by Blaze Ward
“Submitted himself, body and soul, to the comitatus,” Kathra said. “To me.”
She could not give them the truth, lest some fool of a shark decide to try for the gem of which they were hopefully still ignorant. That just might trigger the exact, violent confrontation that they seemed to fear lay just under these polite words.
She had wondered why Koobitz required a second before now. The sharks had enough of the truth to be nervous, but not enough to be reassured.
“All of my women watch him like hawks, gentlemen,” Kathra continued, gesturing to Stina. “Any deviation on his part will result in his death. He knows that. Accepts it. That truth has actually kept him sane, after what Urid-Varg did to him, as Daniel Lémieux is no longer truly human, as you or I understand such a thing.”
“Tell me about the Sept,” Koobitz suddenly spoke up, pivoting the conversation. “Why should we fear them? What will they do when they discover the Anndaing?”
“The Axial Megacannon on the bow of a Septagon can destroy cities on the surface of a planet from low orbit,” Kathra said. “I have seen the results when someone angered the Sept enough to be made an example of. That is one of the reasons Yagazie decided to remove the Mbaysey from the reservation on Tazo when she won our freedom from Sept slavery.”
Kathra paused to take a breath, before what erupted from her mouth turned to acidic fire.
“I could have brought Erin with me, but chose Stina. Erin has a barcode tattooed on her right cheek, done in solidarity with her grandmother,” she continued, tapping her cheek to show the place. “Ezinne had that mark because she was property. Not a person. A thing that a Sept nobleman owned.”
Both sharks recoiled a little now from the ferocity of her words. The anger in her voice. The fire no doubt sparking in her eyes.
“We knew that our freedom was a temporary thing,” Kathra said. “A piece of paper from a court that would only last until the powerful ones who lost property found a way to overturn it. Or subvert it. We fled them. They pursued. Even beyond their own borders. The Sept eventually invaded Free Worlds space with a Septagon, trying to destroy me as an example to any other people who wanted to be free. They will come here eventually. You are not even humanoid enough to rate under their laws, Anndaing merchants. Merely intelligent animals, much like the Vida or Atter. The Se’uh’pal will continue to serve them as alien traders, because the Se’uh’pal are apolitical creatures, only interested in profit and loss. Their language does not include a word for morality. They use Spacer when they have to discuss such an alien concept.”
Kathra leaned back now, aware that she had probably looked like she was about to come across the table at those two. Unintentionally, but body language across species was always a complicated thing to understand. Especially as heated as she had gotten.
“So if they came, you would fight them?” Koobitz asked, his voice as subdued as his hammers now.
“One of the reasons we wanted to visit Kanus first, instead of proceeding to Ogrorspoxu, was to determine its feasibility as a base from which the squadron might explore, while generally being safe from piracy and other problems, gentlemen,” Kathra answered. “That would free SeekerStar up to perhaps range into Free Worlds space and beyond, looking for the bases we already know that the Sept must have built, to have delivered a Septagon to Tavle Jocia.”
“What would you do to such bases?” Gendrah leaned forward now, his elbows on the table in a manner almost identical to what she had done.
“Destroy them,” Kathra said simply. “Without such things, the Sept are greatly curtailed, because of the logistics necessary to feed four hundred thousand crew.”
“Four hundred thousand?” Gendrah gasped.
“Three hundred on the Septagon itself,” Kathra nodded. “Another hundred thousand on the Patrols they bring, plus the ships that would be necessary just to haul food around. And that is only one Septagon squadron. They have many.”
Koobitz started to say something, but Kathra heard her name being spoken.
She cocked her head and waved the shark to silence as she focused her mind on that sound.
Except it wasn’t a sound. Nobody in here had said her name. It was a mental touch, much like Daniel did, but this wasn’t Daniel.
It was alien. The colors were wrong. The flavors were off. Even the air tasted differently.
Kathra came back to herself and turned back to Wyll Koobitz. She pulled out a comm and pressed the signal to contact SeekerStar.
Koobitz had leaned back, in a body language she could only classify as concerned.
“Whatever defensive systems you have aboard this station, I suggest you activate them right now,” she said simply.
Gendrah had a look of confusion, but Koobitz nodded. He reached into a pocket inside his jacket and pulled out a device remarkably similar to the one in her hand. Physics was physics, and Anndaing hands were similar enough to human ones for an engineer designing a tool.
“Commander?” Ife was on the line, sounding breathless, like she had run from the washroom to take this call.
“Sound the alert,” Kathra ordered the woman. “Prepare for combat immediately. Ife, you will take command of SeekerStar until I can return. Do not allow Erin to launch The Haunt unless you yourself think it appropriate, but do not spend time trying to get me to answer questions, because I will know less than you do and I am not sure how quickly I can rejoin you.”
“Understood,” Ife said. In the background, Kathra could hear the alert sirens begin to sound. “What has happened?”
“The Ishtan have found us,” Kathra said. “Assume the Sept are with them.”
She cut the line and focused on Ambassador Koobitz. He had turned sallow, but was regaining his color as she watched.
“When this emergency is done, I will have questions,” he said simply.
“You may not like the answers,” Kathra replied.
“I am aware of that, Commander,” he said. “But if your enemies have come this far to attack you, they may have just become my enemies as well.”
They nodded at each other, the promise of a future reckoning put off for now.
“Now, can we help you get back to your ship?” he continued.
“No,” Kathra decided, rising and prompting the other three to join her. “The battlefield will be too dangerous for me shortly, as I came in a SkyCamel and not a Spectre. Plus, I make a promise to a dangerous, old woman, back at Kanus.”
“What was that promise, Commander?” Gendrah asked, confused.
“To outlive all of you.”
Forty-Two
Daniel still wasn’t sure how he felt about everything he had learned at the boneyard, but he at least had more answers than before. If the questions had also multiplied madly, at least that was a predictable thing.
None of the problems would be his to solve. Kathra would be in charge, as was appropriate. He was just her chef.
They hadn’t exactly taken their time returning to Ogrorspoxu, but Tragee had perhaps plotted his various jumps with less precision, zig-zagging as he did, just so nobody seeing them suddenly appear might be able to guess their origins.
The Merchants Bank was deadly serious about keeping the secrecy of that world tightly contained.
The had hit the farthest navigable edges of Ogrorspoxu’s system with the previous jump. Stayed there long enough for Daniel to fix everyone one last meal as a group, before whatever was going to happen when he returned to meet Wyll.
Much would have changed, probably on both sides of the equation.
Seeing that golden-red star faint in the distance out the bridge window now just reinforced all that.
Before, all of this had been merely an academic exercise. Locate another long-lost species, like the K’bari, and learn their story. He had mused with several of the women of the comitatus about whether a star-traveling people could ever actually go extinct. Several of them were educated enough, sharp enough to have strong opinions on the topic, as one wou
ld expect from a tribe of warriors intent on doing the same thing.
Nobody knew, but the consensus was that you could thin yourselves out too far to maintain viability. SeekerStar and all the other vessels kept sperm banks as repositories for exactly that reason. More than sixty-three hundred women, but only fifteen hundred men, plus donations acquired over time at various stops.
Still, plenty to keep the tribe intact for a time. Even a single ClanStar, if it got separated from the others, could maintain the tribe for generations with careful planning.
Raja was studying him as Tragee prepared the last jump. Joane had found a seat off to one side, but he was too keyed up to sit.
“So now what?” she asked.
And that was the crux of it.
“That depends on your boss,” Daniel said. “And his bosses.”
“You think they will deal?” she asked.
“He would not have allowed us to even know that such a place existed, if they weren’t close to a deal in their own hammers,” Daniel said. “The question is what they will want from us in exchange, and whether Kathra will be willing to pay that price.”
Raja nodded. They were all operating above their pay grade right now. Playing with the gods, as it were, except that Daniel already contained a mad god within him. Only Joane knew that truth.
“You folks ready?” Tragee asked, tilted his head to bring a withering right eye upon them.
Daniel almost expected him to roll that eye, but Tragee was like that. All he wanted to do was fly. Politics was for folks with too much time on their hands and not enough stars.
“Jump,” Raja said simply. “We’ll be home soon and the adventure will be over, Tragee.”
“Thank the goddess,” he said as he triggered the drives.
They rode in a frozen tableau for a few minutes as they dropped down close enough to Ogrorspoxu to come under terminal flight controls. You had to have a comm lag under five seconds to talk meaningfully, anyway.
Windrunner dropped back into space and settled down to begin maneuvering.
“Hey, that’s odd,” Tragee said absently.
Something about his tone had Daniel’s head completely around and Joane up out of her seat before the echo died.
“What?” Daniel demanded harshly.
A finger went out and touched the screen between the two seats.
“SeekerStar, if I’m reading this correctly,” he said, turning his hammer to look up at Daniel. “Yours?”
Daniel looked at the list of ships close to the station.
Sure enough, SeekerStar. They were still too far away to see anything but a dot of light if they looked in the right direction, though.
“Can we hail them?” Joane asked.
“I’ll handle it, Tragee,” Raja said. “You talk to the station.”
Windrunner jarred. It was like an earthquake running through the plates of the ship, plus a sound like someone had dropped a stack of ceramic plates on the floor. Daniel had to grip the back of the pilot’s seat to avoid being thrown to the deck.
“What?” he managed.
“Oh, shit, we’re taking fire from somewhere!” Raja cried. She flipped a switch and her screen changed. “Someone’s got a targeting lock of some kind on us, but it’s nothing like I’ve ever seen before.”
“Show me,” Joane commanded, her voice suddenly deep and angry. She glanced at Daniel, but he was more than willing to let her handle things.
Raja flipped more switches as the vessel rocked a second and third time.
Ranging fire, growing more accurately, although Daniel had no idea how he knew such a thing.
One of his ghosts, he supposed.
“SeptStar?” Raja asked, blankly. “What does that mean?”
On the screen, Daniel could see a smaller, sleeker version of SeekerStar, charging out of the darkness. It had the same cylindrical shape, with a smaller ring around the outside and a thicker torso. Guns at both ends. Turrets around the rim. Those were the ones hammering the hull of Windrunner.
Daniel knew what would happen when the bow cannons finally found them.
“Evasive maneuvering!” Joane yelled sharply. “NOW! All engines open. Pitch, roll, and yaw, Tragee, if you want to live. Do we have guns?”
“What?” Raja seemed lost.
Daniel staggered to a nearby seat and planted himself. There was little he could do, but if he was strapped in, it was possible to step outside the vessel and see what was happening from an alien perspective.
“DO YOU HAVE GUNS?!?” Joane snarled.
“Yes,” Raja replied meekly.
“Take command of the guns and return fire,” Joane ordered. “What is the most armored section of this vessel?”
“The bridge,” Tragee answered, hands dancing across keys as Raja seemed paralyzed.
“Order Bipahl and Kayna up here then,” Joane took charge. “Better they be safe with us if the ship gets broken in two.”
Daniel finished strapping the harness around his body and took a deep breath.
Time to fight them on terms they understood.
Forty-Three
Hadi still had a hard time seeing only the physical world, as he now had some bizarre extra sense that was not bounded by the walls and steel of SeptStar around him. Perhaps only his imagination saved him.
Fortunately, he was a bureaucrat, and not an artist. That would keep him closer to sane.
SeptStar had slipped quietly into this system, cutting across the arc of a chord while chasing the chef across the galaxy, when it became obvious he was returning here to meet Kathra Omezi.
She was here. Hadi could see her, in ways that were not immediately obvious even to himself.
Hadi somehow knew that she was aboard that massive station in close orbit, even as her vessel lurked nearby. Close, but well away from where today’s action would be.
The chef was closer. And the Ishtan had led him to the man. He was their target anyway.
Somehow, they were in his mind now, even though he was on the bridge of SeptStar in zero gravity, rather than out on the ring where his office was, or their quarters. Four of them, wrapped around him like furry, pink tentacles.
They had placed a destination in his mind. Hadi had relayed it to the pilot seated nearby. SeptStar had jumped to those coordinates from the edge of the darkness, almost in perfect synchronicity with his target.
Had they been more accurate, he could have landed exactly behind them, in the perfect kill zone for the bow guns.
A Septagon was designed to kill things that way. Hadi had commanded one of the great ones. As it was, he was atop the little ship almost as soon as they arrived.
“Open fire as you bear,” Hadi ordered his gun commander as they locked onto the vessel.
The thing was alien. Barely a third of the size of one of his Patrol vessels from the old squadron, yet it was flat, as though it had gravity field inducers under the decks.
Were the generators so small that the ship was at one third gravity at all times? Or had the aliens developed something better? More efficient? Smaller?
The Ishtan had not crossed this sector of space in their deathless quest for Urid-Varg, so they had no explanation for the people he could see, or the thousands of vessels plying this system around him.
On SeptStar’s rim, three of the guns began to hammer at the vessel bearing Lémieux. The range was long but not impossible for them. The Ram Cannons on the bow would require the ship to come about if he wanted to hit them, though.
That was next.
“Pilot, ride the gyros hard,” Hadi said loudly. “Bring us about to engage and chase.”
“Aye, sir,” the man responded without looking up.
Hadi had originally picked this crew for Amirin to command, selecting the best he had from all his officers and men on Vorgash. All men he trusted. They would give their all for him today.
“All hands, stand by for maneuvers,” the pilot announced on the intercom.
If you weren’
t strapped down by now, you had no business in this navy, so any injuries you sustained would just be proof of that.
If he was really upset, Hadi could always order such a fool put into a lifepod and fired into an alien system as the ultimate punishment. He had no doubts that the locals would either capture such a worthless specimen or eat them.
Either way, it would no longer be his problem.
SeptStar rattled heavily.
“Enemy vessel is returning fire,” the gunner said. “Weapons better than particle cannons, from the scan. Not as powerful as the Ram Cannon.”
Good enough. Particle cannons could damage the ship, but not badly, unless he just sat there for an hour and let them. Ram Cannons on the station would be too far away to even hit SeptStar, so he would be safe. Only a vessel maneuvering to close with him now would be someone to worry about.
SeptStar’s ring continued to turn, bringing new turrets to bear and allowing the old ones time to cool and recharge. He could sustain a killing fire all day without risking weapons being damaged from overuse.
Downrange, his target finally began to move, pivoting like a worm on a hook trying to escape a fish. It wouldn’t do him much good as SeptStar had the wind on him, poised above and behind the tinier vessel. Anything the chef did now would just be telegraphed to SeptStar’s gunners and pilot, allowing Hadi to respond just as quickly.
His only chance lay in flight, and the possibility that he might be able to outrun SeptStar’s valence drives enough to get away.
Every second he remained in this system was just one more closer to his own destruction.
Better, even in flight he could not escape, no matter how hard he tried, as Hadi and the Ishtan guiding him could find him, every single time he thought to stop and catch his breath.
I have you now.
A heavier impact jarred the entire hull. The little popguns on the alien had been astonishingly accurate, but weren’t heavy enough to damage SeptStar’s armor.
This was the thump of something larger.