Warrior Witch

by J. D. Lakey

  Something about the rat terrified the violet alien. The Scerron’s walls around her mind crumbled into dust and her truth washed through Cheobawn, sending her mind tumbling. Both Oud and Che snarled and fought for control.

  “Che?” Tam whispered. “Are you alright?”

  Cheobawn opened her eyes. She was swaying like a sapling in the wind from the Scerron’s mind. For that brief moment, their minds had become one and all her questions were answered. Drawing a deep breath, she looked up into Oud’s eyes, feeling exhausted and unaccountable, very sad.

  “Star dancers,” Che sighed. “You were great once. The infinite dark of space was your playground. You hold it there, in your heart. But you forgot that and turned your eye inward to the dirt dwellers and it made you less. The assassins were under your control. The men with guns. You have thought me dead twice. The guns were the third. You wanted to be sure this time. You may not have paid the assassin’s wages directly but you guided their hands. You brought harm to my Pack and my friends. I understand that part. But I think you will have to explain the rest of it. I hold your truth now, as you hold mine. Hundreds of thousand years ago your oracles told you about me. You have been hunting for me ever since. Not to be my friend but as a preemptive strike to stop a cataclysm. Tell me that story.”

  “I am innocent. I have done nothing wrong.” Oud said desperately, looking up at the holographic image of the prince. “This is the ravings of a damaged child. Why do we listen to this insanity? I must seek solitude to purify my soul.”

  The rat struggled in her hand. Che pet it. “Calm yourself, little brother. This is almost over. One way or the other.” The rat pulled his teeth from her flesh and licked the blood from his whiskers. The four chimeras of the rat moved in exact synchronicity. But Oud had never been fooled. She knew that the version of Cheobawn that stood before her was real.

  “Do you think you are untouchable? You have made a mistake. No one guards your back, here” Oud said evenly. “Your accusations are falling on deaf ears. There is no proof to anything you say.

  Che stared at her. Why was the High Priestess still lying. The curtains had been ripped away and yet she still protested her innocence. “Psi-Ops traced the money back to the Central Core. No one there wanted me dead except you.”

  “You are dangerous. Everyone wants you dead,” Oud said evenly as she hid her trembling fingers in the folds of her pale robes.

  “Did you mean to pit CPC against the Hegemony in this battle? A clever strategy. The bloodstone trade and star travel are at stake. The careers of any elected official would not survive the scandal. Was it your intent to to gut the governing bodies of the Central Planets?”

  Oud glared at her. “Truth?” she sneered. “Not just the Central Planets. I enlisted Governor Winterglen’s help in this plot. He was more than . . . “

  “Silence that child!” shouted Dermot Winterglen. It was an answer to one of Che’s questions. The governor was on his feet, pointing at Che’s hologram in the middle of Blackwind Pack. People moved in the crowd. Tam barked a command but it was unnecessary. Che heard it over the com in her ear. The Pack’s bladed sticks were already in motion, their bodies swaying like trees in a high wind as they dodged the weapons that should not have been there. Dominick’s check-point had kept all but his own weapons out of this room. The super-hardened metal of the bladed sticks slapped projectiles out of the air. A bullet whizzed through her image and buried itself in the wall behind her. Kirr pulled a small object from the depths of his uniform and shot the man who was shooing at her. A pulse rifle in miniature. Che lusted for it, wondering how she could get her hands on one. There were too many attackers for one small pulse pistol. Tam put his bladed stick through the heart of a man with a large knife. Megan stepped over the top of the body and opened up the throat of his companion with her own weapon. From her place inside Oud’s bubble, she met the Prince’s gaze. Cool and aloof, he was, as if none of this could touch him.

  Hate was like an arrow pointed at her heart. It was easy to follow the lines back to the attackers. She knew her enemies. They were anchored to her now. Che reached out, into the minds of those who were arrayed against her, and, with surgical precision, sucked all the light from their fore-brains, leaving the mid-brain and lizard brain intact. As one, a double handful of bodies dropped to the polished tiles of the great room, their consciousness extinguished. Dominick and the governor were among them. They were still alive but their minds had gone dark. Surprisingly, the Prince Regent was untouched, bearing her no ill will at all.

  “Are they dead? Did you kill them?” Timothy asked. He was not angry, just curious.

  Cheobawn shrugged. “I am getting better at this. It helps that humans have large, complex brains. I can be more surgical. They will live. They might remember this day. Or not. I do not care.” She looked around the room. “I will allow the removal of the wounded from this battlefield,” she announced.

  Tam and Megan cleaned the blood from their blades using the clothes of the fallen. Kander Hess motioned to the servants of the Governor’s Tower who cowered against the far wall. They hurried forward and whisked the limp bodies away, others mopping up the blood. Blackwind Pack watched everything and everyone until they were gone and then Tam and Megan returned to the relaxed pose they had adopted before the attack. Alain and Connor, who had taken rear guard, stayed on alert, watching for more attackers.

  “You are not where we all thought you were, Mother,” the prince observed. “Oud thinks you stand on her world. A world that the Scerrons have been careful to keep secret from us. Do you know where you are?”

  Che smiled. “Of course. I am here. There is a reason they are so secretive. I will not violate that.”

  “And yet you have destroyed them with your words. Who could trust them to take us safely across the universe?” the prince asked. “We will have to go back to two-thousand-year-old technology to travel the stars now. I think it would have been better if you had let this all be.”

  Cheobawn shrugged. “There are other Pilots. The Scerrons are not irreplaceable.”

  The prince looked truly puzzled by that and was about to ask more.

  “Flynn,” Cheobawn said into her com. “Disconnect the Scerron bubble.”

  “How will you get home?” protested Flynn.

  Cheobawn pet the rat in her hand. “I cannot stay away for long. The All Mind will call me back.”

  After a moment of hesitation, Flynn severed the connection. Her ear-com went dead.

  Cheobawn turned to look at Oud. “We are alone. Tell me the story of the Scerrons and the Black Bead.

  Oud leaned back in her chair. Her gill frills were an unhealthy shade of black. “You have killed us. Did you do that knowingly or is it just another manifestation of your gods-cursed luck? What is in your blood?”

  Che shook her head, puzzled. “It is nothing. A magic spell of a sort aimed at the humans. A virus whose guts carry a pico-bot programmed to do genetic surgery. The virus was designed for a very specific human gene so you and the Margai are safe. I decided I was not going to wait a million years for the humans of the Central Planets to evolve enough to live in harmony with the domes, so I brought something down the cliffs. A gift from Amabel. I carry a contagion of change and I have just created a pandemic plague on two of the central planets. They will hardly notice. A sniffle, a scratchy throat and it will be done. They will not be so ill that they cannot travel. The epidemic will spread.”

  “And yet, you bring this rodent. As a threat. I could taste it in your mind,” Oud said, panting in her distress.

  “I knew you would not tell me the truth without some form of inducement. The rat was a threat to get you to talk.”

  “I am not afraid of vermin,” Oud said.

  “No. You do not fear rats. You fear this rat. Why is that? Did you guess what I was about to do with it?” Cheobawn asked. She reached into the mind of the rat and found the place where it touched its All-Mind. Atrophied,
was this spot. Somewhere, lost in time, the first rat sprang from the womb of a verdant planet that had long since been burned into a cinder. Now, lost in the dark, the door into the heart of its planet closed, the rats had become a force of destruction. Chaos followed in its wake wherever it went.

  The rat squealed in agony as Cheobawn opened that door, burned open the receptors in its brain, and connected the creature to the planet called Occonomara. But it was not just this solitary rat that changed. It was all the rats across the universe. Occonomara became their true north, their compass point, their All Mother.

  Oud clutched her head and moaned. “We should have killed you long before this.”

  Che smiled down at the rat. The nothingness between here and there had much to teach her about the manipulation of space-time. You could touch one thing and then touch all who were connected to it by returning to the beginning of the river of time and following all the threads they touched back to the present.

  The rat convulsed one last time and lay still, panting. Che looked up. “Do you want me to walk into your brain and play with who you are? Tell me what I want to know.”

  “Ten thousand timelines,” Oud said, sputtering in exhausted rage, not in the least repentant for her crimes. “You stand in all of them, influencing our futures. We have operated in this reality with utter autonomy since the beginning of time. Now, you block our way at every turn. Who are you to play god with our lives?”

  “Eater of Worlds says you have been hunting me for millennium. Why?” Che asked relentless in her pursuit of the truth.

  “You have altered our future. Who could tolerate such intrusion?”

  “Why?” Cheobawn insisted. “Help me understand.”

  Oud sighed and then coughed wetly before she began to talk. “Your species’s original home-world died over a hundred thousand years ago. The survivors abandoned the planet they had killed and went out into space, not unlike Spider, seeking a new place to live. On that day, our Oracles had a vision of a small blue eyed child carrying that creature, the gray furred, naked tailed rodent. This, the oracles told us, this being will bring about our extinction. So we set about making sure it would never happen. We thought that if we retreated from your advance through space we would be safe but no, you were there, in our visions, killing us with your innocence over and over again. Then your direct ancestors killed Spider on the planet you call Tearmann and the Oracles told us you were very nearly here. Retreat had not worked. We sent a delegation to the Central Planets and low, what did we find. Planets infested with rats. We decided the humans and the rats had to die. We killed the rats whenever we found them but we left the humans to Spider. He did not need much inducement to begin killing your people. Spider started a war and one by one, the outer human planets fell. But then Spider listened to his timelines, saw all that he ever desired was soon to be his, and betrayed us. Instead of taking the fight into the core of the Central Planets, they began a strategy of attack and retreat. Ships and soldiers died but not planets. Then your Mothers began to concoct the recipe that would make you. Our Oracles said we had little time left. Not long after, you were born and Spider dropped the pretense and abandoned us for his own interests without telling us where you were. Fools that we were, we did not realize that Spider’s world was your world and that he had been part of the magic of your creation all along. Conspiracy and betrayal follow you like a cloud. How is it that you are not dead yet?” Oud shook her head in wonder. “We did not hunt you for we knew that something as powerful as you could not stay hidden long. When a wave of desperate sentience washed across the universe, your location was revealed to us. We sent Colonel Bohea to investigate. He came back with a fanciful story of a witch-child that would someday knock the Scerrons from their high place at the Hegemony’s side. We sent the teaching knot. You did not use it. We began to corrupt the governor of your planet along with all his men. I found you in the ambient to start a dialogue but Spider took exception to our interference on his world. He opened up a portal and sent you his children as reinforcements. We sent a troop carrier to take you by force from your dome but you heard us coming and fled. We thought to destroy Occonomara so we floated the rumor that the planet was a source of illegal genetic experiments, hoping the CPC would subvert the will of the Hegemony and burn it to a cinder. The prince sent his people as a delaying tactic but you seduced them to your side and they became your secret keepers. Our most intricate and well-thought out plans failed miserably over and over again so we fell back upon a time honored and primitive method to kill you. We sent men with guns.”

  Oud sighed and closed her eyes. “Still, after all that, you have managed to kill us.”

  Cheobawn held the rat to her breast and studied the Scerron. She definitely looked ill. “How did I kill you?”

  “You did not. Nor did the rat. You are both carriers of something that together is lethal. Stupid child. Did you stop to consider why that rat exists at all? It should have died with its planet of origin. Scerrons have been trying to eradicate them for two thousand years to no avail. We have mapped their genetic code, hoping to induce a change, only to discover that someone had gotten there before us and they had doubled the amount of source code in its cells so any change could be instantly accommodated. In the time it takes of gestate a rat pup, you have a new sub-species. Someone had been carelessly playing god with the life of these rats. Is it any wonder that its planet of origin was destroyed?” Oud stopped to catch her breath.

  Cheobawn stared down at the rat and listened to its ambient. She looked up at Oud, horrified. “I gave it a highly contagious virus. It altered the message and gave it back to the pico-bots who disseminated it, creating a new plague. It was almost as if it were created just for this purpose. Was it random chance that it is lethal to Scerrons? I do not believe in random accidents. That brings us to the question. Who is your enemy, that it can reach through time to kill you?”

  Oud sighed and slumped down in her chair. “I pray to all that is holy that you never meet them.”

  “Who?” Cheobawn insisted.

  “I would explain the nature of the Oneverse to you but I fear I have run out of time. Oh, well. You will have to discover it on your own.” The tall alien stopped breathing and became still.

  Cheobawn stared at the body and then screamed in frustrated fury. “No. You cannot leave me after handing me an unsolvable puzzle!”

  She stood, trembling, not sure what to do. She looked into the eyes of the rat in her hands. “What am I to do with you? You cannot come home with me. You are a carrier of some sort of death. I could let you go here but you would keep on killing. I could take you to Amabel. She could cure you if she could but she is not made that way. The Coven have euthanize greater things than you for less reason.”

  Che put her Ear into the ambient of the rat. It was riddled with pico-bots, all busy converting code to something new. This was not good. She reached into the body of the rat and turned then all off. After a moment’s consideration, she shut down its heart, and kept on sucking until what lay in her palms was barely there. She kept sucking and the thing in her hands turned to dust. Brushing her hands off on her skirt she swept her body of both virus and pico-bots and then stepped around the corner to the place she wanted to be with all her heart.

  Blackwind Pack still stood where she had left them. Tam caught her in his embrace. She hugged him back and then went to each of her Pack and did the same. Megan was last. Cheobawn clung to her heartsister, trembling.

  “Is it done?” Megan asked softly. Somewhere above the Scerron homeworld, Eater of Worlds was howling with glee. Cheobawn shut him out of her mind.

  “The Margai heard what you did. He has only just now stopped howling.”

  Cheobawn pulled herself out of Megan’s grasp and looked around.

  Kirr crouched at Kander’s feet and stared at her in horror.

  What have you done? the Margai asked in horror.

  Dare you judge me, Cheobawn tho
ught. I, who had more reason than any to kill you all? She wanted to be angry with him but that fire no longer burned in her gut. The death of the rat had been too much.

  Turning, she left the way she had come, her Pack guarding her progress through the building. A stunned silence remained behind her.

  “Well, that was instructive,” Che could hear Mora say dryly. “Now you will listen to my list of demands. I will listen to all reasonable rebuttal.”

  “Are we not waiting for the Scerrons?” the Speaker asked.

  “We are done waiting for anyone.” Mora said.

  Che snorted as the doors closed behind her. Better Mora than her. She was finding she had less and less patience for the wicked and the fool.

  Megan handed her a med-tab. It was the antidote to the pico-bot's virus. Che shook her head. “I have burned them all out. It is not necessary.”

  Megan stared down at the tab in her hand for a moment, thinking about arguing. Che breathed a sigh of relief when she merely shrugged and put it back in her pocket.

  Sam fell in step beside her. “Nice trick. Someday you will have to tell me how you did that. Now what? Did you mean to terrify them? Fearful men are dangerous men.”

  “I am a stone perched upon the peak of a mountain. There will be those who wish me gone, but such thoughts will only bring them ruin. Mora will reward those who agree to her terms. Reward them well for compliance. Those who see profit in this will silence those who would fight.”

  “It is not human nature to sit and wait calmly for the stone to fall,” Sam said.

  “If they do nothing,” Megan said, “the stone will not move. Has it not hung upon that peak for a million years? It will sit for another million if left alone.”

  Tam laughed as he skipped down the steps of the plaza towards Robert’s electric cars. “Don’t tell anyone but the stone is busy trying to remember how to fly. Pushing it will only take it higher.”