SeptStar

by Blaze Ward

  Koni Swift was a simple Cargo-6 design, with space for three rows of cargo pods to be slipped out of their silos sideways down each flank, plus the massive cargo bays central and aft. Good scanners, but nothing equipped for espionage, or anything like that. More guns than most Anndaing ships, but also usually farthest from home.

  And pirates rarely ask politely.

  “Koni Swift, assignments and operating procedures have been transmitted,” the female finally said. “Operations staff will be there to greet you on arrival.”

  She left it at that, not that Crence was surprised. Whole new alien species has just shown up and wants to trade? Everyone will want to get in on the action.

  Hell, he’d probably get rich just from what he would normally score in margins, even over this distance.

  And the Guild would pay top credit for anything else he learned.

  Especially if there might be a war going on somewhere close.

  Thirty-Six

  Daniel found he was the odd woman out, but that was nothing new. On SeekerStar and WinterStar, he’d been the only male, most of the time. Here, he was the landshark, totally at a loss as to what all these ships he was seeing meant, at least in engineering terms.

  They represented power. That much was obvious.

  That the Anndaing had even admitted that these ships still existed meant that he and Kathra had gotten through to someone important with the possible risk that the Sept presented.

  It helped that those salauds on Rhages were such incredible sexists, specists, and whatever other –ists you wanted to discuss. They would tend to make enemies anywhere they went, firmly convinced that they were the supreme power in the galaxy.

  Having been the most powerful being in many different sectors across the lifetime of his memories, Daniel could have told them better, but they hadn’t asked.

  And then they’d shot him and his ship in the back with an Axial Megacannon more than once.

  Thing like that tended to leave people like him less than polite on future encounters.

  So he wandered along in the wake of Joane, Raja, and Bipahl. The air was thin and dry, and he had a small equipment belt around his waist with two canteens, just like the others did. Both even had a pinch of salt thrown in for the humans and some citric acid from the spice rack to make it a little tastier.

  Daniel glanced up at the sky, but found it an unsettling gray-brown that had nothing to do with pollution. It just represented the dust that a planet-sized continent generated. At least the volcanism was at a minimum, from what Raja had said.

  He was surrounded as he walked by massive fortresses designed for war. Hundreds of them, stretching every direction. Castles in steel and enamel paint.

  Except that these were really dragons, asleep in their caves until the day they needed to range out and unleash their terrible destruction again.

  Joane and Raja were looking for one in particular, comparing numbers on nearby hulls with the documentation that Wyll Koobitz had sent along with them.

  Ovanii warships reminded Daniel of trilobites from ancient Earth. Teardrops with the tail blunted off and relatively flat. Maybe disks that had been stretched in only one direction.

  The bows were wide and smoothly round, but he could see the armor plating, overlapping outward like scales. Gun turrets could be deployed up or down from the decks to engage, while not risking the edge armor itself.

  There were a lot of such pimples on these hulls, from what he had seen flying overhead as they landed.

  The narrow ends contained engines on the sides, with a weapon emplacement at the center of the flat end, designed to specifically engage someone coming up from behind. Scorpion tails? No…. Skunks.

  And they were huge. SeekerStar was nearly sixteen hundred meters long, but that was the length of the core cylinder needed to let the wheel spin smoothly. It still looked like a dragonfly holding a wedding ring in flight.

  These were rounded scones resting on massive legs. The biggest ones were not as long as SeekerStar, but as wide as the ring and simply solid, conveying the strength of a mountain.

  “We’re here,” Raja announced, stopping in front of one of the monsters.

  It looked like a castle wall to Daniel. Twelve or fifteen meters tall on a dozen legs, with a space below high enough to drive a truck under, extending in both directions as far as the eye could see. Gray in places, but it had also been painted by someone to show off panels in almost every color imaginable, little squares and hexagons like cute freckles on the outer hull.

  He followed them underneath the ship, musing about the poetry these gruff warriors had created, so at odds with their public image as terrible marauders plaguing the spacelanes.

  Raja led them to a landing leg, where she compared a keyboard to an image on her pad and began typing. A ramp lowered from the ceiling and Daniel heard hatches slide open above for them.

  So, still powered after all this time? Or was this the showpiece that the Anndaing used for demonstrating either the vessels or the technology?

  Joane and the two sharks ascended into the vessel, so he joined them.

  Inside, Daniel was reminded that the Ovanii were generally a little over two meters tall, plus or minus. More than half a head taller than humans, relatively. Kathra’s height, but even wider. Built like forceball players, too, although that thought brought back a terrible memory, Angel departing from Pain du Soir on that last night, the thing that was finally too much, when he decided to sell the restaurant to Lucrèce for the cash the man had in his wallet.

  How far we’ve come in just four years.

  Daniel had never been back to his former restaurant. Had only stayed on Genarde itself for long enough to book passage off-planet the next morning. Rather quickly, he had wandered his way to the edge of the Sept empire and gotten himself hired by Kathra as her personal chef.

  And then the adventures had truly begun.

  The interior of this warship was as colorful as the exterior. Or maybe he’d just spent too much time with the poverty of the Mbaysey. Maybe folks with too much money decorated the interiors of their ships with pretty swaths of random color in geometric designs, including the floors and ceilings as well.

  The others had the same impression, from the murmurs and commentary, but even Windrunner tended to be monochromatic in a soft green Daniel might have called turquoise.

  Daniel could see that changing, as Raja touched walls almost reverently as they walked. He suspected she might be slobbering with the anticipation of hiring a new interior decorator when she got home.

  Four decks thick, from the numbering system in place here. Each deck was about three and a half meters of space, with armored tops and bottoms protecting you.

  “Do we need something this huge?” Daniel asked the others.

  “This is just a Dueler, Daniel,” Joane turned to him with a smile. “The Assailants are several times as big. But most of this was used to haul people and supplies. Like the Mbaysey, the Ovanii were nomadic, carrying their entire tribe with them. So this is more like a ClanStar as a warship.”

  “Oh,” seemed to be about all he could manage in response. That made sense, but multiplied by the thousands of ships in the various squadrons, they must have numbered in the millions or tens of millions as a raiding force.

  No wonder they had been a threat. He had been imagining them too small.

  The group ended up on the bridge. Daniel supposed you would call it a bridge. That was what other cultures did.

  He liked to think in terms of kitchens, instead. Feeding people instead of destroying them. Maybe he needed to design more interesting warships, one of these days?

  “Gravity?” he asked, contemplating that this ship was flat, where humans walked on the inner side of SeekerStar’s rings, or swam in space when you were down in the core.

  “Almost as good as the systems we use today,” Bipahl replied, moving to a station and sitting, but pointedly not touching anything.

  The ship should
be powered mostly off and then locked, and nobody was sure what the limits of behavior might be. Where would the Merchants Bank folks decide that enough was enough?

  “So you just power things up and take off, like in a Spectre?” Daniel asked the women.

  “Effectively, yes,” Joane said. “And sneak up on some Sept base, hiding in the darkness to support forward invasion forces. Steal what we need. Blow up the rest. Slip away. The Ovanii were masters of that sort of thing, from what you’ve shown me.”

  “Well, yes,” he agreed, still a little confused about the whole thing.

  Daniel looked around and wondered if Kathra would add something like this as a new warship and move here, or keep SeekerStar. The Ovanii hadn’t done individual fightercraft, unlike the Mbaysey, so there were no landing bays sufficiently large to handle anything beyond two SkyCamels or one of those standard transports the Anndaing flew.

  They spent about ten minutes on the bridge, just in pure wonder, before moving on. Engineering was just as impressive, taking up the entirety of the two middle decks for about the middle third of the width and aft quarter of the ship. Personal quarters followed the ring hallways that wrapped around inside the armor, with that same teardrop shape before running straight and slowly converging.

  What must it have been to be Ovanii in those days? Daniel had memories of folks who had known them, but no Ovanii directly in his mind.

  He suspected that they would have recognized Kathra Omezi as one of their own, though, just from the little things about this ship and how they had built it. Even the colors, although Kathra had not gone that far. That brought him solace as he trudged in the wake of the other three, making sure they saw and touched everything on this supposed Dueler vessel.

  He had lost the Star Turtle, and all other starships were really just things after that, rather than living creatures. He would not get emotionally engaged by just a ship. Only the people, like Kathra or Erin or Joane.

  Joane seemed impressed, though. That was enough for Daniel.

  He had a debt he owed a Septagon named Vorgash.

  Thirty-Seven

  Kathra had all the women in their Spectres today, despite not expecting to launch them. She was down in SeekerStar’s command area in zero gravity herself, seated next to Ife and strapped in for maneuvering.

  Nobody knew what was coming next, but they had arrived.

  Ogrorspoxu. Central world of the Anndaing culture. Home of the Merchants Guild and the Merchants Bank.

  SeekerStar came out of jump at the location that Morgan Wilzae, Trademaster In Residence at Kanus, had told her was the optimum, since she was going to be arriving as an unknown vessel.

  There were ships coming and going constantly in this system, and rules to follow. If you were truly alien, they shuffled you off to a particular orbit until the authorities could figure out what to do with you.

  Ogrorspoxu was a complicated experiment in orbital dance, just watching all the beacons identifying ships and vectors. Thankfully, Kathra had been speaking almost exclusively in Anndaing for weeks now, so she was comfortable without her two experts handy.

  She would have other experts soon.

  “This is Mbaysey vessel SeekerStar,” she announced on the control frequencies. “Looking for an orbital assignment from which we can send shuttles to your station with documentation.”

  Again, straight out of their book. Hopefully, they would even recognize her name, since she didn’t see Koni Swift anywhere on the lists of ships nearby.

  Daniel, Joane, and Crence Miray might be anywhere by now, but they had come here first. She would track them down from here.

  “Mbaysey SeekerStar, you are cleared for the orbital path attached, with standard deviations and spacing for speed,” a male Anndaing voice replied after a few minutes. There was a file attached for Ife.

  Surely, it hadn’t taken them that long to get organized, so Kathra wondered who had been alerted to her presence before anybody replied.

  “I’ve got this, Kathra,” Ife said as she opened the file and read the contents. “We’re almost in the correct location now and just a little maneuvering will get everything in place.”

  Kathra smiled at the woman. That was Ife’s polite way of telling her Commander to get off her deck and go do something useful.

  She rose and swam aft. As she was riding the lift down, Ife came over the comm.

  “Kathra, I have a message from someone named Wyll Koobitz, asking for a personal audience,” Ife said, her voice conveying some level of concern.

  And personal audience sounded wrong. Made Kathra sound like some alien princess come to Ogrorspoxu, rather than a simple merchant tracking down a pair of wayward crew.

  What had Daniel done to impress these people? Or piss them off?

  “Any other details?” Kathra asked.

  “Not currently, should I reply asking?” Ife continued.

  “Yes,” Kathra decided. “I’ll head to my office. Let The Haunt know that they’ll be in their seats a little longer. We may have to fly over there impressively or something.”

  Ife laughed and cut the line. Kathra rode down to the main deck and headed to her office instead of her ship.

  “They’re ready to talk,” Ife said when Kathra opened the line to the bridge from her desk. “Audio and video capable. No scrambling.”

  “Understood,” Kathra sat up and took a deep breath. “Put them through.”

  She rarely used the video channels, because it was cheaper and easier to just communicate by text most of the time. If she needed to talk to someone to their face, she could have them in her office, or fly to their ClanStar.

  But this was the start of a new era.

  Anndaing. Male. Older. Looked smaller than Crence Miray, but he had mentioned that he was tall and broad for one of his kind, so perhaps this Wyll Koobitz was just average.

  Except the face didn’t look remotely average. There weren’t many Anndaing on Kanus, but the ones who were there tended to be exceptional in their chosen field of endeavor, whether it was trade, manufacturing, or service.

  This shark put them all to shame.

  “Commander, it is a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said with a warm smile that flexed his hammer slightly forward. “My name is Wyll Koobitz and I am a representative of Merchants Bank. Daniel and Joane have both told me much about you, as has Crence Miray and the crew of Koni Swift.”

  She nodded and smiled back at the man. At least she knew better what she was dealing with. Her people had come this far and chatted with this man.

  That had to be a good sign. And Merchants Bank was the money in this sector, so he was politely telling her he spoke for the government, without ever being rude about it.

  “Thank you, sir,” she replied. “I have been looking forward to Ogrorspoxu, but the delays at Kanus were greater than I had anticipated.”

  Simple. Evasive. Clear without any clarity.

  “May I invite you to join me for dinner in a few hours aboard the station?” he asked. “I have a chef brimming over with excitement to try out some of his new recipes.”

  “I look forward to it, Koobitz,” she said, wondering what his game was. Recipes suggested that Daniel had been here long enough to teach someone new things, but wasn’t present currently. “How large should I plan for?”

  “I was thinking something compact,” he said. “Myself and a co-worker. You and perhaps Erin, if she can be spared with you off-vessel. Or A’Alhakoth.”

  Okay, so this shark had spoken with Daniel under most friendly circumstances, or Crence had supplied more information than Kathra had been expecting of a simple merchant.

  Assuming Crence Miray was a simple merchant, and not a spy of some sort, considering who she was speaking with now. And they had not uncovered Daniel’s secret, or they would have likely already been trying to destroy SeekerStar, afraid of another Urid-Varg.

  But he hadn’t mentioned Daniel or Joane. Kathra considered asking, but this was an open line, available
for anyone with the right sensor facing to listen to, if they were of a mind.

  Dinner would be the sort of privacy where she could ask.

  “I will bring someone,” Kathra said. “A’Alhakoth remained at Kanus as my Ambassador, along with the rest of the Tribal Squadron.”

  “Excellent,” he said, his eyes flicking off screen for a moment in that weird way they did at the ends of the hammers. “Say four hours, twenty minutes from now?”

  “I am looking forward to it, sir,” Kathra said.

  She cut the line and keyed Ife.

  “I heard,” the woman said. “Stand everyone down?”

  “Yes,” Kathra decided. “Comitatus meeting in the dining hall in thirty minutes. You join us, Ife.”

  Kathra caught the woman’s slight intake of breath, almost a gasp.

  “I will be there,” Ife replied, a little flustered.

  Ifedimma Ogu always handled sensors and communications, while Obioma Nneka was the primary pilot and Ngozi Obi usually was in charge of the various gun turrets, at least so far as being in command when they had to be fired.

  Ife had, in many ways, become Kathra’s other second in command on the ship, like Erin, but never had been elevated to the comitatus. Might never, for other reasons, but if Kathra would have to become a mother soon, everything and everyone else would have to change along with her.

  That would include bringing Ife and others into planning and command, especially if this was going to be larger than just the twenty-four women and one male of the comitatus.

  Kathra made her way to the dining hall, in case Ndidi missed the message. The young woman was busy teaching Ebube some new recipe when Kathra looked into the kitchen itself. With Daniel not around, Ndidi was the primary chef, although she also was generally in charge with him here.

  Like Ife, Ndidi would never fly Spectres. Possibly not command warships, although the brains and skill to command a kitchen would probably transfer over nicely. And Ndidi had as much killer instinct as Daniel did.

  Time to recruit new chefs, and use the kitchen as a training ground for military command?