Ragamuffin Read Free Page B

twitched. He reached under the table, and Nashara raised an eyebrow at him. With a smile the kid stepped back and watched.
    “What are you doing?” Steven asked.
    He tried to pull away, but she yanked him right back and whispered into his ear, “Steven, this is just a table knife, but I’m strong enough that I will begin by puncturing a lung of yours with it. Do you know how much that hurts? After letting you writhe about for a while, I’ll slam this knife into your heart. Of course, you can stop this by giving me what I was promised for doing a very dangerous and dirty job.”
    “We have someone sympathetic to the League,” he said quickly. “The owner of the
Daystar
. It’s docked here at Villach. We’ll spirit you aboard.”
    Nashara watched as three men in long, green robes picked some items over at a nearby stall while watching the two of them.
    “Headed for?” A pair of grubby women with baskets waited to look at the toys on the table. She was in their way. They looked somewhat impatient.
    “A Freeman colony in orbit around the world Yomi,” he hissed out of the side of his mouth.
    One of the ladies snapped her fingers. “You gonna stand there all day, you two?”
    Yomi lay over fifty wormhole transits downstream and in the right fork, the Thule branch. But it was still fifteen upstream from the dead end of New Anegada. Nashara shook her head. “That’s not as close to the planet I was promised.”
    One of the green-robed men glanced over at the increasingly irate ladies, then at Steven and Nashara.
    “No, but it’s not here, where you’re certain to be taken down by a Gahe hunting pack. We need to leave now. We’ll help you find your way to where you need to be once you’re at the Freeman colony. There’s something we need to tell you about New Anegada anyway.”
    He was being too nice. She was half tempted to snap his arm. And Steven specifically avoided looking in the direction of the men in green.
    “Any Ragamuffin ships at dock?” she asked.
    “They don’t make it this far upstream. You might find one at Yomi though.”
    Nashara leaned closer. “Tell those three men to back way off.”
    “What three men?” Steven looked around.
    She dug the point of her improvised knife into his skin, enough to make her point. “Steven, back them off before things go bad.”
    He looked over at them. They moved back.
    Nashara dug out several bloody pieces of silver and tossed them at Peter. They bounced in a trough of chips and wires. A teenage girl with blond hair and sunburn joined Peter, and the two women in front of Nashara stared at the silver.
    “I have a favor to ask you all,” Nashara said to them.
    “What are you doing?” Steven twisted, shoving his shoulders against her.
    “I’m going to pay a handful of these nice people to walk to the Daystar with us with any friends they can round up, board with me, and then leave once I’m nicely ensconced aboard the ship.”
    He tensed. She’d figured that out as well. With a crowd around them the Villach security programs would keep a close eye on a mob. And for all the rhetoric the League of Human Affairs deployed, she’d bet her life it still preferred to skulk about in the shadows.
    “Now let’s go before Gahe start showing up,” Nashara hissed. Time was running out and things were getting complicated.
    Peter pocketed the silver and tapped the air, and as Nashara stepped forward, kids flowed in toward them, jostling closer as the word spread throughout the lamina that some crazy lady was paying Peter in silver to help walk her over to a ship.
     
    The
Daystar
’s cramped quarters made her feel cornered. The grimy passengers bored her. Three indentured workers escaping to the free-zone still dressed in grimy coveralls and casting relieved and yet still suspicious looks around. A human pet with his hair styled in a tall ringed cone and shaved eyebrows, glitter on his cheeks and lips. He didn’t have a name, but he showed her the bar code