Empire

by Michael R. Hicks

  “I am old and my Way grows short,” she told him, her voice sounding fragile, ancient to his ears. “This I would leave to you. It has been among the Desh-Ka for over a thousand generations. Now, it is yours. You wear the rune of our order, now also do you bear a weapon in its name.” Her eyes were soft and vulnerable. He had never seen her this way, and he suspected that few others ever had. “Good-bye, my beloved son,” she whispered. “Go in Her name. May thy Way be long and glorious.”

  “Farewell, Mother,” he said softly. “I love you.” He saluted her, bowing his head to his priestess. She bowed her head in response, as befitted her rank, resisting the impulse to take him in her arms, to hold him as if he were but a young child. Then she stood back, her head bowed, waiting for what must come. She looked and felt old, defeated, and it broke Reza’s heart to see her so.

  Then he turned his attention to Esah-Zhurah, who stood quietly by his side, as fragile as a mirage. He reached out to touch her, suddenly afraid that she would simply vanish and that he would wake up, his entire life having been spent in a dream. But her flesh was firm under his hand. He dropped his gauntlets onto the ground at his feet, wanting nothing so much as to touch her one last time. She did the same, and he saw her hands: they were black with the mourning marks, so great was her pain.

  He could stand it no longer. He began to cry as he pulled her to him, crushing her against his chest. She kissed his neck, her fangs streaking the skin. Her talons dug furrows into the metal of his armor as she clung to him.

  “Please stay,” she whispered, and he felt the echo of the pain in her heart in his own.

  “Do not ask me again,” he pleaded. “I beg of you. For we both know that I cannot. I must not.”

  “How shall I live without you?” she whispered, her arms tight around his neck. “My heart shall die when you are gone.”

  He pulled her away just far enough to see her face. Her green eyes were so bright they seemed to glow. “You must live,” he told her, the desperation plain in his voice. “Live for me. All that sustains me even now is the hope that someday, somehow, I shall see your face again. You must believe that it will be so, that someday our Way shall be one again.” She nodded her head, but her eyes and the keening in her blood betrayed the hopelessness that dwelled in her soul. He held her to him again, and kissed her softly, running his hands through her hair one last time.

  “I have one last gift for you,” he whispered into her ear. Reaching into the satchel at his feet, the leather bag that contained all his worldly possessions, he withdrew the box in which lay the bejeweled tiara. Extracting it carefully with his shaking hands, he held it up for her to see. “This was Pan’ne-Sharakh’s last gift to us,” he told her, “a token of my faith in courtship of a warrior priestess. I was going to give it to you when we met with the Empress, but…” He could not finish. Instead, he carefully placed it on her head, fitting the crown to the woman he would love unto death.

  Even old and blind, Pan’ne-Sharakh had divined in metal and minerals a kind of beauty that was the stuff of dreams, beyond the reach of mortals such as himself. The tiara seemed to become a part of her, and he wanted to weep at how beautiful she looked with it on, but his tears were finished. Only pain and the uncertainty of what the future would bring remained. “Priestess of the Desh-Ka,” he whispered, “forever shall my heart be yours.”

  They embraced a final time. Then she pushed herself away. Her eyes had clouded over, becoming hard as she fought to be strong. But he could see that her resolve was brittle, frail. They gripped each other by the arms as warriors. Then it was time for her to play out the last act of his departure from the Empire. Trembling, she separated out the first braid of his hair. Sliding the two black rings down the braid toward his scalp, she tightened them like a tourniquet only a finger’s length from the roots. She took the knife that had once belonged to the reigning Empress and put the blade’s edge between the rings. With her own hand trembling, she guided Reza’s palm to the knife’s bejeweled handle. “This,” she said, her voice trembling, “is my gift to you, my love.”

  Reza took a deep breath. His eyes were closed, and his heart stopped. He did not know what to expect. “It is Her will.”

  Esah-Zhurah closed her eyes.

  Reza gritted his teeth, and with a swift cut, the long braid came away, falling to the ground.

  “Reza!” Esah-Zhurah screamed as pain ripped into her heart, the voice of Reza’s spirit suddenly having been silenced. “No,” she whispered. “It cannot be. It cannot.” His Bloodsong was gone. The melody that thrilled her in her dreams and when they touched, that gave her strength when she fought, was no more. She wanted more than anything simply to plunge a knife into her breast. But she could not deny Her will. Even her love for Reza could not prevent her from obeying the call of the Empress.

  She felt something being pressed into her trembling hands. “This is yours, my child,” Tesh-Dar said shakily, as if from a thousand leagues away.

  Esah-Zhurah knew what it was. Tenderly, she took the long braid of Reza’s fine brown hair into her hands and pressed it to her face, taking in the scent and touch that she would never again feel. Then she opened her eyes to look upon him once more before he was taken away.

  But there was nothing for her to see but the garden and Tesh-Dar’s grieving form. Except for the bent blades of grass upon which he had been kneeling, there was no sign of him.

  Reza was gone.

  IF YOU ENJOYED EMPIRE…

  The story of Reza and Esah-Zhurah is continued with In Her Name: Confederation, which picks up the story with Reza’s return to the Confederation. You also have the option of getting the In Her Name: Redemption, a trilogy collection that contains the entire first trilogy (Empire, Confederation, and Final Battle).

  To give you a taste of what’s to come, here’s the first chapter from Confederation - enjoy!

  * * *

  “It’s going to be light soon.”

  The statement was more than simple fact. Coming from the young Marine corporal, whose left leg ended halfway down his thigh, the bloody stump capped with crude bandages that now reeked of gangrene, the words were a prophecy of doom. Like many of the others clustered around him, broken and beaten, he was beyond fear. He had spent most of the previous night taken with fever, whispering or crying for the wife he would never see again, the daughter he had never seen beyond the image of the hologram he held clutched to his lacerated chest. There were dozens more just like him crammed into the stone church, waiting for morning. Waiting to die. “They’ll be coming.”

  “Rest easy, my son,” Father Hernandez soothed, kneeling down to give the man a drink of water from the clay pitcher he carried. “Conserve your strength. The Lord shall protect and provide for us. You are safe here.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Hernandez turned to find Lieutenant Jodi Ellen Mackenzie, Confederation Navy, glaring at him from where she kneeled next to a fallen Marine officer. Her foul mouth concealed a heart of gold and a mountain of determination, both to survive and to keep the people who depended on her – now including these Marines – alive. Momentarily turning her attention from Hernandez, Mackenzie closed Colonel Moreau’s eyes with a gentle brush of her hand.

  Another life taken in vain, Hernandez thought sadly. How many horrors had he witnessed these past, what, weeks? Months? And how many were yet to come? But he refused to relent in his undying passion that his way, the way of the Church into which he had been born and raised, and finally had come to lead, was the way of righteousness.

  “Please, lieutenant,” he asked as one of the parish’s monks made his way to the side of the dead Marine colonel to mutter the last rites over her cooling body, “do not blaspheme in my church.” He had said the very same thing to her countless times, but each time he convinced himself that it was the first and only transgression, and that she would eventually give in to his gentle reason. He was not, nor had he ever become, angry with her, for he was a man of great if not quite infi
nite patience and gentleness. He looked upon those two traits and his belief in God as the trinity that defined and guided his life. They had served him and his small rural parish well for many years, through much adversity and hardship. He had no intention of abandoning those tenets now, in the face of this unusual woman or the great Enemy, the demons, that had come from the skies. “Please,” he said again.

  Mackenzie rolled her eyes tiredly and shrugged. “Sure, Father,” she said in a less than respectful tone. “Let’s see, what is it you guys say? Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned?” She came to stand next to him, the light from the candle in his hand flickering against her face like a trapped butterfly. “The only sin that I’ve seen is you and all your people sitting around on your butts while these poor bastards,” she jabbed a finger at one of the rows of wounded that now populated the church, “throw their gonads in the grinder for you.” She saw him glance at Colonel Moreau’s body, now covered with a shroud of rough burlap. “She can’t help you anymore, priest,” Mackenzie muttered, more to herself than for his benefit. Moreau had been as sympathetic to Hernandez’s beliefs as much as Jodi was not. “I guess I’m in charge of this butcher shop now.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Jesus.”

  Hernandez regarded her for a moment, taken not so much by the callousness of her words but by her appearance. Even exhausted, coated with grime and smelling of weeks-old sweat (water conservation and Kreelan attacks having rendered bathing an obsolete luxury), she was more than beautiful. Although Father Hernandez and the other dozen monks who tended to the parishioners of Saint Mary’s of Rutan had taken the vows of celibacy, he could not deny the effect she had on him and, he suspected, on more than one of the monks under his charge. Even for a man of sixty-five, aged to seventy or eighty by a rough life on a world not known for its kindness, she was a temptation for the imagination, if not for the flesh. Hernandez did not consider himself a scholar, but he had read many of the great literary works of ancient times, some even in the original Latin and Greek, and he knew that Helen of Troy could have been no more radiant in her appearance. He could hardly intuit the heritage that gave her the black silken hair and coffee skin from which her ice blue eyes blazed. In his mind he saw the bloodlines of a Nubian queen merged with that of a fierce Norseman. Perhaps such was the case, the result of some unlikely but divine rendezvous somewhere on the ancient seas of Terra.

  “You’re staring, father,” she said with a tired sigh. It was always the same, she thought. Ever since she was ten and about to bloom into the woman she someday would become, she had been the object of unwanted interest from men. The boys in her classes, sometimes the teachers; countless smiling faces had flooded by over the years, remaining as leering gargoyles in her memory. The only man she had ever truly loved had been her father, who had been immune to her unintentional power: he was blind from birth, beyond even the hope of reconstructive surgery. Jodi was sure that the fate that had placed this curse on him had been a blessing in disguise for her and for their relationship. He had never seen her beauty beyond what the loving touch of his fingers upon her face could reveal, and so he had never felt the craving or lust that her appearance seemed to inspire in so many others. He had always been wonderful to her, and there were no words to describe her love for him.

  Jodi and her mother had been equally close, and with her Jodi had shared her feelings, her apprehensions, as she grew. But while her mother could well understand Jodi’s feelings, she had never been able to truly grasp the depth of her daughter’s concerns, and in the honesty they had always shared, she had never claimed to. Arlene Mackenzie was a beautiful woman in her own right, but she knew quite well that Jodi was several orders of magnitude higher on whatever primal scale was used to judge subjective beauty. Jodi was only thankful that her mother had never been jealous of the power her daughter could wield over others if she had ever chosen to, which she never had. Jodi had always been very close to her parents, and she reluctantly admitted to herself that right now she, Jodi Mackenzie, veteran fighter pilot of the Black Widow Squadron, missed them terribly. The priest’s appraising stare only made her miss them more.

  “What’s the matter, father?” she said finally, her skin prickling with anger. “Did you get tired of popping your altar boys?”

  Red-faced, Hernandez averted his gaze. A nearby monk glanced in their direction, a comic look of shock on his face. The Marines lying on the floor beside them were in no condition to notice their exchange.

  “Please,” Hernandez said quietly, his voice choked with shame, “forgive my trespass. I cannot deny a certain weakness for your beauty, foolish old man that I am. That is an often unavoidable pitfall of the flesh of which we are all made, and even a hearty pursuit of God’s Truth cannot always prevent the serpent from striking. But I assure you,” he went on, finally returning her angry gaze, “that the vows I took when a very young man have been faithfully kept, and will remain unbroken for as long as I live.” Hernandez offered a tentative smile. “As beautiful as you are, I don’t feel in need of a cold shower.”

  Jodi’s anger dissipated at the old joke that sometimes was not so funny for those in Hernandez’s position. More important, she appreciated the priest’s guts for admitting his weakness with such sincerity. That, she thought, was something rare on the outback colony worlds, where men were still men and women were still cattle.

  “Maybe you don’t,” she told him, her mouth calling forth a tired but sincere smile of forgiveness, simultaneously wrinkling her nose in a mockery of the body odor they all shared, “but I could sure as hell use one.”

  Visibly relieved and letting her latest blasphemy pass unnoticed, Hernandez took the opportunity to change the subject. “Now that you are in command,” he asked seriously, “what do you intend to do?”

  “That’s a good question,” she said quietly, turning the issue over in her mind like a stringy chunk of beef on a spit, a tough morsel to chew on, but all that was available. She looked around, surveying the dark stone cathedral that had been her unexpected garrison and home for nearly three weeks. Shot down by Kreelan ground fire while supporting the Marine combat regiment that had been dispatched to Rutan, she had bailed out of her stricken fighter a few kilometers from the village of the same name, and that was where she had been stranded ever since. She had never worried about being shot at while floating down on the parachute, watching as her fighter obliterated itself against a cliff face five kilometers away, because in all the years of the war, the Kreelans had never attacked anyone who had bailed out. At least, that is, until the unlucky individual reached the ground.

  In Jodi’s case, friendly troops happened to reach her first, but that was the beginning and the end of her good fortune. As she was drifting toward the black-green forest in which Rutan was nestled, the Hood, her squadron’s home carrier, and her escorts were taking a beating at the hands of two Kreelan heavy cruisers that a few days earlier had landed an enemy force to clean out the human settlement. After destroying her tormentors in a running fight that had lasted nearly three days, Hood had informed the regimental commander, Colonel Moreau, that the ship would be unable to resume station over Rutan: her battle damage required immediate withdrawal to the nearest port and a drydock. The captain expressed his sincere regrets to Moreau, but he could not face another engagement with any hope of his ship and her escorts surviving. There were no other Kreelan ships in the area, and Kreelan forces on the planet were judged to be roughly even to what the regiment could field, plus whatever help the Territorial Army could provide. On paper, at least, it looked to be a fair fight.

  But neither Hood’s captain, nor the Marines who had come to defend the planet had counted on a colony made up entirely of pacifists. Normally, the two thousand-strong Marine regiment would have been able to count on support from the local Territorial Army command that was supposed to be established on every human-settled world in the Confederation. In the case of Rutan, that should have been an additional five to eight thousand able-bo
died adults with at least rudimentary weapons, if not proper light infantry combat gear.

  Unfortunately, the intelligence files had contained nothing about the colony’s disdain of violence. But that was hardly surprising, considering that the information contained in the files was for an entirely different settlement. Only the data on the planet’s physical characteristics – weather, gravity, and the like – happened to be correct. Someone had called it an administrative error, but most of the Marines had more colorful names for the mistake that was to cost them their lives. They were bitter indeed when they discovered that what should have been a comparatively swift human victory through sheer weight of numbers rapidly became a struggle for survival against the most tenacious and implacable enemy that humans had ever encountered.

  Now, a month after the Marines had leaped from the assault boats under protective fighter cover from Jodi’s Black Widows, the proud 373d Marine Assault Regiment (Guards) had been reduced to twenty-two effectives, eighty-six walking wounded, and nearly five-hundred stretcher cases, most of them crammed into St. Mary’s. The rest of the original one thousand, nine hundred and thirty-seven members of the original Marine force lay scattered in the forests around the village, dead. Among the casualties were the regiment’s surgeon and all thirty-one medics. The survivors now had to rely on the primitive skills of the two local physicians (Jodi preferred to think of them as witch doctors), plus whatever nursing Hernandez and his monks could provide.

  The remainder of the population, on order of the Council of Elders and with Hernandez’s recommendation, had holed themselves up in their homes to await the outcome of the battle. Jodi had often pondered the blind luck that had led Rutan’s founders to build their village in the hollow of a great cliff that towered over the forest, much like an ancient native American civilization had done over a millennia before on Terra: it had been the key to their survival thus far. An ordinary rural settlement, situated in the open, would have forced the defenders to spread themselves impossibly thin to protect their uncooperative civilian hosts.