SeekerStar

by Blaze Ward

  SeekerStar

  Star Tribes: Book Two

  Blaze Ward

  Knotted Road Press

  Contents

  I. Scholar

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  II. Hunter

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  III. Ishtan

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Read More!

  About the Author

  Also by Blaze Ward

  About Knotted Road Press

  Part One

  Scholar

  One

  Daniel studied the two books before him, one written in the common Spacer that humans had taken with them into the galaxy, the other in a script he had never seen before he encountered the book in a junk store six months before.

  Nobody else on the ship could read it. And probably nobody within several thousand light-years. The script was as alien as anything he had ever heard of, let alone seen.

  Not Latin characters. Nor Rabic. Vaguely similar to Chinese ideograms, but written left to right instead of vertically. And denser in their construction, most characters having six brush strokes at a minimum, plus the one on the first page containing twenty-two.

  Now that the K'bari ghost in his mind had shown him how to read the book, Daniel knew those twenty-two strokes represented the name of the author who had compiled a history of K'bari galactic exploration. And that he had done so about the same time that humans were building their first industrial facilities for the mass production of metals on Earth, in places like the tiny peninsula of Europe back on the homeworld.

  The K'bari homeworld didn’t exist, anymore. The being that Daniel occasionally impersonated had destroyed it during his ten thousand years of terror and conquest across the galaxy.

  Urid-Varg. The Conqueror. Violeur.

  Destroyer of dreams and peoples.

  Rapist.

  Daniel reached out a hand for the mug of coffee that had gone cold as he had finished off the last of the translation.

  Urid-Varg had encountered the K'bari at some point in the distant past. After he wiped out the entire z'lud over the course of a thousand years. Not that far in the past, either.

  Daniel sipped the last of the cold coffee and looked around the communal dining hall aboard WinterStar where he normally served meals to Kathra Omezi’s comitatus. Three tables with benches facing each other, space for forty friendly women. A long table where bins would go for each woman to walk along and select the food that would fuel her and provide her joy for the day.

  After more than a year aboard the vessel WinterStar, Daniel Lémieux was still the only male that called this ship home. Others came and went as they were needed for various tasks, but they lived aboard one of the other ships that made up the Commander’s tribal squadron.

  The Mbaysey Tribe. Twenty-two ClanStars. Two WaterStars. ForgeStar. IronStar.

  And WinterStar, like a sheepdog protecting all of them from coyotes, pirates, and scouts from the Sept Empire looking to return these women to the fold.

  The Commander had ordered Daniel to complete the translation as a priority, assigning Ndidi as his permanent Sous Chef here in the kitchen, to feed the women while he worked. Perhaps the youngster was now Chef de Cuisine and Daniel had been quietly promoted to Executive Chef when he wasn’t looking. Still in charge, technically, but just a pretty face around the kitchen, rather than the one making decisions.

  After all, they were all in safe hands with Ndidi cooking.

  She wasn’t his rival for skill yet, but he could see her getting there in another year or two. Certainly, at nineteen she was already his peer in the kitchen. He would eventually need to take her someplace rough though, like Nice, or maybe even Brest on the Homeworld itself, and open a bistro with her, in order to toughen the woman up, bring her fully to the level of business acumen that would make her his equal in all things.

  Someplace where you literally had to walk down to the docks each evening and charm the fishermen for their catch before someone else could buy it. Or cultivate the insular, sour farmers who might let you know when the really good vegetables were due, so you could fix them a little something special as a bribe.

  With the Mbaysey, the various clans really couldn’t withhold the good things when they sent the regular tithe and trade goods to the other ships and WinterStar. The WaterStars sent fish as they were supposed to, but Commander Omezi kept them on a short leash anyway.

  Ndidi would need to spend time with folks who could tell her no if they wanted to, and laugh in her face about it.

  The hatch to the main corridor opened as Daniel decided he needed more coffee and stood up. A lone figure filled the doorway, looking around until she found him.

  Kathra Omezi. Commander of the Mbaysey Tribal Squadron. At just twenty-nine years old, she was already a wily veteran who had stepped into her mother’s space seven years ago and protected the rest of the women here from the Sept Empire. And they were mostly women.

  Modern medicine meant that the Commander could maintain an overall population that was eighty-five percent female. Eighty percent of births, with an expectation that some males would leave forever when they were old enough to return to places where men were generally in charge.

  Those that remained found softer jobs to fill. Teachers. Assistants. Artists.

  Kathra’s warriors and mechanics were all female. Her entire comitatus was, as well.

  Save for one of the two chefs.

  Daniel stepped away from the table with an empty coffee mug in hand and went to the samovar.

  “Your timing is, of course, perfect,” he smiled up at her as she entered.

  Daniel had to look up in order to see her face. At one hundred and seventy centimeters, he was short for a male. At one hundred and ninety-five, Kathra was taller than most of the men he had known. Most of the comitatus looked down on Daniel as well.

  At least physically. That is, they were all taller.

  Maybe not tougher, but Daniel had grown up in kitchens, where the squeamish and cowardly didn’t last long. Had eventually started his own bistro, back on Genarde. Sold it and started a second later.

  Earned the coveted Golden Diamond from Gastropode magazine with Pain du Soir, his second bistro. Been famous and wealthy and in demand.

  And had a nervous breakdown.

  Or maybe an angry breakdown.

  Sold that place to his Sous Chef for the thousa
nd Sept Crowns the man had in his wallet at that moment, walked out the front door, and never once bothered to look back.

  It had landed him here. With her.

  Kathra smiled at him as she approached.

  “Perfect, you say?” she smiled, white teeth appearing against onyx-black skin like stars coming out at night.

  The woman moved like a great cat stalking, but Daniel was not her prey this morning.

  He hoped.

  “It is done,” Daniel said simply, gesturing to the two books on the table.

  He turned his attention to the samovar and withdrew enough coffee to keep him going.

  As men got older, they were supposed to put on weight as their metabolism slowed. He supposed that channeling the mental powers of Urid-Varg was the reason he had lost even the trace of a spare tire he had once had around his middle.

  That and healthy eating. And plenty of exercise. He was in better shape now than he had ever been in his life, but on a good day there still wasn’t a woman in the comitatus that couldn’t wrap him around a chair without working up a sweat.

  Unless he cheated.

  Daniel turned when Kathra didn’t answer. She had sat down across the table from where he had been before and turned the notebook around to where she could read it.

  Daniel slowly returned to his warm chair and sat, sucking down heat and liquid as the woman focused on her reading.

  It made him feel ancient to realize that at thirty-eight, he was one of the oldest people on the ship, and far and away the oldest person in the comitatus, in spite of all the other women adopting him.

  He sipped for a time and considered mortality. His, and everyone else’s.

  “Can we find them?” she looked up and interrupted his musing.

  Daniel shrugged as eloquently as he could.

  “Does a star-born species ever actually die out?” he asked. “I can see their culture dying, if you get to be too small as a group and disappear into a larger one. And perhaps eventually they end up living in barrios or ghettos until they rebound, or simply fade away.”

  “You have given this a great deal of thought,” she observed with a grin.

  “Our ancestors were just understanding the industrial revolution when this K'bari scholar sat down to look back at several thousand years of their history in space and highlight some of the interesting things they had done and seen.”

  “Does he have a name?” Kathra asked. “Do either of them?”

  Either of them? Ah, she meant the ghost who lived inside his head. The one who had stepped out of the background when Daniel opened this book and showed him how to read it.

  There were a thousand ghosts in his head, left there when he had mastered the gem that Urid-Varg had used to amplify his powers. That salaud would take over the mind of a new victim with his powers before he embedded the gem—housing his own soul and mind—into their body, riding it for a time until that flesh got too old and Urid-Varg moved on to the next.

  And the next.

  Twelve thousand years as a vampire. Or whatever it was he was.

  Daniel lacked the vocabulary to describe the creature accurately.

  No, that wasn’t true.

  Violeur. That covered the salaud just fine.

  Daniel turned his mind inward to see the K'bari ghost standing in the foreground, where he had been for the weeks it took to translate this book, with all the others choosing perhaps to step back a little and let the man work.

  Three eyes across the face, with the nose below that stretched outward into a furry snout halfway between feline and canine for size.

  Green eyes. Yellowish-tan fur.

  The being had petite horns that swept back from his forehead and outward, rather like an ox, rather than backwards like a deer or a demon.

  And a wan, sad smile.

  “We do not have the right vocal cords,” Daniel explained as he looked back to Kathra. “I call him Arsène. It is close enough to the name he had before Urid-Varg. The scholar I call Idir, which means Alive in the ancient Berber tongue and is a close enough transliteration of his name.”

  “I see,” she nodded, closing the book back up and sliding it towards him. “Should we seek them?”

  Daniel didn’t bother hiding his surprise. He had fancied exotic quests for the K'bari, but never actually imagined Kathra would seriously consider doing such a thing.

  He had never been good at lying to women, and Kathra Omezi already seemed to have a sixth sense for that sort of thing anyway, so he just shrugged.

  “I know what stars they claimed two thousand years ago,” Daniel offered softly. “But we are a great distance away from them, even today.”

  “Indeed,” she agreed. “But we do not need to ever return to the Sept Empire, if we choose. Nor even remain in the Free Worlds. What adventures might we have, Daniel?”

  What indeed?

  Two

  She watched her personal chef turn inward, his eyes losing focus as he considered her words. From what he had said before, Kathra knew he was probably listening to the ghosts as well.

  Unlike most people, Daniel’s ghosts were real. Or however you might describe having a thousand other people in your head, each of whom had been a person once, a living soul, before being taken.

  “I thought we were going to sell a few ships first?” Daniel asked tentatively.

  Kathra smiled and considered the only man she could ever envision as being tough enough to belong to her comitatus.

  “We are,” she said simply. “But that is a means, not an end. After we find a buyer or three at Tavle Jocia, it is my hope that we have enough money to perhaps consider making larger decisions.”

  “Such as?”

  Daniel’s voice had gone just a little nervous, but he was part of her inner council these days, with Erin and Ndidi. The ones who knew the really terrible secrets.

  The dangerous ones. Secrets, as well as people.

  “Commissioning more ClanStars, perhaps,” she said. “Or building something to replace WinterStar. Perhaps an OrchardStar, so we can add to the gardens and trees you have aboard the Star Turtle, as well as begin growing a wider selection of things for ourselves and for trade.”

  He started to say something and stopped himself, just as she had known he would.

  They had had this conversation many times, the two of them in private, as well as in larger groups.

  He would offer her all the space currently unused on the Star Turtle he had inadvertently captured when he’d killed its owner. There were already vast orchards there, filled with many species of trees nobody had ever heard of, but which bore fruit that humans could eat safely.

  She would not accept.

  Daniel meant well, but to move herself and her people aboard that ship was to put all those women in a place he controlled. Daniel Lémieux was in some strange way tied to the mental powers of that gem, and became one with the Turtle when he was aboard it.

  He feared turning into a Mad God at some point with all that power suddenly at his command. Daniel had confessed that to her, as well as to Ndidi, whose job it was to keep him sane.

  If she could.

  Areen was one woman of her crew who occasionally slept with Daniel in the physical sense, but she was also bisexual by nature, and didn’t mind the touch of a male in her pleasures.

  Not for Kathra, but what consenting adults did was not her problem. If Daniel could use his powers to override consent now, she wasn’t worried because he had been intimate with Areen before all of this insanity began.

  Daniel closed his mouth, words unspoken.

  Unnecessary.

  He was a smart enough person, even as a male, to understand that there were some lines she would never cross.

  “So what do we do about my share?” he suddenly laughed. “I find it hard to envision a future where I turn the Star Turtle and those powers over to someone else and happily retire.”

  Kathra had to agree. The powers of Urid-Varg were gendered. Only a male
could wield them, or she would have taken them for herself to protect the Mbaysey.

  As well as to save Daniel from where that sort of power wanted to drag him under the surface of the water on a daily basis.

  She had heard enough of those nightmares, as well.

  “Do you prefer Sept Crowns or Free World Guilders?” Kathra teased the man instead. “Should we open you an account at the same bank the tribe uses?”

  She caught the grimace of pain across his face before it vanished. He was one of them now.

  Mbaysey.

  Not all were children of the African Diaspora. Even her comitatus had Anglos and Spanics in it. Daniel was Rabic, ancestry from the northern coast of Africa, but radically different ethnically.

  Lighter brown skin that looked more like a darkly-tanned Anglo. Wavy black hair instead of the tight curls of her kind. His was graying on the sides at a young age, but again, that had been occurring before, so it didn’t necessarily indicate that the powers were killing him.

  “If we do this,” Daniel’s voice turned deadly serious now, “we might never return to even Free World space, Kathra. I might not, at least.”

  “Carve out your own empire in the galactic interior?” she asked.

  They were alone. Ndidi wouldn’t arrive to start cooking lunch for another half hour or so. That was why Kathra had come now.