Traitor

by C R MacFarlane

  Every fibre of his being screamed at him to go over there and hug her and tell her he loved her and make her come home. Or never leave in the first place.

  But he couldn’t. Lauren was dead. If she wasn’t, she be a hundred-and-seventy-two. Not a child.

  “Kieran, come on,” she called, stomping her foot playfully. “Where are you Kare-Bear?”

  The vision was cruel. There was nothing under the stars he wanted more than to see his sister again. But it didn’t work that way, you had something for a time, and then it was gone.

  The Lauren-vision set up a tea party at a table that appeared to shoot out from the ground, complete with a collection of toy-animal guests. He had to laugh a little bit — their mother insisted he play with her ridiculous tea set, even though he hated it. Truth be told though, he loved sitting there, conversing and sharing scones with his stuffed teddy. Heinrich Bear always said the most outrageous things.

  A rustle in the trees drew his attention, and he turned away reluctantly. Sarrin appeared, slowing as she ran out of the woods. “Kieran,” she said, panting just the slightest. “I’m glad I found you.”

  An unpleasant thought crossed his mind. “Are you real?”

  “Yes.”

  He couldn’t trust it. He reached his hand out to test.

  She jumped back. “Don’t.” Her eyes were wild and her face flushed.

  He sighed in relief. “It is you.”

  Sarrin turned her head, her eyes falling on Lauren. “Oh,” she said, watching the vision as Lauren poured imaginary tea. “I’m sorry, Kieran, she’s not real.”

  “I know,” he smiled bitterly. “It sure is tempting to go over and just have a cuppa though.”

  She fidgeted a careful distance away. “I saw Halud.”

  “That is cruel. I’m sorry, Sarrin.” He chanced to touch her on the shoulder gently.

  She pulled away after a second, her face unusually flushed. “We have to find the others.”

  “Gal warned us it was dangerous, but it all seemed so perfect.” He took one last look at Lauren before turning away from the vision for good. “Do you think its something in the air, a hallucinogenic compound or…?”

  “Or the planet itself,” she finished.

  “Yeah. We have to tell the others.” In front of them was nothing but a swarm of trees, the path gone. “How do we get back?”

  Sarrin shrugged. “We see what it is we want most.”

  “Okay. Then I want nothing more than to get back to the ship. To the real ship.”

  The trees shifted before their eyes, a path appearing between them.

  * * *

  Gal watched as Rayne disappeared into the woods. She was moving quickly, stealthily, and she’d managed to go before he had a chance to stop her. He rubbed his face in his hand, before moving to get up from where he lay on the picnic blanket, the warm impression of Rayne still beside him. His foot kicked the basket as he rolled over. There was a familiar tink and slosh as it shifted.

  He paused, hating himself for what he knew was there. His hands reached forward and opened the basket. The label on the bottle was an elegant rich red with golden swirls. JinJiu. Warm.

  There was a cup on the ground beside him. He had the bottle open and the cup full before he even realized what he was doing.

  It would be so easy to just forget it all, to disappear into that oblivion where nothing mattered so everything was fine. So easy to forget about the past, and the things he’d done. So easy to forget how he ended up here of all places.

  Ironic, really, he’d had his first taste of JinJiu when he sat in Hap’s prison, after he visited Cordelia the first time. His lips split into a wry grin, the cup pressed up against them. In that prison, his future seemed sealed: death by settlement colony. The Gods would never kill anyone, but they could let you die. The JinJiu numbed the pain and the fear just enough to get through the day.

  But then Hap, his old friend from the Academy, gave him a pardon and a ship and a freight run. Death by another means. The pain was still there, and Gal numbed it with anaesthetic, because there were things Hap had never pardoned him for, things he had never discovered, that still haunted him.

  Gal swirled the liquid around in the cup, inhaling the sweet, spicy aroma. He savoured the warmth of the cup in his hands. He even admired the honey coloured glow of the liquid.

  And then, with shaking hands, he dumped it on the ground.

  “Cordelia,” he shouted.

  She appeared behind him, her skirts rustling just enough to alert him. She eyed him warily.

  “Where is Rayne?”

  Cordelia stepped forward, her hands held out, palm up. “All you want is an escape, Gal. It could be here.”

  “No,” he said, grinding his teeth. “Where is she?”

  “She’s with her father.”

  He tilted his head back. “You didn’t.”

  “The people here, they’re scarred. Same as you. They just want what comforts them.”

  “Take me to her. Now.”

  Cordelia paused, her mouth open as though to respond, but then she thought better of it. She nodded and led him into the woods. The path opened into a small clearing and Cordelia stepped aside.

  “Rayne?” he shouted.

  His first officer was already walking toward him, a grin spreading ear to ear. “Gal, you’ll never believe it.”

  He glanced warily at Cordelia.

  “The general is here, my father.” She spun around. And there, in all his regal glory, sat General Nairu, first commander of Strength’s army. His dead brown eyes as hard as ever. “He’s arranged a pardon for all of us,” Rayne said. “And the Speakers want us to re-establish this base, make it a home for the Augments.”

  Cordelia beamed, taking Rayne’s hand. Then she shot Gal a look of defiance.

  “Rayne, it’s not real,” he said.

  “What? Of course it is. He tracked our ship here.”

  She was so excited, how could he take it away? After all he’d put her through, she was smiling. “Rayne, you can’t track a ship through FTL jumps.”

  She blinked in confusion.

  The sound of breaking branches and quick footsteps drew their attention. Even Cordelia looked surprised.

  Sarrin emerged first, followed by Kieran. Sarrin’s eyes danced over everything, calculating.

  Gal gulped.

  “I want a clear answer on what’s goin’ on?” Kieran said, his eyes settling first on the general in his pristine uniform and then on Gal.

  Sarrin’s gaze fixed on Cordelia.

  Cordelia stepped back, shaking. She turned to run, making it several steps before Kieran yelled, ‘Stop,’ and she was forced to freeze. “Please don’t be mad.” She turned slowly, her voice shaking.

  Gal watched Sarrin shift uncomfortably. Kieran looked tired and pale. Rayne peered between all of them. “Tell me what’s going on with this planet,” Kieran said slowly, “why I saw my dead sister?”

  Rayne gasped, turning to him.

  Cordelia sobbed, collapsing to the ground. “I just wanted you all to be happy. I never have visitors.” The sky turned a pale grey, and a light rain started around them.

  “Cordelia, stop raining,” Gal said. “I want it to stop raining. I much prefer sun.”

  The raindrops stopped, some melting in mid-air, and they were bathed once again in bright, warm light.

  Kieran’s eyes met his, and Gal knew there was no hiding it anymore. “What’s goin’ on?” Kieran asked again.

  “I’m just so lonely,” Cordelia said. “Ever since Cornelius….” Her hand came up, wiping away the snot from her nose. Gal glanced at the sobbing woman in front of him, and pulled her up by the elbow. “I don’t want you to go. Please stay with me.” Cordelia’s face melted, morphing into another woman that Gal didn’t know. But Kieran did, jumping back with a yelp.

  “Stop.” Gal shook her, and she changed back into the colonial woman. There was no hiding it now. “None of it is real.”


  “What?” Rayne gasped.

  “I’m sorry, Rayne. Not the grass, not the trees, and certainly not the general.”

  Her head whipped around as the apparition of General Nairu blinked out of existence. “Daddy?” she wailed. She turned back to Gal. “I don’t understand, where did he go?”

  He swallowed heavily. For a second, he considered telling Cordelia to bring the General back. But it was better this way.

  Kieran, for his part, had started to grin, his eyes darting all around. He really was a lunatic. He looked at Cordelia. “You’re the planet. None of it is what we see.”

  “How is it possible?” Sarrin asked, coldly.

  He studied the Augment and wondered how she could not see it.

  Cordelia still sobbed on the ground, a light drizzle falling just around her.

  “Gal?” Rayne sniffed.

  He would have to start from the beginning. Stalling, he searched, finding an overly convenient boulder to sit on before his legs collapsed. “I was in Exploration. I found Cordelia and her companion, Cornelius, during a routine survey mission three years ago. Two planets, absolutely perfect for our needs. They hit every criterion for habitability, and were gorgeous too. But they don’t make perfect planets. You learn that in Exploration, there is always a compromise for habitability. We soon realized these were no normal bodies — the planets seemed to sense our needs, and suddenly things would appear, things that we were thinking about wanting. We learned they were not planets at all.

  “They had travelled far from their home on their own journey of exploration. But they thought we were interesting and wanted to study us. They said their natural form isn’t recognizable or understandable to humans, so they took our memories and created something that seemed like the best fit. And the person you see in front of you is just a representation, a mouthpiece that we would understand. Isn’t that right, Cordelia?”

  She winced, wrapping her arms tightly around herself before she nodded.

  The long silence was broken when Rayne shifted. “There was a second planet?”

  “Yes.” This was it, the heart of the matter, the moment Gal had been fighting since the Ishash’tor’s scanners first showed him the planet. “It was destroyed.” He waited for it to sink in. “The mission returned to Etar. I was eager to tell the Speakers about a planet that had everything we needed and could make whatever we wanted. Cordelia and Cornelius had been the ones to suggest it. The arrangement couldn’t be permanent, of course, but they thought the idea of humans living on them for a few hundred years while they explored our galaxy could be fun and entertaining. And we were in need, so much need after Earth was lost.

  “Some of the team was scared, they didn’t know what to think of something they couldn’t understand, something that didn’t fit into the litanies of the Gods and their Speakers. They thought it was some demon-magic, and they realized that they were tempted to stay on the planet instead of fulfilling their duty to the Speakers.” He looked directly at Cordelia, who still sat under a cloud of rain. “They decided the beings were trying to trap them. And they convinced Hap of it too. The Speakers labelled the planets a threat. Strength decreed the beings should be destroyed. I couldn’t convince him otherwise, although I tried.”

  Gal took a deep breath, seeing only Cordelia as he spoke. “There was nothing I could do, but it was my mission, my find, so I felt I had to go with them. Maybe I could get a message to the planets, get them to flee before we arrived. But there was no way. The weapon destroyed Cornelius.” Now that he’d started, he had to say it all, the demons pouring free. “Cordelia, I’m so sorry. You have to know I did everything I could. I destroyed the ship’s weapons, overloaded the wiring and melted half the systems beyond repair. I nearly blew the whole ship up. But I was too late. He was gone. I’m sorry. I tried.”

  For the first time, Cordelia lifted her head. She looked up at him coldly. “No, you’re not.”

  He inhaled sharply, his chest already fixing to explode.

  “Cornelius is gone. I’m trapped in this awful galaxy forever. Alone, by myself.”

  “Cordelia, I’m so sorry.” He reached out for her. “I never wanted any of this to happen. I didn’t think, I didn’t know.”

  She started to cry again, horrible wracking sobs. Rain poured from the sky.

  “If I’d thought for a second this was how they would react…. You were meant to be wondrous, a saviour. I knew they were afraid of anything that was different, but I didn’t see how afraid.”

  “He’s gone,” she shrieked. “I’m all alone. All. A-lone.”

  Gal sat back, uncertain what to do next. It was all his fault, and there wasn’t anything he could do.

  Kieran appeared at her side, his hand on Cordelia’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I know how much it hurts to lose someone you care about.” She looked to the engineer, nodding along with him, and then she collapsed, throwing herself into his arms. Kieran flashed Gal a concerned look. “But you need to be with your friends. Go home, be with them, not us.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. Cornelius and I were travelling together — it only works with two. I could never travel that far by myself. I needed him.” Cordelia sniffed, burying herself in Kieran’s arms.

  Sarrin held a particularly angry expression on her face as she stepped forward. “You tried to trap us here. To trick us.”

  “I was all alone,” sniffed Cordelia. “I just wanted someone to talk to.”

  “You showed me my brother.”

  Kieran still held Cordelia. “You let her believe Halud was here, but he’s in trouble, he needs our help. You were going to stop us from that. Imagine if your Cornelius was somewhere, and you were being kept from him.”

  “I wouldn’t like that at all.” Cordelia paled, pulling away from Kieran. She stood, dusting off her smock.

  The woods parted again, this time filling the clearing with dozens of soft running footsteps. Grant, running in front, stopped short. The clearing had expanded to contain nearly a hundred Augments. “What is this?” he said.

  Gal stared, bewildered at all the Augments. Three times as many as they had arrived with. “Cordelia,” he admonished her. She looked at him like a sullen child, but he shook his head firmly.

  She sighed, dozens of people fading away, leaving only the ones they had come to know in the last week standing spread out in the clearing.

  Grant spun around. “What did you do to them?”

  “They weren’t real,” said Gal.

  “No, no, no!” Grant advanced on Cordelia. “She’s not alone. There’s a research facility here. We found all the Augments.”

  Kieran stepped forward, putting a hand on Grant’s arm, stopping him. “It was an illusion,” he said. “We all got tricked by something. It’s over now.”

  “What?” Grant sunk down, squatting with his head in his hands. “I don’t understand.”

  “We’ve all seen what we wanted to see most,” said Kieran. “I’m sorry it wasn’t real.”

  “My friends…,” started Grant, then he sighed, dropping his head again. “I knew it was too easy.” His gaze fixed on Cordelia. “Her?”

  Kieran nodded. “It’s taken care of.”

  Gal turned to Cordelia now.

  “I’ll let your people go. But please, don’t let anyone tell anyone about me, I don’t want someone else to come.”

  “Of course. You understand we need to leave immediately.”

  She nodded sullenly.

  “Kieran, get the ship in order. Only the absolutely essential repairs. I want us off this planet today.”

  Kieran turned, a path opening for him. He left, the others following, ambling slowly, confusedly, after him.

  “Daddy?” Rayne said softly behind him, gazing into the woods. She hadn’t moved, still staring at the rock where the vision of the general had sat.

  He stepped up behind her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders gently. “I’m sorry, Rayne. It was just a vision. None of it wa
s real.”

  She nodded bravely and sniffed. “He will understand though, when we tell him. Right?”

  Gal sighed. In all the time he had known the general, he had never once seen him bend a rule or change his mind. “I don’t know, Rayne. But if anyone can convince him, it’s you.”

  She quivered.

  He kissed the top of her head. “You should go along with the others.”

  She nodded, wiping her eyes, even as she left him and walked down the path. The forest gradually opened up so Gal, alone on the hill, could watch them descend into the meadow where the ship sat.

  “I never blamed you, Gal,” Cordelia said, suddenly beside him again. “I know what the UECs did to you, I know you did what you could against them. But I had hoped you would visit. It’s rare to meet a person like you, good to your very core.”

  He stared at her, the words echoing in his head. But she was only telling him what he most wanted to hear. The truth was, he wasn’t good at all.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “KIERAN, ARE YOU IN HERE?” a woman’s voice called

  Kieran slid out from under the impulse manifold. His breath caught as he saw Lauren, the same age she’d been when she left the Observer ship, standing in the doorway. He forced himself to breathe, his heart thumping erratically in his chest. Staring, he swallowed several times in his dry throat before his mind cleared itself. “Hi, Cordelia.”

  Not-Lauren smiled at him and came into the engine room.

  “Can you make yourself look different — not like her, I mean.”

  She frowned, and then her face and body melted into the woman-shape he had come to know as Cordelia.

  He breathed a sigh of relief.

  She flopped down, sitting on part of an open panel, her knees curled up almost to her chin. “I’d give anything to see Cornelius again,” she said. “I thought you would like to see her.”

  “You’re right, I would. But not like this — it’s not real. I have my memories, and that’ll have to be enough.”

  She nodded a few times in understanding — but was it, how could he know what she felt? She wasn’t even human, a fact that fascinated him. IT was wroth further investigation — the things she’d seen, how far she’d travelled, how long — if only he weren’t so tired and admittedly angry, and if Gal hadn’t given him explicit instructions to stay away from her.