by Blaze Ward
“Do we know what it is?” the commander asked.
“Negative, Spectre One,” Joane spoke. “Passive scans only. Didn’t want him knowing that he’d found the whole tribal squadron if it was Sept. Figured we could sneak up on a pirate or prospector otherwise.”
“Good call,” Commander Omezi said.
Daniel watched the dot grow closer on the screen without himself moving more than necessary to breathe and blink. He looked up and spotted the ship in the distance.
“There it is,” he said. “Three fingers to the right off the bow and down a little.”
“He’s too far away to see!” somebody snapped on the radio.
“Then what’s that?” Daniel held out a finger to point, only then realizing he was almost alone in a cockpit and nobody could see his hand.
“Draka…” somebody swore over the line. “That thing must be huge.”
“Septagon,” the commander seated behind him said in a most definitive voice.
Septagon?
Daniel considered the origins of such a word. –agon was ancient Greek. Sept was Roman and the name the Sept Empire had chosen for itself, representing the seven families on Earth that had formed the thing, as well as the traditional seven continents of humanity’s homeworld.
Septagon was a bad mishmash of languages, but suggested a seven-sided structure. Why would you build a ship that way? Felt like all the bad elements of design decisions had been baked into the soufflé, just so you got to have the play on words.
Spectre One was idling. Coasting now. Closing, but without a hard burn to bring the two sides together quickly enough that all they could do was wave in passing.
No, this felt like the sort of speed a defender would take when forcing an attacker to waddle up into all of their guns if he wanted to engage them.
Or he could just blow by them at high speed while chasing the tribal squadron, but that required that he know that they were there.
Daniel’s board changed, drawing his eyes down from the cluster of lights in the distance that represented intruder.
Huh. Septagon. Built by the Sept Empire. Specifications listed down the side.
“La vache. That thing is huge,” he muttered.
“Indeed,” the warrior in the rear seat replied. “They build to overawe the barbarians. It has a downside, however.”
Daniel wasn’t sure what sort of downsides there were when you had a flying space station thirty-two hundred meters along a facing and over seven kilometers, nose to tail. Seventy decks tall on the main part of the ship, with a number of towers stuck out the top where members of the Vuzurgan, the Sept’s nobility, might retire to, to escape the common masses.
The hollow space at the base of the septagonal shape was large enough to park WinterStar without touching.
“Tribal Squadron, this is Commander Omezi,” Daniel heard her voice take on a layer of steel that had been missing before. “All ships flee immediately. The Haunt will follow once you are away, and rendezvous at the next Concursion point.”
Concursion?
Daniel had no idea what the word meant, other than perhaps it bore a linguistic similarity to congress, or conclave.
The image of the Septagon on his screen shifted again, moving to one corner of Daniel’s untouched board and bringing back a list of ships behind him.
One by one, they blinked out, disappearing from the chart, until only the fighterships and the Septagon remained.
“All Spectre ships, stand by,” she said in a quiet tone.
Daniel heard a beep, and then other voices filled the cockpit. Male. Hard professionals talking to one another absently.
“What do you want?” Commander Omezi asked in a voice right on the verge of polite.
Daniel was reminded of a woman walking along the sidewalk that turned to confront you, in spite of the fact that you had just accidentally ended up going the same direction, rather than stalking her.
“This is Septagon Vorgash,” a voice replied a few moments of silence later. “I am Naupati Amirin Pasdar, commanding. You are trespassing in Imperial space and will surrender immediately.”
Naupati? Daniel was impressed. That said that the man was one of the highest ranking naval officers there were in the Sept Empire, but that made a kind of sense, if he was in charge of that. A septagon was a large city floating in space. And being a Pasdar meant he was probably part of one of the main genealogical lines of the seven founding clans of the Sept itself.
A dangerous man to even know, let alone have as an enemy.
“I could say the same about you, Naupati Amirin Pasdar of Septagon Vorgash,” Commander Omezi replied in an equally hard tone. “Wylanne is only a colony, and not a full member. You are outside your laws.”
“I make the laws, Mbaysey,” the man said grimly. “Surrender or die.”
“Catch me if you can,” she mocked the man.
Daniel felt a moment of pure panic at her words, but then the stars around them seemed to stretch and turn blue as he watched.
Daniel had never realized a ship this small might be equipped with a valence drive, capable of leaping between the stars.
One moment they were facing down a monstrosity of a ship, Septagon Vorgash.
The next, they were surrounded by streaks of light as he looked out the windows.
And Daniel was surrounded by the laughter of an Mbaysey warlord.
What the hell had he gotten himself into?
7
Erin didn’t like the way the rest of the group had sort of organized themselves into a pair of wings around her in the dining hall, but she didn’t really have a good argument about her innocence.
Someone had managed to track the tribal squadron to the outer fringes of the Wylanne system. Worse, a major Sept warship, and not just a patrol force that her sisters of The Haunt might have chased off or even defeated.
No, a Septagon had arrived.
Erin had heard it on the radio. Everyone had. Just before the jump, that naupati over there had called Kathra Mbaysey. Had known who he was dealing with, even without a word from the Commander.
They’d known who they were facing. Knew where to find them.
Erin and her two wingwomen had been the most recent team out. Naturally, everyone else suspected them of being spies.
Or worse, being so amateur that they got followed home from Renneth.
The eating hall was quietly ostracizing them. Erin sat with Iruoma and Joane at a corner table after she filled her plate from the troughs by the kitchen window. The little cook was so fast that he had managed to land with the rest of the team, get here, and prepare pasta in sauce with steamed veggies on the side before the women of The Haunt had finished showering and getting dressed.
Erin had taken longer to get here, because Kathra had wanted to ask her something. The rest of the room had gotten surly by the time she arrived.
Kathra stepped through the door now and glanced around, meeting Erin’s eyes with shadows of anger and laughter hooded inside. That made Erin feel a little better, because she had the feeling she was going to be at the sharp end of a lot of insults and jabs over this. Not enough for a true challenge, but she still might have to give way as Kathra’s Second In Command. At least for a while.
If it was her fault.
Erin had her doubts.
The cook arrived with coffee, served the three of them silently before moving on to the others. They were all big girls, able to serve themselves, so she supposed he was making a statement.
Or at least trying to diffuse things. The quiet anger in here almost had a smell to it.
Everyone fell silent as Kathra made her way to the buffet and loaded up with food. Pinched hexagon noodles that reminded Erin of hourglasses. A red pesto sauce rather than a marinara, so extra chewy with stewed tomatoes rather than just the soupy bits. Peppers and something she couldn’t identify by taste or texture, but might have been celery chopped extra fine.
That sweet, cold tea that was the com
mander’s favorite, as well as the cook’s, apparently.
Kathra made her way to the open spaces on this communal table, the space next to Iruoma and across from Erin and Joane much wider than necessary, unless one of them was giving off a particularly foul odor. Not necessarily rare, right after combat, which was why everyone had showered after they made it through jump and back to the mothership.
Kathra looked around the room like a proctor with a class of recalcitrant seven-year-olds, before the genders were separated off a year later so the females could study the harder things they would need, like military art or mechanics, and the males could take up less dangerous vocations. Art. Farming.
Cooking. But she wouldn’t tease him about that. Not anymore. This dinner was simply amazing, especially considering how quickly he had done it and the limited amount of ingredients in his world.
But if Daniel Lémieux turned out to be a spy, she’d put him out the airlock personally.
Kathra Omezi, Commander of the Mbaysey tribe, ate in a bubble of silence that only seemed to pop when she took her second bite. The women around them began to murmur again in subdued tones.
There was little laughter today.
“Renneth to Vorgash to Wylanne is probably eight days, best case,” Kathra announced in a voice too loud to just be speaking across the table to Erin. “And that assumes patrol craft. A Septagon probably requires an extra day for that last bit, even over a short jump like Vorgash to Wylanne.”
She went back to her bowl with the briefest of smiles, the kind that vanished as she picked up the next bite and stuffed it into her mouth.
Erin did the math maybe a hint faster than everyone else, but only because she was so keyed up to whatever subtle mischief Kathra was up to. She smiled at her commander as she caught on to what Kathra had caught and everyone missed.
Even a courier running like hell couldn’t have managed to drop a major warship like that on top of the tribal squadron. Those things were slow.
The valence drive was the most wonderful thing in the galaxy, but speed was inversely proportional to mass. Septagons were the size of small cities, and weighed as much, so they waddled through hyperspace. That was the trade-off that the tribe made with the ClanStars, which were much smaller and faster, but couldn’t mount Gravity Inducer Fields, many of which were almost the size of a ClanStar themselves.
At least the tense reserve around Erin and her two sidekicks was starting to melt. Sisters made eye contact now, offering silent apologies for the earlier, unspoken accusations. Those had stung, but she hadn’t been able to refute them, even unvoiced.
The Sept had found them, in Wylanne no less. Had sent a sector warship after them, although it had just been enough to chase them off.
With a wicked grin she mostly suppressed, Erin wondered just how many ships it might take to actually threaten the Mbaysey. Septagons carried patrol craft: bigger, slower, heavier versions of the Spectres she and her sisters flew. Bigger and better guns. Slower to maneuver, attack, or cross valence space to pursue an opponent.
Two Septagons, perhaps. Maybe three? What would piracy be like in empty sectors, if Commander Omezi managed to draw that much tonnage into her wake? Maybe the tribe could take up piracy as a profitable vocation at that point? Lead the Sept ships around by the nose, never quite catching up.
Slowly, the sound around them returned to something approaching normal. Voices only a little strained, striving to act like nothing had happened. Words had never actually been exchanged. The kind that might have to be settled in a ring with gloves on. At the same time, fault lines had emerged, and Erin knew that she and Kathra would have to work twice as hard to bind the comitatus back into a tighter whole.
But one facet lingered unanswered. Erin wondered how quickly the other women would pick up on it. Kathra had cleared her, Joane, and Iruoma from the accusation that they had been sloppy or had betrayed the rest. But the Sept had still managed to find them.
That suggested that there was a spy somewhere, somehow leaking information to the lords of the Sept. Not the cook, because he had gone through a full inspection when he arrived, including the standard vaccination for men that covered any diseases he might pick up or bring, as well as functionally sterilizing him for the better part of a year, just in case one of the others felt the bizarre need to fornicate with such a creature.
Technically, it wasn’t bestiality, but Erin didn’t see much difference, at that.
So the cook was clean. Kathra was their Commander and heir to the tribal history. Erin knew she was completely loyal to the boss, as well as the dream of the Mbaysey. That just left everybody else.
Who was the spy?
8
Dinner had gone over like a pocket supernova, but Kathra was not displeased with herself. She had heard that naupati’s words. Like the others, she recognized the significance of them.
The Sept had finally come looking for her. Specifically. For Kathra Omezi. And the Mbaysey as well, but her.
The Sept Empire had long memories, going back to her mother, the irrepressible Yagazie, and the Mbaysey first demanding their freedom and rights, after nearly a century of semi-slavery under Sept law. Freedom had allowed them to be ignored long enough to build up their strength. To build the ClanStars as trading ships. To carve out a spot among all the other merchant races and classes.
Until daughter Kathra had convinced them to leave Tazo behind and simply walk away from the Sept entirely. To only interact with the old empire of men when they needed to trade for those things they could not produce themselves. Skills that they needed to learn, by hiring in experts.
To skate into the endless darkness and leave planets themselves behind.
Kathra looked around her office and studied it, as if the whole of the galaxy would be changing so much shortly that it would no longer be something she could remember, if she didn’t stop and memorize the details now.
She had always expected her eventual pregnancy to be the trigger, but she had not yet gone to the refrigerator to pick out her daughter’s father. Apparently, the Sept were tired of waiting.
A knock at the closed hatch brought her head up with a smile.
Right on time.
Kathra keyed a switch to slide it open, and Daniel entered.
He surprised her by carrying a large flask and two cups as he entered and stood between the two chairs on the other side of her desk.
The apparent gravity in here was not as strong, because she was on the inner deck. Just under half a gee. Being on the middle deck would be eighty percent, while the outer deck was kept at one hundred fifteen percent standard gravity, to keep muscles strong and reflexes sharp.
It was much more comfortable sitting on her ass on this deck, when she had to do paperwork. Also, easier to get to engineering, located in zero gee inside the rotating shell, if she was here and there was an emergency.
“Sit,” she ordered the man, wondering if he planned to drink with her.
Daniel took the chair on the right and put everything on the desk between them. Quickly, he opened the flask and poured two equal amounts, grabbing one glass and sipping.
“Sweet tea,” he said simply.
Kathra let the scowl die before it reached her face. They did indeed share that one quirk, and he was apparently trying to make things appear calm and relaxed.
For an outsider, he had learned quickly in a single week. Or a lifetime of training in a kitchen had served him well.
Kathra took a sip and contemplated this chef.
“We did not finish our tours,” she said after a moment.
“I have reviewed the logs that Ugonna left me,” Daniel said between sips. “It would be nice to have more chickens generating eggs on a daily basis, but I understand that only the Ihejirika ClanStar deals in excess chickens to trade with the others, while the Okafor have a small herd of miniature cattle that each produce about two liters of milk per day. I plan to shift towards serving more milk directly by using it in white sauces
and roux, while serving less bread and making more pasta. It stores dry for longer periods of time, and allows me to put calories and protein into the comitatus in a variety of ways.”
“A French-specialist chef disdaining bread?” Kathra asked with the faintest hint of irony in her voice.
“You haven’t have freshwater crab Rangoon, or Vietnamese spring rolls, I suspect,” he smiled back at her. “And I like lasagna, if I can manage to find me someone to make specialty cheeses.”
“There will be other problems, first,” Kathra replied, pulling the conversation back to why she had ordered him to attend her.
“Yes, but I intend to hide in my kitchen while you and yours sort all of that out,” he said simply. “If they didn’t follow me to Renneth and then here, which I couldn’t tell you one way or the other, then I have no part to play.”
“And if they did?” she asked.
Daniel shrugged.
“You hired me,” he said. “Of all the offers I got, yours was the only one even remotely interesting. I presume the recruiters you went through are either people you trust, or that’s probably the easiest way for the Sept bureaucrats to follow me to Renneth. From there, I’m not sure how they would track you to wherever we ended up. Or wherever we are now. Unless someone has found a magical new way to track a ship making a jump.”
“That cannot be done,” Kathra confirmed. “But an observer watching a ship go into jump can make a good estimate where it will come out.”
“I wasn’t flying,” he said with a serious face.
“And I’ve looked at the logs from Erin’s flight,” Kathra nodded. “All three of them short-jumped several times when leaving Renneth, so nobody could have followed them directly.”
“There you have it,” he said. “I will return to my kitchen then?”
“You are not concerned that some of the comitatus will suspect you of being a spy anyway?”
“Until one of them actually stabs me with a knife, they do not even rise to the level of threat of some of my former coworkers,” he said, eyes suddenly darker than they had been.
