by Blaze Ward
But most of those places were small, and irregularly shaped. What he had seen when he looked before was a perfect sphere of silence, uninterrupted by thought.
There were a few places above him.
He leaned back and looked at the thatched roof overhead, as if his eyes could pierce the decks to see, but they remained proof.
“Dinner,” Erin poked him quietly as the waitress delivered plates of food.
He must have been gone longer than he thought, if they’d had long enough to cook.
“Eat,” Erin said quietly as he came back to himself. “Then we’ll talk.”
Twenty-Seven
Erin paid attention to Daniel, even as the other three were focused on immediate threats. She saw his eyes get big and then small, as he concentrated on something overhead. He had been gone so long that she had to wake him up when food arrived.
They ate in relative silence, companionable as everyone consumed pretty good burgers.
Once the waitress removed plates, Erin studied Daniel’s face closer.
“Did you find them?” she asked.
“No,” he slumped. “But I think I might know where to look.”
“The upper decks?” Erin asked, guessing based on earlier. “Permanent housing rather than transient?”
“It might not be enough that they are looking for me,” Daniel replied. “They may be waiting for me to lead them to the Turtle.”
“So they could destroy it?” Iruoma leaned in.
“Or both of us,” Daniel turned to her. “I don’t know where Urid-Varg got it. None of the ghosts remember that far back. At least not the ones willing to talk to me. It’s possible he stole it somewhere along the line and they want it back.”
“Didn’t you say it was alive?” Kam asked now, her hair cropped even closer than the normal one centimeter halo she normally wore. Today, it was almost as short as Iruoma’s shaved head.
“Indeed,” he agreed. “Slowly consuming things like the ClanStars and ForgeStar do, but in the case of the Turtle, it lives off such things, and grows extremely slowly.”
“So it will get even bigger?” Kam pursued the thought.
“It already has,” Daniel said. “It grows perhaps one millimeter a year right now, but I don’t know if it is adult, or just that old. The person who knew is probably dead, and I’m hoping these aren’t gendarme come to arrest me for possession of stolen goods.”
Erin smiled along with the rest of the women. Accessories to the crime, perhaps, but those stolen goods were upgrading the Tribal Squadron to something that could perhaps resist even ambitious pirates and local navies that wished to challenge the Mbaysey.
It would be even more interesting once both WinterStar and SeekerStar were fully operational. Erin could only imagine the power of eighty or more Spectres flying in a massive formation, escorting the two warships into some sort of combat.
Not enough to defeat a Septagon, but probably enough to annihilate a couple of Patrols, if the fools didn’t immediately flee from Kathra Omezi.
“So where do we go now?” she asked Daniel, falling back on practical needs.
“Up,” Daniel replied. “I need to find a spot where I can sit quietly in the middle of the inhabitant deck and look. I can see nothing now, but they might be hiding, or they might have left. And they might be figments of my imagination, but I need to prove that the dog did not bark.”
“You are a weird man, Daniel Lémieux,” Nkechi smiled at him.
“Oui,” he smiled back. “Keeps things from getting boring.”
“In light of the last year or so, perhaps boring would not be the worst outcome?” she fired back at him.
“Trying, mademoiselle,” he said.
Erin paid and they departed. They remained all the way around Daniel as escorts, but he had to direct her, heading the group into an elevator that took them to a promenade largely dedicated to locals. It wasn’t off-limits to spacers, but didn’t have much in the way of shops, and those were more focused on the needs of someone living on the station, like a green grocer and a library filled with actual books, rather than electronic versions you could buy for storage in your devices to keep you entertained between stations.
Erin didn’t have a library card for Tavle Jocia TradeStation, and didn’t feel like going through the process of getting one, so she found a bench nearby and sat Daniel down. The other three spread out a little, but Erin sat down next to him, mostly to keep him from falling over if he got too lost in himself.
“Go,” she ordered him. “We’ve got you here, and I can always tackle you again if you lose your mind.”
They shared a quick grin at that. Urid-Varg had snuck up on him sleeping and taken over. Areen had followed and called for help, and Erin had bounced him off a deck, breaking the monster’s hold long enough for Daniel to tell Kathra what she needed to do to kill the beast and free Daniel.
At least as free as he would ever get.
Erin opened her skyvox and sent a coded pulse outwards. She had no idea where the newest member of the comitatus was hiding, but A’Alhakoth needed to know that they were hunting so she could stalk with them.
She wasn’t sure what the young woman might be able to do, but any surprise would help Erin twist a bad situation to her advantage.
Twenty-Eight
There were beads of sweat at his browline and his palms were clammy, but Daniel swallowed past his sudden fear and tried to breathe regularly.
He didn’t know why he was doing this. It would have been just as easy to pretend nothing was wrong and flee the station with the Commander, once she had enough big guns to stop anybody chasing them.
Except he knew that SeekerStar was going to be just as powerless against whoever they were as WinterStar had been against Urid-Varg. Those mental powers didn’t care how thick the steel plates were that protected your hull. Or how far a Ram Cannon could range to damage someone.
They crept in on you at night, when you thought to sleep, bringing terrible dreams.
Urid-Varg would have been like that, Daniel realized as his butt warmed the seat beneath him. The Conqueror might have chosen to take all of humanity under his control, or at least the key elements.
Humans were still young in galactic terms. The K'bari had gotten old and perhaps a little senescent by the time they met their doom, but humans were still full of fight.
In Daniel’s worst nightmares, he saw himself as some sort of messiah figure, unleashing his forces on an unsuspecting galaxy and ruling over everything with his human governors.
It wouldn’t last. They never did. But he could enjoy a few centuries of utter control in the meantime. Urid-Varg had only learned that lesson about failure later, after enough of his empires had washed away like sand castles under his feet.
Daniel closed his eyes and leaned enough of his weight against Erin to reassure himself that he wasn’t alone.
He reached inside himself and leapt outwards.
Perhaps he was closer. Perhaps it was finally time for the confrontation they had been engineering. Maybe it was just luck, but Daniel could not identify the good or bad that came with it.
A space of darkness appeared in the middle of his vision. In the past, he had seen a station like this as something akin to a school of fish, or perhaps a swarm of fireflies. Bright lights swirling around.
Something.
There was a hollow spot, perfectly spherical. He wasn’t at the edge of it, but he could see it clearly enough. Lights approaching the edge of it vanished when they crossed that line, while others appeared from within, as if people walking out of darkness to arrive at the edge of a streetlight.
Daniel left his body behind and orbited the sphere, always remaining a considerable distance back, lest they somehow detect the effect of his approaching. It felt organic, in ways he could not adequately describe.
Soft and pliable, rather than the rigidity of glass or steel. Wavering a little, back and forth, as if the surface was actually a pond and a bird h
ad just landed, sending out tiny ripples that wobbled away.
It felt cold, though, rather than warm. Like it would suck all the heat out of his body if he touched it. A machine would feel warm, generating such a field and projecting it.
Daniel returned to his body and flinched as he awoke from whatever dreams he had possessed. Erin was still next to him. Fortunately, he hadn’t started to drool on her just yet.
He sought a map of the station in his memory and compared that to the place he had just been.
“Lobe two,” he muttered as he righted himself.
“The alien wing,” she replied, just as quietly.
“Oui,” Daniel nodded and started to rise, slowly lest his head fall off. “They are not human, but we already knew that. This just confirms that they are even less so than I thought.”
Erin stood quicker and caught him just as he was about to pitch over forwards.
“Are you okay to do this?” she asked. “It looks like it has taken more out of you than it should have.”
“That’s just the fear, Erin,” he said, staring up at her face and noting the concern hidden carefully in the back of her eyes. “If I don’t do this now, I might never work up the courage to try again. If you think it might be too dangerous, the four of you could withdraw and return to SeekerStar.”
It wasn’t meant to be a low blow. He wasn’t sure there was much they could do, besides keep him from falling over, but these women were warriors of Kathra’s comitatus. They would see such a thing as cowardice, so Erin growled at him, stood him upright again, and nodded to the others.
Five of them, walking into hell perhaps.
At least he wouldn’t be alone.
Twenty-Nine
Her new skyvox beeped quietly as A’Alhakoth read a history of the recent Sept Empire, written from the perspective of the Free Worlds, who didn’t have any particular reason to view their neighbor as a patriotic fighter for human rights and liberty, like the Sept liked to see themselves.
The Free Worlds had chosen to integrate humans with non-humans, mixing freely in their colonies and their laws, unlike the Sept, who maintained a rigid caste system that was baked directly into their entire legal system.
As a tribe of Central African Diaspora—and A’Alhakoth understood what that meant now—the Mbaysey were near the bottom of the ladder, all the more so because they were a matriarchal society almost as extreme as one could get.
The only thing that could be worse, as far as the Persians ruling the Sept Empire were concerned, would be an alien woman seeking legal rights.
No, that wasn’t true. She was at least close enough to pass for human if the lights were dim. There were others, like the Vida, that were probably rated lower than a Sept Vuzurgan’s prize stallions and camels, if push came to shove.
A’Alhakoth was astonished and insulted by such behavior, but it really wasn’t much different from her homeworld, when she really thought about it. The Sept just had the benefit of ruling thousands of worlds, rather than all of one and small parts of two others.
But her vox caused her to close the reader and mentally prepare herself. Erin had sent a message earlier that her team was hunting, so A’Alhakoth was dressed, prepared, and almost hyper.
This new message narrowed things down. Daniel had apparently found a lead. Or a sign.
A’Alhakoth checked her gear and confirmed everything. Cheap clothing in that universal gray that everyone at the bottom of the social and economic ladder seemed to wear. Hair tied was tied back today, rather than the complicated braids she normally wore.
Hopefully, the look would convey vulnerability to humans encountering her. Non-threatening.
Anything that might let her get close enough to get to someone with hands or a small club.
She wasn’t bringing blades or firearms today. Again, non-threatening. And she didn’t know what information Daniel or Erin might require, so she needed to be able to take someone down hard but not kill them.
At least not immediately.
She situated everything in their appropriate pockets, and looked back into the room where she had been staying. Humans called them coffins, but she was a smaller scale, so it was just crowded, rather than psychologically oppressive. A’Alhakoth made her way to the door on hands and knees and exited.
The place was cheap enough. Low profile, for someone hanging on precariously to the lowest rung of society. There had been offers of companionship in the last few days. Even offers to pay for such things. A’Alhakoth had only had to beat someone up once before everyone became much more polite.
She looked all the way around her before moving on and confirmed that she was alone as she locked the hatch and took a breath. Six stacks of six coffins, one atop the other like a square insect hive with catwalks across the front leading to stairs on her right.
Erin had said Lobe Two. A’Alhakoth was familiar with that area, but had never stayed there. It was dedicated to non-standard environments, for aliens uncomfortable with the rest of the station, whether that was too hot, too cold, or the wrong gravity. A few places even had the ability to maintain entirely separate atmospheres, if you needed certain things to breathe, or not breathe.
Hopefully, whoever it was Daniel was chasing was just hiding over there, safer because you could remain in your own area.
A’Alhakoth didn’t want to think about what monsters might lurk on those decks.
Thirty
It was nearly done. Kathra stood on the bridge of her new CommandStar and smiled. Ifedimma Ife Ogu and her women were hard at work in the zero-gravity space, triple-checking everything, but they were happy.
Larger, faster, tougher, meaner than WinterStar and ready to take the tribe into a new future. Hopefully, one where the Sept would not pursue her. Perhaps no one would be able to follow her, because she was never going to be tied even to a star nation again.
Daniel had done much to ensure that future, handing her the four ships for sale to a collector like the man standing next to her, and promising to return later with at least half of the rest for a future sale.
WinterStar had been a little packed, carrying twenty-three Spectres and the four alien craft. SeekerStar could take the whole load and still have plenty of space left on the flight deck.
New ClanStars? New WinterStars?
What could she do with a larger tribe?
“I take it that the ship meets with your approval, Commander?” Trade Factor Isaev asked with a knowing smile. He was standing to one side with his feet hooked under a bar and one hand holding a post for people who didn’t have a seat to buckle into, like Ife and her crew.
The man was also alone save for his majordomo, with several members of the comitatus providing security here on the bridge. Everyone was aboard SeekerStar finally, save for a skeleton crew on WinterStar to maintain systems.
“It does,” Kathra replied.
She didn’t like the man one bit, but he had been a relatively honest businessman once they got down to brass tacks. Probably surprised that she hadn’t swooned at his charisma, but once the man got over himself, he had treated Kathra like any other businessman with whom deals could be made.
“I was amazed at how raw you decided to leave everything,” Isaev continued, gesturing at the walls. Kathra’s eyes followed his hands. “Most vessels I build spend substantial amounts of time and resources with insulation and paint to make things more…homey, I suppose.”
“You’ve been aboard WinterStar,” Kathra smiled starkly at the man. “Such things are unnecessary. We’ll add a coat of paint here later, but I expect the crew to need to make modifications of the vessel over the next several years, once they get a feel for the habits they’ll need.”
She could see the confusion on the man’s face, but he was used to building cargo vessels and yachts for rich playboys. People with money to burn.
Even after selling the rest of Daniel’s collection, the Mbaysey wouldn’t be rich. Just better off. Maybe enough to build a few more s
hips, recruit more crew, and go sailing.
And nobody outside the comitatus was aware that she planned to build a larger ship at some point. A CityStar that could hold as many as forty thousand people just on that one ship, with space to expand by adding more rings slowly over time as population grew.
It would not be a station, although it would act like one much of the time. More like a tiny Bishop ring with engines attached to a central hub, with enough surface area to include parks and orchards like Daniel had on his Turtle.
A place where the entire tribe could gather regularly, perhaps move to permanently, rather than having all the ClanStars, each with a tiny crew, isolated from one another most of the time and growing slowly into different cultures.
Over generations, that would be problematic, but Kathra was already planning for that day.
“It will be the work of my people to study every square centimeter of the surface,” Kathra explained as the man’s confusion remained present. “This is just a skeleton, that they will eventually turn into a home.”
“And you still plan to return with more of those ships to sell?” he asked.
“Indeed, but I expect we’ll auction some of those, just so your competitors have the chance to get involved and spend their own money on supporting my people.”
“What else do you expect to find out there?” he asked, finally turning serious. “You wouldn’t be dumping all of those ships now, unless there was something better to be had.”
“I have my suspicions,” Kathra replied with a conspiratorial smile that the man shared. “Daniel has his research and notes. But we won’t know until we get there. At that point, we might be able to bring prizes back. At worst, I can hire a mobile dry-dock to haul something large or sell you the coordinates and let you retrieve it.”