by Blaze Ward
It made it possible to have a fast food chain that spanned the entirety of the Sept Empire, and had even reached its horrible, gustatory tentacles into the Free Worlds.
Anything to shave a tenth, or even a hundredths of a Crown off costs, in the name of bland mediocrity that could achieve the same low bar of food quality on every planet you ever visited.
“This is all your fault,” Iruoma caught up and walked on the side opposite Ndidi.
She had the rudest smile on her face as he turned to her.
“What?” Daniel stammered.
“A year ago, I would have considered that a pleasant meal, worth escaping Ugonna’s cooking for,” she continued, gesturing with one long arm back at the several nearly-identical storefronts they had finally emerged from. “You have ruined me now forever with your fancy cooking.”
Everyone laughed at that.
Ndidi leaned in as they walked and that young woman was positively cruel.
“I’m sure we could talk to Kathra about franchising, Iruoma,” she offered with glowing eyes. “Open up a store right there on WinterStar so you never have to be without.”
“Don’t you dare,” Iruoma’s eyes were bright. “I’d have to reconsider joining a cloister somewhere. Or something equally pitiful.”
“Just making sure,” Ndidi laughed. “Wouldn’t want you to feel left out or anything.”
Daniel smiled with her. Maybe he had made a positive impact on all their lives, after all. Ndidi could certainly handle her own bistro, were he to ever take her back to Genarde with him. The women would never allow someone like Ugonna to cook a pedestrian stew for them again, without an armed revolt.
He felt some of the weight slide off his shoulders.
Maybe he belonged here with these women, after all.
Twelve
Erin studied the crowd as they walked. She was the tallest person in today’s group, although both Kathra and Areen were taller in the inner circle of the comitatus.
Eyes followed them as they walked, but she was used to that. Proud African women, warriors who were taller than most men, stood out. Especially a whole group of them walking together, with a short Rabic man in the middle.
Today, she was paying closer attention to the faces turned her way. Who were the ones hunting Daniel? Who reported to Isaev? Who might be spies for the Sept?
Kathra had executed Ugonna for treason, and spread the story, so the Sept knew by now that they had lost their mole. How soon would they try to recruit another? And would it take the form of a woman walking up to join the Mbaysey on this station?
Erin tapped a thumb on her holster as she walked, cognizant that in many ways, the law out here was what you made of it. There was security on the station, but they were mostly concerned, like all stations, with keeping the drunks from causing trouble and making sure that the station inhabitants were safe.
If two outsiders wanted to ruckus with each other, property damage needed to be kept to a minimum. Daniel could affect minds. Erin and her sisters were here in case that wasn’t sufficient deterrence.
They had left the friendlier parts of the station, the ones Erin always thought of as a theme park, and moved down into the seedier zones. Where the locals lived and shopped, rather than the travelers and traders. Such places existed on every station, usually down a side corridor where the lighting wasn’t as good and maybe the air systems needed to have their filters cleaned a little more regularly than they were.
Cheap places to live. What she was looking for wouldn’t be in the bright pavilions out front.
Erin had point today. Joane was right behind her, and Iruoma had the rear, behind Ndidi. The entire situation had left her a little keyed up, but she also hadn’t had a good bar fight in a long time, either. Not since before Daniel.
“Let’s try here,” Ndidi called out as they entered into a wider section of the hallway with stores on each side, like a planet-side shopping mall. There was no mezzanine open above their heads, but the roof had been lifted a little, making this feel more spacious.
Had they lit it adequately, it might have felt quaint instead of despairing.
Erin turned to one side and let Joane and the others pass. She turned back so she could watch the open courtyard in front of her and her team inside. Joane followed the others about halfway and then stationed herself where she could see the rest of the store and Erin at the same time, so her mind was in that same place.
Comitatus.
Warriors.
Killers today, if need be.
She decided to call the open area in front of her a food court. Like it would be out in the pretty spaces, there were several small shops serving food around the walls. Fried. Boiled. Dried. No smell bad enough to turn her stomach, but obviously the sort of place where you ate when your cash flow was having problems, but you still needed protein and calories.
Not quite Skid Row, to use the old human term, but you could probably see it from here. Maybe even get there if you weren’t careful. Erin imagined that the station would handle vagrancy by putting your lazy ass on a shuttle to the surface. Or maybe selling you to a ship needing crew as a way to pay off fines.
The Free Worlds might be free, but they were also a little rough.
It didn’t help her state of mind that about half the people she could see weren’t human. And not just normal aliens you saw on many stations, like the Se’uh’pal that reminded her of walking rabbits, or the Vida snake people that slithered on a lower half.
If she remembered correctly, the thing directly across the way was an Atter. Certainly, it had the three legs and three arms. Three eyes and three mouths. Green and taller than her, they had reminded Erin of a walking cactus. Didn’t move much faster, either.
And there was no way to tell if it was watching her, since there was always one eye in her direction, regardless of which way the legs carried the creature. Erin shrugged internally and mostly ignored the creature. Any of them could outrun it, and she couldn’t see an obvious weapon on the harness circling that columnar body. Might be hidden under the three-way skirt, but she’d just deal with it if that became a problem.
Erin glanced back and caught Joane’s nod. No trouble so far. She turned her head back to the big space and scowled her disdain at anyone and everyone, just to see who might take offense.
Kathra was a master of that maneuver. She could attack an entire hall with it and immediately locate the three people who held ill will, just by the way they blinked.
If you didn’t care, you didn’t notice. If you had a problem with Kathra Omezi, your hackles would come up like a cat’s, even before you realized it.
Nobody rose angrily from one of the long tables out in front of her, indignant for reasons they might not even recognize. That was good. Erin was feeling maybe a touch feisty today, and really didn’t care if she had to hurt someone in the process. Might possibly be looking forward to it, although she would never suggest that out loud.
She did get somebody’s attention. Looked like a somebody.
Blue. Weird.
Pale blue hair. Darker blue skin. Like maybe one of those blond NorthEuros after you dipped them in blue wood stain for a bit and then let it run off.
Looking this way, and then down in what Erin might have classified as embarrassment when they locked eyes.
Close to human, from what Erin could see. Basic outline was there. Same for the face, although it was hard to tell from this far across the way. Something was off, but blue already told her the person she was staring at wasn’t human.
Female, maybe. Had the right shape, curvier rather than blocky. Was eating her lunch or something over there, just minding her own business, except for the way her eyes came up and stared every few seconds.
Erin paid attention to the rest of the space, on the off-chance she was dealing with some sort of honey-trap situation, but nobody else was even looking. She turned to Joane and nodded the woman closer. Might be worth rattling someone’s tree, just to see what fel
l out.
Kathra had warned Erin and the others that they might have to play a little rough.
Might be time to see.
Thirteen
It was still weird, being considered enough a member of the comitatus to join them in the field. Ndidi wasn’t armed, not like the other three, but she had a nice boning knife tucked into a pocket she had sewn to her thigh, where they had holsters.
Still, she was the least dangerous person here, and she knew it. Wasn’t even offended by it, because Kathra herself had explained the need for Ndidi’s brains in situations where the others might immediately resort to brawn.
Daniel was shopping. She had heard the story told enough times to understand that he didn’t know what he was looking for, except that it would be exotic and alien. Like a book written in K'bari, punched and put into a ring-binger that had originally been a Sept kitchen manual.
There was an even better story there than the contents themselves, but they would never hear it. That was a shame, because someone had found the book and salvaged it. How many other things like that just went out the trashlock to burn up in an atmosphere, rather than being saved for a future need.
Iruoma was standing close to Daniel as they looked at old books. Things that might be written in a language nobody could even recognize, let alone understand.
How many written languages were there among the stars? Even Earth and the Sept Empire had dozens that had come into space over the last two thousand years.
Other cultures, she had read, generally settled into something of a monoculture before making the leap outward to galactic civilization, but humans had been contacted early or something. Given the ability to escape the home system while there were still enough different cultures that human might yet come to be a byword for chaos with some of the better regimented species.
Or not. Who knew what space travel did to well-laid plans?
Ndidi was over in the hardware section of what could passably be called a junk store. Clothing filled a large chunk of the front, because finding things that fit in a store was rare, which was why the Mbaysey just bought cloth and made their own, most of the time. Or like Daniel, brought money with them and then could shop in stores like this and find things that fit.
These three aisles were hard to describe. Good, working electronics were in a glass case close to the proprietor, where you might ask to inspect something under his watchful eye. Things that could be easily dismantled and repurposed were over a row.
This was the leftovers.
Ndidi wasn’t a technician. She’d leave that sort of thing to Joane, who had an eye for it.
Today she was just touching things and judging them. Simple bits could be cut and welded from sheet and bar stock that ForgeStar produced. Other things could be printed using base materials that several of the clans specialized in.
This was junk nobody wanted anymore.
It had had value once. Someone had needed it, found it, bought it, carried it into space.
But it had ended up here.
A small pink cube small enough to fit in her palm seemed to stand out from all the black or gray cases around it, so Ndidi reached out a hand and grasped it.
Cool. Heavy in her hand, as though mostly metal, rather than some polymer.
The faces were all featureless, save for a button on one side, so she pressed it.
The cube leapt out of her hands before she could grasp it, and then hovered in the air rather than falling to the deck. It seemed to be glowing, but she couldn’t see what else it might be doing.
Ndidi shrugged and had reached out a hand to grab it again, when she saw points of light on her hand. It was a projector of some sort.
She put both hands close around it and saw lights like pinpricks showing on her hand. It didn’t want to move when she touched it, so Ndidi pressed the power button and suddenly it was just a heavy cube again, which she nearly dropped before she got fingers all the way around it.
Voices broke her out of her reverie. Daniel and Iruoma stepped close.
“Something’s up,” he said. “Find something?”
Ndidi looked around and realized that Joane had moved to the door and was standing close to Erin, deep in some quiet conversation that involved looking both directions like hawks.
“Maybe,” she turned her attention back to Daniel and held it up.
He studied it for a moment, but shrugged without comment. She had spent enough time around the man to know he had just asked all the voices in his head if anyone recognized it, and nobody had.
It must be a weird way to live, but it gave him an entire encyclopedia to call on, which made up for it.
Ndidi turned and walked purposefully to the proprietor, a fat human with skin like dark butter. He studied her for a second, and then the others.
“Two Guilders,” he muttered.
Ndidi didn’t have all day, since Erin needed backup, but she wasn’t about to just pay the asking price.
In the end, she got him down to one sloth and two fifths. And only took a minute to get there.
Ndidi slid the cube into a pouch on her left thigh and followed the others to whatever trouble seemed to be brewing out front.
Fourteen
Once the others joined her, Erin stepped out of the store and looked for an excuse to cause a little trouble. The blue girl was still there, delicately eating a soup or something. It involved a spoon, whatever she was doing.
“Problems?” Iruoma asked as she stepped close.
“Unlikely, but I’m going to push,” Erin replied in a low voice.
She moved, confident that the others would follow. The meeting later was one that Daniel needed to attend, now that the rich man had had a chance to send his people over and look at the ship. Kathra would come over to the station later with a second group, but Erin had wanted an afternoon to scout the station for trouble.
Even if she had to make some up.
She moved to a place serving human food. Udon noodles in broth with choice of protein from the menu over the counter.
“Small standard with shrimp,” she said as the tiny Spanic man behind the counter looked up at her.
She watched him ladle everything into a cheap bowl and add broth, uncaring if it was any good. It was possible to screw up something so basic, but for one Guilder, she wouldn’t be out anything she minded, if she ended up taking one sip and trashing it.
Daniel was right behind her as she paid and ordered the same, only with chicken, but the others remained out on the concourse watching everything.
She hadn’t mentioned the girl, so nobody else was locked on her right now. That was good. The blue girl ate slowly and looked this direction occasionally, just as she had earlier when Erin was across the way.
Watching.
Daniel paid as she walked out and stood with the others. He joined her a moment later and she set off across the way, bowl and spoon in hand.
The middle of the food court area was largely empty. Mid-afternoon by local clocks, more or less, so halfway between lunch and dinner crowds, if such a thing happened around here.
Erin walked to the table directly in front of the blue girl and sat down with her back to the woman. She nodded Daniel into the space directly across from her, more or less staring at the girl from about four meters away, and the others took up spots around them.
She tasted the udon enough to know that it wasn’t bad. Rich with flavor, even. Thick noodles. Size sixty shrimp inside. Hot enough to scald her mouth right now, so she just sipped a little and blew on it.
Erin caught Daniel’s eye and nodded. He was also sipping the udon, but appeared to be enjoying himself, so maybe this was what it was supposed to taste like. She’d never eaten Nihonese food growing up. Simple vegetables in broth had been her limit, occasionally with meat, frequently with noodles. Kathra’s mother, Yagazie, had been too poor to really do much, other than make sure everyone had nutritious food.
It had taken her daughter years to build up t
he relative wealth to hire an outsider who could teach them about good food.
“Behind me,” she said simply, focusing her eyes on his.
“Blue?” he murmured back.
Erin nodded.
He glanced that way a little longer, like a male might do with a pretty woman in a public place. They were like that when there wasn’t a woman to keep them in line.
Daniel turned back to her and nodded with only his eyes,
“Threat?” she asked.
His eyes got a little big and then he put down his bowl of noodles and his chopsticks.
A big breath swelled that scrawny chest for a moment, and then his eyes started to glow, ever so slightly.
You had to know what to look for in order to see it, but Daniel Lémieux had just stepped outside of himself.
Fifteen
He hated to do this. At the same time, he understood the need.
Daniel looked at the stranger one last time and then took hold of her mind as delicately as he could. Doing this with Mikhail Isaev he’d been a little more gruff. Maybe left the man with a headache on purpose afterwards, just for making him sit inside the mind of a sociopath with almost no human empathy whatsoever.
Probably made Isaev a better businessman, since he generally didn’t care who he hurt, but for Daniel, it would have probably just been less painful to have Kathra or someone punch him in the face with a fist for an hour.
Hopefully, the woman was different.
Blueness, distilled down into a mostly human form.
Cobalt hair. Periwinkle skin. Navy eyes with starkly bright whites around them.
Head more triangular than a human, seen face-on. Prominent forehead and larger eyes tapering down past dominating cheekbones to a tiny jaw.
Horizontal eyeslits, rather than the vertical which seemed more common, from what he had seen of other aliens.