Heart of a Traitor

by Aaron Lee Yeager

  “To create is the most basic aspect of human nature and the most pure expression of existence, for only those that create leave evidence of their passing,” Nori said, cradling the object as if it were a newborn child.

  “Happy birth my little Takuya,” she whispered to the sphere as the sensory nodes on her head curved over to examine it.

  A third time the faint beeps of a passcode being entered were heard, more slowly this time and again the lock chirped negatively.

  Nori’s worktables sat at the center of an incredibly vast bay at the very core of the Onikano. Machines sprouted up from the floor like the trunks of giant trees. Mechanisms were suspended from the ceiling, their cables and wires hanging down like vines. A vast jungle of apparatus and automaton that extended for thousands of feet in every direction. Hundreds of small robots occupied this place, zipping around energetically, performing all kinds of tasks, from mundane maintenance to advanced supervision of others. Their distant chirps and clicks created a background hum like crickets and the distant lights of the implements on the ceiling twinkled like starlight. Nori found it all quite soothing.

  In some places, the robots would get into conflicting positions chirping angrily until one of the larger ones would hover over and reassign them into more efficient systems that did not cause slowdowns. When new devices were required, machines were assigned to design and create assembly robots that would manufacture the required device and then put them into production. Thus, the bay grew and evolved on its own, growing in complexity quite organically. When areas and functions were no longer needed they would be demolished, only to be quickly filled with new undergrowth in the available space.

  From adjoining bays, rivers of red-hot materials flowed into large machinery which growled and grinded as they processed the materials, then rationed out smaller portions into other apparatus, which processed the materials further and then rationed them meticulously into still other machines which shaped them into the needed components for whatever device was being produced.

  From there, components were taken by robots into large assemblers for the final processes. Finished weapons, ammunition, armor, fighting vehicles, and power-cells flowed out of the assemblers into adjoining bays where they would be packaged and stored until needed. This was the heart of the Seventh’s war machine. It was Nori’s orchard.

  Now there was another noise coming from the other side of the door, but much louder this time. A series of metallic bangs, as if something heavy was being used in an attempt to pound the door in. A human voice could also be heard. It was obviously screaming, but the words were too muffled to be made out. Nori sighed heavily and one of her mechanical appendages reached over and plugged itself into the locking mechanism, which gave an affirmative chirp. The nutronite rods on the door moved sluggishly out of their slots and the heavy doors opened slowly. Inami was standing on the other side, with her hair mussed up and holding a smashed polisher robot in her right hand.

  “Fusho, Nori!” she screamed, “I order you to shorten that pass-code!”

  The mechanical arms on Nori’s harness powered down with an anxious whine of disappointment as she removed the device from her head. Her blue-gray hair fell out from the device and cascaded down to her shoulders. Her face was dirty and her hair unkempt. She had bags under her dark-red eyes and her face was puffy from lack of sleep, but she remained quite bright and focused.

  “Taisa, there’s not much point in keeping the forge a secured area if you just expect me to open the door whenever you thump on it,” Nori pointed out. Inami stepped into the forge and discarded the smashed robot to one side. It lay there for only a moment before another came by and dragged it off to be recycled or repaired.

  “How long has it been since you bathed?” Inami asked, waving her hand in front of her face. “It’s getting pretty akushū in here.”

  “You’ve given me a hive of 17.3 trillion highly aggressive, psychically saturated, genetically unstable organic killing machines to watch over and you expect me to have time to bathe?” Nori questioned.

  “Don’t forget the Kuldrizi queen, which is basically an interstellar genetic-furnace and planet-killer...and then there’s your normal workload on top of that,” Inami added, smiling sweetly.

  “You are indeed a cruel task-master,” Nori accused.

  “Ah, you big kidder. You love it and you know it.”

  Nori said nothing, but she smiled to herself as she pulled a ration bar out of a drawer and took a bite out of it cheerfully. She had to admit that there were few commanders, even among the technology-obsessed Daughters of Drak’Nal, who would allow her to bind herself to artifact fragments and bask in the forbidden technologies of the Technossiah. It was an accepted dogma among cyber-priests that the lost arts of the machine were not to be unearthed.

  “Of course,” Nori thought, “they wouldn’t think that way if they unearthed any of the really good stuff.” Inami challenged her and Nori could not recall the last time her boredom had been anything more than a mild discomfort and that was a good thing.

  Inami picked up a silver vial that was sitting on one of Nori’s worktables.

  “Hey, is this that special batch I asked you to make?”

  Nori spit out the food in her mouth and grabbed the vial from Inami.

  “Frak, be careful with that! You want to put us all into cold-sleep?” she gasped. “This is a refined version of the machine-virus that’s been keeping the Kuldrizi in stasis.” Nori tenderly placed the silver vial back in its place on the table, cooing gently to it.

  Inami pouted and sat down on the edge of one of the work tables, knocking over a prosthetic arm that was being assembled there. It slipped off of the edge of the table and clattered on the floor.

  “So, Mai said you had some news.”

  “Yes. The queen is waking up,” Nori stated coldly as she removed her harness and walked over to where the arm had fallen. She picked it up picked up and put it on another table out of Inami’s reach.

  “I hope that means it’s because we have control of her.”

  Nori shook her head solemnly. “It’s developing an immunity to the virus and it’s doing it a lot faster than I thought possible. I’ve been experimenting with the samples brought back to me from Pirané, but the problem is that once we bring the queen even partially awake, it begins exerting psychic force to bring itself into full consciousness and then I’m forced to put it down again. Every time I do that, it takes longer and the sleep isn’t as deep.”

  Inami plucked a metal ring off of a partially constructed weapon from the table next to her and began twirling it on her finger absentmindedly. “Why would it do that?” she asked, strangely interested.

  “My theory is that the Queen’s natural state is to perceive the actions of every creature in the hive and send commands to each and every one. But, right now everything else in the hive is in cold-sleep. My guess is that when it doesn’t perceive anything, it sets off some sort of instinctive reaction to increase force until the hive is again perceived,” Nori explained, quite pleased to have an attentive listener.

  Inami stopped twirling the ring and studied Nori closely. “You have a plan, don’t you?” she demanded.

  “I’m going to hard wire a direct link between the queen and the command network here in the forge,” Nori explained, a faint smile on her face.

  “Are you crazy?” Inami asked. “That would give it control of nearly every function on the Onikano.”

  “Not necessarily. The queen will perceive a network complex enough to satisfy its needs, meaning that we can keep it in a dream state, enough to generate the shadow in the ether, but not so awake as to override our commands to the lesser creatures. We’ll get the best of both worlds and the Onikano itself will simply disregard the commands it receives from the queen.”

  Inami tossed the metal ring at an antenna poking out from a partially constructed comm unit on another table. The ring caught the antenna and made a discordant chime as it slid down the
length of it, which was now quite bent. Inami held out her fingers and gave herself three points for the throw. “But won’t the queen notice when its commands are being ignored?” she asked.

  Nori removed the ring from the comm-unit and began to straighten out the antenna.

  “The hive works from the top down. Signals sent by the queen normally cannot be ignored, so there is never any check made afterward to ensure that the commands were carried out. Anyway, I think it’s worth a try.”

  Nori turned around from straightening the antenna and saw that Inami was now plucking at some wires coming out of an experiment on another table near her. “Taisa, could you please not do that?” she asked, irritated.

  Inami broke out from her thoughts and noticed what she was picking at. It was a rotting human head. Wires and cables protruded from its cranium like some sort of wild metallic hair. Inami squeaked and dropped the head back down onto the table where the wires led into all sorts of dark and bizarre devices, pulsing with organic components that beat and slurped sickly. The head’s rotting face was frozen in its expression, an odd combination of fear and relief.

  “What is this?” Inami demanded as she pulled out a handkerchief and wiped her hands off.

  “It’s the head of Rochestri’s oracle,” Nori explained. “They didn’t preserve it very well on the trip back here, but most of the core is still intact.

  “You must have more free time than you are letting on if you think you’re going to get anything out of that dead thing,” Inami cautioned.

  Cracking into an oracle was nasty business. Their minds were honeycombs of dead ends, redirects, and aggressive barriers that could attack and destroy any probe sent in to retrieve data forcefully. Even if you were able to get anything out of it, it was usually false, as the safeguards would create fabricated data to feed any particularly invasive probe. A well-built one like this would also include a memory purge that would occur at the time of death of either the oracle or his master.

  “It’s not dead,” Nori replied. “The cells have broken down a lot, but they have been reanimated.”

  “How did you do that?” Inami asked, quite surprised.

  Inami looked at the black organs pulsing on the table, pumping a foul ichor into the head as it sat there. “Never mind. I don’t really want to know.”

  “Have faith in the Verussiah,” Nori stated. “We have the Marshal’s ident-code from the light-read and that will allow me to get past the more dangerous defenses in there.”

  Nori moved over to the monitors on her central worktable and beckoned Inami to follow her. She strapped herself back into the harness and re-donned the helmet. The arms came back to life with a cheerful whirr and several returned to their tasks.

  Inami looked at the multiple arms and the tiny cameras mounted on each one that sent images directly to Nori’s brain.

  “It never ceases to amaze me how you can split your attention so many ways like that,” Inami mused. “It makes my head hurt just thinking about it.”

  “What’s that?” Nori asked as one of her appendages clumsily dropped a weapon to the floor.

  “Nothing,” Inami said. “I just decided that I need a stiff drink before I’ll feel better.”

  Nori chuckled. “You’d need to be drunk to take the kinds of risks you do. I still can’t believe you just handed the Eagalo Stone to the head of the Agate Crime Syndicate like that.”

  “We got it back,” Inami defended as she picked at something stuck in her teeth. “Along with a substantial fortune of precious gems. Not to mention a very valuable prisoner.”

  On one of the smaller monitors, the blurry images taken from Rochestri’s mind appeared.

  “Here. I have something to show you,” Nori began. “If I had just dumped all of these images from the buffer I never would have seen it, but I was slightly bored this morning so I decided to look through them before I did. She zipped through the images and came to a specific point. An ancient book, with dark cracking pages written on with a thick red ink was being looked at. Occasionally, the point of view would change as the viewer looked up to glance out the window to one side, the skyline of Ardura visible through the rain.

  “What’s he reading?” Inami asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Nori explained. “The writings are not actually a language. I think it’s one of those Eyrth books the Marshals use. A psychic entity trapped within the pages that speaks only to the person it was made for. It might even be a Grimoire.”

  Inami leaned back, disinterested and began watching the robot fly overhead.

  “However, from the context, I’d say he was reading up on the Eagalo Stone,” Nori theorized.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “This shuttle trip was en-route to purchase the stone from the Fausts. If I were him, I would be re-familiarizing myself with the stone so that I could spot a fake.”

  “I would have been hitting that sweet liquor tray,” Inami confessed.

  “What liquor tray?” Nori asked.

  “Right there, go back three and a quarter seconds.”

  Nori reversed the image flow to a moment when Rochestri had glanced the other way, toward the center aisle of the shuttle. Inami pointed at a blur in his peripheral vision, a female figure walking past carrying a tray filled with glass bottles of various shapes and sizes.

  “Oh, come on, how do you know it’s a liquor tray?” Nori chided.

  “Because of the label on that one. It’s too blurry to read, but you can make out the stallion-shaped symbol on the bottle. That’s Moltavis, a very spirited drink brewed on Aldon and imported to wealthier planets in the sector for the nobles to drink.

  Nori sat there for a moment with her jaw slightly opened.

  “I can’t believe you can spot a liquor label that appeared for two-tenths of a second in the corner of a blurry mind-frame image. You have got a serious drinking problem.”

  “I’m a six hundred and fifty-seven year old Senshi trapped in the body of a twenty-two year old girl with green hair. I don’t think I drink nearly as much as that situation requires.”

  Nori chuckled to herself as she sped the images forward to the key point. The image of the dark book suddenly faded half away, superimposed by another image on top of it. The second image was difficult to make out, but was obviously a copper statue standing in the middle of a bed of yellow flowers, next to an elegant water-fountain with gold and marble trim. Nori froze the image at the point.

  “Okay, here’s what piqued my interest. Here we have a double image.”

  “That means a memory, right?”

  “Right,” Nori affirmed. Inami held her hand up and gave herself another two points.

  “Do you recognize the statue?” Nori asked.

  Inami squinted at the image.

  “Wait; is that a statue of Koichi Hyase?”

  “Yes. The patron saint of Correll. It was located in the royal courtyard of the palace. Rochestri claims that he had never visited Correll. It would have been outside of the boundaries given to him at that time, so why would he have a memory of the royal courtyard?”

  Inami pondered for a second on this, appearing strangely excited.

  “Perhaps he saw a holo-vid of the statue,” Inami proposed. “They sell holo-vids of patron saints and their shrines on most industrialized worlds.”

  “Possibly, but holo-recorders were never allowed inside the palace walls. Any holo-vid of the statue you could buy would have been taken before it was installed at the palace fountain. And then there’s this.”

  Nori pointed to the blurred image of the statues hand, which was outstretched in a manner of warding off evil.

  “You can make out that the index finger is missing from that hand.”

  “You can?” Inami asked, squinting.

  “A few months before the Gunoi came, the statue was put on display in the Luminarch’s Temple on the southern island. When it was returned, workers lost control of it and the index finger was broken off when the statu
e fell. It was taken as a bad omen by the Ruling Council and all of the workers were executed that same day.”

  “So, let me get this straight. You can spot a statue’s missing finger that appeared for two-tenths of a second on a superimposed blurry mind-frame image, but I’m the one with the problem?”

  Nori ignored the comment with the wave of her hand.

  “That is why I’m trying to break into Rochestri’s oracle. I want to know why a Marshal would have a memory of the palace courtyard just a few weeks before the Gunoi invaded Correll.”

  Inami’s excitement turned into fascination. “And, why would he be thinking about that while reading about the Eagalo Stone?” she added.

  They both sat silently for a few moments. Even Nori’s mechanical arms came to a halt. It was Inami who finally broke the silence.

  “This should be quite a chase. Would it put a huge strain on the ship’s resources to schedule Rochestri for a few more light-reads?”

  “No more strain than your command skills normally put on it,” Nori answered.

  Inami slapped Nori on the back of the head. “Quiet, you. Let me know if you need any tissue samples from Rochestri to bypass the oracle’s identification locks.”

  Nori reached out with one of the mechanical arms on her harness and held up a severed hand so Inami could see. It twitched from the red and black tubes coming out of its wrist.

  “Already got some,” Nori explained.

  “Nori, you cut off his hand? You know we don’t do that kind of thing,” Inami said, quite upset.

  Nori looked at her blankly.

  “I’ll put it back on when I’m done with it.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Empty Cages

  Simply by existing, light defines where darkness lies.

  -Anonymous

  Letting someone get close to you gives them power over you. Power to add to your happiness and power to take happiness from you. Being connected to others means that you cannot be happy unless they are as well. In that sense, you give up your emotional sovereignty and unite your own happiness to that of another.