Ragamuffin (2 page)

Three Gahe loped toward her, tentacle tongues lolling. One of them held a gun aimed at her. Nashara held her necklace up, showed it to them, and inserted the pendant in her ear.

“I am legal,” she said.

The large Gahe dropped the gun into the pocket of a biblike shirt over its chest. It thumped the ground with a hind leg and spat at the ground.

“What are you doing here?” The pendant translated the gestures into tinny words in her ear.

“I am waiting for the bus.” Nashara remained still. They didn’t seem like any kind of Gahe that were here to arrest or detain her.

The Gahe sat down in front of her. Nashara waited for a translation of that, but none came. She relaxed and pretended not to see them. She stared off into the distance and waited.

She could disappear here and no one would care, or notice. The Gahe around her knew it too. But they weren’t aware of what she’d done last night. They were just trying to intimidate the free human. Nothing to worry about, and she’d kill them too if they tried anything funny.

Another human was on the pumpkin-shaped bus that showed up, a dark-haired, old lady in a glittering dress and complex, braided hairdo fixed around the top of her head like a crown. The Gahe clustered along the left side of the bus. They lounged in their round chairs and stared out the windows, ignoring her. Nashara thought she smelled mushrooms as she walked down the aisle and sat down.

The lady growled at her and drummed a syncopated rhythm on the ground. She smiled at Nashara.

“Nice clothes,” the pendant in her ear translated the thumping and growling. The lady cleared her throat. “I am Growf.” She slapped her hand on her wrist and growled. “You live behind the wall?”

“Recently, for a while, yes,” Nashara said.

“You hate me.”

“No.” Nashara shook her head. “I’m sorry for you.”

“I may be pet,” the lady growled in Gahe. “But I eat. My great-grandfather pet. Good pet. Eat well. Not starve. Do tricks.”

A Gahe stood up and barked at them both, too quickly for the pendant to translate. It walked over and its tongues reached out and grabbed the lady’s crown. They were strong, strong enough to yank Growf up to her feet.

Growf whined and bowed, kissed the floor, and shuffled over to the back of the bus.

Nashara turned away from the scene and looked out of the window at yellow grass and squiggly trees.

It all depressed her. The whole damn planet depressed her. The Gahe ruled Astragalai firmly, and there were too few humans here to do much about it.

A few hundred thousand lived behind the wall in Pitt’s Cross, most of the rest as professional bonded pets to Gahe.

She’d killed a high-ranking Gahe breeder late last night for some shadowy, idiot organization formed by offworld humans that wanted to free the human pets. The League of Human Affairs. They’d repaid her with a ticket that would take her off Astragalai and aboard a ship heading toward the planet New Anegada.

Five years, planet by planet, trying to get there, the last two a particular hell stuck here in Pitt’s Cross.

Nashara couldn’t wait to get the fuck off the planet. It had been a mistake to head into a nonhuman place. A two-year mistake.

She checked the pendant cover, squinting. Just a few hours left. Any Gahe would have the right to take her as property or kill her when that ran out. Gahe authorities would be moving to deport her right back into Pitt’s Cross. Gahe breeders paid prime for wild pets.

The pickup zone was a clearing, bordered by well-maintained gardens, and a ticket booth. A round pod with windows sat in the middle of the grass. Nashara walked over the cut yellow grass, squishing her way to the ticket booth.

“You travel alone?” The Gahe behind the glass shook its squat head. Round eyes looked her up and down.

“My ticket is confirmed. I am here. I am a freedman.” No damn pet. “Here is my pass.” She waved the necklace at the window. She had no time for delays. The body of the Gahe breeder she’d killed would have been found by now. It wouldn’t take long for its friends to figure out it wasn’t one of its pets or human breeding pairs that had killed it. Enough checking and Nashara’s DNA would be found somewhere on the pen she’d stabbed it in the large eyes with.

“I guess this is okay,” the Gahe informed her. “Go to the pickup pod.”

The pod stood twice her height with a massive reinforced hook at its tip. Fifteen Gahe seats ringed the inside. Reclining Gahe sat strapped in half of them.

Alarms sounded throughout the clearing as Nashara stepped in the pod. A Gahe attendant outside licked the pod with a tongue and the pod sealed shut.

Gahe stared at her, panting. One of them growled.

Nashara strapped herself in as best she could. It was clear they never expected human use of these seats.

Another timbre of alarm started. Nashara turned around and looked down the length of the clearing just in time to see a shadow and then the long line of the orbital skyhook coming straight toward them. The strong rope of carbon
fiber led all the way back to orbit. It spun slowly, each end touching down to snag cargo several times per day.

The massive, rusted, industrial-looking hook on the end whipped toward them and struck the top of the pod.

Nashara’s neck snapped back. She swore. Gahe pounded the floor with their front feet. “Laughter,” the pendant noted as she pushed it back in her ear. The joke was on them. Right now word would be spreading that a human had killed a Gahe. If the League person who’d paid her to do it had told the truth, then the last time that had happened had been a hundred years ago. And that same small insurrection that had left a Gahe dead by human hands in Pitt’s Cross had led the Gahe to isolate the free humans on the planet there.

The pod accelerated, hooked onto the almost indestructible cable. It swung up into the sky past the clouds in a long arc toward space.

T
he space habitat Villach orbited Astragalai. It hung in position to receive pod traffic and redirect it onward if necessary.

The two cupolas of Villach looked like perfect spheres split in half. They were connected by threadlike wires of the same material as the rotating tether that snagged Nashara’s pod and whipped it into orbit. A material that the Gahe sold to humans but humanity was prohibited from making.

Villach’s two separate half spheres spun around each other, connective wires singing a constant low hum in the background as Nashara took the elevator from the center of the configuration down through the clouds hovering at the open top of the space habitat.

Pets wandered around on leashes, their Gahe drumming or slapping their tongues at them. Beautiful hairpieces and costumes glittered everywhere Nashara looked.

Nashara pulled the pendant out of her ear, not interested in hearing alien tongues anymore. The pass beeped, indicating her time was up. But Villach wasn’t a reservation. It wouldn’t have dedicated hunt packs waiting to swoop in on her. By the time something came to investigate the violation, Nashara would be long gone. Besides, a human shouldn’t have been able to afford the price of getting off planet. That would leave them confused for a while.

She broke the necklace off, crushed it to dust between her hands, and let it drift to the floor.

The human section of Villach, a long, pie-shaped area of the five-mile-wide cupola, reminded her of the reservation. But not as desperate. Tight streets, waterproof paper houses and greenhouses. She found a market packed with several hundred people. It was the first time in two years she’d seen that many people gathered together that weren’t lined up for the food kitchens. As on the reservation, they spoke Anglic here, not human imitations of Gahe’s thumps, growls, and whistles.

She pulled out the last of her coins and stopped at the nearest toy shop. Several kids behind the table of used equipment smiled at her. The tallest bowed and stepped forward with a flourish of his waxy red robe.

“Help you?”

“I need a lamina viewer,” she said. “Got anything?”

They handed her an oversize, bright green wrist screen. Designed for
clumsy kid fingers, it strapped on easily enough, and she tapped it on. A simple point-and-shoot viewer. She pointed a finger at the boy and information popped up for her.

His name was Peter the One Hundredth, fifteen years old, owner of the stall. Previous customers rated him “competent” on average, with some complaints about equipment breaking down.

“You like it?”

Some speculated that the goods were stolen.

Of course they were.

Nashara stopped pointing and tapped some more, accessing Villach’s various streams of public information, and checked the habitat’s outbound transportation schedule. She found what she was looking for. The
Stenapolaris
, due to leave in two hours.

Cutting it close. But she had a berth reserved, and
Stenapolaris
would be headed close to New Anegada. Once she was aboard it, the Gahe would be hard-pressed to ever find her.

“Lady?”

Nashara looked up. “Yes, I’ll take it.” She threw him the reservation coins from her pocket.

“We don’t take this,” Peter the One Hundredth protested. “It’s devalued crap.”

Nashara sighed. She propped her boot up on his table and dug her thumb into her thigh until she broke skin and peeled it back with a grunt. She slid a piece of silver out and wiped the blood off it. “Assay this.”

She needed the lamina viewer. All around her in the habitat’s information-rich data streams lay important information. Such as directions to get to the docks, or what elevators to take. Whom you were talking to. Layers of it tagged everything, a myriad of ways to view the entire world lay around them.

Kids ran around the stall seeing virtual monsters they chased and shot with their friends. Merchants quietly passed information among themselves. The station’s public lamina carpeted the sky with up-to-date general information, or provided tags about everything one saw.

To be unable to view lamina meant being illiterate among those who read to survive.

Nashara had to use lamina indirectly or the technology built into her head would get out of control. She bit her lip and focused on the transaction in front of her.

Peter passed the piece of metal to the kid behind him, who walked back into the tent for a moment. Peter’s head snapped up as he heard something inside his own head. “Silver?”

“Good enough?”

All three nodded. Nashara turned and walked into a bulky man dressed in trousers and a yellow utility jacket.

“Nashara Cascabel?” She liked her first name, but always kept the second one changing.

She looked him over. “Who’s asking?”

“Steven.” He looked around, dropped his voice. “We’ve been trying to contact you.”

Nashara held up her wrist and looked at the tag that popped up when she pointed at him. It identified him as Gruther. “I just got access.”

“Shitsticks,” the man swore. “That explains that.”

People up here in orbit had the technology implanted behind their eyeballs from late childhood on. Only four-year-olds or the impaired couldn’t wrap their minds around constantly seeing things that weren’t really there.

“I have my reasons for not plugging directly in,” Nashara said softly. “Your organization and me, we’re done. I’m getting ready to leave. What the hell are you doing bothering me?” She didn’t like this. She glanced around, looking for eyes staring back. This screamed wrong to her.

“The package you delivered has been discovered,” Steven said, meaning that the Gahe had found the breeder she’d killed. “The recipients are not happy, and they’re looking for the postmaster. They’d like to make an example of you.” Too many people around, Nashara thought, to really deal with Steven.

“They thinking to look up here yet to express their gratitude?” Nashara stepped back from him and jostled an old man in a ragged suit who swore at her.

“I’m told they’ll finish their sweep of house’s garden”—that would be Pitt’s Cross—“within the hour.”

“Steven, or whatever the hell your name is, why is this your problem again? You paid me, I did it. I’m leaving. You’re making yourself traceable. You’re holding me up.”

Steven swallowed. Nervous, Nashara thought, but about what? “We’re impressed with what you did. They want to help you more. Do you want to see full freedom, do you think humans should be able to exercise all the same rights as the Gahe? Or any other damn alien?”

“All bullshit aside”—Nashara folded her arms—“what are you trying to offer here? I have a berth to go to. I need to leave.”

Steven took a deep breath. “You don’t actually have a berth.”

Nashara stared at him. His neck would break a lot easier that some Gahe’s. “What do you mean by that?”

“Do you really think that . . . that package delivery was worth the price of a ticket to another world?”

Nashara shook her head. This wasn’t about the assassination. They’d underestimated her again. “You didn’t think I would make it back out of there.” It wasn’t a question. Just a statement.

“No one down there has the ability to deliver packages. But we’re working on it, and we’d hoped that what you did would encourage others to try. And if that happened, we would assist them. We’ve been secretly building a network of couriers, and not just here, Nashara,” Steven brimmed with excitement, “all throughout the worlds. We’ve been preparing for
decades
. We have ships, secret couriers, and lots and lots of packages we want delivered soon.”

They’d expected a martyr. The League needed someone to strike against the Gahe and die, and then they would help Pitt’s Cross rise against the Gahe. But she had no desire to join. She had a mission of her own.

Nashara unfolded her arms and tapped his chest. “I’m going to kill you. It’s going to be very slow, very painful, and you’re not going to care about packages,” or any other simple code words.

“We’re willing to help,” Steven belted out quickly. “Truly. We really need someone with your talent.”

“That was a onetime thing, Steven. I was a desperate girl in a bad situation.” The toy she’d purchased from the stall couldn’t even be purchased with Pitt’s Cross coin, let alone a trip into orbit. She’d had to do something.