by Blaze Ward
SeptStar
Star Tribes: Book Three
Blaze Ward
Knotted Road Press
Contents
K’bari
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Kaniea
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Ishtan
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Read More!
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
K’bari
One
Daniel still wasn’t quite sure why he was alive, but the Commander had said that she wasn’t going to allow him to die just yet, so he supposed that he still had a purpose. Whatever was that terrible thing that the gods had chosen for him had not been made clear yet, but after the last year or so, he knew at least that they had a cold, black sense of humor about them.
What that meant for mere mortals was left to the imagination.
And cooks like him to uncover.
Daniel had no idea what to expect, though. The gem at the base of his throat still contained the thousand or more victims of Urid-Varg's crimes against the entire galaxy, so he had those memories to deal with. That would not change as long as he was alive. At least that was his more pressing fear.
His great ship, the Star Turtle, was dead. Gone forever. Plunged into the heart of a star after having been mortally wounded by that Septagon’s Axial Megacannon. Daniel had almost gone with it, but for the help of his friends.
It was good to have friends.
And the refusal of the Commander to let him die in peace.
He sat today in the wardroom where the comitatus would join him soon for their evening meal. SeekerStar was a starship, forever traveling the darkness of space, but the Commander still kept something like the hours of the planet-bound, even if the ship itself never slept and there was always someone on duty.
Three meals per day. Plus the odd snacks and treats as the women needed or Daniel wished to experiment.
Cooking was Daniel’s job.
Originally, he had trained Ndidi to replace him as the Commander’s personal chef, on the presumption that he would be far too busy with other tasks and adventures to reliably cook for all these women. And they were all women.
Commander Kathra Omezi. Twenty-two other warriors, with various retirements, who flew the Spectre fightercraft into combat when necessary. Plus Ndidi, who had been accepted into that inner circle in spite of being as short as Daniel and needing glasses to see anything more than two meters away.
The young woman approached him now, the apron on her front stained with use. The smells emanating from the kitchen told him that the big casserole dishes had gone into the oven and were undergoing their own brand of magic.
Soon enough, he would rise from his bench and go back there to help her prep vegetables, but there was time.
“What’s today’s task?” she asked as she sat directly across the long trestle table from him.
“More translation,” he said, looking down at the book on his left and the small datapad on his right. “Ovanii this time.”
The first book he had translated, Daniel had done by hand, writing everything out slowly in a reasonably clear hand, so that it could be typed into the system later by anyone else, but that had turned out to be him as well. This time, he was just skipping the middle step. It made the raw translation slower, but the overall task faster.
Efficiency, if not art. Not something he wanted in his kitchen, but good enough for the rest of the galaxy to deal with.
Daniel held up the book he had found in a junk shop at the most recent TradeStation stop for advanced supplies. It was written in Ovanii, which he supposed qualified as a lost language today, as nobody was even aware where the Ovanii homeworld was, or where any modern descendants might be found.
Ndidi took the book from him and turned it to her. She carefully held a finger to mark his page in the middle and then flipped randomly through the rest, not that it would do her any good.
Ovanii was a language that used letters to build words, like Spacer or French, but the letters were completely different, and there were thirty-seven of them. At least that made it easier, as Daniel didn’t have to figure out complex sounds like th or Ж.
She handed it back a moment later.
“So what did you find?” she asked.
Ndidi had frequently accompanied him on his station jaunts, usually when Erin ferried them over, in that woman’s job as Commander Omezi’s second in command.
“It turns out to be a collection of poetry and drama,” Daniel smiled and took it back from her. “Nobody in my head speaks Ovanii, but it was just close enough to written Anndaing that one of my ghosts could translate it for me.”
“Anndaing?” Ndidi perked up. “The ones that uplifted A’Alhakoth’s people?”
“The same,” Daniel nodded. “The Anndaing have apparently been traveling over several regions of space for a long time, trading whenever people get advanced enough, but leaving the more primitive societies alone. Protecting them from outsiders, as it were.”
“And the Ovanii?” she asked.
“Raiders,” Daniel felt his face turn a little sour. “Like all the bad vid show representations of Vikings from the ancient times on Earth, with none of their advanced culture discussed. Well, that’s not true, and I wonder how much is filtered through my ghost’s personal opinions. You have to be pretty sophisticated to build valence drives and starships. And they wrote lovely literature, at least as well as I’m able to translate it. This person might have been their equivalent of Shakespeare, or Rumi, or Gibran.”
“What happened to them?” Ndidi cocked her head a little.
“I’m not sure,” Daniel shrugged. “My ghost is not sure, either.”
“Have you asked A’Alhakoth?” Ndidi perked up. “Her people might have legends, you know.”
Daniel blinked. He had not thought that the Kaniea woman might know about the Ovanii, but it made sense. Her people had been raised to technology by the Anndaing just a few generations ago. Who knew what the Anndaing might have told them?
“Thank you,” he said. “I shall ask her. Now, did you have a reason to emerge from our kitchen, or were you just lonely?”
She shared his grin. Technically, it was still his kitchen, but he was merely the Executive Chef now, and Ndidi was his Chef de Cuisine, rather than his Sous Chef. Perhaps he was her Chef de Tournant at the same time.
It was probably not inappropriate to sometimes think of her as something like a daughter that would inherit the family business someday soon .
It didn’t really matter. She was his peer in everything except for the actual business of running a bistro somewhere on a planet. He would still need to take her someplace rough, like Brest or Nice, back on Earth, so that she could learn to deal with farmers and fishers that had other options besides selling to her.
Still, that could wait. She ran the kitchen as well as he did.
“You need to prep carrots and sweet peppers,” she said, rising now with mock-sternness in her voice. “I’m making a red rice, and we’ll have two dozen or more hungry women to feed shortly.”
Daniel rose as well, closing up the datapad and the book and carrying them with him, where they would be safe up on a shelf until later. He had no idea what terrible task the Commander would have for him next.
But as always, he would be prepared.
Two
Kathra Omezi was Commander of the Mbaysey. Daughter of Yagazie. Inheritor of that woman’s dream to free the Mbaysey tribe from their slavery, both economic and literal, back on Tazo, and get them away from the Sept Empire.
Yagazie had convinced the women of the tribe to buy a small starship that they could use for trade. And it had been almost all women by then, with most of the men off to seek work in the factories off-world or inducted into the military. Even today, eighty-five percent of the tribe was female, with just a few men kept around, where they handled the softer jobs. Child-rearing, or art.
Nothing to challenge their delicate sensibilities.
One starship had turned into a second, and then a third. And then they had built the first ClanStar, and learned how to permanently live in space without gravity field inducers, spinning their ships slowly like tops instead.
Today, there were twenty-two ClanStars in the Tribal Squadron. Two WaterStars to raise fish and kelp. ForgeStar to reduce iron and other metals mined from asteroids into bars and sheets. IronStar to turn all that metal and make it into useful parts that kept the squadron in motion.
And SeekerStar, her new flagship that had replaced the now-destroyed WinterStar, lost in the same battle as Daniel’s Star Turtle. She was sorry that her mother had not lived to see what her dream was turning into, however slow.
Kathra still owed the Sept for the assassin they had hired.
But for the need to trade for advanced electronics and foodstuffs more easily produced on planets, Kathra might never visit another station or human world. Just sail off into the galactic interior and leave everything else behind. The tribe was large enough these days to be self-contained, with over seven thousand women and a large sperm bank to raise several generations more without risking inbreeding.
She was certainly never returning to sectors claimed by the Sept Empire and Earth. These days, Kathra wasn’t even sure that the Free Worlds were safe for the Mbaysey, since Septagon Vorgash had chased her halfway across even those worlds to ambush her.
She paused to think about that again.
The Lords of the Sept were so displeased with her that they had sent a Septagon and all its attendants that far. Four hundred thousand men committed to killing one woman. And her chef.
They had almost succeeded.
SeekerStar and the Tribal Squadron were clear out on the far edge of the Free Worlds now, having fled as far as their maps would take them.
Kathra knew that there were many other sectors out there that were inhabited, even civilized, but humans on nearby worlds were a bare majority now, and out there farther they might be so few and far between that Kathra Omezi and her comitatus were the first humans that some of the aliens she would encounter had ever seen.
She had a decision to make. A hard one.
One that only the Commander of the Mbaysey could undertake, and then she would need to convince the others, because this was not something she could just order and expect it to be obeyed.
The tribe wasn’t that far removed from their generations on Tazo. The Elders on the twenty-two ClanStars would need to agree with her. Anything else risked fracturing the tribe at the very moment when they needed their unity.
Kathra checked the clock and put down the book reader she had been largely ignoring. Right on time, a knock at her hatch, followed a moment later by it opening and one of her comitatus warriors poking a head in to check.
“Ready?” the warrior asked.
Kathra nodded and the woman entered.
A’Alhakoth ver’Shingi. Spectre Twenty-Three. A native of Kanus.
The first alien, true alien, in her comitatus, those warriors sworn to serve the Commander body and soul.
Hopefully not the last.
Three
A’Alhakoth took a deep breath to settle the fluttery insects in her stomach and rapped her knuckles on the metal door. She opened it and looked in, confirming that the Commander was prepared for their meeting.
“Ready?” A’Alhakoth asked, just in case.
The Commander nodded and A’Alhakoth entered, sitting in the chair on the left.
It didn’t matter which chair she chose, as her feet would dangle in the air either way. These chairs were made for humans. Tall humans, she had learned to understand, in spite of being female.
The Kaniea had a much stronger sexual dimorphism than humans did. A’Alhakoth was only one hundred and fifty centimeters tall, as the human measured things. Fifty kilograms. Petite and wiry, compared to the Commander’s other warriors, who started at half a head taller than her and ranged all the way up to the Commander.
A’Alhakoth barely came up to Kathra Omezi’s collarbone.
Daniel Lémieux was only half a head taller, and apparently short for a human male. Shorter than her brothers or father, but all of them would look up to the woman across the desk from her.
At least the Commander was smiling today.
It was always strange, looking at the Commander. Kaniea like her had periwinkle-colored skin, while the Commander’s was such a dark brown that it appeared truly black in most light. A’Alhakoth’s cobalt hair was straight and fine, where the Commanders was a thick, brown collection of tight rings when it got longer. Right now, the woman’s was buzzed tight.
At least their eyes showed a similarity. Navy blue and darkest brown, surrounded on both by bright white eyeballs.
A’Alhakoth let seriousness be her distinguishing feature today, calmly waiting while the woman studied her. She was used to that, being the sixth child and second daughter, even if she had been her father’s favorite, generally.
Sit quiet and wait, rather than fidgeting.
“What was it that brought you to human space originally?” Commander Omezi, Kathra, asked.
A’Alhakoth blinked in confusion, already not sure where the conversation might be headed.
But it had been a serious question, and Commander Omezi was not a woman given to frivolous things.
“The Anndaing are primarily traders in our sectors,” she replied. “Once they were known as great warriors, and have it in them, and so they have also been the protectors of my kind.”
She paused and traced her thoughts back to Kanus itself.
“Understand that all children of the Jarls, like myself, are always sent out on some sort of spiritual quest as part of their adult ceremonies, even before modern technology, as well as since,” A’Alhakoth paused for Kathra to nod. “The old woman told me I would go farther than any other Kaniea. Out and away long before I would ever return.”
“Out?” Kathra asked.
“As close a translation into your language as I can come, Commander,” A’Alhakoth replied. “It had connotations of going beyond our world or our two small colonies on Anndaing worlds. Beyond mapped space might be a better way to phrase it. There was a Se’uh’pal ship that happened to be in system and I was able to buy transit and then work my way along for a while as a crew member. That got me eventually to Tavle Jocia, where I met Erin and the others.”
The Commander stared at her for a long moment, but A’Alhakoth would not fidget.
“Any proven psychic abilities
in the Kaniea?” she asked finally.
“Only dangerous old women who like to tell people they’re witches,” A’Alhakoth grinned. “Nothing verified.”
“So we’re not part of some Chosen One quest that you’re on?” Kathra laughed.
“Well, if we are, then I’ve already somehow managed to slay a dragon,” A’Alhakoth noted in a dry tone.
The Commander grew more serious. Dreadful. Implacable.
“Oh, no,” she said in a voice that might frighten the most jaded veteran warriors in Father’s Longhall. “We haven’t slain him. Merely surprised that dragon and made our escape when he wasn’t looking. I have no doubt that he’s still seeking us, out there in the darkness.”
“How can I help, Commander?” A’Alhakoth asked, reverting to a neutral voice.
She didn’t feel like the Chosen One so much as the troublemaking youngest child who was never going to be content living a boring life on Kanus. She would never be satisfied in the family Longhall that mixed all the old touches of the primitive culture that had met the first Anndaing visitor when her great-grandsire was young, combined with the modern touches of a stellar civilization.
But A’Alhakoth ver’Shingi had been raised to be a warrior, on Father’s correct assumption that Kanus would never hold her.
