Heart of a Traitor

by Aaron Lee Yeager

  Rochestri felt himself sweating in spite of himself. He knew very well what kinds of tools would lie on that tray. Horrible instruments of torture, steaming from the sterilization process. The fact that they sterilized their tools first showed that they were true professionals of the craft. A victim that became infected might die before the critical breaking point was reached. He had used such devices many times in his career, and he doubted these traitors would show him the mercy of a quick death he had shown to so many others.

  The smaller captor walked over to him, her walk annoyingly close to a skip.

  “Hello Rocchi-chan, my name is Ami. If you need anything, just let me know.”

  Ami smiled, tilting her head slightly to one side. “Would you like a cookie?” She held out the tray to him, which was filled with a dozen freshly baked cookies with brown chunks of candy in them.

  Rochestri looked at the tray and spat. With a snarl on his lips he said, “You can go back to the pit of hell from whence you came, traitor!”

  Ami looked down at her tray. “Eww, gross. You spit on my cookies!” Rochestri closed his eyes and began the 33rd litany of alignment. He had never seen interrogation techniques like this before and that made him guarded.

  Ami pouted as she walked over to Keiko at the workstation. “He spit on my cookies,” she said. Keiko’s black hair turned to a faint blue with inspiration.

  “Give ‘em to Mitchels,” she said with a grin. Ami brightened up instantly and walked over to a communication panel on the wall and tapped the runes. The view screen came to life with the image of the unshaven and aged Mitchels in the center, a finger clumsily fumbling around in his ear for some speck of wax that eluded him. “Mitchels here,” he grunted.

  “You want some cookies, Mitchi-kun?” Ami asked.

  “What’s wrong with them?” he inquired.

  “Nothing’s wrong with them, silly.”

  “Well, what kind are they?”

  “Chokorēto.”

  “Don’t you have any peanut butter ones?”

  Keiko looked up from the workstation, her hair shining red with irritation. “Do you want the cookies or not?”

  Mitchels succeeded with the search in his ear and took his finger out to examine his find.

  “You’re awfully testy, Keiko, it must be that time of the month, again.”

  “Drop dead, Mitchels,” Keiko returned. The image of Mitchels was over-ridden by another image. The image introduced herself as Kotone, the ship’s communications officer on the command deck.

  “C’mon ladies. This channel is for emergency communications only. If you want to talk to your boyfriend you’ll have to do it on your personal communicator,” she said with a grin.

  “He is not my boyfriend, Kotone. Stop telling everyone that!” The line was shut down and the screen went black. Keiko grimaced and her hair turned a brighter red as she turned her attention to the polisher robot on the ceiling.

  “You, there!” Keiko shouted at the robot, which chirped in acknowledgment, “Take this tray down to engineer Mitchels in hanger 12.” Keiko spit on the tray herself and handed it to the eager robot, which extended small pincer arms to take the tray and floated off, the door whooshing open and shut as it passed through.

  Ami was furious. “Why is everyone spitting on my cookies?”

  Rochestri was having difficulty concentrating with all of the yelling going on. He decided that they must be trying to wear him down by confusing him. Or, perhaps these were the early stages of a sleep-deprivation technique. He redoubled his efforts of chanting to himself.

  Keiko turned a dial and the center of the ceiling opened with a low hum and a long golden robotic crane-arm descended, ending in a golden circlet covered with impossibly fine lines of wires and small ruby-red crystals. Hair-thin gold wires came from the inside edges of the circlet and gathered together into a central stalk that then disappeared into the housing of the arm itself. The arm finished its descent about half a meter above Rochestri’s head and Ami hopped over to place it on him.

  Keiko worked busily at the controls on the station and a low hum increased in intensity until it became a roaring rumble. The thin gold wires coming from the circlet began to glow and the circlet itself came alive with pulses of energy moving along the fine lines of its surface. Ami placed the circlet over Rochestri’s immobile head and it automatically reduced its circumference, fitting neatly around his temple.

  “I hope you’re comfortable, Rocchi-chan,” Ami said. Rochestri ceased his chanting and opened his eyes to the abomination before him.

  “You’re wasting your time, missy,” he snarled. “The pain receptors in my body have been altered by the most ancient techniques of my order, so that I may switch them off at will. Know that there is nothing you can do to me, scum, to force me to tell you anything that will be of any use to you. May the Luminarch forgive you, for I will not.”

  Rochestri closed his eyes and took up his chant again. Ami walked past him wide-eyed and quite unable to form a response and came up beside Keiko, whose panel was a flash with images as she scanned through the memories stored in Rochestri’s visual cortex, searching for the images they needed. Ami leaned in and whispered to Keiko.

  “I think he thinks it’s supposed to hurt.” Keiko broke her concentration for a moment and eyed Ami, her hair shimmering orange in amusement. Keiko cleared her throat and replied loud enough for the Marshal to hear her over the hum. “Oh my, he seems to be resisting the mind probe,” she said with a grin. “Perhaps we should increase the power.”

  Ami suppressed a giggle and responded just as loud. “Yeah, he’s much stronger than we thought.”

  Keiko lowered the sound-dampener level a couple of notches, so that the hum from the machine seemed to increase in volume.

  “It’s still no good, we’ll have to go up to, uh...level 19.”

  “No! Don’t do it, you could kill him, he’s no good to us dead,” Ami added, nearly bursting with laughter.

  Marshal Rochestri smiled to himself as he focused his energies on resisting the tremendous pain, he assumed the device was inducting into his nervous system. He had used such systems before and was well trained against them. He was pleased to note that thus far, he had felt nothing.

  “Perhaps the Luminarch really is with me,” he thought.

  “I told you demon-spawn,” he shouted back, “I am immune to the torture of your device.”

  Keiko and Ami both had to bite their tongues to keep from laughing out loud. The machine was patterned after an ancient artifact from an alien race called the Delkati, who had died out millennia ago. The device was never designed to inflict any kind of discomfort and Keiko theorized that the only way it could do so would be to manually override the locking arms’ descent mechanism and force it to descend far enough that it clubbed the occupant. Keiko smiled at the thought of it and her hair changed to a richer orange as she worked.

  The images on Keiko’s panel flew by with incredible speed. She had begun on the day of his capture and was working her way back through his visual memory. Images of space travel, landing craft, forge cities, and ancient texts he had been studying flew by. At some points, Keiko would slow down the rate when a series of images looked promising, but would then return to a higher speed once the event turned out to be nothing. Ami looked on in fascination.

  Keiko turned the speed dial a little further, but it was too much and the images became a blur, even to her. She instinctively reacted by turning the dial all the way back to normal playback and she and Ami were faced with the images of the Marshal bathing himself three weeks earlier.

  Ami went wide eyed and let out a faint squeak. Keiko said nothing, but her hair turned violet.

  “Umm, so tell me, Mister Rochestri,” Keiko stuttered, trying not to laugh, “d-did the Luminarch endow you with this power to resist our probe?” Ami let out a blurted laugh before covering her mouth with her hand to hold it in.

  “Indeed he did, foul temptress and he endowed me well.�
� Keiko looked at Ami, who looked like she was about to explode, her cheeks flushing red as she covered her mouth with both hands.

  “Really,” said Keiko, “because it only looks like a little endowment to me.” Ami burst out laughing, unable to contain herself any longer, which in turn made Keiko laugh as well, her hair changing to a brilliant orange.

  Their laughter carried over the roar of the machine and Marshal Rochestri sighed.

  “To try and understand them is truly a waste,” he thought, “for there is nothing to understand. They are a random force, unguided, unfeeling and unthinking. The very definition of chaos.”

  Their laughter was cut short by the doors whooshing open again as the polisher robot re-entered the room carrying an empty cookie tray. It hovered over and handed the tray to Keiko and she noticed that there was a hand-written note on it that read: “Thanks for the cookies, Keiko; you’ll make someone a beautiful housewife, someday.” Keiko’s hair turned to a dull red.

  “I really hate that guy,” she sighed.

  “Hey,” Ami protested, looking at the note, “I’m the one who made the cookies.”

  “Then you’ll make someone an excellent housewife, someday.”

  Keiko ignored Ami sticking her tongue at her as she returned to her work. She slowed down the images expertly and hit playback and record. The images showed the Marshal entering his personal identity code for a Sigmund level command he had sent one month earlier. Sigma-92-A-Padre-0152-Maşină -8231-Lock.

  Keiko smiled to herself, her hair shimmering yellow.

  “We got it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The Angelus Noctem

  So began the Great Revolution. A campaign of remarkable skill and scale. Over the next three hundred years the Luminarch’s armies, commanded by his Luminara children, would conquer the entire western spiral of the galaxy, completely supplanting the old Ashtari Empire and creating the new Terran Confederacy. The Ashtari were hunted down to the last sycophant and continued worship of their race was outlawed under pain of death.

  -Excerpt from The Fall of the Ashtari, suppressed by the Marshals 22.03.4112rl

  Jenther could feel the tension leaving his body as he meditated within the sacred walls of the temple.

  “A decade is far too long to go without the annual purification rights,” he chanted softly to himself. “I give thanks to Mothers of Light for the opportunity to bask here again.”

  The sanctuary of Joyta was carved out of a large crystalline cave and subtle colors reflected all around from the small inlets placed in the ceiling. The water flow was gentle as it caressed the surfaces of the room’s three walls, gliding into the pool that dominated the center of the room, where Jenther knelt, the water reaching up to his shoulders. In front of him stood the beautiful statue of Joyta, Ashtari Goddess of the Mind. If there was time, he would also visit the temples of Julit, Goddess of the Body and Jalet, Goddess of the Heart.

  There was an exotic and disturbing beauty in the alien features of the goddess, a superiority that could never be spoken of openly, but Jenther felt it in his bones.

  Jenther closed his silver eyes and the room swirled around him and vanished. Visions of the future were almost unheard of amongst witches. Even to those of the Junasto bloodline, it was quite rare.

  Jenther found himself standing once again, in a blue-silver corridor, standing before a lovely young woman with dark-blue eyes. “I am Sister Katherine Mary,” she said in introduction.

  This vision was well known to Jenther. He had experienced it many times. In fact, it was the first prophetic vision he had ever experienced. Back when he was a boy and the holy blood of Junasto was first transfused into the vessel of his body.

  It was the vision of his own death.

  Jenther and the woman walked down the corridor together, looking out at the beautiful stars. A purple-mist back dropped chunky Confederate vessels and black-shelled aliens, illuminated by the lightning flashes of the particle lances that rained down past them like a meteor shower. In his youth, Jenther had spent years trying to memorize the positions of the stars in the vision, in order to determine the location. Now, he simply allowed himself to enjoy them.

  The young woman took out a silver injection gun and placed it against his neck.

  Jenther opened his eyes in start. He was back in the temple Joyta.

  The soft sounds of the water became intermingled with the metallic sounds of approaching armored footsteps and Jenther noticed minute ripples emanating from the base of the statue. A large armored figure entered the archway, the light from the water creating organic patterns on his jet-black armor with blue trim. In his right hand he held a staff of ebony material, a serrated axe-head perched neatly at the top.

  “How are the new recruits progressing, Captain Lazarus?” Jenther asked.

  “Better than expected. Like we all were, their minds are wild and filthy, filled with greed and violence. They still look upon the Luminarch as divinity, rather than divinity’s creation, but they will learn the truth in time.”

  Jenther nodded solemnly. He hated having to hide his true convictions. He hated having to hide the truth. But, the universe cared little for truth and if it were ever made known that the people of Ormen worshiped the Ashtari...

  “We have received a summons, my brother, for all nine companies,” Captain Lazarus stated coldly. Since its colonization by the Luminari Junaso himself, the Angelus Noctem of Ormen had enjoyed an unparalleled degree of autonomy, each Captain assigning his company to the battle zones he deemed in greatest need. There were only two bodies with authority to command them directly. The Luminarch himself and...

  “The Marshals?” Jenther asked carefully.

  “Yes. A Sigmund Level command. The encryption Atrudi have already verified it.” Jenther could sense Lazarus’s trepidation.

  “Do you think they have discovered...”

  “No,” Jenther surmised as he gathered his metallic silver hair and stepped out of the water. “This is not a purge. This is...something else.”

  “Thank the trinity.”

  Jenther stepped into his awaiting suit of armor and allowed it to seal itself around him with a hiss. “Nevertheless, we must be extremely cautious. Who sent the summons?”

  “The Marshal’s name was Rochestri,” Captain Lazarus said.

  “Jalet help us,” Jenther prayed. The Marshals normally thrived in their own secrecy, but there were a few names that were widely known to those on the outside. Ostentatious and boisterous individuals who enjoyed the fame and power of reputation.

  “Who is he?” Lazarus inquired.

  “Rochestri is the only living Marshal to have ordered Nimici-Extremă, the extermination of an entire Confederate system.”

  The once peaceful room now felt full of tension and the two remained silent for many moments. Jenther felt he saw a shadow fall over the statue of Joyta.

  “I will recall all company commanders,” Lazarus stated. “With the strength of Juanasto we cannot fail” Jenther and Lazarus crossed their arms across their chests in salute.

  “Juanasto, Sit nostrum abbas,” exclaimed Jenther.

  “Sit solus verus filius imperator,” responded Lazarus.

  Chapter Forty

  The Iron Forests of Nori’s Forge

  Honor is only as meaningful as the criteria under which it is given. A crown that is given to all is a worthless gesture.

  -Book of Cerinţǎ, Chapter 17, verse 43

  The large doors to Nori’s forge had been reinforced with seven large neutronite rods, which, when locking the door, were moved by powerful motors into three slots above and four slots below the door and would burrow directly into the superstructure of the ship. It was a matter of debate whether or not this had been done to keep people out, or to keep something in. The lock had a seventeen-digit pass-code and voiceprint identifier with a pass-phrase and only a select few of the command staff knew both the code and the pass-phrase.

  From inside the forg
e, the faint beeps of a pass-code being entered outside could be heard, followed by a negative chirp from the lock. If Nori heard the sounds, she didn’t let it show. She focused intently on her work. She wore on her head a bizarre bowl-shaped device that covered her eyes and ears. Small camera nodes and sensory antennas sprouted from its surface in no particular pattern and made her look like some sort of freakish metallic insect.

  Again, a series of numbers being entered could be heard followed again by a negative chirp from the lock.

  Nori sat in the center of a circular array of large worktables behind a display of monitors showing various kinds of information in a variety of languages, both organic and synthetic. Each of the tables around her were covered with an assortment of bizarre machinery, some mechanical, some organic, some obviously alien in origin.

  The long mechanical appendages attached to the harness on her back moved from table to table scanning, assembling, welding, cutting, attaching, and detaching in a symphony of motion, sound and light. Only by working on several projects at the same time could she alleviate the excruciating boredom that plagued her life like a crippling disease. Of all the sensations a mind could be exposed to, she found boredom to be worse than any torture. For Nori it was a constant companion, an open wound that would never heal.

  “Although constant motion can numb it out,” she thought to herself.

  A mechanical arm ending in a claw grabbed a finished project and deftly handed it to Nori. Small and circular, it contained the first few living cells that, once cultivated properly, would grow into a neural matrix that could be used to store and retrieve data faster than any oracle could ever hope to. There was no limit to its capacity. The larger the matrix grew, the larger the capacity. It was the culmination of the artifact technology she had excavated from a dead planet, the legacy of some long-dead alien race that Nori had resurrected from the dust.