by Calista Skye
"I guess we'll find out," Dani said. Somehow she wasn't nearly as afraid as she maybe should have been. She was about to fight alongside a being that she had seen effortlessly dispose of huge Vlon like they were cockroaches in a barrel, and his god-like bearing hadn't changed. If it helped him to think that he was more than her, then that was fine with her. He was probably right, too.
She climbed back up the side of the crater and peered cautiously over the rim. The Vlon were much closer, and now there were some coming in from the camp side as well. They were surrounded for real and there was no escape, as far as she could tell.
"Tell me this," she said. "Is there any escape?"
He shook his head. "If I concentrate all my power, I can probably translocate off this planet. But I can't bring anyone. Not even you."
"Just checking." She quickly carved out a rocky platform right below the edge of the crater, got a secure foothold and aimed at the mass of Vlon coming at her at full speed. She could just about see the individual beings now, and she had to remind herself that on this big planet, the horizon lay much further away than on Earth or on Brax. They were still out of range of her multigun, and her ammo wasn't unlimited. Far from it.
Crixael stood above her and looked down. "Even from this angle you entice me. I will get to the bottom of why that is." He glanced at the horizon. "But I suppose I have to deal with these things first."
Then he ran towards the closest part of the undulating black wall that was the Vlon attack.
Despite the deadly trap she was in, Dani couldn't help admiring his grace and obvious power. Even in this strong gravity, he ran as relaxed as if he was strolling down an idyllic beach. His muscles flexed with each step, and still he had that golden aura that made him look so much like an ancient god.
She couldn't help shaking her head in pure disbelief. She had made love to that, just minutes earlier.
Even alone on an alien planet, about to be attacked by a multitude of huge cockroaches, she felt her girly parts tingle at the thought of it. He was spectacular. If only he would be a little more human, show just a little bit of emotion outside of lovemaking...
He moved with a speed so unfathomable that Dani had a strong feeling of unreality, that it was all just a dream. Ethereal.
She brushed a speck of dust of her multigun. No, it was real enough. And this was probably her last battle. If the Vlon didn't get her, those Ethereals that had bombed the camp probably would. She had no idea what that meant, and Crixael had been very enigmatic about it.
Her helmet couldn't pick up individual Vlon, and just framed the whole horizon in red, marking them as Hostile! It sporadically picked up Crixael as well, but the AI didn't know what to make of him, and sometimes lost track of him completely.
Already he was just a golden speck against the wall of living black that was coming towards her. Then he appeared to start shining brightly, and she saw huge Vlon being thrown fifty meters into the air, spraying their black blood.
She set the helmet display to show the battlefield as seen from above, with the crashed saucer in the middle. It looked like a black/red screen with a circle of empty desert in the middle, and the crater and herself in the middle of that again. But as she watched, it was no longer a circle and became more like an oval, elongating in the direction where Crixael was mowing down tank-sized cockroaches like they were bowling pins and he had a long baseball bat.
She couldn't quite make out what he did to them, but he must have destroyed hundreds of them within a couple of minutes. As she watched, one part of the circle opened as he wiped out all the giant insects and then turned to the side to take out more.
But that was miles away. And the other sides of the encroaching circle were advancing on Dani. And now they were within range.
The silence was eerie.
She took aim and saw one Vlon up close in her helmet display. As always, doubts seeped into her consciousness. If she pulled the trigger, she was firing on a sentient being. Had enough effort been made trying to talk to them before war broke out? Did they perhaps have a good reason for what they were doing? Could she be sure that Space Force weren't the bad guys in this conflict? Why was there always conflict? How many alien species had mankind encountered where war hadn't broken out immediately? Were there any?
She loved her mother, and she trusted her leadership of Space Force. But she also knew that the six-star star marshal who was also the queen of Brax, her husband's kingdom, had been emotionally scarred during her first encounter with hostile aliens. Well, anyone would have been scarred by the Ethereals, considering what they had done to Earth that first time. But Dani feared that it had made the Supreme Commander too aggressive against other aliens, too.
She took aim again. Usually, by this time, other marines would have fired their weapons at the enemy, and so the choice would have been taken away from her and she could just join them. It would make little difference. But now, it was her or nothing. What if they just wanted to check out the crashed saucer?
What if they wanted to kill her? She forced herself to empty out her mind and pulled the trigger, like she had done many times before. The multigun jerked slightly in her hands, more to let her know it had fired than because there was any actual recoil. She followed the shell's trajectory on the display until it hit an alien and burst.
Perfect hit! her display told her in jubilant, animated letters. 1000 points!
She wasn't sure how she felt about the decision to let Space Marines see their battles as little other than a computer game, with points and levels and everything. It dehumanized the enemy, reduced them to fictional and artificial beings. But that also made it easier to fight. And this time, she needed it to be as easy as possible.
Crixael had already attacked, so she had to assume that they were not friendly towards her.
She fired again and again, making sure to make each hit count. Each shell took out one Vlon. One of thousands. And she didn't have thousands of shells.
On the display, she saw that Crixael was still making inroads against the aliens, but they had closed the gap he had made, and they were still coming.
It wasn't looking too good, she suddenly realized. They were coming fast.
She frowned. His golden light was much weaker now. And something about the way he moved...
A ball of ice settled in the pit of her stomach. Yeah, Crixael was injured.
18
She wasn't sure why, but she was running towards him. Maybe she instinctively knew that alone, she would have no chance at all. That crashed saucer might not be adequate as a hiding place. And her radio was still silent. No chance for a rescue in the nick of time.
But this was completely against Space Marine tactics. You don't leave cover. You don't run out on a plain with no way to get cover. You don't meet the enemy out in the open. You don't run to the aid of someone who is pretty much dead anyway, sacrificing your own tactical advantage.
No, this wasn't Space Marine behavior. This was the warrior in her. This was Danai'a the Braxian princess. This was what her father would do. Yes, this was King Ator'aq behavior. The thought made her feel better about it.
The exoskeleton helped her run in the strong gravity, but she still was exerting herself more than was wise. The wall of Vlon came closer much faster now that she was running towards it.
She switched firing modes from shell to projectile. Taking down one Vlon would take fifty bullets that hit perfectly, and she had a thousand of them. That was twenty Vlon at most.
She saw that she would meet them before she would get to Crixael.
She started firing straight ahead without aiming too much. The first alien fell, and she leaped on top of its carapace and looked around.
There he was. He was still killing aliens, and his staff was black with their blood. His torso was dripping with his own red blood from a multitude of little holes where he had been pierced by the Vlon's needle thin attack spears.
No human could have survived more than one of those holes, Dani
knew. And he had at least twenty.
She coiled, letting the exoskeleton know that she wanted maximum energy, then jumped from the back of the Vlon and landed right beside Crixael.
"I hope I'm not getting in your way," she said. "Seeing how you're more than me and all."
He didn't spare her a glance, just kept piercing aliens and tossing them away. But he was obviously struggling now. "Why are you here? The saucer will shield you fine. You can still make it. Go back!"
She shot a Vlon with a burst of bullets, realizing that she didn't have many left.
"I'm just as dead there as here, and I think you know it."
"Your whole pitiful Space Force is losing against these things, and you think that one little female Space Marine is going to win against them?" His effortless cool had left him, and there was cold anger in his voice. It was as good a clue as any that he was not doing well.
"And how is one big male Ethereal doing?" She fired another burst. "Not great, looks like."
He didn't reply, just kept disposing Vlon.
But he had a point, Dani knew. There were still thousands of aliens, and they kept coming. She had to dodge spears that were shot at her from every angle, especially from above. It seemed the Vlon had adapted their tactics to deal with humans.
The ammunition counter on her display reached zero. She couldn't use the shell launcher at short range, because the shells would kill her more effectively than the Vlon.
She drew her sword for the first time in combat. And for once she enjoyed the weight of it and the primitive simplicity of an ancient weapon like that.
It was simple iron, but had been given special treatment by very gifted aliens so that it would kill Ethereals easier. Her mother and father had told her about how the sword would sometimes seem to come alive in their hands, to help them in the fight and to perform moves that would otherwise not be possible. Well, they were heroes. Dani wasn't.
She cut into the hard carapace of a Vlon, and immediately she was sprayed down with its black blood as the sword sank into it. She recalled how the state-of-the-art nanotech blade of her standard issue machete hadn't even made a dent in that same material. Yeah, this sword still had some mileage left in it.
She hewed and cut and sliced, and the exoskeleton helped her work with the heavy sword.
"I suppose I should hate seeing that blade in your hands," Crixael called out to her. "But I have rarely seen a finer image."
Her battle suit would already be drenched in alien blood if the nanotech material it was made of didn't repel everything. But the ground under her feet was so wet with enemy blood that it was just a dark, wet mud. And these were sentient beings they were fighting...
"Thanks," she yelled back. "Hey, I thought of something. Do those Ethereal talents of yours include languages?"
He glanced at her again, obviously surprised. "Could you perhaps be more clear?"
Working together, they had cleared a pretty big circle of Vlon, and Dani took the time to slow down a little and think more about the idea that had suddenly struck her.
"I mean, you speak English like you were born and raised in Kansas. Assuming that it isn't your first language, you probably have a talent for it."
He speared a charging alien with his staff, narrowly avoiding four of its spears. "We can speak to anyone, as far as I know. Never thought about it."
She jumped up and plunged the sword into the hard back of an enemy. "Can you speak to these things?"
There was a pause in the conversation, and then she heard an earsplitting sound as from two giant rusty iron pipes being rubbed together.
Decibel overload, her helmet display said and reduced the volume.
Immediately the nearest Vlon froze and even pulled a couple of yards back.
Crixael lowered his staff and looked at her with a little smile, then shrugged.
"Um... was that it?" Dani said carefully.
"That was their language, as close as I can get it. Looks like it had an effect, anyway."
He pointed to the mass of Vlon around them. They were not charging anymore, and on the overhead map on Dani's display it looked as if the inactivity was moving out through the mass of aliens like the wave from a pebble dropped into a pond.
"Okayyy... what did you say?"
He placed one end of his staff on the ground and leaned on it, peering off into the distance. He was incredibly beautiful. "I said, bring your leader to me."
19
The Vlon leader had a carapace that had probably been black at one time, but was now a dirty, splotchy, yellowish white. She was quite repulsive, but she was so different from all the other ones that Dani had to assume that she had a special status.
It was the first female Vlon Dani had ever seen. Most of the aliens were assumed to be drones, asexual neuters that were a form of worker slaves and soldier to the females. It was somewhat similar to an ant colony on Earth, Kienle had once told Dani, except completely different.
If she was in fact their leader, then she was a brave one. She came out from the mass of huge, belligerent aliens and calmly made her way over towards Crixael and Dani, coming to a stop ten feet away.
The air reverberated with the rusty pipe noise again, but this time it was much softer and lower.
"She says we should make peace with our hive," Crixael said. "I interpret that to mean that she's implying that we're about to die."
Dani's mind raced. What should she say? She had no idea of their background.
"Say that we wish to talk to her peacefully," she suggested, sheathing her sword to stress the 'peaceful' part.
Crixael nodded thoughtfully. "I think we already are."
He was right, of course. Maybe it was better to get to the point.
"Fine, okay. Say that we wish to be left alone until we can get off this planet."
"That's something we could say," Crixael agreed. "But it is true, more or less. It pains my Ethereal soul to give away a true secret like that to the enemy."
Dani wasn't sure herself. "Let's just try it."
The Ethereal scratched his chin. "I wonder, in your primitive language, is there perhaps some method that one might employ when one makes requests of someone else? Say, a kind of a special one-syllable word one might speak? One that turns a crass demand into a polite request and is taught to young children the moment they start talking and is considered the most basic of courtesy? I'm just guessing here."
She groaned. She didn't think they had time for that. "Fine. Please let us try it."
He had turned down the volume of his own Vlon noises, and they went on for several seconds.
They looked at each other and raised their eyebrows. Whatever happened now would be interesting.
The female Vlon said something, and Crixael started translating while she was talking.
"She only deigns to communicate with us because no prey has ever talked to them in their own language, and only rarely in any other language. She doesn't understand our demand. Also, we should make peace with our hive and so on."
"All right, we will. I guess we have to make her understand," Dani said, somehow starting to feel better about this. At least they weren't killing each other right now.
"Say that we only wish to return to the crashed spaceship and sit there and wait for rescue and that we will not kill anyone in that time. Also that if we're prevented from that, we will kill everyone. Please."
Crixael distractedly twirled his war staff in one hand. "I can't help but think that we have no way of killing them all. Despite appearances, without my full Ethereal essence, I can't go on indefinitely with this. And neither can you."
"But they don't know that," Dania'a said. "We're as weird to them as they are to us. Especially you. So, please."
It was a long sentence and the rough, atonal squeaking went on for a while as Crixael spoke.
The leader took some time to reply, and Dani got the feeling that she was somehow in communication with others of her kind far away. But the radio i
n her helmet didn't register anything.
Then the queen squeaked again.
"She says," Crixael translated, "that they are very many, and we are the number of her war
spears on one quadrant and even less than that. She points out that it is often the case that the very many will conquer the very few. Especially when the very many have a biomass that is many orders of magnitudes larger than the very few. I personally feel that a study of warfare through the ages would probably confirm her theory, at least to some extent."
Dani was feeling more confident. This was a lot more interesting than just killing. "Fine, fine. Don't worry, we got this. Say that we very few have already killed hundreds of their-"
"Thousands," Crixael said. "I got carried away."
"... have already killed thousands of their kind, and that we will kill thousands more, including her. All we ask is to wait to be picked up. We will not bother anyone."
The interchange of terrible noises went on for a while, and especially the Vlon seemed to have a lot she wanted to convey.
Crixael frowned. "She finds it of little credibility that we should not bother anyone, seeing as we have already killed many of theirs, as we just confessed. Are we now aware that this planet is under their protection and that they are under holy orders from their Ancestors that no one else may tread on it? She thinks it unreasonable that we should try to remove her from pre-Ancestral reality, as she puts it, because no one else has ever done that to one of their leaders. It would place our own Ancestors in grave danger. Even those who are dead can be waged war against, she says, and here I have to comment that she appears to be somewhat out of her mind. I get the feeling she really does believe it."
Dani pondered. So they placed great value on their ancestors? Interesting.
"Please say that we have changed our minds and that in the face of their stubbornness, we will kill them all anyway and then take our own lives so that we may kill them again after death in eternity."
Crixael twirled his pole again. "I notice that we keep making threats that we can't deliver or have no intention of delivering."