Morningstar, p.1
MorningStar, page 1
MorningStar
Star Tribes, Book Five
Blaze Ward
Contents
I. Ovanii
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
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
II. Sept
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
III. Mbaysey
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
Part I
Ovanii
1
Ndidi paused as she stood up and looked around her office, noting the shelf with knickknacks, the two chairs for people to sit on the other side of her desk, even the art painted directly onto the wall that had been there for however long it had been since the ship was built or rebuilt.
Her office.
Hers.
Ndidi Zikora, Speaker for the Anndaing Battlemaster MorningStar.
How much had changed. It had been nearly a year since the Sept had captured Tavle Jocia. Time spent for Crence Miray to catch up with them in Upynth space. Then back to Ogrorspoxu and the Merchants Bank. Negotiations for a new warship and crew. Training. Preparation. Even the time to sail across the darkness of K'bari space to get here today.
An object on a shelf caught Ndidi’s eye. A small pink cube small enough to fit in her palm.
Tavle Jocia. She’d found it on that TradeStation a lifetime ago it seemed.
Nobody had been able to identify what it was then. Later, they had at least figured out that it was made of some sort of heavy polymer that acted like a metal alloy.
She stepped close and lifted the heavy coolness into her hand. Weighed it against the tonnage of her soul.
The faces were all featureless, save for a button on one side that she pressed.
The cube leapt out of her hands and hovered in the air rather than falling to the deck. Like always, it glowed faintly. The lights in her office were dim enough that the device could calculate refraction and displayed three thousand five hundred stars in relative proximity and motion to one another in a sphere about two meters across, not counting where she stood.
Someone’s homeworld sat at the exact center of it, and the tool provided the galactic navigation parameters for someone traveling within that area. Not all that far across as a region of space.
Not even Daniel’s ghosts had been able to identify things from the night sky that would be visible at the center.
Ndidi had considered handing it off to an astronomer somewhere on Ogrorspoxu to investigate. None of the charts she had checked covered the space, but presumably an expert would be able to guess where the tool had come from originally.
She did know that it was about a thousand human years old, give or take, but nobody had been able to even guess how something like that might have ended up at Tavle Jocia, short of the sorts of random, interstellar tides that carried everything forward.
Ndidi captured it in her hand and powered it down.
For a moment, she almost put it back on the shelf, but slipped it into a thigh pouch instead. Ndidi couldn’t even tell herself why, but it seemed like today was the day she should ask her Pilot to run the data inside the cube against MorningStar’s astrogation computer.
If nothing else it would give her Pilot something to do on the long sail pending.
Her Pilot. Ndidi’s.
Speaker for the Ovanii Battlemaster MorningStar, currently in Mbaysey service and leased from the Anndaing Merchants Bank.
Ndidi pulled at her jacket to smooth things. She wore the pants of the Comitatus, a flame orange Daniel had called tangerine, tucked into tall brown boots. Black T-shirt. Turquoise jacket that buttoned on the front like something the Sept Empire might have cut.
The ship was even kept colder than a Mbaysey vessel would be, just because the officers should appear in uniforms that connoted seriousness of purpose.
Ndidi glanced at a small mirror she kept on another shelf, just enough to show her face and the seriousness of purpose there, as well.
She still woke from the dead of night occasionally panicked that she was in over her head and about to get everyone killed, but Ife and Kathra had both told her they felt the same way from time to time.
If those two women could overcome such feelings, Ndidi could, too.
Because they believed in her.
Many people believed in her. She had a responsibility to bring them home safe. At least as many as she could.
It might not be all of them, she considered as she opened the door to her office and strode out onto the bridge deck of MorningStar.
She had a war to fight.
2
Daniel was in his accustomed space on the bridge of the big war machine, over on the left out of everyone’s way. He had thought that SwiftStar was a large vessel, until he got aboard MorningStar and came to understand what huge really was.
It was not the size of a Septagon, those Sept Empire battleships that waddled around space with a deadly lance and three hundred thousand human crew members. Instead, it was more compact, if still enormous. A full crew might only be five thousand, if they had loaded everyone they could.
This bridge reflected hugeness, though. SwiftStar had only a single Sword controlling the various gun turrets on that Ovanii Dueler. Here, she was in charge of a team of eight, each with responsibility for an arc of coverage and a class of weapons.
Ovanii Battlemaster. Anchor point for an entire battle fleet. Worse, Daniel had studied an ancient battle where eight of them had formed a line and attacked a K'bari formation made up of smaller ships, more of the class of the Ovanii Assailant.
And annihilated them.
He looked around the bridge again, still feeling like an outsider. There was no equivalent role in the Ovanii or Anndaing charts for what he did. Or human ones, either.
Acqueir Chanthraphone, the Anic sensors officer from SwiftStar had transferred over as part of the acquisition of this vessel. Daniel supposed that his job was closest to hers. She listened for other ships while he listened for other minds.
There was only one that mattered. Two, he supposed. Hadi Rostami had been transformed by the Ishtan into something like Daniel, only weaker. Amirin Pasdar was the man who had been the naupati of the Septagon Vorgash, the first time Daniel ever encountered such a thing.
He had also killed Daniel’s ship, the Star Turtle, nearly killing Daniel in the process.
And he had led the invasion of Tavle Jocia that captured it for the Sept Empire.
Daniel had listened closely for both men, but neither were still in the vicinity, or even still in the Free Worlds. If Daniel’s geometry was correct, both of those men were either on Earth, or at the Imperial Capital on Rhages. From here, the parallax wasn’t all that great, and he could only sense a direction, but not a distance.
Acqueir seemed to sense his look, because she turned and smiled briefly at him.
An Anic pair-bond was not activated by sexual relations with a human. Or she had decided that he was different enough from her kind. She still came by his cabin occasionally, on some odd watch schedule that ensured he was alone.
Daniel supposed that the several women he occasionally entertained had worked out something amongst themselves, but had never asked. He still didn’t fully grasp why it was that he was attractive to those women.
He was short for a human male. Slender, like an average male shrunk down to a 90% copy. His curly brown hair was coming in fully gray on the sides now, but he didn’t bother doing anything about it.
At least he was in better shape at age forty-three than he had ever been in his life, but Daniel had no id
All he had going for him was that he was a chef from Genarde who had once been awarded a Golden Diamond by Gastropode magazine, headquartered in the shadow of the ancient and rebuilt Eiffel Tower, in Paris itself.
Not bad for a Rabic cook of Algerian descent, born several sectors away.
His gaze turned to the ship’s Sword and he felt his breath catch a little.
A’Alhakoth ver’Shingi. Spectre Twenty-Three in the old days when Commander Omezi kept a comitatus of women, pilots and warriors sworn into her service. Daniel had been admitted later, the only male ever awarded such a place. Ndidi and Ife had come after that. These days, Kathra’s command circle was much larger, given the vessels in her squadrons, but Daniel was still part of that innermost group. Along with A’Alhakoth and a few others.
She was studying her boards at the moment. No more Kathra’s Ambassador to the Kaniea, the Anndaing, or the Upynth. Now she was Ndidi’s Sword. The woman in control of all the guns on this monstrous war machine.
He turned his head some more and caught sight of Hirly, the only Anndaing officer on the bridge. Not the only one on the ship, but this woman had been good enough to be made Ndidi’s Shield, her second in command, when the Anndaing leased the vessel to the Mbaysey.
Daniel had originally been expecting a female Anndaing warrior to be a large specimen, something like Crence Miray or Jine Riffin, but Hirly was petite. Smaller than Daniel even, when most adult Anndaing women were taller.
In that, Daniel almost felt like a giant here at times, in spite of being a short Rabic man. Ndidi was only his height. A’Alhakoth and Hirly were smaller.
Even Tanuss Barleyne, the Engineer who had previously served aboard SwiftStar before coming over to MorningStar, was a shade shorter than he was.
This after living several years in the shadow of Kathra’s comitatus, where all but two of those women had been taller, all the way up to Kathra’s enormous height. Some days, it had been like standing in the middle of a valley, to be surrounded by woman like Kathra, Erin, Areen, or Joane.
Hirly turned her hammer just enough to point her left eye in his direction and wink. She was safe ground for him, with a husband and several pups back home.
The main door opened and Daniel felt the air in the room change as Ndidi entered. Everything became crisper, sharper.
Electric.
She caught his eye and he could see the bottom of her soul. If death could somehow look like chocolate brownies fresh out of the stove, that would be it. But they had already shared everything, going back to when Kathra instructed the young woman to learn the inside of his mind and to be his friend.
She needed friends, but forgot occasionally that she had so many. All of the comitatus were her sisters. The entire Mbaysey looked up to her. Random strangers on the streets on Ogrorspoxu might know the name Ndidi Zikora, as the first person other than an Anndaing to ever command one of the great Battlemasters, going back to the Ovanii themselves.
Daniel smiled at her and watched her relax a shade.
Not much, but maybe no longer feeling like she had the weight of the universe on her shoulders.
All the other women perked up. Daniel always found it amusing that he was the only male officer on this ship. And the ratio on the crew was close to the eighty-five percent female that the Mbaysey maintained across the entire tribe.
The Anndaing were more binary, but there had been sufficient women to fill the slots, when Kathra laid down her recruiting rules. A few Kaniea had answered the call, but weren’t officers, beyond A’Alhakoth. A few more Anic and Wisp, like Acqueir and Tanuss.
And one human male. Chef and bloodhound.
Secret weapon, he supposed, but the Sept knew who he was. At least one of them even knew what he was.
Ndidi took her spot at the center of the bridge, with most of the other women in front of her but generally facing inward towards her. She took a deep breath and did her own quick inventory of the room, but everyone was poised.
“Open a line to SwiftStar and the squadron,” Ndidi said simply. Quietly. Forcefully.
“All vessels on the line, Speaker,” Acqueir replied a moment later, like she had already set things up and was just waiting.
Always staying ahead of the woman in command. Professional.
But the women on this bridge were also angry. It was an underlying flavor, like adding a dash of salt to something sweet, and letting the mouth pick it up last as that lingering surprise on your tongue.
Most of them had never been to Tazo, the homeworld the Mbaysey had abandoned when they became a Star Tribe. Ndidi had not even been born there, but enough of the older women of the Mbaysey remembered.
They had gathered the officers and crew of MorningStar together a week before sailing, human and alien alike. Had told them of the history of the tribe that they were now associated with. Some might even choose to join later.
Grandma Ezinne had been there, a spry, ninety-year-old woman unbowed by the weight of her life. She had spoken about the tattoo on her left cheek, the one she had chosen to keep, sixty years on. The barcode put there by a Sept aristocrat of the Vuzurgan rank. The Grand Nobles of the Sept Empire.
She had spoken slowly and carefully, pausing to answer questions with a mind still sharp.
Grandma Ezinne had told these women what it meant to be a slave. To be property. Her granddaughter, Erin Uduik, Spectre Two, Kathra’s Second-In-Command wore an identical mark. This was was so that Erin’s daughter, Kwento, would grow up in a world where nobody ever had that happen to them again.
It had been a forceful speech, however quiet and prim the woman with the sparkling, laughing eyes had been while giving it.
The entire Mbaysey combat squadron had heard her speak.
Watching her, he could see Ndidi draw on that now, eyes slightly unfocused. Or perhaps seeing something measured in light-centuries, going back to Tazo. To Rhages. To Earth.
“We know why we are here,” Ndidi said simply. “You have trained. Studied. Practiced. We who have been there before have taught you everything we know. Shared with you our dreams, our fears, and our blood. Commander Omezi has her comitatus. Once, they numbered twenty-three, but that was the past. Those were the ones she trusted to protect the rest of the tribe. Today, she relies on all of us. We protect not just the Mbaysey, not just the Anndaing, but everyone, everywhere, from an evil that must be denied, must be repulsed. Must be destroyed. We protect the future. That is why Kathra chose us. Why she put us here. Why we must face these costs.”
Daniel forgot to breathe as he listened. His lungs reminded him, and he was not alone from the sounds around him. He wondered how many other people had hung too sharply on the young woman’s words. He had twelve thousand years of ghosts to draw on in his memory, and had encountered few speeches with similar power, especially delivered by such a woman.
“Mbaysey Tribal Squadron, come to readiness,” Ndidi ordered. “All vessels jump.”
