Ragamuffin

EPILOGUE

Cayenne was three days and too many transits upstream from Chilo, where the Ragamuffin ships patrolled with a watchful eye at the League of Human Affairs. Only Ragamuffin ships were allowed past Chilo.

The Raga high council had decided to keep calling the planet New Anegada, but call the countries of the prime continent Nanagada and Aztlan. It was where captains argued how to integrate the new Teotl and their technologies. It was the return of a whole livable planet to the human race for the first time in as long as most could remember.

It was home.

But this was Astragalai Cayenne orbited right now.

Copies of Cayenne dwelled within navigational buoys and corrupted the lamina of Gahe habitats. In the confusion her selves provided, Ragamuffin and League ships transited in through the wormhole. Now men and women prepared to drop to the ground and engage Gahe hunt packs.

Pepper belted up for battle in the holds of the Takara Bune. Etsudo bounced from wall to wall in his cockpit. Mongoose-men from New Anegada and mongoose-men from Ragamuffin ships prepared to hit the ground.

Cayenne smiled and accepted an incoming message from the Daystar.

“Hello, Danielle.”

Danielle smiled. “Cayenne. It’s so odd to be calling you that. But then, one of your… selves that dwells in the Villach lamina calls itself Velvet. I think you ran out of Pepper-related names?”

“The joke got old.” Cayenne watched the first wave of shuttles depart for the fringes of the upper atmosphere.

“I wanted to warn you that after this, the League thinks it is powerful enough it doesn’t need your help to continue the revolution.” Danielle wore a blue uniform with star-shaped medals, shoulder pads, and double rows of brass buttons. “You’re to return to New Anegada. I warn you now because some of my colleagues agitate to find countermeasures to your trick, and others to destroy your ship and turn off Satrapic lamina everywhere.”

They were out here to see what the League was doing and to help free humans where they could. The League’s methods had veered into the extreme, whole purges of anything nonhuman in systems they held. And the Ragamuffin council wanted them to keep a close eye on developments in the forty-eight worlds as they fell into war. The Takara Bune would be skulking around a while longer.

But no need to tell Danielle that.

“Thanks for the heads-up.”

Danielle laughed. No doubt she suspected what Cayenne and her friends would be up to. “Pitt’s Cross, that landing will be personal for you.”

“Of course.”

“What will you tell them, when you land?” Danielle asked.

Cayenne had been thinking about that.

“We come to free you from your walls,” she whispered to Danielle. “You can take arms with the League and turn your anger on the Gahe, or you can leave the planet and find yourself welcome among any number of free human communities. These decisions are yours to make. And the consequences will be yours to receive as well. This will be a real emancipation.” And it would be the first time in centuries that so many would take that heady freedom for themselves.

Cayenne cleared the information around her away and cut the connection to the Daystar. She watched the pinpoint flares of hundreds of nuclear explosions blossoming all over the surface of Astragalai as she descended toward Pitt’s Cross for the second time in her life.