Three thousand years ago, there had been Earth. One crowded planet, drowning within a sea of humanity. They were beginning to expand into space, but it was too late for them. Their ships were too slow, the space between habitable worlds too vast. They would have died, crushed beneath the hubris of their own greedy selves, were it not for the sudden appearance of the Deep.
It took time for the humans to realize they were no longer alone in the galaxy. The Deep didn’t have a body, after all, and humans are prone to ignore that which they can’t measure. Except the shipping lines between Earth and Mars kept reporting packages disappearing, reappearing, disappearing, reappearing…utter chaos at the docks. For some time after that, humans still believed they were alone, testing those who worked in the supply lines for latent psionic abilities.
Myopic species, humans.
Then, finally, the Deep found people who were able to translate for it.
The first Witches thought…well, there were no good records of what they thought. Everyone was obsessed with the Deep. Extra-terrestrial life—sapient life!—which seemed to enjoy teleporting objects between planets. Hmm. How…useful. And what did the Deep want in exchange? Nothing? Are we sure? We are?
…hmm.
First came the Deep. Then came its Witches. After that came Lancaster, and a great wave of humanity crashed across the Milky Way.
Then, three thousand years later, came Tembi Stoneskin.
She had no illusions about her significance in this long and complicated mess. If the Deep wanted to show her a broken moon? She would listen to her friend, and do her best to understand.
Down to the moon.
Tembi chose to take the long way, to fly instead of teleport. Down, swooping and dodging to avoid chunks of displaced rock, down to where the moon’s thin, shattered gravity managed to catch hold of her bare feet. She landed as lightly as she could within the middle of a dusty maelstrom, a sphere of cleansed air surrounding her. Beyond the invisible edge of the sphere was dust, dust everywhere, gray dust, black dust, blue dust, a whole dull rainbow of the stuff, all of it trying to settle into new homes.
It was also reflective, which was unnerving. She saw a dozen fragmented versions of herself keeping pace beside her, their heads and gracefully tapered ears held high, their dark brown skin and the silhouettes of golden birds painted on their cheeks the only source of living color for hundreds of kilometers in any direction.
“Deep?” Tembi asked, more to cut the eerie silence than in hope of an answer. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Let me know what it tells you.”
The voice came from the reflective dust cloud. For a moment—one heart-stopping moment—Tembi wondered if she had finally snapped under the strain, if all of this jumping about the galaxy with her near-omniscient invisible telepathic alien friend had finally broken her understanding of what it meant to be real. Maybe, instead of standing on this strange half-a-moon, she was, oh, say, crumpled on the floor of a restaurant where she had been enjoying a nice bowl of soup before she had become mentally and spiritually unmoored, and maybe the faint tingling sensation in her fingertips was the result of the local law hitting her with several thousand volts of well-placed popstick.
Then she recognized the voice, and wondered if it would have been better to lose touch with her sanity after all.
“War Witch,” she said, nodding politely.
Her on-again, off-again, currently extremely-off-again boyfriend emerged from the dust, wincing at the nickname. “Tembi, don’t.”
She relented. “Kalais.”
They stared at each other. She hadn’t seen Kalais for the better part of a year. He was living on Earth these days, trying to convince the Earth Assembly to do this and that and the other on behalf of Lancaster. Life on Earth seemed to suit him. He wore a blue uniform with silver bands along the sleeves, colors which matched the swirling silver-blue patterns the Deep had painted on his cheek to mark him as one of its own. His brown skin was a few shades lighter than her own, and he appeared to be Earth-normal except for his nearly white eyes.
(Her traitor brain reminded her that she was ten different exotic varieties of scruffy in her bomb disposal uniform, which she hadn’t washed in weeks, not even after that scene with all of those skittering creatures that weren’t quite spiders. She mercilessly crushed that thought down and shoved it aside so the Deep wouldn’t pick it out of her head and slap a fancy set of dress robes on her. Today didn’t need to turn into the most embarrassing day of her life on top of everything else.)
He smiled at her. The small frown lines at the edges at his mouth disappeared. “You look good,” he said. “New earrings?”
She held up a hand before he could finish. “Stop,” she told him. “Let’s figure out why the Deep brought us here, and then we can leave.”
Kalais hesitated, his smile fading, and then nodded.
They fell into step beside each other, the sounds of their footsteps muffled by whatever the Deep had done to create a portable atmosphere. The dust had finally been caught up in the low gravity, and was settling around them in dense drifts. The only visual sign that they were still surrounded by a sphere of breathable air was the path it cut in the dust as they walked, the small hillocks falling in on themselves once the edge of it passed them by.
“How long have you been here?” Tembi asked.
“Arrived in time to see the moon split open. You?”
“Same. Do you know what happened?”
“No.” He knelt to scoop some of the moon’s foamy dust into his hands, and swirled it around as if searching for clues before letting it fall. “Is this one of the Deep’s hallucinations?”
“Visions,” Tembi corrected him. “Not hallucinations.” She paused and shut her eyes, her hands extended, her toes set deep in the dust. The Deep’s visions were almost indistinguishable from reality, but if you paused, if you allowed yourself to be still and be present within the moment, you could always find your way. The skin on her feet was as hard as the rest of her, but she was sure she could still feel the shape of the moon. Not sorrow, not pain…no emotions at all. A moon was a rock. A chunk of mass, floating in space. It still shook with the residual energy of an event not of its own making, but it didn’t care. It could be crushed down until nothing remained but the dust, and it wouldn’t care.
“Real,” she said, certain that the Deep couldn’t invent anything that wasn’t grounded in emotion.
Kalais took a deep breath, as if expecting the small sphere of air around them to vanish.
“Relax,” Tembi said. “The Deep isn’t going to yank it away.”
“Maybe for you! You’re its favorite. If I soss it off, it might decide to let me die in space.”
“Don’t.” She shook her head. “The Deep wouldn’t do that.”
He glared at her. “We’ve heard the same stories, Tembs.”
“I’m not having this fight with you again.”
He opened his mouth, their old argument ready and waiting, but chose to nod instead.
They resumed walking. With the dust finally clearing from the sky, Tembi could make out the small planet, strange in its colors. A storm appeared to be roaring across its surface, clouds as crimson as blood moving quickly towards the horizon.
Kalais stopped to watch, his pale eyes fixed on the storm.
“See anything?” Tembi asked. He came from a low-light planet, and his nearly white eyes were designed to function in settings like this. Similar to this, she reminded herself. Kalais had described his homeworld as slow, peaceful. A drowsy place which basked in the glow of an old red sun. Not this broken moon hanging next to a bloody planet.
“No,” he replied, shaking his head. “Do you know where we are?”
“Deep?” Tembi asked.
Eight small rocks shot up from the surface and began to orbit a large central rock. A pebble circled around this, with a long tail of dust trailing behind it. The comet was the detail needed for Kalais to put a name to the planetary system: “Stross cluster.”
“That’s next door to Vega.” Tembi glanced towards the black sky around them, as if she could see the enormous shipping hubs which dominated her home system.
“Stross is uninhabited,” Kalais said. “No native life forms, not enough water on a Goldilocks planet to make terraforming worth the cost.”
“Seems like a good place to set off new a weapon…” Tembi replied, the words coming out slowly as she considered each one. “…uninhabited, but close enough to Vega be discovered by smugglers using FTL ships.”
“Rumors start to spread, word gets back to Earth that someone’s blowing up moons,” Kalais agreed. “But if that’s what happened, why are we the only two people around?”
“FTL ships leave traces,” Tembi guessed. “If it were me, I’d plant the weapon, abandon it for as long as I could, and then wait to hear what happened.”
“No,” Kalais said. “If you’re testing a weapon for the first time, you need to gather data. This place should be swarming with people and ’bots.”
“I didn’t say they were testing the weapon,” Tembi replied, her face pointed towards the bloody planet so Kalais couldn’t see the edges of her mouth twist. This wasn’t the time to count points.
“Small gods,” he said quietly. “You think this is a message?”
“You’re the War Witch,” she replied. “You tell me.”
The nickname didn’t reach him: Kalais had already leapt into the sky.
Tembi followed.
The two of them moved across the broken moon in great bounds, not quite flying but leaping up, up, and then arcing down to land in a cloud of dust. They kept pushing forward, eating up the ground, each step covered the better part of a kilometer. The moon wasn’t that large; Tembi thought they’d be able to circle it within an hour or two. As they traveled, they searched, looking for anything different, anything strange, anything that wasn’t part of the moon itself.
“There!” Tembi shouted.
Despite the distance and the lack of air, Kalais heard her. He turned and raced towards where she was pointing, quick as lightning. The two of them landed beside a large piece of plass that had been twisted beyond recognition, presumably by the same force that had split the moon.
“I’ve seen this before,” he said, kneeling beside the plass.
“Me, too,” Tembi said. “This is what’s left from larger pressure bombs.” Kalais glanced up at her, surprised. “I disarm bombs, remember? Sometimes they go off.”
“I’d forgotten,” he muttered. “I only remember how you said you’d never join the war.”
“People were dying.” She hated how those three words summed up everything. Or how he smiled at them, just a little, just enough so she knew that smile was for her and her alone, and not for the waste of human lives that had finally dragged her into horror. She did her best to move the moment along. “Disarming bombs is the only thing I’m allowed to do, and only if they’re found in a location where Lancaster does business.”
Kalais nodded, frustrated, and turned away from her to yank on the plass hard enough to lift it from the dust. It was twice his size, but the low gravity let him pull it up like an unwanted weed. “Help me find more pieces.”
Into the sky again, looking for anything that might be connected to the bomb. Now that they had found the first piece, they were able to locate more. In a matter of minutes, they had sketched out a space and covered it in shrapnel. When there was nothing left to find, they retreated to the sky to get a bird’s-eye view of the mechanism.
“Less of it than there should be,” Kalais mused aloud, as they puzzled over the scraps. “Or maybe there’s more…I don’t know what this thing was. What do you think?”
“I think I’ve spent the last two years keeping these things from going off,” she said. “I don’t like being around one that’s completed its job. Hey, Deep? Did we miss any of the pieces?”
In reply, the surface of the moon began to jerk as more scraps of the bomb shook themselves loose.
Kalais wrinkled his nose. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you only think about the Deep when you want to jump across the galaxy,” she replied, as the Deep maneuvered countless pieces of plass and all kinds of unrecognizable materials into a hastily sketched impression of order. “Deep? Do you know what this looked like before the explosion?”
The pieces paused in midair, and then began to move again, pushing and pulling themselves into a rough device.
“I can’t tell what it was supposed to be. There’re too many missing parts,” Kalais said.
Tembi was about to say something nasty about how it had been a bomb, after all! but stopped herself. There was something odd about the debris, how the bottom of the structure had suffered more damage than the top. She drifted over to a piece where there was a melted edge along the plass, whole on one side and ruined on the other, as if the strength of the bomb hadn’t been quite enough to wipe itself out.
“Doesn’t make sense,” she said under her breath, her fingers prodding that bubbly line between right and wrong. “This bomb could break something as large as a moon, but…
“Come on,” she said, as she leapt into the sky again. “I want to see something.”
They didn’t have far to go. The fracture in the moon appeared, clean as the edge of a knife. Tembi paused to wait for Kalais, and the two of them went over the side together.
This side of the moon was in shadow. The half-moon’s orbit was still adjusting to the force of the explosion, but was no doubt stabilized to some degree by the Deep. The movement, coupled with the light reflected from the planet below, painted everything in an eerie wiggling red.
The face of the rock was clean of dust, clean of all possible damage. Unnaturally clean.
Unnervingly clean.
She reached out and brushed her fingers along the flat surface. The sound of stone grating across stone caused Kalais to wince. “Oh, Tembs.”
“It’s been a hard year,” she muttered, putting a little more distance between them so he couldn’t touch her. Sympathy would get them nowhere. She returned her attention to the rock face. “This reminds me of a shear bomb, but those cut buildings in half. Not slice chunks out of whole moons!”
“I’d swear someone took a plasma cutter to this,” Kalais said. “The size of it, though!”
Tembi shook her head, unable to grapple with the implications. She had seen shear bombs do their work too many times. Those hellish devices were good for a single burst of energy strong enough to slice through most materials. Then, their job done, they would be buried within the rubble of the building, or the ship, or that mineral mine…
That mine had been bad. A shear bomb, hidden in an unused tunnel, left dormant until its sentinel ’bots reported that the mine had reached critical capacity, full of workers and machines and various creatures of business who had deigned to go beneath the surface of the asteroid to see how their credits were ground out of the walls. When the bomb went off, it had sent out a single pulse of energy. This pulse formed a single horizontal beam, disk-shaped and all-encompassing, which sliced neatly through everything it encountered along its way until it lost its mojo and trickled out, dispersing into the walls of the asteroid a quarter-kilometer away.
That pulse hadn’t been all that wide, starting out with the thickness of a hair and diffusing out to two centimeters at its most lethal point. But in an underground world crafted from careful engineering, two centimeters was more than enough. More than enough to take out walls, to cut through machines, to rip through flesh and bone while still allowing a couple of panicked heartbeats to wonder how you got all of that blood on your trousers—
“Focus, Tembi,” she whispered to herself.
She pressed the palms of her hands against the wall, and pushed herself off to float up beside Kalais. “I’m out of my depth,” she admitted. “The wreckage we found looks like what’s left over from a cheap pressure bomb. This, though? It’s beyond anything I’ve seen. I’ll call Cooper. He’s the expert.” Cooper was the demolitions specialist who had trained her, and she knew he’d be overjoyed to see this moon. He treated bombs as art forms which demanded respect, and he rarely got to see such a dramatic new variant of the theme. He wasn’t a Witch himself, but he had the authority to drag a Witch away from their own duties at Lancaster, and she could imagine him setting up camp on the sliced edge of the moon to study it.
Kalais pushed himself away from the shadowed edge, and hung in the air. The red light tugged at the edges of his clothing, his hair, his face, and he blinked to lower the embedded black lenses which allowed him to see in bright sunlight. “I’m going back to Earth,” he said. “Come with me. They’ll want to hear what you have to say.”
She shook her head. “You go to Earth. I’ll go to Lancaster. I need to be debriefed anyway.”
“I don’t know how to explain this,” he said.
“Don’t bother. Just bring them here.”
“It’s not going to be that easy,” he said. “The Deep brought us here before the bomb went off, remember? How do we explain that?”
“Simple.” Tembi shrugged. “The Deep moves through time.”
He rolled his eyes. “Tembi—”
“The Deep moves through time,” she insisted. “It saw the explosion, and brought us back so we could watch it happen.”
“That’s impossible.”
Tembi pointed at the broken moon, at the depths of space around them, at the two of them hanging in an airless sky, and then turned the movement into an especially rude gesture.
“Point taken,” he said. “But you’re still wrong—they’ve studied the Deep forever, Tembs! All it can do is manipulate space and matter. We know this. Time travel isn’t one of its abilities.”
“I’m not saying it moves Witches through time often. Or that it’s easy for it to do. But yes, Kalais, the Deep can move us through time as well as space.”
“No, it can’t.” He shook his head in disgust. “Stop. You’re giving this…thing too much power.”
The old argument was bubbling up between them again. It wasn’t the place for it, and there was never a right time for it. Except here they were, voices rising while they stood on the edge of impossibility.
“Be realistic, Tembi,” he said hotly, arms knotted across his chest. “How often do those bombs go off? Wouldn’t the Deep be able to stop that if it could see through time?”
She kept her mouth shut, a thin line tight from anger. If she opened it, she’d say something about what happened when she made a mistake, when those little tubes didn’t align properly, when the Deep wrapped her in itself so fast that she couldn’t process what was happening, when she was suddenly halfway across a planet and she knew there was now nothing she could do except wait a few minutes, hands clenched, so those flecks of carbon which had been people and buildings could burn out or settle in place before she jumped back to the scene.
“We know nothing about this creature,” he said. “The faith you put in it…I’ll never understand it. Just because it likes you—”
She finally had enough. “Love,” she snapped. “It loves me. And you.”
“It lets us die!” he roared. “If we soss it off, it punts us into space and we’re gone forever! Better to ignore it than convince ourselves it’s capable of something like love!”
“Don’t be cruel,” Tembi replied. “It doesn’t let us die.”
“Then where do those Witches go? The ones who’ve disappeared? Or what about the ones who start aging again?” He was pacing, furious. “We’re nothing but its toys, Tembs! When it gets bored with us, it kills us off and replaces us with someone new.”
He was right. There were Witches who had gone missing, and some Witches who had stopped aging suddenly grew old and then died. The doubts that swarmed Tembi’s peace when she was on the verge of sleep swelled and—
No. He’s not wrong, but that doesn’t mean he’s right.
“Stop,” she told him. “Just stop. The Deep isn’t omniscient. You know that!”
“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I thought you finally understood that this creature has limits. If it could move through time, it could make sure none of this—” and he spread his arms wide. “—would happen! If it could prevent this, why wouldn’t it?”
“Because people don’t make sense! The Deep is the first intelligent alien we’ve encountered, and we treat it like a tool! It’s a person, Kalais! You know that as well as I do! It’s got a sense of humor!” She was shouting now, her hands firm on her hips. “It likes cats, for gods’ sake! You’re a Witch, Kalais, the Deep talks to you! Even if you can’t understand most of what it says, you can’t deny what you know!”
“I’m the War Witch, remember?” Kalais stared at her with dark eyes. “War’s what I know!”
“It doesn’t want us to be at war!” she snarled.
“Then why did it choose me?” Kalais pounded himself on the chest with a closed fist. “I’m the first soldier it’s chosen. Ever! Three thousand years, and I’m the first! If the Deep is a person, then you should respect its choice and listen to me for once!”
That was new: that struck Tembi straight through her heart. Oh, he had been thinking about that one! Well, she had spent many a trip across the galaxy reliving their old fights, too.
“The Deep is an innocent person. Matindi thinks it might even be a child,” Tembi said harshly. “It isn’t omniscient, and its choices aren’t infallible.” She stopped before she added: And it made a mistake when it chose you.
He knew her too well. Her omission shouted louder than the words themselves.
He took a deep breath. “We don’t know what the Deep is,” he said, very slowly, very calmly, each word as cutting as if he had sharpened them like razors. “It’s told us that it’s older than our entire galaxy.”
“If you ask a six-year-old how old they are, they’ll proudly tell you they’re all grown up now.” The calmer he got, the more she wanted to throw things at his head, or maybe kick him hard enough to spin him in a wobbly arc towards the planet. Maybe there was enough atmosphere to give him some minor burns before the Deep jumped him to safety—No. Better to try and talk sense into him, this one last time.
Calm. Yes. She was Adhamantian: he could do calm, she could do calm, they would be two adults having a calm adult discussion. While floating in space. In little bubbles of air…oh, she had such a stomach ache! “Think, Kalais, please. Lancaster has told the galaxy that the Deep is an unlimited energy field. We can’t keep spreading that lie. Not when the Deep is someone we have to protect.”
“So what if it is?” Kalais rounded on her, all calm gone, suddenly furious. “I was a child soldier. Eight years old, yanked off my homeworld, a weapon shoved into my hands! I didn’t have a choice!”
“No, you didn’t,” Tembi said, her own sense of calm held tight between her clenched teeth. She hadn’t meant to push this particular button. “Someone should have defended you. If I had been there, I would have stood between you and those who wanted to use you.”
“How?! We’re the same age, Tembs. When you were eight, you were eating out of the trash and picking pockets to survive!” Kalais roared. “If the Deep hadn’t chosen you to become a Witch, you’d still be on your dead-end planet, selling yourself on the street to get enough credit to buy a meal!”
Too far.
The anger vanished from Kalais as quickly as it had kindled, all of the heat snuffed out by the cruelty of what he had just said. “Gods, Tembi, I’m sorry—”
“Get out of here,” she said, as cold and as lifeless as the broken moon. “You’ve got a duty, War Witch.”
Kalais blinked again. The artificial lenses retracted, and he looked at her with his pale defenseless eyes.
“Don’t you dare,” she warned him.
He turned, wrapped himself in the Deep, and disappeared.
“Someone should have been there for you,” Tembi said quietly.
She took one last look at the moon, and stepped into the Deep.