Heart of a Traitor

by Aaron Lee Yeager

  Nariko disappeared before the shots reached her, reappearing on top of a pillar.

  “To the left!” Reika yelled, but only about half of the Daughters fired with her. Again, Nariko seemed to vanish just before the attacks landed.

  “To the right!” Reika yelled, but only a couple of the Daughters fired with her. Nariko dissipated again just before the wall was shredded where she had clung.

  Nariko appeared directly in front of Reika, fearlessly standing up to her full height, towering above her.

  “You can’t dodge this,” Reika said with a smile, but she could not fire her weapon. Turning her rifle to the side, Reika could see small bits of dust clinging to her gloves. Try as she might, she could not squeeze the trigger, the dust held her hand tight.

  “What is this stuff?” Reika asked in disgust, trying vainly to brush it off. It was raining down in the air all around her. It was pieces of Nariko’s wall.

  It was only then that Reika noticed the other Daughters, their bodies being twisted and wrenched like puppets as they were forced to lower their weapons.

  Bones popped and muscles strained and one by one each Daughter was forced down to her knees, unable to move, barely able to breathe.

  Reika fought hardest of all, practically screaming as her body fought against it.

  The rest of the steel wall atomized and covered the Daughters more completely. Nariko walked around Reika coquettishly, flicking her with the end of her tail. “Reika, you are so proud. It would be so easy to make you fall. It’s like an avalanche, you know? It starts with the tiniest pebble. Just a little push and everything comes crashing down.”

  “You Amanos always had black hearts, your whole family,” Reika spat.

  “Speaking of family, why don’t you tell everyone about yours?” Nariko said coyly.

  Reika’s feline eyes opened wide with trepidation. “No,” she said defiantly.

  The dust on Reika’s collar squeezed her neck tightly, she fought to breathe.

  “Tell them what you are,” Nariko pressed.

  “Never!”

  Nariko smiled demurely. All around the room, there were shrieks of horror as each Daughter was forced to raise up her hands and place the barrel of her own weapon against the faceplate of her environmental suit.

  “How many do I have to shoot before you give in, I wonder?” Nariko asked salaciously.

  Reika’s eyes lost their defiance and became saddened.

  “My family were Yogoreta, the untouchable class,” Reika admitted quietly.

  “Louder!” Nariko barked, Reika’s collar squeezed even tighter.

  “My father was a grave digger,” Reika coughed out, unable to breathe.

  “Thank you,” Nariko said sweetly.

  Nariko released Reika and the once proud warrior slumped to the ground, her head hanging low.

  “Like I said,” Nariko boasted. “All it takes is a little push to get things going.”

  “Come on Nari, you’ve got to fight her, you’re stronger than this,” Keiko groaned through clenched teeth.

  Nariko blinked her red eyes. “Her? What do you mean her? I am Nariko. I always have been.”

  Nariko’s hands erupted in black fire and she placed them onto the cool amber surface of Takuya. Nariko began laughing even harder than before as the flames encircled the crystal and its surface began to flow onto her, coating her skin.

  “What is this?” Shika asked Inami.

  Ianmi looked on, unable to move. “It is the beginning...of the end.”

  Outside the Onikano, Mai breathed painfully as she slowly spun away from the warping ship. Inside her environmental suit, sweat rolled down her face. The maneuvering thrusters on her suit had run out of fuel and the emergency patch across her stomach wouldn’t hold for much longer. Her injuries were making her weak and faint. If she didn’t get back inside the ship soon...

  The fabric of her suit changed colors, as if the starlight itself had flickered out. Looking around, Mai could see that a long shadow was being cast over the Onikano. Above her was a growing area of space with no starlight, a black visible against the blackness of space. Stars around the void flickered and winked as thousands of smaller voids swarmed around.

  The Kuldrizi had found them.

  Inside the forge, Nariko and the crystal become one. It coated her like a layer of dark green paint. Cackling maniacally, Nariko grabbed the cables and black fire began to spread out, covering every inch of the forge. Material warped and screeched. The very air moaned.

  Her concentration elsewhere, the dust covering the Daughters fell away to the floor. Many of them opened fire again, but the bullets and energy beams became bathed in fire as they approached, fusing into Nariko’s body like raindrops hitting the ocean.

  “She’s binding herself to the entire ship!” Keiko called out as she dragged Nori along the floor, stepping back from the approaching wall of black fire spreading out toward them.

  “Get everyone out of here!” Inami ordered out, her voice ringing clear over the noise. “Get everyone into the lifeboats.”

  “The lifeboats are just as likely to kill us as the ship is,” Shika yelled out as she stepped back.

  “Fine, then have everyone get to the Tsunami bays. Make sure no one is left behind!”

  As the Daughters scrambled, the ship made sounds around them like a pair of skyscrapers being rubbed together. A bending and twisting of metal and glass, mixed in with screams and laughter. It was a sound never to be forgotten by anyone who heard it.

  Tangles of conduits and wires writhed on the floors like stricken worms; panels and closets burst inwards like open wounds. The few lights that remained flickered and buzzed like blinking eyelids.

  The next few minutes were a blur of motion as Tsunami after Tsunami was filled and launched, the injured and dead tucked under their arms in environmental bubbles. Small little dots against the blackness of space streaking out in all directions from the stricken form of the Onikano.

  “Is that the last of them?” Inami yelled as she eyed the approaching wall of black fire moving across the launch bay.

  “Yes, that is everyone,” Shika confirmed as she rocketed away.

  Inami leapt out just as the pressure doors snapped themselves shut behind her and everything became deathly quiet. She watched the warping form of the Onikano as it curled. Its spine became sectional, covered in large, smooth armored plates, like a giant ammonite. Great silver tentacles sprouted out from its belly and hung down beneath it. It looked like a silver copy of a Kuldrizi queen. Then something moved over it. A blackness so complete it was visible even against the blackness of space. The real Kuldrzi queen wrapped her hairy tentacles around the Onikano as the rest of the swarm gathered around her.

  Inami and the others gathered together and looked on impotently. Their suits were like grains of sand compared to these giants. The queen was poised to extract her revenge, when something silver flashed out, then another, then another. The surface of the Onikano whipped out in long ribbons of metal that snapped and flicked in every direction.

  For a long moment, everything stood still, then there was a spray of blood and ichor and the queen came apart. Diced into thousands of pieces, the mighty creature, larger than even the greatest battleships ever constructed, floated apart into thousands of floating spinning chunks of flesh. The Onikano swallowed them up hungrily, taking in each piece and making them a part of herself. The ship swelled and bloated unnaturally, until every piece had been absorbed and she was as large as the meal she had consumed.

  The rest of the swarm formed up around their new queen and with a flash of stretching space, the hive was gone, leaving the Daughters drifting alone in space.

  “This is really bad,” Keiko said as she approached in her suit, holding Mai inside an environmental bubble.

  “It’s worse than that,” Nori explained from within her bubble. “Up until now, we have been preventing the Kuldrizi from reproducing. If Nariko figures out how to remove that restrict
ion, then every time she strips a planet bare, all that biological material can be ingested. The creatures will calve, spawning millions of new Kuldrizi. Each planet she attacks, she will have greater numbers, lose fewer creatures, overwhelm the defenders more easily. The growth of the swarm will become exponential. By the time she finishes consuming the Uragan, her force will outnumber the stars themselves. The Confederacy won’t stand a chance.”

  “Then we have to stop her now, before the swarm grows too large to stop,” Mai coughed.

  “But, we don’t know where she is going,” Shika reminded them.

  “Perhaps we do,” Mai realized. “If Nariko fused with the Onikano, then she knows our next target. She knows that we intentionally sabotaged the Dragon’s power cabling, she knows where we aimed the planet killer. It would only make sense that would be the first place she goes.”

  “But, even if we follow her, what can we do?” Nori asked.

  Inami leaned forward, her eyes focused. “We have to try. Signal the other divisions.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The Limitless Fortress of Min’Draguard

  The belief that there is no such thing as true evil is held only by those so sheltered that they have had no contact with it. There are forces that cannot be reasoned with, people who cannot be compelled or persuaded and slaughter that will not cease unless it is defeated.

  - Davin Larid, the Grand Theologist 6301-6481rl

  The ether space around Min’Draguard was torn apart as the Kuldrizi swarm burst into realspace, bathing the entire system in their shadow and cutting it off from the natural flows of the ether. At its head was a gleaming silver queen. Clutched underneath the queen vessel and partially fused with it, was the decomposing tarnished form of the Onikano. The Kuldrizi writhed and squealed hungrily in anticipation.

  Min’Draguard was the most heavily defended planet in the entire Uragan. The demon world was a planet-sized fortress. Its diamond-hard surface was covered with endless fields of pillboxes, anti-aircraft bunkers, naval-grade cannon emplacements, trenches, and tunnels. Beneath the surface lay an endless series of tunnels and corridors, carefully laid kill zones, ambush points, and traps, extending all the way down to the core of the planet itself.

  Other fortresses were limited in their design by the need to protect something, a throne room or a reactor core. It pinned the defenders down and made them static. But, Min’Draguard had no such structure, even at its center. The defenders could redeploy themselves endlessly along the surface and within the depths of the planet, using secreted passageways and sorcerous teleportation pads. An assaulting force of any size could be endlessly drawn through the most horrific defensive barricades ever devised, unable to come to grips with their elusive opponents, until their numbers dwindled down to nothing.

  Such was the world forged by the Great Betrayer Heinreich Verräter, a physical manifestation of his cruel and twisted nature.

  Already the presence of the Kuldrizi was causing the planet to wither.

  Heinreich Verräter was broad shouldered and thick-necked, with a sharp jaw-line and sunken eyes. His flesh gleamed with the metallic sheen of bronze, crisscrossed with scar tissue of a lighter hue.

  “Bun Zi la spre ţu, un cireaşă vil al tău fămilie,” Nariko greeted him formally, intentionally using the high Ashtari that he would have spoken at the time of the revolution, a subtle gesture to remind him of who he once was.

  Verräter looked around in his throne room. Her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. The movements caused his flesh to tear open at the corners of his eyes, fresh metal welling up from underneath to form new scar tissue.

  “I know who you are,” he said, beginning to laugh maniacally, which tore his cheeks wide open. The deep powerful laugh rippled out from the planet, causing vibrations to rumble through every fortress. Even before his elevation to demonhood, he had been extremely powerful. But now his metallic skin was beginning to appear dried and some of the cracks did not heal. Verräter’s laughter died down and the tears in his cheeks filled with fresh scar tissue.

  “If I had known that it was the cowards of Drak’Nal that were skulking behind our lines, I would not have sent an entire battle cadre out hunting for them. I regret that I have wasted so much of my time bending my mind toward you.”

  “Coward, huh?” Nariko repeated to herself. “You know, I’m not entirely sure I know what that word means. To me it’s just a made-up word. When my ally does something I’m supposed to call it courage, but when my enemy does the same thing I’m supposed to call it cowardice. When we use words in that way they cease to mean anything.”

  Nariko’s voice became pointed. “But I guess I’m supposed to point out that it should mean something to you. Did you fight your father with courage when you murdered him? Could you have won if you had?”

  “Don’t tell me that’s why you came here,” Verräter said bored, his forehead tearing open as he furrowed his brow.

  “I didn’t come here for the Luminarch,” Nariko said, her voice embittered. “I came here for me.”

  At that moment the stars became completely overwhelmed by a beam of energy tearing out from the ether and racing out from above the queen ship.

  The enormous beam passed near a geo-stationary space fortress, which was flayed apart, layer-by-layer, the fragments drawn along by the current of the beam. The defense fleet was torn to pieces, spun and flung about in the eddies of the beam as if they were nothing more than toys in a bathtub. The mile-wide lance impacted the surface of Min’Draguard, which sunk inward as the beam’s warping energy bored into the surface. Metal and ferrocrete twisted and warped, taking on shifting colors and textures. Living organs and limbs grew out near the impact point and then died just as quickly. Air became ash and ground became fire.

  The planet twisted and groaned as its core was gutted by the warping fire of the beam. Horrible earthquakes ravaged the surface, shattering stone and crumbling buildings. Plumes of fire roared out from fissures in the surface, racing hundreds of thousands of feet into the air. As devastating as the damage was on the surface, the damage to the interior was far worse. Tunnels collapsed and shifted and thousands were buried alive within the first few moments of the quakes. With a howl that shook the heavens, the beam from Bael’Eth burst out the other side of Min’Draguard, sending a stream of wreckage and material out into space. Pitted, the planet fragmented and came apart, breaking into massive chunks the size of continents, only roughly held together by their collective gravity.

  The bucking and convulsing swarms surged forward, raining down onto the slowly rotating fragments of the planet like a dark rain of locusts. Despite the damage, large portions of the defenses retained power and coordination and wrought their horrible vengeance upon the descending swarms. The defensive batteries tore huge holes into the black tapestry that fell down toward them, killing thousands, but on they came, pushing through the defenses by sheer weight of numbers.

  The queen vessel hung over her pawns, the light from the battle below reflecting ominously off her metal surface.

  The dead Kuldrizi emitted a powdery yellow smoke that filled the skies. The powder descended through the atmosphere, like falling snow, but was ignored by the defenders, who were confident in the protection of their armor. It was only when the dust fell upon them that they realized their folly. The powder was the second component of a catalyst that had been intentionally built into the power cabling of their armor. Upon contact, their power cables burst into flames, robbing the occupants of the strength to move in their heavy suits and roasting them alive as they fought and struggled within their metal coffins.

  Thousands of pillboxes and defensive cannons were silenced as their crews were burned alive, their screams collecting together in a cacophony that rose up above the sounds of war around them. The smoke and fire seemed to gather together and the skies above Min’Draguard burned.

  Three hours later, the elegant form of the Onibiku entered realspace. A heartbeat later a
cluster of strike craft and frigates appeared around her in perfect formation.

  Sitting high in her command chair, Taisa Ayame of the Fifth Division was calm and sober, fully dressed in her resplendent Correllian dress uniform. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun at the back of her head. Beside her Inami and Mai looked on in shock at what they saw. Where once had sat the most heavily fortified world in history, now there was nothing more than a floating debris field of destroyed defenses and dead bodies.

  “There’s no sign of the Kuldrizi anywhere,” called out the auger officer.

  Mai looked over at Inami sadly. “We’re too late.”

  Ayame leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Inami, you damned fool, you’ve doomed us all.”

  “There’s plenty of time to assign blame later,” Inami retorted. “Right now we are in a race against time. We need to send out search teams. Somewhere within that field is the dead body of Heinreich Verräter and he owes us a blood sample.”

  Ayame nodded reluctantly in agreement and the orders were given.

  There was a snap and a thump as someone fell into the command deck from the corridor. The trio turned to watch Ami as she picked herself up and ran over clutching her elbow. She appeared to be on the verge of tears.

  “Ami what are you doing up here?” Inami huffed.

  “I had to, you keep blocking all of my calls,” Ami whimpered as she unwrapped her arm, revealing a long cut from wrist to elbow. “Look,” she implored, lip trembling.

  Mai sighed. “Ami, the Taisa doesn’t have time to bother with your boo-boo.”

  Inami snorted. “Nothing needs to be done Ami, you know that. It’ll heal at the next sunrise anyway.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” Ami insisted, tears forming at the corners of her large pink eyes. “I’ve had this cut since yesterday.”

  Inami’s head snapped up to attention. “It didn’t heal?”

  Chapter Fifty