“Red sparrow to purple and brown sparrow, it doesn’t matter because there’s no such thing as aliens in the first place,” Sorano corrected.
“BY THE THRONE! Clear the line, all of you!” Nariko barked as she reached the gates of the Cathedral and handed the child over to her grateful mother. Nariko gritted her teeth. She felt like screaming. Screaming at nothing, at something, at everything. She fought to keep herself still.
Nariko saw flashes of light coming from the north ridge and turned just in time to feel the thud of distant artillery fire. The first shell smashed into the Cathedral, splintering the enormous archway and shattering the stained glass on all sides. The shockwave picked Nariko up off of her feet, but there was no noise, the pressure causing the cilia in her ears to lay flat and register nothing. Nariko spun silently in the air, land, sand, and sky cartwheeling before her until she came crashing down to the ground.
For several moments Nariko fought to stand up. Bits of masonry and dirt landed noiselessly around her as she fought to free her hidden weapons from inside her cloak.
When Nariko finally got to her feet, she could see the remnants of the archway crashing sideways against the ruined gate. The screams of terror from the people inside were strange and warbley as her senses returned. As if in answer to their plight, the sky above the Cathedral changed to a golden yellow as a new barrier formed and descended down around the Great Cathedral. Nariko looked to the south and could see that Aka and Kuroi squads were setting up an effective barricade around the entrance to the Temple of Sanctity, but as she ran to join them something made her pause and look back.
There, at the gate, the barrier had descended down until it struck the ruined archway leaning across it. This left a triangular shaped hole between the top of the leaning archway and the ground, as tall as a person at the widest end. Through the hole Nariko could see the people huddled inside, with only a handful of shrine maidens to protect them.
Fusho!
“Okay, new plan,” Nariko ordered as she ran to the hole. “We’ve got a gap in the barrier; we’ll have to defend it until reinforcements arrive.”
“Who said that? Was it blue sparrow?”
“Just drop the sparrow thing, we all know who you are, Taka!”
Nariko ran up to the gap and was quickly joined by Sakurako.
“Hurry inside with us,” beckoned one of the shrine-maidens from within.
“I wish I could,” Nariko answered. “We’ll bottleneck them here as best we can, have your sisters attend to the wounded inside.”
“On whose authority?”
Nariko paused for a moment, unsure how to answer.
“We’re with the Confederate Marshals,” Sakurako announced boldly, her hands erupting in blue witch fire.
“Uh, right away,” the shrine-maiden said, ducking her head back inside.
Nariko prepared her weapons, a pair of ceramic blades. She spun the left one as best she could in her injured hand. Already hundreds of traitors were pouring into the catacombs through the mausoleum to the east.
“So, we’re with the Marshal’s eh?” Nariko commented. “That’s playing it pretty bold, don’t you think?”
“It’s an old mind-trick I learned. Make your hands catch on fire and people will be startled enough to believe pretty much anything you say.”
Nariko glanced down at her burned hand in anger. “I see.”
A great call rose up from the other side of the plaza; thousands of discordant voices that made the air feel sickly and stale. “For Power and Glory!” the traitors roared.
Without bidding, the civilians inside the Cathedral shouted their defiant response. “For the Luminarch!”
Sakurako shouted along with them, but Nariko could not make herself join in.
The traitors charged across the plaza, most heading south toward the Temple of Sanctity, the rest heading for the breach in the barrier. The traitors came in all shapes and sizes, no two dressed or armed alike. Some bounded on long insectizoid legs, others flying aloft on great leathery wings. Still others slid across the ground leaving trails of thick mucus.
Aka and Kuroi squads opened fire, their weapons tearing great chunks out of the traitor ranks.
From within the traitor ranks a sorcerer released a stream of green fire directly at Nariko, incinerating several of his comrades in his attempt to strike at her first. Sakurako responded with a jet of blue flame of her own, which deflected the blast skyward.
Witchcraft and sorcery really do seem indistinguishable at times.
Nariko charged forward as the first traitor approached. He was bloated and pallid, his arms ending in large rusty curved sickles. Nariko ducked beneath a clumsy swing and slashed upwards, severing his limb at the elbow, worms and rotten blood spraying in all directions. The sickle fell to the ground, its tip scratching against Nariko’s calf. Undaunted the traitor swung down at her with his remaining limb. Nariko blocked his sickle with her blade, but his superior strength knocked her to the ground.
“Stay down,” Sakurako warned as she finished her incantation. Purifying blue fire leapt out from her hands, engulfing the traitor and a dozen of those that followed him. Their silhouettes within the flames disintegrated completely, leaving no trace of their existence as the flames died out.
I have to get up.
Nariko tried to spring to her feet, but a horrible cramp in her leg brought her back down to her knees. Glancing down at her leg, Nariko could see that the scratch had already festered into a fist-sized wound of dripping puss.
Nariko forced herself to her feet and screamed past the pain as she put her full weight back on her leg.
You traitors disgust me.
An amphibian-skinned traitor leapt straight at Nariko. Rather than stepping out the way, she pointed her blades straight at him and smiled with satisfaction as he impaled himself onto her swords.
Out of the corner of her eye, Nariko spotted several traitor tanks walking into position at the far end of the plaza.
“I can’t stop a tank,” Sakurako warned into her communicator.
“Working on it, brown sparrow,” Sorano responded.
On their hill west of the Cathedral, Sorano took out a spike driver and pinned the second leg of the bipod directly into the bedrock while Taka finished attaching the third length onto the unreasonably long barrel. It was Sorano’s little baby.
Taka’s wings twitched as she peeked through her viewfinder.
“What amateurs! The suds are setting fire to the graveyard and the mausoleum.”
Taka put down her rangefinder and pulled the lasing material out of its case, a thin rod of gray material only as thick as a twig, but weighing several tons. It was encased in a series of anti-gravity locks, which was the only possible way to move it around.
“It’s such a beginner’s mistake. Always pillage BEFORE you burn,” Taka criticized as she loaded the rod and closed the breech. “Shouldn’t we make a plan in case they head our way?”
“I got your plan right here,” Sorano said as she put her eye up to the rangefinder and grabbed the trigger. “Let’s kill them all before they get the idea.”
The discharge of energy from Sorano’s weapon on the east hill was so bright that it could be seen for miles in all directions. The lance of pure silver struck the lead traitor tank, puncturing its metal torso and bursting out the other side. The beam then struck the second tank, burning off its legs and lower carriage. The third tank had hunkered low, preparing to fire on the gap in the barrier, so the beam caught the engine housing on the backside, tearing it to pieces in the wake of the blast.
The beam continued on, undiminished, until finally striking the distant mountain range, where it burned a meter-wide hole through the mountain before breaking out the other side and roaring off into space.
“That was so kawaii!” Taka exclaimed, fluttering in a loop-de-loop in the air as she witnessed the destruction.
“I call it ‘The Sorano Special,’ for short,” Sorano boasted.
“The super-dynamic, wide range, wonderful and beautiful, yet unbelievable cannon.”
Taka paused to look at her squad mate.
“That is a horrible name,” she criticized. “I LOVE IT!”
Sorano’s response was cut short by a whiz of air and the wet thud of impact as a high-powered rifle round hit her in the chest. She fell back groaning as Taka darted over to catch her.
“How bad are you hit?” Taka grunted as she pulled the gasping Sorano behind the weapon.
Sorano choked, coughing up black blood. “I think my secondary heart is okay.”
Taka moved to apply a medical patch, but Sorano’s blood had already hardened to seal the exit and entry wounds. “I didn’t hear a muzzle-blast. Where did it come from?”
A second round nicked the top of the Sorano Special, the bullet impacting just inches above Taka, who hunkered down even further into the cover.
All across the ridge, screaming cultists and walking tanks vehicles poured chaotically down into the valley. Fighters roared overhead, looking for a target.
Back at the Cathedral, Nariko and Sakurako were completely overwhelmed. Nariko sidestepped the swing of a rusted axe and stabbed her sword into the wielder’s rotten throat, only to catch a bullet in her thigh fired from one of his compatriots. Sakurako released a blast of blue hot fire that incinerated the traitors in front of her, only to have several grenades land at her feet. She summoned a wall of energy to protect her at the last second, but the blast threw her backward into the rubble of the toppled archway.
They did this to me, Nariko thought as she spat the blood from her mouth. She could feel the weight of their foul aura as she forced herself forward. The air felt saturated with disease and infection. Worms and insects writhed up from the ground in ecstasy and dead birds fell from the sky around the traitors.
I will never forgive them, never!
Nariko screamed against the pain and anger and slashed low, severing her opponent’s hairy leg at the ankle, then raised her blade just in time to block a blow from a thorny-skinned traitor that had flanked her. Nariko sidestepped a clumsy swing from a bloated traitor that put him off balance. She snapped her blade out to the side as she stepped past him, the tip of her blade slicing through the back of his leg as he fell forward. A second and third traitor lunged at her, so she hunched herself over and charged into the stride of one, using his own momentum to flip him up and over herself as she stabbed into his stone-skinned companion, her blade entering his mouth and bursting out the back of his neck.
Ignoring the pain in her burnt wrist, Nariko pulled her sword free and ducked down as a rusted sickle sailed over her head, plunging into the chest of another traitor. She slashed upwards, taking off the head of her attacker with a backhand slash as she shifted her weight for the next opponent, who was forced to the ground with a sword plunged into his chest.
I hate them, I hate them all!
Nariko caught a glance of Sakurako looking at her worriedly as she came to her feet, but Nariko was too angry to care. A barbed chain swung out at Nariko’s head from somewhere. She ducked under it, but an energy blast from somewhere else caught her in the shoulder. In all directions all she could see was a mass of bodies, armor and weapons.
Nariko roared in anger and spun around wildly, stretching her blades out without aiming, only managing to drive the crowd that surrounded her back half a step for a moment.
“Nariko, you’ve got to calm yourself down,” Sakurako warned as she grabbed a traitor on the shoulder, blue fire erupting out of his mouth and eyes.
Don’t you get it? I need my hate. It is the only thing that keeps me going.
From somewhere a whip wrapped itself around Nariko’s injured leg and yanked her off of her feet. Her head cracked loudly against the stone of the plaza and for several moments the world around her was just a haze of filth-encrusted weapons and fangs.
In the southern spire of the Cathedral, calmly looking down at the battle happening thousands of meters below, Marcos Faust took a long draw on his cigar allowing the aroma to hang in the air around him. His guest was silent, which Marcos appreciated. True cigar aficionados know not to interrupt mid-draw.
Marcos held up his cigar, indicating that he was ready to continue.
“When my cousin contacted me from Futara, I almost turned him down, you know?” Marcos began steadily. “In my line of work, when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.”
“The war is not going well,” Inami cooed as she reclined back in her chair, smoothing the ruffles in the stylish fur coat she was wearing. “My sources tell me that the Tyrant sector will be over-run within the year. The upper echelons in the Cordon are in complete disarray. No less than three people are vying for the position of Rehepar-akured to replace the late one. In the meantime, absolutely no one is in charge and every battle group in the entire sector is fighting on its own, unable to get support from anywhere else. The Uragan-Alliance will slaughter the entire cordon at once.”
Marcos took up his cigar again and took a long draw. One of the benefits of cigars was that it created a natural pause in your speech patterns. This allowed you to collect your thoughts and kept you from speaking rashly.
“It was inevitable, really, but it is a shame that it should fall on my generation,” Marcos said steadily.
“This campaign of death will not end until it reaches Holy Terra itself,” Inami warned. “Your world of Ardura will not be safe.”
Inami paused for a moment and took out another chocolate stick, savoring its flavor. “You and I both know how this will turn out. The parts that survive will simply align themselves with whichever side wins the war, so you need to stand in a place that will survive. You will need portable wealth if you are to relocate your syndicate to the western parts of the Confederacy.”
Marcos took another draw on his cigar and sized up his guest. It was a skill he thought he had mastered years ago and yet this person was almost completely unreadable to him. That made him wary, but the shrewdness of his guest’s reasoning was equally persuasive.
Marcos ran many different scenarios through his mind and most ended well for him and his family. The few that did not would have to be prepared against. He put out his large rough hand and took the item.
“My fee will be forty percent of the selling price,” Marcos intoned.
Inami clapped her hands and wiggled in delight. “Excellent, let’s break out the booze.”
Concealed among a rocky outcropping on the northern ridge, Victson looked through the sight of his sniper rifle at the pair of soldiers he had pinned down on the hill west of the Cathedral. The voices were growing louder by the day. Promising him wealth, promising him power. He licked his lips hungrily at the thought of what gifts his masters would bestow on him for serving them so well. He shook his head to clear it.
Through the optics of his sniper rifle, he could see one of the soldiers waving her arm out above the cannon making obscene gestures.
“Is she challenging me to shoot her arm off?” he asked himself aloud. He placed his finger on the trigger, but the arm was pulled back. Elsewhere a leg was protruded and began wagging at him seductively. He moved to aim at that as well, but it was pulled back. Then, someone’s bottom was stuck out, wiggling at him tauntingly. He quickly fired before it could be retracted, but the aim was off, missing the rump by mere inches before it was pulled back in. Victson held his breath in anticipation, waiting for another opportunity. For several moments nothing happened and then another arm came up, making even more obscene gestures than before.
“Man, she is really freaking annoying,” Victson said to himself.
“Isn’t she, though?” a voice answered him. Victson looked up and saw a young woman standing over him, her blue wings fully outstretched and catching the sun behind her. He didn’t even hear the blast of her gunshot before there was nothing left
of his head to perceive it.
In the skies above, the first wave of Confederate aircraft strafed overhead, dropping their bombs onto the traitor column as it poured over the ridge toward the Cathedral. Transports and tanks were lifted off the ground by the sheer weight of the bombs before the actual explosions tore them apart, sending shrapnel and bodies in all directions.
The Confederate fighters paid for their audacity as anti-aircraft fire tore through their formation, tracer rounds creating arcing lines of light against the metal sky as the fighters burst into flames.
Back at the Cathedral, Nariko fought against the haze as she lay on the ground. Distantly, she thought she could hear Sakurako calling out to her, but she could not tell what direction the sound was coming from. She had the sensation of a half-formed warrior pouncing on top of her. She felt, almost detachedly, a putrid blade being stabbed into her stomach.
I’m so weak, I hate myself.
Good. Use that hate. Make it a cloak and wear it brightly. Hone it into a sharpened blade.
In what felt like slow motion, Nariko stabbed upward with her broken blade catching the traitor on top of her in the neck. The gurgling warrior rolled off of her, revealing a huge oversized traitor who towered over her. He held aloft a stone slab plucked up from the plaza ground, intending to crush her with it.
I hate what I have become...
Drop the pretense. Show them who you are really mad at.
Nariko’s head rolled to the side. Through the dozens of feet scampering and jumping about her, she could see the gap in the barrier and the huddled civilians inside. Safe, protected, and loved. Nariko watched as they prayed to the Luminarch and he encircled them about with his arms, while she lay broken, bleeding, banished, unwanted, and alone outside.
“What makes them so much better than me?” Nariko howled hoarsely, her voice carrying over the sounds of battle around her. “What makes me so unworthy of your love? Why can’t I be your child too?”
I can feel myself changing; something inside of me is changing.
Heart of a Traitor Page 22
