Traitor Read online

  It had been perfect, with beautiful, giant flowers that glowed in the dark. He had taken Rayne to a lush grove, rich with transluminant plants and a view of the stars, late one night, when the colours were their brightest. He had held her hand as they laughed and talked together.

  He forgot the danger of their conversation. Instead, he smiled, taking her hand as he did then. He reminded her teasingly, “You kissed me.”

  She raised an eyebrow, her face softening as it did then with a smile. “Yes, I did.”

  Aaron caught Gal with his eyes, waving his hand in the air, asking him to elaborate on the doomed story of Yates. Gal frowned and turned to stare out the porthole again.

  “Gal, whatever is going on, I want you to tell me,” she said, coming back to the bed and leaning forward. She took his hand in hers. “Even if it’s more crazy, drug-induced hallucinations that don’t make any sense. It can’t be good to keep this all bottled up. Maybe I can help you figure out what’s real and what isn’t.”

  All of it was real. None of it was real. He shook his head, staring at the grey planet below to avoid looking at her.

  “I followed you after the Earth was lost. I followed you on Exploration. I even followed you out here on this cracked freightship in the Deep Black.” She gripped his hand harder.

  He frowned. “Why?”

  “Because I love you.”

  Everything he had ever hoped for, but it was wrong, terrible. He turned to stare at their intertwined hands. “Love me?” He threw her hand away. “You don’t even know me.” He rushed off the bed and stalked across the room, demons jumping as he passed.

  Rayne’s mouth hung open. “Of course I know you. We’re going to get through this, Galiant. But you have to tell me what’s going on.”

  He leapt back onto the bed, shuffling on his knees to the porthole, pressing his face into it. “It’s too dangerous.” He pulled Rayne roughly, forcing her to stare through the porthole with him. “Don’t you see?”

  “What? Junk?”

  “Yes, Junk.” But that wasn’t right — Junk held secrets, yes, but those were the secrets of the Speakers. The new planet was something else entirely. “No,” he said. He found Rayne again, pressing her hand to his almost hopefully. “What if there was something more?”

  “More?” she frowned.

  Desperate, he pulled on her arm tighter, so it couldn’t slip away. Would she understand, could she understand? “More,” he whispered. “When they find them, they destroy them.” But she didn’t see, how could she? She was already slipping away. He stared out the porthole. “The planet is dead. All the planets are dead.”

  “What?”

  There was no way to tell which planets were good and bad. “Yates. They bulldozed the entire thing.” He leapt off the bed and started pacing again.

  She blinked, swallowing heavily. Blinking again, she seemed to recover, or to forget. “You’re confused. I’ll bring some of your tea.”

  “I don’t want tea!” he shouted, louder than he meant to. The world was spinning out of control around him. Demons shrieked. “They’re going to destroy it. It’s all happening again, again, again!” He clutched his head in his Hans.

  “Gal, I —.”

  “Get out.”

  “I don’t understand,” she squeaked. “What about the unmarked planet? We can talk about it.”

  “Out!” He pointed to the door. She didn’t understand, and she wouldn’t.

  Rayne jumped, true terror across her stricken face. The room cast briefly in the light, and then darkness again as the door opened and shut coldly behind her fleeing frame.

  Gal spun on his heel, nearly bumping into Aaron who had come up behind him. “What’s got you so riled up, Galiant?” The demons had formed a weird audience, huddled together on the bed.

  Gal pushed Aaron out of the way with a grunt.

  “Come on.” Aaron paced behind him with a dog-eared grin. “I’m your friend. If you can’t tell your subconscious, who can you tell?”

  “No one.” Gal stared at the grey floor, revelling in the solid feel of it. But the floor changed, from grey threadbare carpet to brown cracked tile. He looked up. Impossibly, A barkeep stood behind a rough wooden bar. “What’s happening?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  “The stress is making you hallucinate,” Aaron explained. He slid into a seat at the small, rough hewn table tucked into a dark corner, easily picking up a handful of cards and joining the cadets around him. “Do you remember this day?”

  Gal stared. He’d lost all tack of the freightship and his room.

  “Second term, first year at the Academy.” Aaron pointed to his cadet uniform, as if he needed to remind Gal of the occasion. “We had been to Bo’s Bar more times than we could count, but this time was different. You were different. We had just returned from leave, just come back from Indaer, hadn’t even had a class yet.”

  “I don’t want to see this,” Gal said, stepping back.

  “You forget that I’ve known you your entire life. You were late when we left Indaer, almost missed the transport. You’d never been late in your life.”

  “My shuttle crashed, I told you that.”

  Aaron smiled sadly and shook his head. “You were hours late, almost a full day. We had made plans to meet in town the night before, but you showed up as the transport was about to leave. The Gal I knew could fix a tractor with his eyes closed, a shuttle wouldn’t have been that much harder. And besides, something had to have happened, otherwise what happened at Bo’s never would have happened.”

  The memory played out like a 3D vid infant of him. A younger version of himself played in the card game too, cards and chits and figurines strewn across the table. His friends laughed, sloshing their drinks.

  The lights in the room flickered, then went out for five seconds. When they came back on, the younger Gal was pressed up against the wall by a man in a dark mask, a laz-gun in his side. Young Gal stayed calm, talking quickly in hushed tones, and slowly, the revolutionary let him down, nodding in agreement.

  “Why are you making me remember this?”

  Aaron shrugged. “I’m not, but it must be important to you now.” He was suddenly standing beside Gal. “We should have fought them off. That was our duty as UEC cadets. But you talked to them. You joined them. I joined you, and so did the others. We didn’t know what was going on, not at all, but you seemed to. Seemed to know too well.” Aaron cocked his head, staring into Gal’s soul. “I died, Gal. Hermes and Andre and Coyne all died too. Something happened to you on Indaer. It changed you so that you saw things the rest of us couldn’t see. It changed you then, it changed you with the Augments, and it changed whatever is happening with this planet.”

  “I never forced you to stay,” he choked out. Gal had lead them all to their deaths without ever offering a true explanation, never the whole thing. He wasn’t even sure he understood it. He had encouraged them to follow what they believed was right, but they put their faith in him and his subconscious still carried the guilt.

  “This thing, it’s happening again. I want to know what. We deserve to know what.”

  “You’re right,” he told Aaron. “Something did happen that day the shuttle crashed, something that changed everything I thought I knew. But I can’t tell you. It isn’t safe.”

  Aaron frowned, back in the grey room of the tiny freightship. Demon’s crowded around gleefully.

  Gal whispered, “This is a secret too big.”

  “Bigger than all the others?”

  “Yes.”

  Aaron blew out a breath. “You keep too many secrets, Gal. They’re eating you up.” The demons drew their long faces into frowns, fangs showing from the corners of their mouths.

  Gal shook his head. He couldn’t, he just couldn’t. “You stayed with me all those years because you thought I was right. There’s a reason they killed Cornelius. Why they destroyed the Augments, why they’re paving over everything on Indaer. It isn’t safe. I have to protect you and Rayne
, everyone.”

  The demon’s backed away, somehow satisfied, if only temporarily.

  “We can’t let it happen again, over and over.”

  Aaron nodded, placing a firm hand on his shoulder. “And we won’t.”

  Gal gripped his friends arm. “We have to keep them away from the planet.”

  “It’s okay, Gal. We’re not too late.”

  “Promise me!” he cried.

  Aaron nodded, his expression drawn and tight with worry. “We’ll do whatever it takes.”

  FOUR

  “I’M NOT SAYING THAT I don’t trust you, but I see no reason to avoid the planet,” Leove said. “If I’m not mistaken, you wanted to go there initially. I don’t understand the change of heart.”

  Hoepe wiped the elbow of his surgical gown across his forehead, rolling the tight muscles in his shoulders at the same time. “I’m not saying I understand the reasoning either, but I know these people and trust their judgement.”

  His brother stood on the opposite side of the table, monitoring the patient’s vital signs. They had removed tracking chips from nearly all the rescued augments, and Hoepe’s hands worked easily through the motions.

  “You told me the captain suffers violent hallucinations.”

  “Suffered,” corrected Hoepe. “He has recovered. Besides, I didn’t mean the captain. I meant Sarrin.” Hoepe gently pulled a 1cm-square chip from the patient’s frontal lobe and passed it into a sterile dish that Leove held out. He glanced one last time at the display from the camera before he removed the laparoscope and began suturing. The procedure was finicky, but with the scope they could perform it with minimal invasiveness, making only a tiny hole in the cranium.

  “Inactive,” Leove commented as he studied the chip. They had only found one active chip, and that was the one Sarrin had pulled out of her own skull. The rest were quiet. Still, it was worth the risk of the anaesthesia and surgery to be sure the warship couldn’t track them with one again.

  “Finished,” announced Hoepe and he tied and cut the last suture.

  Leove nodded, and pulled the syringe of injectable anaesthetic from the IV port. Inhalant anaesthetic would have been preferred, but their supplies were limited.

  “I’ll call the next one,” said Hoepe.

  Leove sighed. “I think that’s enough for one day. We’ve done six already. And my back is starting to ache.”

  Hoepe frowned. “I think we should do another. No sense waiting if we are able to do it now.”

  “Brother, I’m sorry, I don’t think I can.”

  It was still strange to hear someone call him brother, and an unabashed smile crept up on Hoepe’s face every time he heard the word. “Are you well? I would still like to examine you for injuries from your time on Junk.”

  Leove shook his head. “No need, I was merely incarcerated. But I am tired and do not see the need to push myself.”

  “The warship could return at any moment. Do you want to put off removing the one chip that might be active and lead them here?”

  “The warship will likely not be surprised to find us here. But if we were to go elsewhere”— Leove quirked his eyebrows, surreptitiously mentioning the contentious planet—“it may be of increased importance.”

  “I see your logic. We will continue tomorrow.” Once again, Hoepe prayed he hadn’t misjudged Sarrin, but she had never been wrong before.

  The Augment on the table started to stir.

  “Then I will see you tomorrow. I have someone to meet for dinner,” said Leove.

  “I could join you,” Hoepe blurted, Kieran’s suggestion that what they relationship needed was time, and preferably time outside of the infirmary. “Adequate nutrition is important to maintaining proper functioning of body and mind.”

  “I’m afraid it is a social call, if you know what I mean.”

  Hoepe frowned; he didn’t. A meal was a biological necessity, he had never felt the need to seek out company for idle discourse. Not until his brother arrived, anyhow.

  The Augment patient recovered quickly from the anaesthetic, as they all did, their accelerated metabolisms making quick work of the drugs. Leove gave her aftercare instructions and sent her to a quiet room for rest.

  They cleaned the surgery in silence.

  “I don’t want it to come between us, Hoepe.”

  Hoepe frowned again — didn’t want what to come between them? “Nothing could,” he said, although an intense feeling of otherness and separation welled up in him, the same as it had been growing for the last week.

  “I am so pleased to have met you again.” Leove gripped Hoepe by the forearm, drawing him close. “We may have opinions that differ, but we’re still brothers.”

  A pleased smile spread on Hoepe’s face. But something caught his ear as it repeated in his mind. “Met again?”

  “Of course. We were seven years old when we were taken. Surely you must remember.”

  He shook his head.

  “Yes, of course you must.” A confused look spread across Leove’s features, mimicking Hoepe’s own. “The ramshackle apartment, mother’s root vegetable pies, father’s favoured collection of leisure equipment neither of us had any interest in.”

  “Not at all,” said Hoepe. He recalled only the white walls of Evangecore. He assumed he had been too young to remember anything else. “Seven?” he asked unbelievingly. He should have remembered something.

  Leove’s face fell in an almost unreadable manner. “Yes, seven.”

  “I don’t remember at all,” he admitted. “Do you… do you remember our parents, before they died?”

  Leove’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “Of course.”

  “How is that? I have no recollection of my life before we were taken to Evangecore. Not of you, not of our parents, our home, nothing.”

  “Oh.” Leove looked away, focussing on the ground. He scratched a spot on his arm in a gesture that Hoepe recognized as avoidance of a difficult topic. “I suspect it was intentional.”

  Hoepe gasped, the words hitting him hard in the gut. “What?”

  “Think. They had a facility full of orphan children on which they tested every parameter. They must have wanted to know what effect not having their parents would make on them. But everyone’s brain biology is different, everyone is preprogrammed to react to challenge in a certain way. And then we showed up, twins with identical backgrounds, identical brains, identical bodies…. You must see the research opportunity they had.”

  Hoepe forced his hand to return to motion, wiping the surgical table.

  “Martin and Laurie Fallows,” said Leove tentatively. “They were kind people. Independent, so we never had much. They survived the fever for a time.”

  “Did you remember me?” Hoepe blurted.

  “It was hazy. I couldn’t be sure if it was memories of me or of someone else.” He smiled a silly grin Hoepe was certain he had never made in his life. “Sounds spread now, doesn’t it? But we looked the same.”

  “So they let you remember our parents and me, while I forgot?”

  “I’ll tell you everything about them, if you’d like.”

  “You said they survived?”

  “Yes, they were patients in the hospital,” said Leove.

  “You knew them?” Leove bit his lip, and Hoepe realized he was shouting. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly, but a kernel of anger, foreign and uncharacteristic, flared. “How is it you had our parents, your memories, everything, while I was left with nothing?”

  Leove searched the ground again, Hoepe panting as he watched the identical and so very different man across from him. They were nothing alike. He had been fool to ever think it. And the worst part was the hole that had always been inside of him, temporarily patched, ripped open wide than ever.

  * * *

  Sarrin side-stepped, arms wrapped tight to her sides, avoiding the jostling of dozens of Augments as they moved down the corridor. Skinny arms with heavy dark barcodes waved, deceptively strong. Blue eyes
darted from one Augment to another, the corners crinkled instead of drawn, the light in them bright. There was chatter too — questions about the planet, about surviving the next few days, and even beyond. On top of their fear, their uncertainty and confusion, ran a different emotion: excitement, and above that, hope.

  Big, capital-letter-H-Hope.

  This was freedom, she realized. This was how they should live. And there was Hope that one day, they would.

  Breathing deep, she crossed the threshold into Engineering. Others passed around her, but Sarrin paused. Kieran had briefed her on the damage, but there was no way to imagine the complete disarray of burned conduits, hanging wires, and ship components in various states of reconstruction.

  It was too much, the monster dancing around, confused by the sounds and colours after so many days hiding. She longed to return to the safety of the room.

  Someone tugged on her coveralls, the shock of the touch shooting up her arm, even through the heavy fabric. She pulled away, breathing heavily as she warily eyed Thomas. “You okay?” he asked. She blinked twice in response.

  She’d known Thomas in the war, always appreciated his gentle yet firm nature. But more than anything, she appreciated the way he seemed to view her as a person no different from the rest, unlike the myriad of blue-eyed stares that descended on her now from around the engineering bay. Their curiosity tore into her, gazes carving pieces of her flesh for examination.

  The monster clawed at the edges of her vision, and she darted away, leaving Thomas in the centre of the room. Head down, she made her way to the engine room, retreating as far as she could before she was stopped by the utter jumble of displaced engine parts and open floor panels.

  Kieran had told her about the FTL too, about its melted wiring and the blackened conduits, the Kepheus Drive hanging free from its mount, the cracked screens and the broken pieces strewn across the floor, but nothing prepared her for the utter silence. The engine always hummed, sometimes out of tune when one of the thousands of parts was out of alignment, and it brought her comfort. But now, there was nothing.