As they had no way to know where the prisoners were being taken, the two of them took shifts clinging to the side of a ship, living barnacles which couldn’t be shaken by multiple jumps through FTL. It was necessary: the hulls were designed to repel tracking ’bots, and while the Deep might remember some of the colonists, and it could remember a particular ship, this was not the time to gamble on its attention span. Thus, Tembi and Kalais rode the ships. Soon, they had to bring Bayle into it, and then Matthew, too: Bayle came in to relieve them, as Tembi and Kalais needed time to perform their usual duties for Lancaster, and after Matthew was told how Matindi had died, his cold anger had demanded he take an active role. And then, after word had spread that Matindi had been murdered by the Blackwings, all the members of their tiny not-resistance joined in, taking turns riding the prisoner transport ships as they crawled their way across solar systems.
As they flew, they plotted.
For the first week, anger drove them. FTL was so slow! and there was ample time to nurture their anger. Anger over Matindi’s murder; anger over the Chameleons and the lies which had erased them. And, as the reality that they lived in a world of lies and murder finally penetrated the thick skulls of the older Witches, there was anger directed towards Lancaster.
Word spread. Witches who had never considered Lancaster to be in the wrong denied the accusations. That lasted just long enough for a Chameleon to make an appearance. Some denied their eyes and required genomic tests before they would believe.
(Tembi was sure that some never would.)
By the second week, anger had been replaced by confusion and sorrow, and a sudden flare-up of accountability. Tembi was grateful that so many of the older Witches had come around, if only because she had somewhere safe to stash the colony’s children. The Witches in Lancaster’s picturesque central village had opened their homes and taken in the refugees, convinced that the act of offering shelter to a fellow human being counted as doing something good.
The third week after the raid on the colony, Tembi realized that their little non-resistance had become an actual resistance. She had been talking to Williamson as the two of them shared a shift, a small bubble of atmosphere encircling them and a couple of comfortable armchairs. The Librarian had brought beer, which he preferred to drink at room temperature; Tembi opened her bottle and asked the Deep to slow the beer’s molecules to chill it, and then took a deeply satisfying drink.
“Domino’s in on it,” Tembi told him, and not for the first time. “She has to be. She hated Matindi.”
To her surprise, Williamson nodded. “Did she make sure you and Bayle wouldn’t be there when the raid went down? Probably.”
“That’s the first time you’ve acknowledged it,” Tembi told him. This conversation had happened time and again with any Witch careless enough to stand still around her, and none of them had been willing to commit to Domino’s involvement.
“Hold, Sir Stoneskin.” Williamson held up a hard-used scholar’s hand, ink crusted beneath his nails. “She likely played a role in the raid, but not to the extent of your accusations. What’s more likely: that she murdered Matindi, or that the Blackwings approached her as a courtesy, told her they were planning a raid, and asked her to remove her wayward Witches from harm’s way?”
“Domino poisoned Matindi once.” That fact was Tembi’s final word in every argument. It had happened when she was a child and Matindi was raising her at Lancaster, so it was a fairly recent salvo in their infamous war.
Tembi’s usual closer had little effect on the Librarian. “She didn’t mean to,” Williamson said, as he went to open a second bottle of beer. “A sedative for one modified human can be toxic to another. Say, instead, that Domino meant to drug her, which is a crime and a moral failure, but one not on par with murder.” He leaned forward, as if trying to push the meaning of his words into her mind. “Most of us are here, Sir Stoneskin, to learn how the Blackwings murdered a Witch. If we can save some good people along the way, so much the better for our consciences, and we all want justice for Matindi. However, Sir Stoneskin, self-interest is a powerful motivator for us old immortals, and I beg you to remember that.”
She nodded, grudgingly, not yet ready to ask Williamson why he was here. She was sure, completely sure, he was here to help the colonists…but.
Regardless, a large number of Witches were now committed to riding these ships to their destination. And once they arrived…
Well. They were all sure they would do something, even if the specifics were lacking.
Except Paisano was not convinced of that. There had been a fight, the kind that could not be patched over with gentle words. Two weeks after the raid, Paisano had started to ask questions:
Why couldn’t Tembi just—
Why wouldn’t Tembi just—
Why was she leaving his people on the ships?
She tried to remind him about Lancaster and neutrality. Paisano wasn’t hearing it, called her excuses weak, demanded she put deed to word and rescue the prisoners.
They had been standing in her kitchen, sharing a tense meal where politeness could easily go sour. She forgot what had catalyzed Paisano’s anger, but the spark never mattered when the gas lay thick all around and was toxic besides. Tembi was accused of holding him a captive, of crimes beyond her power. All of Paisano’s anger at Lancaster roared out of him, crashing against Tembi, and then he shouted that her inaction had resulted in her killing Matindi!
That was whole-cloth bosh, of course. Neither direct nor indirect action on Tembi’s part had caused Matindi’s death, unless you went all the way back to the beginning where Matindi would still be alive if Tembi had simply minded her own business and left the Chameleons to soss off and manage their own rotting selves!
Then, a cold moment between them in which both knew they must apologize and neither would, so Paisano knocked a stack of books off of her kitchen counter and stomped out the front door.
Tembi had given herself the luxury of a long-overdue cry, taken a shower, and hopped over to the hospital to see Moto. He was still motionless, still unconscious. She had pulled a chair over to his bedside and resumed crying, and most likely would have stayed that way for much of the afternoon had she not felt another’s eyes upon her. She looked up, and—
Domino.
The tall woman’s ears were set to sorrow. She had nodded to Tembi, and vanished.
“Here once a day.” A medical professional had swept into Moto’s room, touching various devices. Tembi didn’t understand what they meant until they clarified: “Domino is.”
“Truly?” Tembi had wiped her eyes on the bedsheet. She couldn’t cram a bedside manner into her view of Domino’s personality.
“Truly.” They had picked up one of Tembi’s hands uninvited, testing the hardness of her skin. “Same planet?” they asked, nodding towards Moto.
“Same neighborhood, practically,” she had told them, grinning. Doctors always thought Adhamantians were fascinating specimens of genetic engineering. Half-assed engineering, but still.
The specialist had released Tembi, and turned to test Moto’s cheeks. “Your friend,” they said. “Soft skin. Good dreams.”
“You still don’t know what’s happened to him?” she had sighed.
They had shaken their head. “Not mindfuck. Sedative? Maybe. In his cells, like chiithen, drinking vitality, theeet theeet theeet.” To emphasize that last point, they had pursed their lips and made a sharp sucking sound.
“Chiithen?”
They had paused, and then extended their hands a half-meter apart. “Sharks?” They shook their head as they searched for the right word. “No. Leeches. They fly.”
Tembi had decided she wanted no part of whatever planet they were from. “Can you wake him up and ask him where he’s been?”
They glared at her. “Sedative, child? Means he is sedated. Sleeping.”
“I know what—” She had caught herself. “Thank you. Yes. What if you stimulate him enough to wake him?”
The specialist had patted her on the shoulder and left.
“I thought it was a good suggestion,” she had muttered.
And so she had left Moto once again.
Now, alongside Williamson, riding the transport ships towards their unknown destination, Tembi wanted…
She had no idea what she wanted, and she said so.
The Librarian passed her another beer. It was a start.
Traveling in FTL was a series of overlapping grays. There were no colors or features to be seen, and the hum of the ship’s engines was a quiet drone, barely audible within the bubble. Bayle had called it a pulse, the sound of blood in the ears when the head was pressed against the pillow at night. Maybe, maybe not; Tembi considered Bayle’s sense of hearing adequate at best. Although she did agree that the ship sang a lullaby of sorts, a slow-moving rhythm which traveled up and down in soothing scales.
“I never imagined my life would be like this,” Williamson said. She looked over to see him watching the silver-black blur of space over the dark line of the ship, his own bottle of beer pressed up against the small rim of atmosphere surrounding them. “Glory, always glory, called to service and given every possible gift in exchange.”
“Do you want to die?” she asked, surprising herself. “Is that why you’re here?”
“What? No,” he said, amused and horrified. “Never. I could live a million years and not even begin to understand what it means to be alive.”
“Then you’re here because you don’t want to die?”
He smiled at her. “Your moral code is a small glory on its own, Sir Stoneskin, but perhaps you don’t need to invest as much of yourself in exploring the motives of others.”
“I just need to know!” It came out close to a snarl.
“Why?”
“Because nothing makes sense! Nothing matters unless we make it matter! It’s blood and chaos until we decide it shouldn’t be, and we can’t even agree on how to do that!” There was more in there, about the purpose of life being the act of crafting meaning from nothing, but there were no words—there would never be words!—to articulate it.
“A true philosopher,” he said, grinning. “I’ve read about you, but I’ve never actually met one before. See? There’s always something new to learn.” There was a good chance she would have hurled her bottle at him, save that the gray of FTL began to shift into different colors. “Ah,” said Williamson, as he began to pack up his travel kit. “I believe we’ve finally arrived. You stay here and I’ll pop off and get our team, yes?”
Right, yes. Their team. Three weeks of preparation, anger, wondering… They weren’t battle-trained, and Kalais refused to teach them, saying he would be sending Witches to possible slaughter. The compromise was that they would slide Sabenta operatives into the prisoner population during the transfer. Several teams had been left on standby, ready to go as soon as the ships arrived. Williamson jumped from the ship to pick up their team, taking the armchairs and beer with him. Tembi settled herself on the ship’s hull to wait, thinking about the complete uselessness of philosophy.
The Librarian returned in minutes with four Sabenta spies, each indiscriminate in manner and appearance. They sat down upon the hull, talking quietly amongst themselves. What plans did you make when you were about to sacrifice your freedom? Voluntarily going into a prison, with no promise of escape. Tembi fixed their features in her mind, hoping that would be enough if she had to ask the Deep to yank them to safety. But one human was so very much like another to the Deep, and it only seemed able to remember its Witches.
No, she thought. That’s not true. There had been many times when the Deep had sent her images of people. Specific people, some of galaxy-shaking importance, while others were so small and insignificant in the scale of things that they had never needed to exist at all. The Deep knew them. It remembered them!
But Cooper died alone in the dark.
Kalais had stuck them behind a monitor array, believing that in the unlikely event that the Blackwings were equipped to detect life signs on the hull, their proximity to the sensors would be interpreted as equipment error. The spies clustered together, two still in quiet conversation, the third praying over a small white icon, while the fourth stared off into the multihued reaches of hyperspace.
Tembi sat beside the fourth, a woman in tattered, somewhat smelly robes.
“Witch,” the woman said, nodding politely.
“I understand if you need silence,” Tembi said.
The Sabenta spy seemed to silently weigh several answers before replying: “No. I’ve made my preparations.” She extended a hand, palm up. The ends of her fingers had small adhesive pads. “Gych.”
“Name or greeting?”
The other woman grinned. “Name.”
Tembi gently pressed her palm against Gych’s own. “Tembi.”
“I know.” Gych nodded. “What do you need?”
“Nothing.” She was suddenly sure that forcing herself on Gych had been a huge mistake. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
Gych sniffed. “You’ve taken my bombs apart, you know.”
“Eh?”
“My bombs. Careful ones. Good ones! I know you’ve disarmed at least four.”
Tembi stared at the spy, unsure whether she should be angry or just give in to the urge to start laughing hysterically. “I’m sorry,” she offered, substituting bland manners in place of sincerity.
“No hard feelings.” Gych patted her on the knee. “You did your job. Now, back me up so I can do mine?”
All of those flecks of carbon, twisting into nothing, forever.
“Sure,” Tembi said woodenly.
“We get the kids first. Then, as many adults as we can.” Gych pressed both hands against the hull, rocking back and forth. The pads on her fingers stuck to the surface. “You take them away from the camps before we blow the solar batteries.”
Somehow, Tembi had never fully realized that she was aiding and abetting a Sabenta sabotage team. Her stomach knotted. “Is this the plan?’
Gych looked at her as if she had sprouted another eyeball. Definitely a stupid question. “No, Witch Stoneskin. This is an opportunity. Infiltration during distraction. Then, rescue and demolition. The plan is to take the whole compound down at the end.”
“How long will this take?”
Ah, she had certainly sprouted a fourth eyeball with that last question. Gych was all but looking for a child’s toy to distract her. “Rescue phase takes longest. Coordination within the camp, make sure everyone knows to be at the right point at the right time. Do it slow, do it careful. Rush it, we’re caught, we’re dead.
“Once that’s done? You know how fast things can burn.” Gych nodded, an absent-minded gesture. “Yeah, you do.”
The strange auras of hyperspace fluttered and then stopped as the ship dropped from FTL into orbit around a green-and-yellow planet. The ship cruised lower, pulling through the atmosphere, the dotted colors of the planet resolving themselves into deserts and marshy plains. From the ship’s perspective, the rim of the planet was touching the night, and off in the far distance was a large city ablaze in lights. Tembi thought that the ship was moving towards that distant city, but it curled in the air and moved towards a dusky patch of grassland where a mammoth building waited, an armored shell protected beneath a weather cage. As the details of the building became clear, she wondered…no. It would be too much of a coincidence to have the ships end their journey at Camp Divested. They had reached a different Hawk-class facility, another city-sized mess of hideous plass-and-stone blocks, the lot of it cast in the blacks and grays and reds of loss.
The Sabenta spies had clustered together again, trying to isolate which of the fourteen separate structures would be used for processing. One spy had a databand embedded in the radius bone of his left arm, and was using it to chart constellations.
“Deep?” Tembi asked aloud. “Where are we?”
A vision appeared, six planets in orbit around a sun, with rings around the second and third planets, and the fifth lit with a golden halo.
“Andromeda Four,” the Librarian said, surprising her.
“You can see this?” she asked, gesturing towards the Deep’s vision hanging before her.
Williamson nodded. “If we’re on the fifth planet, we’re in A-Four.”
Gych had been listening. “Camp Investment,” she said to the others. “Hawk-class processing facility on the planet Thunder Bay.” The one with the databand grinned; the other two traded quick hand gestures. She turned to the Witches to explain. “Camp Investment is third-gen. Lots of security holes in third-gen Sagittarius Armed Forces installations. They think it to be state-of-the-art, but it’s easier to move around in here than in older facilities.”
“All right,” Tembi said, nodding. “How do we get you in?”
“You don’t,” replied Gych, as the ship slowed and turned towards a landing strip cut along a bare patch of plass. “We get ourselves in.”
“Easy enough.” She settled back on the hull, waiting. The vibrations cutting up through the ship were almost unbearable, even with the Deep providing a shield around them as protection. She shut her eyes and tried to find the music in it, but there was none to be found in the sound of the antigrav engines as they hauled the great mass of the ship around.
Then, a gratifying thump! as the ship clicked into its port, followed by the sound of powering down.
More waiting.
On the ground, the landing crews scrambled around, prepping different receiving areas for the prisoners. The Sabenta spies watched intently: the chaos between the moment when the prisoners stepped off the ship to the moment they were processed would be used for infiltration. One pulled up his shirt and opened a small sack glued to his stomach, and then began to pass small, nearly invisible eyekits to the other Sabenta. There was an extra set; he handed it to Tembi, who dropped the small lenses over her eyes and looked around, her vision magnified.
She was honestly surprised at how long the landing process was taking. She was used to the relative concepts of here and there, and was usually long gone when ordinary humans sank their resources into the transportation process. If seemed as if you had whole weeks to waste on FTL travel, you’d quite logically invest that time planning the most efficient and effective disembarkment processes so your cargo would be off the ship as quickly as possible—
Gods! Hiding on top of a prison transport ship and she was still thinking about logistics. You could take the Witch out of Lancaster and all that.
Focus, Tembi.
Across the landing pad was a second ship. She wasn’t sure why the Blackwings had brought multiple ships: the colony hadn’t been large enough to fill one ship, let alone two. The other ship had landed before theirs, and their crew seemed more organized. The doors opened, and the prisoners were being funneled from the hull to the ground.
The eyekit focused on those other prisoners, allowing her to spot individual faces. Oh, she knew so many of these people! She had shared meals with them, read stories to their children, helped them build their homes. Names and memories cascaded through her mind, ripping into her stomach, shredding her already-thin composure.
And then, the unexpected, as a withered old woman emerged from the other prison ship. Tembi sat, stunned, jaw slack as if she had taken a hard punch to the face. She had asked the Deep to bring her to Winter a dozen times, and relented only when she assumed the old woman had died in the raid. Why else would the Deep refuse to listen to her?
Williamson had noticed her confusion. He reached over and plucked the eyekit from her face, adjusted it beneath his glasses, and began to search the prisoners. “What am I looking for?” he asked.
“Bald head with strands of white hair,” Tembi gasped. “Old woman. Really, really old.”
“Hmm.” He had already spotted her, his head tilted as if he was grasping at a memory. “Do you know her?”
“That’s Winter! She was there when Matindi died!” No, that wasn’t quite right. Winter had shown up after the Deep had put Matindi’s body back together. She knotted her hands and knuckled her forehead, trying to remember. “Scheisse! I thought she was dead.”
“Do you think she killed Matindi?” Skepticism in his tone; Winter’s journey across the galaxy in a prison transport had not helped her appearance. Or, likely, her smell, as even with the refugees crowded together and moving forward, there was a small gap around her.
“No!” Tembi hadn’t, but now she was rethinking everything. “Matindi swore Winter knew more than she let on. She kept trying to get her to talk. Maybe…maybe she knew Winter was dangerous, or maybe…” She gave up. Nothing she said felt right.
She turned to the Librarian. “We’ve got to get her out of there.”
“We yank her out, and we risk telling the Blackwings we’re here. No one at Lancaster will thank us for wasting their time.”
Or the Sabenta. Gych and the other spies were watching them as if they expected them to set fire to the ship.
“What if she’s the one who murdered Matindi?” Tembi asked him. “Are we just going to let her escape?”
“Lots of good people died in that raid,” muttered one of the Sabenta.
“Including my mother!” she snapped at him. “Can you bring Winter out with you?”
Silence. Then, Gych said, “No promises.”
“But—”
“We’re not choosing between as many babies as we can save or an old esorohing.”
Tembi closed her eyes at the brute force of their logic. “Gods,” she whispered. “All right. I’ll go in with you. I’ll get Winter out myself.”
One of the spies snorted. “No.”
“Yes.” Williamson leaned forward, eyekit in one hand, his glasses in the other. “She goes with you.” He turned to Tembi and gave her back the eyekit. “Get in, get out. If Winter killed Matindi, find out how and why.”
“You are children,” said one spy. “You will get us all killed.”
“Tembi’s a child, but she has training in espionage,” Williamson replied. “I, on the other hand, do not. However, I am twenty-eight centuries old, and I have long exceeded my life’s stock of patience.
“Relevant to your concerns,” he said, leaning forward, “if you want your mission to succeed, you need to make me happy enough to want to be here when you get out.”
The Sabenta protested. They argued. They tried calm reason. None of it worked: they didn’t have time to make it work. “What do I do?” Tembi asked Gych.
The spy had already resigned herself to the inevitable. She sighed. “Realize you have no power.”