded slightly.

“Okay. We take care of things first.”

John looked up. “I hate that calm you have.”

Pepper tilted his head. “Okay. But just get your son, let’s move on. There is time for grief later.”

John pulled away with a sob and grabbed Jerome’s body, which Pepper looked away from.

Grief.

There’d be a reckoning later. A full reckoning. Pepper pulled the Teotl closely.

These aliens, with their focus on adaptive personal engineering and sublimation of self to the greater good, were effective and dangerous. Ultimate survivors. They communicated and made you think of them as human. Words.

But they weren’t human.

No.

Or at least, not human enough to realize that John and Pepper would not easily put this behind them.

Deep, slow breaths.

Then he yanked the collar out of the unconscious Teotl’s face and pocketed that. Jerome had shown quick thinking, there. He’d done good. Stayed on his feet. Pepper admired that in a person. Jerome had been a young man with a mess for a past, but had pulled through and been dumped into a bizarre situation.

They should have left him on the planet, but even then, the chance was high Jerome would have been hunted down by some Azteca and sacrificed.

Pepper looked down at the Teotl.

When the time was right, being half-blind would be the least of this particular creature’s troubles. That he vowed. That he would not forget, this moment, these feelings.

N
ashara used drones and ships to create a detailed update to the world around them as she approached the crippled craft hanging a third of the way between the two wormholes.

“That one Hongguo ship is still just sitting still outside the upstream wormhole,” Cascabel said.

“The
Datang Hao
.” Nashara looked down at the scale model of their environment. The tiny tube hung nestled deep in the Ragamuffin shield. “Something important’s on it.”

“Something that could force a large, military ship like the
Shengfen Hao
to . . .” Cascabel waved and a ghostlike image of the gutted destruction appeared in the lamina before them. A long trail of debris hung out behind the alien craft, spewing out from large gashes in the hull. “Like it did the people aboard that habitat.”

The image faded away. “There must be a Satrap there.”

Piper joined them. Each version of herself was taking to wearing different clothes. And hairstyles as well: Cascabel had dreadlocks. Piper had kept a close-cropped military fade. “Most of my occupants are sealed within the bay docks, they’re trying to negotiate with me now, rather than try to shut the
Wuxing Hao
down.”

Nashara hadn’t thought about that. Piper had been firing on the
Shengfen Hao
and also trying to fight the Hongguo from within.

“I’m worried about Cayenne on the
Takara Bune
,” Piper said. They all were, but Piper had accelerated the
Wuxing Hao
up above them to try to catch up to the upstream wormhole since the engagement.

The acceleration had also served to pin her crew down until they’d agreed to cease their attempts to shut the lamina down and kill Piper in the process. Tidy.

Hell hath no fury like a Nashara, Nashara thought.

“The warning didn’t say anything much,” Piper said. “We’re not sure if she’s fighting with the crew, or dead, or captured. If captured, I’d hate to think of what is happening. I like Etsudo, but something about this is making me feel really uncomfortable.”

“I agree.” Cascabel nodded. “But
Magadog
is moving to help out with the
Duppy Conqueror
close behind, and we can use either ship’s communications
as a relay point to help Cayenne once they do their work. Joining in, that’s a waste of a powerful ship.”

Piper considered that for a second. There was one last thing left that Nashara wanted to try. Would her twinned self want to do it as well? “Then I want to try for the upstream wormhole. There are going to be a lot of Hongguo coming through, maybe more Satraps. If we get cut off, or destroyed, my being on the other side may help send warning to other humans. The girl did say this was a genocide, not just Raga-cide.”

Nashara nodded. She’d come to the same conclusion. The word had to get out before Hongguo poured out of the wormhole. “Get everyone off your ship.”

“I’m working on it,” Piper said.

The
Wuxing Hao
began to speed up, moving into higher, faster orbit to overtake the upstream wormhole. An almost suicidal run, but if anyone could do it, she could.

Cascabel and Nashara turned back to each other as the
Toucan Too
slowly tapped the massive curve of hull before them.

Nashara popped her request for a mobile device with a high bandwidth communications array and lamina projection out to the Ragamuffins.

They replied that they would be able to set something up for her particular needs.

A large tender, the
Cornell West
, had made several stops at the large Ragamuffin ships patrolling the wormhole. There had been just a few terse messages back and forth with the ancient Ragamuffins aboard the alien craft. The cylindrical bulks of the
Starfunk Ayatollah and Xamayca Pride
already jutted from the docking bays.

A grounation would be held aboard the alien craft. And there would be enough Ragamuffin troops to solve any problems that might arise.

Nashara followed the
Cornell West
in and docked. She watched the outer cameras as muscular organic clams rose out of the walls to hold the ship in place.

Then waited for the bay to seal itself and pressurize.

Several Raga waited outside for her. They towed with them a large, silver, oblong sphere on oversize wheels for gravity and acceleration situations, tiny jets on the side for weightless areas.

They had large guns. Recoilless.

Nashara smiled and dumped a piece of lamina into the mobile unit. Several
dishes and a whip antenna rose up as she began to test it. It puffed jets of air to move forward.

“Thank you,” she said. Her physical body didn’t have the raw signal power and bandwidth between the ship and itself once too far from the
Toucan Too
. With the mobile unit she could bridge that gap and use her body outside.

Without the mobile unit, her body would stop. Without careful adjustments, her heart rate would flutter wildly, until it died. And Nashara would remain in the ship, wondering what had happened.

“It’s good,” Nashara said. “I’m ready.” At the center of the alien craft they all hung in the air. The two Ragamuffins turned and pushed their way off down a long shaft, and Nashara followed them. They moved along the center for several hundred yards, until finally they stopped. A massive plug or rock rolled aside, and Nashara stepped into a room of captains and strangers.

She recognized Don Andery floating above the table and shook his hand. Monifa Kaalid nodded. A handful of what looked like other highly placed Raga had come in with the
Cornell West
. Enough to make any decisions at this grounation stand for the all the Raga involved in this.

Twenty mongoose-men from Ragamuffin ships hung in a circle around the room, guarding exits and looking wary.

She moved in front of the other man she recognized. The gray eyes and the dreads. Yes. Nashara held out a hand. This was Pepper. It was like an electric shock, shaking his hand.

“And you are?”

“Nashara. Nashara Capsicum.” She shook his hand, watching the frown at her name. “It’s good to meet you finally, Grandpa.”

In the pin-drop silence that followed, Nashara smiled and moved on, looking down at a man who crouched next to a body of a young man, maybe just over twenty.

A loss and a shame.

And next to him one of the alien Teotl floated. It had a slashed trunklike face and was missing a tentacle. “What’s with this one?”

“He speaks for the Teotl,” Pepper said. The grounation began to form a ball of people, all facing each other in the air. He moved closer to her, long dreadlocks floating above the collar of a cumbersome trench coat. “Are you really my granddaughter? Wouldn’t I have to have had a daughter to have had a granddaughter?”

“I’m a second removed clone of you.” Nashara twisted to look at him.

“Female though. When the Raga lost you behind the wormhole to New Anegada, they created several clones of you.”

“Why?”

“You have something of a reputation,” she told Pepper. “But mostly it was for your DNA. My superiors cloned me and several brothers and sisters. We were fitted with technology dangerous to the Satrapy and sent to get back to New Anegada and give it to you all for your use. Our DNA profile would be something the Raga here would know about and know that were truly what we claimed to be.”

“The Satrapy?” Pepper seemed hung up on that. “The Gahe and Nesaru used that term to describe their alliance, but you all seem to use it differently now.”

“You went and hid deep in the wormholes, well out of contact to create New Anegada. We know there was little communication, just a small bit of trade. The Satrapy hid deep behind the Gahe and Nesaru; even now it still tries to hide behind the Hongguo. But they were there. We are all just their puppets, except for Earth, New Anegada, and Chimson.”

“Three hundred years.” Pepper shrugged.

Nashara grabbed his arm. “Exactly. Look, the main reason I’m here now is because the Teotl know how to reopen wormholes. I want to go back home, to Chimson, and I’ll do whatever I can to help if that’s something we think can be done. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been back to my home.”

“I can understand that.” Pepper still stared at her with a bemused expression.

She turned to face the mass of people. It was time to start this thing. “I have a couple questions. For one, does this thing really reopen wormholes, and two, what do we do next?”

“Good questions,” Pepper said. “Ask the Teotl about the first.”

The alien twisted slowly. “Yes,” it whispered. “But we need more power sources, more antimatter fuel, in order to achieve such results. It is a very expensive process, and we will not share it with you unless we have some guarantees about our safety first. Particularly since this nest is about to fall apart.”

“Teotl,” snorted an older, yellow-skinned captain who’d come in on the
Cornell West
. “We had fight you long enough back in the day, and now we got you. You go take what we give you, and it go be fair.”

“Seen,” a pair of Ragamuffins over in the corner said. “

Do not trust the Teotl,” the man against the wall with the dead body growled. “Be very careful of their promises.”

And so the grounation began as the Ragamuffin leaders deliberated what to do next.

Cascabel appeared, but only to Nashara. “Nashara, Piper wanted me to pass something on to you.”

Nashara paused and peered into a new model of the area around the upstream wormhole. The
Datang Hao
had started to retreat back through the wormhole.

But other Hongguo ships were coming through.

The grounation would have to hurry up. The clock was ticking.