by Blaze Ward
He was tough, they knew that, but he was still just a male. Who knew what the silence would do to him?
Kathra Omezi nodded and pushed off to head forward. Ndidi knew the woman had prepared herself for an apocalyptic battle when they arrived, however much they were now just going to stay long enough to cast their favorite chef to the wolves and hope he could sing for his supper.
“Are you okay?” Ndidi asked after a few moments of solitude.
“Scared shitless,” he grinned wanly at her. “There are so many ways this could go wrong, and only a few where it actually works out. But we have no choice whatsoever, and this is a duty that I cannot pass off to any of the rest of you.”
Ndidi nodded.
“What does flying in space feel like?” she asked, mostly to distract him in the few minutes until the countdown reached zero and the stars turned back into points in the darkness, instead of streaks.
“Much like being here,” he said, gesturing with the hand not holding on to a rail. “There is no gravity acting on me, nor inertia. I think, and I go. As you said, we are little fishies.”
He took a deep breath and Ndidi watched his eyes focus on something a thousand light-years distant. He grabbed the pole with both hands and pivoted himself around to go feet-first into the airlock.
“And now, we must part,” he said with stone in his voice.
Ndidi watched him, and came to a decision. She took a breath.
“I’m coming with you,” she said. “You said you could probably wrap your field around more than just you, to carry things or even people through space.”
“I was talking about rescuing someone from a broken Spectre, if I recall,” he replied. “Not attacking a Septagon in single combat.”
“Nonetheless,” Ndidi challenged him. “You need someone to come with you. Otherwise, you will be alone with your ghosts for however long it is until you catch up to WinterStar again. That would be bad for you.”
She saw the bolt of pain that shot through the man. Yes, she knew his weaknesses now. Kathra Omezi had ordered him to share them with her and Ndidi, so they could keep him sane. Sane enough, anyway.
Ndidi knew what things brought him up from a nightmare, screaming as he woke. Solitude was nearly at the top of the list, behind only evil itself.
He studied her face now. They were on a plane right now, relative to one another and the corridor. He was weighing his options against his needs.
“You will get permission from the Commander,” he challenged her back finally. “Otherwise, the answer is no.”
Ndidi nodded and reached out to key a comm line open.
“Commander Omezi, this is Ndidi,” she said simply, waiting.
“Go ahead,” the Commander replied after a moment.
“I believe it would be best if I accompanied Daniel on his mission,” Ndidi said in as firm a voice as a nineteen-year-old cook could, when challenging both her Commander and a male who might yet become the Mad God he feared. “He requires your approval.”
There was a long pause as Kathra Omezi considered the situation. It ran long enough that Ndidi was expecting her to side with Daniel.
“Yes, you should go,” Kathra said. “Daniel, she has my blessing.”
“Understood, Commander,” Daniel said, reaching out his free hand and closing the line. “Thank you, Ndidi.”
“You haven’t taught me everything you know,” she teased him. “Can’t have you escaping my clutches just yet.”
He chuckled, and it looked like some pain disappeared, from the way his eyes got brighter.
“Come,” he held out a hand.
Ndidi took it and let him pull her into the airlock and close by his side. It was not a sexual movement, rather he was holding her against his hip with an arm around her waist, side by side as he keyed the lock to close.
Cold water started at her toes and slowly rose up her calves. When she looked down, there was a faint, silvery glow engulfing her body from the bottom up, like the one around Daniel already. Quickly, it cocooned her before warming.
To do this, you must become me, and I you, Daniel said in her mind. Perhaps the Conqueror had other methods, but he would have never allowed a peer this close, and he had no friends.
What must it have been like to live so long and only have victims? To never have someone you could drink wine with, or enjoy a pleasant meal?
Ndidi looked around and realized that part of her was inside the being known as Daniel Quentin Lémieux, even as Daniel touched the points that were Ndidi Zikora. They could have no secrets from each other while it lasted, as they slowly merged into one being in some way that she could not explain.
They remained separate, though, even as they were not, like a swirled cake ready for the baking. The cake still had the vanilla and chocolate parts, easily identifiable even after it became a cake.
She looked, and felt him looking at her. He saw her as a woman, and thus ogled her body to a certain extent, even as she could not overcome the revulsion at the sexual touch of a man. But he understood evil, and she was safe. And he had Areen and a few others, if he needed.
They could be emotional partners without ever turning into something else. And he was old enough to be her father. At least that was the laughing phrase she heard from his side of the split.
Ndidi grinned at him and wrapped her left arm around his waist as well.
She watched him press the button and air slowly started pumping out of the space as the clock counted down to zero.
Shortly, it would be just the two of them against the entire Sept Empire.
But Daniel would not be alone when he faced them.
39
Walking into darkness.
Daniel tried not to hold his breath as the outer hatch opened and he could see the lines of nearby stars stretching to infinity before him.
And the endless night.
He had a firm hold of Ndidi’s hip against his own, flying lightly towards the opening while remaining yet inside WinterStar’s safety, just to test how it felt to bring a second person with him. It had been only theoretical before, the possibility that he could rush out to a damaged Spectre and rescue the pilot by encasing her in the same shield that protected him from the cold and vacuum of death. But it was working. Ndidi smiled nervously at him, reaching up to absently push her glasses back into place on her nose.
Daniel did something and reduced the temperature around them a degree or so. Just enough to offset the mad heartrates and sweat of two adventurers about to threaten a Septagon.
The clock wound down the last few seconds as he watched. When it hit zero, the stars returned to his world almost at exactly the same instant.
Daniel slid to the outer edge of the airlock, took a grip, and looked out. Nothing was immediately close enough for the naked eye to spot, so he carried them outside the ship, past the theoretical limit that the valence drive might accidentally pick him and Ndidi up when WinterStar jumped.
Cold, silent eternity.
Below, the green and gold banded marble shooter of a gas giant. Daniel knew that there were perhaps as many as a hundred moons in various orbits, some below but most still above them somewhere, along with the faintest wisp of rings seen nearly edge on. He drew a breath from somewhere and moved in the direction of the great storm in the planet’s northern hemisphere, a grand upswirling of blue gas like an underground water line erupting upwards to flood out your kitchen and close the business for three days while plumbers and inspectors argued about minutiae of legal interpretations.
But it was still the perfect place to hide his ship. And it made a mad sort of sense to park a thing he always saw as an aquatic creature near an underground ocean. Or whatever that layer of blue gas underneath turned out to be. He was a chef, not a physicist.
A thought drew his attention back. It might have been Ndidi’s desire to look, but she remained silent in that odd, metaphysical salon where they spoke. Still, he turned them as an entity to watch the great, graceful l
ines of WinterStar hovering in a high orbit.
The ship would not remain for long, if they spotted anything or anybody that gave them pause. It vanished as they watched, a soap bubble popping into nothingness and dooming Daniel to this mad feat he had undertaken.
Hopefully, Ndidi’s death would not be on his conscience as well.
Forward and down, there was nothing they could do now. WinterStar would never return to this system. Or at least not for several years, when they might know safety after the Sept had left for good.
Daniel reached out with his various senses and tried to smell the scent of danger in the solar wind.
There.
And several other, smaller places.
They must have brought both a Septagon and more than one Patrol. One enormous collection of minds even greater than the largest TradeStation Daniel could imagine, surrounded by a swarm of silent fireflies, just waiting for the moment to light up and shatter the darkness.
You’ll do fine, Ndidi told him.
Daniel smiled and tried to nod persuasively. If he could do that enough times, he might even convince himself. Pigs might fly, but he was alone in orbital space, without a suit, carrying his new Sous Chef to a rendezvous with a stolen starship, hidden in the clouds of a gas giant while hiding from a Septagon dangerous enough to destroy cities from orbit.
Could it get much weirder today?
Daniel moved to mask himself from the Septagon’s eyes. He lacked a vocabulary to describe it, even to a woman inside his mind, but he envisioned a cloak around their shoulders, and pulled the hood up to shadow their eyes. The Septagon would still see them if they got close and they pounded the area with a scanner beam, but until then, they were just a small rock moving around.
Commander Omezi had once told him that orbital space in a gas giant’s neighborhood was a messy place, filled with shattered remains of comets and old moons that had been destroyed. Or had it been someone else talking? One of his ghosts?
Daniel shuddered and pretended it had been Kathra Omezi. Any other conclusion was one step closer to madness.
Yes, Ndidi said. I was there when she mentioned it, discussing with Kam where to best mine things for ForgeStar.
Good, he was only slightly crazy, then. Or no more than usual.
And the Septagon was too busy looking up. They were not directly over the place where Daniel had hidden the turtle. Not far enough away that he could sneak the ship out without being seen, but had they known the location, they would have been closer to it.
Daniel focused on being a rock and falling into the gravitational depths of the gas giant.
40
Ndidi had to remind herself to keep breathing occasionally, even as she knew that it didn’t really matter, as long as Daniel was doing whatever it was that carried them through space. None of the comitatus had ever had a view like this, as they were always either inside a Spectre, or at least looking out from a suit’s viewport.
She was a goddess, reigning over the very heavens themselves. A hawk, starting to swoop down on a rabbit in the tall grass, aware of a great cat lurking somewhere nearby.
Have they seen us? she asked the other half of herself.
I do not believe so, Daniel replied. Perhaps we will make it.
Ndidi tried to relax and not distract the man as he flew. She was in his mind, listening to all the voices, some of which were other people and one of whom was just a male chef with what he thought of as a beautiful woman on his arm as he broke into the Bey’s palace.
But Daniel had no secrets from her now, just as she had none from him.
Now she understood what the Commander must have gone through when she sentenced Ugonna. One entity, made up of thousands of parts, most of them small and quiet in the distance.
Daniel stiffened as she held him. They had fallen perhaps halfway to their destination, if she could measure such a strange distance. The planet had gone from a slightly rounded circle to a place where she could see the depths of clouds below her if she squinted a little.
An eagle comes, he whispered in her ear.
Ndidi looked around and knew that one of the patrol craft was approaching, although it was still just a brighter light against the sea of stars above them. Had they seen something? Detected two people dancing in orbit? Or was this just part of their regular patrol around the great behemoth that was only the suggestion of seven sides in the distance?
Daniel stepped from their mutual salon to a metaphorical window, perhaps, staring at a postal deliverer approaching up the front sidewalk.
Ndidi had never been on the surface of a planet, so it must be some memory of Daniel’s as she watched those things unfold. In her mind, she saw a shadow appear against a cloudy day, slowly moving across the sky overhead.
Stupid machines, Daniel cursed. Minds I can twist, but they would see something in their records later, regardless of how I cloud their eyes now.
Can you make them see something on a nearby moon? Ndidi asked. Convince them that the scanners are wrong and somebody saw a light on the surface?
I can try, he offered.
She was alone in the room now, but also flying next to him as they both appeared like ghosts over the heads of the six men on the ship’s bridge.
“I’m sure I saw something, Aspbad,” one of the savaran said.
Aspbad. A Sept ship’s captain, a rank below a naupati, but Ndidi wasn’t sure how she knew that. Perhaps Daniel did, or read it from the men below them.
Savaran. An officer rank serving below the Aspbad.
Was this what it meant to share a consciousness?
“There’s nothing on the scanners or the logs,” the commander replied.
“Understood, sir. It was a flash of light from the surface of the moon. Could they have cloaked themselves against detection?”
“Notify Septagon Uwalu,” the Aspbad commanded after a moment. “Tell them we are moving to investigate.”
“Acknowledged, sir.”
Ndidi blew out a breath. Sneakiness. Let the minds believe they have seen something the machines missed, and turn away from uncovering the truth. Hopefully, it would work for long enough. Daniel agreed with her and they resumed their fall into the clouds.
At some point as she watched, they crossed a threshold, and the sky above went from blackness to a pale salmon color.
This must be what it was like to live planet-bound. To have miles of atmosphere overhead, diffracting the light of the star into a haze. Blue on ancient Earth. Pinks and oranges at Azgon.
Are we safe? she asked him.
What is safe, child? he sent back, concentrating on the rapidly rising wind around them.
Even at this altitude above whatever depths lay below, they were engulfed in a hurricane, winds racing madly along from the warm side of the planet to the cold to redistribute the heat of the star and the interior. Visibility with her eyes fell to almost nothing, just an endless, pinkish fog bank around them.
But above, from orbit, a Septagon might notice, if they sent a beam this way. They had not, or Daniel would have noticed it, she thought, but what would they do when even the stupidest scanner ever built suddenly detected a massive object rising like Leviathan?
How powerful had the Conqueror been, ere he died? How much luck was involved at that moment when he had set out to command all the women of WinterStar as his slaves, never suspecting a male?
Perhaps merely her life rested on the answer. Maybe her soul.
Night fell. If you could call it that.
Shadows where there had been illumination before. Little fishies diving into the dangerous depths of the sea, rather than the shallow safety of the reef.
Down where the great monsters might swim.
The leviathan itself appeared suddenly before her out of the depths and darkness. Two great, gleaming eyes stared back at her as Daniel flew closer.
She had seen the images of the Star Turtle in space. Witnessed it out a porthole. But that was against the night.
Here, it was the great beast emerging into a nightmare as she watched.
And she had never been so happy to see something like it.
The maw opened and Daniel flew into it. The jaws could have snapped the core of WinterStar in half, had they bitten, but they were designed to gnaw on comets and asteroids from what Daniel had told her. Eat space debris, just as a sea turtle ate jellyfish and other things.
The throat looked big enough to fly a Spectre down easily, as it opened. She had no desire to go there herself and see.
Instead, Daniel took them to a small portal just below the roof of the mouth, where the uvula might hang on another creature. Into the space he flew, depositing her onto the deck as gravity again appeared around her.
Ndidi did not understand how the turtle could have gravity. The great Septagons and TradeStations had grav field inducers, but they were huge things, enormously wasteful of power. Even the patrol ships used them, but they were the smallest things that flew with such devices, and they took up more than half the internal volume to work.
The turtle was a creature according to Daniel, and not a thing. But it generated gravity inside.
The thing she thought of as an airlock hatch closed behind them and the room seemed to gasp to life. Daniel looked around and lowered the shield that had protected them and they both took a sniff. Ammonia and other noxious things, but just enough to perhaps make her eyes start to water, and not enough to poison them.
An inner hatch opened and Daniel released the death grip he had maintained before.
Suddenly, she was alone with her thoughts again, a separate entity from Daniel.
Ndidi blinked and stared at the man.
“Yes,” he nodded. “It is like that all the time. Welcome to my nightmares.”
She didn’t know what to say. He would know anyway, as they had been one person for long enough.
But she understood, perhaps in the same way the Commander did.
And yes, Daniel needed friends.
