“Jesus,” she whispered to herself. “What the hell is going on?”
***
She met Father Hernandez as she was moving toward the front of the church and the roughly aligned ranks of her gathered command.
“I see that, yet again, you refuse to have faith, lieutenant,” he said somberly, his eyes dark with concern. He had said the same thing to all of them every morning that they had gone out to fight, hoping that someone would accept his wisdom as the truth and lay down their weapons to let God do the work of feeding them to the Kreelans’ claws. “If only you would believe, God would–”
“Please, father,” she said, cutting him off more harshly than she meant to. But the incident, hallucination, or whatever the hell it had been back in the rectory had really rattled her, and she did not need his well-intentioned mumbo-jumbo right now. “I don’t have time.”
She tried to push her way past him, but he held her up, a restraining hand on her arm. “Wait,” he said, studying her face closely. “You saw something, didn’t you?”
There was no disguising the look of surprise on her face at his question. “What the hell are you talking about?” she blustered, trying to pull away.
“In there, in the rectory,” Hernandez persisted, his eyes boring into hers with an intensity she had never seen in him before. He gripped her arm fiercely, and she suddenly did not have the strength to struggle against him. It reminded her too much of what had happened only a few minutes ago. “I know when people have seen something that has touched them deeply, Jodi, and you have that look. Tell me what you saw.”
“I didn’t see anything,” she lied, looking away toward the crucifix hanging above the altar. The wooden statue of Christ, forever pinned to the cross by its ankles and wrists, wept bloody tears. A shiver went down her spine as she imagined the statue’s eyes opening, revealing a pair of unfathomable green eyes. “Please, father, let me go.” She looked at him with pleading eyes that were on the verge of tears. “Please.”
Sighing in resignation, the old priest released her arm. “You can close your eyes and ears to all that you might see and hear, you can pretend that it never happened, whatever it was, but He is persistent, Jodi,” he said. “Even you cannot ignore God’s Truth forever.” He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead, surprising her. “Go then, child. I do not believe in what you do, but that will never stop me from praying for your safety and your soul.”
Jodi managed a smile that might have been more appropriate on the face of a ten-year old girl who had yet to experience the pain and sufferings of adult life. “Thanks, father. For whatever it’s worth–”
“Lieutenant!” Braddock’s voice boomed through the church over a sudden hubbub that had broken out near the great wooden doors that led to the outside. “Lieutenant Mackenzie! You better take a look at this!”
“Now what…” Jodi muttered under her breath as she made her way through the rows of invalid Marines, running toward the doorway.
“What is it?” she demanded as she pulled up short next to Braddock.
Her voice was all business now, the acting sergeant major saw. She had it back together. Good, he thought. “Look,” he said, pointing through the partially opened doors toward the village gates. “Just who – or what – the hell is that?”
Jodi looked toward where Braddock was pointing. The village gates were at the apex of the semicircular stone wall that formed Rutan’s external periphery beyond the cliff into which the settlement was recessed. The church, located under the protective shelter of the cliff itself, was in line with the gates and elevated by nearly fifteen meters, giving anyone at the church’s entrance an unobstructed view of the approaches to the village. The only approach of concern to the Marines had been the stone bridge that spanned the swift-flowing Trinity River. It was there, along the deforested stretch from the river to the village gates, that most of the battles for Rutan had been fought. The Kreelans had taken refuge in the thick forest on the far side, unable to find any suitable ground closer or to either side of the village, and it was from across the bridge that they attacked each morning. It had not been so in the first week or two, when they had engaged in fluid battles away from the village. But after the humans’ heavy weapons and vehicles had finally been knocked out, the Kreelans had set aside their more powerful war machines and contented themselves with a small war of attrition, virtually forcing the humans into daily fights at close quarters, often hand-to-hand.
“I don’t see…”
Then suddenly her voice died. There, facing the bridge and the Kreelans already advancing across it, was the man who had come to her in the rectory, standing like an alien-inspired Horatius.
“Reza,” she whispered. She suddenly felt very, very cold.
Braddock was staring at her. “Is… is that him?” he whispered incredulously. “He was real?”
“Looks that way,” Jodi replied hoarsely. She did not have enough energy for anything more. “I, ah, think we better get out there and get ready. Don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Braddock replied absently as he pulled out his field glasses and held them up to his eyes, focusing quickly for a better look.
But neither of them moved. Behind them, the Marines murmured among themselves, unsure and afraid at their leaders’ strange behavior. A few of them were standing up on pews to see what was happening, peering out the narrow windows and reporting the action to their fellows. The church grew uncharacteristically silent, even for a holy place filled with the injured and dying.
Nearby, Father Hernandez watched the two figures peering out the door. A curious smile crept onto his face.
Fascinated into inaction by what they saw, Jodi and Braddock watched the Kreelan phalanx converge on the mysterious figure that awaited them.
***
La’ana-Ti’er stepped forward from the group of warriors who had come in search of combat. Kneeling, she saluted her superior. Behind her, the other warriors kneeled as one.
“Greetings, Reza of the Desh-Ka,” she said humbly. “Honored are we that you are among us, and saddened are we that your song no longer sings in our veins.” She bowed her head. “To cross swords with you is an honor of which I am unworthy.”
Reza regarded her quietly for a moment. He was chilled by the emptiness he felt at no longer being able to hear in his heart what she and the others could, at being unable to feel the Empress’s will as a palpable sensation. Although he had possessed that ability for only a brief period, its absence now was nearly unbearable. The severed braid that had been his spiritual lifeline to the Empress throbbed like a violated nerve.
“Rise, La’ana-Ti’er,” he told her. They clasped arms in greeting, as if they had known each other their entire lives, had been comrades, friends, as if they were not about to join in a battle to kill one another. “It is Her will.” He was left to interpret Her desires from his own memories of what once was. With his banishment to this place, wherever it was, all he had left were his memories and the single, lonely melody that sang to him in the voice of his own spirit.
La’ana-Ti’er looked upon him with respectful and sympathetic eyes. She did not pity him, for pity was beyond her emotional abilities; she mourned him. “Should you perish on the field of battle this day,” she told him, “it will bring me no joy, no glory. I will fight you as I have fought all others, but I pray to Her that mine shall not be the sword to strike you down and cast you into darkness.” She dropped her eyes.
“My thanks, warrior,” he told her quietly, “and may thy Way be long and glorious.” He drew in a breath. “Let it begin.”
***
Jodi blinked at the sudden violence that erupted on the bridge. One moment, the Kreelans who had come to finish them off were all bowing in front of the strange man who had come to her. In the next there was nothing to see but a whirlwind of clashing swords and armor. A memory came to her from her days as a child on Terra, when a neighbor boy released a single black ant into the midst of a nest of re
d ones. The savagery and intensity she had seen in that tiny microcosm of violence was an echo of the bloody chaos she was witnessing now. The church reverberated with the crash of steel upon steel, the cries of blood lust and pain raising gooseflesh on her arms.
“What the hell’s going on?” Braddock whispered, his eyes glued to the binoculars. “Lord of All, they’re fighting each other!”
“Can you see him?” Jodi asked. Her eyesight was phenomenal, but the distance was just too great to make out any details in the raging rabble that had consumed the old stone bridge. All she could see was a swirling humanoid mass, with a body plummeting – hurled might be a better word, she thought – now and again from the bridge like a carelessly tossed stone. She had lost sight of the man after the first second or two as he waded into the Kreelans’ midst, his sword cutting a swath of destruction before him.
“Yeah… No… What the hell?” Braddock wiped his eyes with his hands before looking again through the binoculars. “I see him in one place, then he just seems to pop up in another. Damn, but this is weird, lieutenant.” He turned to her. “Should we go take a closer look?”
“How much ammo have we got?” she asked.
Braddock gave her a grim smile. “After we redistributed last night, three rounds per rifle and a handful of sidearm ammunition that isn’t worth shit. Everybody’s got their bayonets fixed for the rest of it.”
Jodi sighed, still concentrating on the scene being played out on the bridge. It was no worse than she expected. “Let’s do it.”
Braddock turned to the Marines now clustered behind them. “ALL RIGHT!” he boomed. “MOVE OUT!”
Twenty-two Marines and one marooned naval flight officer burst from the safety of the church’s stone walls and began to move in a snaking skirmish line toward where the unexpected battle still raged at fever pitch.
***
Reza paid no attention to his eyes and ears, for he had no real need of them at the moment. His spirit could sense his surroundings, sense his opponents far better. He was living in a state of semi-suspended time as the battle went on, his opponents appearing to move in slow motion, giving him time to analyze and attack with totally inhuman efficiency, his body and mind acting far outside the normal laws that governed physical existence. His fellow warriors knew that they would die at his hand, but none of them would ever have dreamed of turning their backs upon an opportunity to face a Desh-Ka in a battle to the death. It was unspeakably rare to engage in such a contest since the Empire had been born; the Empress had sought external enemies to fight, allowing Her children only to fight for honor among themselves in the Challenge, without intentionally killing one another except in the most extreme of circumstances. To face one so skilled, regardless of whether they lived or died, would bring much honor to the Empress and their Way.
Now their blood keened with the thrill of combat, and as they died, slain upon Reza’s sword, their spirits joined the host that awaited them and welcomed them into the Afterlife. By ranks they charged the warrior priest who for the briefest of times had been a part of their people, throwing themselves into his scything blade like berserkers bent upon self-destruction. Time and again they converged upon him in a ring, swords and axes and pikes raised to attack, and time and again he destroyed them. There was no sorrow in his soul for their passing, save that they would no longer know the primal power of battle, and never again could bring glory to Her name through the defeat of an able foe.
At last, it was over. His great sword still held at the ready, Reza surveyed the now-quiet scene of carnage around him. There were no more opponents to fight, no one else to kill. The bridge was slick with the blood that still poured from the dead Kreelans’ veins, blood that turned the churning white water of the river below to a ghastly crimson swirl. La’ana-Ti’er’s lifeless body lay nearby, her hand pressed to the hole in her breast, just above her heart, where Reza’s sword had found its mark.
Replacing his bloodied weapon in the scabbard on his back, he knelt next to her. He saw Esah-Zhurah’s face on the woman sprawled beside him, and a terrible realization struck him. He knew that he would see his mate’s face upon every warrior he fought, and would feel the pain of loneliness that now tore at his heart, that burned like fire in his blood, for every moment of his life. Worse, he knew that she would be enduring the same pain, and would never again sense his love, or feel his touch.
He had touched her for the last time but a short while ago, and already it seemed like an eternity.
He bowed his head and wept.
***
“My God,” someone whispered.
Only a few minutes after Jodi, Braddock, and the others had reached the village wall, only a hundred meters or so from the church, the battle was over. The Marines who now overlooked the scene on the bridge were not new to battle and its attendant horrors, but none of them had ever witnessed anything like this. Even Braddock, a veteran of eight years of hard campaigning ashore and on the ships of the fleet, had to look away from what he saw. Fifty warriors, perhaps more, lay dead upon the gore-soaked bridge, or were now floating downstream toward the distant Providence Sea. They had ceased to be a threat to the inhabitants of Rutan, and Braddock seriously doubted that there were any more to contend with, except maybe injured warriors who would only kill themselves to prevent capture.
Braddock turned to Mackenzie. “Looks like Father Hernandez got his bloody miracle, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she whispered, still not believing the incredible ferocity and power of the man who now knelt quietly among the dead. “I guess so.” Somewhere down the line of Marines, huddled against the stone of the chest-high wall, someone vomited, and Jodi fiercely restrained the urge to do the same.
“What do we do now?” Braddock asked, clutching his pulse rifle like a security blanket.
Jodi licked her lips, but there was no moisture in her mouth, her tongue dry as a dead, sun-bleached lizard carcass.
“Oh, shit,” she murmured to herself. There was only one thing they could do. She began to undo her helmet and the web gear that held her remaining weapons and ammunition. “I want you to keep everyone down, out of sight, unless I call for help,” she told him.
“What are you going to do?” he asked, suddenly afraid that she really had flipped. “You’re not going out there by yourself, are you?” he asked, incredulous. “After what we just saw?”
Shrugging out of her armor, glad to be free again from its clinging embrace, Jodi smiled with courage she didn’t feel inside and said, “That’s the point, Braddock. After what I just saw, I have no intention of giving him the idea that I’m a Bad Guy. I don’t know how he’s choosing his enemies, since he just waxed a wagon-load of what I suppose are – were – his own people. But walking up to him with a bunch of weapons in hand doesn’t seem too bright.” Finally free of all the encumbrances demanded by modern warfare, she fixed Braddock with a look of concern that failed to mask her fear. “If he polished off that crowd by himself,” she said quietly, “we wouldn’t stand a chance against him should he decide to turn on us. I don’t know who – or what – he is, but he scares the piss out of me, and I want to do everything I can to try and get us on his good side before he starts looking for some more trouble to get into.”
Standing up, she put her hands on top of the wall. She did not have the patience to walk the fifteen yards to the bolted gates. “Give me a boost, will you?”
“You’re nuts, el-tee,” Braddock grumbled as he made a stirrup with his hands to help lift her over the wall.
“Look at it this way,” she told him as she clambered to the top. “At least he’s human. Besides,” she went on with faked cheerfulness as she dropped to the ground on the far side, “I know his name. Maybe he’ll take me out for a beer.”
Worried like an older brother whose sister has a date with a known psychopath, Braddock kept an uneasy watch through the sight of his pulse rifle. He kept the cross hairs centered on the strange warrior’s head, as Jodi slowly made h
er way toward the bridge and the silent, alien figure that knelt there.
The closer she got to the bridge, the faster Jodi’s forced upbeat attitude evaporated. She was excited, which was good in a way, but she was also terrified after what she had just witnessed. The memory of this man holding her captive only a little while ago, holding her closer than she had ever allowed a man to hold her, overshadowed all her other thoughts. It was also a sliver of hope: he had not harmed her then, and she prayed to whatever deity might listen that he would not harm her now.
As she stepped onto the old stone blocks and saw more closely the destruction that lay just a few meters away, she stopped. The thought that one individual, wielding what she had always considered to be a very primitive weapon, a sword, had shed so much blood in so brief a time, was beyond her understanding.
But looking at Reza now, she saw no trace of the monstrous killing machine that had slain her enemies only minutes before. He appeared bowed under, crushed by some incredible pressure, as if his spirit was that of an old, broken man.
Stepping gingerly around the ravaged Kreelan bodies, Jodi slowly made her way toward him.
“Reza,” she said quietly from a meter or so away, trying not to startle him.
After a moment, he slowly lifted his head to look at her, and she cringed at the blood that had spattered onto his armor and his face, coating him like a layer of crimson skin. He stared at her with his unblinking green eyes, and she began to tremble at what she saw there, not out of fear, but with compassion for another human being’s pain. Kneeling beside him, she took the sweat-stained bandanna from around her neck and began to gently wipe some of the dark Kreelan blood from his face. “It’s okay now,” she soothed. “Everything will be all right now.”
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