Traitor Read online

  She stared quietly, aware of his approaching footsteps and his still racing heart, even before Kieran cleared his throat to speak. “We’ll fix it, hey.” When she turned, a smile was on his face, but not a real one. The expression underneath was unreadable, emotions kept silently to himself, and she found herself studying him.

  His bright eyes met hers, and her heart sped up. “I’m glad you’re here. Thank you for staying.”

  She had tried to get away, to slip through a wall panel while everyone on the bridge argued, but Kieran had slammed the panel shut before she could disappear. Fear rolled off of him then, much as it did now, the angry emotions rolling around the bridge pushing her to the edge. Dark tendrils licked at the corner of her mind, and she turned her gaze to the engine.

  “What was all that stuff about Twenty-seven?”

  She blinked. The nickname had stuck for many years, but she hadn’t realized the importance it seemed to hold for the Augments. After the day she attacked and killed twenty-seven guards, she became too dangerous to let loose, and she didn’t see any of the others again until Evangecore had been bombed and the war started.

  In the war, she learned that her clandestine leap into the observation station had grown entirely out of proportion, and the person who had done it became a legend, someone that kept them hopeful. They thought she could lead them to salvation, but she couldn’t keep anyone safe, not even Halud. She was the most dangerous thing on the ship.

  “I’ve heard them call you that before,” Kieran tried carefully. “What does it mean?”

  She shook her head, unwilling to bring back the memory. Kieran at least treated her like a normal human being, however naive it might be. Instead, she reached into her coverall pockets and removed a heavy spanner, a laz-gun, and a half-dozen knives from the canteen, holding them out.

  Kieran stared at the weapons in her hands, hanging in the space between them. Just as she started to fidget, deciding she had been wrong to reveal them and her dark habit of collecting weapons, he snorted. “O-kay.” He took them from her, a bemused grin spreading across his face. “You don’t happen to have a spare FTL in there, do you?”

  She — whatever possessed her — pretended to search through the pockets, drawing her hands out to show they were empty, shaking her head apologetically.

  Unexpected laughter burst from his lips, and her heart leapt. He used his thumb to wipe the corner of his eye. “I always thought you would be funny.”

  Her brow tightened in confusion, but her heart remained light, muscles on her face tightening in an unfamiliar pattern in an attempt to match his.

  He dropped the knives in a haphazard pile by the door and came back to stand beside the long engine casing. “But, really, what are we gonna do with this?” He proceeded to list the status of each component, but Sarrin shut out her conscious recognition of his voice, instead stepping forward to put her hands to the silent beast. She lost herself in the feel of it, in the diagrams that drew themselves in her mind trying solution after solution.

  Slowly, she became aware that Kieran had stopped speaking, and she looked to him, standing quietly in the corner, hands folded as he watched her.

  “What are we gonna do, Sar?”

  She pressed her lips together. The diagrams had failed to yield a solution for the engine.

  “Are you sure it’s a good idea to stay here? That planet seems awfully tempting. If its trajectory keeps coming this way, and if it’s stable and not too unpredictable, I think we should go. We can fix the hull plating on the way and land on the surface — it’ll make repairs easier.”

  Maybe it would be better. The readings had been ideal for all she knew about planetary exploration. It even had an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.

  “I know what you said about Gal, but….” His hand brushed over his face, pulling at the dark circles under his eyes. “I guess it’s hard.”

  “I know.” But they couldn’t go to the planet, not if Gal said no. Halud trusted him. Gal was their best chance. She knew it as well as she knew anything, although it defied everything her logical brain shouted at her.

  “The warship will come back,” he said. “I don’t know what the others are thinking, but there’s no way to get the ship ready for that kind of fight. Even fully repaired, we wouldn’t stand much chance. Our only option, I think, is to jump the second they show up. But that means we need a working FTL.”

  She nodded, casting her gaze once again over the long room of ruined parts, even though she had memorized and catalogued each burnt component the second she had walked into the room.

  “I’ve been thinking about sourcing the energy for the gravity-generator from somewhere else in order to bypass the Kepheus Drive altogether. I just don’t know where.”

  Her eyes closed, but the diagrams were blank. “The engine is the only way to get enough power to grav-jump.”

  His exhausted sigh rested heavy on her heart. “I know. I just don’t think the Kepheus can take any more jumps, or repairs. It barely held together before.”

  “I’ll see.”

  “Thanks.”

  She nodded confidently, even though she already knew it was impossible. Perhaps there would be a way to repair the drive or construct a new one, but gravity-jump drives were sophisticated pieces of equipment, each component specially designed and absolutely necessary for the ship to be able to bend space and travel instantaneously across galaxies.

  “I’m going to go check on the others,” he said, turning back into the main engineering bay.

  Sarrin ran her hand across the engine again, intent on finding a solution. Only, she wasn’t alone for long. A set of short, quick footfalls approached. “Twenty-seven?” The Augment, Rami, stood directly behind her. When she turned and met his gaze, it was intense and eager. “I came to talk about the warship, I want to help.”

  She blinked in surprise, an unintelligible sound escaping her mouth.

  He pulled out a tablet, activating a set of diagrams. “I thought, if we could approach their ventral hull, the access to the hangars is there and would make an ideal docking port for the ship.”

  Blackness pulled at her, cutting away everything but the diagram. The monster raised itself up with glee, scheming and planning. “What?” she managed, pushing through the darkness.

  “You know,” said Rami, “for when they return and we attack.”

  She shoved the monster down; even it knew attacking the warship was insane. “No.”

  “Okay.” His voice shook, suddenly uncertain, and he flipped the tablet to a new diagram. “There’s also the wings and the large thruster manifolds. The ion discharge disrupts the targeting sensors.”

  Her breath caught, the monster scheming, attack diagrams unfolding in her head.

  “-Ello? Twenty-seven?” A hand flashed in front of her face. Startled she realized Rami still stood in front of her. “We’re going to attack the warship, aren’t we?” he asked.

  She blinked, glancing at the door into the main bay. Is that what they thought? “No.” It was suicide. The stack of knives caught her eye, her vision narrowing.

  “But… but…,” he stammered, pausing to frown at the floor. “You’re Twenty-seven, aren’t you?”

  A loud drawl caught their attention from the door: “Hey, Rami.” Sarrin stumbled back, gasping as Rami’s intense stare left her. Kieran strode towards them, his jaw clenched but smile firmly in place. “Whaddya got for me?” He reached for the tablet.

  Rami yanked it out of his grasp, turning back to Sarrin. “Surely, the weakness in the communications array?”

  She shook her head, gazing at the floor. The warship had no weaknesses, it was a perfect system.

  “What do you mean?”

  The monster took her away again, reminding her she was wrong. The warship did have a weakness — one she had painted in once she realized what the UEC researchers were having her construct. Its multiphasic shields kept all energy-weapons at bay. It’s reinforced duranium hull made physical weapo
ns all but useless. But the gravity jump drive was the largest the Central Army had ever built. That made it the most vulnerable, the delicate resonance grids unstable. A pulse of the right frequency would disrupt the plasma stream and tear the warship end-to-end.

  They wouldn’t even have to get close.

  The exploding ship would have enough time to sense the disruption and jettison the computer core. All they would have to do was retrieve it and they would have access to all the information the warship carried: information about other Augments, information about Halud.

  She turned to Kieran, catching his eye. He met her with a single eyebrow raised, his head tilted to the side — he could already see she had a plan. “Harmonics,” she said.

  His brow wrinkled together. “We would need to know the frequency.”

  “We do,” she assured him. She had designed the gravity drive too.

  One eyebrow raised again in curiosity, but he accepted the fact without her having to explain. “And the generator?”

  “Electro-pulse,” she said. “Simple.” An effectively tuned electro-torpedo would do, it wouldn’t even have to penetrate their shields — better actually if the frequency was absorbed by the shield to vibrate all around the ship. Easy then: she would build a weapon. To rip the warship apart. To kill everyone on board.

  “What’s going on?” Rami’s eyes darted between them.

  Kieran ignored the Augment, catching her eye again, his expression drawn. “Do you really want to?”

  “What are you saying?” Rami demanded. He reached out in frustration, his hand landing on her arm, energy searing her flesh.

  The monster flared to life — Rami’s grip filling her with cold darkness — and blocked her vision completely. An unknowable time later, the hand left her, and she stumbled back, crashing into the engine casing.

  Rami shouted, “Hey!” He glared at Kieran, pulling his arm from the engineer’s grasp.

  “Don’t touch her,” Kieran said.

  “What?” spat Rami. “Don’t touch me. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Look”—Kieran held up a hand, the other in his coveralls pocket, tracing the auto-syringe—“trust me on this one. Just don’t touch her. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

  Rami thrust a finger at Sarrin without looking, his glare pushed right into Kieran’s face. “That’s Twenty-seven, I know exactly who she is.”

  Sarrin blinked, but her memory was eidetic. It was a face she had never seen before, not at this age or any other.

  “Come on, Rami,” Kieran said quietly. “Maybe she’s not who you think.”

  For a minute, Rami relented, his shoulders came down and his features softened. He looked at Sarrin, blue eyes soft, filled with unfettered adoration.

  Her own eyes went wide, and she pressed into the engine casing at her back. Rami looked at the same way Halud did: full of hope, full of expectations she could never meet.

  Kieran reached a hand between them, taking Rami by the shoulder and starting to turn him to the door.

  But instead of going, Rami scowled, his brow hooding darkly over the lines around his eyes. He looked between Kieran and Sarrin, and she could nearly feel the turbulent thoughts that wheeled around his head. His arm came up fast, pushing Kieran so he stumbled across the floor, landing on his back. Rami turned to Sarrin, his heaving chest and an accusing finger still pointed at Sarrin. “No, I know you. What’s going on?”

  Sarrin clenched her eyes shut, squirming away. Her heart beat too fast. Even the monster didn’t have an escape from these expectations.

  “Twenty-seven?”

  Kieran stood, she felt him as much as saw him stalking towards Rami, outmatched but it had never deterred him before. The monster flared to life, suddenly seeing a threat it could handle, calculating the precision it would need to eliminate Rami while minimizing damage to Kieran.

  Grant appeared in the door, changing the entire scenario and interrupting the movement diagram the monster outlined in her head. “I heard shouting,” he said. “Everything okay?”

  Sarrin had never felt more glad to see him than now.

  Rami tensed, anger boiling inside of him and crashing across the room. “Something’s not right here.” The monster flared, still on high alert. Muscles coiled, preparing to strike.

  Grant scanned the scene quickly. “Come on, Rami.” He kept his voice light despite the darkness in his eyes. “Let’s go check on the thrusters.”

  “No.” Rami stepped even closer, so he was standing toe-to-toe with Sarrin, and she flattened herself as much as possible, squeezing her eyes shut even as the monster whispered to her. “I know you,” he said. “Why are you being like this?”

  Grant wrapped an arm around Rami, forcibly pulling him away. “Don’t be a fool.” He cast a wary glance at Sarrin.

  Rami snarled, but he let Grant pull him to the door, glancing over his shoulder. “That is Twenty-seven, right? That filthy common is doing something to her!”

  The dark tendrils retreated as Grant and Rami disappeared into the main engineering bay. She found she was holding a length of broken con-steel and dropped it to the floor. Her hands uncurled, blood dug under the fingernails and seeping from her palms.

  “You okay?” Kieran asked. He glanced behind him at the empty doorway. “What was that?”

  She blinked furiously, pushing back the last of the black fog. “He wanted me to attack the warship. He thought we could win in a direct fight.”

  “And could you?”

  Maybe. Probably. Definitely yes, the monster whispered. She shrugged in response to Kieran’s question.

  “But that’s what you agreed to do. To destroy it by overloading their gravity drive. Right?”

  Slowly she nodded.

  He bent down in front of her, not touching but close, his green eyes staring up at her intently. “Sarrin, are you sure you want to do that?”

  She looked away. It was brutal. Of course it was. But she knew how to kill, not save. In Evangecore, the children cheered because she had killed twenty-seven guards the day she launched herself into the observation tower. That killing had brought them hope.

  Maybe destroying the warship would bring them hope. Maybe she could do some good. It oddly brought her hope. “The warship will have information about Halud.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the other Augments.”

  He frowned. “We already collected a database from the Comrade.”

  She shook her head, recalling the dark, feverish eternity she spent sneaking aboard the warship with Halud, the strange and familiar presence aboard. She had been too wrecked to notice it at the time, but the database they had collected had transferred too quickly, abnormally small. “That was the database they wanted us to find. This will be everything, even what’s meant only for the Speakers’.”

  He gulped audibly, but he nodded anyway. “I’ll help you however I can.”

  FIVE

  HALUD CLIMBED THE FAMILIAR STAIRS through the familiar halls. He had lived in the Gods’ compounds since he was a teenager. Since Hap had risen to First Speaker and named him as his Poet. Graceful paintings lined the walls — the work of the Artist Laureate — and gentle music tinkled in the background — from the Musician Laureate.

  The only unfamiliar thing was the armed escort and the laz-rifle that continually poked him in the back.

  This was his home, and had been since they evacuated Earth and built the new compound four years ago. At the top of it were the offices of the Five Speakers — direct descendent of the Gods who had lived among them millennia ago, and who took the mantle of leading the folk. The First Speaker — the leader — was Hap Lansford, the descendant of Strength. He was the youngest, the same age as Halud, in his early thirties. The others had nominated him First Speaker when he ascended after his father’s death. They had wanted him to be First because the ongoing war needed the power of Strength most.

  There were four others: Faith, Knowledge, Fortitude, and Prudence.
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  The Dome was the only floor above the Speakers’ offices. It was perfectly round, a complete glass hemisphere designed to give the Speakers full view of the heavens and of the folk. They were the only ones allowed in the Dome, the place where they could be almost at one with the Gods.

  Halud’s old office sat below the Speakers’ along with the other Laureates. The guards pushed him past it unceremoniously.

  The receptionist, Joyce, smiled brightly, looking up from her overly large console. “Hello, Halud. It’s good to see you again. You look refreshed.”

  Halud frowned, his steps faltering. He had been gone for weeks, surely everyone knew what he had done.

  “How was your holiday?” she asked sweetly.

  Why would she think he had been on holiday? He had defied the Gods, only death was certain in his future.

  The guard stepped in front, obscuring Halud’s view of the receptionist. “Ma’am, he has a meeting with Mr. Lansford.”

  “Oh, yes! I did see that.” She checked the appointment block on her console. “Go right in then, he’s expecting you.” She smiled again.

  The guards pushed him forward, up the round staircase to the circular landing. Five doors lined the walls, each equally spaced, marked only with a symbol specific to the Gods they represented.

  Memory moved Halud’s feet to Hap Lansford’s door, his hand sliding easily over the familiar handle. The office was unlocked. Halud gave his customary knock, as he had hundreds of times before, and stepped in without waiting for an answer. The guard shut the door behind him.

  The walls were decorated — one featuring a full-length mural depicting the victories of Strength, the opposite hosting trophies of unrecognizable creatures, perhaps once real, perhaps mythical. Over the door was a staff, a six-foot long steel club that was said to have belonged to the God himself when he walked the Earth with men. It weighed over one-hundred kilos and Hap had lifted it once, with great effort, when he had been inaugurated to his role of Speaker. The desk was a dark mahogany — also an ancient artefact, the wood long extinct — riskily saved from the imploding Earth. Halud took a seat in one of the plush chairs, and waited for Hap to turn from the window and face him.