The blackwing war, p.1
The Blackwing War, page 1
THE BLACKWING WAR
K.B. Spangler
Smashwords License Notes
Copyright © 2021 by K.B. Spangler and A Girl and Her Fed Books
The Blackwing War is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the creations of the author. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination.
Cover art by Sebastian Maza.
This file was sold online via ebook distribution networks using Smashwords, Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. If you have received a copy of this file via any source other than the original point of distribution, please visit kbspangler.com or agirlandherfed.com to learn more.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
In the beginning
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Acknowledgements
IN THE BEGINNING
There was a shining planet, hanging in space, inhabited by ten billion souls. The grand sum of their reach was one pale moon and a small colony on a nearby red planet.
But they had potential.
ONE
Except for an old white cat that would never die, Tembi Stoneskin’s bed was empty. Cooling, but empty, as its usual human occupant was blearily shrugging into her uniform and muttering impolite words about explosions. A splash of water on her face, a scarf to hold back her mutiny of black hair, and Tembi wrapped herself in the Deep and vanished. Five minutes later, she was two solar systems away from her bed and staring at the latest bomb.
She was so very tired of bombs.
Tembi wasn’t prone to the dramatic. She was from Adhama, after all, a dry-baked world with windstorms fierce enough to tear itself apart at least five times a season. Her people had a reputation for being quietly practical: as long as you never pushed them to their breaking point, they could micromanage the galaxy. Adhamantians dealt with the latest crisis, prepared for the next, and rested in the moments in between. But this relentless, perpetual, eternal chore of bouncing from one solar system to the next to disarm one bomb after another made her want to scream.
Be fair, she reminded herself. Better to get here before they’ve gone off instead of after.
She had seen more than anyone should of that, too.
Killing was easy. Death was easy. Bombs were so easy, a couple of parts banged together and left in a strategic location, and then? Either the Blackwings or the Sabenta took credit for the chaos, and promised next time things would be much worse. That this was said while Tembi was still on-site with the cleanup crew, trying to make sense of the bits and pieces of what had once been people, also made her want to scream. She was so very tired of soldiers who insisted the use of bombs was the ethical choice, or the tactical one, or that circumstances necessitated turning other human beings into distorted flecks of carbon.
But! More than anything else—anything in the entire galaxy!—she was tired of disarming the twice-cursed things in front of panicked onlookers.
This particular bomb had been left in a shopping plaza aboard an orbiting shipping hub. A bit of a misnomer, as the station hung in empty space, with not even a nearby planet to provide a sense of scale. Ships jumped in, ships jumped out, and their crews used the hub to switch cargo or grab a meal in those hurried minutes in between. The station’s security team had shooed the travelers back to their ships, but others had been left behind, hundreds of them, those poor souls whose only purpose was to maintain small shares of this groaning chunk of plass and metal.
They stared at her, silent, their worry a palpable force.
Tembi was already sure this was a Blackwing bomb. This station was home to those who lived on the edges, people and companies crushed by the weight of those more powerful than themselves. This far out from the central Earth-normal systems, the definition of what it meant to be human got complicated. Out here, bodies were shaped for survival. Cheaper to modify a genome than a planet, after all, and heavy-duty genetic modding made a tasty target for the Blackwings.
She hated Blackwing bombs, with powerful explosives sealed inside tiny, well-designed packages. The Sagittarius Armed Forces had money and resources and, worst of all, trained engineers. Their bombs were disgustingly clever. They were only slightly easier to defuse than the Sabenta’s bombs, which were slapped together from whatever materials the rebels had on hand and were thus the essence of unpredictable.
The security team grumbled and paced, saying the usual things about Witches and the war. Behind them, the crowd was beginning to stir, their worry turning to anger as they muttered about how a Witch had been called instead of any form of law. How this particular Witch didn’t look old enough to know what a bomb was, let alone how to take one apart. How Lancaster could stop all of this in a heartbeat if they wanted to.
Well, they’re not wrong.
She did her best to ignore them, her eyes shut tight and ears half-curled so her other senses could trace the hard plass shell of the bomb. Except her dear departed ancestors had gone and upgraded their sense of hearing when they sossed around with the shape of their ears, and she couldn’t help but overhear when someone mused aloud about how this young woman with her filthy uniform and her bare feet couldn’t possibly be a real Witch.
About how they should stop her before she made matters worse.
Tembi turned and stared at the speaker, willing her face to be utterly still, to be devoid of all emotion. It was easy: practice, practice, practice. For Adhamantians and Witches alike, emotions could be more dangerous than bombs. She was doubly damned to bind herself in false serenity for the rest of her life.
The crowd was chastened into silence. Good enough. She turned away from them and back to the device. Its shape told her a large part of what she needed to know about how it was connected to the utility conduits of the shipping hub, how it had been shaped into sleek, perfect tubes and concealed within all of the other sleek, perfect tubes, completely unnoticed except by one sharp-eyed security guard with a keen appreciation for atmospheric maintenance systems.
The scent of cold metal brushed against her senses, followed by birdsong. Tembi didn’t bother to open her eyes as she formed the mental question: “What?”
An emotion not of her own making rose within her, and she paused to pick it apart. Tension, anxiety, shame, and a dreadful sense of loss: the Deep didn’t like this particular bomb at all.
“Can we do this?” she asked her friend. “Or should we evacuate and let it go off?”
Two questions stacked against each other was too much for the Deep. The sensation of uncertainty strengthened, anxiety swelling to fill the cracks.
Tembi shoved this new surge of anxiety down into the boiling cauldron of ulcers that served as her stomach. “We’ve got this,” she assured the Deep, molding her thoughts into certainty. The two of them had done this a hundred times, a thousand times, countless times before. Maybe this bomb would be different, but they wouldn’t know unless they tried. And they were a team, right? The two of them were unstoppable.
The feelings of anxiety and stress eased as she comforted her friend. The smell of metal rose again, a fresh brassy scent. Tembi grinned to herself as the Deep’s confidence swept through her.
“Are you sure you should be doing this?” A new voice, and angry: the station’s captain, standing a meter away from her left shoulder. As the captain snapped Tembi’s own question at her, this newfound confidence trembled. She crushed her insecurity into a tiny mental ball before the Deep could notice.
Focus, Tembi. Concentrate on the bomb before it detonates and things go from bad to worse.
A calming breath, a moment of stolen silence. The explosive device beneath her fingers was—
“Pardon me, young woman, but are you sure you should be doing this?” The same question again, delivered in a much sharper tone. The captain was losing his patience.
“Yes,” Tembi replied without bothering to open her eyes.
“How old are you?”
“I am a Witch,” she replied automatically, as she tried to follow the twists and turns of one slick black conduit which hummed a quiet song of murder. “We are timeless.”
That usually worked. Except this captain knew Witches, did the endless political meet-and-greets as they jumped into and out of the busy shipping port. He was familiar with their ageless faces and their self-possessed demeanors. Only an experienced Witch could look at another human being and see a problem they merely had to outlive. At twenty-three, Tembi couldn’t shake the habit of looking at other human beings as human beings. She was sure she’d grow out of it in a century or so, but for the moment it was an enormo us inconvenience.
Be honest, Tembi reminded herself. Pretty much everything is an enormous inconvenience. Your life is nothing but bombs, bombs, and more bombs, and he’s right, you shouldn’t be the one responsible—
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized the captain was reaching for her hand to snatch her away from the bomb.
“Deep?” Tembi said aloud. “Bobcat.”
The captain—I should have learned his name. They’re never as angry when I call them by name.—squalled and fell to the ground in a ball, trying to protect himself from the snarling bobcat that the Deep had dropped on his head.
“It’s not real,” she said to the security team, some of whom had gone for their weapons and found them missing. Behind them, the crowd murmured in restless shock. “It’s a synth, programmed to keep him occupied so he doesn’t touch me.
“He won’t be hurt,” she assured the sharp-eyed guard who had discovered the bomb and started this whole mess. “I need to focus, or…” she pointed at the bomb, and flicked her fingers in a semblance of an explosion as she whispered, “…boom.”
The guard nodded and went to remove the synthetic bobcat from his captain’s face.
“Please evacuate the area,” she told the others, who were suddenly more than happy to listen to a girl willing and able to hurl strange animals willy-nilly. Better than any motivational speech, that bobcat. One of the best purchases she’d ever made.
Tembi shut her eyes and ears, and reoriented her attention on the bomb. Again. By all the small and wriggly gods, this bomb should be dead by now. I should have led with the bobcat. A calming breath…another…another. She needed to silence her mind so she could let the Deep fill her senses. Her friend spoke in layers upon layers, a sediment of meaning that pressed itself into the fluid fabric of space and time, emotion and memory twisted into dense knots of intent. If she was extremely lucky, the Deep would articulate a word or two, to accompany its true meaning, minuscule decorative sprinkles atop a scoop of ice cream the size of a planet. She didn’t grab at those words, oh no, not any more, not since she was first able to speak with the Deep and learn that its opinion of words was the same as her opinion of rocks on a beach, where one was very much like the other and were, for all practical purposes, wholly interchangeable.
(And don’t get the Deep started on homonyms, not unless you had an entire week free and were willing to explain the nature of how two things could be both the same and different to a galactic intelligence who knew very well that this was a frequent happenstance but at least it had the good sense to attach a few musical notes and the scent of an extinct animal for the sake of clarity, thank you very much.)
The Deep was good with specifics. Shipping schedules, bills of lading? It understood those, no problem at all, and any confusion was easily resolved by changing problematic line items. “We need to take apart this bomb” was a good directive, too, as failure to pay attention meant messy consequences. The Deep had all of the concentration problems of a small child hopped up on sweets, but it could focus when the stakes were high. So when she shut her eyes and closed her ears, the silence gave the Deep what it needed to fill her with information.
The environment came first: she stood within the mechanical hold of a shipping port stationed a million klicks from anywhere of consequence. A shipping port like hundreds of others, a waystation between a nebulous here and an ambiguous there.
The shipping port was a fact, a thing, a sterile creation of humanity glittering away against the black. It shouldn’t be a thing at all: the Deep made shipping ports irrelevant. Except nothing that humankind touched could exist as the sum of itself alone. This shipping port existed because of three-thousand-year-old laws which declared that, no, the Deep didn’t need ports, but we should build them anyway because what if the Deep vanishes as quickly as it first appeared? If that happens, we’ve got an entire civilization spread throughout the galaxy and no infrastructure to get around.
The next level was commerce: after a couple hundred years of using the Deep to jump from here to there, the Deep had become as much a simple fact as the shipping ports themselves. Nobody thought the Deep would disappear, not any more. But there were industries which made their money from shipping ports, along with all of those employees who depended on the jobs that went along with those shipping ports, and the invisible hand of the market continued to masturbate itself into relevancy. Humans suffered from a dire failure of imagination. This glorious alien entity appears and offers up its services, and all they can think to do is remake what they already had? Shameful, really.
And then came war.
Focus, Tembi.
She grinned. It had been her voice, the kind of thing she said to herself a million times a day. But she never added the petal-soft brush of flowers against her cheeks. By all the invented hells, she couldn’t even remember the last time she could feel something as delicate as a—
Focus, Tembi!
Right. Eyes closed, ears sealed. Get this done.
The shipping port. A speck of mechanical brightness within the void. Now fully evacuated of all human life except for the captain and his crew standing around her, standing around the bomb seated deep within its guts.
The shape of the bomb appeared in her mind again, quite quickly this time. Plass, copper and aluminum alloys—They used metal in the build? For the Blackwings, that’s practically prehistoric.—a dozen different kinds of conductive gels. A fist-sized chunk of atmosphere sealed in stasis field. No ’bots in this one, which was good, as nanotech was single-minded about accomplishing its mission. In this case, the mission would have been to populate the space formerly occupied by the shipping port with brand-new flecks of carbon. ’Bots in bombs were oh so much fun.
“Deep?” she said quietly.
A flutter of musical notes lined the edges of her mental image of the bomb.
“What happens if we were to remove this part here?” As she spoke, she concentrated on one of the parts of the bomb, that particularly nasty-looking black conduit which fed into one of the near-infinite number of tubes. She imagined the conduit as pulsing red.
There was a pause. Then, her mental version of the bomb disappeared into a menace of ugly brown-and-yellow paisley.
“Great,” she muttered. Whoever had built the bomb had left a few decoy triggers, just in case it was found and someone tried to disarm it.
Well, they hadn’t planned on her and the Deep. Right?
Right.
Back to work. Focus, Tembi, and all that. She let her fingers do the walking. Not by her sense of touch, as she could barely feel anything through her skin of late. But movement was its own form of communication. As her fingers moved, they helped solidify the image of the bomb in her mind, giving it shape and depth, transforming it into a complete object. The Deep kept filling in its invisible guts, those internal pieces she couldn’t see or feel. After a few minutes, she finally knew the bomb well enough to take it apart.
“Captain,” she said.
“Ma’am?” It was the sharp-eyed guard.
“Tell the crew to do a last sweep and make sure you’ve moved all residents and irreplaceable equipment to safety,” she said, as two short lengths of tubing, identical to some of those supporting the bomb, appeared in the air beside her.
“It’s just me,” the guard replied.
Tembi looked around; they were alone except for the synth bobcat sprawled across his shoulders, purring.
“The captain thought it would be better to give you some space.”
“You mean he’s sure I’m about to blow his station apart and he doesn’t want to get caught up in it.” She had to chuckle at that. “You better clear out, too. Find a ship and get a few klicks away. Just in case.”
“Can I stay?” She snuck a glance at his face. He seemed…eager. Not at all the kind of expression that she’d expect to find on the face of someone whose career choices might be about to go up in flecks of carbon.
Watch him, Tembi told the Deep.
Three crystal bubbles appeared in front of the guard. These popped—one, two, three!—each bubble releasing the sound of a cat’s meow.
