SwiftStar Read online

  SwiftStar

  Star Tribes, Book Four

  Blaze Ward

  Knotted Road Press

  Contents

  I. Warriors

  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

  II. Pirates

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  III. Marauders

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Read More!

  About the Author

  Also by Blaze Ward

  About Knotted Road Press

  Part One

  Warriors

  One

  Daniel stood patiently and stared out the wide window at the massive ship maneuvering close to the station. Shortly, they would send a shuttle over for him.

  Him. Daniel Lémieux. Chef.

  And other things.

  He wondered what his various ghosts might have to say on the topic, but now was not the time to dive inside himself to ask them. War was coming and he would have more than enough time on the flight outwards to do that.

  The beginning of the war would take the form of that enormous horseshoe crab monster of a starship over there, thousands of years old and painted with freckles like a deranged pixie had been hired as an interior and exterior designer. That thing would become his new home shortly, because he could do something that only one other person in the entire galaxy could do right now.

  Use the mental powers of the Ishtan to find people and things at distances measured in light-years.

  Shortly, that ship could carry him to war.

  Daniel still wasn’t sure how he felt about it, but it was necessary. That described most of his life these days.

  Necessary.

  He glanced over at the Commander, Kathra Omezi, standing next to him as they both watched the approaching ship move into orbit. As always, she towered over him, but he was short for a male and she was tall for any human, nearly two meters and certainly an entire head above him.

  Tall and athletic, with a leanness yet that was only starting to turn into muscle and mass as she aged. Skin like onyx and hair kept buzzed tight against her skin most of the time.

  She had a few years yet before it would start coming in gray, but the woman was thirty-three now. No longer the terrible warrior she had once been, but only because the other leaders, older women of the tribe, had demanded that she stop taking so many crazy risks.

  Kathra had responded by vowing to outlive them all instead.

  She probably would.

  But her world was changing, just as his was. The war was coming. Perhaps not as many light-centuries would be involved for her, but she was still overturning everything she had known in the process.

  Everything he had known as well. In Kathra’s case, she was pregnant finally, with a daughter that would be the next leader of the Mbaysey Tribal Squadron, although hopefully not for many decades.

  Daniel Lémieux was simply going to war in her name.

  He even understood why Kathra was making the choices she had. Appreciated it, as well, but it was still strange to actually be living through the consequences of those enormous decisions, like that ship coming closer.

  SwiftStar.

  But he was comitatus. Sworn to serve her, body and soul, like the two dozen warrior women Kathra had. And one other cook.

  It was the definition of comitatus that was changing, and Daniel wasn’t sure the galaxy would ever be the same.

  He was merely Commander Omezi’s personal chef.

  Except he wasn’t that anymore.

  Up until now, it had been an academic discussion for the most part. Ndidi had done more of the cooking than him over the last year or so. He was just Kathra’s Executive Chef now, while Ndidi Zikora was the Chef de Cuisine, actually running the kitchen and training new women how to cook like she and Daniel did, using mostly Daniel’s original recipes plus things culled from every cookbook he had obsessively acquired while they were still in human space.

  The adventures had carried him far beyond the regions the Sept Empire claimed, or the Free Worlds beyond that.

  Beyond even that swath of savagely damaged worlds that were still known as K'bari space, even though the K'bari themselves were no longer a stellar civilization. At least on those few worlds where they had survived at all.

  Well closer to the galactic core, Kathra’s Mbaysey Tribal Squadron had located the Anndaing, bipedal hammerhead sharks who possessed the most advanced technology in the region.

  Fierce merchants who carefully hid the terrible secret of what dangerous warriors they could turn themselves into if threatened. When the rare Call to Armada led them to assemble fleets of thousands of small ships, like terriers ready to assault a bear.

  Perhaps piranha taking on a killer whale was a better image, because the Anndaing had broken many threats, including the people who had once built this frightening warship just coming into a docking orbit with the station.

  The Ovanii.

  Once they had been wanderers and raiders. But no more. Their legend today might remind educated Anndaing of the human stories of the fierce Vikings that had so terrorized northwest Eurasia before industrial technology. Like the Vikings, the Ovanii had possessed a wealth of nearly-forgotten culture that Daniel was slowly bringing back, but that was not today’s story.

  In that distant past, the Anndaing Armada had broken the Ovanii. So utterly and permanently that only one colony of the people survived today, just barely crawling back up to their own industrial revolution after millennia of barbaric darkness, when they would not accept defeat and integration into the Anndaing Merchants Guild, the government and culture that had defeated them.

  What would it be like if they finally returned to the stars after so many centuries? Did they still have legends of being great star-faring warriors? Daniel had asked Wyll Koobitz, the representative of Merchants Bank, but the reports had been ambiguous.

  “You are remarkably silent today, even for you,” Kathra finally broke the silence engulfing them, looking down from her incredible height and smiling.

  He shrugged and looked closer, but she was only three months pregnant at this point, so nothing showed yet. Except the glow the woman seemed to exude this morning.

  Daniel had never been around pregnant women, but others assured him this was normal.

  Erin, Spectre Two and Kathra’s second in command, had the same glow whenever Daniel saw her, tempered somewhat by the woman’s innate fierceness.

  But it was just the two of them, him and Kathra, right now.

  “I am standing on the landing pad, back on Genarde,” Daniel looked up at the woman. “I have just sold my restaurant to my Chef de Cuisine for the eleven hundred or so Sept Crowns in his wallet at the time, and walked away from everything and everyone I have ever known.”

  She nodded, silently, understanding.

  Daniel had inherited mental abilities he could not describe or explain when the two of them had killed the terrible villain known as Urid-Varg. Kathra had been Daniel enough times, been to the very core of his soul to understand all his secrets.

  She knew him better than he did, because she didn’t have any of the deflections or evasions a man constructs after he turns forty and has to admit to the kind of person he has become.

  All the comitatus had merged with him at one time or another, but only Kathra, Erin, and Ndidi did it regularly. A’Alhakoth, Spectre Twenty-Three had done so as well, but she saw other things in Daniel than the human women did. Things that still left him unsettled.

  “The future did turn out to be more interesting than just starting another restaurant,” Kathra assured him with a warm smile. “Or even opening a hot dog stand on a starport concourse somewhere.”

  “There are days I do not believe you, Kathra,” Daniel grinned back.

  But he understood her. He had been her, just as she had been him. Some days, it was difficult to tell where each of them ended. Ndidi was the same way, but Kathra had originally ordered that woman to become his confessor, and never rescinded that.

  Fortunately, most of the comitatus detested the thought of a male’s touch. Even Kathra had gone to the sperm banks and secretly selected the father of her child for the doctors. She and Erin had the same man, whoever he was, but Daniel had not pried.

  It would be enough that the daughters born would be sisters of the blood, as well as the soul.

  “Everything must change, Daniel,” Kathra noted, returning to the refrain that had been her mantra since that day, half a year ago, when a Sept warship had emerged from jump right here in this system, and come that clos
e to killing him, but for Kathra, and more importantly, Ife.

  He turned back to the ship in front of him.

  The design reminded him of a horseshoe crab with the long end chopped off. Armor scales around the flat and plates across the top and bottom where a frightening number of turrets could emerge for combat.

  The Ovanii had built it so long ago. The Anndaing had interred it on a different planet from its crew, stored against future need.

  Kathra Omezi had bought it.

  Knowing the Anndaing as he did from close contact over the last year, the fact that they had sold her the ship outright, instead of making such a deal a long-term lease, told him just how serious they took the threat of the Sept.

  But then, their galaxy had changed as well. The Anndaing sectors were beyond K'bari space when seen from the perspective of humans worlds. Humans had been unknown beyond K'bari space to them as well.

  Until the Cargo-6 Koni Swift and Trademaster Crence Miray had stumbled into the Mbaysey at a system that had no name. Just a number. A milepost in the wilderness, as it were.

  “Everything must change,” he agreed with a nod. “But I don’t have to like it.”

  “You’ll still be cooking, as much as Ndidi will allow it,” Kathra grinned. “And with a larger crew, she might need you now.”

  They shared a laugh. Before, Kathra’s comitatus had required one cook, because all two dozen of them ate communally, occasionally with a handful of crew selected by lottery once word got out about the new chef Kathra had hired.

  Ndidi had cooked for the rest of the crew, until it became necessary to promote the woman to be Daniel’s keeper. And his friend.

  Ndidi was comitatus as well, although her glasses had kept her from ever flying a Spectre fighter ship, which used to be the measure of the comitatus warriors.

  But with Kathra retiring to simply command, several other women had changed roles as well. Others had been promoted, but the comitatus as it had been was no more.

  Change.

  “It will not be the same,” Daniel echoed. “And that will be good. But I look forward to this war ending, so that I can return to a bistro, or perhaps a brasserie somewhere, and just cook.”

  “That will be easy then,” Kathra said.

  Daniel turned back to her, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “We just have to destroy the Sept Empire.”

  Indeed.

  Two

  Once, the need to wear glasses had meant that Ndidi would never be a warrior. Never join Commander Omezi’s comitatus. That the only way she would be allowed to serve aboard the great flagship WinterStar was by taking an apprenticeship in the kitchen.

  But they had seen more in her than she had known, even then.

  Ndidi studied her reflection in the mirror and pulled at the jacket she wore, still uncomfortable in so many layers and long sleeves.

  But Ife had insisted that her officers dress in uniforms, rather than the simple pants and light shirts everyone wore on SeekerStar, where Kathra kept the temperature a balmy twenty-five degrees most of the time.

  SwiftStar was kept four degrees colder. At first, Ndidi hadn’t understood, but now the jacket she wore made sense. She still wore the tangerine pants of the comitatus, and the black shirt, but with a turquoise jacket over that, signifying that she was an officer aboard this vessel.

  Second in command even, which made no sense to Ndidi whatsoever, except that everyone had celebrated her when it happened.

  Again, maybe they knew her better than she did.

  She looked at the stranger in the mirror again, trying to see what they saw.

  Twenty-four years old. Short compared to most of the women Kathra had surrounded herself with. Muscular and stocky. Blind as a slug without her glasses.

  Attractive enough to the women of the comitatus and crew that she’d gone to bed with more than one of them. Even Daniel found her beautiful when she looked in his mind, but the thought of a male touching her made her skin crawl. Even a friend like Daniel.

  And he had other outlets, so she didn’t need to worry.

  She tugged at her sleeves again and the bottom of her jacket, trying to make it lay right, but it was doing what it wanted, regardless of her ideas.

  Like much of the galaxy.

  Ndidi took a deep breath and shrugged.

  She turned and cast one quick glance around the cabin she had been assigned. Most of the ship was empty, so there were a tremendous number of rooms available, but Ife had wanted everyone centered, with the bridge just forward and engineering just aft.

  The Ovanii had carried their entire tribe in fleets of ships like this, so they had suites for more than a thousand families, and the Ovanii had been as tall as Kathra on average, so the rooms were large as well.

  Her personal cabin was larger than the room she had once shared with five other girls when she was just a cook aboard WinterStar, before circumstances had put her in charge of the main kitchen.

  Before Kathra made her comitatus.

  Ndidi grimaced at how far she had come, and how far she might fall when she finally made a mistake, but she would do the best she could until then.

  She emerged into the ring hallway on the port side, exactly opposite the matching room Ife had to starboard. It wasn’t really a ring, running in a loop from the aft hull around the bow and back again, but that was what they had been called on WinterStar and SeekerStar, when the one hallway connected to itself if you just walked for long enough.

  These didn’t but you could still walk a long ways when you wanted to. Probably why Ife had the whole crew together in as compact a space as possible.

  The gravity was strange as well, without any Coriolis force working on her inner ear. SwiftStar didn’t rotate, unlike the rest of the Tribal Squadron. It had something close enough to grav field inducers like the old Sept and Free Worlds TradeStations, but much more efficient.

  And set higher, which she was still getting used to. The Ovanii lived at 1.15 gravity, rather than the lower settings humans from Tazo preferred, and even that was 1.06 compared to Earth.

  For Ndidi, it meant retraining herself not to catch at a falling knife in the kitchen when she dropped something. Knives, pans, pots, mugs.

  They fell just enough faster that her hands would have to be retrained, and she wasn’t there yet.

  Yet.

  Even she knew how stubborn she was. None of the other crew were more stubborn. Didn’t matter if they were comitatus, flight crew from SeekerStar, or new recruits picked up from the various species of Anndaing space to fill out crew slots.

  Maybe that was why Kathra had promoted her.

  She entered the flight deck’s observation lounge as the door slid into the wall, marveling at even the tiniest bits of technology the Ovanii had had, compared to the poverty Ndidi had grown up with. Doors with power to sense you coming and open themselves without you doing it.

  Lights that came on when someone entered a dark room for the first time, although she’d nearly jumped out of her skin the first time they went dark, having seen no movement from her in so long they presumed the room was empty.

  Ife was already there, smiling proudly at the space. It wasn’t the massive flight deck of SeekerStar, or even the cramped ones they’d had on WinterStar. Just enough for three good pilots to put SkyCamels or Spectres in here, or a reasonable professional landing an Anndaing transport, like today.

  Nobody else was here but the two of them as they watched the shuttle come to rest and the outer doors close. A long pause, and air began to fill the space.