SeptStar

by Blaze Ward

  “I could say that Urid-Varg made it possible,” Daniel replied, finally understanding what had brought Crence to him today. “But that raises even more questions than it answers, doesn’t it?”

  “Especially as you claim that Urid-Varg is destroyed,” Crence said.

  Daniel understood the look in those eyes now.

  Trojan Horse. A simple, wooden statue, according to ancient legends, that was brought inside the walls of Troy, where men emerged and opened the gates from the inside, allowing the Hellenes to destroy the ancient city.

  Given the number of centuries between the events described and them being written down in any format Daniel had always assumed a bad description of a siege tower covered with horse hides and wetted down to protect it against burning oil. Plus the image of a long, upright neck with a platform for getting over the walls would look remarkably like a horse, seen from the side.

  But the outcome was still the same.

  Troy sacked and her people hauled away in slavery by the warriors pledged to Agamemnon and Menelaus.

  “You fear that I am another Urid-Varg,” Daniel said simply. “And that you are hauling me directly to the heart of the Merchant Confederation where I am a poisoned apple.”

  “I would have perhaps dressed it up in prettier finery, but yes, that is close enough,” Crence said. “What are you, Daniel Lémieux? And how did you kill Urid-Varg?”

  Daniel chuckled.

  “Actually, I beat the salaud to death with a fire extinguisher,” he said with a smile. “Afterwards, he tried to conquer my mind, like he had so many others, but we had surprised him, and his plans eventually failed. But not before he did things to me that I cannot easily explain.”

  The shark had grown perfectly still and quiet. His mind still had a flavor of fear mixed with threat, but nothing Daniel was concerned about.

  Whatever Crence might think to do, Daniel was still faster.

  But he dared not merge identities with the Anndaing. Crence was male, at least enough that he could probably use the mind gem in ways that Kathra and her women would never be able to. The man would learn secrets, and then perhaps be infected with the sorts of greed that would make him want that power for himself.

  It didn’t matter that he might make excuses about greater goods. Daniel was still the only man he could remember who wouldn’t want to be a god given the opportunity.

  But he’d already been there. That Golden Diamond was as close as a normal human could possibly get to that level of adulation and respect and fear.

  “Afterwards?” Crence whispered. “After you had killed him?”

  “He was twelve thousand years old, Crence,” Daniel said. “There were things he had done to ensure that death might only be a temporary inconvenience, in ways I won’t bother to explain right now. He was not prepared for humans in general, and Commander Omezi in particular. He is truly dead now, but I bear his touch, and will until I’m dead. That includes memories of languages so old that they have been forgotten.”

  “Ovanii and K’bari,” Crence nodded.

  “And others,” Daniel said. “I do not have any of Urid-Varg’s immense power for evil, but many of his memories.”

  “And the ones that hunt you?” Crence pressed. “The Ishtan?”

  “Urid-Varg’s mortal enemies,” Daniel said. “They would wipe out any taint of his existence, and were terribly offended that I didn’t just choose to die at the time.”

  “So what will you do at Ogrorspoxu?” Crence turned the conversation beyond Trojan horses now.

  “Talk money with greedy bastards like you,” he laughed. “And then send you to Thrabo or Tavle Jocia with a list of cargo guaranteed to make you rich if you get there first.”

  Crence laughed along with him.

  “If we get there first?” Crence asked.

  “That isn’t the most likely outcome?” Daniel smiled. “You land at Ogrorspoxu just long enough to hand me off to someone else, then practice your human Spacer language lessons before anyone else can catch you?”

  “Maybe,” Crence grinned, his hammer tilting up a little at both ends.

  “After the excitement dies down, I will ask for a library card,” Daniel continued. “There are books I want to read, and will translate into human for you and everyone else.”

  “It is a long journey to human space,” Crence noted. “Across that dead zone that once represented K’bari space.”

  “And there will be monsters,” Daniel said. “Human and otherwise. But the Free Worlds will welcome you, and the Sept can go piss up a rope for all I care. They are Kathra’s enemies, just as the Ishtan are mine. Specist salauds intent on conquering all human space and then subjugating the rest.”

  “What does Commander Omezi want?” Crence asked.

  “To be free,” Daniel said. “To get there, she intends to find the best technology any culture has to offer, in order to build herself a ship that can push the Sept back. And anyone else that threatens her.”

  “The Ovanii were fierce, deadly warriors in their time,” Crence mused.

  “So I gathered,” Daniel nodded. “That is why I want to know more about them. The Anndaing overcame them with raw numbers eventually, but perhaps they have something to teach Kathra, even after all this time.”

  “Have you brought your war to my threshold?” Crence asked, turning serious. “Threatened the peace of the Anndaing with a human issue?”

  “No,” Daniel retorted. “They were always going to find you eventually. The Sept Empire cannot stop expanding, or they will drown, like sharks on my worlds or your distant ancestors who still relied on their gills. Kathra has given you a century or two advanced notice that they are coming, so that you could prepare for them.”

  “And her?”

  “She’s going to fight them,” Daniel said simply. “I’m going to help.”

  Twenty-Two

  Hadi Rostami did not enjoy visiting with the creatures Pasdar had met when Vorgash had killed the Star Turtle, but they were necessary to this mission. More than necessary.

  Fundamental, perhaps.

  So he took himself around the wheel to the space on the upper deck where they had been installed. Unlike SeekerStar, SeptStar only had two decks on its ring, and those were not required to maintain a flight squadron of up to sixty fightercraft.

  SeptStar was smaller, lighter, and faster through jump as a result.

  And the Ishtan were leading him to his prey.

  He approached the hatch to their environment, colder and darker than the rest of the ship. The door opened and he entered.

  Unlike Vorgash, they had a small space here. Four couches around the outside of a medium-sized room, with space to pace if they needed. Slither, maybe?

  Additional food had been packed for them, but they could process human sustenance well enough. A steward delivered four trays twice per day.

  Hadi walked to the center of the room and took his seat on the human chair that had originally been added for Amirin, before he came to his senses and sent others off to die in his place.

  Die?

  Hadi considered that a highly likely outcome. Not a given, but a warrior prepares each morning to make his death a glorious, hard-fought thing, and then he can face it without reservation or fear on the day when it finally arrives.

  Hadi Rostami had no fear.

  Nor should you, the voices said. You are not our enemy. You are an ally who will help us rid the galaxy of evil.

  Hadi shrugged.

  “An ally of convenience, perhaps,” he replied, unwilling to lie, even with these creatures in his mind.

  Convenience because you are fruit flies compared to Ishtan, they harmonized. The youngest of us is fourteen thousand of your years old. We are the last.

  “What will you do when the chef is destroyed?” Hadi asked. “What happens to the last of the Ishtan, when the last mission has been completed?”

  We have given this much thought, Hadi Rostami. Humans risk becoming like Urid-Va
rg, given access to the knowledge we hold.

  “I would agree,” he nodded at them. “The Sept would conquer the Free Worlds and then move on. The only question is how many cultures and species they might destroy forever before they fell.”

  He sensed almost a hiccup of surprise from the four beings. As though they had been expecting the naupati and forgotten that not all men were the same.

  Were Ishtan just pieces of a common whole, without individual identity?

  You are closer to the truth than you might imagine, Hadi Rostami, the voices filled his head. Ishtan is a single being, even as it is composed of individuals. We are less than we were, but we still are.

  He shrugged. After this much time around them, he wasn’t all that surprised by the revelation.

  Your thinking on the Sept betrays disloyalty to your cause, but also a deeper understanding of the arc of empires than that of Amirin Pasdar.

  “Empires of conquest breed resentment,” Hadi replied, thinking back to his historical studies. Warriors always focused on tactics and strategies, rather than logistics and the construction of stable bureaucracies that outlived emperors. And even ruling houses. “Both the Chinese and the Byzantines forged stable structures not reliant on a Great Man. And they gave outsiders both reason and opportunity to join. That fostered loyalty to an ideal, rather than any particular individual. The Sept ideal sees gradations of power and privilege. It will eventually fail.”

  And yet you support it, they noted.

  “I am Sept,” Hadi replied with heat, almost surprised by the depth of patriotism his own words churned up. “That fall will occur long after my time, and in the meantime I work to strengthen the structure, that it might yet improve for others drawn into our web. That it might change into something lasting.”

  Inwardly, he studied himself with a jaundiced eye, but could detect no hint that the outsiders were manipulating him.

  We are not, they chanted abruptly. These are your thoughts, perhaps subsumed ere now by your loyalty to the person of Pasdar. In such betrayals of the Sept ideal, you do perhaps represent a human future that the Ishtan might assist. But such an occurrence would require many generations of human lifetimes to come to pass.

  Hadi nodded. In that time, Sept would evolve or fall.

  Hadi Rostami would be forgotten, except as perhaps a footnote suggesting that his mission to bring down the Mbaysey was a success or failure.

  Long after his time.

  Long after your time, they agreed. But the mission is well begun. We see the shadow that the cook Daniel Lémieux casts in his passage. We will bring you to his destruction, even though we must rely on ephemeral humans and their tools to achieve.

  Hadi shivered at the concept of ephemeral as the Ishtan conveyed it. They had sworn to live forever, if that was what it finally took to destroy the creature known as Urid-Varg. Twelve thousand years later, they had lost two in combat, but the other four still chased.

  They were weaker now than they had been before, but the chef was a pale shadow of Urid-Varg, from what they had shown him.

  And Hadi would bring the whole might of the Sept with him to destroy the Mbaysey.

  Soon.

  Twenty-Three

  Crence studied the logs and the charts from the privacy of his office. Koni Swift was getting close to Ogrorspoxu now, but he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

  There were no easy answers to the complexities that the humans had introduced into his life.

  A rap at the hatch was followed a moment later by Dane opening it.

  The shark entered with a small tray of something in one hand. Four disks, each about the size of Crence’s palm and not as thick as his fin. Each was a weird golden-brown in color, with a dusting of something brownish-red across the top.

  The smell that accompanied him into Crence’s office was sweet and compelling.

  Dane sat the tray on the desk and took one of the disks in his hand, followed a moment later by taking a bite out of it.

  “Daniel has failed, yet again, to kill us all,” Dane announced as he chewed. “Mase, however, lost this round.”

  “What are they?” Crence asked.

  “Daniel calls them snickerdoodles,” Dane said. “Some sort of dense sweetbread with a really rich, complicated set of flavors going on.”

  “And nobody has died of poisoning?” Crence asked as he reached for one and studied it.

  Still warm from the oven. He broke off a piece and sniffed it. Yummy and earthy in ways that shouldn’t appeal to a sea-based creature, but he took a bite.

  It was quickly evident why Mase was on the losing side of this round, whatever he’d made. This snickerdoodle thing was good.

  “We yet live,” Dane nodded.

  “You do realize that he can’t kill us all until we get him to Ogrorspoxu and land, right?” Crence teased, just to watch Dane’s eyes bulge suddenly with the faintest hint of panic.

  He took a bigger bite of the treat.

  “He wouldn’t,” Dane gasped. “Would he?”

  “You’ve been nice enough to the human that he saves you for last?” Crence laughed. “They do eat meat. Anndaing might not qualify as cannibalism to a human.”

  Just watching Dane’s hammer twitch made it worth it. The sputtering from the shark was a bonus.

  “Did Mase get the recipe?” Crence asked.

  “Well, yeah, but it required the last of the weird stuff Daniel and Joane brought with them from their ship,” Dane said. “From here on in, he’s cooking with our supplies.”

  Crence nodded.

  “We’ll be at a human planet soon,” Crence reminded the shark. “If we can pick up bulk raw materials, we could introduce new foodstuffs into Anndaing culture at one hell of a profit. A truly ambitious shark might figure out how to grow all the ingredients and bring them someplace like Ogrorspoxu. It’s not just technology that might make us rich.”

  Dane nodded and grabbed the third disk.

  “Which reminds me,” he said around a mouthful of cookie. “Joane was asking about our tech. Nothing bad, mostly just what things were and how they worked, but I got the feeling she’s also pretty good as a mechanic. We’ve got what, four days left?”

  “Give or take,” Crence agreed. “Jine’s yet to calculate the last few jumps, but I haven’t told him to push or lag, either. Why?”

  “So did you want to let Joane apprentice with some of the maintenance?” Dane asked. “I got the impression that she wouldn’t push, but also wouldn’t say no. We friendly enough?”

  Crence went for the last cookie before Dane got greedy. The shark could be like that.

  And he was right back to the top of the conversation he had been having with himself before the interruption.

  How far did they trust the humans? Daniel had provided very concise and glib answers to most questions, except how Urid-Varg had gotten himself into a position where a small human could beat him to death with a fire suppression cylinder and live to tell the tale.

  Or what the touch of that salaud had done to the human afterwards.

  After the Conqueror was dead.

  Was Crence bringing an infection to the heart of the Anndaing Merchants Guild, even accidentally?

  Joane was even less known than Daniel, but she barely spoke Anndaing, and then with a thick accent. His human was barely good enough to talk to her about much of anything beyond the basic pleasantries.

  Crence could see hiring a few humans first thing when he got to wherever he was going, just to sit around and talk with his crew.

  Possibly a new assistant cook for Mase, while he was at it, as long as the person knew how to make snickerdoodles.

  He leaned forward and flexed his hammer upwards just enough to make his point.

  “Don’t set her to fixing anything critical,” he decided. “About what you’d do with any rookie who didn’t know their fin from their tail. Keep them friendly and keep us safe. Once we get to Ogrorspoxu, they’ll be someone else’s problem, at least unt
il we get back from human space.”

  “Understood,” Dane said, sobering as the implications sunk in.

  The humans were still relative strangers, even if they had been model traveling companions.

  And Daniel had too many holes in his stories to make Crence feel safe.

  Balance that against the potential for enormous profit, especially if Anndaing grav systems were really that much better than what humans had. SeekerStar’s guns appeared to be more powerful than anything a ship that small should be able to mount, so maybe the humans were better at mayhem and warfare.

  Welcome to the life of a trademaster.

  Twenty-Four

  Joane was no mechanic. She was the first to admit that. Adanne and the others were much better at taking things apart and putting them back together again. At the same time, those ladies were just mechanics, rather than comitatus warriors. They didn’t generally know which end of a pistol was the dangerous one.

  Joane was the nerdiest of the warriors, and the killer among the mechanics.

  She grinned that they had her cleaning kitchen equipment today. She’d been a probie before this, probationarily welcomed until she could prove herself worthy of remaining. And assigned the scut duties nobody else wanted because they had someone that such things could be dumped on.

  Like SeekerStar, Koni Swift ran pretty much completely on electrical systems powered by the ship’s generators. In essence, they used resistance to generate heat for the stoves and cooking tops.

  Earlier, she had helped dismantle and clean one of the local units that heated and circulated warm air through vents to all the rooms contained within this set of the ship’s frames. Technology that was ancient, only because nobody had really bothered to improve on it in forever.

  She was working with Dolon Marquez today. Shark of all trades, as it were, since he was mostly a stevedore moving cargo around, as well as the ship’s medic.

  And principle handyman when it came to fixing mechanical things.