WinterStar

by Blaze Ward

  And then the Sept would be able to break her and the comitatus. Without that, the tribe would not survive.

  She could either trust Daniel now, or never rely on the man again. It was as easy as that.

  Kathra saved the message file and closed it up so she could see her boards again. Everything was running normally on her ship, at least for now.

  She opened a different program and typed a message out for Erin, rather than calling her on the vox, as Daniel has suggested. Part of her didn’t want that man inside her head, but he had already given her the pieces she needed, in order to save them all.

  Erin,

  Got your note about you being delayed longer than the other SkyCamels. Make sure they’re all accounted for when your team is ready to depart. Half The Haunt will return to WinterStar now and prep for our next mission. Good luck and see you shortly.

  Kathra.

  36

  “No, I don’t understand,” Daniel shook his head and tried to understand what Erin was telling him.

  Being in a public space where they had to keep things obscured from casual listeners did not help.

  Erin nodded and thought about it for a second.

  “There are twelve camels on station right now,” she said. “Us and all those from ClanStars. Kathra wants us to make sure the others are all home and docked before we detach. Assuming she understood your message, she’s going to go take care of her urgent problem right now, and then wants to be able to run like hell to get to our other destination.”

  “That’s how that reads?” Daniel was skeptical, but he’d know the Commander for six months, and Erin had been raised almost from birth with the woman.

  “It is,” Erin reassured him. “I’m going to send a note to the StationMaster now and get an update on our departure windows, and then we’re going to go window shopping as a group. Understood?”

  Daniel nodded along with the other women. Safety in numbers. The spy would not likely want to reveal himself now, unless something exceptional were to happen, such as being able to capture Kathra Omezi herself on this deck, rather than chasing her across space again and again.

  The Sept were playing an exquisitely long game here, so the group should be safe from the authorities as long as they did nothing to provoke those folks. Individual women, even bad-ass, ex-comitatus killers like these, could be surprised if they were alone, if a committed group of men wanted to cause trouble.

  There was no group large enough that Daniel could not stop them. Today, that might involve hurting them, badly, in ways that were not explainable, unless Erin decided to start spreading stories that she was also a shamaness of some sort, capable of inflicting the evil eye hex on her victims.

  That might be fun. Daniel made a note to mention it to her and the Commander later, after they had escaped the current trap.

  When. Not if.

  They paid for the mediocre food and set out to shop. A TradeStation was not a place that was served by normal trade shipments from industrial planets. You could bring up food and materials from the planet below, but the stock in trade was normally whatever oddities might have made their way across space in the back of a SkyCamel or a tramp freighter.

  Once you got past the bodegas with a fixed inventory of goods, almost every store turned into a pawn shop of some sort eventually, filled with mysteries you could never solve, being reduced instead to making up wildly entertaining stories, however implausible they might be, to explain how something got here.

  The women were warriors and pilots by training. They did not have any great, esoteric needs, at least none they were willing to admit to in public, so Erin let Daniel stop at one shop that seemed to call his name for reasons he could not even formulate, let alone articulate.

  Junk. That was his impression when he stepped past the line in the deck where a hard hatch closed each night. Assuming they recognized night.

  Daniel had never really spent much time on stations. Were they constant affairs, running in shifts, but never actually closing? Certainly the humans would need to sleep, but they didn’t have the sun rising to reset their personal clocks, so they might remain on whatever schedule their ship ran, or just adjust to something here.

  Yet another mystery to solve, if he truly was going to remain in space.

  He wasn’t sure that he had any other option at this point, with the Star Turtle. Certainement, he could give the power away at some point, but to whom? And he didn’t dare just navigate the great beast up to a TradeStation like this and dock. If nothing else, the turtle was larger by overall volume.

  And so utterly alien that it would bring adventurers and assholes who wanted to see it, steal it, or at a minimum hassle him to the point he had to do something to them to make them stop.

  But the junk store called his name. Not like one of the voices in his gem, but just some triggered subconscious thing that said walk in here and shop.

  So he did.

  There had been a store between his restaurant on Genarde and the flat he rarely slept at, spending too much time sleeping in his office or at Angel’s apartment. It had started out selling military surplus clothing and personal gear in some forgotten past, and then moved on to random, industrial junk. Not electronics, although the few times he had wandered in curiously, there had also been that sort of thing scattered about.

  Surplus uniforms of a military cut and color, mostly the dark monochromes of the Sept, as if the owner got used things from retired military, or had a cousin who knew a dude who handled disposal from military depots. Thing had fallen off trucks with stunning regularity in that old neighborhood, to hear the stories bandied about.

  The women behind him were occasionally poking and prodding things, but mostly seemed content to follow him into the deeper parts of the store. The owner was human. Or at least close enough to pass in the semi-darkness he seemed to prefer. Daniel glanced up to confirm that half the lights were just off, and that he hadn’t wandered into a cave with a troll.

  Books on a shelf drew his eye. Deciphering the spine on one, it appeared to be a thick, Sept Navy cookbook. They always seemed to have complicated manuals on doing everything, from cooking, to vehicle maintenance, to all the ways to kill a human with common, household goods.

  Daniel ran his hand down the worn spine and pulled it off the shelf.

  “Finally going to learn to cook, Daniel?” Marra teased from close behind him.

  He suspected she occasionally regretted retiring from the comitatus to have her two daughters, if for no other reason than she didn’t get to eat his food all that often. She did, however, know an astonishingly broad range of dirty jokes.

  “Perhaps,” he said with a wink back at her. “If they capture me someday, I can always work in their kitchen instead of the laundry.”

  That got a round of chuckles out of all the women. They were close enough to him now that he could smell the rich scent of the soap they washed their hair with. Somehow it split the difference between coconut and pine, in ways he had never figured out, since no ClanStar grew either.

  Flipping it open, Daniel knew a moment of disappointment. The thing was a four-ring binder of the military style, straight on one post and seven centimeter loops for papers to be stacked.

  None of it was in a language he understood. If it was a language.

  From the heft, he had been expecting a complete inventory of everything a Sept naval cook should be expected to know, including starting the stove, cleaning it, and dismantling it for repair, as well as a thousand recipes. Useful, if only for the inspiration to go beyond the fifty or hundred dishes he normally cycled though.

  “What in the world?” Erin murmured, leaning over his shoulder to peek.

  “Something else, obviously,” Daniel replied. “Not what I was expecting.”

  He looked closer. Not Latin characters. Nor Rabic. Vaguely similar to Chinese ideograms, but written left to right instead of vertically. And denser in their construction, with many characters having six brush st
rokes at a minimum, with one on the first page containing twenty-two.

  Somebody muttered something, but Daniel didn’t get even the gist.

  “What did you say?” he turned to Erin.

  “I didn’t,” she retorted. “None of us did. What did you think you heard?”

  “Somebody said…” his voice trailed off absently.

  Daniel closed his eyes and looked inside.

  His ghosts were always just that. Vague shadows in half-light, half-shadow. Slightly-glowing eyes if he concentrated, but nothing more substantial than mist. One seemed to glow brighter. Daniel studied it.

  Three eyes across the furry face, with the nose below that stretched into a snout halfway between feline and canine for size.

  You speak this tongue, Daniel focused on it.

  The man nodded slowly. He had petite horns that swept back from his forehead and outward, rather like an ox.

  Show me, Daniel commanded.

  The characters seemed to change shape under Daniel’s gaze, settling on Latin letters arranged in French. Not what Daniel had learned as a child, but what he was most likely to communicate in, when he wasn’t speaking Spacer with these women.

  “Merde!” he whispered, suddenly reading a K'bari history of space exploration. Published nearly two thousand humans years ago, if he understood the date conversion. About the time humans were discovering industrial metallurgy, on the way to exploring space for the first time.

  “What?” Erin challenged him.

  Daniel had closed the book and pulled it tight against his chest, understanding that there was nobody within several thousand light-years capable of even translating it.

  If that.

  What other strange prizes might lurk, if you had all these friends willing to help?

  “Mine,” Daniel whispered to her. “I can read it.”

  “How…?” she started, before correcting herself. “No, not here. I know how. Anything else here we should snag?”

  Daniel turned and started to scan the shelves, but he needed both hands to do that.

  “Hold this,” he commanded Marra with as much intent sincerity as he could manage while his heard pounded.

  She took it from him after a cross look from Erin, and Daniel pulled every other book down. Most of them were what they professed to be, being bound rather than ringed. Mostly literature of one flavor or another, plus a shelf of repair manuals for starships Daniel had never heard of.

  He did pull each of those and study them against the memory of all those shuttles he had inherited, but there were no matches.

  But somewhere, someone had written such things. Now he knew to hit every TradeStation and look for them. At least he didn’t have to carry physical pictures around that might arouse suspicions.

  “Nothing,” he finally admitted glumly.

  At least until Marra handed him back the first book and Daniel felt a surge of wild excitement pass through his whole being.

  Urid-Varg’s victims had memories, but not annotated logs and star maps detailing the conqueror’s journey through the galaxy. Daniel knew the creature had at least touched the K'bari species at some point. Daniel could find them. Or at least their legacy.

  Daniel turned and staggered towards the front counter. Erin caught him by a shoulder before he pitched over. The price marked on the inner cover was three Guilders. Dinner for two at a regular restaurant, but not a fancy place. Eleven Sept Crowns, since Kathra had given him those coins to burn on this station.

  He let Erin bicker the man down to two Sloths and a fifth, and called it good. Seven Sept Crowns. The merchant seemed like he wanted to dicker merely for the practice, to break up an otherwise empty day.

  Daniel made his way out into the rest of the station with the tome in his hands.

  Did a star-borne species ever go extinct? Daniel had memories of destroying planets. Or at least nightmares, but he wasn’t trying to dig deep to determine right now.

  If your world was destroyed, did your species go with it? Losing Earth would not end humanity as a thing. They were on too many other worlds now. Plus spaceships.

  The K'bari were probably still out there somewhere as well.

  If he could find them.

  37

  At least they had escaped the Carggi system without the first of the many possible attacks Kathra had feared. Half of the SkyCamels had flown back to various ClanStars and docked, and then all the other ships besides WinterStar had moved at once, vanishing on cue on their valence drives into the darkness on the first of nine jumps to the eventual Concursion.

  If anybody had been planning anything stupid, that should have ruined most of his plans, as she had changed the original destination. The other five camels and all The Haunt had been in space for the last flight home, once Kathra knew her schedule.

  Nobody had tried their luck. And she had not been forced to rely on Daniel as an ugly surprise. Not yet, anyway. That day was coming.

  Kathra Omezi had to determine how intent the Sept was on pressing her and the tribe before she bit back, but that day was indeed coming.

  She hadn’t really understand the coded messages from Erin about a book Daniel had found, and thank the various gods of spacers that it wasn’t critical enough that he had to explain it to her himself, using the only utterly secure method of communication they had right now. But it had made Daniel happy, and Erin confident in future adventures, and that was enough for now.

  Even being a position to plan for a future was sometimes an iffy proposition.

  Kathra was on the bridge of WinterStar, having docked first and gotten the ship into position to flee even before the camels docked.

  But they had made it to jump safely.

  Given the time-criticality, Obioma had plotted a course with only two stops to get to Azgon, rather than the more-leisurely path the tribal squadron would take to meet up with them in a week in a nearby system.

  The Sept might find the rest, if Ugonna had given them enough information to crack codes, but Kathra had changed the original destination at the last minute before they leapt.

  “We are away, Commander,” Obioma confirmed as the stars went from dots to lines, when viewed out the open blast shields. They didn’t do that on a screen, becoming merely rapidly-moving dots, but the human eye interpreted things strangely in jump. “Twenty-seven hours to first coordinates.”

  “Very good,” Kathra replied, pushing herself off from a stanchion and heading towards the hatch aft and the elevator stack that would take her down to the ring. “Keep all of the cannons warm for now, just in case, and make sure everyone knows that we will come out of jump ready to flee or fight immediately.”

  “Understood, Kathra.”

  She didn’t fidget as the elevator carried her down into increasing gravity, but Kathra knew she was too wound up right now.

  Ugonna had been taken into custody without warning and put into a cell for the time being, but the woman needed to be dealt with, and everything needed to be resolved, now that WinterStar was away.

  But the only way to do that involved asking Daniel to do even more evil than he already had.

  At what point would her fragile, little, male chef break? She knew him to be tougher than most men. Almost a match for her comitatus in his own way. But they were well beyond Commander and Chef right now.

  They might never return to that simpler, magical place.

  Erin was waiting when the doors opened. Daniel was immediately behind her, with Areen and Kam as well. All of them looked harsh, although she doubted that the latter two knew why the situation had gotten so tense.

  “Follow me,” Kathra said simply, turning to her right and walking some of the excess energy off.

  Uphill, around the ring, her feet making almost as much noise as Daniel’s on the metal deck. WinterStar didn’t have a proper jail, as the Sept would have expected. Kathra’s ultimate sanction wasn’t to imprison someone, or even have them killed.

  No, if your crimes were sufficient
, she would just leave you on a TradeStation somewhere and strike your name from the tribal rolls.

  That wasn’t an option with Ugonna. The woman knew too much. Too many secrets, even before Daniel and the Star Turtle entered their lives. Now, she could tell the Sept about Urid-Varg.

  The Conqueror.

  Kathra stopped at the place where they normally held classes for small groups. The door was locked from the outside, and the interior had been isolated easily enough. Kathra nodded to Stina and Nkechi, who had been guarding the door, and they unlocked it.

  Ugonna had been surprised when Kathra ordered her locked in there earlier. As Kathra entered now, at the head of a small force of her warriors, Ugonna stood up from the floor and her face took up a snarl.

  “Come to kill me?” Ugonna sneered.

  Kathra nodded to Kam, who closed the door and stood before it, just in case the older woman decided to somehow make a break for it. Perhaps throw herself into an escape pod, leap out of jump and back into the universe, hoping that she was close enough to a planet or ship to survive?

  Those odds were still better than Kathra’s anger.

  “Do you have anything useful to say to give me pause?” Kathra asked.

  Most of the room separated the seven on this side from the prisoner. Ugonna’s eyes fell on Daniel. She spit on the floor between them.

  “You chose a male,” the woman snarled. “A Rabic one, at that, and not even a proper Mbaysey. An outsider. You are weak. The Sept will break you, and teach you that you will never measure up to Yagazie. Kill me, so I can be standing at the gates of hell to welcome you shortly.”

  Kathra nodded, a bit surprised at the rage bubbling off the woman, even now. It was more of a confession than she had been expecting, but the woman had to have known that she would be found out eventually.