Shera-Khan nodded in acknowledgment, then bolted for the flight deck at a dead run.
In the meantime, Reza tore open the medikit and began to do what little he could until the others could help him get their friends into the ship’s sickbay.
Fifty-Five
Above the Kreelan Homeworld, ships danced and died. But the one-sided slaughter of Kreelan ships that had been the hope of the now-deceased President Borge had become far fiercer than anyone, except Reza, could have predicted. The Kreelans did not fight with their usual expert skill, but they fought with the tenacity of cornered tigresses, and the tide of slaughter was beginning to turn against the invaders.
And yet, despite the carnage that was gutting both of the great fleets, the humans had managed to secure a tenuous perimeter around the solitary moon. Since the heavy ships and their big guns were still engaged with their Kreelan counterparts, and so could not be brought to bear for an orbital bombardment, the task force that had been assigned the moon had begun to disgorge hundreds of dropships. Thousands of Marines were deploying to attack the single built-up area on the moon’s surface, a mountainous city that dwarfed the greatest such construct ever conceived by Man.
Leading them was recently promoted Major General Markus Thorella.
“Sir,” reported one of the comms technicians, “the Third Fusiliers have landed at–” he read off coordinates that corresponded to a flashing blip on Thorella’s tactical display “–and report no enemy present, no resistance. Colonel Roentgen reports ‘proceeding toward primary objective.’”
Thorella frowned. He should have been elated that his troops were making such swift progress, but the lack of all resistance – of even sighting any Kreelans at all – thus far on the moon fundamentally disturbed him, especially since this was the fifth regiment on the ground, and the previous four had made nearly identical reports. “Advise all assault elements,” he said, “to proceed with caution.”
He turned to his deputy division commander for maneuver, the woman who was directly responsible for coordinating the activities of the units disembarking from the ships and moving on the ground. “This is too bloody strange,” Thorella told her. “That place should be crawling with Kreelans, confused ones or otherwise. Where could they all have gotten to?”
“Withdrawn to ambush sites?” she suggested.
Thorella shook his head. “No, that’s something we would do. The Kreelans prefer head-to-head fighting, whatever the terms.”
“But this must be an extraordinary situation for them,” she pointed out, simultaneously directing another regiment toward its destination on the moon below, the stylus in her hand marking the destination, which was then sent over the data link. “If Reza Gard can be believed, they’ve never faced an invasion before.”
Thorella considered the thought. “No,” he concluded, more to himself than for the other officer’s benefit. “Something else is going on, but what?” He had to know, he thought to himself.
Turning to the command ship’s captain, he snapped, “Get us down there, now.”
***
“There is nothing more we can do for her now,” Reza said quietly as he finished programming the ship’s autodoc to do what it could for Jodi. “We can ease her pain, but that is all.” With the help of the automated ship’s surgeon, Reza had managed to numb Jodi’s spine above the point where it had been severed, confusing her brain into believing that the great nerve pathway merely slept, and was not utterly destroyed halfway down her back, just below her heart. A more general painkiller shielded her from the many other points of damage that would have brought overwhelming pain as the shock slowly wore off.
“Will I be all right?” Jodi asked softly, unexpectedly regaining consciousness, if just for a moment.
“Yes, my friend,” Reza replied as he watched the monitor, but he did not – could not – turn to face her. “You will be as good as new.” He looked at her then and tried to smile. Failed.
Jodi smiled up at him. She knew he had just told the first lie of his adult life, and she felt honored somehow that he had done it for her, to make her feel better.
“I tried to stop them,” Eustus said bitterly. His injuries, less severe than Reza had at first feared, had been dealt with quickly by the ship’s electronic surgeon. He still carried terrible bruises, but that affected his looks more than his health. His greatest injury was guilt at not having been able to help Jodi, at having to helplessly watch the things they did to her. His own pain was nothing. Even without his second sight, Reza could feel the guilt feeding on his friend’s soul. “But–”
“Eustus,” Jodi said, opening the one eye that was not swollen shut. Sleep was not far away, a drug induced coma that would save her from the pain, but she would not let that stop her from comforting her friend. “Eustus,” she said again, reaching out with a hand which held only broken fingers, now dead to any further sensation, “it’s not your fault. It’s Thorella’s. If you want to blame someone, blame that bastard, not yourself.”
Eustus took her hand in his as if it were an intricate, delicate sculpture of blown glass. “Jodi…” he closed his eyes, fighting the tears.
“I will find him,” Reza told her quietly. “I swear in Her name that he shall not escape me again.”
Slowly, she shook her head. “No, Reza,” she whispered. “We’ve come too far… given up too much, for you to throw it away in an act of revenge. You have to save your Empress, and give your own people – and ours – a chance to survive. Ships and people are dying out there, and you’re the only one who can stop it.” Her mangled lips managed a smile that tore at Reza’s heart. “Besides, you have a son to look out for now. What will happen to him if you throw your life away after Thorella?”
That thought had not occurred to him; he had not yet really begun to think like a father, to realize that until Shera-Khan well understood the Way and how to follow it, he, Reza, must guide him. And it would take both of them to save the Empress.
“The truth do you speak,” Reza admitted grudgingly.
“Reza,” Nicole called through the ship’s intercom, “we are hitting the atmosphere. I need you to guide me.”
“Coming,” he answered immediately. He felt most sorry for Nicole: the only one among them qualified and able to pilot the ship, with Braddock keeping her company, she had to remain at the helm as her best friend lay grievously injured, dying. But there was nothing to be done. The ship’s autopilot was not good enough to bring them unscathed through the maze of ships blasting at one another. Only Nicole’s skill had made that possible, and even so, the Pearl’s hull now sported a score of burn marks where salvoes from human and Kreelan ships alike had grazed her hull through the weakening shields.
“Good… luck,” Jodi said, as the ship’s computerized surgeon boosted the level of painkillers in her system. She closed her eyes, and her mangled hand, still clutched carefully in Eustus’s own, released its tiny, childlike grip.
Reza’s sandaled feet were silent as Death upon the deck as he made his way forward, Shera-Khan close behind him, leaving Eustus and Enya to tend to Jodi. He did not look back.
The view from the Pearl’s flight deck brought tears to Reza’s eyes. The Imperial City, Her home for thousands of generations, lay burning. Dim, almost forgotten memories from his youth of another shattered world, of a young boy orphaned by strangers from the sky, clouded his mind’s eye. Streamers of flame reached as high as mountains, as hundreds of assault boats and fighters swarmed over the great buildings and spires. They fired their weapons randomly, and dropped bombs and cluster munitions into any portal or avenue that could have harbored any Kreelan defenders. Pillars of smoke blocked out many parts of the city, but Reza’s imagination easily filled in the blanks. Over one hundred thousand years, he thought bitterly, tomorrow shall be nothing more than smoldering ash.
“Father,” Shera-Khan said from behind him, the boy’s hand gingerly touching Reza’s shoulder. His voice was brittle with fear. Never before, eve
n during the Great Chaos before Keel-Tath’s ascension, had harm come to the Empress Moon. But now Shera-Khan and Reza were witness to its systematic destruction.
Reza put a hand over his son’s, to reassure the boy as well as himself, although he said nothing; he did not trust his voice not to display the fear he himself felt.
Can Esah-Zhurah still be alive? he wondered. And what if she is? What is even the Empress to do against… this?
“How is Jodi?” Nicole asked from beside him, her voice carefully controlled. She had stopped worrying about either Kreelan defensive fire or being attacked by the scores of human ships prowling about. From the chatter she had been monitoring from the landing force, the Kreelans on the surface were offering no resistance at all, and the other human ships had not been alerted to the Pearl’s escape. But she had not stopped worrying about Jodi.
“She…” Reza paused, not sure how to tell her. Death and suffering had been his constant companions since childhood, but this was different. Simply blurting the wounding truth was somehow impossibly difficult. “If we do not get her to a healer soon, she will surely die,” he finally said. “The ship can only ease her pain, no more.”
“And if we take her in time to someone who can help her,” Nicole finished for him, “the Empress will die, and we will all be finished.”
Reza only nodded.
Nicole stared through the viewscreen at the glowing hell below that was rushing up to meet them. “We have no choices left, Reza,” she said grimly. “If there is a chance of you stopping this battle, this war, we must take it, no matter what the cost to ourselves.” She looked at him hard, and he thought he saw a glimmer of Esah-Zhurah’s strength in her eyes, and he wanted desperately simply to reach out and touch her, that he might touch a tiny part of the woman he loved. But he could not, dared not. “The tide of the battle is changing,” she told him. She had been keeping watch on the tactical display as a staggering increase in the number of human ships was added to the casualty list, while fewer and fewer Imperial ships were being destroyed. “More Kreelan warships are arriving all the time, just as you predicted. The main battle group, most of our ships, is scattered, cut off from its jump point. They are being torn apart. Our only hope now is through you. Just show me the way.”
Just as they emerged from another pillar of smoke, Reza saw their destination. “There,” he said, pointing to a crystalline pyramid that rose over five kilometers in the sky. “The Throne Room is at the top of the Great Tower. That is our destination. We must find a landing bay as high up as possible.”
“Reza, this is not a fighter, remember,” Nicole reminded him as the computer scanned and rejected most of the bays as being too small. “We cannot land in a shoe box.”
“Could we not use the Empress’s portal?” Shera-Khan asked, pointing to a large bay complex that also happened to be the highest on the tower. “It will lead us directly to the Throne Room.”
“It is closed, Shera-Khan,” Nicole said, looking at the information the computer was showing from the scanners.
“No longer,” the boy announced, touching his collar in a peculiar fashion. “Behold.”
Less than two kilometers away now, the iris door of the great portal suddenly began to open, exposing a warmly lit bay that could have held a dozen ships the size of the Pearl, but that now lay empty and barren.
“All who are taught to fly as I have been are given a special device to open the portal,” he explained proudly, “that any may serve Her when She calls.”
“Well do you serve Her this day, my son,” Reza said. He did not know until that moment that Shera-Khan had been trained as a pilot, no doubt under Tesh-Dar’s tutelage. He only mourned that he had never known him until these last few desperate hours. How much I have missed.
With a precision that matched the grace of the big yacht, Nicole brought the Pearl inside the bay. She moved the ship in as far as she could to avoid damage from the raiding ships outside, and to put them closer to the many doorways that lay within. From her last glance at the tactical display of the fleet’s desperate plight, every second would count against them from now on.
“Shall I close the portal?” Shera-Khan asked, his hand at his collar.
“No,” Nicole advised, just as Reza was about to say the opposite. “We may need to leave quickly.”
If we fail, Reza thought silently, we will have nowhere to go. “Let it be, then,” he said. “We must go.”
The others were waiting for them at the main hatch.
“Reza…” Nicole said, her gaze straying down the main hall toward the sickbay.
Reza nodded. “We shall wait for you,” he told her as he slammed his fist down on the button to open the hatch and drop the ramp to the deck below. He did not offer to go with her; their farewells to one another would be a private matter.
“I will not be long,” she told him.
Nicole entered the sickbay knowing what she would find, but not really prepared for it. To do that would have been to do the impossible. She bit back a small cry as she looked at what had become of Jodi’s beautiful face, now little more than a hideous mask of torn flesh, glued loosely to a bruised and battered skull.
“Oh, Jodi,” she whispered. “What have they done to you…”
Her friend opened her eyes in the way someone might when returning to the world from a vacant but pleasant dream. “Nikki,” she said, “you shouldn’t be here… you don’t have time…”
“I have always had time for you,” Nicole told her, tears flowing freely down her cheeks. She gently touched what looked like an unbruised spot on Jodi’s cheek. “And I always will.”
“I love you,” Jodi said simply. They were words she had said to Nicole a thousand and more times in her dreams and daydreams, but never once in the flesh. She loved her too much to drive her away.
Nicole had no words to answer her. Instead, she leaned forward and kissed Jodi gently on her tattered lips. “I will be back for you, Jodi,” she whispered. “I promise. Then… then we will have time together, to talk about things.”
Jodi tried hard to smile, but her beaten face made it look more like a grimace. “I’m not going anywhere, babe,” she said. “But you’d better. You’ve wasted enough time on me. Good luck, Nikki.”
With bitter tears burning her eyes, Nicole quickly left to join the others at the ramp.
Time was running out.
Fifty-Six
“Where is everyone?” Enya whispered. They had been moving through the halls of the Great Tower toward the Throne Room for what seemed like half an hour, and they had not seen a single Kreelan – alive or dead – anywhere. Rooms and alcoves that were obviously meant to be occupied stood open and empty, and the halls through which they crept were eerily silent, devoid of any sound at all except the occasional boom of a bomb exploding somewhere outside, or perhaps a stray energy bolt from an attacking fighter. The invading Marines had apparently assumed the tower would be the most heavily defended position, and so had not attacked it directly. But, if the rest of the city were like this, they would make their way here very quickly, indeed.
“I am not sure,” Reza answered uneasily as he saw the bluish glow from the Throne Room grow stronger with each step. His second sight told him that the entire Imperial City was dead. Or, more exactly, he thought with a tingling in his spine, the city was completely lifeless: none of the millions of Her Children who had once lived and toiled here in Her service remained. Except in the Throne Room. From there, and there alone, did he sense the faintest tremor of life.
“The Empress,” he whispered to himself. “Let it be She.”
“Could the Marines have already gotten here?” Enya asked.
“No bodies, no sign of firing,” Braddock answered. He felt vulnerable in the business suit he usually wore under his councilman’s robe, no Marine combat dress having been handy. But the blaster in his hand reassured him, and his political self had easily stepped aside to let the old Marine inside take charge. “It seems
as if they just vanished into thin air, walked off a cliff or something.”
Eustus, walking backward most of the time to keep an eye on whatever might be behind them, took the opportunity to turn around and add his two bits to the whispered conversation. “Then what happened?”
He almost blundered into Enya, who stood with the others at the massive doors to the Throne Room. None of them, except for Shera-Khan and Reza, who had both been inside before, had any idea of what to expect, other than something ornate, something alien. They had been awed by the halls through which they had come, the walls rising tens of meters to crystalline domes overhead, any one of which human architects could only dream of. But the Throne Room, hundreds of meters across and as many high, its hectares of sloping and curving walls graced with the work of artisans who had lived and died millennia before Michelangelo, overwhelmed them into stunned silence, immobility.
And in the great room’s center, at the literal heart of the Empire, stood the Throne itself, poised upon a pyramid of steps that formed the watermark of the Empire’s social ranking, the guiding weave of its cultural fabric. But She was not there. Instead, an unholy wall of cyan light, a kaleidoscope of turbulent lightning, encircled the great dais that stood above the highest steps, blocking the Throne itself from view. And only then did Reza understand why there was no one left in the city.
“It is as Tesh-Dar feared,” he said quietly. “They are gone, all of them. Dead.”
“Who… who is dead?” Nicole managed. She was not quite as stunned as the others, for she carried Reza’s blood in her veins, and had seen this place before in her dreams. But to actually be here…
“The inhabitants of the city, of this moon,” he explained bleakly. “All of them are dead.”
“How can that be?” Eustus whispered, still unable to tear his eyes away from the incredible wonders that lay before him. “How did they die? Our Marines didn’t kill them. Where did the bodies go? There must have been… well, millions living here. They couldn’t have just disappeared!”
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