In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Down!” Sparks screamed as he saw a number of the Kreelans throwing something. Everyone ducked but a soldier who hadn’t heard over the deafening rifle fire: she suddenly staggered back, a miniature flying buzz-saw having cut right through her combat helmet to embed itself in her brain. With a twitch, she pitched backward, dead.

  Sparks and the major resumed firing, and the others joined in, popping up to fire a few rounds, then ducking down as more of the flying weapons sailed through the front window.

  Hadley grabbed a grenade and hurled it through the window like a hail Mary pass, then dropped back down to snatch up another one. There was no need to look for a good target: the Kreelans were bunching up out in front of the shop. It didn’t matter where he threw the grenades, because he just couldn’t miss. The explosions rocked the shop and shook dust and plaster loose from the ceiling to rain down on them.

  Steph was holding her rifle in front of her, pointed out the window, but still hadn’t fired a single shot. She was staring wide-eyed at the frenzied action, watching it as if she were doing a slow-motion review of her own recording. The Kreelans, throwing any sort of tactics or caution to the wind, trying to rush the window. The cavalrymen, faces locked in expressions of grim determination, pouring rifle fire into the enemy. Two more of the soldiers being killed by the flying weapons, one of them decapitated, the other falling to the floor with one embedded in his chest. Hadley next to her, screaming epithets at the enemy as he bobbed up and down like a lethal jack-in-the-box, hurling grenades into the enemy’s midst. The smoke from the rifles, acrid and foul-smelling, mixed with the coppery tang of blood and the dryness of plaster dust, that wreathed the soldiers. Colonel Sparks, his rifle’s magazine having run dry, thrusting his bayonet into the neck of an alien warrior who had managed to leap through the window, falling on top of her, driving the bayonet’s tip into the wood floor as the alien thrashed and clawed at him. And the terrible, terrible snarling of the enemy warriors, their fangs gleaming as they howled in some terrible ecstasy while they crashed in wave upon wave against the humans’ defensive position.

  All this she saw in what could only have been a few seconds before another warrior flung herself through the window to land right in front of Steph, the Kreelan’s sword raised high and fangs bared in a killing rage. Time was suspended for a moment as Steph realized that there was no one else to help her: Hadley was down behind the counter, reloading his own rifle. Sparks, spattered with blood, was shouting something at her, even as he was trying to pull his bayonet from the Kreelan he had just killed. The others seemed not to have noticed that there was an enemy warrior in their midst as they frantically fired at the endless stream of warriors trying to climb through the window.

  Steph tried to scream, but nothing came out: her body was completely paralyzed. She saw the gleaming blade of the sword - so beautiful! - swinging toward her neck, and in that moment she knew that she was going to die.

  But before the blade could touch her flesh, the Kreelan warrior unexpectedly flew backward, still in slow motion, and Steph imagined a look of surprise and perhaps even disappointment on her alien features. There was a single round hole in her chest armor, right between her well-proportioned breasts, the black of the armor around the hole now a star of shiny metal.

  With no small surprise, Steph saw the swirl of smoke streaming from the muzzle of her own rifle; she had not seen the muzzle flash as the round fired. Perhaps she had her eyes closed, an infinitely long time as she blinked. She felt her right index finger, curled around the trigger and holding it tight. With a conscious effort, she managed to let go: Hadley had told her that the rifle wouldn’t fire again until she let up on the trigger.

  For the first time in her life, she had killed another creature larger than a fly. A sentient being. An enemy of the human race. A being intent on killing her. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to celebrate or puke. But as her perception of time again sped up as the Kreelan warrior’s body fell lifeless to the floor, she realized she didn’t have time for either. With newfound determination, she raised the rifle to her shoulder and fired again. And again.

  * * *

  “What the fuck?” Coyle yelped as a huge stream of people came tearing around a street corner halfway up the block, heading straight toward them. Unlike the first group they had encountered, which had been a few hundred, this was a gigantic mob that filled the entire street. She heard screaming above the low whine of the tank’s motors, accompanied by a frenzied volley of weapons fire. She could tell that the firing was from Terran assault rifles from their distinct staccato sound.

  Standing up in the cupola so she could see better, she didn’t have to tell Mannie to stop the tank. But he hit the brakes so hard that her chest slammed into the metal hatch coaming. Her body armor kept her from being bruised, but it was hard enough to almost knock the wind out of her. Mannie was still shaken by running over the people when they broke free of the building they’d used for cover, and she’d heard him vomit three times. But she didn’t have anyone to relieve him.

  They had passed by the First Battalion commander’s position, and found his command track burned to a crisp with two gigantic holes punched through the armor. Of their own company commander there was no trace, nor had any of the other company commanders survived. Or if they were still alive, they hadn’t been able to dig themselves out of the rubble. So Coyle had kept searching.

  One tank from another company had joined them, but so far that was it for their entire battalion. It was clear that they had gotten the full treatment from the Kreelan ships as they passed overhead. Coyle couldn’t be sure, but she suspected that they must have homed in on anything using a combat data-link, because the command tracks had received special attention. But you didn’t have to be a genius to find a tank, she thought, disgusted.

  Some tanks had survived the barrage, only to be killed by something else. She had found nearly half a dozen in the street that looked like they’d been incinerated. The sight made her very uneasy: while the streets here were quite wide, this being a newer upscale district, the tanks were still extremely vulnerable to attack by any Kreelans holed up in the buildings they passed.

  The only good news was that she’d run into a platoon of infantry that had somehow survived. They were part of the mechanized infantry company that was task-organized to her battalion. Their infantry combat vehicle had been hit by the enemy ships, but had only been disabled. So they went looking for other survivors, and the enemy, on foot.

  They soon found that the rest of their company hadn’t been so lucky: every other vehicle in the company had been destroyed.

  While the platoon was commanded by a second lieutenant, she knew that he was straight out of school and had zero leadership experience. She’d called him and his platoon sergeant, who also outranked her, up on top of her tank and told them quietly but bluntly that she wasn’t going to obey any orders that she thought were stupid and would endanger her tanks needlessly, and if the boy had any sense he would listen to what she told him and do it.

  Much to her surprise, the lieutenant had agreed. With a wry smile and no small amount of sarcastic wit, he turned to his platoon sergeant and said, “So, is this one of those leadership training opportunities you were telling me about?”

  The three of them had a good chuckle at that, and after a brief discussion the lieutenant set about putting Coyle’s “suggestions” into action, deploying his squads ahead, behind, and to either side of the tanks to help protect them from bomb-throwing alien wenches that the tankers might not see or be able to react to in time. Coyle was incredibly relieved.

  Now, with the screaming horde of civilians flooding toward them, the infantry hurried to get out of the way, flattening themselves against the walls on either side of the street. A few of them - Idiots! Coyle cursed - tried to get in front of the mob and wave them to a stop. But at the last moment they all managed to dodge out of the way of the speeding human freight train.

  The people surged arou
nd her tank, which was at the front of the modified three-tank wedge they had been moving in, and then suddenly started climbing on top of it, clearly with the intention of trying to get into its protective armored shell.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Coyle cried as a man did an amazing set of acrobatics up the front glacis plate, over the gun, and onto the top of the turret, reaching for her hatch. She hit the panic bar, dropping her seat down inside the turret and slamming the hatch closed, barely missing the man’s fingers. She hoped Gomez and the other tank crew had buttoned up or they were going to have an interesting time.

  “What do we do?” Mannie croaked, terrified that she was going to tell him to move forward through this mass of people.

  “Sit tight, Mannie,” she told him. “Yuri,” she said to her gunner, “watch for those bitches coming along behind them.” Based on their first encounter with the Kreelans driving the civilians along, she figured there must be a ton of them behind this mob.

  After a few minutes, though, the stream of people started to taper off, with no sign of the enemy behind them. The civilians on top of her tank, having decided that she wasn’t going to invite them inside, had hopped off and followed their fellow scared-shitless citizens down the street.

  “Okay, Mannie,” she said, popping the hatch and sticking her head back out into the smoke-filled air again, “let’s move it.” The firing she’d heard earlier had tapered off drastically, then suddenly stopped. “And let’s hurry...”

  * * *

  Only Sparks, Hadley, and, by some miracle, Steph were still alive. Two Kreelans had reached around the edge of the window and hauled the operations major off his feet: wielding his combat knife, he disappeared in a frenzied mob of tearing claws and slashing swords. Hadley lobbed his last grenade into the scrum of Kreelan warriors tearing at the fallen officer. The two other cavalry troopers had been killed by warriors who had managed to get in through the window, much like the one Steph had killed, and been quicker with their swords than the other cavalrymen had been with their rifles.

  “Out!” Hadley cried: he was completely out of ammunition, even what he had gathered up from the other fallen soldiers. Steph was out, too: while she had been shooting non-stop, she had shared her spare magazines with Hadley, and had since then been crouching on the floor behind the cover of the counter, feeling like a coward. No longer worrying about the threat from the flying weapons, which the Kreelans had only used at first, he moved around the counter, holding his rifle now as the base of his bayonet.

  “Out!” Sparks called, throwing down his empty rifle as half a dozen warriors clambered through the window. He quickly drew the big pistol he carried and emptied the magazine into them, killing five outright before more warriors came through, forcing him back.

  Without time to reload his pistol and unable to reach his rifle now, Sparks had only one card left to play. While it was centuries out of date, an anachronism in this age as he himself was, he drew his saber from the scabbard at his side after dropping the now-empty pistol on the floor.

  While a sword was still used as part of Terran Ground Forces ceremonial dress, the weapon Sparks held in his hand wasn’t made of the inexpensive low-grade and brittle metal of the ceremonial weapons: it was a faithful replica of the last saber ever issued to the United States Cavalry, the Model 1913 that was designed by a young Army lieutenant by the name of George S. Patton, Jr. Made with a strong and flexible steel blade, it had cost Sparks a small fortune and had always been his most prized possession. He had even paid for formal training on how to use it, both from the back of a horse and dismounted. But even in his wildest dreams he had never thought he would actually use it in battle. Yet here he was.

  With a confident thrust, Sparks stabbed the nearest Kreelan, who was turned toward Hadley as he charged from behind the wooden counter. He drove the blade into her armpit where there was a gap in her armor, the weapon’s tip going deep into her chest. With a cry of shock, she fell to the floor, dead.

  The impact on the other warriors was instantaneous and totally unexpected: they stopped their attack. Had Steph not been peering over the top of the counter, no longer content to cower behind it as Hadley had told her to, she would not have believed it. The half dozen warriors who had already come through the window stepped back away from the two cavalrymen, their swords held in what Steph took to be defensive positions. The warriors outside, having seen Sparks draw his sword, immediately backed away from the window, clambering past their many dead sisters who were stacked up in front of the devastated shop.

  Hadley, in what otherwise might have been a comical moment, stopped in mid-charge, his war-cry dying on his lips.

  Sparks, after tugging his bloodied sword from the side of the fallen Kreelan, backed farther away from the aliens, unsure of what was going on. He watched with disbelieving eyes as the Kreelans inside the shop warily retreated, moving to join the others who now stood outside in what looked like a wide circle open to the storefront. A Kreelan warrior, bloodied and injured, stepped into the center of the circle. In what he recognized as what must be a universal gesture, she beckoned him forward toward her.

  “I’ll be damned,” he breathed.

  “What do we do, colonel?” Hadley asked him.

  Sparks glanced at him, then said, “We go kill as many as we can before we die.”

  * * *

  Shanur-Tikhan stood in the circle of the gathered warriors as the humans unblocked the door to their small redoubt, apparently a shop of some kind not unlike those found in the cities of her own people. She was senior among her gathered sisters, and although she was already grievously injured, she would not be denied the privilege of matching her sword against the human’s. While the warriors of Her Children were versed in the ways of weapons of many kinds, the sword was the ultimate balance of physical form and spirit. That this human possessed one spoke well of him and his kind, even if he was a soulless animal whose blood did not sing.

  She grunted in appreciation as the human bearing the sword emerged from the doorway, walking with dignity instead of clambering awkwardly through the smashed window. Two others, a male and a female, accompanied him. The male, unarmed, stooped next to a fallen warrior to pick up her sword before coming forward to join the male who appeared to be the senior of the two. Shanur-Tikhan and her sisters took no offense at his taking the sword, for it was unbound from the dead warrior’s spirit. The female human merely stood by and watched, which Shanur-Tikhan found highly curious.

  The two males approached her, the dominant without fear, his subordinate with some obvious trepidation. The former held his weapon confidently, while the latter did not. If they meant to fight her two on one, she would accept such a challenge. Her wounds were serious and would soon kill her if she did not seek out a healer, but that was inconsequential. All that mattered was the challenge.

  Opening her arms wide, she invited them to make the first move.

  * * *

  “Hadley,” Sparks asked quietly, “do you have a damn clue what to do with that thing?”

  Gripping the alien sword tightly, Hadley answered, “No sir, I don’t. But if I’m going to die, I’m not going to die without a weapon in my hands.”

  “Well-spoken, son,” Sparks told him. “For what it’s worth, you’ve been a helluva soldier.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Hadley said, his throat tightening up. He had been with Sparks for two years, and had been given his share of ass-reamings by the colonel. But the man had never done anything, even dressing down a man or woman under his command, without the goal of making him or her a better soldier. And he had always treated his soldiers with respect. “It’s been an honor, sir.”

  Nodding, Sparks said simply, “Shall we, soldier?”

  “Garry Owen, sir!”

  Together, the two cavalrymen attacked.

  * * *

  “You saw what?” Coyle exclaimed, unable to believe what she was hearing.

  “You heard me, sarge,” the lieutenant said. “I
t’s the colonel and another soldier fighting one of the Kreelans with swords! And that reporter is there, too. Surrounded by a few hundred hostiles.”

  The lieutenant’s infantrymen had been scouting ahead, peering around the corners to make sure Coyle’s tanks didn’t get ambushed. They’d been heading as fast as they could in the direction from which they’d heard the firing, but the “crunchies” - the infantry - couldn’t go nearly as fast as her tanks, and she dared not leave them behind. The woman on point had come running back to the lieutenant, telling him what she’d seen. Unable to believe what she’d said, he had gone forward himself for a look. And now he was relating the same ridiculous tale to Coyle.

  It was so bizarre that it had to be true.

  “We’ve gotta do something, sarge,” the lieutenant said earnestly.

  And there sat the big, fat and ugly problem: what to do. She had plenty of firepower to blast the Kreelans to bits, but she wanted to rescue the survivors of the headquarters company if she could. If she came in, all guns blazing, there’s no way she could keep them from being killed in the crossfire.

  Calling up a map of the neighborhood, she had an idea. “Okay, el-tee,” she told him, “here’s what we do...”

  * * *

  Sparks was gasping for breath, and his right shoulder was burning like fire from holding and swinging the saber. It wasn’t a heavy weapon, but he wasn’t used to fighting with it, and his body was exhausted after the frenetic firefight they had just gone through. But he was nothing if not determined, and he ignored the pain, willing his wiry body to stay in the fight.

  Hadley, beside him, wasn’t in any better shape. While bigger and physically stronger, he had no training at all with a sword in his hand, and had suffered a brutal cut to his upper left arm. He could still swing the sword with his right, but the pain and loss of blood were telling.