Heart of a Traitor

by Aaron Lee Yeager

  She put her hand up to her face unconsciously and felt something wet.

  What’s this on my face? How humiliating.

  She wiped the tears off with her hand. It frustrated her that she couldn’t even sit there with dignity. To show such weakness in front of a person like this was sheer agony.

  The floor around them had completely iced over. Trembling, Nariko brushed a strand of hair away from her face and noticed that it was covered in frost. She felt so very tired. Her breathing and heart rate were very slow now. Her body’s functions were shutting down. She was dying.

  “N-Nariko?” Kielter asked, shivering.

  “Yes?”

  “W-What does it feel like to die?”

  Nariko sat there silently, unable to form words. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what to tell him. She could hear the fear in his voice and it felt like daggers in her chest. Her lip trembled.

  “Pain,” she finally admitted.

  “Pain?”

  “...and fear,” she added.

  They sat in silence for a few more moments, until the faint red glow of the incense stick grew dimmer and then went out.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Nest of the Kuldrizi

  The nobility of man comes from the connections we form with those around us. The Luminarch is perfect because he is connected to every single member of the human family. It is when we are solitary that the darkness in man surfaces.

  -Saliātus Ōnis, the Fallen Saint 6701-6845rl

  Why?

  Chizu felt a deep sting in her thigh as a Gunoi bullet tore through the muscle. Her mouth opened instinctively to holler, but she stopped the noise in her throat and instead forced her leg to keep moving as she fell back with her squad deeper through the ruined capital gardens.

  The hoard of red-skinned aliens before them drew ever closer, screaming war cries in their guttural and hateful language. Chizu fired a burst of bullets that pulped the thick brow of a Gunoi, his comrades simply stepping over his body as their mass pressed forward.

  I don’t understand.

  Chizu ejected the empty cartridge from her weapon and took cover with her squad behind a ghastly barricade made from the dead bodies of her kin, crudely stacked three and four deep like cord-wood. Crude Gunoi rockets streaked in wild arcs overhead as she rummaged through the putrefying bodies for another ammunition clip. Already her boot had filled up with blood.

  “Someone find me another clip,” she called out calmly over the roar of cannon fire.

  “Right here,” Sergeant Kenzo called out, pulling one off a dead body at his feet and tossing it to her, his eyes shining brightly from underneath his helmet. Chizu reloaded and brushed her short black hair away from her face.

  “I may be out of line here, guys, but this almost seems like too much war to me,” Kenzo admitted.

  “That’s because you’re not doing it right,” Chizu scolded as she pulled the safety pin out of her detonator and hit the trigger. There was a deafening explosion from their previous position, an expanding sphere of white-hot energy that flung hundreds of burning Gunoi bodies sailing in all directions.

  “There’s no reason why you can’t enjoy your work,” Chizu explained with a grin. As she bandaged up her leg, she looked up for the fiftieth time that day searching in vain for the descending ion trails of confederate dropships, but none were there. The clouds above were painted red from the fires. The Great Library of Kita was burning. The ancient Crystal Gardens had been pulverized by Gunoi artillery. To the east, Chizu could see other squads falling back as the circle of Gunoi grew tighter and tighter around the royal palace.

  Why is this happening?

  The Gunoi released a wild barrage of bullets in their direction and Chizu could hear the sickly thuds as the bodies she hid behind absorbed them. She was speculating on how long it would take for her finger to be shot off, were she to poke it out, when Sergeant Kenzo called for the squad to rise up and return fire. Several of the men and women looked at him obviously wondering if the man had suddenly become insane, but Chizu stood up and opened fire without hesitation. The sea of Gunoi before her seemed endless. It wasn’t even necessary to aim; she simply let off bursts as she traversed her weapon before her.

  “You know what I love about this?” Chizu admitted as the rest of the squad stood up and fired with her. “Not a single round is being wasted. How often do you get a hundred percent hit ratio?”

  A bullet struck her in the head, shredding off most of her helmet. A second shot struck her in the shoulder, throwing her backward onto the ground. She tried in vain to sit up, but her body refused to respond. From her position she could see the thousands of women and children huddled against the sealed doors of the royal palace, raising their voices in beautiful prayer to the Luminarch.

  Why would the Luminarch forsake us?

  Blood trickling down the dark brown skin of her face, Chizu joined their prayer as best she could. Her vision blurring, she closed her brown eyes. The hum of battle became a deafening thrum and the air felt greasy somehow. She could taste an acrid metallic flavor in the air.

  The thrum became a force, shaking the ground. Gunoi began dropping their thick weapons and bringing their clumsy hands up to their ears. Chizu felt as if slick claws were scratching at the surface of her skin, but when she opened her eyes she could see nothing there, only the silhouette of Sergeant Kenzo standing over her trying to apply bandages to her wounds. Chizu thought she could see the forms of serpents flying in the air around them, leaving ripples in their wake.

  The thrumming sound seemed to condense into a single point and the roof of the royal palace ruptured as an enormous geyser of flickering violet erupted from the ruined top, ascending thousands of feet in the air.

  Chizu’s hearts soared and she opened her bloodstained mouth to shout out praise to the Great Liberator, but her prayer died in her mouth. She could feel darkness all around her. Visions of slaughter and excess crowded at the edges of her vision. She knew this was not of the Luminarch.

  The walls of the palace bulged out and exploded from within, a tidal wave of black energy rolled out across the landscape. In its wake rode horrible spectral creatures, twisted and fearsome, gibbering hungrily. As the wave washed over them, the Gunoi howled and whimpered in pain. Their bodies simply began dissolving, fine crimson particles breaking off from their bodies and mixing in with the waves and current of energy washing over them. They were being blown away like living sand sculptures.

  The violet geyser reached its apogee and split into thousands of individual tendrils, which slithered back toward the land in all different directions. With a frightful crash a single tendril came down and implanted itself into Sergeant Kenzo’s back. Chizu watched in horror as his eyes grew dead and lifeless. His body slumped over and shattered into a pile of ash as another tendril came down and slammed itself into Chizu’s right collarbone. She convulsed and shook as the tendril invaded her body and soul, worming around inside her like a probing finger inserted into a wound, violating her very being. She could feel the twisted flying creatures clamping onto her body, their tails and limbs flapping energetically as they burrowed deeper and deeper into her flesh. Chizu opened her mouth and screamed louder than she ever had in her life.

  We have been betrayed.

  Shining out from its bottomless depths was a pair of eyes. Disapproving, unloving, unaccepting eyes. Eyes of rebuke. Dark red like the color of blood. Chizu opened her mouth to scream, but no noise came out.

  Then the eyes began changing. The red color faded into silver and the eyes became milder, unsure, even timid. The face that belonged to the eyes was unassuming and nearly expressionless, with only the slightest twinge of concern. Around the youthful face flowed the bangs of silvery hair. Not gray silver, but metallic silver, which shimmered brightly when it caught the light. The long hair behind the bangs was gathered together in a braid, the strands woven artfully together and tied at the back with a hair clasp.

&nbs
p; It took Nariko a moment to realize that she was awake and that the face she was looking at was talking to her.

  “...you should have enough time to get some food and change before we reach the Onikano,” she finished.

  Nariko sat up and realized that she had been lying in a healing-tank. In the tank next to her lay Don Kielter, snoring peacefully as he floated in the amber fluid.

  I had that dream again...

  “The others, did you get them too?” Nariko asked, looking around for them.

  “They’re fine,” Sakurako said soothingly. “I’ve got them in the tanks below.”

  “Did I...?” Nariko began, unable to ask out loud.

  “No, you were still alive when I found you, but just barely.”

  Nariko signed and looked up. Not only was Sakurako’s hair metallic silver, but her eyes were as well. Even her skin and teeth had a slightly silvery hue to them.

  She’s a witch.

  Nariko suddenly found herself feeling a little uneasy. Witches, after all, had a mixed ancestry and carried the blood of the Ashtari in their veins. In the Confederacy, the only thing worse than a Technologist was a half-breed. Sakurako became uneasy and turned her gaze aside as she ran her fingers through her silvery hair. Nariko realized that she was staring at her.

  “I...I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare. I wasn’t aware that our people still had any witches among them.”

  “There’s just the two of us,” Sakurako said quietly. The woman was very soft-spoken almost shy, very unusual traits for a Senshi. Yet, there was something healthy about her presence. Nariko could actually feel the darkness within her retreat further and further back into a corner of her mind.

  That’s right, I had forgotten. Witches’ spells can banish demons back to the ether. That’s why the Confederacy doesn’t just wipe them all out. Nariko suddenly found herself feeling enlivened.

  I wonder if she could banish the other me?

  “I’m sorry but I can’t,” Sakurako answered gently. “If I could do that, I would have banished it from myself a long time ago.”

  “You can read my thoughts?” Nariko asked suspiciously, feeling even more uncomfortable.

  “I’m sorry, I try not to. It’s just that...” Sakurako trailed off timidly, unwilling to finish.

  “Just what?”

  “...you think really loud.”

  There was a moment of awkward silence. Sakurako tugged self-consciously at a lock of her silver hair.

  “I guess I do, don’t I?” Nariko answered, a slight smile forming on her lips.

  “I’m sorry, I’ll try not to,” Sakurako insisted, becoming flustered. “I know it’s a huge invasion of your privacy. Sometimes when I get to know someone it becomes easier to tune them out.”

  “Well, then, I guess we’ll have to get to know each other better.” Nariko requested. Sakurako looked a little confused at the offer, then smiled warmly.

  “I’d like that,” she said, saluting smartly.

  Nariko was offered a tray with some rice balls and dumplings and ate them embarrassingly fast. It had been far too long since she had her own native food and she realized how much she had missed it.

  The two tanks were completely out of place with the rest of the chamber that appeared to be a giant cave of some kind, with wet slick walls covered in small spines and large black hairs and slurping organic doorways that led into other chambers. Hot air moved into and out of the chamber in great breaths and the walls pulsated and stretched.

  Is this some kind of living creature?

  Nariko pulled herself out of the tank and put on a fresh null-suit that awaited her. The microbes in the healing tank had stripped away the layers of grime and filth that had covered her for so long, but she did not feel much cleaner.

  Sakurako stood at one end of the chamber, where a tower of bronze cables buried themselves directly into the flesh of the floor. On top of the tower was a hollow sphere of crystal, filled with a viscous fluid. As Sakurako chanted softly to herself, her silver hair floated up around her. She touched the sphere with her fingertips and the fluid flowed in different currents. Nariko could feel the creature change directions as it swam through space.

  Nariko had always been taught in her youth that witchcraft was unnatural and evil. But watching it take place before her for the first time, it didn’t seem unnatural to her at all. Demonic sorcery always felt raw and dangerous, like placing your hand in a fire. This felt completely different, almost wholesome, like standing next to a flowing stream.

  “Most people are afraid the first time they see witchcraft,” Sakurako said without opening her eyes.

  Nariko’s first instinct was to hide her feelings and say something polite, but instead she decided to be honest. “It is very intimidating, but I guess I’ve seen enough of sorcery to know the difference.”

  Nariko walked back over to the pair of tanks and began dressing herself in a fresh uniform that lay there. Once her uniform was fully donned, she picked up a data slate that had been left for her and began looking through her orders. As expected she would be assigned as Gunsho, for Shiro squad. Nariko sighed. She had been dreading this day for some time.

  She placed her ring finger on the identity panel and it withdrew a small amount of blood to verify her identity. The slate beeped in the affirmative and she was allowed access to the Division’s portion of the crusade. The Seventh was to collect the blood of Ricot Juanasto, Kurson Deltmar and Heinreich Verräter.

  “You guys drew Heinreich Verräter? The Great Betrayer?” Nariko felt a chill go up her spine at the sound of that man’s name. The Great Betrayer, the man who murdered the Luminarch.

  “Kind of kills your motivation, doesn’t it?” Sakurako observed.

  “No wonder you guys haven’t made any progress,” Nariko observed. “The Luminara Ricot Juanasto and Kurson Deltmar have been dead for nearly eight centuries and Heinreich Verräter...”

  Nariko turned off the restricted access and began looking through the personnel records for Shiro squad.

  Ittohei First Class Sakurako Shimizu, kappa-class craft user, and small-arms specialist. Nariko was not thrilled about having a witch in her squad and she made a mental note to request a transfer for her as soon as she made a mistake. If she made no mistakes, Nariko would put her in a situation where any decision could be interpreted as a mistake.

  Sakurako gasped in offense and glanced back with a scowl on her face, although Nariko couldn’t imagine why. Shrugging, Nariko returned to the data.

  It read: Keiko Akiyama, rank Heicho, tactical operations specialist. Nariko was surprised to see a name she recognized. Keiko had been her squad-mate long ago before the fall of Correll, but Keiko had abandoned the corps, disappearing for the better part of a century. It’s no wonder they sent her to the seventh. There was just no place among the proper divisions for deserters.

  The next entry read: Ami Kawano, rank Nitohei Second Class, communications and cryptology specialist. Nariko noticed a strange entry in the dossier: She has an extensive collection of stuffed animals. Also, she borrows money without returning it.

  Why would that be in a personnel record?

  The next read: Sorano Jinnai, rank Ittohei First Class, heavy weapon specialist. Does not bathe often enough, can eat thirteen naga chili peppers at once without passing out.

  “Just what kind of comments are these to put into a personnel report?” Nariko wondered aloud.

  The next was: Michi Sakura, rank Heicho, specialist in military engineering. Expert foot masseuse and likes to read poetry. There was no doubt why she was in the seventh. She was the only member of the former Taisho Kanaye’s command staff that had not fallen.

  What was particularly strange is that none of the usual data from daily weapon drills, hand to hand combat marks, or the results of squad-level tactical exercises were present. In their place were extensive lists of recipes, recordings of holo-dramas, popular music from a dozen different worlds, and the squad’s current gambling pools.
/>
  Did the former Gunsho actually delete information in the official records to make room for all this? Nariko tapped a few more runes and brought up the former Gunsho who made these entries.

  It read: Taka Matsuno, rank Nitohei Second Class, specialist in every single aspect of warfare. Hardest-working, strongest, most trusted and most ravishingly beautiful daughter in the entire Seventh Division.

  I should have guessed.

  Nariko set down the data slate and rubbed her temple. Looking around at the pulsating walls, she walked over to Sakurako.

  “Just what is all this?” She asked, pointing this way and that.

  “They are called the Kuldrizi.”

  “What?” Nariko asked, taking a step back. The Kuldrizi were like interstellar locusts, stripping whole worlds bare before moving along to the next. Nariko’s eyes darted about, looking for a way to escape.

  “You are in no danger,” Sakurako comforted. “This one is in a deep sleep, a kind of hibernation. Through this orb I am able to infuse my own will into it.”

  “Like a puppet,” Nariko surmised, finding the concept extremely distasteful. “Look, I’m really grateful you saved me, but these things are really dangerous. How do you know you won’t lose control of it?”

  Sakurako looked at her out of the corner of her eye. “I don’t.”

  At Sakurako’s command, the membrane in front of them became transparent. Nariko approached its clear, mucousy surface amazed that any organic material could be strong enough to protect against the vacuum of space and yet still be so thin. Nariko tapped it gently with her finger and it gave way slightly, before twitching in irritation.

  Looking out into the space outside the ship, Nariko could see hundreds of creatures like the one she occupied. Nearly invisible against the backdrop of space with hard chitinous exteriors curled up into a circular shape and long dangling hairy tendrils sprouting from the base of the shell, like giant ammonites. Some were as large as the one Nariko was traveling in, but most were much smaller.