Crusader: Crossbreed
Prologue: Traktaia

Sort of a prelude/prequel to my Arusian Crusade series. This is Pidge's backstory. Sadly, no ninja scientists are involved.


It all started with defiance, as it so often did.

The balance of power on Balto was always shifting. Never the overall balance; Tenra and Sryka had long ago concluded they could not afford to go to war. But the regional balance changed monthly, the local balance almost daily. When a gang of Tenra moved into a quiet Sryka neighborhood, it wasn't even unusual enough to merit a second glance from police. These things were always so simple. Pay the tribute, wait for the gang to get bored and move on.

But of all the neighborhood, one woman refused to pay the tribute. Not for any real reason. Only defiance—which, in fairness to her, was often reason enough.

The Tenra were reasonable. Generous, even. They chose not to punish the whole area for a single transgression, a single woman. They simply watched her, stalked her, punished her as they deemed fit. With their power thus fully asserted, they left. Such was the way of things.

She never reported the incident. It was a crime, of course, right there on the books. But Balto was a rough, unsentimental world. Strength was law, survival was virtue, defiance was costly, and sex was cheap. Rape was just another crime, and a complicated one to look into at that. It would never be investigated. She let it be.

Sryka were biologically incapable of abortion. The symbiosis was too great; the mother would die as surely as the unborn child. There was no choice but to wait.


He was born in the fall, as the wind rattled the windows of the small hospital and the chill was just beginning to seep through the walls. For a Sryka child he was quite large, but not dangerously so, and the doctors gave him a clean bill of health. His true nature was not apparent to them. Not yet. At birth Tenra and Sryka were startlingly similar, a relic of their shared ancestry, and the distinctive features of each race developed later. A crossbreed infant had no telltale signs, not when examined so quickly.

No point in telling the doctors of her shame. She left.

It had seemed so simple when she was carrying the child. He would be birthed quietly and killed quietly, as quickly as possible. Neatly disposed of. It wasn't murder, it was a mercy.

Crossbreeds were forbidden. But there was more to their scarcity than that taboo. As they began to develop the stresses became too great, too quickly—their tiny bodies were torn between two divergent races. With exceptions so rare as to be hardly worth mentioning, they died within the first year. The 'lucky' few who survived the developmental period were reviled as abominations, scorned by society, leaving poverty and starvation their inevitable end.

Either way they died in agony.

Yet he stared at her with wide, curious emerald eyes, and she stared back at him with a creeping sense of dread. Abomination he might be, but it wasn't his fault. He was so innocent, he was of her own blood... and he was doomed.

Kill him. Give him a painless release from this world.

There was no logical reason not to do it, but she found herself paralyzed. She couldn't just kill such a child. But she could hardly raise him, either. No. His time was short, too short, and she dared not grow attached.

She left him on the doorstep of an orphanage. Let the child's fate be someone else's burden to bear.

As she vanished into the night she whispered the traktaia, the ritual for the dying.