After a moment he realized that the point was moot: the paratroopers, while clearly fighting valiantly, were also being completely overwhelmed. Their part of the battle was already over.
“Mon colonel,” the vehicle commander said thickly through the painkillers that the attending legionnaire had pumped into his system after applying a tourniquet and self-sealing bandages. “Behind us.”
Grishin turned to look behind them, and was shocked to see a line of Kreelan warriors standing there, clearly waiting for him and his men. There really was nowhere for him to run, not that he was inclined to. The road that had been the baseline for the regiment’s deployment had relatively open ground to the front for a few hundred meters, but then swiftly turned into dense woods that would be difficult, if not impossible, for his tanks to traverse. To the rear was another hundred or so meters edged by a steep drainage culvert. He would have liked to deploy his regiment on the other side of that defensive feature, on the “inside” toward Foshan, rather than on the “outside” where he was now, but that had been forbidden by the Keran government because of the high-value property in this area. Grishin suddenly wished he had done what Sparks had, and driven his tanks right into the houses and business buildings there, the local government be damned. But it was too late for that.
Besides, while his motivations were different, he was no less a warrior than the alien creatures he now confronted. And while his personal courage had wavered for a moment after they had appeared, he was no longer afraid.
He knew that there was only one option left: to try and break through to link up with the Terran tank regiment, if it still survived. Against so many warriors, the legionnaires stood little chance of survival. Grishin smiled to himself. He had always wished that he could die in a modern-day Battle of Camarón, where centuries before a small band of legionnaires had held off an army of nearly two thousand men in a battle that had become legend. He had never thought this wish would come true. So few ever had.
Signaling his tank commanders to wheel right and come line-abreast facing the Kreelan warriors who stood patiently waiting for them, Grishin rendered his men a sharp salute, which they returned. Legionnaires, to the last.
“Camarón!” Grishin bellowed as the survivors of the 1er REC charged the enemy line, guns thundering.
* * *
Tesh-Dar had quickly become bored with digging the humans out of their strange vehicles. Leaving Kamal-Utai and Li’ara-Zhurah to lead the warriors who had jumped from their doomed ship, for they could not keep up with her, Tesh-Dar raced along the human lines at an inhuman speed, far faster than any human being had ever run. She had seen in her mind’s eye a nearby group of human warriors that had no vehicles, and went to meet them.
As she did, a group of warriors from one of the other ships was dropping onto that part of the human line, and the humans fired their projectile weapons at them. While the warriors preferred their swords and claws, they had no hesitation in unslinging their own projectile weapons and firing back. Tesh-Dar was proud to see that they were far more accurate than the humans, with nearly every round finding its target.
With a final great leap, her heart pounding with anticipation, she landed next to the strange trench they had dug for themselves and unleashed her grakh’ta whip.
* * *
Soldat 1e Classe Roland Mills had joined the Légion étrangère for the same reason countless others had over the centuries: he was an adventurer and soldier of fortune. Aside from his rugged good looks and muscular build, he was unlike the romantic stereotype of the legionnaire: he wasn’t trying to escape his past or avoid pursuit by any authorities. In fact, he came from a very respectable English family back on Earth, and had never committed a crime. While he would have lightly scoffed at anyone who thought him a scholar, he was nonetheless quite well-educated. By all accounts, he would have made an excellent barrister and family man, except for one tiny quirk: he was a hopeless adrenaline junky. He had immersed himself in virtually every extreme and nearly-suicidal endeavor he could find, but eventually they came to bore him.
Then one day, he happened to see a news broadcast that played a bit about the Alliance Légion étrangère, and came to see it as a nearly non-stop thrill-ride. Over his family’s vehement protestations, he signed up two days later at the recruiting center in Paris.
Nearly eighteen months later, despite having had to adjust his perception of reality of what the Legion really was, he had come to really enjoy it. Learning French had been a snap for him, as had the other basic skills he had been taught.
In the end, he had gotten what he had hoped for: he was selected for the elite 2ème REP and was given jump training (although he already knew how to jump and paraglide). He had loved every minute of it.
When he found the Alliance was deploying every one of the Legion’s combat regiments to Keran to protect it against a possible (if far-fetched) alien threat, he had been elated. He had never seen combat, and was hoping that this would be his chance.
Now, however, elation wasn’t the emotion he felt. It was gut-wrenching fear melded with the determination to survive as alien starships thundered overhead, dropping thousands of alien paratroops right on top of the regiment’s lines. He had been looking for the ultimate thrill, and he was afraid that he might have found it.
“Fire!” his squad leader shouted, echoing the orders passed along the line of the entire regiment as the aliens flew down on their version of paragliders. Over a thousand legionnaires fired their rifles and automatic weapons nearly straight up at their swarming attackers. A handful of aliens, then dozens, began to fall from the sky, dead and wounded.
But the enemy proved to be far from helpless, even as they glided toward the ground. They had their own rifles, and with inhuman accuracy began to kill legionnaires. Some also dropped what looked like hand grenades where legionnaires had bunched together. But when they detonated they released an enormous electrical flux like lightning, turning everything in a radius of four meters into smoldering carbon.
Easily outnumbered two to one, the legionnaires did what they had done since Camarón: they stood their ground, fought, and died.
Roland Mills, however, wasn’t ready to die yet. He was terrified, but this was what he had joined the Legion for, after all: the opportunity to participate in unrestricted mayhem. Combat was the ultimate adrenaline rush.
Taking aim at the nearest cloud of warriors bearing down on their lines, he opened fire, emptying an entire magazine into their formation and taking grim satisfaction at seeing six of them plummet to the ground, out of control.
“Mills, down!” one of the other legionnaires in his squad shouted. Mills dropped to the bottom of the trench as a warrior swept down behind him. Three of his squad mates blasted the thing to bits with their rifles, spattering Mills with bloody gore.
Suddenly, over the unbelievable din of men and aliens shouting and screaming and the non-stop firing of rifles by both sides, he distinctly heard a strange whip-crack! from just beyond the parapet around the trench. Mills looked up just in time to see what looked like a set of thin, barbed tentacles snap over the top of the parapet to wrap themselves around one of his fellow legionnaires. The man screamed in fear and agony as the metal barbs pierced his flesh and the whip-like tails of whatever the thing was encircled his limbs and torso.
Ignoring the chaos around him, Mills leaped to his feet, drawing his combat knife in the same motion, intending to cut the man free of this thing that attacked him.
But in the blink of an eye and with a howl of terror the legionnaire was bodily snapped over the top of the parapet, as if he were a small fish that a fisherman had snatched from the water.
Trying to erase the image of the man’s terrified expression from his mind, Mills ducked in time to avoid having his head taken off by a Kreelan warrior’s sword. Marveling for just an instant the he was facing an alien, he lunged forward, blocking her sword arm with his left fist as he drove his knife into her gut below her armored brea
st plate.
The warrior screamed in pain, but was far from mortally stricken. She slashed at him with the claws of her free hand, tearing the cloth camouflage cover from his back armor. Kneeing her in the groin to throw her off-balance, he pulled his knife from her belly and rammed it up under her throat, the knife’s tip burying itself in her brain.
Whip-crack!
Another legionnaire shrieked as he was seized by the devilish weapon and heaved by some unseen force from the trench.
But this time Mills had seen something he had not the first time: he saw where the tendrils had come from over the parapet. Pausing only for a moment to pick up a rifle and shoot a warrior in the back of the head, he threw a hand grenade over the parapet in the direction the legionnaire had disappeared.
* * *
Tesh-Dar bared her fangs in a sort of primal ecstasy that she had not felt since the Change, since the day she was accepted as a priestess into the order of the Desh-Ka. Having trained for combat since birth, she was finally experiencing war in its true form, without any of the rules that governed the challenges in the arena. Great would be the glory she brought to the Empress.
While her warriors occupied the humans in the trench, she allowed herself a minor indulgence. She knew that she should not be standing in the open as she was, focused on her prey. But it was an entertainment that she would allow herself. For now. With the whips wrapped around her next victim, she gripped the grakh’ta with both mighty hands and threw her entire body into the motion of snapping the whip back, reeling in the hapless human warrior. The human came flying out of the trench, arcing through the air toward her. As the creature drew to arm’s length, her left hand snapped to her short sword in a move no human being could match. Twirling aside as her victim flew by, the sword sang from the sheath at her waist and neatly decapitated the human without the blade touching the tendril of the grakh’ta that was wrapped about its neck. She flicked the blade with her wrist, ridding it of most of the human’s blood before she replaced the sword in its sheath.
She was just snapping her weapon free of the body when she sensed the small object sailing toward her. Abandoning the grakh’ta, she leaped clear as the grenade went off, shredding both the whip and the legionnaire’s body. Had she not been a warrior priestess with her heightened senses, she would have been killed.
With her blood singing glory to her Empress, Tesh-Dar leaped into the trench to find the one who had come close to killing her, to honor him with death.
* * *
Mills’s world had become a snarling orgy of stabbing, hacking, kicking, and grappling with the alien warriors. Few rifle shots rang out now, as the enemy was in so tightly among the legionnaires that a bullet was as likely to kill a friend as a foe. Besides, the enemy was simply too close: at one point, while Mills was fighting one alien, he suddenly realized that he had his back pressed up against another alien who was doing her best to strangle a legionnaire. Suddenly, all four of them were blown into a struggling heap as a grenade went off nearby. Mills was the only one to get to his feet alive.
In addition to his knife, which was by now soaked with blood and had a blade that was nicked in a dozen places, he held a Kreelan sword. He had never received training in how to use any edged weapons but his knife and bayonet, but he had nonetheless put it to good use. About as long as his arm and slightly curved, the sword had proved to be an excellent weapon in trench fighting.
A Kreelan warrior suddenly came staggering backward toward him, two legionnaires clutching at her arms, and he stabbed the alien in the back of the neck with the sword.
“Down!” he yelled at his two newfound companions as he saw another legionnaire, badly wounded, hurl himself into the midst of at least half a dozen warriors who had cornered two more legionnaires and were hacking them to death. Mills had seen that the man clutched a grenade in each hand, and the resulting explosions sent bits of bodies, shredded clothing, and twisted body armor for fifteen meters in every direction.
As he got back to his feet, helping up his compatriots, he saw something that made his skin crawl. Looking down the trench toward the end of the regiment’s line, perhaps twenty meters away, was what looked like nothing so much as a living threshing machine. But it wasn’t a machine. It was an alien warrior. She was huge compared to the others, and bigger than Mills, who stood a full two meters tall and weighed in at one hundred kilos of solid muscle. In one hand she had a short sword, and both it and the claws of her other hand were soaked with blood.
Eyes wide with disbelief, he watched as a legionnaire emptied an entire magazine from his rifle into her chest. But it was as if the bullets simply passed through her; he could even see the spray of dirt they kicked up from the trench wall behind her.
The warrior strode right up to the legionnaire and with what Mills thought must be a look of contempt stabbed her claws into his chest, right through his torso armor. Screaming in agony, blood spraying from his lips, she lifted him from his feet and tossed him from the trench as if he weighed no more than a piece of paper.
Suddenly, he realized what had been behind the whip-like weapon that had snatched some of the legionnaires from the trench earlier. It had been her.
The other Kreelan warriors moved aside as she passed, rendering what appeared to be some sort of salute. Killing every single legionnaire who stood before her with flashing steel or outstretched claws, she finally came to a stop directly in front of him, her strange cat’s-eyes blazing, her entire body spattered with human blood.
As if it were some sort of signal, the rest of the Kreelan warriors in the trench eased away from their human opponents. The exhausted legionnaires used the unexpected respite to catch their breath, wondering just what was happening.
“What does she want, Mills?” one of the legionnaires next to him whispered, afraid to break the spell that had suddenly fallen over them all.
The warrior herself answered, but not with words. Raising her right arm, she pointed at Mills. Then she handed her weapons to one of the other warriors, who took them for safekeeping.
“I think,” Mills said slowly, “she wants a bloody duel. But why me?” He wasn’t the biggest or toughest man in the regiment, or the best close-in fighter. On the other hand, he was probably the biggest and toughest who was still standing. Of the regiment’s roughly thirteen hundred men, he guessed that maybe a hundred, if that, were still alive.
“We’ll fight with you,” the legionnaire said. Mills didn’t remember his name, as he was from one of the other companies.
“No,” Mills told him, dropping his own weapons. “Let’s see where this leads.”
“But-”
“Quiet,” one of the others, a sergent, ordered. “Mills, do what you need to do.”
You always wanted the ultimate thrill, Mills chided himself. Well, it looks like you finally found it.
* * *
Tesh-Dar knew the one before her had thrown the grenade that had come close to killing her earlier. She had never seen him, did not recognize him by scent, and had not seen him with her second sight. But among the gifts she had was the ability to sense some of the threads of time and action, cause and effect, that were woven together into the river of destiny. She could not read the future and predict where that river might lead. However, she could sometimes see a murky vision of the past that she had not witnessed through her other senses, a place where the river had once flowed. She could not see the river’s trace for others, only for those events directly tied to herself.
And so it was that she now stood before this human. She had not had any idea what he would look like, or how fiercely he would fight. She only knew that he was the one she sought.
Around her, the other warriors gave the surviving humans some respite. Few were left now, but they had fought well and with great honor. Many of Her Children had died at their hands, and Tesh-Dar mourned their deaths deeply; not that they had died and were no longer with her, but that they could never again glorify the Empress in battle. For Te
sh-Dar’s people, death, honorably won, was the completion, the fulfillment, of life in Her eyes, and meant an eternal place in the afterlife among the Ancient Ones.
She pointed to the crude steps leading from the trench to flat ground above and led the human there. What motivated these creatures to burrow like sand-worms she did not know or care to understand. All she knew was that it would hardly serve as an impromptu arena.
* * *
Mills followed the huge warrior out of the trench and onto the ground behind it, his feet leaving small clouds of dust as he walked. He happened to see the alien’s feet, shod in sandals, and noticed that she left no tracks at all. Nothing. A chill ran down his spine, wondering if she was some sort of supernatural creature. Perversely, that thought gave him even more of a high. He wasn’t afraid, he was completely “juiced” as some of his friends might have said.
Behind him, a silent and altogether unnatural procession followed: the hundreds of Kreelan warriors and the comparative handful of surviving legionnaires, mixed together. The latter did not exactly seem to be prisoners, for the Kreelans did not seem to care if they came along or not, or if they kept their weapons, as long as they did not use them (the few who had were quickly butchered). But the legionnaires went anyway, for they had no idea what else to do, and few wanted to risk trying to take their leave of the Kreelans. As word spread that Mills would be facing off against the big warrior, all of them wanted to see the spectacle as much as the Kreelans apparently did.
The warriors formed a large circle around Mills and his opponent. The legionnaires, somewhat emboldened now by the mere fact of their continued survival, pressed up close behind the warriors who formed the inner edge of the circle so they could see.
Mills stood about two paces from the warrior, who kept her eyes locked on his. He had no idea what to do to get this particular ball rolling, so he simply waited for her to make the first move.
* * *
It was time. The human clearly had no idea what to expect or what to do, which was understandable, as he was not of the Way. He had no way of knowing that this challenge, defined by what may have been nothing more than a lucky throw of a grenade, would determine not only his fate, but that of his fellow animals, as well. She would not show him leniency, but she would show him fairness. She would use none of her special powers, for that would be no challenge in such a match, and would bring the Empress no glory. Even her claws, she would not use, for the human had none. She would not give the match away, for she knew that she could hardly lose, but she would measure him by his determination and will to survive.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 31