Chapter Six

The shell of the tiny, black vacuumball Pepper sat in hissed and cracked. Only an eggshell’s width lay between him and whatever lay outside. The ball had flown a million miles in three days, with Pepper curled up and festering inside by himself. In a device made only for emergency escapes from destroyed ships.

A welcome sound, the cracking. But it came two days too soon. Pepper tensed as the shell split open with a wet, sticky rip.

“Welcome aboard the Shiek.” The woman on the other side had her hair pulled back in
cornrows and tied off in tight braids. After skulking about the other side of the DMZ, Pepper had to admit he enjoyed hearing a New Anegadan accent again. He relaxed as he heard more New Anegadan voices behind her.

The people aboard the Shiek came from a piece of the Caribbean that had picked
itself up from the mother planet and held together for centuries now. They had made the exodus light-years away to New Anegada, where the members of the Black Starliner Corporation once hoped to silently create a world of their own. But as the BSC faded away into the loose-knit community of
Carribean descendants known as Ragamuffins, they found themselves growing into larger players in the greater game.

“We snagged you up to save the original pick-up fuel,” the woman said. “The Ragamuffin Dread Council go pay us beacoup digits for altering course and snagging you instead of them sending a whole ship out just for you.”

The ad hoc representative democracy of the Dread Council guided Ragamuffin security, and they’d sent a safe ship for Pepper. Since humanity rose up against the alien races that once dominated the Forty Eight worlds they’d gotten more involved in things like this, with Pepper eagerly offering himself up as one of their nastiest tools.

He looked at the woman. “Glad you picked me up. I once got trapped in one of those balls for longer than I’d care to talk about.”

Pepper pushed past the broken pieces of the vacuumball and took her offered hand. His long trenchcoat brushed against the edges.

“I heard about that story,” she said. “I’d have gone insane.”

He had. For part of that. Before landing on New Anegada and rededicating himself to action: any action, as long as there was movement and things didn’t get in his way. It was why he volunteered over and over again to pass through the DMZ and get into the League worlds. If he ever slowed down, he would face himself again like he had in that pod, once. Even this last taste of being trapped in one again had pushed him too close to the edge. He had too much blood, too many sins, and too long a history to sit down and consider it. Men like him needed to stay one step ahead of themselves.

Hopefully there would be things to do soon. Upstream among the League worlds ships disappeared, gathering somewhere Pepper couldn’t find, no matter how many heads he cracked. And many of his most reliable informants had also gone to ground.

The last time the League got that organized they’d tried to invade New Anegada and unify
the free human race.

Fifty years ago. Craters still dotted New Anegada from that struggle. A lot of leading League officials lay dead by Pepper’s hands as well. A reminder to them that the cost of invading New Anegada wasn’t worth it.

Pepper had a gut feeling that the League needed reminded again as he stepped into the confines of a cargo hold. Typically a tight area, after three days in a vacuumball, it felt like the inside of a cathedral. This cargo hold was a traditional pie-shaped segment of the ship’s cylinder. Number fifteen, according to the large numbers painted on the walls.

It felt like he stood on the bottom of a wide curve, which meant that the ship spun to provide some light gravity for its passengers. If this ship resembled most Ragamuffin higgler ships, from the outside it looked like a giant pen with its end jammed into a larger cylinder of the nuclear thrust unit.

“Thank you.” Pepper brushed shell fragments off his forearms. He winced as he walked: a three-day-old bullet wound to the calf. Thanks to his over-mechanized and designed body it was healing up nicely but it still stung.

The woman touched her ear and listened to something. “Cargo all safely retrieved,” she said, responding to a prompt whispered into her air by someone elsewhere in the ship. She grabbed Pepper’s hand and shook it. “Grenada LeFevre, we all please to meet you. Captain Canden say welcome up in she ship, but not to ever talk or go near her.”

Pepper looked up towards the narrow top of the room and the rows of catwalks with cargo lashed in on the sides. Four men with rifles, well spaced out, all sighted in on him with an unwavering patience that Pepper appreciated.

“Thanks for the hospitality.” Pepper stepped forward, but Grenada moved in front of him.

She held up a hand. “Listen, in order for you leave the hold, we need to get something straight.”

“I’m listening.”

“You name’s Juan Smith.” A slight smirk from her meant she’d probably selected the name from the list of his assumed identies that the Dreads gave her.

“Really?”

“However you want play that, up to you.” She shrugged. “Second, you have to hand over all them weapon underneath that coat.”

Pepper nodded. Fair enough. He slowly reached in. An automatic pistol under the left armpit. The half sized mini-grenade launcher on his right thigh, the shotgun on his left. Explosives strapped to the small of his back. Extra ammunition clips on his chest and ribs.

Two combat daggers, one on a quick-release gel strap on his right wrist, another on his left ankle. Each piece hit the metal gridwork under their feet with a clang that echoed through the hold.

“There you are,” he said.

“That last dagger, strap up on you back,” Grenada said.

Pepper reached back. Somewhere between a shortsword and a knife with compensation issues, he’d become slightly attached to the piece. “It’s a gift. Not a weapon.”

He kept it for special assignments. Only the most important of the Ragamuffin’s enemies saw the sword just before dying.

“Don’t look like nothing I got hang up on my wall.” Grenada reached out a hand. “I see all that blood near the hilt, right?”

Good eyesight. Almost as good as his. No one else would notice the faint discoloration: Pepper had cleaned it up on the way downstream to the DMZ.

Pepper handed it over. “If anything happens to it I would quite disturbed.”

Grenada took it and laid it on the pile between their feet. “I take it for you, look after it real good.”

“Thanks.”

“Third, we telling peeps you been hole up in you cabin because you in bad health.” She looked him over. “I see you already done and gone get that memo.”

Pepper’s body had cannibalized fat and muscle during the escape and ensuing journey, burning through immense amounts of energy in a short amount of time. He remained not much more than a tentpole that the overlarge trenchcoat draped over. His clothing covered the scarring and wounding.

The price of doing business sometimes.

“I’ll be eating extra meals for the next few days. High quality proteins appreciated.”

“I feed you extra, if you tell me how it was all up in a vacuumball getting catapult out

from wormhole to wormhole until you got to the DMZ.”

Pepper snorted. “Maybe. I was supposed to get picked up later. Why the change?”

“Well, that there’s a whole mess,” Grenada shook her head.

#

“Thing is,” Grenada bounced in the lighter gravity of her cubbyhole of a room, closer towards the hub of the ship. “You wasn’t the only one out past the DMZ. The Dread council got a message. From some League high-ups.”

The council kept a relay system going for open communications between the two. Mostly diplomatic static, but occasionally something useful snuck through. “So they bit?”

“Yeah,” Grenada said. “And they send me and the captain in. Captain say she could turn a nice profit on a run past the DMZ, pick up some rich refugees on the low who want out the League. Add that to big bonuses up on taking diplomats over, at a time when anti-matter fuel running higher and higher… hard to turn down.”

She opened up a small cupboard, tossed a few packets over her shoulder at Pepper, who caught them out of the air. Emergency meals, high in protein. Just what he needed. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, ship-wide dinner coming up in two or three, but that should hold you up.”

Pepper tore the packaging open and listened to the meal sizzle as it warmed up. A full course meal’s worth of savory smells filled the room. Orange chicken and rice balls. He pulled the pair of telescoping chopsticks out of the package sides. “What did the League want?”

Any information to add to his suspicions was helpful. He knew that, based on his suspicions, heavily armed Ragamuffin ships waited around the wormhole leading to New Anegada. They also lurked in orbit around New Anegada. All on high alert.

“Another try to get New Anegada to join the League.” Grenada pulled off her jacket. Pepper noticed the handgun, combat knife, and explosives that lined it.

“They don’t stop,” Pepper said through a mouthful of orange chicken.

Grenada wore an armless t-shirt. Her left arm sported a grinning cartoon mongoose, black ink on her brown skin. She straddled a chair. “Yeah, but this time they was a bit more convincing.”

Pepper nodded at her arm. “You’re a mongoose man.”

“Well, yeah, mongoose, but don’t be calling me man.”

“Where you been?”

“Got tatted up after the Tangent Run.” Grenada leaned forward. “Nothing like the trouble you been around for, though.”

No, but it meant she’d served ten years as part of the elite that protected New Anegada. If she volunteered for the near-suicide raid at Tangent Run, deep into League territory, then Pepper could give credit where it was due. The Dread Council trusted her with this ship’s protection. She’d do.

Pepper crushed the remains of the foil wrapper in his hand. Scarfing the meal that quickly: not exactly high manners. But they were soldiers swapping info, not diplomats at a fancy table.

Grenada leaned forward over the chair’s back. “You went out to watch the League kill the last Satrap, didn’t you? That’s the word around the mongoose, that’s what they saying.”

There’d been a lot more than that, but that had been one of Pepper’s little missions. “Yeah. Wasn’t much we could do to stop it.” From rulers of the Forty Eight worlds to extinct. A long way to fall for the alien Satraps. Now the revolutionary League of Human Affairs sent out video footage of the execution that took place on MidHaven, the League’s heart, everywhere. For them, proof that humanity had thrown the last traces of Satrap rule off its back, seventy five years after first taking up arms in the revolution against them.

“Not even you. But why go if you couldn’t do nothing?”

“Because the universe is a fucking hostile place, and I need more usable data,” Pepper said. “For example, you know the Satraps were religious?”

“They believe in gods?”

“Not as such. Those big worms, they lay in their webs of power, they may have ruled us all and the other races in the Forty Eight, but they claimed they were created, by another race far away from here. They were created to act as a biological throttle on any developing intelligent creatures that evolved in this area.”

“You believe that shit?” Grenada folded her arms.

Pepper shrugged. “According to the creature that I watched die, who really had no reason to lie, the last several hundred years of struggle, our bondage to the Satraps, that was just a distant race’s form of preventative pest control.”

“A ghost story, just trying to spook the little human.”

“Maybe.” Pepper leaned against the stacked bunks, already getting hungry again. “Think about this though: on Earth we were just one of a handful of species that developed intelligence as a survival mechanism. Not a lot of competition, back there. But on the galactic level, we’re on the edges of an ecosystem with a multitude of competing intelligences no doubt honed out of a stew of survival of the smartest and most dangerous. What gets culled out of that?”

Grenada slapped her tattoo. “Nothing the mongoose can’t handle yet.”

She was too young to remember when Ragamuffin ships hid in the depths of space, skulking around the edges of the Satrapy. Too young to remember New Anegada as a pre-industrial world on the edge of destruction.

“We’re ants,” Pepper said. “Living on the edge of a park near a city and congratulating ourselves for figuring out how to cross a road. We don’t even know how the wormholes we use to skip around the Forty Eight worlds were made, or why they’re here.” And with the League constantly trying to consolidate humanity under one banner, everyone paid more attention to small fights in the DMZ than trying to invest in pure research.

“We go get there. We tough.”

“True, living in the cracks nothing has noticed us yet. But at some point, something nastier than the Satraps will notice we’re here, and it’ll have to make a decision about us. I bet it might not be a decision we like.”

“We have to be like them fire ants,” Grenada said. “Swarm them.”

“We’re going to have to get our shit together,” Pepper said. “Right now we’re squabbling with the League. Humans arguing over competing ideas. These are just distractions. We need to start getting ready for the next wave. Or we’ll get burned bad.”

That penetrated. Grenada sat up. “Burned. Yeah. Just like the League diplomat: you spinning the same story.”

Pepper looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“The League, their little attempt to get us into the fold. They made the same argument you just did. Only, a little more dramatic.”

“Tell me.”

“Ain’t pass me report back to the Dread council, but, you privy to all that.” Grenada stood up. “After dinner I show you some pretty pictures. Gotta go prep now, provide security.”

“For dinner?”

“Lot of refugees from all the League areas we pass through, in the mix with a few politicians from New Anegada, and some freak with a silver eye from Chilo, and some sightseeing idiots. Don’t need to find out that some refugee we taking to Chilo really an assassin. You coming?”

It sounded exhausting. “No. Bring me back some food, I think I’ll rest up.”

“You bunks you rest, I be back.” Grenada slipped her vest back on and checked its contents.

Pepper pulled himself up into the bunk and clipped the webbing over it that would hold him in place if the ship had to suddenly adjust course. “What’d you see out there, Grenada?”

“The League think they seen what them boogeyman you worried about done.” She smiled and backed up to the door panel, which slid aside as it sensed her approach.

“Which was?” A transit warning sounded. The Shiek was about to pass through one of the many wormholes on the way to Chilo.

“Someone burn a whole planet up, man,” she muttered, and stepped out of the room.

Chapter Seven

Pepper’s feet hit the cold metal floor as the door screeched from being forced open.

“You up?” Grenada’s voice sounded strained.

He grabbed his coat and looked around while pulling it on, getting oriented. A full eighteen hours had ticked away. In the two days since being picked up he’d mainly spent his time hiding out in her cabin, not in the mood to talk to other passengers. She brought him back hot meals, and he’d been trying to undo the damage done recently to his body, letting the tiny machines and souped-up biological systems in him layer muscle and bone density back on.

“I’m up.” He felt heavy and tired. Each dreadlock seemed to pull at the roots of his scalp, not something he ever noticed usually.

The room pitched at a completely different angle. He stood with his feet on what had previously been one of the walls.

Grenada forced the door the rest of the way open and tumbled in. “Emergency power only.” She turned around and pulled a green duffel bag into the room, which she tossed at Pepper. Outside, shadows grew and flickered as tiny red lights flashed on and off.

“What’s going on?” The zipper stuck, and the fabric tore as Pepper continued to pull it open. The duffel contained all his confiscated gear.

“We going end over end.”

The heavy feeling: increased gravity, the force of them being jammed down against the floor at twice a regular gee.

“Wobbling too,” Pepper said after a second of studying the varying feelings of force as he massaged his holsters into place.

Grenada cocked her head and put a hand over her ear. “Canden. She say we been infiltrate.”

“League agents, a hijacking?” Pepper finished arming himself. “I’m not going to be optimal, I’m still recovering.” Low bone density, a leaner body, deep scarring in the left bicep and both thighs.

“We do what do with what we got,” Grenada said.

“The League got someone aboard while you were on your little daytrip.” Pepper shook his trenchcoat out and let it settle.

“I don’t think so.” Grenada flipped her mattress up to reveal an arsenal of her own strapped to the bedsprings. “Not with me breathing down every lock, everyone on or off the ship.”

Pepper looked out of their room. The once vertical bulkhead near the room had turned into a floor down ‘under’ the door. “Maybe,” he said to himself.

“We near the tip, most the passengers back near hull central. Even like this we got just enough gravity to keep them from being sick, and not enough for them to hurt themself.”

He looked up. Rungs and rails ran along the corridor. They looked strange when the ship spun for gravity, but if the ship wasn’t spinning and instead was being pushed, their orientation made sense. Yet using rails and runs at twice a gee, that would be exhausting in a hurry. “We joining the passengers?”

“We look like passengers?” Grenada clambered over the door and dropped to the bulkhead ten feel below.

“End over end going to flush out our infiltrator?”

“Slow him down, force the passengers up into central for the head-count.” She bit her lip and listened to the distant voice again. “My boys looking for the final few passengers. Once they fully round up, then you and me, we make we move.”

“Thanks for rearming me.”

“You want in?” Grenada tapped her ear.

Pepper shook his head. He had no capacity to network in. Yes Grenada and her friends, as well as any given passenger or crew on this ship could share and see information laid over the world, but a chipped optic nerve with a network connection could be hacked.

So could an aural connection.

“You remain pure,” Grenada smiled. “No accessing the Ragalamina for you.”

“Satraps ruined that for me.” Pepper smiled back. Accessing the reams of data that could be laid over the world around him always tempted him, but Pepper didn’t trust it. Satrapic lamina was riddled with backdoors that let the Satraps hack into human beings to use them as neural puppets.

Even though Ragalamina protocols were human made — custom rolled, open sourced, and of fine pedigree — Pepper really, really, did not like allowing anything like that under his defenses.

“Fair enough,” Grenada said. “Even heavy encryption like battle Ragalamina could get break.”

“Your problem then.” He just hoped that if that did happen it wouldn’t become his problem in a hurry.

“Fair enough.”

“So what now?”

Grenada sighed. “Harsden?” She shook her head, frustrated. “Two passengers yet. Harsden ain’t responding.”

“He might be hurt,” Pepper said. “You shouldn’t have sent him alone.”

When she looked at him he regretted it. Here on a tiny ship, with four others sworn to protect the ship. They would be close, a tight brotherhood. “We going.”

Grenada grabbed a rung and pulled herself up.

Pepper followed. “We’ll be walking towards the infiltrator, on their terms.”

She looked back down at him. “You think?”

#

They climbed four levels up. Pepper could feel sweat collecting in the small of his back. Not a whole lot of effort to climb this, usually, but he remained weaker than normal.

Grenada glanced over the edge, then rolled over it. “Clear.”

Pepper dropped down to the bulkhead with her, peering down into the dark. He pulled out the grenade launcher.

Grenada looked over. “That thing?”

He put a finger to his lips. Something shuffled a hundred feet below them in the dark. A scrape, a step, then a scrape, and then another step.

Grenada leaned over quickly with a UV penlight and painted the area as Pepper tensed. “It’s Marsden. We good.”

Pepper glanced.

One of the men he’d seen back the cargo bay pulled a limp body behind him by the feet, struggling with the heavy weight. He looked up and signaled. All good.

They clambered down and dropped to the next bulkhead.

“I off the battle lamina.” Marsden looked relieved to see Grenada. “Just like you had train us.”

Pepper raised an eyebrow. “You don’t trust lamina?”

Grenada cleared her throat. “Fifteen years ago, you once had speak in Capitol City and I went and listen. You said if we was using lamina, cut it off when stuff getting real strange. I train them the same.”

Marsden grunted and dropped the body by their feet. “You want strange: the man attack me.”

The heavy man still wore expensive silk pants. But a fleshy structure grew out of the neck and shoulder line: a series of black spikes.

Pepper reached out and tapped the growth with a boot. It disintegrated, bits falling through the grate and flaking off into the air.

Strange. The man’s body had started reshaping parts of itself.

“Don’t touch that.” Marsden moved up away from the body. He kept his distance from both Pepper and Grenada as well.

“Captain. That all the passengers, all the crew,” Grenada said. “Stand down.”

A rumbling rippled through the Shiek as thrusters fired to cancel the spin. A defensive measure worked out between Grenada and the captain to make it hard for an infiltrator to move throughout the ship.

Very solid.

The heavy feeling of gravity lessened, and then lifted completely away.

“Okay. We bringing the body to medical.” Grenada grabbed the rail and hauled it up into the air between them.

“What about contamination?” Marsden still kept his distance.

“Whatever on its back all in the air now.” She kicked off down the rail with body in tow. “If the League want to kill this whole ship, they already done it. They trying for something else. This man, the specialist: first one off the ship. Now he dead. But why go through all that just to poison we all when they could have just blow the ship up?”

#

They moved into the ship’s hub: an empty core that the elevators ran ‘up’ and ‘down’ when under acceleration. Right now it looked like a half-mile-long tunnel with subway cars, lit by patches of emergency lights, that ran through the ship’s center. It depended on orienatation and perception, and what the ship was doing.

No matter which way it felt, with a dead body it became a gloomy traverse. The three of them coasted down its center with the strange corpse.

Halfway through their journey the full complement of lights returned and one of the track

cars zipped down the tube and matched their speed. Grenada pulled herself aboard through sliding doors. “Get in.”

The tunnel at the heart of the ship narrowed and they entered the drive cylinder: the engine and command center of the ship. They eventually got out, transferred to a spoke of a corridor, and floated their way down past a series of utility rooms.

Captain Canden met them in the sick bay, sterile lights gleaming off her shaved skull and large dark eyes that matched her skin. After studying Pepper she looked at Grenada. “He got armed.”

“We was infiltrated, and there ain’t none better. Better he packing than not.”

“Don’t like no stranger packing no gun on me ship,” Canden snapped. “Strip his ass down.”

“You just had to ask politely, that’s all.” Pepper pulled everything out, letting the weapons hang in the air in front of him.

Canden twitched and moved closer. She pushed the grenade launcher out of the way to stare him in the eye. “You a passenger to me, same as the diplomats. This a higgler ship, not some tool of the Dread Council. We independent, you hear? Don’t want no hassle.”

Pepper held his hands up. “No hassle.” On Canden’s turf, fair enough. He would go back to the passengers.

A good meal would put this behind him. The issue was dead, literally dead in the air behind him in the form of a corpse. Not his problem. Canden’s. And she had enough stress without some other variable.

He could behave.

“Good.” Canden smiled. They understood each other and she liked that. “Grenada, get him down to the hub, we keeping passengers there until we hit Chilo. Everyone in observation in case anything else funny happen. I ain’t jeopardizing that bonus the Dread Council offering.”

Grenada gave a curt nod.

Outside, skimming away from the sick bay, Grenada turned in mid-air. “She stress. Sorry.”

“It’s no problem,” Pepper said. “Her ship, her rules. I can abide.” Canden sounded like she’d made one too many wormhole transits out into dangerous League territory and back to Ragamuffin safety.

They hit the central area. Crew floated outside the doors, and they opened them for Pepper and Grenada.

He floated through — she hit the doorframe and stopped in place. She handed him a small wrist bracelet. “Sorry,” she said as they shut the door on him. “Just a temporary thing.”

Outside the sounds of the door getting dogged shut clanged throughout the room. The wheel spun down and clicked on the outside.

“Welcome to lockdown,” said a man in an expensive silk dasheki nearby. His greying dreadlocks hung in place by his cheeks. “The captain figures if anyone else is running around the ship, the sensors won’t be confused by us wandering around. I know you, see you at the Council meetings. Pepper, right? Mongoose command?”

“Yeah, but here, I’m Juan Smith.” Fifty other passengers clumped in various groups, many around the bar on the far side.

“Juan Smith?”

“Yeah. No one special or particular.” He sighed and kicked off towards the bar.

Fifty potential problems floated around in here with him. He had none of his favorite weapons. He just had to relax here. While Canden watched to see what would happen.