Free Ragamuffin by Tobias S. Buckell

his docking and fueling rights. If he left his ship and ran into hiding, his fellow Hongguo would hunt him down and wipe his mind down to blank, leaving him as another calculating machine for the
Gulong
.
    He had been doomed to this ever since being born among the Hongguo.

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    T he machine had been a gift. An inheritance from Kenji Hajiwara, the man Etsudo thought of as father, a father whose bloodline included the original Hajiwara of the Hongguo.
    Etsudo grew up aboard the
Takara Bune
. It never bothered him that there weren’t any other children. Not even into his teens as Kenji taught him how to thread the
Takara Bune
through a wormhole. Not even into adulthood, when the Hongguo began to assist the Satrapy and its alien subjects control human technologies.
    “Do you remember your mother?” Kenji had asked him once.
    Etsudo remembered standing in the observation gallery by her casket, crying, watching it slide out from the habitat until it dwindled away on its long, decaying orbit toward the blue-tinged sun in the distance.
    “Of course I do. Always,” Etsudo replied.
    “Do you remember your mother?” Kenji had asked him again, just before Kenji died, riddled with an artificial form of infectious cancer.
    “Of course,” Etsudo had told him.
    But then an hour later a message came, a recording Kenji had left with a date stamp on it that was over ten years old. Kenji, younger but more tired, faced Etsudo one last time.
    “Do you remember your mother?” the recording asked. Kenji looked more incredibly sad than Etsudo had ever seen him. “Because I have a confession to make, my son. A hard one to make, which is why I’m recording this, and locking it to be released when I die. Though I guess that is easier than telling you this myself.”
    Kenji had always wanted a child, so he’d taken one from a small orbital research habitat. A five-year-old, whose parents where about to be reconditioned. Kenji created a new mother in his mind, and a new father.
    Did Etsudo remember his mother? He didn’t know. That face that had kissed him in the mornings, sung to him, that might have been the same face. Or one that Kenji stole from a database somewhere. Etsudo never bothered to find out. He destroyed the message and walked back to Kenji’s room in the hospital.
    Looking in at the body of the man, Etsudo crumpled to the floor to cry for the last time in his life. His father had died and his mother had never existed, and neither did he.
    And here was this loyalty to the Hongguo built into him by his father, and yet the knowledge that he was one of their victims. The love of his mother, who didn’t exist. The love of a father who did, and had betrayed him.
    A ship to run that was his. Kenji had worked hard to make sure Etsudo had full captainship of the
Takara Bune
.
    Etsudo heated a bulb of tea over the hot pad at the center of the round table in the cramped galley. Brandon gripped the edges of the table as if he would fall away from it if he let go. Vertigo was a small side effect from reconditioning. Etsudo had a sick bag in his back pocket. He handed the bulb to Brandon, who cradled the handcrafted glass in his two callused hands. The etched silver swans on the sides caught the glint of the cabin lighting as he rolled the bulb between his fingers.
    Brandon looked up from the tea, a brown drop of liquid hovering above the tiny lip. “Etsudo, I’ve been wired to send everything I see and hear back to Deng.”
    “You’re okay.” Etsudo shook his head. “Nothing leaks out of this ship unless I want it to. But Deng will be contacting us soon when you don’t report back to him.”
    Brandon shuddered.
    “I know.” Etsudo nodded. “But we will be okay.”
    “I’ll fall apart facing him right now.”
    A message pinged for Etsudo’s attention. He relaxed and settled into the lamina. The image of Jiang Deng appeared before him, standing on the table. “Etsudo,” Deng snapped. “Check in.” Then the