WinterStar

by Blaze Ward

  “Tribal squadron, this is Commander Omezi,” her voice drew Daniel’s head back around to where the boss was seated like a war goddess. “All ships but WinterStar withdraw to the next Concursion. We will be along in a few days, or will send you a message.”

  That made sense. That violeur had been intent on capturing at least all of WinterStar’s crew. Perhaps the whole tribe.

  Why the crew over there had done nothing since made no sense, but perhaps the invader had been out of touch with them and they were not aware that he was dead? The tribe needed to flee before those invaders over there could do anything to stop them, but the Commander would have to remain behind.

  Daniel hadn’t really signed on to die aboard a ship that the Sept apparently didn’t like, but that turtle out there was nothing that had ever come from a Sept world.

  Or any world Daniel could imagine.

  Just how big was the galaxy? And who might be out there?

  Humans had only been in space for about a thousand years. And even they had not explored much. A dozen other species had already been present, none of them as warlike as the Earthlings, but the Sept Empire was a recent thing, just in the last few centuries.

  That had come from somewhere else.

  “Is it armed?” the Commander asked her bridge crew.

  “I have no idea, Commander,” one of the women replied. “We have relied on passive scans only, because if we’ve all been hypnotized, we shouldn’t be pinging her.”

  “If the tribe flees, they’ll figure it out,” Omezi said. “Ping him hard enough to tell. Prepare to jump if he does anything at all.”

  “Stand by.”

  Daniel found a rail to get a good grip on. WinterStar didn’t have gravity inducers, so he would be subject to inertia if the ship started to move suddenly. The women around him would probably be fine with being tossed around in zero gee, but he didn’t want to be bleeding. He already had enough blood on his apron and in his hair.

  If that was blood.

  Whatever the fluid was, he still needed a shower soon. He was beginning to stink, but now didn’t seem like the time to remind these dangerous women that he was just a cook.

  After all, he had just killed a man.

  Tattooed psychopaths with knives, and all that.

  The bridge beeped like an alarm clock that wasn’t taking no for an answer this time. Everyone else tensed, so Daniel hoped that he wasn’t about to join that other branleur in hell.

  “Well?” Commander Omezi demanded.

  “Uhm…” came the response.

  Daniel did not have a warm and fuzzy feeling. It was like he had fallen through the glass instead of Alice, to be surrounded by doubt and rabbits. Not that he was any better, but these women were supposed to protect him.

  Well, protect the tribe, but as long as he was hiding behind their kilts, they would protect him, too. He hoped.

  “What?” the Commander followed up.

  “The scan did not penetrate the hull of that thing at all, Commander,” the woman said.

  Daniel made a note to get all four of these women’s names later. And figure out their favorite desserts. He had a feeling that he would want to bribe them occasionally, going forward.

  “How is that possible?” Omezi said aloud. It sounded rhetorical, but there was nobody who could answer her anyway.

  “No reaction from the turtle,” one of the other women said.

  Good, they saw the same thing he did, a massive, space-going sea turtle. More or less.

  “No reaction?” Omezi repeated in disbelief. “How can they not notice?”

  “ClanStars are jumping, Commander,” the scan operator answered instead. “Space around us is now clear for maneuver.”

  ForgeStar, IronStar, and both WaterStars had gone quickly enough. Now there was just WinterStar and a gigantic Star Turtle contesting local space. Daniel didn’t even know what system the tribal squadron had ended up in, too busy down in his kitchen to worry. Three meals per day for thirty to forty women, depending. Fruit and vegetables to can, jar, freeze dry, or just plain freeze.

  A bistro that never even had a First Day off to close.

  “Roll us on gyros to bring as many guns to bear as possible,” the Commander ordered in a voice that sucked fifteen degrees of warmth out of the room.

  WinterStar itself wasn’t much larger than the head on that turtle, or one of the fins, and she was getting ready to fight it? Was this woman insane?

  No. Not really. Desperate, perhaps. She had convinced the rest of her tribe to give up even a passing connection to the Sept Empire and flee into deep space. They were poor and free, which was apparently a good enough trade for these women.

  Not one Daniel understood well enough to have made himself, but he was also a man, and the Sept were a highly patriarchal structure. He could see where all women were generally accorded second-class citizenship.

  Plus, the Sept kept slaves. Occasionally Spanic and Anglo, but more likely Africans and Asians. Anyone that didn’t fit the genotypal mold of the Persian Plateau that had forged the Seven Clans. Even the Rabic were accorded honorary citizenship with the Persians. Erin still had the mark of Grandma Ezinne permanently on her face, a barcode used to identify property, much like handhelds and personal transports.

  Yes, they would fight and die before they surrendered their identity to an outsider. Their agency.

  “Anything?” Omezi called as the turtle was suddenly lined up along a side of the ship, where presumably defensive turrets could all bear.

  Daniel really didn’t know how WinterStar was armed, either, come to think of it. The central cylinder rotated around the longer core, so perhaps there were guns at both ends and maybe spinning with the body. More questions to ask, although maybe he would let that one go unanswered.

  They still didn’t entirely trust him, so asking those sorts of questions might raise a red flag or six. A few of the comitatus and crew appeared to suspect him of being the spy that allowed the Septagon to find them several months ago.

  If he was, it was because someone was tracking him secretly. He hadn’t known that Kathra Omezi was apparently important enough for the Sept to hate. Hopefully he hadn’t joined her on someone’s shit list, because he had always intended to return to civilization at some point and start over with a new restaurant.

  Hadn’t he?

  Daniel watched the other ship just hang in the darkness, almost looking like a dragon preparing to belch fire at them, but he couldn’t remember what his actual plans for the future had been. Go home after a time. Open a bistro. Or maybe just a hot dog stand.

  Wasn’t that an even bigger challenge?

  “Daniel, what do you see?” Omezi’s voice suddenly broke him out of squirreling in on himself.

  “What?” he fumbled around as he turned to face her, instead of the Star Turtle looming like doom over there.

  “What is it that you see, when you look at the ship?” she asked in a slow, careful voice, rather like asking the five-year-old where the cookie in his hand had come from.

  “A huge turtle,” Daniel said, frantically trying to figure out what she was really asking.

  Not that he had ever managed to understand any woman that well.

  “And?” she prompted.

  “Hanging in space watching us, except he hasn’t moved at all,” Daniel let the words spill out, hoping someone else could make better sense of them that he could. “Is there anybody over there?”

  “Why wouldn’t there be?” the woman who appeared to be in charge of the weapons asked.

  “Erin said he didn’t dock a ship,” Daniel turned to look at the others, aware that he probably wasn’t supposed to refer to these women by their nicknames, but Erinkansilemi Uduik was too much of a mouthful to pronounce correctly more than one time in three. Especially today. “Someone asked if he just flew over, but there was no suit. If I was going to attack the tribal squadron, I would have brought some crew with me, even if just to keep a stupid cook from ambu
shing me with a fire extinguisher and beating me to death when I was distracted.”

  Several someones chuckled.

  “What if he had no crew?” Daniel offered.

  “What?” Omezi actually, literally stood up to confront him. “A ship that big with no crew? Impossible.”

  “How the hell would I know what’s possible?” Daniel demanded back at her, suddenly aware that he was the third smallest human on this bridge, and the least dangerous, even for having killed someone the most recently. “They haven’t reacted to the squadron leaving, have they? Or WinterStar lining up to shoot at them. Is there anyone even over there?”

  “Ife, open a radio channel and hail them,” the Commander ordered, her eyes never leaving Daniel’s.

  He was plagued by images of hawks and mice. Or tigers and rabbits.

  One of the women murmured into a microphone. Daniel held his breath. Others seemed to be doing the same.

  “Well?” Omezi demanded.

  “Nothing, commander,” Ife said quietly. “Not even an automated acknowledgement.”

  “Has the ship moved at all, relative to us?” the Commander asked in a less violent voice.

  Her eyes never left his.

  “Negative,” one of the other women said. “We are drifting towards its right flank now, but the ship remains facing the spot we were at before.”

  Kathra Omezi had never struck Daniel as a woman given to wild rolls of the dice. She had always been the careful planner, reacting calmly and intelligently to a situation, rather than emotionally.

  Her next words nearly caused him to piss himself.

  “Engage thrusters,” she said in a hard voice, eyes still locked on her cook. “Just enough to bring us alongside parallel and then stop. Flip us end for end when you do, so we are facing the same direction as the turtle.”

  Daniel gulped past a frog that had taken up residence in his mouth when he wasn’t looking. There was a smile in her eyes now. He had seen some of his employees get that look when the stress had pushed them to the breaking point. When knives were coming out and you had to throw a bucket of cold water in someone’s face to get their attention, right before the rest of the men tackled them and held them down long enough for sanity to return.

  “You need to go take a quick shower and change,” Commander Omezi smiled at him with lethal edges. “But make it quick.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re coming with us.”

  Somehow, he had known that was coming.

  Merde.

  13

  Rather than handle the leaking corpse, Iruoma had wrapped it in a tarp and carried it over one shoulder inward to the medbay. There wasn’t that much blood that had dripped on the deck behind her, but she ordered one of the mechanics to clean it instead of doing the job herself.

  Kathra has specifically ordered her to guard the body. That meant not leaving it alone to take care of the mess she had left. Sorry about that.

  Unwrapped and laid out in a bed, it was about the size of the cook. And probably weighed about the same.

  Bright green and white clothing, where it had not been stained in blood, or whatever the grayish liquid was that was cooling and drying. The medical scanner did a thorough job on the corpse, but could find no match for species, so it wasn’t one of the score or so that the Sept had encountered. Nor the trading clans.

  Legs like a woman, longer in proportion to the torso than on a man. Short trunk and short arms. Strange, almost glowing gem at the base of the neck. Scales over skin, with a few places where they might have turned into the sorts of horny armor that lizards got.

  Iruoma wasn’t in the mood to check to see if the pupils were round or slitted. Or something equally weird. It was enough that the machine found no vital signs and was tracking the body as it returned to room temperature.

  Someone else would get the privilege of performing an autopsy at some point.

  “Iruoma,” Kathra’s voice came over the interior systems.

  “Here,” she replied.

  “Still dead?” the boss asked, like perhaps there had been some doubt up on the bridge.

  “Still dead,” Iruoma confirmed. “Med scanner doesn’t know what it is.”

  “Are there any radio signals emerging from the body?” Kathra asked in a strange tone.

  “Repeat that,” Iruoma said.

  “Scan the corpse for communication signals,” the Commander ordered.

  “Uhm. Stand by.”

  Iruoma looked around for something that might work. This was a medbay, not a mechanic’s shop. She called up the control board for the medical scanner built into the bed and it would do everything she didn’t want, so she pulled open cabinets and drawers until she found something she had completely forgotten that they owned.

  An electronic Scrutinizer that shouldn’t have been left in medbay, so she supposed that someone had gotten hurt on some mission and in the rush to get them here, someone else had forgotten to put the thing back where it belonged. Iruoma checked the log, and made a note to yell at Areen at some point. The Scrutinizer had been in this drawer for almost two years now.

  Still, it had enough charge to work today. She held it over the corpse and let the machine work its magic.

  Body covered in keratin-like scales. More inside, so it was rather more like a shark or a ray. Light bones, almost birdish. Originally evolved from a quadruped lizard of some sort was the scientific, wild-ass guess from the machine.

  Age unknown, with a lot of question marks.

  “Weird,” she muttered to herself.

  “What’s that?” Kathra was still listening on the open channel.

  “Uhm…” Iruoma pushed a few options and let the device work. “The gem on the chest is a power source of some sort, but banked right now. No radio signals, but I’m reading strange amounts of entropy and decay in what should be a fresh corpse.”

  “Repeat that?”

  “The Scrutinizer I found thinks this is a week-old corpse, Commander,” Iruoma replied. “Not an hour dead.”

  “Recalibrate it.”

  “I did, Kathra,” Iruoma snapped. “Same result.”

  “Merde.”

  “Oui,” Iruoma fired back, just because she felt like being a shit. They had all started cursing in French because of Daniel Lémieux.

  People on the bridge chuckled loud enough for the microphone to pick it up.

  “Suggestions?” Iruoma continued.

  “Keep a gun handy and stay put with it,” Kathra said. “Keep scanning and see what other surprises it has.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Turtle hunting.”

  14

  Because he had been the one that killed the thing, Kathra made it a point to bring the cook along. Something had kept him separate from the others when the invader had apparently taken over everybody else’s minds. That much was obvious from the security tapes she had reviewed.

  And Kathra made a note to remember the extra uses of a fire extinguisher in a fight. There was dirty, and then there was rude. And she quite approved of rude.

  “Haunt, hold here,” Kathra called as the ships circled the alien ship like a school of sharks.

  Nothing had changed about the thing. It still resembled a Star Turtle, as Daniel had remarked. The bow was still pointed at exactly the spot that it had before, where WinterStar had been resting during the…

  Could she call it an attack? Attempted kidnapping, perhaps? Something. Enough for a lethal response from the least dangerous person on her crew.

  The Star Turtle lurked there in the darkness. If it had any weapon turrets aboard, none had emerged to track any of her hunters.

  From here, the top and bottom were both slightly curved. Like half the curvature of the top had been stretched into the bottom, leaving the legs emerging from exactly the centerline, rather than along the bottom, like a sea-going reptile.

  Kathra brought the nose of her craft around and triggered just enough thrust to push her aft re
lative to the thing. The ass end looked like a turtle as well. Flippers from where it would have had corners, were it rectangular. Stubby tail like a whip, trailing. No place where engine nozzles emerged from the carapace.

  How in the nine hells did it get around without thrusters? Even the Septagon had engines on the aft facing. Seven of them across, of course.

  Did this thing swim?

  Worse, she had hoped that moving The Haunt around would allow the targeting computers to perhaps do a better job at scanning the interior of the creature than WinterStar’s eyes. But every scan reflected off the skin of the thing.

  She could see the shape. Measure its dimensions in perfect detail, but nothing penetrated.

  “Erin, tell me again about the airlock,” Kathra called over the team line.

  “I triple-checked the logs, Commander,” her wingwoman said in a tired singsong. “There was nothing that docked and triggered the outer housing. He got in and pressed the inside panel to close the airlock, like we do when we’re in a suit.”

  “He wasn’t wearing a suit,” Kathra said absently. “How did he get from here to there?”

  “He flew,” Daniel muttered low enough that the mic probably didn’t pick it up. “But where was his suit after he arrived? Or is that the gem?”

  “What was that?” Kathra cut the comm so she could have a private conversation with the lethal chef.

  “How did he take control of all of your minds?” Daniel asked in a stern voice. “He was doing something, and it required concentration, because once I hit him, he lost it. Was it the gem? Iruoma said it seemed to be a power source of some sort, but banked. Was he controlling it? Was that how he did these things?”

  Kathra opened the radio again and checked her transmission power.

  “Iruoma,” she said simply.

  “Here, Commander.”

  “Take the Scrutinizer and scan the gem specifically,” Kathra ordered. “How much power is there contained it in?”