Ragamuffin (22 page)

“It’s a good thing I’m here,” Pepper said. “Or some of them would be dead by now.”

“The old priesthood despise the moderates and preach against the new leadership,” Xippilli said. “They can’t accept the outcome of the Great War. They think if we had fought harder, a little bit longer, that we would be the masters of Nanagada. It’s not surprising they’re still out trying to affect things.”

“I should have come out earlier, cracked some heads, sent a message.” Pepper pulled his collar up and shook his head.

“Does the boy mean that much to you?” Xippilli asked.

Pepper looked over. “I asked John deBrun for a favor. In return, he wants me to keep an eye on his son right now. Yeah, it’s babysitting, but who better?” He didn’t agree with the delegation. Opening the Wicked High Mountains, such a perfect barrier to the Azteca, seemed stupid.

But he wasn’t in charge, and no one had asked him. Instead John had come to ask him to keep a close eye on Jerome, as many Azteca would welcome
striking back against one of the main people who’d helped end the Great War.

“Indeed,” Xippilli said. “Who better?” Both men stood in the rain for a moment, then Xippilli walked over to the road.

A few moments later a steam-powered car slowly chuffed down toward them. Red-and-yellow-caped Azteca hung from the sides, watching the road. Pepper moved back into the brush and watched it go by.

“How are things going with the delegation?”

Xippilli shrugged. “They’re still touring the city, seeing the sights. The cocoa plantations today were the main event.”

Pepper watched the steam car creak off into the city. “I think I feel worse for the boy in there.”

“Politics do drag on,” Xippilli said. “But they run the world.”

“Flapping mouths.”

“They might bring our two cultures together.” But of course, Xippilli had a strong interest in all this. Since leaving Capitol City politics, Xipilli had turned to trade. His knowledge of Azteca and Capitol City customs and people let him build airships and trade routes over the Wicked High Mountains. And he wanted the two connected more permanently. More profit lay there. “That’s worth all this, don’t you think?”

“I’m just fulfilling my side of a bargain.” Pepper brushed past leaves to step up onto the road. The rain paused, a break in the dark clouds showing the light blue sky.

“What was this favor you asked of John?”

“Checking to see if that damn spaceship of his is healed up yet.”

“Eager to leave us?” Xippilli asked.

“You have no idea.” Pepper looked up into the sky at a small, bulging twinkle. The Spindle. Legend said that it would one day disgorge the Azteca’s gods in vast numbers.

Unlike most legends, Pepper knew this one was true. At some point the energies that leaked out to create the always visible Spindle would force the wormhole back open. When the alien Teotl returned in force, all hell would break lose. Been there, done that, Pepper thought. And he didn’t want to be around for it the second time.

A
gaudy airship with a bloated gasbag and peeling red paint floated high over the walls of Capitol City, propellers churning as it fought the sea-breeze headwinds that kicked up in the evening.

An Azteca airship.

Once it would have made John deBrun nervous. Today it was just another trader. A lot had changed in the last decade, particularly in the last seven years since the fall of the old Azteca leadership to more moderate rulers. Airships moved back and forth over the almost impassable mountains that separated the Azteca from the Nanagadans. Trade boomed in Capitol City and the land recovered from the Great War. The Teotl had led the Azteca to the city walls, but had been dealt a blow in that war that toppled the old leadership and sent them back over the mountains.

Nanagada’s masterful specialist fighters, the mongoose-men, had built up their numbers along the Wicked Highs to prevent a repeat anyway. It was a secure, stable, and prosperous time for Nanagada.

The airship slowly dropped into the heart of the city, disappearing behind the massive walls perched on the peninsula’s tip.

John watched the spray drift up from waves constantly smacking into the rocks at the city’s seawall base. It would be a salty day if one stood on the wall walkway.

A larger steamer churned by John’s small fishing skiff, giant nets hanging from long metal arms off either side. The men on the deck waved.

The fishing fleet steamed farther and farther out these days. Water currents changed, the ocean had slightly cooled.

It would keep cooling as Nanagada failed to get enough sun. The orbital mirrors keeping the planet warm had fallen two hundred years ago. Ice had crept over the northern continent, and fishermen reported icebergs hindering the fishing grounds.

The technological proficiency needed to keep a terraformed planet going had been lost in the war with the Teotl. Electromagnetic pulses from nuclear weapons and the destroyed wormhole leading back to the Teotl had left the whole planet shattered, only just now reacquiring the tools it needed. But, John knew, not soon enough to countereffect the cooling of the planet.

Before Pepper got to use the
Ma Wi Jung
to try to bridge the depths of the
stars to the next wormhole, a centuries-long journey, John needed the still-working spaceship to help Nanagada. That would be an interesting conflict when the time came.

John sailed on, letting Capitol City dwindle until it felt as if he were all that sat at sea. A tiny speck of a boat bobbing out in the ocean.

He knew exactly where he was. John could close his eyes and see a map of the area, complete with his exact location, the city, and the spaceship he looked for.

He dropped the sails and threw the anchor over. He walked back to the bench by the mast and sat down.

Beneath his boat John could feel the presence of the spaceship
Ma Wi Jung
. Deep beneath the waves, sucking nutrients and metals out of the water, it slowly repaired itself. One day it would fly again, lift itself into the air and spring for space.

Maybe.

John queried the ship, feeling his mind connect with it like a snake burrowing down into a hole. Images floated over his eyes as he accessed the ship’s datasphere.

Status?

The answer impressed itself somewhere deep in the back of his head. Another fifteen years. The starship’s self-repair mechanisms were working at double the speed they’d been designed for, a little hack thanks to John.

He glanced overhead. The Spindle hung in the sky. Its geosynchronous orbit kept it at the same spot, day or night. An omen for many, a worry for the few who knew what it really was.

John sighed. The Spindle was the remains of a wormhole, and when that wormhole reopened, something he hadn’t known was even possible when he’d helped try to destroy it, there was going to be a world of hurt. Nanagada’s old enemies would come through.

And the other wormhole in orbit around Nanagada, the one that had once led out to allies and that John had come through to get to Nanagada, that one didn’t seem to be reopening. It was invisible.

They were alone.

He pulled a lure out of the tackle box beneath him, rigged a pole, and cast over the side of the boat.

As the sun slipped beneath the horizon, John ran a light up the mast. He’d stay the night; he enjoyed the fishing.

He didn’t have any obligations, and he had no worries as Pepper was keeping an eye on Jerome off in Tenochtitlanome. He missed the sea, salt drifting over him, night sky packed with stars. He’d stay. He’d nap. It would be refreshing.

The old wooden boat rocked an easy rhythm, mast swaying, as John leaned back, closed his eyes, and smiled. Almost four hundred years old, and fishing still hadn’t lost its appeal.

But he kept glancing back up at the sky.

As the sun rose, John tied the small fishing boat to one of the low wooden piers in Capitol City’s harbor. Capitol City jutted up out of the peninsula’s tip, a great amphitheater with one edge slouched in the water.

Several hundred years ago the entire city had been grown from scratch, using an experimental and highly illegal form of nanotechnology powered by microwave radiation focused down on the spot from orbit.

Well before humans had come down to settle Nanagada. Well before the Ancient Wars hundreds of years ago, when they were reduced to no technology, scrabbling around on the surface trying to get by.

“Good catch?” someone in a long fishing skiff asked.

John stretched out the several fish whose gills he’d run wire through and held by a foot-long wooden stick. “Not bad.” His accent sounded flat, as even after all his years among the Caribbean descendants of Nanagada he had never picked up the dialect as fully as he would have liked.

“You catch them good, John.”

He smiled. A good catch, but only because the
Ma Wi Jung
heated up the water below, attracting fish and activity. He’d fry this batch up and enjoy a good breakfast.

John shifted the catch to his right hand and climbed the steps up to the stone cobble of the main waterfront. He waved at a few fishermen scaling fish on stone tables.

The apartment he lived in lay half a mile through the tight alleys and shortcuts John had internalized easily enough. A ghostly series of compasses and lines hung in the air before him that only he could see. It was a talent wired into his brain hundreds of years ago to allow him to plunge ships through wormholes in haste.

John closed his eyes and relied on the internal map still visible to him. He took thirty-seven steps forward, stopped, turned right, and started walking.

A dumb trick. He opened his eyes to avoid tripping on alley trash.

A Toltecan walked toward John, one of the moderate Azteca who spurned human sacrifice and lived in Capitol City. Many had returned and reformed the city of Tenochtitlanome when the government had fallen apart, bankrupt due to the costs of its invasion of Nanagada. Quite a few remained in the city, though. The Toltecan’s fringed hair was brushed down almost over his eyes.

“Morning.” John nodded as they approached one another. With barely room for each to pass, John turned aside to let the man through.

The man, a true Azteca, drew a knife and struck John’s shoulder. It hit bone, and the pain drifted down John’s arm. “Your time is over,” the man hissed, pushing the knife farther in. Waves of dizziness grabbed John. “You now pay for defying the gods.”

John dropped to his knees. A second man grabbed him from behind. John twisted just far enough so that the knife bit into his left lung instead of a kidney.

He tried to scream, despite one punctured lung, and despite the fingers jammed down his mouth as they pushed him down to the ground. The first man yanked the knife free from his shoulder, slick with blood, and John grabbed the next stab with his left hand. The knife impaled the meat of his hand.

All three of them struggled on the dirty, wet alleyway ground.

Deep inside, old technology struggled to maintain his consciousness, suppress pain, and keep him standing. John hadn’t been in combat shape in a long while, though, and only his body’s natural shock prevented him from passing out.

More footsteps. John kicked a kneecap in and struggled to get free, but he just couldn’t draw a breath.

“Hey!” Someone yelled into the alley. “Somebody get help, is a mugging going on!”

John pulled the knife out of his left hand as his attackers looked up. He stabbed it deep into the belly of the man who sat on his chest. The man screamed and stumbled back.

The remaining assassin spun and took off running. John pushed himself onto his hands and knees and looked over at the corner of the alleyway. Something glinted back at him.

A homemade bomb.

John struggled forward out of the alley.

The world roared, shifted, and John flew forward. His back exploded in pain from shards of rock and metal embedded in it.

Face, shoulders, and back streaming blood, nose broken, eyes too bloodshot to see, his head ringing, John crawled out. He felt the larger cobblestones of the road under his hands.

He collapsed into the dirty water of a gutter. Strong arms grabbed him to pull him up. “We need get you to a hospital.” The faces of several Ragamuffins, the city’s policemen, looked down at him.

“No,” John croaked. “Boat.” The men who’d tried to kill him, Azteca spies posing as Tolteca, had done a good job. He was as good as dead unless he got back to the ship.

He pushed them away and dropped to his knees.

“He hit he head too hard,” someone offered.

John turned toward the sound of the voice. He focused down into himself to try to manage the pain. “I’m perfectly clear of mind. If I don’t get out to where I need to go, I’ll die, there’s nothing any doctor here can do for me.”

“But . . .”

He coughed blood. “Do not argue with me.”

They argued about it, each taking a minute too long, but someone had recognized him and commandeered a small boat with a steam engine still hot. John could smell fish everywhere as they gently moved him into a hammock.

“This ain’t no good,” the captain of the small vessel protested. “You go die if you don’t get help.”

“Will you just trust that I know what I’m doing?” John asked him.

With his eyes closed he could see exactly where they had moved. Each step remained in his mind since they had left the edge of the alley to walk down the docks.

Now at sea he gave them orders, moving them out toward the
Ma Wi Jung
.

His heart rate dropped, close to failure. “Hurry,” John told them. “Hurry.” The small boiler next to the hammock radiated heat, which made him drowsy. The door clanged as someone fed it wood.

By steamboat it took only a couple hours, though by then John’s eyes started to glaze.

“Stop!” John whispered, and the captain coasted to a stop.

The waves tossed them back and forth, rocking steadily.

John fumbled out of the hammock and felt his way to the rail. His legs
protested, but he used every last ounce of strength to walk over and grab hold.