by Blaze Ward
“How so?” she inquired.
“If they sought to located Urid-Varg, and have begun tracking me, then it is entirely possibly that they consider themselves powerful enough to take on the Turtle,” Daniel drank some more wine to calm his suddenly racing nerves. “WinterStar would be no match for someone like that.”
“We can always flee,” Kathra sought to reassure him.
“Do not let any alien ship get close to you, Commander,” Daniel said. “If they have a spider web device, I do not know how long its reach might be. WinterStar might become a fly.”
“Noted,” she said, handing him back the glass. “I will leave you to your wine now. You appear to be safe enough, but let me know if they touch you again, so we can track them instead.”
“Oui,” he nodded wearily.
A knock at the hatch distracted both of them.
For the briefest moment, Daniel panicked clear to the bottom of his soul and reached out with his powers, adrenaline surging through his entire body to the point he thought he might become physically ill.
The touch outside was warm and friendly. Patient, even.
He opened the hatch.
“Hello, Areen,” he smiled at her.
That she occasionally spent the night down in his quarters was well known, but such events were not all that common. Still, she flushed like a teenager caught by her parents when she saw Kathra already standing and moving towards the door.
The Commander just laughed.
“You’ll be good for what ails him,” Kathra said as she reached the other woman. “Daniel is feeling small and alone tonight.”
She turned from the hallway and smiled at him.
“All I need is a little time,” the Commander said. “And then we might give anyone a good game.”
“That’s what frightens me,” Daniel murmured, but she was already departing and Areen was stuck halfway into his cabin.
“Would you like some company?” she asked in that rich alto tone of hers.
He watched her cornrow braids move as she walked, mesmerized as if by Medusa coming for him.
Her skin reminded Daniel of an old, copper Half-Crown. Not the brighter red of a new coin, but an older one that had been out in the galaxy for a while and picked up some dirt and weathering. The kind you could clean up with enough patience and the right touch.
If she allowed it.
“I can think of nothing better in this galaxy right now,” Daniel replied, frozen in place.
The woman had half a head on him, and outweighed him to boot, but tonight she had turned off all the signals of the bad-ass warrior, and turned herself into a woman. Soft, pliant, gentle even.
She took the bottle from his hand and placed it carefully on the end table.
He watched, in awe as always, as she reached down and pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it onto the chair with a wry smile.
“I might have needs as well,” she said, pushing him down onto his back and climbing onto the bed with him like a snake seeking warmth.
She kissed him. Daniel almost felt like a bystander, watching everything from outside his own body, but her warmth suddenly cut through the cold that had gripped his soul. He reached for her and she was there.
Ten
Kathra looked up as Erin knocked on the door frame then entered, throwing herself more or less into one of the two chairs.
“You rang?” Erin asked.
Kathra studied her second in command for a moment, closing the screen she had been reading and leaving the inventory for later. Paperwork never ended, even when you were poor.
In fact, it got more important, since every Guilder had to be accounted for, planned for, and used to the best efficiency.
“I was just down talking to Daniel,” Kathra said.
Erin snorted.
“Did you manage to pry the bottle out of his hands first?” she laughed. “He looked like he needed a stiff drink by the time we got back to the ship.”
“I did not, but I did drink a little with him,” Kathra said. “He’s in good hands now.”
“Oh?” Erin sat up a little straighter.
“Areen decided to keep him company.”
Kathra noted the shiver of disgust that ran through Erin’s frame. She didn’t feel the same level of revulsion that a male might touch her, but she also understood that human sexuality ran along a variety of axes. Areen’s bisexuality wasn’t even one end, according to scientists, but it represented one end here, where few men were allowed, and most women were happy to do without their services.
She could keep the tribe intact from the refrigerator for decades right now. In fact, she would need to make such a medical visit at some point, but it could wait another year, she thought.
Erin only touched women. And that was fine. Daniel’s needs were few and rather vanilla. And Areen seemed to enjoy it, so he could remain among them.
“So what did you learn from our cook?” Erin asked as she settled herself again.
“He thinks that he may be being chased,” Kathra said.
“By?”
“Enemies of Urid-Varg,” Kathra contemplated who such people might be, but had no answers. “People who might have been hounding that salaud across the galaxy and driving him into human space.”
“So, dangerous?” Erin perked up, always the warrior.
“Dangerous to Urid-Varg,” Kathra corrected her. “Since Daniel is in command now, they might be amenable to reason.”
“Do we know anything?” Erin asked.
“Pure speculation on his part,” Kathra offered. “Extrapolated outwards from the simple fact of someone touching him mentally and then retreating.”
“So it could be anyone?” Erin asked.
“Someone alien, yes,” Kathra agreed. “Pay attention to any non-humans you encounter on station. Anyone that seems to be too interested in our comings and goings.”
“It’s the Free Worlds, Kathra,” Erin pointed out. “We’re not in the Sept, where ninety-five percent of the population is human. Tavle Jocia sits on so many trade routes, so far from Earth itself, that we’re probably only fifty percent human on the concourse.”
“Understood, but you’ll make a point of traveling only in roving packs of three or more,” Kathra ordered. “Armed at all times. Paranoid at all times. I’m not sure if having Daniel with us when we’re on station is a good idea or a bad one, but we’ll deal with that later. You inform the comitatus.”
“What about recruiting?” Erin asked, her voice turning sharp.
“What about it?” Kathra countered.
“You’re looking to build a bigger vessel than WinterStar,” Erin noted. “Either we decommission our old boat, or we’ll need to expand to a second crew. Same if you end up building some of the support vessels you talked about with Factor Isaev. That means vetting. If we’re paranoid, do we trust anybody?”
“We have Daniel to help,” Kathra’s voice turned dark. “Any spies will either be deflected before they join, or we can deal with them later.”
“You thinking of having Daniel turn them inside out?” Erin’s eyes squinted.
“I doubt he would agree,” Kathra said. “That boy is too squeamish for that, but he makes up for it elsewhere. I’ll ask if it comes down to the perfect situation, but more likely we’d just execute anyone that managed to get past his abilities and your paranoia to make it aboard the squadron. And we can hold each of the ClanStars personally responsible for any spies that they recruit as we expand, so they’ll be extra vigilant.”
Erin nodded, but Kathra could see the way she was biting her upper lip in thought.
“Out with it,” she continued.
“What about recruiting aliens?” Erin said. “Alien women, if we can identify them, following the same rules as the rest of the Mbaysey. Dare we trust them?”
Kathra leaned back in her chair and thought about it. She’d always entertained the notion, but up until now, all of her followers were human. Most of them ref
ugees from the Sept Empire, although a few Free Worlders had joined. Usually, those were escaping bad marital situations or running away from home to prevent an arranged marriage.
They had never been this far from the Sept Empire, geographically or culturally. Or this deep in the Free Worlds, where non-humans started to become the dominant population.
The risks would go through the roof, but Mbaysey was a state of mind, not a fact of biology. Women freed from the tyranny of the racist, sexist Persians that had founded the Sept Empire. Few men allowed, and those vetted closely. All the important jobs held by women, with the sole exception of cooking for Kathra’s comitatus, and even then, Ndidi was handling that chore more than Daniel.
And both would have to give way soon. Such was the nature of this adventure.
“In small groups,” Kathra decided. “Individuals who walk in will be subject to the same sorts of scrutiny as mobs volunteering. And Daniel will have to meet them all. Same for the ClanStars, so we can make sure they can’t communicate home.”
“How would you send a message FTL?” Erin goggled and sat up.
“I have no idea, Erin,” Kathra said. “But we’re moving into alien realms. What can they do?”
“Point taken,” Erin sat back. “Nobody can explain Daniel or the Star Turtle, either.”
Erin paused, contemplative again. Kathra waited for her to decide to speak.
“Are we really considering turning our back on human space altogether?” she finally asked.
“No,” Kathra said simply. “We are, however, going to see about opening new trade and communication routes to places humans have perhaps never gone, so that we might partake of their technology and at the same time not be dependent on the Free Worlds resisting the Sept Empire for our own freedom.”
“You think the Sept are coming?” Erin asked.
“I have no doubts, Erin,” Kathra said. “The only question in my mind is when.”
Eleven
Tavle Jocia TradeStation. Daniel couldn’t help but study the looming mass as Erin’s SkyCamel was on final approach. Couldn’t help but to reach out and try to smell the scents that the station gave off. The people gave off.
Whatever he had sensed a week ago was gone now. Daniel sometimes questioned his own sanity on the topic, wondering if he had imagined everything, the underlying paranoias of Urid-Varg flavoring everything.
It was not a good way to live.
He had given up wine altogether, afraid that he would slip into a bottle one of these days and never find his way out again. It was a common enough problem in a commercial kitchen, where the easiest way to deal with everyday stress involved taking a drink of something to numb the pain.
Followed by another.
And more.
“You breathing over there?” Erin asked, her voice intruding on Daniel and breaking him out of the cycle of squirreling in on himself.
Merde, he was having a bad day.
“Trying,” Daniel answered.
It was always easier to simply be honest with these women. They had all seen the insides of his mind enough times to understand the truth and not be offended by it.
“Try harder,” she smiled as he looked over.
That brought a smile to his face. Erin had been the hardest of the women when he first came aboard. The one most offended that Kathra had hired a male, and a Rabic one to boot.
At least he had won her over.
“So we have time before the meeting,” Daniel said. “What’s on the afternoon schedule?”
“K'bari,” Erin replied, her grin growing even wider.
“Huh?”
Daniel was feeling especially eloquent today.
“That book you found on K'bari history was hidden in a Sept cookbook,” she said, turning a little more serious now. “We have time to haunt Tavle Jocia’s darker corners and see if there’s anything interesting. Remember where we’re likely to go next, if all this works out.”
“I feel like the child in the fairy tale,” Daniel sobered. “Following a trail of breadcrumbs backwards in the forest, waiting for the evil witch that my grandmother warned me about.”
“Fortunately, you brought along all the big, bad wolves, Daniel,” Erin laughed. “We’ll protect you.”
“That you’ll even need to is my fear, Erin,” he replied. “I’d rather just stay in my kitchen and commit art, but then I’m in Ndidi’s hair all the time as well.”
“What are you two talking about?” her voice floated up from the rear. “I heard my name.”
“The need to teach you small arms and close combat, Ndidi,” Erin called back.
“I can dice some fool just as well as I can a tomato,” Ndidi sassed.
Daniel turned in his chair by loosening his harness a little. The SkyCamel wasn’t carrying any cargo today, and the alien ship was currently docked aboard WinterStar while Kathra worked out her deal with the Trade Factor. Ndidi, Joane, and Iruoma were strapped in back there, waiting to get to the station and go for a walk.
Kathra had ordered three, so Erin had brought three with her when she and Daniel went to the station. He certainly felt more secure than he would have alone, with these women around him, but it didn’t help but give him a terrible foreboding as well.
“Stand by for docking,” Erin called to everyone.
The SkyCamel entered the maw of the landing bay like a great whale swallowing them, and then they were committed as the mouth closed.
Slowly, the side walls moved in and locked into place to provide the smallest volume that needed to be pressurized, and air began to hiss against the hull.
Daniel felt the band around his chest loosening as the air pressure built up around them. He unbuckled last and stood, moving to the rear of the shuttle and waiting for the door to open.
Out onto the concourse, he sniffed, but didn’t detect evil or malignancy aimed at him or the women surrounding him. Hopefully, there was none.
And if you believed that, I’ve got a used starship to sell you.
Except that he did have used ships to sell people, so maybe that was a bad metaphor. Some of them were so alien that they didn’t even use valance drives to move between stars, so he couldn’t sell them until Kathra Omezi figured out their secrets.
What was an entirely new stardrive technology worth on the open market?
“You okay?” Ndidi stepped close and stared into his eyes.
“Define okay,” he smiled at her grimly. “I successfully managed pants this morning, against great odds. Presumably we’ll be eating lunch in public at some point and I shall strive not to embarrass the rest of you. Am I wound too tight for my own good? Oh, oui.”
“As long as you’ve got it under control,” Ndidi grinned at him and turned in such a way that she could lean in with her shoulder and bump him.
It was a friendly gesture, born of the kitchen. When your hands were full and your eyes focused on a pan, a simple bump could communicate friendly support. It was never a good idea to pat someone on the bottom uninvited when there were knives close at hand.
But he smiled at her. They all understood his secrets, and his stresses.
Even how critical he had become to the success of the Mbaysey themselves, although he had never wished for something like that.
What would he do in the future when he was finally ready for a new challenge? Something simple, like opening a new bistro in Paris, back on Earth, in the shadow of Gastropode magazine’s corporate headquarters?
He laughed at that silly thought, realizing that something like that would be a vacation compared to what he was doing now.
“Let’s go shop,” he turned his smile to Erin and let her lead.
Tavle Jocia’s TradeStation followed most of the standards of deep space. Flat disks several decks thick, each attached to a central housing like lobes on a flower. The station itself was enormous, big enough to include grav field inducers so that everyone could walk around like they were on the surface of a ship, or out on one of the
rings on WinterStar, where things spun just fast enough to mimic gravity.
The planet below was a blue marble with several connected oceans that produced masses of seafood and such for export. The limited land and relative poverty of heavier elements in the crust meant that industrial products had to be imported from other systems, and the folks who had colonized had brought with them a maritime-style, trade-based culture and economy.
You could find everything on these docks, with a little work and a lot of exercise. Fortunately, Daniel was in far better shape today than a kitchen had ever left him. He could easily keep up with these four women, when he would have been gasping and dragging had he tried to climb this many steps or walk this long a year before.
The docks were at the lowest levels of this lobe, as they were on most, so you climbed stairs to the promenade decks that were in the middle. Personal quarters were above, both for long-term inhabitants as well as the hotels for transients, ranging from simple sleeper coffins all the way up to elaborate suites, such as the one the Trade Factor owned.
Erin brought them out in a place Daniel could only classify as a tourist zone. Everything was pretty and had been painted recently. Pots filled with plants and flowers were everywhere as he looked around, adding a floral undertone to the air and helping clean it.
Even the people he could see, human as well as alien, all seemed to have been touched by the happiness fairy at some point today. He wondered if they were all robots programmed to look cheery at all times.
Worse, they were probably organic, and that behavior had been pounded relentlessly into them.
He looked forward to escaping to one of the grungier sections of the station, especially given the scent of hot oil he picked up as he followed Erin along. Someplace nearby was cooking lunch by breading it and dropping it into the grease station, probably straight from the freezer and programmed to a specific timer on the package.
He tried to keep the growl of disapproval to himself, but Ndidi had caught it. Or maybe she felt the same way about industrialized food, disseminated from central warehouses off-world aboard those massive transport freighters that carried thousands of shipping containers between worlds.