Witches, Tembi had learned, developed an instinctive feel for locations. Moving across the galaxy, across time zones, into space and onto planets? All of this spoke to a small part of the brain which remembered life as an ape, and took inventory as soon as the body was dropped into a new environment. So when Bayle brought them to the address which had appeared on her databand, Tembi knew they had come out in a room somewhere below the ground, and there was a good part of the planet above them.
“Ah,” Gallimore said, as they reviewed their surroundings with a gimlet eye. “Yes, this would have been an inconvenient walk.”
“Inconvenient?” Bayle’s voice was a squeak. She was pointing at a dozen security ’bots, all of them closing in on long and spindly legs.
Gallimore spoke a series of letters and numbers, and the ’bots turned and left.
“Deep, where are we?” Tembi asked, her eyes shut so the Deep could sketch the edges of Adhama’s maps in her mind. Her own home city, itself large enough to cover a fifth of a continent, shone bright, with a red dot pulsing near the shore. They were about a dozen klicks from the restaurant, next to the shipping docks.
“These used to be housing,” Gallimore said, as they waved at the room around them. “An old cave system, found and explored when Adhama was first settled, and home to our ancestors until they got the terraforming settled and the storms tamed.”
“I had no idea,” Tembi said, as she paused to examine the walls. They were stone, but shaped with a plasma cutter to give them surfaces smoother than old glass. The floors had been left rough-cut, and were welcoming beneath her bare feet.
“Few people do.” Gallimore stopped at the open door and knocked on the metal frame. “Incoming friendlies!” they shouted. “It’s Gallimore. I’m here with Witches. Be aware.”
“Should we—” Tembi began, but Gallimore held her back.
“We’re guests in their house,” they said.
There was a high-pitched buzzing, and a swarm of near-microscopic ’bots darted into the room. Tembi had a lightning-fast thought, there and gone, in which she asked the Deep to keep them off of her and Bayle, and the swarm landed on Gallimore as a dark humming cloud.
“They’re searching for tags,” Gallimore explained, as they turned and lifted their arms so the ’bots could reach their skin.
“The Deep wouldn’t let a tracking tag through,” Bayle said. “Not unless we wanted it. Or swallowed it.”
Gallimore opened their mouth, and winked as the swarm zipped down their esophagus and back into the air. “Feels like nothing,” Gallimore assured them. “If you want to meet the Sabenta…?”
“Fine,” Tembi grunted, and asked the Deep to let them through.
It was all psychological, Tembi reminded herself. The ’bots were so small as to not cause any sensation, even as they sped through her nasal passages, her ear canals… She wondered about tags that had migrated to the stomach or lower, and that thought led to another, where a spy who had timed their digestive processes just right might have another opportunity for a listening device? No, there were easier ways to manage that… And was she sure all of those thousands of ’bots were being polite?
Then the swarm was out and gone, down the hallway, leading the way.
“Come, come,” Gallimore said, as they followed the swarm.
The three of them left the small room and turned a corner. Tembi found herself in a massive hallway, dark as anything except for a single band of light coming from a slice in the floor. No, not a slice: a corner. An edge, with the old lights illuminating the point where the ground fell away. The floor dropped down nearly a meter, ending in another floor with thick strips of rusting metal running its length.
“Train rails.” Gallimore was peering over her shoulder. “Cheaper than anti-grav at the time.”
“What’s a train?” asked Bayle, and Gallimore obliged her with a description of thundering metal and plass, bearing down like enormous monsters into waiting stations before zooming out again, people stacked together within the shells as if a great divine hand had shoved them into messy bins.
Tembi whispered, “You’re so much better than a train,” and the smell of roses filled her mind again.
A scuttering noise of rock kicked across rock came from behind her. Tembi turned. Five meters away, a naked child stared back. His skin was a dull gray in the shadows, and Tembi had to squint to make out his features. Overlarge silver-blue eyes designed for a low-light planet reminded her somewhat of Kalais, but the child’s fingers ended in deadly sharp fingernails.
“Hey,” she called softly, as she crouched to sit on her heels. “What are you doing down here?”
The child backed away, then turned and ran, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hide! Everybody, hide!”
“Ah, now, that’s done it,” Gallimore said. “Put your paint on, honorable Witches, lest you get shot.”
“Shot?!” Bayle gasped.
“Shot,” they confirmed, as they placed a firm hand on Bayle’s shoulder to try to keep her from bolting.
Tembi sympathized with her friend. Guns were rarities, single-purpose weapons which couldn’t be rationalized as anything other than what they were. Why carry a gun for self-defense when a popstick would do? Oh, right. That would be for the murders, or, at best, the psychological terror. She had been terrorized more than once while on bomb duty, and relished those times she got to turn that terror around on the gun’s owner.
“What are we getting into?” she asked Gallimore.
Their ears dipped towards uncertain. “It changes, Witch-nim,” they replied. “Please put your paint on. We do not want your mighty friend to hurt these people.”
She asked the Deep for her Witch’s paint and some good robes, and found herself dressed in a set of black robes she kept for semi-formal occasions, with gold trim along the sleeves to complement the rising silhouettes of songbirds on her cheek. Bayle was likewise dressed in her good blues and silvers, and while the Deep had left her shoes, her head was now bare and her hair hung in its usual long waves.
Gallimore nodded their approval, and cupped their hands to shout down the old rails. “It’s Gallimore!” they called again. “I bring friends of Moto! Fail to welcome them at your peril!”
Slowly, cautiously, the shadows began to crawl as people stepped from them. They shared the boy’s large eyes and sharp-tipped fingernails, but the color of their skin shifted from the dark of the shadows to that of the creamy gray-white of the tunnel’s old halo lights. They were dressed in long robes of different shades of black and gray, with flashes of metal and cut-stone color concealed within the fabric to suggest each was wearing a large quantity of jewelry.
They were also breathtakingly beautiful. Tall, with their heads close-shaved, and utterly flawless skin, they seemed an alien race as they shifted between shades of gray, graceful clouds on a moonlit night.
“Chameleons,” Bayle whispered. “They’re Chameleons.”
Gallimore nodded. “The last of them, smuggled off-world in small groups during the blockade.”
Chameleon was a deadly world with unimaginably rich mineral deposits. In addition to a heavy atmospheric viral load which behaved as if it loathed humans, the majority of the animal species native to the planet were ambush predators, and resisted capture and killing. The settlers of Chameleon had invested in antibody profiles and chromatophore genome mods, and had slowly established small colonies to harvest the planet’s wealth. Their world had been one of the first Blackwing targets in the war, ostensibly because the Chameleons were a major source of funding for the Sabenta. Money was certainly part of it, yes, but so were the Chameleons with their heavily modded bodies: the loudest Earth Pure pundits never failed to point out that interfertility between Chameleons and non-modded humans was abysmal, and this showed that Chameleons were on their way to becoming a separate species. Couldn’t have that!
The Blackwings had kept a blockade around Chameleon for decades. Nothing went in, nothing came out, and Chameleon had to eat itself alive. Without access to off-world resources, extreme famine had resulted in civil war. After that, when most of the native Chameleons had died out, the Blackwings had occupied the planet in the name of peace.
All of this had happened nearly thirty years ago, long before Lancaster had agreed to move civilians affiliated with the Sabenta to safe locations. Today, the Blackwings held a wealthy world but could do nothing with it, as the problems that had required the first Chameleons to adapt themselves to their environment persisted and nowadays there was not a Chameleon to be found. At Lancaster, the genocide was spoken about in whispers. The Witches knew they could have helped, could have circumvented the blockade, could have evacuated the people from their planet. They could have done something. But, as the Chameleons had allied with the Sabenta as soon as the blockade appeared, Lancaster could—did—not.
Tembi had never seen a Chameleon. She had been told they were all dead, had died before she was born, and she had wanted to believe it. Dead meant past, gone, out of reach. Dead meant the problem had belonged to someone else, and that they had failed.
These people were alive.
“Tembs…” Bayle whispered.
“I know,” she replied.
“We are in the most secure of the Sabenta’s waystations on Adhama, honorable Witches,” Gallimore explained. “The location moves beneath the city, hence the overcomplications in bringing you straight here. Cendo is their supplier, but he was not sure where they went after Moto disappeared, as Moto is the one who keeps track of their camps. If the Blackwings knew of their existence…” They allowed that thought to hang in the air, intentionally unfinished.
Bayle recovered first, bowing deeply before the Chameleons. “We are no threat,” she promised.
“They are quite likely in need of food and supplies,” Gallimore said. “With Moto gone, our direct access has been severed.”
“Good riddance.” A Chameleon man, tall and graceful, came forward. “Witches,” he said to Gallimore cuttingly. “We finally rid ourselves of the one, and you bring more?”
“My new friends, come and meet Paisano, my old friend,” said Gallimore, as they led the way down a long hallway. “He is usually a lot of fun.”
Paisano was around Bayle’s age, with long legs, large dark eyes, and skin that flickered in different shades of creamy gray as the four of them passed through pools of light and shadow. He had tattoos spiraling down from his head to beneath his robes, their design mimicking his eyes in pale gray touched with silver. Around his neck was a jeweled collar wide enough to hang over his shoulders, and great golden cuffs covered his forearms. He wore his wealth and was likely rich beyond measure, except wealth had no measure when you were trapped in ancient tunnels beneath a third-rate city on a planet whose only purpose was as a waystation.
Gallimore turned into an alcove. It had been set up as an improvised temple, with pillows hugging the floor and an altar to the gods of Chameleon against the far wall. Here, again, was another display of massive wealth, as the altar was carved from a single pale gray moonstone. The top of the altar rose and fell in the shape of a tree canopy, with patterns of leaves etched into the moonstone’s surface. The artist had decorated the individual leaves with different precious metals, and these shivered gently in the underground air currents. In the center was a forest god, a predatory silhouette cut from a separate gem, pitch black in color, full of sharp edges and wicked teeth.
Religion again, Tembi thought. What a day.
Tembi had no inclination whatsoever to spend any effort learning about imaginary beings or the wholly fabricated rules which governed them. The god—perhaps gods?—of Chameleon were alien to her. Nearly every god was. It was a big galaxy, and each planet tended to generate at least one dominant religion, usually more. No planet was a monoculture, and there were plenty of opportunities for multiple religions to spring forth and give birth to gods. She read up on local religions only when they bled into the legal system, and only to the extent which would reduce possible liabilities for herself or Lancaster, as some civilizations got viciously prickly when you couldn’t be sossed to remember their respective gods’ names. She chose to avoid religion altogether, except when she felt it necessary to throw gods around as the occasional curse.
Faith? That was a different. She didn’t begrudge anyone for putting their faith in love, or honor, or a universal commitment to whatever they held to be pure. Such commitments, she believed, were embedded within human nature, which explained why almost all religions held them high as priorities. If somebody needed religion as a delivery mechanism for kindness? Well…she supposed that was acceptable, as long as they didn’t insist on talking to her about it.
As Paisano moved to the edge of the alcove where a table with four chairs waited, the relief of not needing to discuss someone else’s version of sacred lifted her up. He gestured for them to sit while glaring at Gallimore. “Moto was bad enough, cousin. You realize if I’m caught talking to Witches like this, then the alliance the Sabenta has with Lancaster could fall apart?”
“I made sure we took the most ludicrous road here. No one followed us.” Gallimore chose the chair with their back to the open door. “We haven’t been tracked or tagged, and the Sabenta know you are the liaison between your people and those who might help them, anyhow.
“So,” they said, with a casual wave. “Begin. Liaise.”
“I am not supposed to talk to anyone without a representative from the Sabenta—” he began, but Bayle pulled herself to her full height.
“Sir,” she said, as she sat beside him and folded her hands on the table. “Thank you for coming. Gallimore is correct; we took every precaution in coming here. We would not jeopardize the safety of you or your people for a routine fact-finding mission.”
Paisano glared at Bayle with sharp gray eyes, and then asked, “Who are you, really?”
“Lady Bayle Oliver of Atlantis,” Bayle said, as she inclined her head to him.
“Large and vengeful gods!” cursed Paisano, standing so quickly that his chair tipped over.
“There’s no cause to be dramatic,” Gallimore said.
“Her father’s on the Council!” Paisano was pacing. “Just being in the same room as her would be enough to inspire a whole fleet of rumors! Why not bring the War Witch himself while you’re at it?!”
“He’s my ex, and I’m rather angry with him at the moment,” Tembi said. She was enjoying herself, probably a little too much, but it had been a difficult couple of days and Paisano flailed in a most hilarious manner.
He froze, noticing her paint for the first time. “Witch Stoneskin.”
Tembi imitated Bayle’s delicate head bow. It felt like a lie.
Paisano stood clumsily, unable to take his eyes from her face. He stumbled towards her and then knelt before her. “I’m no good at this,” he said, still staring. “I’m…thank you. You’ve saved so many lives. Thank you.”
“What?! No! Get up!” It was Tembi’s turn to flail. “Stop! Bayle?”
Her friend came to save her, crouching beside Paisano in a swirl of robes. “Paisano?” Bayle said, very gently. “Could you come back to the table?”
“Yes, yes, it’s—” He was flustered, still staring at Tembi. “You have to understand: Lancaster came to join the war only because you forced their hand. Without you, many among the Sabenta would have died.”
“All we do is run transport for refugees,” Tembi said. Her stomach was trying to creep out of her body by way of her feet. Who knelt anymore, really? Even when she was knighted, she hadn’t been asked to kneel. “Besides, Kalais persuaded Lancaster to help the Sabenta. Not me.”
“The War Witch has always given you the credit.”
Really? This had become a full day of surprises. “He’s being generous,” Tembi heard herself mutter. Kalais? But Lancaster hadn’t done anything until he was chosen as a Witch. Why would he—
“Perhaps we should concentrate on what brings us here today,” Gallimore said, each word dipped in a hundred different flavors of bemused tolerance. “When all of this is over, we shall all go out for drinks together, yes? Paisano will buy the first round to show his gratitude.”
“Good idea,” Tembi said, as she shuffled around to the far side of the table, sliding its metal mass between her and Paisano. Who kneels? Honestly, that’s just sossing eerie.
“What can I do for you, Witch Stoneskin?” asked Paisano, as Bayle escorted him back to the table.
“You know Witch Moto Sanders?” Gallimore asked. “Cendo’s brother?”
“Of course. He’s our…” Paisano paused, unable to keep himself from looking at Tembi.
“We know what Moto does for his brother,” Bayle said, gently. “He keeps lines of communication open among persons involved in transport.”
Tembi kept her face still. Only Bayle could tidy up something as consistently messy as language.
“I…yes.” Paisano nodded. “Witch Sanders isn’t involved with moving refugees. He does make sure that the Sabenta has access to material goods…without Lancaster,” he added quickly. “He’s…”
“He puts the Sabenta in touch with people like Cendo,” said Bayle. “And he makes sure that Lancaster provides space for people like Cendo to help the Sabenta.”
Paisano glanced at Gallimore and then sighed, a deep gray sigh which floated up and expanded to fill the room nearly as well as if the Deep had been involved. “There are no secrets from Witches,” he said quietly.
“You might have noticed that Moto was unwell?” Tembi asked.
“Yes,” answered Paisano. “A tremble to his hands, a nervousness to his manner. The Witch had always embodied strength—I took those as signs that he had betrayed us. For many days after he left, I kept my people on the move. We settled here a week ago: we are tired, and when you’re tired it’s easier to accept how there’s no running from Witches.
“When you arrived, I thought you had come to end us,” Paisano added, nodding to Tembi. “If Gallimore had not been with you—”
Tembi cut him off. “If Gallimore wasn’t with us, the Deep would have been. The Deep always is with us. It’s safer if you remember that.”
His eyes moved to the shrine, and he gestured with both hands in a well-practiced ritual motion. “I will remember, Witch Stoneskin.”
Bayle changed the subject. “We came from a meeting with the Blackwings,” she said, as she tapped away on her bracelet. An image of Carroll’s fortress appeared. “At a Hawk-class facility. We received a rather one-sided sales pitch, and no evidence of what might have happened to Moto.”
“We’re also trying to find the weapon which split a moon in the Stross system,” Tembi said. If she hadn’t been watching him, she would have missed it. But there it was, a quick flicker of tension as his eyes darted to hers and away. “Would you like to tell us anything about that?”
“No, Witch Stoneskin,” Paisano said. His skin took on a slightly darker cast, as if he was retreating into familiar shadows. “I wouldn’t.”
Tembi leaned forward. “I disarm bombs,” she said. “Day in, day out. All kinds. Pressure, pulse, shear, distortion, acid, toxin, vapor, mass… You know what they have in common?” Paisano was watching the doorway of the alcove, as if she wasn’t speaking, as if he was waiting for someone more important to come and to join them. “Massacres cost money,” she continued, rapping her fingertips on the tabletop with a sharp clackclackclack. “The Blackwings are unmatched on matters of scale. All the Sabenta can afford to do is detonate and hope they get lucky.
“Adhama’s next door to Stross,” she continued. “This is a busy shipping system. Plenty of traffic. I’d think the Sabenta on Adhama would be busting themselves to find out what happened to that moon.”
“Unless they already knew,” Bayle said.
“I’m not the one you should ask,” Paisano said, his attention still aimed towards the door. “I’m a refugee on the run, and responsible for the last of my people. I’m in no position to help the Sabenta.” Tembi stared pointedly at his elaborate shoulder collar, and then nodded towards the altar and its blend of artistry and riches. At first, Paisano pretended not to notice, even as his skin shifted from gray and began to redden. “What do you want from me?” he finally snapped, a rush of blood turning his face a dusty rose. “Yes, the Sabenta build bombs! They sabotage and terrorize, and if we’re lucky, the right people die! But the Blackwings? They’ve built whole cities to warehouse the Sabenta before they kill them! Now they’re slicing into moons? How do we stand against that?!”
Tembi couldn’t help but notice his minor slip. “You don’t,” she said. “You can’t.”
“We’re dead,” Paisano said, his energy spent. “All of us, dead. You’ll be fine,” he said, with a quick flip of his hand towards the Witches. “The rest of us… You think it’ll stop? If the Blackwings get an official seat on the Earth Assembly, if they keep running their programs… Even after we’re gone, they’ll say ‘Never again’ and do it again anyway, and again and again—”
“Easy,” said Gallimore. “You’re among friends.”
“Am I?” he snapped. “The Sabenta are losing—losing!—and the Witches could fix all of it, just magic the Blackwings away! Easy and done!”
“I believe we’re at the intersection of anger and nowhere,” Gallimore began, but Tembi placed a hand on theirs. “Wait,” she told them. To Paisano, she said, “We need to help Moto. He might have information that can help the Sabenta.”
“Might?” Paisano echoed. “Might?”
“We won’t know unless we find him. Officially, the last place he went was the Blackwing facility,” said Bayle. “Unofficially?”
“Fair, fair…” Paisano angrily rapped his knuckles against the table, as if thinking. He glared at Gallimore and said, “Start Downriver.”