Hammer of the Witches

by Kai Wai Cheah

  “How old are we talking about?”

  “Middle Ages.”

  Pete goggled. “You’re kidding. Middle freaking Ages?”

  “Yeah. Way back then, the Phosterian nations of Pantopia refused to trade with known covenanters, and guards would inspect traders from the East for charagma. Arab traders who wanted to carry jinni with them got around this by binding jinn to scraps of leather with blood and nythium. It allowed them to plausibly claim that they weren’t majusi or fedeyeen while still giving them an edge if trouble broke out.

  “This is the first time I’ve heard of it,” O’Connor said.

  “And for good reason. This tech has a major flaw. The nythium constantly erodes the leather. Once the leather falls apart, the sigil breaks, and the jinni is loose.”

  Pete shook his head. “That can’t possibly end well.”

  “And it didn’t. In the mid-fifteenth century, after rogue jinn wreaked havoc across the Near East, the Osmani Empire forbade the practice of jinn binding. Anyone who practiced it was immediately executed, and books describing the techniques were burned. Other Wahi states took their cue from the Osmans.”

  “But the practice persisted,” Eve said.

  “Yeah. Other minor states still preserved the lore of jinn binding, and the Osmans couldn’t do a thing about oral traditions. If you look hard enough on the darknet, you’ll find texts teaching people how to bind jinn.”

  O’Connor sighed. “Should have pulled those texts when we had a chance. Now, any wannabe jihadi with a Horde client can download and spread them across the net.”

  Horde was the next generation of peer-to-peer file sharing technology. Each Horde node within a network stores chunks of an encrypted file. Individually, each chunk might be innocuous or otherwise look like garbage, but once combined, they would become a fresh copy of the original file. Designed for plausible deniability, it was becoming the tool of choice for software pirates and terrorists.

  “You can’t stuff the jinni back into its lamp,” Eve said sadly.

  Pete rubbed his chin. “I’ve been on ops where daimons suddenly popped up out of thin air even when there weren’t any covenanters around. After the excitement died down, all we found were burned pieces of paper or leather. Maybe that’s it.”

  “Deniable summoning,” O’Connor said. “Just what we need.”

  “The Musafireen are world leaders in nythium research,” Eve said. “They’ve developed special ceramics and polymers that can resist nythium corrosion. If they bind jinn into containers made of these materials, they could have jinn on call almost indefinitely.”

  “Like a modern take on old tech,” I said.

  “Yes, exactly,” she said.

  “That’s… troubling,” O’Connor said.

  Pete snorted. “That’s an understatement. At this rate, DW won’t even need shooters any more. Just guys willing to carry bound jinn into soft targets. They let the jinn loose and run. After that, there won’t be any evidence connecting them to the jinn.”

  O’Connor rubbed his temples. “My God…”

  “My sympathies,” Eve said.

  “It gets worse,” I said.

  “Hit me,” O’Connor said.

  “Every DW facilitator, leader or other upper-echelon type we’ve hit recently are either covenanters or have access to jinn. Every last one of them. I think DW is stepping up their game.”

  O’Connor drank his coffee. Folded his hands. Sighed.

  “I’ve noticed, too. It’s not just you. There’ve been… other ops. Other guys who found themselves facing jinn while servicing targets. Those jobs went south.”

  Eve arched an eyebrow. “And some of those botched jobs made the news, too?”

  “Yes.”

  Ever since we grabbed Fahad, there had been an uptick in daimon-related news. Mostly about rogue daimons rampaging about Pantopia, Asia and, occasionally, the Near East. Sometimes “heroic bystanders” put down the daimons and quickly disappeared. Sometimes they weren’t so lucky.

  And those were just the incidents that made it to the press.

  “We’ve taken losses, haven’t we?” Pete asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Damn.”

  “Indeed.” O’Connor rubbed his temples again. “Upper management wants to know what’s going on. We’re under a lot of pressure here.”

  In other words, the Nemesis Program needs an unambiguously successful operation to continue to prove its worth. One that the media will never know about.

  “I don’t think there’s much we can do,” Pete said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “DW’s handing out jinn like candy to everybody in their ranks: shooters, managers, facilitators. They won’t do something like that on a whim. It looks to me they’re adapting. Instead of just relying on stealth, they’re implementing active measures to protect themselves.”

  “They may even know about the Program,” I said quietly.

  A chill fell across the table.

  The Nemesis Program did not exist on any budget or line item anywhere in the Hesperian intelligence community. It existed to deploy operators on covert operations targeting threats to the Hesperian Confederation. If DW suspected we existed, it would make life difficult.

  “DW suspects we exist,” O’Connor said.

  “What?” Eve said.

  “We’ve been working our target set hard and fast over the last year,” O’Connor said. “You can’t take out so many actors from their network so quickly and not be noticed. Especially if they have jinn powerful enough to kick up a fuss. Our cyberwar cell noticed DW members discussing whether there’s a Western black ops unit targeting them on their darknet forums.”

  “Maybe the jinn aren’t just for protection,” Eve said. “Maybe they are like warning flares. If the jinn can’t protect their covenanters from assassination or abduction, they can create so much havoc that other DW members will know what happened to their friends.”

  I pursed my lips. “And if they see a cover story, something like a rogue daimon running around and ‘murdering’ someone they know, then they know a black ops team is targeting them.”

  “This just keeps getting better and better,” O’Connor said.

  “What are we going to do now?” Eve asked.

  “For now, I’m going to type up your report and send it in,” he replied. “I’m going to pass the word: from now on, we must assume that every high-level DW target is also a covenanter or has a jinni nearby.”

  “And our pay?” Pete asked.

  “We’ll take care of it.” O’Connor paused. “The usual rate and terms, of course.”

  We were paid like contractors. The going rate for a black bag job was less than for a kill. The Accounting Department won’t reward operators who screw up. This wasn’t the first time it had happened. It likely wouldn’t be the last.

  “Fine by me,” Pete said.

  “I’ve got nothing else for you,” O’Connor said. “Thanks for coming. We’ll be in touch.”

  O’Connor left, leaving his cup at the table. A moment later, Pete chugged down his coffee.

  “It’s been good, but I’ve got a train to catch,” he said. “I’m gonna leave you two lovebirds alone.”

  Eve made a face. “Lovebirds?”

  I sighed and shook my head. “See you.”

  As Pete left, I scooted around the table, sitting across Eve.

  “What happened to you in London?” I asked.

  “Eh?”

  “The incident with the towel. And calling the elevator when it was locked down. You know better than that, don’t you?”

  She frowned. “Hey, I’m not like you, okay? I don’t have your level of training.”

  Eve wasn’t one of us. She was an asset, not an operator. She wasn’t even Hesperian. As a Swiss national, Eva Martel would never be part of the Program. Before joining us, she ran Hexenhammer, a multinational vigilante group that targeted criminals and terrorists. We met on the job, and she stuck
around after that.

  “This job was supposed to prove your worth as an asset,” I said. “If Pete thinks you’re not up to scratch, he’ll recommend cutting you loose. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Of course, how well she did also reflected on me.

  “I know that,” she snapped. “I was just… running on autopilot. That’s all.”

  “You can’t do that anymore. If you want to run with us, you have to shape up. You’ve got potential, but we can’t have you dragging us down.”

  “It would be nice if I had some extra training.”

  I didn’t know what kind of training she had gotten before she met us. Going by her tradecraft, it was informal and incomplete. Right after I’d recruited her, we ran her through a tradecraft course. But her training focused on espionage, disguises, surveillance, countersurveillance and other tricks of the intelligence trade. Not the killing trade.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  The Program had its own training curriculum, but I didn’t know if she was cleared to attend it. She was not even cleared to know the name of the Program. Keeping her aboard required bending more operational security regs than I had thought possible. Just one misstep and the bureaucrats would come down on us. Hard.

  She nodded curtly and drank her coffee.

  “Hey. We’re still in this together,” I said.

  She nodded again. “Partners, right?”

  “Right.”

  There was a deeper layer here, one that O’Connor and the rest of the Program didn’t know about. A war between the gods was coming, and among us only three people—me, Eve and Pete—knew about it. No one else in the Program knew we were covenanters. Being a covenanter was a capital crime in Hesperia, and there was no way the Program would trust me on my word alone.

  We hadn’t covenanted with daimons. Eve had covenanted with a god straight out of myth. I had covenanted with the archangel of the religion DW believed in. DW in turn was being manipulated by the Unmaker, a fallen angel and the primary adversary of the Phosterian faith, for his own ends. I wouldn’t be surprised if DW’s new tech came from the Unmaker.

  Gods, daimons, fallen angels—a theomachy. It sounded crazy. It probably was. But how can a man doubt after seeing an archangel and a fallen angel with his own eyes?

  “What are you thinking?” Eve asked.

  “Eh?”

  “Your face says you’re thinking hard about something. What is it?”

  “It’s… the Unmaker. He’s up to something. I don’t know what it is. Won’t be surprised if he had a hand in DW’s new security profile.”

  “Me neither. Hakem didn’t tell you?”

  “No. What about Sol Invictus?”

  “Nothing. Maybe they’ll talk to us when we’re ready.”

  “And until then, we need to get better.”

  She nodded.

  “What are your plans?” I asked.

  “I’m flying out in the evening,” she said. “Until then, I’m free.”

  “Leaving so soon?”

  “I don’t have a reason to stay here.” She raised an eyebrow. “But I could be persuaded otherwise.”

  “How about–”

  My phone vibrated. New message from O’Connor, addressed to me and Pete.

  As of now, you’ve been pulled from active operations. Please check in on Project Kalypso and update me by the end of the week. Travel plans are attached.

  The “travel plans” described a chartered flight from Columbia Airport to our destination. It was scheduled to arrive in three hours. Just enough time to do what I had to do but nowhere near enough to do what I wanted to do.

  “How about what?” she asked.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Turns out I’ve got more work to do.”

  “A new op?”

  “Paperwork.”

  “Ah. My condolences. Maybe next time.”

  “Maybe.”

  3. Kalypso

  Project Kalypso evaluations tended to drag on for days. I prepared myself accordingly.

  I found a laundromat and selected the express service, washing and dry-cleaning the clothes I had carried to Anglia. As I waited, I recharged my devices and planned my travel route.

  In my head I shifted my internal narrative. Now I was a sheepdog in sheep’s clothing, a soldier pretending to be a civilian. Senior and skilled enough to be trusted with plainclothes duties, not so much that he wasn’t imprisoned in the Pentagon and had forgotten how ordinary people lived. I comported myself accordingly, keeping my spine erect, my head on a swivel, my body language focused and measured. It wasn’t my preferred persona, but it would be what the Kalypso team expected.

  I met Pete at the airport in time for lunch. At the food court, we grabbed a table and the closest available high-protein low-carb meals we could find.

  As we tucked in, Pete said, “How’s progress with Eve?”

  “There’s nothing between us.”

  “Even after you slept together?”

  Only in the literal sense. Not that he’d ever believe it.

  “Not that we had time to do anything more,” I said.

  “But you’d like to, right?”

  “You know the rules about fraternization.”

  He snickered. “Mister Goody-goody to the end, aintcha?”

  “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.”

  His laughter was a like a hurricane, cutting above the background din. Everybody around us glanced our way for a moment.

  “Seriously, bro,” Pete said, “you haven’t seen the way she looks at you?”

  “There’s something… off about her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I told him about her reaction about the towel, about her rushing to the elevator, how she responded when I braced her about that.

  “I don’t know if I’m overreacting, but… there’s something about her that doesn’t feel right,” I said.

  Pete sobered up in an instant. “Maybe it’s not you. Know any woman who switches moods as rapidly as she does?”

  “Not anyone I want to be around.”

  “Exactly. We gotta watch her.”

  Left unsaid was that if she couldn’t meet our standards, we would drop her from the Program. Nothing personal, of course.

  In the departure lounge, we maintained our personas as sorta-kinda-maybe veterans in the guise of bored businessmen waiting for their flight. I read the news on my Samsung Clipcom holobuds, scanning my surroundings every so often, while he appeared to stare into thin air. He had a suite of implants and augmentations far more sophisticated than mine: artificial eyes, prosthetic hands and an in-head computer that packed more processing power than my holos combined. He was probably doing the same thing I was doing, just more discreetly.

  The Program had arranged an airship for us. Huge and ponderous, it took five whole minutes for the craft to, very gently, land. Its presence told me that this was a low-priority, high-volume flight. At least I had a cabin all to myself. We made two more stops to pick up passengers and cargo, arriving at our destination in the following morning.

  Stony Ranch Airstrip used to be a private airport. After WWIII and the global economic collapse that followed, the original owner went bankrupt, and it was abandoned and left to rot. After Project Kalypso went online, we bought the airstrip for a song. The first thing we did was erase it from the official records.

  The second thing we think we did was resurrect the facility.

  When we deplaned, a squad of security guards greeted us in the terminal. They were veterans of the Third World War, still ready and willing to serve despite their advanced years. They wore their scars and blue uniforms with pride, carrying milsurp pistols and carbines with last-gen load-bearing gear. I would have preferred more modern kit, but this was the gear they had used in their martial days.

  The security team ran us through a series of inspections, verifying our identities and checking for contraband. Pete and I
were the last in line. When they were done with us, they gave us visitor passes and earmuffs and wished us a nice day.

  After snapping up the facility, we spent millions of dollars to modernize it. Security cameras and armed drones watched the site. The entire terminal had been overhauled, and we had built a brand-new dormitory next to it. Maintenance bots examined the concrete runway and fixed minor damage.

  At the hangers, men and machines bustled back and forth like bees engaging in a complex dance. A deafening cacophony of sound—metallic screeching, hammering, shouted conversations—filled the air. As we put on our earmuffs, a tiny blond woman approached us, waving.

  “Heya!” she said.

  “Hi!” Pete replied. “It’s been a while, Lisa.”

  Lisa Taylor was the lead project manager. As we shook hands, I took care not to crush her dainty fingers.

  “Don’t mind the mess,” she said. “We only got word that you were coming yesterday.”

  “Hey, we only had a half-day’s notice ourselves,” Pete said. “I don’t mind messy so long as we’re getting stuff done.”

  “That we are. If you’d follow me?”

  We entered Hanger One. Here, Project Kalypso awaited.

  In another life, she was the airship Thuraya, formerly the property of the now-disappeared Sheikh Fahad. Following a hostile takeover, we claimed the airship and virtually all of Fahad’s wealth. A not-insignificant portion of the funds went to transforming the Thuraya into the Kalypso, a restoration that remembered the base design’s original purpose: a Soviet military airship.

  The massive dual-hull airship lay bare and deflated in the hanger. Her gas bags flopped loosely against her keel. They reminded me of flaps of skin loosely hanging off the bodies of once-fat people who had starved themselves skinny.

  Even so, she was so large I had to crane and tilt my head to take her all in. With the lifting cells empty, I could make out the shapes of the cargo holds integrated into the hulls, the housings for her engines and the solar panels lining the top.

  The gondola was supposed to be nestled between the hulls. Instead, there was only the bare titanium frame and a gaping hole. Under the frame, a lifting platform provided access to the bowels of the ship.