SeekerStar

by Blaze Ward

  “Can we replicate it?” she glanced over as she asked.

  He shrugged. Daniel was pretty good at that.

  And it was one of the reasons so many women were willing to tolerate him. He didn’t have all that testosterone demanding that he answer in the affirmative and only later admit that he’d been lying.

  If Daniel didn’t know, he was woman enough to say so. Saved everybody effort.

  “Urid-Varg was not a technician,” Daniel finally said. “Some of the men he captured were, so I know strange dreams, but none of us have really tried to dive deep into the oldest memories. Some of those folks are extremely strange creatures.”

  “What was Urid-Varg?” Ndidi asked now as Erin cleared the flight platform and waddled slowly away.

  This ship was something a little more impressive than a transit bus, but not so interesting as a fightercraft. Maybe a yacht with a small crew. Ninety meters long and ten or twelve on the beam, it had the feeling of subdued wealth.

  Erin didn’t let that subtlety blind her to the fact that it was culturally unique and therefore possibly priceless in this sector of space. Alien tech could always find a rich buyer needing something special in his collection to show up a rival.

  Again, the strange silence as Daniel went deep inside himself.

  “Mnapyre,” he said in a dark tone, pronouncing it OOM-na-pire. “He was the last of his kind, like a terrible wizard that has outlived all the others with his magic. Except he preyed on them as long as they lived, before moving on to others later.”

  “Ten thousand years ago?” Ndidi pressed.

  “Maybe twelve,” Daniel said. “I have not sat down and counted the years with each being. Some of them will not speak with me, while others do not know how.”

  That brought about an awkward silence. Twelve thousand years ago, humans were just discovering writing.

  “Tavle Jocia Flight Control, this is Spectre Two on approach,” Erin said to distract everyone from the sorts of morbid thoughts she knew they would be having.

  The benefit, she supposed, of sharing Daniel’s mind with them as a group on several occasions.

  “Acknowledged, Spectre Two,” the man at the other end called. “Maintain course and heading for docking. Customs officers are waiting.”

  Yes, they would be, wouldn’t they? Nobody had ever seen anything like this ship before, and many people would want to know how and where Kathra Omezi and the Mbaysey had acquired it, especially since it was in good enough shape to fly.

  Six

  Daniel was not all that impressed by the Tavle Jocia TradeStation.

  He knew that relating it to places like Genarde wasn’t a fair comparison, but Daniel had only ever left the supposedly-safe confines of the Sept Empire after he had accepted a job offer so different from anything he ever envisioned that it had intrigued him. Even more than that month as a short order cook in a burger dive had been.

  He didn’t have much to compare this to, save the Sept worlds he had previously traveled.

  And cooking for Kathra Omezi hadn’t turned out to be anything as dreary as he had feared it might be, once upon a time. Daniel wasn’t sure he would ever achieve boring again in his life. Certainly not here.

  Most TradeStations in the Free Worlds were a little seedy, according to what he had seen and been told. That wasn’t the case with Tavle Jocia. There was money here.

  Several of the major trade routes through the Free Worlds crossed this system, bringing goods from all over space to this station, however briefly. As a result, Trade Barons, plural, thrived here.

  On most stations, you might have one seriously rich merchant, and then a second tier of players. Tavle Jocia had at least five who might have been wealthy enough to afford to hire someone like Daniel Lémieux as a personal chef, at least for a little while.

  He was too much of a control freak to live at someone else’s beck and call for long, but he’d been wandering while he tried to figure out why he was so unhappy with life. Still wasn’t sure he’d truly found it, so much as had the future thrust upon him like some heroic fool in a fairy tale.

  But it allowed Kathra to take her team out to a nice dinner on the station, in a place that might have vied for their own Golden Diamond from Gastropode magazine, were they several thousand light-years closer to Earth, and all the politics that wrapped themselves around that level of snobbery.

  Briefly, as the maître d' sat them, Daniel wondered if he should take up a part-time career as a field researcher, sending anonymous letters to the magazine suggesting they send folks to various places to see for themselves.

  “What’s so funny?” Kathra asked, primly studying his face from directly across.

  He had Ndidi on his right and Erin on his left, close enough that she occasionally tapped his knee with her mechanical leg when she shifted. Areen, Kathra, and Iruoma sat across from him.

  “Wondering if I should take up a career as a secret agent food reporter,” he murmured back.

  Daniel didn’t dare say that too loudly, or someone might take him seriously. Worse, they might ask who he was and then get silly if they’d heard him.

  “You’ve already been busy enough,” Kathra smiled. “If you decide to do more, I’m not sure when you’ll sleep. And I’ll have to hire a whole other team just to keep up with you.”

  “Bon,” he grinned. “I am probably causing enough trouble as is.”

  “You saved all our lives,” Iruoma spoke up.

  She had been there at the first, when he met Joane and Erin on that first platform. She still rose early every morning to shave her head gleaming enough to show off the complex symbols tattooed into her skull, but her fierceness was aimed outwards now.

  She considered him just another woman.

  “And you have all saved mine, so I think we’re more or less even,” he replied.

  She smiled back at him and conversation stalled as they turned to the menus.

  Eating in a restaurant was a rare treat, even for most of the comitatus. They usually ate whatever was in the kitchen, which, before Daniel had come along, had been generally pedestrian at best.

  Even today, Erin usually flew SkyCamels to TradeStations because that let her see the local color and enjoy the local food. Daniel frequently joined her simply to see what inspiration he might derive.

  It was one thing to know ten thousand recipes. It was another to remember to cycle beyond the hundred or so at the top of his mind.

  Dinner itself proved to be exceptional. Kathra was treating everyone to something nice, so they all had splurged for the sorts of prime cut steaks that they would never do on the ship, where food needed to stretch as far as possible.

  The dessert choices were wider than he would normally make for a single meal, but not really as good. Industrially-well-made, he supposed.

  Certainly lacking art. But it was a restaurant, and the steaks had been exceptional, so he was willing to cut them some slack, but only after he had tried a single bite from each of the four things the others had ordered and were sharing.

  “Now what?” he asked the Commander as they rose and began to make their way to the front door.

  Something pulled him up so short that Ndidi plowed into him from behind.

  It was most fulfilling, a second later, to be surrounded by women warriors with pistols drawn and facing out, even in the nicest restaurant on a nice station. Nobody took their own security for granted.

  “Daniel?” Kathra asked in a tight, quiet voice.

  “There,” he said, suddenly running hell for leather down a corridor for reasons he could not fathom, let alone explain.

  Out the door and turn right. The crowd was not terrible, as stations never really went to sleep at night, but the mob wasn’t so bad that he couldn’t move quickly.

  Nobody stood out as he raced. Many people, apparently innocently, walked away from him, so he could not tell what it was that drew him, except that something had touched him as he stood to leave the restaurant.
r />   And it had been external. The voices in his head had more or less worked out a method of drawing his attention when they wanted something. They weren’t ghosts, but maybe the echoes of ghosts, so they would respond to tell him something he needed to know, rather than complain for the sake of complaining.

  But the touch had been similar.

  It was gone now.

  Only Erin made any sound when she ran, but that was because she hadn’t bothered with the matching boot she sometimes wore. At least she had worn longer pants today, so her mechanical knee and shin weren’t obvious most of the time, except she thumped the deck with her leather-covered heel, pounding in his wake.

  At the curve, he gave up. Slowed to a stop, pivoted in place, and studied everyone around him with the mental sight he had stolen from Urid-Varg when he killed the salaud.

  Most of the faces turned his way were tsking in their heads at his behavior, but nobody broadcast any sort of emotion that they had been watching him. That they had touched him.

  But somebody had.

  Daniel realized that he wasn’t even breathing heavy from the run. None of the women were, either, but they were all warriors, including Ndidi, who was technically just another cook like him. He had gotten in much better shape.

  Kathra grabbed his sleeve and tugged him out of the middle of the concourse to a quiet corner, holstering her pistol while the others kept watch.

  “Immediate threat?” she asked in a quiet, simple tone.

  Daniel closed his eyes and looked around once more, just to be sure.

  “No,” he said, opening them. “It’s gone now.”

  “Explain later,” Kathra said. “Everyone relax and pretend like nothing happened.”

  The other women straightened up and weapons vanished in the blink of an eye.

  Kathra studied his face for a long moment, as if committing something to memory, and then pulled out her skyvox. Quickly, she checked something and then began to walk.

  Everyone fell in behind her, but Daniel noted that both Ndidi and Erin were beside him and Areen and Iruoma walked several paces behind him, rather than ahead.

  Whatever it was, they were all taking it seriously.

  Kathra led them out of the tourist area of the TradeStation to a lift in a quiet side corridor. She pressed the button, waited a moment, and then spoke.

  “Kathra Omezi to see Factor Isaev,” she said into the microphone.

  The door slid open and she entered. Daniel knew a long moment of doubt before he could make his legs work, but this lift didn’t appear to be a trap.

  Whoever it had been earlier was hopefully just watching, for now.

  But how had they managed to hide from him?

  Seven

  The lift doors closed and Kathra found herself and her cook surrounded by a team of high-strung killers, intent on doing violence for her at the drop of a hat right now. Whatever had infected Daniel had spread to the other women. However, she didn’t have his story yet, and this open deck wasn’t the place to have that kind of discussion.

  Rather than speak, Kathra reached out a hand and pulled Areen to one side and behind her, instead of standing right in front of the doors and prepared to take a beam from someone when they opened.

  She caught Daniel’s eye and his nod. Anyone attempting violence now would have to deal with him, and he was at least as rattled, perhaps as angry, as he had been while fleeing Azgon, from the stories he and Ndidi had shared after their escape.

  But she could relax. After all, the Factor himself had invited her, intent on possibly expanding his collection of exotic vessels, if the price was right.

  He would make no untoward moves this early in the relationship. Not the least because her message had mentioned that this was just the first such vessel coming onto the market, and not even the most interesting.

  That should pique anybody’s interest. The Mbaysey had a reputation, as far as she knew, as a poor tribe that mined for metals and exotic gases, trading them at various stations for food and electronics that they could not make themselves.

  Nowhere was there a history of owning a junkyard filled with old, valuable starships.

  Something must have happened…

  And the stories would be even stranger when she started selling some of the truly alien craft she had inherited.

  The lift doors opened onto a chamber that could only be described as lush. Carpeting thick enough under her feet that she didn’t hear footsteps. Overstuffed chairs in two corners that looked deep enough to fall into and never escape. Harder chairs on the other side for people who didn’t need as much decadence.

  The strangest thing for her was the fish tank taking up an entire side wall of the chamber. One meter thick, running three meters to the ceiling and wall to wall across the six meter room. Because she owned the two WaterStars, both filled with a variety of fish to feed her tribe, she recognized a few of the species in here, but not many.

  Daniel might do a little better, but she was willing to bet that even he got lost before he reached halfway.

  Before they got settled, or distracted by the fish, a door opened in the far wall. The man who entered had the look of a majordomo. A gray-haired, senior servant to a powerful man, who was still probably a power in his own right.

  He certainly smelled like it, with an expensive perfume about him that was industrial chemicals in origin, rather than the sort of plant oils some of her ClanStars produced for trade.

  “Commander Omezi,” he said with the faintest nod as she turned to him. “The Factor will see you now.”

  She gestured for the others to find seats or get comfortable and nodded at Daniel to join her. The newcomer looked like he wanted to say something.

  “My mechanic will be necessary,” she smiled down at the tiny male, barely any taller than her cook. “He fully understands the technology involved, and will be the only one able to explain it to your specialists. You did bring stellar architects, yes?”

  The man’s face soured for the briefest moment. Probably didn’t have any on staff, and had been forced to hire some for the occasion. Or better, was expecting any of the mechanics he did have on staff would be good enough and was possibly rethinking that decision at the last moment.

  The man retreated, rather than try to match wills with her. Kathra followed him deeper into the suite, glancing once to make sure Daniel was with her.

  On top of everything else, his mental powers made him the best bodyguard she could ever conceive of having right now, even before his paranoia got ramped up.

  Down a hall, they entered a different wing of the abode, and passed through a large space that felt more like the salon where favorites and powerful guests were entertained. Still decorated using a stupendous amount of Free World Guilders, but done tastefully.

  Money showing off, but being a little more polite about it.

  Kathra Omezi had never had money. The Mbaysey produced significant budgets, but every Crown and Guilder went into operating costs and repairs, with very little left over merely for decorating a room.

  The majordomo led them to a door and stepped to one side.

  Kathra had seen a variety of pictures of the Trade Factor. Mikhail Isaev was a tall, bulky man, standing on the far side of an ornate, wooden desk. Nearly her height, but at least fifty kilograms heavier, and very little of that was muscle.

  Most of the images had been manipulated to show the man off better.

  The hair on his head was artificial. She could see the seam, three centimeters above his ears, where the last of his natural stuff had been dyed recently, but faded from matching the fibers higher up. The tan was fake as well, but that looked like chemicals the man ate with his breakfast, rather than a cream he slathered on his skin. Too orange for someone who had to stand under a tanning light in the shower, as most Anglos like Isaev did. Daniel didn’t require as much, but still some.

  Kathra was already almost the color of night, so the tanning for her was just the vitamins and benefits
of sunlight, for a woman who never set foot on an actual planet unless she had to.

  “Welcome,” he said in a voice almost as fake as the rest of him.

  Still, this man represented the opportunity for a surge of wealth that might even break the chains that bound her to the Free Worlds, even as she had already decided that she would never return to a Sept TradeStation.

  At least not without riding in the head of Daniel’s Star Turtle, intent on doing some level of violence.

  Kathra sat and studied the scene as the two men joined her. Daniel was keyed up from whatever he had seen or sensed in the restaurant. Isaev was more naturally paranoid, from the look of him.

  They made small talk for the requisite period of time, Daniel remaining mum and allowing her to field all questions, in spite of the occasional glances thrown his way.

  If you didn’t know who he was already, I’m not going to tell you know, Factor Isaev.

  “So I am given to understand from our earlier communications that the vessel you have currently for sale is unique, and part of a larger set?” he asked finally, stepping to business rather than discussing opera seasons and other frivolities any longer.

  “Unique, yes,” she agreed. “I would only classify it as part of a larger set in the sense that we have had the opportunity to salvage a number of vessels from where they have been stored for some time, and sell them on the private market.”

  “And where did they originate?” Isaev asked, focusing what Kathra supposed was meant to be charisma on her.

  It might work with a woman whose stomach wasn’t turned by the thought of being touched by a male. Even Daniel would not rate highly, although she had had the occasional thought to explore the sorts of orgasms he might induce with his mental powers, were she to ask.

  “From a number of places,” Kathra smiled and deflected the question. No use explaining any more than utterly necessary. “The prior owner was controlled by a larger conglomerate that is no longer a viable business concern. The successor-in-interest contacted me about marketing and disposing of the vessels.”