Eustus sat for a moment, pondering this new situation. It did not take him long to come to a conclusion and decide upon a course of action. Commodore Marchand’s hunch had been right: there had been something important on that ship – this girl. Eustus did not know why she was important, but the Kreelans, especially the warrior whom he now took to be her protector, had gone to the greatest lengths to keep her alive, despite their present condition of general confusion, which itself remained a mystery.
He had to take her back with him. The only question was how.
“Well,” he said, struggling to his feet, “there’s only one way to find out.” Shuffling to the side of the slab that pinned the girl to the floor, he leaned over and grasped the exposed edge with his battered hands, doing his best not to rip open the wound on his leg.
He pulled. Nothing.
Grimacing, he pulled harder, feeling his muscles and tendons pop and crack with the strain, until the stone just barely moved under his grip.
But that was all. He tried one final time, but it was just too heavy, and he let it settle back into place with a sandy grinding noise. The girl did not cry out, and he thought that perhaps the stone merely pinned her, and had not crushed any of her limbs. But until the stone was removed, there was no way to know for sure.
Panting like a dog, he sat on the slab that had just thumbed its nose at him. “I’m sorry,” he apologized to no one in particular, “but that’s just a bit… too heavy.”
The trapped warrior pointed at him. “Sh’iamar tan lehtukh,” she said, hammering her hand against the stone that pinned her. She pointed at him again, then gestured with her hand for him to come, then pounded against the rock.
Then she pointed at the girl. “Shera-Khan.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure. If I helped you get out of there, even if we both could move that rock, the first thing you’d do is gut me like a pig.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
The warrior was adamant. “Shera-Khan!” she cried. While Eustus knew nothing of their ways and language, he had no doubt that a deep and frightful anguish lay behind the warrior’s voice. He knew that her job must have been to protect the girl, to see her safely to wherever they were going, and that she was failing. Had failed. And if he let her out of her confinement, he had no doubt that she would kill him without a second thought and carry on with the girl.
On the other hand, he had come to realize that she might be his only hope of making it home. By his own admittedly unreliable estimate, it had taken over half an hour just for him to hobble down to this part of the tunnel, a distance of less than fifty or so meters, and clamber over a few slabs of rock. At that rate, how long might it be before he finally found his way out of here? Hours? Days? And how long had he been unconscious? Most likely, it would take him more time than the hours the boat would wait for him to return. And the warm stickiness he felt down his right leg told him he was still bleeding, a process that was already exhausting him and, if not stopped, could leave him dead. The bandage helped, but it was just that, a bandage, and not designed to hold up to what he was trying to do. Unfortunately, the more sophisticated medical tools in his first aid kit that could have sealed the wound permanently had been destroyed.
That settles it, then, he thought. “All right,” he said, knowing that he was going to regret this. “I’ll help you get out of there so you can help the girl.” He pointed at himself, then the rock, and nodded, hoping she would understand. “In exchange,” he went on, “you help me out of here and back to my ship.” He pointed into the darkness and her glowing eyes, then at himself, then upward, toward the surface. He saw her blink, but that was the only acknowledgment he received.
Gritting his teeth at the pain in his thigh, he struggled up from the smaller slab pinning the girl and took the few steps back to where its larger cousin held the warrior trapped. Taking a deep breath, trying to still his mounting apprehension, he stepped within range of her hand. She did nothing. Accepting that as a positive sign, he planted his injured leg on the ground, hoping it would support him long enough to get this over with, and set his other foot against the wall. He gripped the edge of the rock with both hands and said, “Now!”
He pulled against the stone with all his might, his face contorted in a rictus of effort. Nothing was happening.
He was about to give up when he heard a savage cry from beneath him and the stone shuddered, rising upward.
“Push, damn you!” he spat through clenched teeth, pulling with his arms and upper body as his leg pushed against the wall with all the strength he had left. The slab continued to rise up and away from the wall, gaining speed as its center of gravity shifted to their advantage. Suddenly, it was standing on edge, and with a final shove the Kreelan warrior sent it crashing over and onto the floor. Eustus flung himself out of the way to avoid being crushed by its ponderous bulk. He lay on the floor, his lungs burning from the exertion, his leg a mass of pain as he waited for her to come and kill him.
But he waited in vain. Behind him, he heard her groan again, a sound that was followed by the crash of another slab falling to the floor. Rolling over, he saw her kneeling by the child’s side, her great hands gently touching the child’s face. Beside her lay the stone that she had pulled off of the girl.
He pulled his hand away from where it had been holding his thigh. It was slick with blood. “Damn,” he whispered to himself as he was struck with lightheadedness. He waited a moment longer for the Kreelan to do something, and when she did not, he half crawled, half dragged himself to where the girl lay deathly still.
Looking at her small body, he saw that her injuries probably were severe. Her armor was creased and pierced by the shards of rock that had been blasted from the wall and then fell on top of her when the tunnel collapsed, and there was a lot of blood from a number of wounds in her head, chest, and legs. As he had guessed, while the slab that had fallen on her had undoubtedly produced its own injuries, at least it had not crushed her arms or legs, or anything else he could see. She might still live, but she would have to get medical attention fast.
He reached for the tube of liquid bandage in his pocket, eliciting a fierce glare from the warrior, whose muscles visibly tensed. “I’m going to try and help her,” he said softly, holding his hands up, one empty, the other with the partially used tube. “This won’t do much, but it might help stop some of the bleeding.” The Kreelan watched suspiciously as he put some of the gray paste on the girl’s head where the skin had been broken. Then he managed to get the woman to help him unfasten the girl’s armor, letting him squeeze the bandage into some of the more serious wounds.
“Oh, man,” Eustus breathed as he peeled away the tattered black undergarment that he had been accustomed to since basic training when he first saw Reza in one. “She’s got some broken ribs,” he said softly, being careful with the bandage. “Probably some internal injuries, too. We’ve got to get her to a doctor.” The warrior only stared at him uncomprehendingly. “Isn’t there a doctor here? Anybody?” He gestured around them, then at the bandage, then at the girl.
The Kreelan pointed at herself, the girl, then Eustus, then swept her arm around them, then pointed to the three of them again.
“So,” Eustus said miserably, “it’s just us chickens, I guess.” He bit his lip, thinking. “Then we’ve got to get her to the ship. You’ve got to help me get her to the ship or she’s going to die.” He tried to convey the thought through a series of gestures, but the warrior only stared at him. He tried a different set of gesticulations. Nothing. No reaction.
He was about to try something else when she drew out a wicked looking knife that she held over the child’s heart. Eustus knew what was about to happen. Unable to save her, she was going to kill the child, and then herself.
“Wait!” he said, grasping her hand and trying to move the knife away. But her hands were huge and powerful, and he might as well have been wrestling with a two hundred-kilo silverback mountain gorilla for all the effect
he was having. “Dammit,” he hissed angrily at her stubbornness, “I wish Reza was here.”
“Reza?” the warrior whispered. “Reza tu’umeh sameh ka’ash?”
“You know him?” Eustus asked, shocked. “Reza Gard?”
The woman’s eyes closed as she put a hand on her armored breast as if to keep her heart from stopping. The knife fell away from the girl’s chest. Eustus watched in shock as she knelt there, her body trembling as if she were crying. She spoke softly, as if saying a prayer, mentioning Reza’s name several times.
Suddenly, he understood. “He’s not dead,” he told her, cursing their inability to communicate. “He… listen.” Her eyes remained closed. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Listen! Reza didn’t die. Look.” He gestured to himself “Reza, right?” Then he took her knife from where it had fallen on the ground, pretending to thrust it into his chest. She turned away as if she had been struck. “Dammit, pay attention to me!” Eustus shouted angrily, shaking her again. She whirled around, ready to strike him, but he ignored her, repeating his enactment of the sword spearing through Reza’s armor. He fell over like he was dead and closed his eyes.
Then he opened them again. “He didn’t die,” he told her again. He pulled himself painfully back up to a sitting position. “He was hurt really bad,” he told her. “Look, this is Reza,” he set a rock between them. “Reza. Doctors worked on him for a long time.” He took the bandage tube and squeezed some of it on the rock. “It took a long time for him to get better, but he recovered.” Eustus took the rock and stood it up like a doll, marching it around between them. “He’s alive,” he told her again. He pointed to her, to himself, then swept his arms around them.
“He’s alive right now. Right now.”
The light of understanding finally dawned on her. “Reza,” she said through trembling lips. Then she pointed to the girl. “Reza.”
“No,” Eustus said, waving his hands. “She’s not Reza. Reza’s out there,” he pointed upward, “on Earth still.”
The warrior’s eyes brightened. She pointed upward as Eustus had. “Reza?” she asked hopefully.
Eustus nodded. “Yes. He’s on Earth, though, not here, not on the ships up there.” He pointed at the girl again. “That’s not Reza.” He took a guess. “That’s Shera-Khan.”
The warrior nodded, as if copying his gesture. He did not know that she had learned it many years before from a very young human boy. “Shera-Khan,” she repeated. “Reza. E’la tanocht im.” She gestured at her loins, and then at Eustus’s, and then at the girl. “Esah-Zhurah. Reza. Shera-khan.”
Eustus sat back, feeling like someone had slammed him over the head with a club. “She’s his daughter,” he said numbly. “Esah-Zhurah is her mother and Reza is her father. And Esah-Zhurah almost killed him. Jesus.” He looked at the girl, shaking his head in sad wonder. “And he never even knew about her, did he?” On impulse, he reached out and pulled up one of the girl’s eyelids again. There had been something strange about the iris, and now, taking a closer look in the dim light, he saw what it was: the child’s eyes were green like Reza’s, and the pupils were round, totally unlike the cat’s eyes of the Kreelans. The “normal” Kreelans, that is. He had not noticed it before, mostly because he had not expected to find anything like that. But now…
“Listen,” he said, wishing that she could understand what he was saying, “I can get you to Reza, and to some doctors who might be able to help Shera-Khan, but we’ve got to hurry. We’ve got to get to the surface and the ship that’s waiting there – I hope – before it leaves.” He gestured at the three of them, then upward. “Reza,” he said again, pointing up.
He did not need a translator this time. The warrior understood perfectly. With infinite care, she gathered the child in her arms and stood waiting while Eustus staggered to his feet.
“This is really going to suck,” he said, mimicking one of his older – and deceased – brothers as he tried his best to follow the warrior down the tunnel. He stumbled after the first few steps. His vision was turning gray as his leg beat at him with lancing pain. He only made half a dozen steps more before he collapsed, exhausted and bleeding.
He could only watch as she returned for him, and he felt himself plucked from the floor as if he were a mere paperweight before she draped him over her shoulder. The floor began to pass by in a blur with the woman’s powerful strides, and her rhythm felt to him like waves rolling on the ocean. Eustus closed his eyes.
Darkness.
Forty-One
Vice Admiral Yolanda Laskowski sat back in her padded armchair, infinitely pleased with herself. It had taken her three times longer than she had originally estimated, but she had found a solution.
No, she corrected herself. She had found the solution. Working alone with the battle computer that was her only true friend, the only one she had ever felt she could really trust, she had finally found an answer to Evgeni Zhukovski’s “hypothetical” scenario (which she knew quite well was more than hypothetical). The projected outcome, while not exactly a landslide in humanity’s favor, nonetheless predicted victory. She had found a way, in theory – and with the help of some very special weapons – that a human fleet might be able to win.
While she had been forced to use a number of unverifiable assumptions in the decision matrix that the computer used to generate the result probabilities, she felt her assumptions were close enough to fit the available data. The Kreelans were in headlong retreat, and were ripe for a full, devastating pursuit.
She stood up and took her place behind the podium at the front of the briefing room.
“First,” she began in her briefing to L’Houillier and the senior members of the General Staff, “this scenario is only valid as long as the Kreelan forces do not demonstrate their historical fighting potential. If at any point in the first phase of the operation they regain their will to fight, for lack of a better description, our odds drop to near zero.” Heads nodded around the table. No one needed the battle computers to tell them that.
“Second, we must have complete surprise. Even in their present state, their fleet potentially could mass enough firepower to beat back the most determined attack we make. Just in measure of known numbers – and the STARNET figures are almost certainly conservative by a factor of at least fifty percent – the engagement will leave us outnumbered by one point seven to one. Only strategic and tactical surprise can balance out that inequality.
“Third, our commitment has to be total. I input every armed ship either currently afloat or ready to put out of drydock into the attack, giving us a total of two-thousand, eight-hundred, and forty-seven vessels. That includes Navy combat vessels and every armed coast guard and auxiliary ship with hyperlight drive that could be assembled in a forty-eight hour period, using midnight Zulu time tomorrow as H-hour.”
She called up the holo image of space that extended from the human-explored Inner Arm sector, inward toward the galactic core. “This,” she pointed to a red spheroid that appeared among the star clusters like a malignant tumor in a mass of neurons, “is the zone where the Kreelan fleet is gathering, which the scenario assumes to be the approximate location of their homeworld. As you can see, it has diminished somewhat in size since it was first identified, but we still do not know the precise location of their massing point.” She paused, looking at L’Houillier, then Zhukovski. “That is the last, and most crucial, assumption I have had to make: that somehow we will discover that information before our fleet sails.”
“I accept your assumptions, admiral,” L’Houillier told her, but he was looking at Zhukovski. “As for the last one, we will see what can be done.”
The Russian admiral said nothing, but stared impassively at the red corpuscle in the holo display as if he had not heard his superior.
“Please go on,” L’Houillier said quietly.
“Sir,” Laskowski said, nodding. Their exchange had not gone unnoticed. Zhukovski, her chief rival, was coming under some kind of pressure.
Good. “The operation itself is fairly straightforward, with two simultaneous attacks, one in support of the other. The objective of the first attack is to engage and tie down the Kreelan fleet. It is not to destroy the enemy in a decisive manner, but to prevent it from engaging the ships taking part in the second attack. The objective of that effort will be the physical destruction of the Kreelan homeworld or worlds.”
Faces among the staff suddenly became deadly serious. “Planet-busting,” as it was often called, had always been more of a theoretical issue than a practical one. For one thing, humans had never encountered a Kreelan world. For another, many believed that it could not be done without involving a tremendous number of ships in an extended bombardment.
“A task force of seven ships,” Laskowski went on, “will approach the Kreelan system from a different vector than the main body. They will be armed with kryolon and thermium torpedoes.”
Laskowski felt an electric thrill run through her body at the mention of the device and the effect it had – stunned silence – on her audience. The kryolon torpedo was nearly a legend, a weapon that had been theoretically perfected years before, but that had never actually been used in anger. It was a star killer that caused a star to go nova, obliterating any orbiting planets. Their existence never confirmed to the populace or the military at large, the few weapons that had actually been constructed had remained in carefully protected secret bunkers on faraway asteroids, a suitable target for them never having been identified.
Until now.
“Three ships will launch their kryolon weapons at the system’s primary star,” Laskowski went on before anyone could interrupt, “while the others will seek out and attack any inhabited planets or moons in the system with improved thermium torpedoes.” Thermium torpedoes had been developed with the help of research done on what was left of Hallmark. While not nearly as cataclysmic as the kryolon weapons, they would destroy the atmosphere of any Kreelan-held worlds. And these weapons had been tested against a real planet, an already-destroyed human colony. In a way, Laskowski thought, the Kreelans had sown the seeds of their own destruction.
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