by Blaze Ward
Kathra laughed to herself as Ndidi approached with a cupcake in hand, frosted in blue and with sprinkles of something on the top.
Kathra raised an eyebrow at the woman.
“Cupcakes can be prepared ahead of time, contain a jolt of energy, especially as the chocolate has some coffee mixed in, and I wasn’t sure who I would be cooking for or when,” Ndidi said simply. “Eat.”
Kathra sat and peeled the delightful treat. Daniel didn’t understand the obsession with chocolate, but he understood females well enough to include chocolate desserts. Ndidi was female. Her default was the chocolate that Zalman ClanStar produced, with other things thrown in for spice.
“Sit,” Kathra told Ndidi as the woman started back into her kitchen. “You can cook later. The rest will want showers first.”
Ndidi complied, eyes perhaps a little wider than normal behind those glasses that had kept this brilliant child out of a cockpit, when such poverty was the norm. If they could trade well here, without the Sept chasing them off every so often, how much wealth could they accumulate? Enough to fix the eyes of children and elders? Disease was uncommon, but genetics was what the tribe brought with it from Tazo, supplemented by the males allowed to contribute.
Should she recruit males to command positions in her coming fleets? It was a novel, painful question. Mbaysey was female. Sept was defiantly male. Even the Free Worlds tended that way.
Her own revolutions notwithstanding, could she afford to exclude a competent male, just because of his gender?
Ndidi had snagged a second cupcake and was nibbling at it as Kathra watched her.
“How good is Ebube as a chef?” Kathra asked between bites, her voice quiet enough out here that the other woman would not hear as she worked on something in the kitchen that involved banging pans occasionally.
“Competent,” Ndidi replied. “Better than Ugonna on her best day, but perhaps not an artist at her craft. She can follow Daniel’s and my recipes sufficient not to poison anyone.”
Kathra noted that Ndidi didn’t ask why. Just supplied the information her Commander needed, on the assumption that there was more going on. There was, but it was pleasant to see that level of emotional maturity in someone so young.
“You will need to recruit and train others to cook, both here and in the general crew kitchen,” Kathra decided. “As well as intensify your language studies until you are fully, conversationally fluent in Anndaing.”
“Getting there now,” Ndidi nodded. “Perhaps a little better than the comitatus, at least at present.”
“At present,” Kathra agreed.
Ndidi had been there when Kathra met the clan leaders. And she was smart enough to see the shape of the future.
Change was coming. Major change.
Erin entered the dining hall with a cluster of the comitatus. Ndidi exploded off her bench and moved quickly into the kitchen, returning with a platter of cupcakes.
“Coffee is brewing and will be ready shortly,” Ndidi announced to the women.
That explained Ebube’s noises. Ndidi was always trying to be a step ahead of Daniel, who was working to outthink Kathra and the others. Military-grade planning.
Yes, Ndidi would be a key part of the future. Along with so many others.
It was time to explain it all to the comitatus. They knew it instinctively, but they had perhaps never seen the shape that the future would take.
Kathra could see the river begin to delta before her.
Thirty-Eight
Crence had spent enough time around Daniel and Joane to appreciate how stressed these new humans were at Tavle Jocia. And he had seen pictures of terran sharks that bore a remarkable resemblance to Anndaing, with their own version of the hammer that was a sensor unit detecting electrical signals.
Supposedly not as terrifying as the ancient megalodon or their smaller descendants the great whites from their home, but he knew he was still triggering some level of subconscious fear and dread with the folks on the Tavle Jocia station.
Not that he was enjoying himself or anything. That wouldn’t be tactful now, would it?
At least his smile seemed to calm them. It was just the hammer flexing forward and back that caused pupils to unconsciously dilate at these various meetings.
One bureaucrat had given way to a second. A third. An eighth, if his count was accurate without checking his notes or counting on his toes.
Pretty sure he would either run out of people, or be talking to the human in charge of the station itself before too many more such meetings.
This one was female. Named Beryl Cho. Human females had a different shape than males. Or Anndaing. Curvier, with the addition of breasts on the front that would slow a swimmer down, except that humans were land creatures through and through.
Older, from what Daniel and Joane had said, with wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, plus long hair with gold at the tips, gray in the middle, and white at the roots.
Not immense age, but not a pup, either.
He had been shown into her office, in a nicer wing of the station, from the decorations and furniture that was uncomfortable to someone with a fin to sit in.
Crence had been smart enough to bring his own tea bags. Also Daniel’s fault.
“Ambassador,” she began, but Crence had to interrupt her, lest she work up a good charge on a wrong path.
“Merely a trademaster, Madam Cho,” Crence said. “I do not come with ambassadorial credentials from the Anndaing Merchants Guild. Merely their official greetings and a request to perhaps transport a trade representative from the Free Worlds to my sectors, so they can establish better protocols and ambassadorial-level interactions.”
He smiled. It was a load of tuna poop, but nobody here could gainsay him. And even fish shit was useful, in the right circumstances.
“Trademaster, then,” she said, cocking her head to the right as she did.
He wondered if that was like flexing only one hammer forward. He’d never tried it, but there was no reason it wouldn’t work. Maybe later.
“So you have, as you no doubt realized, caused a bit of consternation with your arrival,” Beryl Cho continued as Crence watched her.
He grinned.
“And you have spent enough time around humans to have learned Spacer and handled the technical aspects of arrival and docking correctly,” she said. “Who was it you ran into? Have the Se’uh’pal made it as far as your worlds?”
Crence felt his grin expand mightily.
“We’ve known the Se’uh’pal for many centuries, Madam Cho,” he said. “They have made extensive trade ventures into our space. It was the humans that convinced us to visit you specifically.”
“Humans?” she asked, obviously surprised.
But then, nobody had asked the right questions before now.
Hardly Crence’s fault.
“Indeed, yes.” Crence decided to perhaps have a little fun with her. The whole story would come out eventually, as he wasn’t trying to keep it a secret. “We encountered the vessel SeekerStar and the Mbaysey Tribal Squadron in deep space while on an exploration voyage ourselves. They accompanied us to our capital world, traded some, and provided the sailing directions to visit you.”
“Where is your system?” she pressed, like a proper trademaster should.
“As I understand your notations, a little clockwise around the wheel of the galaxy,” Crence replied. “And well in towards the core itself.”
“That’s K’bari space,” she said, confused. And referring to the barbarian lands that barely traded with anybody anymore.
“The K’bari are no more,” Crence said simply, with a hint of a shrug from both shoulders and hammer.
“Did you destroy them?”
“They destroyed themselves long before us, Madam,” Crence replied, without telling the humans anything about Urid-Varg if they didn’t already know those tales. “We knew them in a previous millennia, when they were great traders across a wide section of the quadrant. And I c
ome from well beyond K’bari space.”
“Beyond?” she echoed.
“For the longest time, we thought K’bari space as primitive and largely uninhabited as you do,” Crence smiled. “It was Commander Omezi that proved us wrong, although I’m given to understand that humans are relative newcomers to these worlds.”
“We are,” Cho replied. “Most of our trade is either with the Sept on human hulls, or with individual worlds, carried out largely by Se’uh’pal or Ch’sh’xx vessels, with a few others also engaged.”
“So we were given to understand,” Crence said. “I for one look forward to breaking the monopoly of the se’uh’pal.”
“As long as you don’t bring your wars into our space,” she said with a bit of an edge to her voice.
“Our wars?” It was Crence’s turn to be confused.
“SeekerStar,” Cho said. “And the other vessel.”
“Other vessel?” Crence asked.
“The one Vorgash had built at Isaev’s shipyard,” she continued with a nod over his shoulder. “SeptStar, I think they called it. We don’t want anything to do with Omezi’s war with the Sept.”
“I can assure you I feel the same way, madam,” Crence said.
Inwardly, he could feel the gaff hook his gills, even though his kind had evolved past such primitivity in the distant past.
He was stuck here when he had a piece of intelligence that people back home would probably kill for. Literally.
But he had to find out what in the four hells a SeptStar might be, because if the Sept was capable of sending warships into Anndaing space today, even just to hunt what they saw as a renegade, then the threat to the Merchants Guild had just gone through the roof.
“Just so we understand each other,” Trade Ambassador Beryl Cho smiled at him now, looking remarkably like one of his own kind with her own shark smile.
“Oh, we do, Madam,” Crence assured her. “We do.”
Thirty-Nine
“So now what?” Daniel asked as Windrunner seemed to hover about five thousand meters in the air above the Boneyard.
Tragee, Raja, and Joane all looked at him with different emotions. Boredom, more or less, from the pilot. Awe from the trademaster. Greed warring with Triumph on Joane’s face.
Windrunner seemed to almost be a puppy straining at a leash, from the way the ship seemed to skim across the winds up here, but Daniel had seen Tragee flying it for long enough to understand that he knew what he was doing. Rather well, actually.
“Now we head home,” Raja said after a moment. “Unless you have some other place in your instructions that I need to take you.”
“Non,” Daniel shook his head. “All Koobitz gave me was this place and the instructions for you.”
“Should there be more, Daniel?” Joane asked.
“I do not know,” he shrugged. “My original goal had been to learn more about the Ovanii as a people, so that I could better understand that odd mix of culture that drove them forever into deep space, rather than living on planets. Perhaps I was unconsciously trying to compare them to the Mbaysey in that.”
“Have you found it?” Tragee, of all people, asked. “That thing that would make sense of them? To us, they were just terrible raiders who might appear in your skies, strip your world like locusts, and then move on.”
“There was that,” Daniel said. “But the Mbaysey did not set out to become Vikings. I could see that being an outcome in another few generations, however. Originally they just wanted to escape Tazo and the Sept.”
“Do you think that the Ovanii had their own Tazo?” Joane asked. “Their own vile overlords to flee from?”
“Again, I do not know,” he said. “Perhaps when we return to Ogrorspoxu I can find the right book in the right library and answer that question. But if so, it is not that uncommon a thing. Consider the ancient tales of Moses and the Egyptians. Would the natives of the Levant have seen the onrushing Jews as an Ovanii horde?”
Raja wanted to say something now. It was in her eyes and the way her hammer moved. Daniel turned to her and smiled encouragingly.
“Do you have Ovanii memories?” she asked skittishly. Possibly expecting a lightning bolt for her effrontery, but she only knew the pieces of the truth he had been willing to share with her or Wyll Koobitz.
He started to speak, but stopped.
Did he? How many of those ancient ghosts might have simply refused to communicate with him?
The K’bari were a gregarious people. Or had been, once upon a time. The Z’lud more logical and taciturn, but they also had possessed surprisingly complex philosophical systems, at least before the monster reduced everything into stark balances of good and evil.
Maybe he needed to write some Z’lud philosophies sometime. And love poetry.
But he was seeking the Ovanii. Memories of their peoples, or at least of their passage down the twelve thousand years of his former lives.
Daniel closed his eyes and made sure he had a firm grip on the back of Tragee’s seat, just in case.
He dove inward. It was usually like swimming in a cocktail party when he did this, surrounded by hundreds and perhaps thousands of beings of all colors and species. The only thing that unified them was their former existence as erect bipeds, but Daniel already knew that Urid-Varg’s original form had been humanoid.
How hard would it have been to exist instead as a Vida, or a Bhaorajj, to say nothing of the Atter?
The conversational hum quieted as he descended into their midst. Frequently, he found himself on one side of a glass wall, with all the rest opposite, but today they surrounded him, and it felt friendly.
“Do we know the Ovanii?” he asked simply.
He had done that before and gotten no answer, but now he had walked on one of that race’s decks. Experienced their spaces and their dreams.
The Z’lud to his left all shook their heads in unison. Daniel was always surprised to see them hornless, but these were not the Upynth, even as they resembled both Upynth and Terran zebras, although their hides had more subtle stripes and more colors than either of the others.
These were Urid-Varg’s second empire, after he wiped out all of his own kind and then began his long wander as other species began to rise to technology. The oldest of these ghosts had died perhaps nine thousand years ago.
A few Roahrt also shrugged. They had provided the Destroyer a few bodies, but he had not stayed around long enough to build himself a new empire. Perhaps outliving two before that already had jaded him for a time. Certainly, he had not tried again until the K’bari.
And look where that had gotten him.
Daniel turned slowly in place, practically gobsmacked that all of his ghosts seemed to be present today, even the ancients who were the Mnapyre themselves, Urid-Varg’s people. Normally they were far more aloof and distant, refusing to even make eye contact with him.
What had changed today?
A K’bari stepped out of the crowd and approached.
Arsène. The one who had taught Daniel the K’bari language so that he could translate the book by Idir, the scholar.
He was taller than Daniel by a few centimeters, with pale green eyes, and yellowish-tan fur that covered his body in a fine pelt. The man had three eyes across the face, with the nose below that stretched into a snout halfway between feline and canine for size.
Petite horns that swept back from his forehead and then outward always reminded Daniel of an ox.
Daniel bowed. Arsène returned it.
“What has changed?” he asked the ghost, gesturing to the crowd around them, almost humming with warmth and excitement today. Arsène had always been one of the friendliest.
“You have always understood evil, Daniel Lémieux,” Arsène replied simply. “Given the power of Urid-Varg, you have time and again refrained from exercising it.”
“Oui,” Daniel said. “The Left Hand of Evil.”
Arsène nodded.
“All expected you to succumb anyway,” the ghos
t said. “Such is the nature of the power you hold, terrible as it is.”
It was Daniel’s turn to nod. He had never met any male that he would have trusted with this power, and only by subverting himself to the women around him had Daniel been able to control it. Areen. A’Alhakoth. Erin. Ndidi.
Kathra.
“And now?” Daniel asked, breathless as he realized that all of his ghosts had joined him on a precipice now. He could see eternity at the bottom of the cliff, waiting to swallow them up forever.
Would that be a bad outcome, given the power at his command?
“It would,” Arsène answered, surprising Daniel all the more.
“How?” he gasped.
“Because you have changed, Daniel,” the ghost said. “Previously, you understood evil and resisted it. Now, you have chosen to actively fight it.”
He started to deny those words, but they died on his tongue.
The Sept Empire.
It was Urid-Varg, without the Destroyer himself seated at the center of that web.
Arsène nodded.
“They will continue to expand, and do so by force, as none can resist them,” Arsène said. “Or rather, like always, those who can resist will wait too long and be unable to stop the thing later, when they might have succeeded today.”
“The Sept Empire must be destroyed,” Daniel said aloud. For the first time, he really meant it.
The crowd responded in their own ways, about half nodding and half shrugging.
“Perhaps broken is a better term,” Arsène said. “No culture deserves to be annihilated, if people still support it, but their power to impose on the weaker must be ended. The K’bari are no more as a stellar civilization. We are unsure if the Z’lud even exist today as a species. The Mnapyre are known to be gone, as Urid-Varg chased the last of them down and personally killed her, to prevent another from rising to challenge him later.”
“Are there Ovanii here?” Daniel spread his arms wide at the group, but nobody answered.
Nobody answered.
There were only those records that the Anndaing had preserved, and even then they were generally lost behind a forgotten language after so much time.
