Ragamuffin (6 page)

In his view, she had some psychological hang-up not to make more in a few months than he would ever see in his life. She could go anywhere, do almost anything.

He would spend his life here.

Nashara
was
doing anything she could to get out of this as-yet-unnamed, still-under-construction orbiting pit of a tin can.

She just couldn’t allow a direct neural access with the lamina. She couldn’t afford to unleash herself on it. Chimson had created her as a weapon. She’d watched her nine sisters let loose on lamina, out there in the cold space. Watched them rip apart an entire ship as they took it over.

It was her secret. Her burden.

“Len. You know I owe you. Big.”

That was all that kept her here. He knew that she had more opportunities than he did, that she could repay him. Big. And damnit, she would.

“Yeah.” He didn’t look too excited about it.

The door chimed.

Len looked even less excited about that.

Nashara nodded at it. “Who’s that?”

“No one.”

He walked around her to it, pulled it open, and revealed four Honggua. Their black-and-white leather uniforms identified them as zhen cha: station scouts for the Hongguo. Had it been Hongguo feng, she wouldn’t have had time to worry about uniform design.

All across the habitat alarms sounded, doors locked. The Hongguo had shut the place down. They’d just been waiting, cautious, biding their time.

“They paid you,” Nashara said.

Len looked down at his dirty boots. Avoiding her eyes.

Three zhen cha remained guarding the door, one of them covering the corridor with his eyes, hand near his belt. The first one, a pair of gold pips on his tight collar indicating he led the group, stepped in front of Nashara.

He pulled out a Geiger counter with a flourish, ran it over Nashara’s chest, arms, then stomach. It blipped, gave a reading, and satisfied, the man snapped it back onto his belt.

“You are under arrest for technological progress violations under the Benevolent Satrapy. Do you have anything to say?”

Nashara shook her head.

They cuffed her while she stood there glaring at Len. Moron. He had no idea what he was turning her over to. And for all his hatred of antihuman Hongguo, Len had rolled over quick for a large reward.

Stupid, she chided herself. But then she knew almost nothing about lying low or settling down.

She did know, however, that she did not want to end up as a brainwashed foot soldier for the Hongguo.

“Len.” He looked up at her, face uncertain. No doubt hovering somewhere between happiness at finally seeing a drain to his financial security gone, and guilt at turning over a family member’s friend. “You know what the Hongguo do, right?”

“You’ll be given a fair chance to explain yourself,” the zhen cha cuffing her said.

Nashara shook her head. “Did you and Danielle set this up when she dropped me off? A little extra profit off the whole experience?”

Len shook his head. “No. It’s just me.”

“You lousy shitfarmer—” One of the zhen cha put a patch over her mouth to shut her up.

“If you’ve done nothing wrong,” Len said, “then it should not be a problem. They’ll get your DNA sample, give you your documentation back. They’ll prove you didn’t set off a nuclear bomb on Villach. I gave them the records from Danielle’s ship proving you were aboard and couldn’t have done it. You can open a formal line of credit. It’ll be okay. Everything will be fine.” He still stared at the ground miserably.

Nashara’s eyes narrowed.

He was hunting for ways to sleep at night now.

Full of shit.

She walked past him, looking straight ahead.

Best of luck to you, Len, she thought. He’d need it if she ever ran into him again. She should have roomed with one of the human pets that got off the
Daystar
, she could have kept him intimidated and quiet.

Enough remorse. She focused on figuring out how to get out of this, wondered how she’d make him pay for this.

Of course, the way things really worked, there was a good chance she’d be brain-wiped before he saw her again and all hell would have broken loose.

She hoped he’d at least lose some sleep over it all.

R
andom passersby stared, then cleared out of the way, as the zhen cha marched Nashara down the corridor. Fear fluttered through the air.
The Hungguo bagged someone, check it out
.

Glad it isn’t me
.

Nashara didn’t see a chance to break free of the zhen cha just yet. And then she spotted several feng dressed in dockside paper overalls, mixing with the crowd, eyeing her.

Run now and they wouldn’t give her the courtesy of living.

Head down, shoulders slumped in defeat, Nashara shuffled along, watching, waiting. It took fifteen minutes to get to the docking locks. They passed the berth to
Takara Bune
, and Nashara looked over at the locked air lock with a wistful gaze. She continued to shuffle on.

The berth for
Shengfen Hao
came into view around the curve of docksides. Black-and-white leather uniforms mingled outside the open maw leading into the ship.

One lock to go before they had her in their vise.

One empty lock.

Forget lying low. Forget being nice. Time to move. Time to be herself again.

Nashara tried to smile underneath the patch, but couldn’t. She snorted with annoyance. Using the slightest of movements, brushing too close to the zhen cha on her right, she started subtly herding the whole group closer to the empty lock.

Closer.

Maybe fifteen feet.

The zhen cha pushing her along frowned and started to move them back away, adjusting the direction of his gait.

Nashara stepped forward and head-butted the zhen cha next to her, spun around him, kicked the next one in the chin while she dislocated her shoulders with a popping shrug.

The zhen cha holding her turned. Good. Nashara stepped backward over her bound hands, holding them up in front of her, and shook her shoulders back into place. She kicked the stun prod out of the man’s hands and into her own.

She grabbed him by the hair, holding the prod at his skull and raising her eyebrows at the remaining zhen cha.

He stayed frozen, not sure what to do next.

Three feng moved out of the crowd, disguises dropped and their guns raised. They ran at her, cutting off escape vectors.

Goddamn, they moved fast: half the docking bay in three easy loping strides.

But they weren’t thinking
quite
like her yet.

Nashara kept dragging the struggling zhen cha with her until she backed up against the massive docking lock. She cracked the prod against the control panel, listened to it short out.

She grabbed the emergency handle and yanked as the zhen cha pounded uselessly against her. He made a good temporary human shield in case anyone started shooting.

The internal motors whined loudly as the inner air-lock door, five inches thick, ten feet tall, began to split open with a puff of stale, grease-smelling air. One, two, three seconds, the feng stopped and frowned.

Yeah, watch this. Nashara hit the zhen cha over the head with her cuffed hands and slid sideways through the opening as he slumped. She stood inside a massive chamber facing the outer set of air-lock doors. There was no attached ship beyond them.

The inner doors continued their slow crawl open. The feng would wait until they’d opened farther before exploding in after her.

She waited behind the door to jump them anyway, standing right next to the emergency ship-release lever. First though, she flexed her arms using clasped hands as a lever point. She watched as the cuffs bit into her skin until they hit the stratum basale and stopped against something infinitely harder than skin.

Then she pushed harder, watching the metal warp until it snapped. She threw the cuffs aside and took another step backward to compensate for the still-opening lock doors.

Okay.

She looked down at her inner forearm, tapped a few menus, made a call.

“I am Nashara Cascabel.” She was pretty sure she’d used that last name before with New Anegadans before both Chimson and New Anegada were cut off from the Satrapic worlds. “I think, I think I remember your ship. You are Raga. I am Raga also, from Chimson. I will be at your air lock in five minutes and I need shelter and protection.”

The only kind of gambles left were the big ones. Time to suck it up. She was going to have to hurt someone, fight to make it out.

She hyperventilated, supercharging and oxygenating her blood until spots danced in front of her eyes. Orifices clamped closed with triggered muscle, clear dark membranes shuttered her eyes.

She yanked the emergency ship-release lever.

The docking clamps on either side of the bay rolled open into release mode and the outer air-lock doors blew open. Klaxons blared, so loud they buzzed through her despite the closed ears.

With another series of shudders the inner lock doors reversed their direction to stop the massive gale of air rushing out of the station. Another few seconds and it would just be Nashara in an airless air lock.

The first feng somersaulted in high, paper overalls crinkling and giving her a split-second warning. Nashara plucked him out of the air and grabbed his chin to snap his neck. Like a cat falling out of a tree he twisted around and grabbed her forearm.

It didn’t snap.

His eyes only registered a moment’s dismay. He punched her neck as he landed on his two feet.

His fingertips splintered.

Nashara kicked him in the stomach. Threw him against the lock doors. Grabbed his head and slammed it against the five-inch-thick metal and felt it give in. Instant lobotomy; crushed frontal lobe.

One feng down.

She unlocked her nostrils and started hyperventilating again. The doors had five inches to go.

Another feng slipped through. He took her rib-shattering kick, sprang up, and ran to the other side of the lock. He looked back at the lock doors as they sealed.

The outer doors, what felt like the gravity-determined “floor” of the lock, opened in an explosion of escaping air.

Nashara ran toward the crack and jumped through.

The feng, insanely quick for his packed muscular frame, jumped with her. He exhaled all his breath in fog of crystals. Smart, his lungs wouldn’t explode. He had a slight chance. Nashara ignored his grip. She caught the lip of the lock and jerked to a jarring stop.

He wrapped his legs around her waist and squeezed. Nashara twisted, trying
to hold on to the door and dislodge him. If she let go, they would both be spun clear of the station.

They wriggled around each other like a pair of greased eels, trying to gain a hold on one another, until the feng began to bloat. Ice formed around his eyes.

An inhumanly skilled fighter, true, but just a human in a vacuum.

He began to forget his training, his centered warrior calm. He scratched at her skin, ripping lengths of it off in his fingernails.

Nashara turned and faced him. He froze. A midnight-black face with whole midnight-black eyes was what Nashara knew he would see. A demoness.

Convulsions began.

She kicked him free. Watched him drop down away from her, pitched out into space.

The wrestling left her heart rate up. Nashara forced it down in the sixties, a third of what it had been. The adjustment dizzied her.

Then she moved along the outer docks. Hanging from ladders where she could, using crevices, cracks, and anything else she could hang on in other places. The station’s rotation made this feel as if she were hanging above a very, very long fall into an abyss.

She kept in the camouflage of the constantly moving shadows of spinning station’s curved outer wall, eyes searching for a particular dock number. Outer skin flaked off in the vacuum. Her hair broke off and fell away from her.

Fifteen minutes later. She almost doubted she could make it. But here it was. The
Queen Mohmbasa
. Ragamuffin. Maybe. She prayed for it.

Nashara struggled along the hull of the long, cylindrical ship to find a small service air lock. She hit open, banged on it, and kept banging and banging until it opened and she swung in.

By the time the air cycled in and pressurized, she was on her hands and knees, barely able to see from oxygen deprivation.

The first breath, when she ripped the patch off her mouth and sucked it in, was insanely sweet and cloyingly fresh.

“I’m Raga,” she croaked when two fuzzy, but seemingly armed, forms appeared at the door. The membrane over her eyes refused to open, frozen shut. She couldn’t focus.

A pair of hands grabbed her, pulled her out of the lock, and laid her on a cold metal grating. “Grab some tissue for a look at her DNA. Run it, get that back to me as soon as possible.”

The nearest shape reached down, pricked her arm.

“Broke the syringe.” The shape rustled around, then Nashara felt a swab scraping the inside of her cheek. “She modified to survive vacuum.”

“You think?”

“Get ready to burn out the dock if the Hongguo twitch. Throw her in one of the empty rooms.”

Nashara remained limp, regathering strength as she was picked up onto someone’s shoulder. They walked her down through a corridor, hitting her head against a bulkhead, and then into a room.

Nashara leaned against the wall, shivering from heat loss and burned-off energy reserves. She stood there, unable to pass out thanks to her combat-enabled body, experiencing every wave of pain, every severed, screaming nerve.

“Don’t know the hell you is,” one of the two blobs said. “But you gone and pick the wrong ship to get aboard. The moment we try to blow out this station, the Hongguo go come hard for we tail. Blow us out the sky, you too. We dead, and now you is too.”

The door shut. Locks clicked. Nashara slumped to the floor facedown.

Triple damn it, she was alive. Fuck if the pain wasn’t somewhat sweet because of that.

F
our days before his ship had arrived at Bujantjor and before meeting Nashara, Etsudo Hajiwara had watched the destruction of an entire habitat once home to tens of thousands inside its protective shell. His stomach churned slightly as fifteen low-yield nuclear charges detonated three hundred kilometers away, each a tiny blinding flash of light. The windows before him darkened as the flash grew. The habitat Dragin-Above ceased to exist.