SeptStar

by Blaze Ward

  Daniel Lémieux had vanished from their sight, which meant that he was in jump, traveling away from the place SeptStar had been heading before. The chef would need to emerge somewhere so that they could track him again. Better to simply wait and then begin a new track.

  Hadi decided that he needed an update. Visiting the Ishtan was no more objectionable than dealing with any other alien, but he always emerged feeling like he needed a shower. Except that there was no way to wash the trace of their thoughts from his mind.

  At least, he supposed, Amirin Pasdar had been able to send an officer that would treat the Ishtan like valuable, sentient allies. Some of the men Hadi knew would have considered them little better than tracking dogs.

  That would have been a mistake. Possibly a terminal one, but certainly Pasdar’s alien allies would have likely moved on, rather than providing their assistance to the Sept.

  He rose and exited his day office for the quarters of the Ishtan.

  Guards were unnecessary at their hatch. No sailor would willingly enter such a place except him, and they had ways to enforce that with their mental powers if they chose. At the same time, they were content to let their bodies rest in this space, while sending their minds somehow out thousands of light-years to find that creature whom they hunted.

  He entered, stifling a sneeze at the strange musk in the air. It was always present, but perhaps a bit more prevalent today. Hadi wondered if it represented frustration on their part.

  Four furry snake bodies stirred as he took his chair, the focus now of twelve eyes.

  “Why are these worlds not more advanced?” he asked the room without introduction. “Those that are populated. It was my understanding that civilized, interstellar cultures have been in this area of space for many thousands of years.”

  Urid-Varg, they replied in a simple harmony tinged with rage and regret. These were K’bari worlds, when the K’bari were still a trade federation. Until the Destroyer built an empire on their necks. After a time, they resisted, with the aid of others, and a terrible civil war broke out. Urid-Varg was driven away, but his followers still revered him as a god. They did not accept his demotion to mere creature. The wars were terminal in many places.

  “So the Anndaing and others helped the K’bari destroy themselves?” Hadi asked.

  Such local history had never really mattered before now, and only really mattered because he was a scholar and a bureaucrat focused on building the longest logistics chain in human history.

  The Anndaing mostly watched, they replied. And sold weapons and ships to their allies, as they do. The K’bari did it to themselves.

  “And the K’bari are the natives we might find on these worlds?” he pressed.

  Descendants of that people, if they survived the fall. Most would not have, and we have never bothered to ask if others did, as these worlds are not capable of even space flight so they represented no threat to the Ishtan or the rise of another Urid-Varg.

  Hadi leaned back and considered this odd bit of trivia. Earth history was filled with epochs of colonization, where a more advanced culture displaced one at a lower level of technological development, either by conquest or extermination.

  Would the Sept see these worlds as already-tilled fields to take over?

  They would, the Ishtan harmony replied. You are an edge case in even considering the ethics and morality of the situation, rather than just seeing an opening to exploit. The Sept are most likely to establish a variety of what your mind calls forward operating bases on these K’bari worlds, in their own expansion pulse. Whether they conquer the Free Worlds space first or second is beyond our ability to determine.

  Hadi wondered if he would go down in Sept histories then as an explorer, when viewed by future generations, when he was really just an assassin.

  But that was not anything he needed to worry about. They would lead him to the chef, which would let him kill Kathra Omezi as well.

  Then the Seven Clans would determine what to do with the information he brought back to Rhages.

  So we expect, but that will be after our departure.

  Hadi nodded and rose. He had the answers he needed. The chef would be destroyed. The Ishtan would either join the man in death, or retire to a monastic lifestyle somewhere. Hadi would return home.

  And the Sept would be able to get serious about conquering the galaxy.

  Thirty-Four

  Boneyard.

  Joane nearly giggled out loud at the word itself, as this Anndaing Cargo-2 emerged from jump and settled down a safe distance from a planet, alone in the darkness and maybe the galaxy. She saw the scanner ping the neighborhood and show reflections of nothing at all on the screen in front of Raja, seated just in front of her on the shark’s bridge.

  Joane rather liked the trademaster in charge of Windrunner. Daniel had bribed the woman’s crew with good food, but she and Raja had nerded entirely out over ship design and the little engineering details until even Raja’s other crew were rolling their eyes.

  But Raja’s engineer, a big Anndaing male named Bipahl, was severely lacking in the area of dreaming about hot-rodding space ships. He just wanted to keep Windrunner sailing and fix the ship when things broke. Raja was the one who went beyond.

  Similarly, Tragee, the male Pilot, and Kayna, the female Loadmaster, were quiet kinds of sharks. A Cargo-2 didn’t have a lot of space to haul megaloads of stuff, so Raja had worked hard to turn her ship into something of a flying observatory for the occasional scientist and ambassadors and trademasters visiting newly-contacted worlds. Whatever modules you needed plugged in.

  Having a pristine-feeling ship helped.

  Raja looked up and Joane could see the gleam in the eye pointed towards her. She wondered what look Daniel was getting, standing on the other side, closer to the pilot.

  “What’s the scale on the scanner?” Joane asked, leaning forward and grinning at her new partner in crime.

  “Scaled out carefully to show anything that might be a risk to us,” Raja replied. “Otherwise, you’ve got nothing but random rocks floating in space here.”

  “And nobody around that might be a problem?” Daniel spoke up.

  Joane leaned back enough to catch his eye. He would be searching in his own way, but she doubted that he would see anything like an automated killer robot that way.

  He saw minds.

  “Nobody is even aware of this planet, Daniel,” Raja said. “I didn’t know until we watched the clip from Wyll Koobitz, and I’m pretty tight with the Merchants Bank people. This is one of those military secrets that I have to take to my grave kind of thing. But it also means I’m something of a made shark now, so thank you for getting me here.”

  “Wyll wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t trust you, Raja,” Joane reminded her. “Believe me. The comitatus is all about that sort of thing.”

  “I’m really looking forward to meeting this Commander of yours, one of these days, just from what you two have told me,” Raja smiled and flexed her hammer forward. She turned to the pilot now. “Tragee, take us closer and start listening for challenges. Just because there aren’t supposed to be any doesn’t mean we don’t stay alert.”

  “Are you expecting someone?” Daniel asked sharply. “I thought that Wyll stated we were headed to a secret system that nobody ever visited. You can’t put a major base or anything here, or word will eventually get out.”

  “You might have missed the part that the Bank itself monitors this system,” Raja turned her hammer at him. Joane watched the bridge lights dim a shade as the engines came up. “Trademasters who come here without authorization get their credentials revoked. That includes my whole crew, so none of us would ever be able to fly on an Anndaing vessel as crew again. Nobody is going to risk that, but you still have to worry about smugglers who might make a run in here to see what they could steal.”

  “I see,” Daniel said, but it was obvious to Joane that he didn’t.

  “Most of these ships are not flyable, Daniel,�
� Joane said. “The effort required to rectify that is significant, so it would be obvious if someone had tried. That’s one of the reasons that many were landed on a planetary surface, that and the Ovanii built ships that way, unlike the more fragile vessels the Mbaysey have, or the larger Anndaing haulers.”

  “Are the bigger ones still around?” he asked, possibly still a little confused.

  “No,” Raja said. “Those are stored at one of five major naval bases the Anndaing maintain. If they ever need to call up the Armada again, those monsters form the fighting wing, but they are too big for your needs, since they are at least half the size of those Septagons you described.”

  “Oh,” Daniel said as his eyes got a little big.

  Joane wondered if he’d snuck into someone’s mind at some point and looked at their memories, but had never been able to ask. Not that it mattered that much.

  Ovanii Battlemasters weren’t what Kathra needed, anyway.

  Daniel had been given an ancient, printed book, rather than an electronic one, and had translated enough for her to look at. An Ovanii Assailant would be a terrible vessel to find, sufficiently large to take on several Sept Patrols and smash them by itself. Or crush SeekerStar and The Haunt with ease. The notes were ambiguous as to whether any here could be repaired, but the smaller vessels, translated as Duelers, were in generally good shape, if you spent the time and money to bring everything back on line.

  One or three of those would make lovely pirate vessels to slip back into Sept space and blow things up. Not that Joane got excited at that prospect.

  Perish the thought. She was just a nerdy, petite nobody out to explore the options of maybe finding or buying a ship Kathra could use for trade.

  You’ll believe that, won’t you?

  “So now what?” Daniel asked, possibly completely lost at this point, as one might expect a chef to be.

  He was in the wrong context, after all. Joane could fix that.

  “So now we go visit the morning market and see what fish the boats have brought into port, and what vegetables the farmers want to sell us,” Joane said.

  Okay, so maybe she’d been paying closer attention to the conversations with Ndidi than everyone else, but that was their problem now, wasn’t it?

  “Ah,” Daniel’s eyes finally uncrossed and he turned to her. “And Kathra and Erin will be in a position to plan lunch and dinner. Thank you.”

  Joane smiled. They made a pretty good team, even if she was going to need a couple of other women with her on the next mission like this. Maybe Areen for Daniel and Nkechi or Obi for her to fool around with.

  Gods below forbid she got so horny she considered letting a man touch her, even someone like Daniel.

  Raja was calling up a map of the new world, this forbidden place called Tnesu, as the ship started sailing into the planetary atmosphere. The ancients had picked this place because it was mostly stone, with very little water, so not all that pleasant a planet to even visit, let alone live on.

  One massive continent nearly straddled the southern hemisphere, with several ranges of mountains that served to dry the air out nicely and deflect storms. Throw in some grasslands to capture the dust and dirt blowing, and there was an area down there with just minimal annual precipitation for low grasses to grow, but nothing bigger.

  Ships, whole fleets, had been soft-landed here after they had surrendered to the Anndaing fleets, and then shut down for long-term storage. Like centuries at this point. But the Ovanii had built rugged and durable things.

  They had just misunderstood that those polite merchants they had thought they could push around were willing to go junkyard dog on them eventually. One badass Assailant cruiser wasn’t going to win if the other guy suddenly showed up with several hundred armed freighters and a willingness to absorb terrible casualties so they could get close enough to knife you.

  Nobody had been willing to show Joane any sorts of battle reports from the engagements themselves, but everyone agreed that Ovanii warships were extremely capable things. And that the Ovanii had still gotten their asses kicked so hard that they functionally ceased to exist as a culture today.

  Sure, there were probably a bunch of farmers somewhere now, with really good legends. And a homeworld or home sector out there that had unleashed them on an unsuspecting galaxy in the first place, but the Anndaing were still the undisputed masters of this range of space.

  Joane didn’t need to know any more than that.

  Raja seemed to be reading her mind at this point.

  “They really going to let you walk away with one of those ships?” she asked, slightly in awe.

  “I have no idea,” Joane replied. “That’s a negotiation between Kathra and Wyll. We don’t even know where we are, so we can’t tell anyone anything, other than what we find and if we rate it interesting enough to bring some of the other women on a future trip. But it would be nice to be on the ass-kicking end of things for once, instead of forever being chased off by the Sept when they show up. Pirates we could handle, but Sept always came in packs, like dogs or sharks, and we were never strong enough to fight them directly. And a Septagon might even be too much for a Battlemaster to handle.”

  “That’s even more frightening,” Tragee offered, showing that he had been paying attention, even as he made adjustments to take them into the atmosphere.

  “Oui,” Joane agreed. “But hopefully we have convinced the right people to help us, and in doing so help themselves.”

  The other three generally agreed at that point. They were all just pawns in something larger, and knew it.

  But Joane could see a much more interesting future for herself and the Mbaysey coming.

  Thirty-Five

  Crence was on the bridge when Koni Swift came out of that last jump, the one that put them out on the very edge of the planetary system known to the humans as Tavle Jocia, although they still had at least one and maybe two jumps left, depending on how tight he wanted Jine to run the first one.

  It was a massively busy system from the number of signals he could see on his boards. That was to be expected, from what Omezi had told him. Two major trade corridors crossed here, one running from Sept Imperial space to a border outside anything on an Anndaing chart, and the other running almost perpendicular to Koni Swift’s course getting here.

  Nobody really knew about the Anndaing sectors, but those were a long ways away, even in a fast ship. Across a wide swath of darkness.

  At least all the traffic around here looked civilian. Not that he was sure what human militaries would look like, but everyone here was transmitting an identity beacon on the frequency SeekerStar had used and talking in the clear.

  Crence had even configured a second beacon for Koni Swift that read like they were just another ship sidling into port.

  “Thoughts?” he asked the bridge.

  “Nobody caught us getting here,” Dane replied. “Doesn’t mean they aren’t trying.”

  Translation: let’s do this thing and stop screwing around.

  But Dane was too polite to say that out loud.

  Most of the time.

  “Jine, gimme a jump a little high and close enough we can talk to the station without too long of a delay,” Crence ordered. “But make it look professional. I want everyone else coming along to be graded on the fin we cut today.”

  “Coming up,” Jine replied, pressing buttons.

  The second jump was a short one. Almost a blink you could miss if you weren’t paying attention. Then they were above the north pole of Tavle Jocia, as the planet organized its orbital traffic.

  Things were thin up here, by design.

  “Tavle Jocia Flight Control, this is Anndaing merchant vessel Koni Swift,” Crence said into the radio, attaching his current coordinates in a file format and numbering system that humans could understand, silly creatures being stuck with only ten toes to count on. “Request lane approach and docking assignment.”

  He had also included the relevant bits they would need
in order to figure out where and how to dock a ship like this. Crence still hadn’t had time to rip out a full airlock and replace it with something closer to Free Worlds standards.

  Maybe if there was a derelict around here he could buy parts from for salvage? Weirder things had happened, and he was happy to haul home bits and pieces of human technology that Wyll and his people could tear apart.

  They’d also pay well above market value, since it qualified as intelligence gathering on this first trip, and they’d want to know as much as they could.

  “Koni Swift, this is Flight Control,” a female human voice replied several seconds later than she should have. Sounded female. Closer to Kathra Omezi’s or Joane’s from the conversation recordings he had been watching morning, noon, and night. “We have no records of Anndaing vessels calling here before.”

  She left it dangling like that. Crence wasn’t surprised. Bureaucrats liked things easy and predictable. A whole new alien species and trade competitor arriving was probably triggering all sorts of alarms in various places. Hopefully friendly ones.

  He glanced over at SeekerStar’s birthplace, that massive ships foundry that the human Isaev used to make new ships, wondering how he might get an invite to a tour. Scans from in-system weren’t likely to be viewed hostilely, at least not today. That would probably change later.

  “Flight Control, we’re new in this sector, but have traded with humans in the past,” Crence said. Technically, it was true, which was the best kind of truth. Plural. Kathra Omezi AND Daniel Lémieux. “We’re prepared to handle your atmosphere, won’t add anything dangerous, and all have our medical records updated. Plus we have cargo those humans suggested might go over well here.”

  Yeah, parse that.

  He smiled to himself.

  “Dane, scan the Isaev platform hard, but make sure you scan everyone else just as hard, and only do it once,” Crence ordered.