In Her Name

by Michael R. Hicks

  “The enemy, sergeant,” Thorella snapped. “Tell me about the enemy!”

  “Uh, yes, sir,” the woman replied. “Five individuals, sir. At the very top of a big, I don’t know, a pyramid, like.” Pause. “But I could swear that four of them look like our people.”

  “What do you mean, ‘our people?’” Thorella demanded. Any thoughts of exploring the Golden Pearl further were rapidly fading.

  “Humans, sir,” said the staff sergeant, reporting what she could make out through her image enhancers. “Two males and two females. One of the males is in Marine combat dress, one of the females in Navy uniform. The two others are in civvies of some kind. But the fifth one is definitely Kreelan, but she looks kind of small.”

  “About the size of a human teenager?” Thorella asked, his face contorting into a rictus of ice-cold rage.

  Pause. “Now that you mention it, yes, sir, that’s what she looks like. A young Kreelan–”

  “Get them!” he choked.

  “Sir?” Riggs cut in over the confused staff sergeant.

  “You heard me!” Thorella raged as he whirled, running back down the corridor toward the hatchway. Now he knew what had happened to Borge: he had never made it off the doomed Warspite. “Get them! They’re renegades, they killed the president!” Thorella did not need a body for evidence. He knew for sure that Borge was dead. Precisely how he had gotten that way was of no further concern. All that mattered now was that his own ascension to power was finally cleared of the last obstacle, his despicable father. He just needed to be sure that Reza Gard and his accomplices were noted in the history books as President Borge’s murderers, and himself, the avenger. “And I want them alive!” He would not be denied the fulfillment of his long-lived vendetta.

  Outside, Riggs felt his blood turn to ice. Such an outrage could not go unpunished. Two presidents, murdered? It was unthinkable. “Yes, sir! Sergeant Khosa,” he ordered, “open fire! Pin them down, but do not – repeat, do not – shoot to kill. We’re on our way.”

  * * *

  Nicole stood close behind Shera-Khan. Lightly, she put a hand on his shoulder. He did not flinch away. “Do you… feel anything, Shera-Khan?” she asked as they all stared into the light that swirled and writhed like a living thing.

  He shook his head. “I am empty,” he said bleakly. “I cannot hear my father’s song; I cannot touch his soul.”

  “How will we know if he’s successful,” Eustus asked, “or… if he fails?”

  “If the Empress dies,” Shera-Khan said, “this–” he gestured toward the light, “–will be no more, and Darkness shall fall upon the sun. All shall end; there shall be no more.”

  “Shera-Khan,” Braddock said quietly, “I’ve known your father for a long time, and I know how much he loves her, and I know how much you must love her. But, even if she dies, the universe will still go on. You’ll still be alive and well, and–”

  “You do not understand,” Shera-Khan interrupted. “She is not an individual. She is all of us. Our souls and spirits are bound to Her. Even now, now that I cannot feel Her or any others of my kind, should She perish, I shall surely die also. With Her last breath, so shall the Empire perish from the Universe. My father bade me come with you should he fail; he did this out of kindness and hope. But should the Empress perish, so shall I; so shall all my kind.”

  Braddock and Enya still did not understand, but Nicole did, and she drew Shera-Khan closer to her. “He will win the Challenge,” she said, a tingling sensation running through her chest at the words. “He must.”

  “Hey,” Eustus said from behind them. Unable to watch the eye-searing light anymore, he had turned to study the rest of the throne room. Now, as he watched Riggs’s Marines darting in through the entrance they themselves had used, advancing on the great stairway, he almost wished he hadn’t. “I think we’ve got company.”

  “Who–”

  “Down!” Eustus cried, throwing the others to the floor of the dais just as a hail of energy bolts blasted chunks from the stairway below and ricocheted from the crystalline dome above.

  * * *

  Reza hissed as Tara-Khan’s sword slashed through his armor, drawing blood from his shoulder.

  “Well do you fight, young one,” Tara-Khan told him through gritted teeth, for Reza’s sword had found its mark on occasion also, “but still do you have much to learn.”

  For what seemed like hours the two had fought, caught in a cycle of desperate attrition, one to save the future, the other to slaughter imperfection, unworthiness. Both were perfect in their craft, unable to inflict a decisive blow, only able to harm. To hurt, to bleed.

  “I have learned much already,” Reza hissed. His sword swung through space with a power and speed that left thunder in the air as the great blade sought Tara-Khan’s neck. It was perfectly timed, the razor’s edge keening as it sought the older warrior’s flesh.

  Instead, it found only falling water.

  “What?” Reza stammered in confusion. Tara-Khan had disappeared. Only a pool of water, rapidly sinking into the sand, was left where he had been standing. Warily, he stepped closer, prodding the wet sand with his foot.

  A flutter caught his eye. The Empress, he thought. She moved! But as he studied Her, he knew it must have been an illusion. She was still as the stone upon which She lay. If he did not save Her soon, that was how She would forever remain. Pushing Tara-Khan from his mind, he took a step toward Her. Every second he waited was a grain of sand slipping through the waist of a cosmic hourglass. And so few grains were left, he thought. So very few.

  Another step.

  Where was Tara-Khan? He whirled about suddenly, his sword cutting a protective arc, but Tara-Khan was nowhere to be seen. There was only the cryptic stain upon the sand, quickly fading. Surely, he thought, Tara-Khan had not conceded, not in silence, without a word?

  He took another step toward Esah-Zhurah, the Empress. And another. Closer to Her now, he could hear the slow, shallow rustle of Her breathing, could smell Her hair, and his insides began to tremble. The trickle of warm blood that ran down his side from his shoulder felt like a caress, as when her hand had touched him lovingly, when he had held her close. So long ago, he thought. So very, very long ago.

  He was close to Her now, his sword ready at his side, but his eyes were filled with the image of Her face. She had become his world, the very Universe. The song that had turned his blood to fire sang still, not for battle, but for love, for Her.

  At the dais, now. Climbing the steps. The sound of his feet through water. Her face, turned toward him–

  Water?

  – as if watching him, Her eyes closed…

  He did not see the water stir as he passed, heard nothing as it rose and took shape and form, silent as a still pool as metal, flesh, and bone emerged.

  His inner alarms clamored and his body reacted with the strength of a tiger and the speed of lightning, but it was too little, too late. With a triumphant roar, Tara-Khan attacked. The great blade speared through the side of Reza’s armor, embedding itself deep within him in a searing flash of pain.

  In agonized rage, Reza swung his own weapon at Tara-Khan’s unprotected head, but again it found nothing but water.

  I have failed, he thought miserably, as Tara-Khan rose again, his sword ready to strike.

  “You fought well young one,” the elder warrior said, “but you are not The One. You are not worthy of Her love, and thus shall you perish.” The sword fell.

  Water, the thought flashed through Reza’s mind as the blade hissed through the air. Water… and ice…

  At the last instant, Reza threw himself forward, sinking his claws into Tara-Khan’s armor as the sword whistled past above his head. Laughing at Reza’s desperate attempt to save himself, Tara-Khan did as Reza had hoped. His body melted into water, his essence slipping through Reza’s fingers.

  But they were no longer in the arena.

  * * *

  “Look out!” Enya cried, as an energy bolt she
ared an elephant-sized chunk of the great glassine dome from the slender frame above.

  With a jerk of his head, Braddock saw the huge glass fragment falling toward him. Twisting desperately to the side, he tried to get out of its way, but he was too late. With a crash that shook the dais itself, Braddock disappeared beneath the mass of crystal as it exploded into a million tiny shards.

  “Tony!” Nicole screamed as she crawled through the debris toward him, the crystal fragments lacerating her hands and knees. She reached out to take hold of the glass shell that covered Braddock’s body like the transparent lid of a coffin.

  “No!” Shera-Khan cried, batting her unprotected hands away from the razor sharp edges. “Let me.” Sensing a lull in the firing from below and using his armored hands and diamond-hard talons, he struggled to lift a fragment of the crystal that covered Braddock’s body, but was unable to move it. It was far too large, too heavy.

  Nicole slid up next to him, keeping her head down and out of the line of fire. Above them, the dome began to disintegrate, huge chunks falling into the throne room as the structure began to lose the last of its integrity.

  “Tony,” she whispered, peering at his smashed body through the clear crystal. His face, his coat, his hands were covered with blood. Blood was everywhere. “No,” she moaned. “Please, Tony,” she whispered, “You cannot die!” But she had seen death enough times to recognize it. And Tony Braddock was dead.

  As Shera-Khan watched helplessly, Nicole laid her head on the crystal that covered her husband and began to silently weep.

  On the other side of the dais, separated by the circle of blue light from the others, Enya and Eustus continued to fire at their attackers, trying to keep them pinned down.

  “There are too many of them!” Enya shouted above the thunder of the guns.

  “You have a talent for understatement, my love,” he replied as he sent a round into a careless Marine’s leg. He was trying desperately not to kill any of them, only to injure them or keep their heads down. The ISS guards were one thing; they were as much an enemy as the Kreelans had ever been. But the Marines were his people, his family. “Nicole,” he bellowed, “how are you doing?”

  Only the guns below answered him.

  “Nicole?” he called again. They had been able to hear each other before. “What the hell are they doing over there?” he asked Enya as he turned, ready to skirt around toward the other side, where the other three of their little band had posted themselves.

  The ugly snout of a blaster suddenly thrust itself into his face.

  “Drop it,” a voice growled from behind a combat helmet. Eustus saw that where the nameplate had been on the man’s armor, there was nothing now but a still-hot scorch mark. “Both of you. Now.”

  Hesitating for just a moment, Eustus did as he was told. They had lost.

  Behind him, Enya asked quietly, “Eustus?” She still held her weapon, clenched in her left hand.

  “Drop it,” Eustus told her. He heard the weapon clatter onto the cold stone floor.

  “Where are the others?” Eustus asked.

  “Shut up,” the Marine snarled as three more armored figures appeared from the other side to surround them. The Marine motioned with his blaster toward where he had left Nicole, Braddock, and Shera-Khan. “Move it. Now.”

  Eustus led Enya around the cylindrical wall of light, ignoring the vicious shove the Marine gave him as he passed. As he walked, he heard something crunching under his feet, like glass. And then he saw Nicole slumped over a huge mass of crystal, Shera-Khan on his knees beside her, a Marine covering them with his rifle. A pool of blood seeped from beneath the crystal.

  “Sweet Jesus,” he whispered. “Nicole, what hap–”

  A huge Marine slammed an elbow into Eustus’s jaw, sending him sprawling dangerously close to the light. Through the stars dancing through his brain, he smelled hair burning, and a prickling sensation told him that it was the hair on his arm, being burned into plasma by whatever energy governed the barrier.

  “Eustus!” Enya cried as she grabbed at his ankles, pulling him away from the shimmering wall. “You could have killed him!” she snarled at the figure looming behind her.

  “He’s a traitor,” Lieutenant Riggs sneered over the suit’s PA system, “just like you. I don’t know why General Thorella wants you alive, but he does.” He grimaced at all of them, a look of utter disgust diluted only with hatred, not caring that they could not see his expression behind his helmet. “And I follow orders.” A booted foot kicked at Braddock’s crystal sarcophagus.

  “You bastard!” Nicole shrieked, leaping to her feet, her blood suddenly blazing with a fiery alien rage.

  Shera-Khan watched in amazement as this human woman, this friend-warrior of his father, struck out at the animal in armor. She moved as if she had talons, with the deadly grace and speed of a warrior priestess.

  Riggs was caught off-guard, and his head rang against the inside of his helmet as her hands slammed against his armor with a strength he never would have guessed at by looking at her. But sheer mass, if nothing else, was on his side, and he recovered quickly. As one armored fist fastened itself around one of Nicole’s wrists, the other rose to smash her in the face.

  In that instant, Shera-Khan sensed a tremor pulse through his body, and he knew that if he did not act, Nicole would be dead.

  Like a tiger he leaped, his arms outstretched, his claws reaching not for Riggs, but for Nicole.

  * * *

  Reza fell to his knees upon the ice, his face already a cherry red from the freezing wind that howled over the great glacier at the south pole of the Homeworld, a place so cold that spit froze solid before it hit the ground.

  Forcing his eyes open against the frigid wind, he saw Tara-Khan’s face, frozen in a nightmare state that was half flesh, half ice. One eye was still fully formed, staring at him in astonishment, while the other was stretched, elongated like a broken yolk as it had begun to flow toward the ground. The mouth, misshapen, skewed, was open, but what emotion might have been conveyed there was unimaginable, horrible. His arms and sword had liquefied, falling to fuse with what was left of his legs, now mannequin-like sculptures in ice that had become one with the glacier.

  And Reza’s hands, which had been holding onto his opponent’s armored chest, were now locked in an icy grip, fused inside Tara-Khan’s partly-solidified torso, water and ice, flesh and blood.

  With a cry of desperation, Reza broke his hands free, falling backward onto the ice, Tara-Khan’s cooling blood-water on his hands. Struggling against the gale and his own rapidly ebbing strength, he stood up, facing what remained of Tara-Khan.

  “May you find peace in Her name,” he said to the nightmare face. Then, with his hands clasped together, he smashed the frozen warrior’s head from his shoulders, sending frozen bits of ice and flesh across the plain of white.

  He turned toward the sky, toward the Empress moon, which hung low on the horizon. Running out of time, he thought, his vision starting to turn gray from the blood that poured from the gaping wound in his side, his limbs numb from the cold. As his breath froze into crystals around his mouth, disturbed only by the small trickle of blood he had coughed up from his punctured lung, he closed his eyes, picturing the dying Empress in his mind.

  After a time that was not time, he opened his eyes. The arena was dark around him, the walls hidden in shadow. Even the sky through the dome above was darkened, invisible to his failing vision. Only around the Empress was there a halo, an aura, of gently pulsating cyan light that faded as he watched, its power failing with Her will to survive.

  Willing his dying body to move, he struggled toward her, his sandals dragging his frostbitten feet through the sand. He stumbled, fell against the stone of the dais, then dragged himself forward, up the steps on his hands and elbows, fighting pain, fighting time, fighting a cursed fate.

  He made it to the top, facing the stone slab on which She lay. Around him now was darkness, as if the world itself was shrin
king down upon Her, and even She was falling into shadow as the light around Her pulsed, faded.

  “No,” he moaned, forcing himself to his knees, crawling to Her side, leaving a trail of blood in his wake. Shaking off his gauntlets, he reached forward with trembling hands to touch Her, felt the coolness of Her skin, the silence of the spirit that cried for release from its pain. “I am here,” he told her as he willed her to wake, to rise. “Please, my Empress, you must not die.”

  Then it was that he saw something clutched in her left hand, something about the size of his fist, and now black as coal. The crystal heart.

  Not really knowing why, following an instinct that had been planted long ago in a race that was not his own by birth, he pried the scorched crystal from her hand, noting the scar on her palm that matched his own.

  Drawing the dagger of the Empress, the one that Esah-Zhurah had given him so long ago, he joined his hand to hers, the cold metal between them. Once before had he done this with the woman who owned his heart; now he would do it with the woman who owned his spirit, and the spirit of his adopted people.

  “With my last breath,” he whispered to her, “do I give thee life, my Empress.” He pulled the knife between them, feeling the pitiable trickle of warmth that welled from his numbed hand, then closed his bleeding palm over hers.

  As the world faded toward darkness, he gently kissed her lips. The tingle of memory, of what once had been, surged through his mind as he touched her. Closing his eyes, he laid his head upon her breast. He rested next to her on the cold stone slab, his life rapidly draining away into the empty shadows where once the dais had been, where now the Darkness of Forever reigned.

  “I love you,” he whispered. The last of his strength did he give that his hand could hold hers. He hoped that the tiny spark of life that remained in his body would be enough to rekindle Her own.

  His heart beat slower, ever slower. And then it was still.

  He did not feel the quickening of Her breath, or the sudden warmth of Her breast beneath his gray, frozen cheek. He did not see as once again the crystal heart began to glow beneath the blood, his own, that coated it and had penetrated it as had Keel-Tath’s millennia ago.