Hammer of the Witches Read online

  “In other words, formally induct her into the Nemesis Program. As an operator, not an asset.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s a foreigner. I don’t have the juice to do that.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s another thing I need to discuss with you.” His face hardened. “The Unmaker is abroad. I will need you again. And Eve.”

  “What is he up to?”

  “His puppets are in motion, and the Basileon Abyssou is suspiciously quiet. He stalks the world, whispering into the hearts of men, luring them to corruption and blasphemy.”

  Never a straight answer when you need one.

  “What are his current plans?”

  “Already in motion.”

  “What?”

  The stars outside swirled and coalesced. Blazing light filtered through the glass.

  “You will see. It’s time to wake up.”

  “But–”

  “Oh, yes. You will need your airship.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Get up.”

  ***

  “Luke, get up!”

  I flung myself out of bed. Pete stood in the doorway in his nightclothes.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “There’s been a terrorist attack in Hellas. Hexenhammer claimed responsibility.”

  Alpha: Kill Zone

  “Remember: speak Hellenic.”

  Alpha grunted. His fellow killers said nothing.

  “Do you understand?” the handler asked, continuing in the same language.

  “Neh,” Alpha said. Yes.

  “Good. Get to work.”

  “Neh.”

  Alpha led his three shooters out the van. Forming a line, they marched in lockstep down the pavement.

  It had been too long since they had walked on the face of Gaea in the flesh. He had forgotten the dry humid heat of an eastern Hellenic summer, the feel of fabric against actual skin, the chattering of people in his native tongue—what was left of it, after mutating over the centuries.

  The quartet were dressed the same. A thick black trench coat, black gloves, black boots, black balaclava, radio headset. Over their outfits each shooter wore a plain canvas chest rig, every pouch laden with ammo and equipment.

  Their weapons were also the same. PKM general purpose machine guns, each fitted with a hundred-round ammo box. They were perfect instruments for committing mass murder.

  If only their mental shackles allowed them to point the weapons at their preferred targets.

  “Yah! What are you doing?”

  A male stopped in front of Alpha. A female cowered behind him. Across the street, a passer-by stopped and stared. Others were too engrossed in their holos to notice.

  Alpha briefly fantasized about striking them down. But he didn’t need the attention. Not now.

  “Who are you? Why are you carrying guns?” the male continued.

  Alpha shoved past him and continued.

  “Yanni, we should go,” the female urged.

  The male ignored her, placing himself in front of Alpha. With every step Alpha took, the male stepped back.

  “If you don’t stop, I’m going to call the Astynomia,” he said.

  They had been ordered to prevent people from calling the police before entering the engagement zone. They had also been ordered to refrain from firing a shot until they arrived. Alpha resolved the dilemma by spearing his weapon’s muzzle into the male’s sternum.

  The male doubled over, falling on his side. Alpha drove his boot into his face. There was a wet cracking sound.

  “Yanni? Yanni, are you all right? YANNI!”

  Alpha kept walking.

  The quartet arrived at a chain link fence. A teenage female stood at the entrance, staring into a hologram. As they approached, the female turned her hologram off.

  “Who are–”

  Alpha swung his weapon butt. Her jaw shattered, and she went down. He stomped on her face and entered the engagement zone.

  An array of white tents spread out before the shooters. Musafireen, mostly adult males, circulated among them. A handful of Hellenes, male and female, handed out packaged meals and bottled water. None was armed.

  To the left of the camp was a high embankment. To the right, a canal. At the far side, Blue Team was ready to intercept anyone trying to escape the kill zone.

  The targets had nowhere to run.

  “Red Team is in position,” Alpha said.

  “Blue Team is in position.”

  “All Teams, Control. Execute, execute, execute.”

  As one, Red Team leveled their machine guns.

  The camp inhabitants stared at them. And ran.

  “KTISTES NIKA!” the shooters roared.

  As one, they fired.

  The PKMs bellowed. Streams of green tracers leaped forth from the muzzles. They worked left to right, right to left, cutting down everything and everybody in their path. Tents burned. Clothes ignited. Men, women and children screamed and fled and died.

  “Red Team, advance,” Alpha ordered. “Talking guns.”

  “KTISTES NIKA!” they shouted again.

  They swept forward. To Alpha’s left, Beta loosed tight three-rounds bursts, hosing the killing ground. The rest of the team kept walking, firing only at people still moving, still breathing.

  Then there was a sudden moment of silence.

  “Reloading,” Beta called.

  “Reload,” Alpha responded.

  Now Alpha took up his weapon. He fired at a row of tents. He fired at a cluster of bodies. A female got up and ran. He fired at her, too, sending her sprawling face-down into the dirt.

  He kept firing. The PKM sucked up cartridges from the left and spat out empty brass and links to the right.

  CLICK

  “Reloading,” Alpha said.

  “Reload,” Gamma said.

  Dropping to a knee, Alpha ejected the empty box, letting it and the spent metal belt fall. He grabbed a fresh ammo box from a pouch, mounted the box, broke the action open, fed the link, snapped the gun closed and worked the bolt.

  Getting up, he caught up with the rest of his team. Red One had reloaded and was back on line, watching their back. Red Two was reloading. Red Three was taking over.

  They walked and fired, fired and walked, going through three ammo boxes. In their wake they left a bloody half-mile of corpses and casings and collapsed tents. Fingers of smoke reached for the sky. Outside the kill zone, occasional bursts of gunfire rang out, the security teams in action.

  At the far end of the camp, Alpha called, “Clear front!”

  “Clear rear!” Delta reported.

  “All clear!”

  “KTISTES NIKA!” Alpha shouted.

  “KTISTES NIKA!” Red Team replied.

  Alpha hit his push-to-talk switch. “All call signs, Red Team. Objectives complete. Proceed to extract.”

  There was one last thing to do. Alpha rifled around his butt pack and removed a plastic bag. Inside was a flash drive. There was a white sticker plastered on the bag. Across it was written, in Hellenic, From Hexenhammer to the rulers of the West.

  A black van rolled up to the team. As the team boarded, Alpha set the bag down by the entrance to the camp.

  Alpha was the last up. He closed the door and settled in.

  “How are you doing?” the handler asked.

  He and his kind were the embodiment of war. They had slaughtered hordes of mortals, defeated countless daimons and battled beings so incomprehensibly powerful they wouldn’t even notice these humans. For their reward they had been granted a sacred duty. And the humans had torn them from their posts and enchained them to weak bodies of flesh just to pursue this petty little conflict, an eyeblink in the face of eternity.

  There would be a reckoning, but not today. Not until they learned how to break their chains.

  “We are well,” Alpha replied.

  “Good work.”

 
; Alpha grunted and said nothing.

  4. Warning Order

  It was good to be home.

  The pure air of the mountains. The history of the continent and the nation reflected in the architecture of the cities and the villages. The ringing of church bells to mark the time, greet the dawn, call the faithful to service or any other occasion.

  Here, she was no longer Eve of Hexenhammer. She could simply be Eva Martel of Switzerland.

  Mostly.

  Home was presently a two-bedroom apartment in the heart of Zurich. Mami and Papi were finally settling down in their golden years. Eva had lost track of how many times they had moved homes over the course of her life, but no matter where her parents went, they always kept a room for her.

  She had arrived at half past five in the morning at the airport. Mami and Papi were there, waiting for her. They welcomed her with hugs and kisses and drove her home in their car.

  Over breakfast she simulated small talk with her parents. Mami believed that she was a travel writer whose work took her to the far corners of the continent and beyond. Papi probably knew better, but he never asked about what Eva did, and she never volunteered. Instead, she regaled them with stories of what she saw in Scotland, Hesperia, Gallia—places she’d actually been, places she wrote about on the blog she maintained as her cover. They weren’t lies. Not really.

  Restlessness was in her blood. After the meal, she donned a pair of walking shoes and hit the streets.

  When was the last time she’d been home?

  She couldn’t remember. Not offhand. Before Hexenhammer, she’d lived out of hostels and hotels and motels, each blurring into the next. After Hexenhammer, there were guesthouses and safe houses, but she never stayed in one place for long.

  Zurich had changed without her. There were new fashions, new consumer tech, new people, new words. More people on the streets spoke Anglian now. These included visitors from Asia, Hesperia and the rest of Pantopia. She supposed Anglian was better for communication with foreigners than the unique strain of German spoken in Switzerland.

  But some things stayed the same. Lindenhofplatz had adapted to the passage of centuries, marrying its ancient architecture with the needs of modern civilization: free Wi-Fi, motor traffic, indoor plumbing. Across the limpid waters of the Limmat River was the Niederdorf. Here, bars and cafes clothed themselves in classical Pantopian aesthetics while offering contemporary cuisine. Hidden stores tucked away in the alleys beckoned her, selling everything from trinkets to books to craft alcohol.

  Every quarter hour she heard the peal of church bells all around her. She wasn’t sure if she could ever believe in the Phosterian faith again, but the bells were an integral part of Swiss life.

  She spent hours soaking in the atmosphere, though she didn’t buy anything. Eventually, she caught a bus south to the neighborhood of Forchstrasse.

  To an outpost of the enemy.

  The Alim Mosque of Zurich was one of the two mosques in Switzerland that boasted a minaret. The minaret was always silent; there were no Wahi calls to prayer in the country. Instead, believers relied on their own clocks—and a community-developed app—to track their prayer times.

  She had arrived just in time for midday prayers. Crowds of believers flocked to the mosque. Women in hijabs entered through one gate, men in pants and long sleeves through another.

  It was one thing to see Musafireen praying at the mosque. Quite another to see fair-skinned light-eyed sons and daughters of the soil partaking in these foreign practices. And there were more of them every time she came here. It wasn’t Swiss. It wasn’t even Pantopian. It was… wrong.

  She clenched her fists, breathed out, released and walked on.

  Swiss Bahithoon were fine. She could even tolerate them being a tiny minority so long as they respected Swiss laws and customs. But elsewhere in Pantopia, Bahithoon were a threat to Western civilization.

  In the wake of the Third World War, the Pantopians foolishly brought over Musafireen as migrant workers to assist in reconstruction efforts. They came by the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. They had settled down instead of returning home, living apart instead of integrating. When the Wahi State came into being, a second wave of Musafireen flocked to Pantopia, claiming to be refugees and bringing their religion with them. Once again, the Pantopians accepted them, ignoring the fact that the majority of these “refugees” were fit military-aged males who had left their women and children behind.

  The newcomers joined the ones that had gone before them, swelling their ranks. Now numbering in the millions, they demanded the right to impose their way of life on everyone else, the right to govern themselves by their own laws, the right to live as separate people with separate laws and standards.

  This wasn’t immigration. This was colonization.

  It was easy to say it wasn’t her problem, of course. She was Swiss, and Switzerland does not involve herself in the affairs of other nations. But this was self-defense. They attacked the Pantopian Examiner for the crime of insulting the faith. They encouraged the mujahideen who raided the office and killed almost everyone—everyone except her. If she didn’t do anything, Switzerland would find herself surrounded by a sea of green and black. Maybe not in her lifetime, but definitely in the lifetimes of her children or grandchildren.

  She would never tell Luke that, of course. He was incredibly naive in some respects. Hesperians loved to see themselves as the good guys fighting for the underdog against powerful foes. If he ever caught a glimpse of what she really thought and felt, he would abandon her in an instant. And Hexenhammer would be finished.

  Pausing at a streetlamp, she smoothly spun on her heel and powered her holobuds. In her peripheral vision she checked for unwanted attention.

  Notifications flooded her screen. She checked the first.

  BREAKING: REFUGEE MASSACRE IN HELLAS

  She blinked and followed the link.

  A barrage of photos: first responders tending to the wounded and evacuating civilians, burning and collapsed tents, killers machine-gunning a crowd of innocents.

  And in the news summary, a bold bullet point stood out.

  New Phosterian terrorist group Hexenhammer claims responsibility.

  She fought down a curse and read the entire article. Three times.

  Terrorists attacked a refugee camp on the island of Chios. Hundreds dead. Between four to eight terrorists. Killers still at large. Island on lockdown.

  Hexenhammer claims responsibility.

  Eve forced herself to breathe. It was time to be her other self again: an arm of the anonymous Kraken who terrorized the terrorists. A woman who brought down the hammer on the witches plaguing Pantopia. She opened her secure mail app and fired a message for Luke.

  You must have heard about Hellas. We did NOT do it. We must meet. Call me.

  ***

  “Eve didn’t do it,” I said.

  “Why? Because she told you?” Pete said.

  “No. Because this doesn’t have the hallmark of a Kraken operation, much less Hexenhammer.”

  O’Connor’s voice issued from my holophone sitting on the table, reverberating in the secure conference room. “Just so we’re on the same page here, what is the hallmark of a Kraken operation?”

  I rubbed my eyes. It was half past three in the morning, and despite the adrenaline in my veins, I was still jet lagged. I paused for a breath, composing my thoughts.

  “Hexenhammer prides itself on proportionality and precision. They conduct information warfare and propaganda campaigns against their ideological enemies. They only target gangsters and terrorists—people who’ve caused actual harm—for assassinations.

  “They’ve got a high standard for selecting targets. They post the target’s details on their internal forum, they talk about it among themselves, and they only go ahead if an admin is satisfied the target meets the standard of harm.”

  “When they do strike, they rub out only the target,” Pete said. “No one else, except ma
ybe nearby bad guys. And they attribute the hit to a mysterious figure they call Die Kraken.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “They don’t kill innocents. They never had. Why would they start now?”

  “To ‘strike a blow against the forces of globalization and Wahism threatening Western Phosterian civilization,’” O’Connor replied. “Or so their manifesto goes. They left it at the scene and mailed copies to the press.”

  “BS. They don’t think like that.”

  “You mean Eve doesn’t think like that. It doesn’t mean others in Hexenhammer don’t. Hexenhammer isn’t necessarily a monolithic organization.”

  “This doesn’t fit their MO,” I said.

  “Maybe they are changing how they do things,” Pete offered.

  “Without telling their founder?”

  “Or maybe Eve just didn’t want to tell you.”

  “That’s not Eve,” I said. “She’s a killer, but she’s surgical. This? This is mass murder. She’s not psychotic enough to even think about it.”

  Pete crossed his arms. “Okay, so who did it?”

  “We’re going nowhere with this,” O’Connor declared. “It’s hasn’t even been an hour since the attack. Until we know the big picture, we can’t say for sure what’s going on.

  “How about this: I’ll fly out to your location. I should be there in… twelve hours. By then I should have more to share with you, and we can plan our next step.”

  “What do we do now?” Pete asked.

  “Consider this a warning order. We need to figure out what’s going on with Hexenhammer. Get ready for an overseas trip to meet and assess Eve and the rest of Hexenhammer.”

  “All right. And the Kalypso readiness report?”

  “I’ll need that, too.”

  Pete groaned. “You just had to ask, didn’t you?”

  No point going back to bed. Pete went off to collect coffee. I re-read Eve’s email. At the end of it was a phone number. Knowing her, it was a disposable one-time-only number. I generated my own burner number with a holophone app and called her with it.

  She picked up after the first ring.

  “Grüezi,” she said.