Traitor Read online

  Aaron crouched beside him, watching as he pulled at the wires, improvising a solution. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  Gal nodded. “Just a little trick,” he assured Aaron. “No one will get hurt.”

  “That’s not what I meant. This isn’t a warship, Johnny. And that’s not Navigation, it’s a shuttle hangar’s docking controls.”

  * * *

  Kieran tried to make his footsteps as quiet as possible as he fingered the auto injector filled with high-powered sedative in his pocket. He was still shaking, and there was no telling what condition Sarrin would be in when he found her. The trance had been so close — she had actually attacked Rami — but then she’d run.

  He felt like he’d let her down. She hadn’t been out of the room in days, afraid of this exact thing, but he’d asked her, practically begged her to stay and held in engineering. All he knew was he needed to find her — the repairs could wait — no knowing where she was left an empty ache in his chest, like he had lost something vital.

  He pulled an access panel off one of the main walls, this one across from the shuttle hangar doors. His shoulders were too wide to fit in, but he craned his neck to peer around the dark space. “Sarrin?”

  He was ready to step back and close the panel, when he heard a rustling. “Sarrin?” He tried again, squishing himself into the tight space.

  More rustling, and then two shining blue eyes blinked in the dark.

  “Oh, thank God.” He sighed in relief. “Are you okay?”

  She slithered down the wall, and he gave her space to crawl out.

  “What happened?” he asked stupidly.

  She stared at the grey carpet, crossed hands digging into the flesh of her shoulders.

  He reached out to her, making contact on the exposed flesh of her hand. An electric shock zapped up half his arm.

  She gasped, pulling her arm into herself. “Don’t.”

  He stepped back, stinging hand held to his chest. “Sorry. I just thought….” He leaned against the wall, adrenalin dissipating now that he had found her, and he slumped to the floor. “I was so worried.”

  After a minute, a light pressure passed across his thigh, and he looked to see her toes retreating from the light bump. She folded her legs and sat against the wall beside him. “I’m sorry. He was so angry….”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “I nearly hit you.”

  He shrugged. “I ducked.”

  She closed her eyes, head dropping to rest on her knees.

  “No one got hurt. No one really even saw but me.” He sighed, and they sat in silence for a minute. “Rami wants to instigate something called the Rule of War. What is that? He said the Augment with the most marks would be the alpha, the leader.”

  She nodded once, her eyes closed. “It’s how we decided when we were kids, going into the war arena.”

  “Grant says he’s trying to take over. What will you do if he does?”

  Her lips pressed into a line.

  “You have more marks than anyone else. Hoepe showed me.” And the image of the forty-three harsh, black marks marring her too-skinny body was burned in his memory.

  If possible, her face turned even whiter than before, and she leaned her head back, knocking it against the wall. “I can’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have…. I wasn’t supposed to know that.”

  She refused to open her eyes.

  “I appreciate it, you know, what happened in the engine room with you protecting me like that.” He reached for her again. The foot tap had been a good sign, maybe she was warming to the idea. And his mama always said a hug or a touch was worth a thousand well-meaning words in times of despair.

  She flinched away before he could reach her. “I shouldn’t have.”

  He folded his hands in his lap, trapping them between his knees. He had seen what really happened, and while it was nice to think it was all for him, it was something very different. “You picked up Rami’s anger, didn’t you? That’s what you meant when you said you could feel everything. That’s why you started to slip.”

  The colour drained from her face, blue eyes wide.

  “Maybe I can help you.” He lifted his hand again.

  “Please,” she croaked. “Don’t. If…. If anything happened.”

  With every ounce of will left in his mind, he clamped his arms to his sides instead of wrapping her in them. “Okay.” His lungs shook as he took a breath to steady himself. He was an Observer, he couldn’t get involved. “Why don’t you go to our room — my room. No one but Hoepe knows you stay there. It’ll be quiet. I shouldn’t have made you come out.”

  She nodded, both of them standing in the corridor.

  Kieran prepared another apology — every was so messed up, so cracked — but he never got the chance. A violent impact shook the ship, sending them both sprawling to the ground.

  Sarrin was up first, tapping into the nearest console.

  “Warship?” Kieran guessed.

  Smoke poured out of the narrow gap between the doors to the shuttle hangar. A second later it started to retract, and the surrounding walls glowed, orange flickering light escaping where holes in the access panels melted away. Wall fire.

  He climbed to his feet, Sarrin already running diagnostics. There was no warship on the sensor readout.

  “What happened?” Kieran asked.

  She shook her head, pressing more controls.

  More flames burst around them — overloaded relays and burned out conduits. Suddenly, the fire nearest him went out. And another. His lungs suddenly couldn’t quite catch enough air. “Atmospheric breach,” he realized.

  Smoke that had filled the hallway disappeared, sucked out into vacuum. Sarrin ripped panels off the opposite wall, pressing them into the largest of the holes that was draining their atmosphere.

  Augments came from the hall towards them. “We need to seal these breaches,” Kieran shouted, and several hands leapt into action.

  Hoepe arrived, his brother behind him. “What’s going on?”

  Kieran’s eyes darted over the information pouring across the screen. “Atmospheric breaches through the hangar.”

  “The shuttle?” Hoepe said.

  Kieran had to assume as much, but he wanted information first. “I don’t know what went wrong.”

  “Can we get in there?” asked Hoepe, pushing at the doors. “There may be injured.”

  “The doors auto-lock when the vacuum seal is comprised.” Kieran typed again on the console. “I’m only seeing a small breach in the hangar itself — we’re losing point-three-psi per minute.”

  Rami pushed through the crowd. “What happened?” He shot Kieran a glare harsh enough to make his heart stop for a second.

  “I’m not sure, but if I was to guess, I’d say the pilot overshot the landing. Bumped the seal on the inner door.”

  “Then shut the outer door,” said Rami.

  Kieran shook his head and pointed at the diagnostics that appeared on the console screen, Sarrin stepping out of the way. “They banged it on the way in. It’s jammed.”

  Rami snarled. “Pilots don’t just overshoot landings.”

  Hoepe’s eyes flared wide. “Who’s flying the shuttle?”

  “Isuma,” Kieran said.

  Hoepe shook his head. “I thought she was a trained pilot.”

  “She is,” snapped Leove, face unusually pale.

  “Isuma’s flown four flights today,” Kieran said.

  “Four flights? Who authorized that?”

  “You did.”

  Hoepe now rubbed his hand over his eyes. “She’s been sleeping though.”

  Kieran nodded, stifling his own yawn. “I assume, she bunks every night.”

  Hoepe shook his head, “I don’t understand. She should be able to do that. Prolonged periods of wakefulness were standard training.” He shook his head in disbelief. He turned to Kieran. “Can you fix it?”

  Kieran s
hut his eyes. It would mean taking a space-walk, his least favourite activity under the stars. “Yeah, we’re gonna have to. But I need a way to gout out there. That was out only airlock.

  Sarrin nodded, gesturing to either side of the corridor, hands sweeping side to side, miming the barriers they would need. “Force-shields.”

  “Yeah?”

  She shrugged. “Close.”

  “Okay.”

  Rami crossed his arms. “What are you saying?”

  She turned away, presumably to build them.

  “What are you planning?” said Rami.

  “I need a force-shield that can stand up to negative pressure fluctuations — one on either side of the corridor around the door. Sarrin says she can build them, then we can use it as an airlock.”

  “That’s spread,” Rami argued.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  * * *

  Sarrin took two gravity generators and fifteen laz-torches from Engineering, rewiring the first as she ran, schematics drawing themselves in her head. The dark clouds still fuzzed the corners of her vision, the morning’s events too much for her cracked mind. She should retreat to the quiet safety of Kieran’s room — that would be safest — but something in her could not leave the others trapped aboard the shuttle, the ship slowly venting what precious atmosphere they had left.

  Back at the hangar, she dropped the pieces to the floor, and they were eagerly picked up by waiting hands. Ig boring the glint of silver, she demonstrated how to modify the torches to emit a high-frequency web. The gravity generators would help solidify the force-shields.

  “Is this going to work?” one of the Augments asked.

  Of the force-shields she had no doubt — she had designed the strongest force-shield ever known after all, the one that destroyed Earth. But what could bring destruction could also bring hope. Right?

  The stronghold, the shaking, the realization the shield would cut into the Earth — her mind played the scene, the battalions moving across the frozen landscape, the sneaking retreat, the sudden race to find a way off world.

  Kieran came up behind her, stopping her mind from reeling itself into oblivion. “How’s it comin’?” He was nervous, his accent extra thick, and he was dressed in the lower portion of an EV suit.

  “The seal will be incomplete,” she told him. “You will have ten minutes-estimated before the oxygen reserve on the ship becomes too low for survival.”

  He shuffled in his suit awkwardly, and somehow she remembered or understood his fear of being sucked off a ship’s hull and carried away into oblivion. “You will have gravity and you will be contained within the ship’s walls,” she assured him. “There is no need to be concerned.”

  He raised the other eyebrow. “You just told me I only had ten minutes to get the crew of that shuttle back inside.”

  She nodded.

  “Is there a way to seal the force-shield completely?”

  “There is a microscopic gap on all sides where the shield begins.”

  He knelt beside her, evaluating the apparatus. “Can we recess the generators?”

  “We have.”

  “You doin’ okay?”

  She nodded, but the glint of blood and silver showed on her hands, and the monster whispered in her mind.

  “These are a great design,” he said.

  Too good, her memory flashed, recalling the power the force-shield on Earth had managed to hold before it finally shattered.

  Kieran’s head turned. He shouted to someone, “I’ll be there in a sec.” He flashed her a smile and was gone. But the smile was hollow. It was not as it was before, only a shadow remained.

  More blood appeared on her hands.

  At his signal, she triggered the force-shields — one on either side of the corridor around the door — and watched Kieran disappear into the hangar.

  An Augment leaned over her, and she flinched away. He’d gotten too close while she’d been distracted. Anger rolled off of him, his face blocky and red. His words were far away, only static to her ears.

  She turned away, ostensibly to examine the force-shield, drawing a shaky breath. Not here, not with so many people around. Blood dripped from her and coated the floor. The shiny silver skeleton poked through. The edges of her vision fogged, dark and narrow.

  A hand touched her back, electricity tearing through her, filling her with his rage. She spun wildly and threw him against the wall. Her mind acted on its own, she was powerless to stop it. Too many people in the small corridor. Too many target points. A spanner in her hand and fifty-eight other objects that could be used as deadly weapons.

  * * *

  Kieran and his small team muscled the door to the hangar, opening it just wide enough for them to slip through. Ten minutes. The clock started ticking the second the hermetic seal cracked on the door.

  The problem was apparent immediately: the permaglass viewing panel had shattered, the shuttle’s port wing most of the way through it. The shuttle appeared intact except for some superficial damage, a hand waved through the dark, solar-protected windows.

  “Expanding foam,” said Thomas over the microphone in his helmet.

  Kieran nodded, pulling the canister from his utility belt. Faces watched them from the shuttle’s viewports as they tried to plug the hole. But the foam was sucked out into the shuttle bay and into space beyond.

  “The pressure variation is too much,” said Kieran. The current of atmosphere leaking around the edges of the force-shields was too strong for the foam to take hold.

  The other teammate nodded. “The hermetic seal.”

  The three returned to the hangar door and forced it shut, Kieran retriggering the door seal. They waited until all the oxygen had escaped before spraying their sealant again, this time the foam holding.

  Kieran tested, venting in a small amount of atmosphere and then more and more. The foam seal held.

  They forced the door into the hallway open again. Kieran gave the thumbs up to the Augments waiting in the hallway. The hangar repair had been successful and relatively easy.

  But their expressions were horrified. Hoepe pointing anxiously to the other side, and Kieran turned.

  There were a dozen Augments pressed against the walls. Rami slammed into the force-shield, then crumpled to the ground. He stood back on his feet, unsteady, and leapt, flinging his arms around Sarrin.

  “Jesus,” Kieran swore.

  Sarrin’s eyes were far gone — she had slipped in to the trance — a spanner swinging wildly in her hand. The only thing saving the people around her was their own intensive training as they ducked out of her way. Although if half the stories he’d heard were true, she could bury every last one of them.

  He rushed forward, pulling at the seals on his EV suit as he went. “Sarrin!” he called, but there was no way for her to hear him through the helmet. He bounced off the force-shield, landing on his backside.

  Sarrin focussed on Rami, slamming him into the ceiling. She pulled a fork from her coveralls and embedded it in his leg before he fell back to the floor. Rami picked himself up and made to run at her again, doggedly.

  “Don’t!” Kieran screamed inside his helmet, the sound echoing around. He waved frantically for someone to drop the force-shield. “Sarrin!” he shouted over and over. She couldn’t hear him, but it was a reflex.

  Someone deactivated the force-shield. Augments stumbled past, moving back as he pushed through them, pulling off his helmet and dropping it on the floor.

  Sarrin turned, the same wild ferocity in her eyes as the first time it had happened, when she had lost herself in the cargo bay after boarding the warship. Another Augment jumped on her from behind, and Sarrin knocked them away easily.

  Kieran fumbled, finding the auto-syringe in his coveralls pocket under the EV suit. He swallowed dryly. He had hated Hoepe for suggesting he always carry one, he had wanted to believe Sarrin was better.

  He called her again, careful to keep his voice level and even. Would she recog
nize him and stop? He squeezed the auto-syringe nervously.

  She turned, stalking forward. At least she hadn’t leaped.

  “Sarrin?” he tried again.

  Before he could stop it, Rami lunged forward, wrapping his arms around her again. Sarrin spun violently, her hand reaching for his neck and squeezing.

  Kieran rushed forward, grabbing her arm. A moment of recognition dawned in her crystal blue eyes, as his other hand slammed into her neck, the auto-syringe unloading its full dose.

  He grabbed her as they fell, her body limp and small, his crashing on top. Below them, Rami sputtered, a hand protecting his throat. The Augments stared, leaned away from her.

  Kieran clutched Sarrin tightly, squeezing his eyes. “You have no idea what you’re doing,” he spat at Rami. Carefully he lifted her up. No one said a word. They stared at her, at her ripped shirt, the lines and lines of black procedural marks marring her back.

  He called out instructions to cut through the wing and pull out the Augments, not daring to look back as he carried her away.

  SEVEN

  HALUD STEPPED GRACEFULLY THROUGH THE doors of the research wing of the central hospital. It was a sterile place, cold white walls and echoing footsteps.

  A vid crew came behind him. The same cinematographer and producer he had worked with several times before. A factician and a scientist were with them as well.

  And a guard.

  It seemed his life had returned to normal after all, at least from the outside. He still had his handmade wool bed and his antique writing desk. His apartments were the same, the view the same, the shops the same. Everything was the same as always. Except the guards and the new cameras tucked into the wall everywhere he went.

  Each day, he would wander the halls and climb the stairs to the Speakers’ Complex. He would exchange pleasantries with the secretary, and he would sit in his office. Twice he had been asked to compile a statement for Arthur Herrington, Speaker of Knowledge, and once for Renee Green, Speaker of Love.