Their opponent, Sparks realized, was drawing out the affair. Even gravely wounded, as she clearly was from the amount of blood seeping from beneath her armor, he knew that she probably could have killed both of them in the first few seconds. He merely gave thanks for her sense of fair play, because it just gave him that many more opportunities to kill her.
Steph watched as the two men battled the Kreelan warrior, furious with herself that she was unable to help them. She could try picking up a sword and dive into the melee, but she figured she would last about five seconds. Instead, she focused on doing her very best to capture the battle. She had forgotten about the Pulitzer. This was about posterity, assuming any of them actually survived.
Suddenly, she became aware of something that was totally out of place in this shattered street, filled with hundreds of alien warriors watching an uneven battle of survival: music. It was an instrumental of a song she didn’t immediately recognize that sounded like something someone might hear in an old-style Irish pub.
But the effect of the music on the two cavalrymen and the aliens alike was profound: the Kreelans turned to look down the street to see what this strange noise was, while Sparks and Hadley charged their opponent as if they had been shot full of adrenaline.
Then Steph saw the first of the tanks belonging to the 7th Cavalry Regiment round the corner up the street with the regiment’s official tune, the Garryowen, booming from the lead tank’s external speakers.
* * *
Coyle’s plan was straightforward: she would take the tanks straight in to try and draw the enemy’s attention, which was something tanks were very good at, while the young lieutenant took his infantry platoon down the next street as fast as he could to get in position behind the Kreelans. Her hope was that most or all of the Kreelans would head toward the tanks, giving the infantry a chance to grab the colonel and the others, literally behind the enemy’s back.
The tanks made very little noise when they moved, as the electric motors were practically silent. The only thing one could hear from any more than a few yards away was the tracks. Even that, with vehicles maintained as well as those of the 7th Cav, was lost in the background noise of the burning city. And Coyle wanted to make something of a grand entrance that wasn’t potentially lethal to the colonel and the others.
So she decided on something a bit unconventional. The colonel loved the damned Garryowen, the Irish drinking song that was the regiment’s official air, and every vehicle had a copy of it that could be played at his whim. She knew that to Sparks, and most of the rest of the regiment, even if many wouldn’t admit it, Garryowen was a battle hymn that took him back to the era he wished he had been born in. “And the stupid song gives me goosebumps, too,” she confessed quietly to herself. She switched on the external public address system that was standard on all the regiment’s vehicles and cranked up the volume.
Rounding the corner, she saw that her efforts had met with good effect: the bulk of the Kreelans were now standing there simply staring at her tank, while the colonel and the other soldier charged the enemy warrior facing them.
With Chiquita taking up position in the center of the street, the two other tanks moved up beside her. Taking up virtually the entire width of the street, the three tanks moved forward to meet the Kreelans.
* * *
Shanur-Tikhan was shocked at the sudden surge of strength and determination in the humans she fought as soon as the strange noise washed over them. Breaking contact for a precious moment by shoving them both away, she turned to see three large vehicles moving toward her warriors. Why their war machines made such a noise, she could not imagine, but the threat to her warriors was clear.
The challenge, then, was finished.
* * *
Steph looked on in horror as the warrior, wounded though she was, easily parried a slash from Hadley’s sword and then, with a brutal attack with her own weapon, opened him up from his left hip to his right shoulder, the sword cutting right through his armor as if it were made of cloth. With a startled cry, he crumpled to the ground.
Sparks attacked the Kreelan with a series of savage thrusts with his saber, but on the last he slightly over-extended himself, and the Kreelan took full advantage. Knocking his sword aside, sending him off-balance as if he were sprawling forward, she pirouetted and brought down her sword, stabbing him through the back. The colonel gasped in agony as the sword’s blade ran him all the way through, the bloodied tip hissing through the armor of his breast plate. As he fell to the ground, the warrior yanked the sword from his body and flicked the blood from it.
* * *
“Fucking bitch!” Coyle screamed as she saw the colonel go down. Like the other Kreelans, the one who had just stabbed him had turned to look at Coyle’s tanks, and in the magnified view of her combat console it seemed like the Kreelan was looking right into Coyle’s hate-filled eyes. Coyle hoped she was, because it was the last thing the warrior would ever see.
Making sure her aiming pipper was on the center of the warrior’s body in the targeting display, Coyle pulled the trigger on the cupola-mounted gatling gun. The Kreelan warrior disappeared in a gout of bloody mist as a dozen twenty millimeter rounds blew her apart.
* * *
Steph ignored the chaos that erupted around her as the warriors charged the tanks en masse, sprinting across the hundred meters or so of open street to reach them. The tanks’ gatling guns and coaxial guns fired continuously, and she heard the pop-pop-pop of the tanks’ close-in defense weapons launching grenades, then the explosions that followed. And over it all, the horrible war cries of the Kreelans as they charged and died.
She ignored it all as she crawled over the blood-soaked ground to get to Hadley and Sparks. She reached Hadley first, and was amazed to see that he was still alive. Unconscious, but alive. Gingerly prying the severed plate of his chest armor apart, she saw a great deal of blood and the white gleam of bone in the deep gash over his rib cage, but the sword hadn’t penetrated his vitals. If they could keep him from bleeding to death, she was sure he would live.
Then she low-crawled the few meters to where the colonel lay face-down in the street, a pool of blood beneath his body. Gently turning him over, she saw that he was still conscious. She saw his lips moving, but couldn’t hear what he was trying to say over the din of the tanks firing and the Kreelans screaming.
Putting her ear to his lips, she heard him say, “Turn me...so I can see...”
Nodding, she pulled him around enough to where he could see the battle, his head cradled in her lap.
As they watched the carnage together, they were suddenly surrounded by infantrymen.
“Medic!” a young lieutenant cried as he knelt next to the colonel, who simply nodded to him, then returned his gaze to the undulating dance of death taking place farther down the street. A medic was instantly at the colonel’s side, with two other soldiers tending to Hadley.
There was a sudden boom, then another, and again as the tanks’ last-ditch close-in defenses triggered: explosive strips with embedded ball bearings that were attached in segments all around the hull.
Steph saw the Kreelans dying by the dozens as they continued their insane assault. And more died as the lieutenant ordered his infantrymen to add their own fire to the mayhem, taking the Kreelans from behind.
It was a massacre.
In the end, the Kreelans refused to yield, they refused to even attempt to retreat. They were killed to the last one. But the regiment paid a high price: two of the three tanks were hit with Kreelan grenades, destroying the vehicles and killing the crews. The only survivor was Chiquita, a large patch of its left flank blackened from the intense heat.
Driving through the abattoir that was all that was left of the Kreelans, Coyle’s tank, blackened and smoking, the suspension and most of the lower hull covered with Kreelan blood and gore, pulled up close to where the medic was stabilizing Sparks, whose eyes had never left the vehicle that rumbled to a stop in front of him.
Climbing out of the cupola and gingerly making her way down the gore-spattered hull to the street, an exhausted Staff Sergeant Patty Coyle saluted her regimental commander.
“That was good work, trooper,” Sparks said quietly through the haze of painkillers the medic had pumped into him. He was hurt badly, but the medic had told him that if they could find a decent hospital or get back to the fleet, he would fully recover.
Her face dirtied with soot and flecks of blood from a Kreelan who had come within arm’s length of killing her during the fight, Coyle managed a grim smile. “Garry fucking Owen, sir.”
That was all the colonel needed to hear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Lieutenant,” a voice said. It was vaguely familiar, but muffled and distant, as if in a dream. The voice itself was pleasant, that of a young woman, but even voicing that single word, she seemed distraught for some reason. “Lieutenant, can you hear me?”
Blinking his eyes open, Ichiro Sato saw a pale blur hovering above him that gradually resolved itself into a face: Natalya Bogdanova. The last few seconds of what happened on the bridge flashed through his mind, when Morrison had relieved him of duty and replaced him with Bogdanova as the Kreelan shells were about to hit.
And hit they had: the last thing Sato could recall was flying across the bridge as explosions wracked the ship. He remembered very clearly the thought that your life was supposed to flash before your eyes before you died, and he had felt cheated that he hadn’t been able to see his own life replayed before his body smashed into the bulkhead.
Looking up at Bogdanova, he could still hardly see her face: the bridge was shadowed in darkness, with only a few of the emergency lighting strips working, throwing a ghastly dim red glow through the smoke that swirled slowly in the compartment. But what he could see wasn’t good: she had a deep gash across her left cheek, and her face was smudged with blood and darkened by the heavy, acrid smoke. Her cheeks were wet with tears, from pain or the emotional trauma of what the ship must have endured, he couldn’t tell.
“Lieutenant,” she said again, and now he could feel one of her hands cupping the back of his head, and the faint sense of wetness there. Blood. “Please say something,” she whispered desperately.
“Bogdanova,” he managed, breaking into a wet cough. His head began to throb. Aside from that and some heavy bruising, he seemed to be well enough. Making a few exploratory movements with his hands and feet, he discovered that nothing was broken.
Hearing her name had an immediate effect on the young ensign. “Thank God,” she whispered, lowering her head down to his chest, a sobbing cry sticking in her throat.
“Boarders?” he asked immediately, the nightmare from over a year ago coming back to him in an instant.
“No,” she reassured him. “No sign of boarders or anyone else. After we were hit, the fleet moved on toward the planet, and we were just left floating in high orbit. I think the Kreelans must think we’re dead.”
Levering himself up on his elbows, his eyes stinging from the smoke, he asked her, “Where is everyone?” He couldn’t see very far in the haze and dim red lighting, but the bridge should have been bustling with activity, the captain helping the XO direct damage control efforts to make the ship at least spaceworthy, if not ready for combat.
“Only four of us made it,” she told him as she helped him sit up. “You, Beale, Akimov, and myself. Everyone else on the bridge is dead.”
That tore through his headache and chilled his heart. Out of a combat crew of nearly a dozen men and women on the bridge, all but four had been killed? “The captain?” he asked. Regardless of how much he hated Morrison, he was nonetheless a competent ship’s master and would have a good idea of how to get McClaren underway again. Not hearing his badgering voice was somehow disheartening.
“Dead,” Ensign Drew Beale spat as he came forward through the smoky shadows with Seaman First Class Nikolai Akimov to join them. “The fucking bastard.”
“What about the XO and the chief engineer?” Sato asked, his mind rapidly shedding the remaining cobwebs from his close encounter with the bulkhead. “And how’s the ship?”
“We don’t know if anyone else made it,” Bogdanova told him. “We have no communications at all, inside or outside of the ship. The bridge has been holding air well enough, but I heard some venting up forward after we were hit. All the controls and consoles are out.” She looked around through the dim red haze at the panels that should be glowing with buttons and information. “But we’ve still got artificial gravity, so main engineering must still be at least partially on-line. We can’t get the hatch open to get to the rest of the ship, though.”
“We haven’t heard anyone outside in the passageway, sir,” Akimov offered tentatively. “No one has come to try and find us.”
Sato thought for a moment, then got to his feet with their help. He was still a bit unsteady, but they had no time to lose. It suddenly occurred to him that they all should be wearing respirators, if not full vacuum suits. The smoke in the air would be at least mildly toxic. And if the bridge suddenly did decompress, the respirators would allow them to breathe, even in a full vacuum environment, although they would suffer from the bends as nitrogen bubbles formed in their blood. It was a bad choice between ways to die. “Get your respirators on,” he ordered. Something else Morrison, and the XO, by following a bad example, had fallen down on was basic survival and damage control drills. Sato was surprised that the ship had managed to survive at all.
The others quickly moved to the emergency lockers located at strategic points around the bridge, pulling out the respirators and putting them on. Bogdanova handed one to Sato, and after he’d pulled it on handed him a flashlight. Sato was eerily reminded of the first moments aboard the Aurora after the alien ship had immobilized them, when the crew had been cast into utter darkness before the strange blue glow began. He involuntarily shuddered, a chill running down his spine as the ghosts of his old ship’s crew brushed against his soul.
Trying hard to ignore the bodies strewn about the bridge, Sato told the other survivors, “First, we need to get out of here and find out who else is left, and see what sort of shape the ship is in.”
“But we can’t open the hatch,” Bogdanova said quietly.
“Yes, we can,” Sato told her as he knelt down next to the small access panel, much like Yao Ming had done on the Aurora after the Kreelans had attacked. Sato had spent a great deal of time studying the McClaren’s schematics after he had come aboard, and he had learned the trick that Yao Ming had used on their old ship. The mechanism was exactly the same, and he did it the same way Yao had. “I’ll just crack the hatch first, in case the other side has been depressurized.”
Turning the manual handle, an awkward process at best, the hatch began to slide open. Aside from a very slight hiss of pressure equalizing, it looked like the passageway was still holding atmosphere. Sato cranked it open the rest of the way.
Unlike the bridge, the passageway that led to the rest of the ship was fully illuminated by the emergency strips. Putting away the flashlight for the moment, Sato led the others aft and down. His first goal was main damage control, to see if the XO was still alive. Then on to engineering to find Lieutenant Commander Pergolesi.
It took nearly half an hour to reach the hatch for main damage control. Along the way they found over a dozen sailors still alive. After making sure that they all knew how to open the hatches manually, Sato sent half of them forward to find any other members of the crew who might still be trapped.
When he cracked open the hatch to damage control, he was instantly rewarded with a roar of air being sucked out of the passageway into the compartment on the other side of the hatch.
“It’s been breached!” he shouted as he frantically cranked the hatch shut again. He knew there would be no survivors: none of the crewmen in the breached compartment would have had a chance to get into one of the inflatable emergency balls. And even if they had, they would have run out of air by now.
With a heavy heart, he again led the others aft toward engineering.
Not long afterward, they turned down yet another passageway.
“Halt!”
Sato, leading the others, froze instantly. He couldn’t see anyone else in the passageway.
“Identify!” the voice barked.
“Lieutenant Sato, tactical officer. You’re a Marine, I take it?”
Suddenly a man dressed in a specially designed armored vacuum suit stepped into view. The suit was entirely off-white, a perfect match with the ship’s interior. While he certainly wasn’t invisible, he blended in quite well, and would have been difficult to spot for anyone who wasn’t paying close attention or was moving fast.
“Gunnery Sergeant Ruiz, sir,” the man answered through his external speakers as he lowered his rifle and made his faceplate transparent so Sato could see him. “Kinda glad to see you, sir,” he allowed as several other Marines magically appeared behind him. They all looked huge and menacing in their combat armor.
“The feeling’s mutual, gunny,” Sato said earnestly, “believe me. How many of your men made it?”
“All of ‘em, sir,” Ruiz answered as if to say, Of course they’re all still here. “I got eight here, including me, and the rest are still at their battle stations throughout the ship. Tanner almost caught a Kreelan shell, but he and his team made it okay.”
“You’ve got comms with all of them?” Sato asked, incredulous.
“Yes, sir,” Ruiz told him. “Just voice and vidcom over induction, none of the data-link stuff. The radio signals are for shit. But we don’t need that to kick alien ass,” he went on, gesturing with his enormous weapon, a recoilless rifle that was designed specifically for space combat.
For the first time since this disaster began, Sato managed a smile. The Marine combat suits not only had radio, which was currently useless, but also had the ability to send signals through the metal of the ship from induction sensors in the palms of the armored gauntlets, the soles of their shoes, and even a pickup sensor that could be attached to the ship with a simple magnetic clip. In testing during the hasty development of the suits, they had found that radio was often unreliable in the hull of a ship, so the Marines, ever inventive, had come up with an alternative. Just in case.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 35