by Blaze Ward
And the chef.
Her vox chirped with a signal from the station, acknowledging receipt of her manifest. Probably choked a little, when the system realized the tonnage she was hauling today. Enough to maybe depress the market for a while, but WinterStar wouldn’t be this way again for some time, so others would just have to deal with market fluctuations instead.
Erin keyed open the hatch and let the station air in. Carggi always had a sweet/dry smell she had never been able to isolate. Cardamom and ginger maybe, now that Daniel had taught her a greater appreciation of such spices in her food.
She emerged first, with Daniel right behind her. Station had put them all together on a terminal, a deck below the usual cargo spaces, since they were delivering metal stock pure enough that it could go straight into the machine shops for processing. Outbound cargo for the return trip would need to be brought down a level, but that would still be easier, since that stuff weighed far less and the limits for the six camels would be space rather than tonnage.
Erin gathered up the other five pilots and waited for the rep of the StationMaster to arrive with receipts. Crews were already standing by with roller carts. The complicated dance of trade.
Rep today was a woman who looked Spanic at first glance. Same dark as Daniel, but redder. She was perhaps in her late thirties, an older woman compared to the pilots around her, about the same as age the one male.
Paperwork got signed. Receipts got exchanged. Life was good.
Daniel got a raised eyebrow from the woman, but he wasn’t dressed like the rest of the crew, and Erin didn’t volunteer anything. Daniel was a shit and leered openly at the woman, like he hadn’t gotten laid in a year. Erin would have had to drink half a bottle of something hard before she would consider that woman, but she suspected Daniel had no more interest than she did.
Just wanted to act tough, or something. Out of character, if you knew him. Setting boundaries early, if you didn’t.
“Bar,” Erin said as the rep departed.
Part of the reason Erin had usually flown these missions in the past was the opportunity to have different food on a TradeStation while waiting for crews to unload and reload the camels. Being Kathra’s Second-In-Command just meant that she could pull rank on the others, unless they wanted to fly a camel as well. Four of the five women with her had retired from combat flying to safer tasks, but they understood her logic and agreed with it.
Except that, upon consideration, she really didn’t have to do that anymore. Daniel was a far better cook than Ugonna on his worst day, and willing to make exotic things, if he had the ingredients to match her hunger. Only thing he wasn’t doing right now was making different kinds of beer from the grains that usually came off Ihejirika ClanStar in trade.
Still, she got to have adventures on a station while the others stayed home, even as little as those adventures usually were. You had to travel to one of the major Sept TradeStations before you were likely to get into a really good fight on the deck.
Not that she was looking forward to one. Honest.
Chinese Diaspora food today. Ancient recipes as reinterpreted by Anglos in the distant past and standardized into something the true ancients of the Chinese homeland would have been appalled to consider. Tea. A little whiskey. Finger food, because she had never bothered to learn how you were supposed to pick something up with two pieces of bamboo half as wide as her smallest finger.
Halfway through the munchies, Erin decided that Daniel did this better, too.
Oh, the sacrifices we make.
34
Perhaps the weirdest thing about the scene, at least for Daniel, was that there were others in here who looked like him. Rabics from the central regions of the homeworld. WinterStar had mostly Africans, with a few Spanics. There were several people in here from the same ancient lands on Earth, including the family that owned the place. Lebanese in their case, to use the ancientest term, rather than Algerians, but close enough cousins, when you got down to it.
The food was industrial generic. The sort of thing you might find on any TradeStation or planet-side food court, where they would advertise with a tiger and a panda. Factory-made dim sum. Adequate for fuel. Good enough if you normally ate something different.
He could tell from the women around him that he would need to add a round of something similar to the menu more frequently when they got home. Their faces had fallen from anticipation to experience, and it was not that great, at least compared to the taste they had in their minds when they got up this morning.
Worse, he would have to have a chat with the Commander, and possibly Ndidi, to make sure these five women were in the rotation to eat with the comitatus, the next time he did this. He would likely never hear the end of it if they were left out of good dim sum, having to eat down in the main mess that day.
Something niggled at the back of his head as he grabbed a fresh bit of sweet and sour pork with his chopsticks. The sour looks he was getting from the six women were priceless, but chopsticks weren’t a thing on WinterStar, so they had never learned the trick. Might have to fix that, too, when he got back. Not with bamboo, but it would be easy enough to have a machine shop do him up something in plastic.
And then get enough made for the main mess as well, since not everybody got to eat the good stuff, except about once a month.
The shock hit Daniel so hard that he dropped his pork right onto the table.
Erin started to grin, as a prelude to teasing him, when she saw the look on his face. Instead, her right hand dropped out of sight below the table top, where she was, no doubt, unlatching the strap that held her pistol in place and putting her hand on the pommel.
“What?” she whispered fiercely.
The other five women stopped laughed and chatting like a guillotine had dropped across the conversation.
Daniel blinked rapidly, letting his mind cycle as he stared at Erin blankly.
“When we went and interviewed everyone on WinterStar, we forgot someone,” he said quietly. “It was my fault, because of the way we did it.”
“Who?” Erin whispered back as the other women also seemed to be contemplating sudden, industrial-scales of violence in a fast food bar.
“Someone who normally talks to TradeStations anyway,” Daniel said. “And could easily pass along messages when nobody would even notice.”
“Oh, shit!” Erin sat bolt upright.
“And someone I suspect might have an axe to grind,” Daniel continued. “I don’t know the woman at all. Would she be that angry?”
“Who?” one of the other pilots asked. Daniel hadn’t gotten all their names, yet, so he couldn’t call her anything but SkyCamel Three, which didn’t sound even remotely polite at this point.
“Is this a trap, Daniel?” Erin focused her brighter eyes on him and ignored the other women. “Are we about to be attacked here on the station, or are they waiting out in the darkness?”
She caught his glance at the other women and understood the significance.
“If you wish to keep flying with Kathra Omezi, you will take this secret to your graves,” Erin said in a voice that had Daniel twitching, so say nothing of the five pilots. “Am I clear?”
One by one they nodded, barely daring to breathe.
Daniel put both hands on the table, framing his plate and the rogue sweet and sour pork. He closed his eyes and let his mind reach out.
Urid-Varg had been able to do this over distances that were frightening. Perhaps that was his vast depth of experience. Perhaps his native species had the power. Perhaps there had been something in the mounting that the Commander had destroyed.
Daniel didn’t dare pursue that matter anymore than he had. God-like powers were bad enough. Mad Gods were not the sorts of people he wished to have as peers.
Still, now was the moment he needed to push to see just what he could do.
The dining hall around him was easy to see in his mind’s gem. Mostly human, with a pair of Se’uh’pal back in a corner beh
ind him. One hundred and twenty centimeters tall to the tops of their heads, with another thirty of what looked exactly like bunny ears above that. Round faces covered with a fine fur and big eyes. Merchant/traders. Apparently most of the species were, at least to some extent, but these two made a primary living at it.
Okay, good enough. Daniel reached out.
He had no idea who the Lords of a TradeStation like this might be, so he could not lock in on a person, like he could do with Erin, seated across from him. Instead, he let his subconscious mind sniff for something marked as danger. Strong emotions centered on Erin, or perhaps Kathra Omezi.
The station was a gray, foggy mist as he let his mind flow. People living normal lives. Occasional bits of triumph. Long stretches of anguish. Nothing jumped out.
No, that wasn’t right. He tasted something. A flavor too bright for his Ratatouille, almost a sweetness instead of the normal earthy tones. Daniel had no other way to describe the casserole around him, but that at least made sense to him.
He focused on the flavor. Let it resolve itself into an image. A person. A mind.
Daniel growled deep in his throat and did the one thing he had sworn would be an evil too great.
He stepped into the man’s mind and rode him, just like Urid-Varg had done.
Human. Male. Middle aged. Not a boss, but a senior-enough bureaucrat. Except he wasn’t. Or rather, wasn’t just.
Daniel peeled back the layers of the man’s mind. Found two beings in there, one sheltered behind the other. He rifled the man’s memories ruthlessly, turning over boxes and pulling drawers out of the wall to find what he wanted.
The man would probably be plagued by the most exquisite nightmares for a week after this, but Daniel really didn’t have any sympathy for him at all.
The man was a Sept spy.
Deep cover. Hiding as another. Living a double life so precisely that even his wife did not know the truth. Not revealing himself in any way, except that he could send messages off to his true masters, without the StationMaster knowing any better.
Thus did the Sept keep their fingers intertwined with all of their children colonies, lest one think to break away and join the Free Worlds, costing all those banks that had funded the colony everything, and perhaps necessitating a forceful intervention.
Say, perhaps, a Septagon arriving overhead.
Daniel reread the message the man had sent. Memorized the words with mental abilities that were more the act of telling his ghosts and asking them to remind him later. They were allies. At least for now. Later might be a different story. But later he might be able to let them go to their graves properly as well.
Daniel opened his eyes and nearly fell over as he let go of the stress in his body. The woman on his left caught him with a hand and held him while he drew a breath.
“And?” Erin asked quietly.
“The station is not a trap,” Daniel managed, reaching out a hand to grab his tea mug and empty the now-cool liquid into his mouth. He poured more and wrapped his hands around the mug to warm them, a cold not just metaphorical.
“But there is a trap?” Erin pressed.
“There is,” Daniel said.
Quickly, he repeated the message that had been sent, triggered when the ClanStars first arrived in system and began to communicate with the TradeStation for docking schedules and trade needs.
And an extra message, buried within the others.
“Does their spy know who ours is?” Erin’s eyes became pools of dark death as he watched.
“No, but I recognize her vocabulary,” Daniel nodded. “Her speech patterns.”
“And it is indeed her?”
“It is,” Daniel whispered, sipping some more tea.
“Who?” one of the others asked in a quiet snarl. “Who is the viper in our nest, betraying us to the white men?”
Daniel didn’t take offense at the woman’s rage. Her kind had been slaves and worse within the lifetimes of their still-living elders. He was close enough, ethnically, to be mistaken for one of the Farsi Overlords of the Sept, the Seven Clans, even if he had never been to Earth himself, and his ancestors were from nearly a quarter of the planet away.
He still looked like the oppressors.
Daniel instead looked a question at Erin, asking permission to share some small bit of the secrets with the others. She nodded and grabbed more food. Probably they would need a to-go container for the rest so they could pay and flee.
Most of the ClanStars were close by, conducting their own trade with the station for things they needed personally, while WinterStar handled the major work. Only the four support hips were not in the immediate vicinity: ForgeStar, IronStar, and the two WaterStars.
But trouble was coming.
Daniel turned to the other pilots and waited for each of them to nod back.
“Our spy is Ugonna.”
35
It was like waking from a midday nap, but Kathra wouldn’t do something so amazingly stupid as that while flying. Not on escort duty with Erin and more than a dozen SkyCamels currently docked with Carggi Station.
The Haunt was maintaining a polite patrol around the tribal squadron. Just sitting out there, generally hovering in a complex pattern that let their scanners see in all directions, because Kathra’s paranoia knew that someone meant them ill.
She shook her head to clear it and saw a message on her board where she normally tracked internal systems. Apparently, she had opened a note-taking program and overlay it.
What had she been meaning to jot down?
The words sent a spike of fear through her soul.
Commander Omezi, I must apologize to you now, and perhaps every time I ever see you again forever, for doing this. Erin insisted that the message be delivered, and done in strictest secrecy, so I had no choice. In order to do that, I had to locate your mind in space, take it over, much like my nemesis Urid-Varg would have done, and write you a message using your own hands.
I’m more sorry that you can possibly imagine, but there was no other way we could find.
Carggi TradeStation is not a trap, but there is a spy here, and they have been in communication with a spy on WinterStar. One we missed.
Sitting at dinner, I realized that in the process of cycling the rest of the staff through the comitatus to eat with us, where they could be inspected, we missed someone, because she was always in charge of feeding the rest of the crew. The oversight is mine, I should have made a proper checklist to follow, instead of relying on a flawed system. Once that realization was confirmed by finding the spy on the station, I reached out to our traitor and confirmed it.
Ugonna has internalized a great rage at you for being, as she sees it, demoted from the prestigious job of cooking for your comitatus, to merely cooking for the junior varsity. Her words.
It was she that passed a message along at Renneth, as soon as the squadron arrived, giving the authorities time to indeed contact Septagon Vorgash and vector them down onto the squadron. That we fled immediately still proved to the Sept that she could be relied upon to provide more information for a future ambush.
Another message is making its way to the Lords of the Sept as we wait at Carggi. As before, I doubt that there are sufficient patrol forces nearby to threaten The Haunt and risk the SkyCamels, but Ugonna has told them of the gas giant at Azgon where we have hidden the turtle. She did not say what they would find, only that a great treasure awaited them there.
We are being watched by the spy here and his minions, so we must move with care, awaiting your orders. It is possible to communicate this way, as distasteful as I find it. If you tell Erin to check her message pack for an update, I can return here and read a message you have written on this board.
I wish there were other ways to do this. With your permission, I will work with Ndidi at a later date, in safer climes, to find something that is not evil itself, but the devil pursues us now and time is of the essence.
Your humble and chastened servant,
Daniel.
Kathra had already gone through the stages of rage and acceptance before she was halfway through the letter he had written her. The violation was so severe that thoughts of just killing the man outright were foremost, but he had to know that. Had feared it. Had told Ndidi how sickening it was that he had the power to do something like that, and had to fight the urges to fix the things around him, lest he become the conqueror he had defeated once.
She reread the message. It was an exquisite trap for her.
The ClanStars could simply vanish into the night without giving their former Sept Overlords any opportunity to pursue them meaningfully. Those fleets requires bases and forward supply stations to operate for any significant amount of time. The three hundred thousand people on a Septagon ate an enormous amount of food on a daily basis. Far more than their ship could grow on its own. There were deliveries on a near-constant basis. Food. Medicine. Even mundane things like new uniforms and replacement filters for air systems. One continuous stream of supply freighters.
But right now, she was half-way trapped at the station herself, awaiting her SkyCamels returning.
Perhaps on some future date, The Haunt needed to start attacking that Sept supply chain? Just damage the ability of the Septagons to control space, if they didn’t dare get any great distance away from their supply stations?
Or maybe she and Daniel needed to figure out how to capture a supply depot, loot what they needed, and destroy the rest?
She might be finally getting angry enough, if the Sept had decided to begin hunting the Mbaysey with that sort of commitment and energy.
Tomorrow.
Today, she needed to escape this trap and get to the Star Turtle before the Sept could destroy it. They couldn’t capture it, unless they could somehow turn a gravity inducer field inside out and use it to pull the ship up from the atmosphere of the planet where it lay hidden, but the Sept could easily destroy it.
For the briefest moment, Kathra wondered if Daniel was setting them a trap, but if that was the case, he could have just remained silent and let WinterStar emerge from the jump right on top of a Septagon that was waiting. The massive Ram Cannons would be more than sufficient to terminally damage her flagship in those moments when they were blind to their surroundings, waiting for sensors to return to normal.
