Dinner had gone over like a pocket supernova, but Kathra was not displeased with herself. She had heard that naupati’s words. Like the others, she recognized the significance of them.
The Sept had finally come looking for her. Specifically. For Kathra Omezi. And the Mbaysey as well, but her.
The Sept Empire had long memories, going back to her mother, the irrepressible Yagazie, and the Mbaysey first demanding their freedom and rights, after nearly a century of semi-slavery under Sept law. Freedom had allowed them to be ignored long enough to build up their strength. To build the ClanStars as trading ships. To carve out a spot among all the other merchant races and classes.
Until daughter Kathra had convinced them to leave Tazo behind and simply walk away from the Sept entirely. To only interact with the old empire of men when they needed to trade for those things they could not produce themselves. Skills that they needed to learn, by hiring in experts.
To skate into the endless darkness and leave planets themselves behind.
Kathra looked around her office and studied it, as if the whole of the galaxy would be changing so much shortly that it would no longer be something she could remember, if she didn’t stop and memorize the details now.
She had always expected her eventual pregnancy to be the trigger, but she had not yet gone to the refrigerator to pick out her daughter’s father. Apparently, the Sept were tired of waiting.
A knock at the closed hatch brought her head up with a smile.
Right on time.
Kathra keyed a switch to slide it open, and Daniel entered.
He surprised her by carrying a large flask and two cups as he entered and stood between the two chairs on the other side of her desk.
The apparent gravity in here was not as strong, because she was on the inner deck. Just under half a gee. Being on the middle deck would be eighty percent, while the outer deck was kept at one hundred fifteen percent standard gravity, to keep muscles strong and reflexes sharp.
It was much more comfortable sitting on her ass on this deck, when she had to do paperwork. Also, easier to get to engineering, located in zero gee inside the rotating shell, if she was here and there was an emergency.
“Sit,” she ordered the man, wondering if he planned to drink with her.
Daniel took the chair on the right and put everything on the desk between them. Quickly, he opened the flask and poured two equal amounts, grabbing one glass and sipping.
“Sweet tea,” he said simply.
Kathra let the scowl die before it reached her face. They did indeed share that one quirk, and he was apparently trying to make things appear calm and relaxed.
For an outsider, he had learned quickly in a single week. Or a lifetime of training in a kitchen had served him well.
Kathra took a sip and contemplated this chef.
“We did not finish our tours,” she said after a moment.
“I have reviewed the logs that Ugonna left me,” Daniel said between sips. “It would be nice to have more chickens generating eggs on a daily basis, but I understand that only the Ihejirika ClanStar deals in excess chickens to trade with the others, while the Okafor have a small herd of miniature cattle that each produce about two liters of milk per day. I plan to shift towards serving more milk directly by using it in white sauces and roux, while serving less bread and making more pasta. It stores dry for longer periods of time, and allows me to put calories and protein into the comitatus in a variety of ways.”
“A French-specialist chef disdaining bread?” Kathra asked with the faintest hint of irony in her voice.
“You haven’t have freshwater crab Rangoon, or Vietnamese spring rolls, I suspect,” he smiled back at her. “And I like lasagna, if I can manage to find me someone to make specialty cheeses.”
“There will be other problems, first,” Kathra replied, pulling the conversation back to why she had ordered him to attend her.
“Yes, but I intend to hide in my kitchen while you and yours sort all of that out,” he said simply. “If they didn’t follow me to Renneth and then here, which I couldn’t tell you one way or the other, then I have no part to play.”
“And if they did?” she asked.
Daniel shrugged.
“You hired me,” he said. “Of all the offers I got, yours was the only one even remotely interesting. I presume the recruiters you went through are either people you trust, or that’s probably the easiest way for the Sept bureaucrats to follow me to Renneth. From there, I’m not sure how they would track you to wherever we ended up. Or wherever we are now. Unless someone has found a magical new way to track a ship making a jump.”
“That cannot be done,” Kathra confirmed. “But an observer watching a ship go into jump can make a good estimate where it will come out.”
“I wasn’t flying,” he said with a serious face.
“And I’ve looked at the logs from Erin’s flight,” Kathra nodded. “All three of them short-jumped several times when leaving Renneth, so nobody could have followed them directly.”
“There you have it,” he said. “I will return to my kitchen then?”
“You are not concerned that some of the comitatus will suspect you of being a spy anyway?”
“Until one of them actually stabs me with a knife, they do not even rise to the level of threat of some of my former coworkers,” he said, eyes suddenly darker than they had been.
Kathra just studied the man, one eyebrow raised in surprise.
“Kitchens are not always convivial places, Commander,” he announced in a simple voice. “At least, not until you reach well-run ones. I have been stabbed or slashed several times, requiring stitches or glue to close up, on top of all the times I have been punched, shoved, or burned. The warriors around you do not intimidate me, for all that any one of them could bounce me off the walls and appliances until they got bored or I broke. I am here to cook. If you have other requirements, Commander, I will attempt to meet them as best I can, or perhaps find myself unemployed and standing bereft on a platform again.”
“Again?”
“It will not be the first,” he said in a flatter voice. “I do not expect it to be the last, either. Now, what should I prepare for dinner that would remind your killers that they are friends and comrades, rather than wherever they ended up at lunch today?”
“Something exotic,” Kathra decided. “Spicy and new, to remind them that this is a grand adventure.”
She watched his eyes grow distant within, seeking something.
How could she tell any of them that she had hired this man for two such radically unrelated reasons? First, because she had simply grown bored and listless with Ugonna’s pedestrian cooking. They all had. Stew was not a treat, the fortieth or sixtieth time you had it, regardless of how the cook might play around with ingredients.
They had already come round to understanding what a new cook could do, especially a great one challenged to keep outdoing himself.
But second, and far more important to Kathra, was to remind everyone that while the Mbaysey were a tribe of outsiders, they could not grow insular as a result. Fresh blood would be needed on a regular basis. Fresh ideas, just like they regularly had to trade the excess metal ingots ForgeStar produced for grains grown on the surfaces of planets they never visited.
Her war with the Sept would not be fought with guns. She would lose quickly and be erased from history if she sought to challenge that mighty empire on a level footing. But she could win by providing an alternative to the planetary-based thinking that made so many others grow stale.
Kathra could have invested in an autochef capable of taking any manner of input chemicals and ingredients and spitting out meals that were good enough to satisfy your nutritional needs.
Those machines had no soul whatsoever, which was why much of the Sept relied on them. They had lost their own dreams, and were losing whatever elements of identity they had once possessed. The Mbaysey had managed to retain that element for this long.
Kathra Omezi, Commander of the tribe, was looking for something far greater.