WinterStar

by Blaze Ward

“But a male?” Erin asked again.

  “There are other men in the tribe, Erin,” Kathra pointed out starkly. “To be white or male does not disqualify you if you wish to belong to the Mbaysey, even if you stand out from the rest of the tribe. And it’s not like we’re hiring him to be a warrior. Or even a mechanic.”

  “He will be the only male on this entire vessel,” Erin pointed out, stretching for anything to deflect her commander’s will.

  “I’m sure there are a few women aboard who might be open-minded enough to consider him, for at least the odd tumble,” Kathra replied. “The new flavor of the month, as it were. You will not be required to participate, or even notice.”

  Again the flinch. Absolute horror at such a visceral level, to consider being touched by a male. Kathra had dabbled, in her youth. As had many of the women, before Kathra managed to convince the clans to rise up and finally seize their freedom from the Sept by leaving planets behind. Not every woman on this ship was born Mbaysey, but all belonged today, down to the lowliest, Anglo crew member. Or a Rabic one, perhaps.

  One of these days, even Kathra would need to go to the refrigeration station and pick out the sperm she would use to provide a new generation of Mbaysey leaders.

  It would be filtered, spun, and verified, so she would bear a daughter who could take up her crown, as the others in the comitatus did when they reached the point where they no longer had the reflexes to fly with her. It hadn’t been long enough since they were free, but there were a few, and there would be more over the next few years.

  Modern science was a wonderful thing. The tribe could trade for the sperm they needed to remain viable, without ever needing all that many men around. Kathra had set the limit at twenty percent of births and members.

  Of those males born, some would choose to leave the tribe later, seeking their fortune in a patriarchal galaxy more favorable to their kind. The rest would come out of the training crèches and find their place in the softer parts of the tribe. Teachers of the young. Artists. Nothing that required them to do anything physical or dangerous.

  “Are there other complaints, Erin?” Kathra asked, watching the woman continue to fidget with extra energy.

  “None that will likely sway you, once you’re like this,” Erin shrugged and grinned.

  She had fired her shot and watched it bounce harmlessly off Kathra’s armor. And they both knew it.

  “Should I send someone else when we get to the station?” Kathra asked, studying the woman who was her right hand.

  “No, I will do it,” Erin stood. “Best this fool of a man learn his place quickly enough, if he’s going to be serving the comitatus.”

  Kathra nodded and smiled as the woman departed without another word. That would be an interesting conversation, if she could but be a fly on the wall to watch.

  Her command vessel, WinterStar, had a full crew, hundreds of hard working women doing everything necessary to keep such a warship functioning. Around them, were the myriad other ships that made up the Mbaysey tribal squadron. ForgeStar. IronStar. The WaterStars. The many ClanStars that each held a facet of her people.

  Into this Kathra knew she would rile things, like a rock dropped into a still pond.

  But how often does one get the opportunity to hire a mere cook with a Golden Diamond next to his name?

  3

  Erin would have preferred to do this in her fightership, Spectre Two, but she needed to pick up supplies for the fleet as well as retrieve the new cook, so she had flown in from WinterStar in an ugly SkyCamel, the stubby, boxy transports that were the complete opposite of her sleek dagger.

  Two places up front for flying crew. A cargo area with flip down seats that could haul a dozen people or boxes in combinations. No particle cannons. Nearly blind. At least she had a lot of armor around her.

  But she would not subject even one of the other women of the comitatus to an ignorant male.

  The ship shifted into the airlock with a solid thunk as the station reached out and grabbed it with metal clamps. A moment later, the gravity field inducers extended their fingers and down became down again.

  “SkyCamel Six docked,” Erin announce tersely over the radio.

  Neither of her escorts replied, other than to flash a green light on her piloting board, but Erin knew that Spectre Five and Eight would immediately move to dock as well, so that she would have her own wingwomen when she got onto the deck.

  She didn’t like Sept TradeStations, but they were a fact of life when you lived in deep space. At least she didn’t have to do something stupid today and actually land on a planetary surface. Those were the worst, just imagining all the things that could go wrong with nowhere to flee.

  Because she was also feeling extra feisty, Erin had worn her shorts today, instead of the long pants she normally had on when she was around outsiders. It let everyone see the cybernetic replacement that started at her right knee with a big, armored housing over the joint that was as much cosmetic as functional. The titanium post that was her shin. The secondary hinge across the back that looked like a calf muscle under long pants. The hoof-like foot, since she hadn’t even bothered with the toe extenders she could attach when wearing boots.

  There was a reason she had never let them talk her into the sleek replacements available back in the Sept Empire, the ones that looked just like a real leg with fake flesh over the top. Erin told everyone that she was concerned it would throw off her flying reflexes, having grown so used to the current, mechanical version.

  That was a lie, but a good enough one that the Commander had never said anything about it.

  Let this silly-ass white male see that he was dealing with warriors, rather than shuttle pilots. The pistol on one hip and the knife on the other would barely register, she knew, because everybody zeroed in on that leg and their mouths would drop open like fish.

  Erin stepped onto the deck once the lock completed cycling and looked around for trouble. It was always weird, standing on a platform with artificial gravity. The builders tended to do silly shit like make square corners into geometric shapes.

  WinterStar and all the rest of the tribal squadron vessels were too small for Grav Field Inducers, so they were just big, spinning disks rotating around an engine and power core in zero gee. Centrifugal forces kept your feet on the outer hull as it spun, and you could get anywhere by walking in a straight line long enough.

  Here, the fools actually had slidewalks installed on perfectly-flat decks, to haul people around. Lazy gits.

  Most of the folks in the immediate vicinity were human. That made sense, with the Sept Empire being centered on Earth and most of the early colonies. A few alien worlds had joined later, some of them even by an invitation not delivered from bolt cannons.

  The others were generally just wanderers who had happened along.

  There was a Vida slithering into a bar down the way, the creature’s belly scales hissing on the rough, steel floor and the tail spikes tapping rhythmically. She couldn’t see enough of the upright top half to determine if it was a male or female, but it was definitely a warrior, with a thin katana on a shoulder baldric and a pistol hanging off one hip. Or whatever you called the part where it stopped looking like a scaly human and started looking like a big snake.

  Erin didn’t really care. The Mbaysey were mostly human, although Kathra would probably be willing to accept any warrior or mechanic that wished to join the tribe and showed enough competence or potential.

  As long as they were female. The men could go elsewhere. Or learn to cook. There was always that.

  Two figures approached from beyond the bar the Vida had disappeared into. Joane and Iruoma. Spectre Five and Eight. Her backup.

  Joane had taken the time to pick her dark, kinky hair up into the sort of huge, poofy halo that shouldn’t fit under any flight helmet. Iruoma just got up every morning and shaved her head smooth to show off the complicated tattoos.

  Good enough.

  Erin pulled out her commbox and sent
off a message to the package. Station authorities already knew she was here, and everything had been negotiated, so work crews would soon board the SkyCamel and fill it with cargo.

  She still had a man to deal with.

  There was no response, which really put sand in her gears right now. Hopefully the stupid bastard wasn’t drunk somewhere, or asleep. She had docked and stepped onto this deck within seventeen seconds of the scheduled time. Stupid git should have been waiting for her to arrive.

  Then he stepped out of that same bar the Vida had entered. She knew him as soon as they locked eyes across the distance.

  Short. Swarthy. Not an African genotype like her, but too dark and reddish in skin to be Euro or Anglo. Spanic, she might have guessed, had she not known he was actually Rabic.

  He had a bag slung over his shoulder that was smaller than she had been expecting. Maybe thirty centimeters in diameter and twice that long. Semi-rigid. Anonymous. Like the man.

  Erin considered meeting the man halfway as he started walking towards her, but that might suggest a willingness to do exactly that, so she just watched him walk towards her. Joane and Iruoma took up corner positions where they could cover all approaches. Sept authorities generally didn’t bother the Mbaysey, but that wasn’t the same as saying no gendarme troopers wouldn’t suddenly get punchy.

  Still, this was a TradeStation, not an Outpost. The rules were different here.

  Iruoma wasn’t the shortest woman in the comitatus at one hundred and seventy centimeters tall, but most of the rest were taller than most of the men around. Erin was one hundred eighty-five in height, organic and metal appendages included.

  This male was two or three centimeters shorter than Iruoma. Maybe. Depending on the heel on his boots. And not a muscle-bound dwarf either. It was like someone had taken an average male and just shrunk him down with magic, keeping all the proportions. Black, wavy hair starting to gray, but the face was largely unlined.

  And it wasn’t expensive rejuvenation treatments. Those left the skin on the neck loose. No, he was just going gray young.

  Dark eyes that didn’t miss a thing. Scanned her foot just enough to nod to himself, before moving on to study her face, her tattoo, and her mohawk. Glanced at the other two woman, dismissed them as her wings, and addressed himself to her.

  “Daniel Lémieux. Am I in the right place?”

  Voice was a little rough. Like talking quietly was a new thing to him, when he wanted to yell. Kitchens on planets must be loud places.

  Erin nodded.

  “Gear?” she asked.

  He pulled the bag around front and tapped it with a palm.

  “All set.”

  “That’s it?” Erin was a little shocked.

  Most fools traveling in deep space had trunks of crap, because they had never sat down and thinned their needs to the true basics.

  Or never faced the poverty of a renegade star tribe trying to make a living without gravity.

  “Yes,” Lémieux replied. “I left the rest on Genarde for them to burn.”

  Erin had wondered. Most people had baggage. Physical as well as the rest.

  Top chefs like him didn’t just come on the market like this one had. Must be having a mid-life crisis early and gone off to reinvent himself.

  Or some other stupid, upper-middle-class-mysticism bullshit that rich white people indulged in.

  Being the smallest person here didn’t cause him to flinch though, or get aggressive. Small men usually did, but he seemed poised and self-contained in ways she hadn’t been expecting.

  What had she been expecting?

  Male.

  Territorial dominance games. Sexual innuendo and boundary pushing. Stupid crap she would have to break him of quickly, maybe using enough blunt force to get through to the pinhead’s brain if she was lucky.

  Mbaysey didn’t tolerate men. Didn’t even need them, beyond a duty they could fulfill alone in a quiet chamber with a small pump.

  Chef-boy just watched her without fidgeting or rocking. Eyes stayed on her face, instead of wandering down her curves. As if a man was ever touching those.

  “The station will need an hour to load my shuttle,” Erin looked at the man.

  “The bar I was just in has food I would rate above poisonous, but below adequate,” the cook said. “There is a burger joint in a nearby corridor that seems better run, but I’ve had to stretch my funds to get here and didn’t feel like indulging in the expense while I waited.”

  He fell silent and watched her.

  What had she been expecting?

  He had offered two suggestions to kill time, rated them, and waited patiently for her to decide, as if she was in charge.

  She was, but most men outside the Mbaysey never seemed to grasp that they weren’t.

  Erin glanced at Joane and Iruoma. Both nodded and twitched in the silent language that said they preferred the burgers.

  Meat was a rare delicacy in the tribal squadron. The ClanStars produced all manner of fruits and vegetables in their hydroponics operations, but anything more than a few miniature cattle for milk required too much space and feed.

  A good chunk of the cargo she was hauling, by mass but not value, included frozen chubs of ground meat. Several different kinds. None of the cuts particularly choice, but compact protein that a young girl needed if she was going to be tall and strong when she grew up.

  “Burgers,” Erin decided.

  The cook nodded sharply.

  “Do you know the place, or should I lead?” he asked.

  Again, offering information, without assuming that he would decide.

  Erin gestured for him to walk and listened as the other two women fell in behind her.

  Maybe this punk could be made to fit in with the rest of the females on WinterStar, if he could be trained well enough.

  They’d see.

  4

  What the hell had he been expecting?

  Daniel didn’t have a good answer to that one. While Angel had been petite, around half the women he had encountered in his adult life were taller than he was, even if they weren’t wearing heels, but these three were all big, tough, dangerous women. Break him in half if they felt like it.

  Inwardly, he shrugged as the concierge sat them in a corner booth and dropped laminated menus before departing.

  It was easier to not think of them as women at all. He’d done enough research on the public boards to understand that the Mbaysey were almost as close as you could get to the ancient Amazon warrior legends of Central Asia, back on Earth. Not that he’d ever been there, but one picked up all sorts of odd tidbits when researching food and recipes.

  Almost no men. Women filled all the traditionally-masculine roles that he had grown up with, except that they considered cook to be a lesser role, which was apparently why they were willing to hire him.

  Since Angel, Daniel wasn’t all that interested in female dalliance right now. Not that he liked men, but he was going to need time to get over his broken soul to consider a woman.

  She hadn’t broken his heart, but certainly had uncorked a rage he had forgotten about, buried deep beneath the need to run a perfect bistro. Seven months wandering in deep space hadn’t done more than perhaps shave the thinnest slice of prosciutto off the top of that anger.

  Still, he was here. Seated at a table with three impressive women. Fighter pilots and warriors. Calm, silent, and hard as freaking nails.

  He might have forgotten what the other end of the female spectrum was like, after dealing with Angel for so long.

  “Joane?” he said, pointing a finger at the tall one with the enormous hair.

  She nodded silently, with perhaps the faintest hint of a smile.

  “Iruoma?” he turned to the one next to him, with tattoos on her skull that told him just how tough this woman was, because someone had once explained to Daniel how much something like that hurt.

  “Iruoma,” she corrected his pronunciation with a hard, cold face.

  Daniel nod
ded gratefully and went back to the menu. Erin was easy to pronounce, hard to miss, and apparently not the least bit willing to engage in idle chitchat today.

  He could work with that. His life probably hinged on these women having a reasonable opinion of him, because he’d be on their ship soon, deep in space, with no place to go if they got angry.

  At least nobody from Gastropode magazine was likely to send a spy out to rate his food when he wasn’t prepared.

  Starting with a clean slate, like mornings back with that first bistro he had ever worked at. Buy whatever was available at the market today, figure out how to work magic with it, wipe the board clean when you run out of something.

  Start over again tomorrow.

  He contained a hollow sigh and tried to keep himself as compact as possible, physically as well as emotionally. Good kitchens were so tight that brushing people as you went by was unavoidable. He had never stood for bad touching from anyone on his staff, but his inner crew had been together for years, so physical contact as one went by was natural. People had bad days and needed a hand on a shoulder or a hug. People had good days and a high-five was a way to celebrate.

  Daniel was pretty sure he’d pull back a bloody stump if he tried to touch these women.

  He listened as they ordered, coming around to him last not because of courtesy, but relevance. The waitress knew these women, by reputation if not sight. He was the afterthought.

  Each of the three had different tastes, but cataloging something like that was second nature by now.

  “Number seven,” he said simply when it was his turn. “With cold, sweet tea to drink.”

  That got him an interesting look from the leader, Erin. Black eyes bored in on him, making Daniel wonder if he’d missed something in his research. Not that there was much information available about the tribe, but he’d consumed it.

  He stared back, working hard to keep his face neutral. But also not backing down from something so basic as what he liked to eat.

  Madam, I am a chef. That will be my kitchen and you will be my customer. And you will be satisfied with your food.