WinterStar

by Blaze Ward

  Erin listened to the hydraulics step up as the machine pushed. Or pulled. Tried to open its hand.

  The gem started to glow internally.

  “Daniel?” she called, feeling her hand drop onto a blade pommel automatically.

  “This is why we needed the robot,” he yelled back. “It would be inside your head right now issuing orders. Or maybe just killing you.”

  What a wonderful thought.

  Erin checked her blade, held in a knife-fighter’s grip in her right hand. Kathra had a pistol, in case she needed to knock the bastard across the room.

  Erin didn’t say anything to the robot. It would continue until it succeeded, or something broke. She didn’t know how much pressure that would require, but she had seen this bot lift a corner of a Spectre off a landing skid to repair it.

  It torqued at the gem as she watched, but nothing was happening.

  No, that wasn’t true.

  Erin had the impression that the gem was somehow fighting back. Hopefully it wasn’t the corpse deciding to not be dead anymore.

  “System, scan the corpse for other power sources,” Erin said on a whim.

  She wasn’t the least bit prepared for the response. Stupid bot had a beam splitter for marking things with a laser when humans needed to see where to work or weld. It came on now, painting the corpse.

  The body was wearing a hoodless, green onesie, with a white stripe, about ten centimeters wide, that ran down his chest from the gem to his belt buckle. The belt was white. It connected to white stripes down the outsides of both legs. Both boots were white. Another white stripe went north from the gem and down the tops of both shoulders, along the outside of the arms to white gloves somewhere between what you wore to the opera and what you used when welding.

  Everywhere that the creature had white, the robot’s laser was painting pulses of light, like it was a circuit connecting everything. Looking closely, she couldn’t tell if those parts were glowing all by themselves, or that was just the laser.

  Any twitch over there and she would start hacking.

  At least the rest of the crew was cursing under their breaths as well so she wasn’t alone there.

  Still, the bot should have succeeded by now. The damned thing was likely to break itself if she didn’t intervene soon. But it was a bot. They’d just have it fix itself, or take it to one of the other ones for the work.

  Something popped.

  Erin saw a flash of light so bright she thought she was blind. A pulse of energy seemed to push her backwards like a wind on a planet was supposed to do.

  She blinked furiously, wiping her free hand across eyes suddenly running with excess tears.

  Damned corpse hadn’t moved. But it had changed.

  It had been deflated before. Now there was nothing but a mummified skeleton. Skin that looked like leather left out in a desert for a century of sun. The bodysuit hung loosely where it had been taut before.

  One hand slid to the side and a glove dropped off a mummified hand to fall loudly on the deck, nearly causing Erin to pee in her flight suit and start stabbing. At least it wouldn’t go down her leg if she had.

  The gem had separated from the platinum setting finally. The arm had moved about fifteen centimeters.

  Erin smelled smoke. Looked over, saw flames licking at the housing of the maintenance robot.

  “I’ve got open fire here,” Erin called.

  Stina leaned in and emptied the fire extinguisher already in her hands into the bot’s housing, candy-coating it with sticky, white foam until it stopped.

  “What the hell was that?” Kathra asked.

  Erin agreed. She stepped around to make sure the bot was done and out, but she could smell the ozone in the air. HVAC systems detected it, too, and jumped to max draw again, like they had earlier when the thing was rotting.

  Robot was dead. Erin wasn’t even sure they could fix it, as parts looked like they had been spot welded by a drunk, flight-deck pixie. The most dangerous kind.

  Looking at the corpse, it was beyond dead now. Mummy. Papery skin wrapped across ancient bones and pulled tight.

  The gem had stopped glowing so hard, falling back to some more quiescent state she hoped meant that it was asleep. Or whatever magical diamonds did when they weren’t trying to take over the galaxy.

  “Daniel? You okay?” Erin called.

  No answer.

  She looked.

  He was on his knees, holding his head, but Areen wasn’t kicking him, so he must have just collapsed. But he had been connected to it, when it did…whatever.

  “Daniel?” Kathra looked back.

  “He’s dead,” the feisty chef said after a few moments. “Really dead this time.”

  “As opposed to?” Erin asked, compelled maybe.

  “All his victims are in that gem,” Daniel looked up and locked eyes with her. “Screaming. He’s inside the platinum part.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Did you miss the screaming part?” he snarled at her before he remembered where he was, who it was that was surrounding him and modulated his tone. “God, I need a glass of wine.”

  Areen helped the male to his unsteady feet like he was just another sister, holding him more or less upright with the help of the corridor wall.

  Erin turned to Kathra.

  “The bot’s cooked,” she said.

  “Yes,” Daniel said from outside. “That’s why none of you could be touching it.”

  And then he fainted again.

  19

  “Hopefully, this doesn’t turn into a habit,” Kathra chuckled as they walked.

  Areen was carrying the chef like a sleeping child. His eyes were open, but really not focusing on anything. They had run him through a med scan just long enough to confirm utter exhaustion and nothing deeper.

  “What, you aren’t expecting a giant space shark next, to come hunting the turtle?” Areen laughed.

  The corridor wasn’t wide enough for both of them, with Daniel’s head and feet sticking out, so Kathra trailed by a half-step.

  “Celestial octopus,” Kathra suggested. “Nothing so mundane as a shark.”

  “Wait until you see what’s on the turtle,” Daniel muttered quietly.

  “What’s that, Daniel?” Kathra asked.

  “Akami. Toro. Chu Toro. Harakami Otoro,” Daniel said distinctly.

  Sounded Japanese.

  “Spacer, please?” she prompted.

  “WinterStar is steel,” Daniel said as they arrived at his chamber and Areen opened the hatch with an elbow.

  “So?” Kathra was looking at him closely.

  “That turtle is organic,” he said in an utterly precise tone. “Ancient. And alive, in ways that I don’t think I’ll live long enough to ever explain.”

  “Controlled by this Urid-Varg?” Kathra asked. “Like he was trying to do to us?”

  “Close enough,” Daniel said. “Some of the oldest voices were awake at the end. I’ve seen a picture of that thing when it was barely larger than WinterStar. However long ago that was.”

  “So it’s a pet?” Areen asked.

  “It lacks any intelligence at all,” Daniel said. “Golem, to use the old Hebrew term.”

  “If we killed its master, will it die?” Areen moved to the bed and rested Daniel on it carefully, still rumpled from before dinner and the evening’s entertainment.

  “We haven’t killed him, Areen,” Daniel said.

  “But you said he was dead,” Kathra pulled up her chair and sat.

  Areen moved to the foot of the bed and sat there with one hand on Daniel’s foot, probably to comfort him with touch.

  He had already had a worse day than any Kathra could remember having in the last decade.

  Daniel fixed her with a stare that didn’t seem to focus on this side of the galaxy.

  “Tower, moat, village,” he muttered that refrain again, almost like the chorus to a song nobody really wanted to sing along with.

  “Is the gem his
tower?” Kathra asked.

  “No,” Daniel’s eyes finally came back to the present. “The gem is the village. And the power source, I guess you’d call it. He’s somehow inscribed himself inside the platinum setting, like a very sophisticated computer program, except that it’s alive enough that it would have eaten its way into my chest to set itself, like it did that thing back there.”

  “That’s not Urid-Varg?” Kathra pressed.

  “No,” Daniel said. “Just his latest victim. A species he encountered at some point along his travels.”

  Daniel rooted around as she watched, pulling the blanket from under himself and curling up under it.

  “God, I’m so cold,” he whispered.

  Kathra could see the male shivering, but she couldn’t tell if it was nerves, adrenaline, or something else. Her own nerves were almost shot, and she’d just been a witness to all this for the most part. Daniel had been the player.

  “Can someone grab me the spare blanket from the foot locker under the bed?” he asked in a small, tired voice.

  Areen rose and pulled the box out in a single motion. It wasn’t locked, so she flipped the lid and grabbed a quilt off the top.

  Kathra wasn’t sure how it had ended up clear down here, but it was one someone’s grandmother had made special for someone else in some distant past. Still, she wouldn’t begrudge him that. Not after today.

  Areen spread it over Daniel and sat again.

  “Better?” the woman asked.

  “No, not really,” Daniel said. “I’d go stand in the shower under the hottest setting right now, but I’m afraid I’d either drown, or pass out.”

  “Here,” Areen said.

  As Kathra watched, the other woman stripped off her holster first, and then her shirt and pants, standing proudly nude for a moment, almost challenging Kathra to have a verbal opinion before Areen slid under the covers with the male and climbed over him to put her back to the wall.

  She wrapped long limbs around Daniel and held him. That seemed to help.

  Kathra wasn’t offended that Areen would lie with a male. Everyone had their own kinks and perversions. As long as nobody got hurt and everyone involved consented, it wasn’t her job to police her comitatus.

  All of those women were sworn to her anyway, life and soul.

  “Thank you,” Daniel whispered, glancing back.

  His shivering didn’t stop, but he sounded calmer.

  WinterStar was always kept warm. He was the only male aboard, so he had learned to just wear lighter layers and deal with temperatures constantly in the low twenties. Kathra knew that the Sept kept their warships at eighteen degrees, but everyone aboard one of those monstrosities was wearing several layers of heavy wool, rather than the lighter linens and cotton that the tribal squadron imported for clothing.

  “Daniel,” Kathra said to get his eyes open again and focused on her. “What do we do with the gem and the corpse?”

  “Ask me tomorrow,” he whispered in such an exhausted tone that she wasn’t surprised to find him asleep almost before the words were spoken.

  Kathra looked at Areen with her Commander’s eye.

  “I’ll have folks come in and check on you as the night passes,” Kathra said. “Alert me if he does anything or has any issues greater than the nightmares I expect.”

  “Understood, Kathra,” Areen said. “I don’t expect him to move for the next eight hours.”

  “That would probably be for the best,” Kathra said. “Ndidi will fix everyone breakfast, so don’t let him get up. Tomorrow, we have to solve the turtle.”

  20

  Erin sipped at the mug of cold-brewed coffee that Ndidi had just delivered to the Medbay. Only nineteen, the woman was probably going to inherit Daniel Lémieux’s job, at least for a short period, but she was already impressing people.

  Cold-brewed coffee on a warm, fragile night was just the thing Erin and the others needed now.

  The comitatus called it Goldfish Brew. The homemade device was a metal frame about a meter and a half tall, with various glass bowls and pipes that let things drip and work their slow magic, but the way the light had diffracted through the top tank in a picture had made it look like there was a goldfish swimming in it, and nobody had ever let Ndidi live that image down.

  But she made damned fine coffee.

  Iruoma had gone to bed. Kathra and Areen had tucked the chef in and gone to bed themselves, expecting an early morning. Erin and Joane had volunteered to stay up all night, and all day tomorrow, to keep watch on things here.

  The corpse had gone into a box. They would fire the salaud into space at some point soon, maybe by flying close enough to a nearby star to make sure. Or tossing him into the depths of a gas giant. Those were more common, this far out.

  All the clothing had gone into different crates. They had eventually cut the platinum setting out of the thing’s chest with a rotary saw, taking a few centimeters of bone with it, just so they didn’t have to touch anything. That got washed off and put into a storage container.

  WinterStar wasn’t a scientific exploration vessel, filled with hordes of boffins you could just set on a problem and get out of their way. Nobody had any idea how to explain some of what happened.

  Erin was just happy that they were several systems away from any that the Sept claimed, and not scheduled to return to a TradeStation anywhere for at least another two months, give or take.

  Assuming nothing even more strange compelled them.

  “So is there anything anybody will tell me?” Ndidi asked as she leaned back, pitcher in one hand and a devilish grin on her face.

  Like many of the support side, Ndidi kept her hair short and curly, maybe only as much as a two centimeters of poof around her skull. Unlike most of the comitatus, the young woman herself was short and rather stout, standing perhaps half a hand shorter than the chef, and probably weighing as much, most of it muscle.

  Had Ndidi’s reflexes and eyesight been as good as her mind, she probably would have been a candidate to join the comitatus someday, but she needed glasses for anything farther away than her hands, so she had turned her art to food.

  Ugonna had been a perfectly adequate cook. Adequate being the key word. Kathra had demanded more for the women who shared her food and her risks, and had hired a chef with a Golden Diamond, even if he was male.

  In another few years, Erin could see Ndidi giving the male a run for his money in a kitchen. She rather looked forward to that day, assuming Daniel stayed with them longer than the next TradeStation visit.

  There was always that. Still, he had handled today at least as well as most of the comitatus had, so Erin wouldn’t begrudge the male having had enough. She understood that feeling.

  But Ndidi had asked a question. A good one, too.

  “Tell you?” Erin asked the youngster, all of a decade behind her. “What’s to tell? We got attacked by this salaud. Kathra’s chef beat him to death. And then killed him a second time. I’m hoping we don’t have to try a third.”

  “And the Star Turtle?” Ndidi’s eyes were huge through those glass lenses, but they were large without them.

  “That’s next,” Erin said.

  “Are we keeping it?” the girl asked.

  “That’s Kathra’s call, Ndidi,” Erin laughed. “We’re not even sure that there is anybody aboard it.”

  “But it’s enormous,” Ndidi gasped. “How could it be empty?”

  “We’ll see,” Erin said with an elaborate shrug.

  A sound at the hatch had Erin out of the chair where she was keeping watch and a pistol in her hand. Joane was up less than a blink later, moving to the left.

  “Eep,” Ndidi squeaked.

  “Into the corner,” Erin ordered the young woman with her free hand. “Stay quiet and out of the way.”

  Erinkansilemi Uduik was still the undisputed Second-in-Command of Kathra’s comitatus. She could give those sorts of orders.

  Ndidi didn’t argue, but she was well trained. Not a war
rior, but not a slouch, either. She moved, putting the pitcher down on the deck in the exact corner of the storeroom to free up her hands if she needed to fight.

  The sound at the door came again, and still made no sense. The three of them were in a little-used storage room, where Kathra had ordered the invader’s body and gear to be stored. Either someone knew where they were and could open the door, or not.

  Erin moved to one side, pistol still ready, and pushed the comm button.

  “Who’s there?” she demanded in a low voice.

  “Erin, it’s Areen,” the other woman replied from the corridor outside. “I followed Daniel, but I can’t get him to wake up. He’s moaning and twitching, but seems to be sleep walking.”

  Daniel? What in hades name had happened to the chef now? Hadn’t they killed the beast? Would they really have to do it a third time?

  “What does he want?” Erin asked.

  “To get in there,” Areen said.

  Daniel could be heard in the background, making noises and banging against the metal of the hatch, but not speaking or screaming.

  She holstered her pistol and stepped close to a wall before triggering the door open.

  There was a simple button you pushed, but apparently Daniel was too far gone, or the thing that had taken over his mind didn’t remember that. Still, she was bigger and stronger, and had three other women handy.

  They could take a single, male chef.

  Daniel staggered into the room like he was having the best pub crawl ever.

  Erin tackled the man to the deck and sat on him, face-down where the beast inside him couldn’t get any leverage or claw at her. Ndidi and Joane closed. As did Areen.

  Except Areen was completely nude.

  Erin didn’t even want to know. Last time she had seen Areen, the woman had been carrying the chef and walking out of the medbay with Kathra. But everybody knew Areen didn’t consider it bestiality to lie with a man.

  Except Daniel was fully clothed, down to his normal deck booties.

  At least he had stopped thrashing after Erin bounced him off the deck. Smart men were like that.