But he couldn’t do it. He wanted to kill her, wanted to kill every last one of her kind for what they had done, but not in cold blood. He felt his rage dissipate like an ebbing tide, and the strength went out of his arms. Lowering the sword to his side, he slumped to the deck on his knees in front of the warrior, dispirited, empty.
Apparently intrigued by his refusal to kill her, she lifted her head from the floor and again met his gaze.
“Are you Lieutenant Sato?” a voice with what could only be a British accent whispered from behind him, pronouncing his rank as leftenant.
With a surprised start, Sato turned around to see a large soldier peering carefully around the hatch coaming in the passageway behind him, aiming his assault rifle at the aliens. He hadn’t heard anyone come up behind him.
“Yes,” he said. “Who the devil are you?” That was when Sato noticed that there were no longer any sounds of fighting coming from the other parts of the ship.
“The cavalry, you might say, lieutenant,” Mills told him. “Soldat 1e Classe Roland Mills of the Légion étrangère, at your service. Sent by one Miss Stephanie Guillaume. And might I ask, sir,” he went on, “just what the devil is going on here?”
Sato turned to look back at the warriors, who had taken absolutely no notice of Mills or the other men who now spread out behind him, aiming half a dozen assault rifles at the Kreelans. Their leader, blood still seeping down her neck from the cut he had given her, still watched him with her strange feline eyes, almost as if she were afraid or sad to see him go.
“I...don’t really know,” Sato told him honestly as he struggled to his feet, suddenly overwhelmed by physical and emotional exhaustion. He felt Mills’ powerful hand take him under the arm to help him up, the big soldier smoothly moving Sato behind him as the legionnaire kept the muzzle of his rifle pointed at the lead Kreelan’s head.
Mills tensed to pull the trigger, but felt a hand on his arm, gently but insistently pushing his rifle down.
“Leave them,” Sato said quietly. “Just leave them be.”
Pausing only to recover the scabbard for his sword, Sato headed back toward engineering, Mills and another legionnaire covering his back. Just before he turned the corner in the passageway, Sato glanced back to see that the Kreelan, still on her knees, was staring after him.
* * *
As soon as she caught sight of him, Steph threw herself in Sato’s arms, not giving a damn about military etiquette, protocol, or anything else. “Ichiro,” was all she could say before their lips met. She kissed him hard, and he returned every bit of her passion, holding her off her feet in a tight embrace.
“Sorry to dampen the reunion,” Mills said, exchanging a tired grin with his NCO, “but I think we’d best be off, lieutenant.”
Reluctantly letting go of Steph, Ichiro nodded. “Is everyone aboard the boat?”
“Yes, sir,” DeFusco answered, stepping forward to salute him.
He returned it with a smile. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
Following DeFusco and Steph, he and the two legionnaires stepped through the auxiliary airlock into the boat, and Sato watched with sad but relieved eyes as the hatch closed on his first, and probably his last, command.
* * *
Taylan-Murir and her three companions followed the Messenger and his escorts to where the humans had left, no doubt from a boat that had come to rescue him. She put a hand to her neck, feeling the sticky track of blood that had now stopped flowing, and shivered at the memory of looking into his face as he had held her at his mercy. Her fellow warriors were not jealous of her experience, for they had sensed it in their own veins: the Kreela were not all of one mind, but they were bound in spirit. And what one sensed, the emotions one felt, was a stream that fed the timeless river of the Bloodsong.
After pausing for a time where the humans had left the ship, they circulated through the other compartments that were not in vacuum, gathering up what few of their sisters who remained alive. They gave the last rites and ritual death to those who were too severely injured to leave the ship, for there were no healers here. They all had brought the Empress much honor this day, and their deeds would be duly recorded in the Books of Time.
Once they were finished, the warriors again donned their vacuum suits and left the ship, taking refuge in the nothingness of space high above the human-settled world. Staying together in a group, they awaited the imminent arrival of the second fleet they sensed that the Empress had sent forth to continue the conquest of this world.
* * *
“Not that it’s a big surprise, but we’re not going to make it,” the boat’s pilot said in a matter-of-fact voice as he watched the chronometer that had been running, marking the time remaining until the carriers were to jump.
The copilot had been frantically trying to establish a laser link with the big ships, but so far hadn’t had any luck. “There they are,” he said as the carriers suddenly flashed onto the extreme edge of the boat’s tactical display. “Okay, I’ve got a laser lock on Guadalcanal...”
The icons for the carriers suddenly disappeared from the screen.
“Oh, shit,” the copilot hissed.
“What’s wrong?” Sato asked him, leaning over his shoulder to see the display. As the ranking Terran Navy officer, he now found himself in command again, albeit of a much smaller vessel. After speaking with the legionnaires, he had checked on Colonel Grishin, but he was barely lucid. If they didn’t get him to a sickbay soon, he would die. Colonel Sparks was worse, his pulse weak and erratic. He was bleeding badly internally, and while every soldier had basic first aid skills, none were medics: all of them had been killed during the running battle on the planet.
“The carriers jumped,” the pilot told him bitterly. “We’re stuck here.”
The soldiers and the survivors of McClaren were disappointed, but not surprised. The soldiers had known the risks of trying for a rescue, and had taken them anyway. The crew of the McClaren was grateful for even a few more minutes beyond the reach of the enemy’s swords and claws.
“Well, that’s that, then,” Mills said with a sigh.
“Not quite,” Sato told him, looking out the window to starboard, where a deadly dance of fireflies was taking place in the near space between the planet and its moons: lasers and the flares of explosions as the human and Kreelan fleets collided.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Ticonderoga shuddered as she took another hit from an enemy kinetic weapon, and her hull screamed as an enemy laser raked her flank, vaporizing tons of hardened steel alloy in an instant.
Tiernan and the rest of the flag staff did the only thing they could: they held on tightly, strapped into their combat chairs, and prayed. There was no point in giving orders: all semblance of cohesion in the fleet had vanished as they had slammed headlong into the onrushing Kreelan warships. Half the laser links had been lost in the snarling chaos of the battle, and effective control was impossible.
The ships fought in a swirling pass-through engagement that was more like a massive dogfight from the long-ago Second World War than a fleet space engagement. But there had never been a fleet battle in space nearly as big as this, and the reality of it had thrown half a century of modern naval thinking out the window. Tiernan knew the Navy was going to have to start from square one on tactics and strategy, because this enemy simply didn’t act human, for the most obvious of reasons.
Cruisers and destroyers on both sides hacked away at one another in a knife fight at ranges of hundreds of meters, using weapons that were designed for combat at hundreds or thousands of kilometers. Kinetic guns ripple-fired until their magazines were empty, sometimes sending an entire salvo into the hull of an enemy vessel as it flashed by on an opposing course. Lasers slashed across hull plating, vaporizing armor and often penetrating into the target ship’s vitals, sending streams of air and doomed crew members into space. Ships of both sides that were gutted and dying tried to ram the nearest enemy. In a few cases, the ships s
urvived the collision, with the crews fighting each other hand to hand.
“Once our ships pass through the enemy formation,” Tiernan told his flag communications officer, “they’re to jump out to the rendezvous point. We can’t fight like this and hope to win without losing most of the fleet.”
“Admiral!” the fleet tactical officer called out, “Jean Bart is losing way - she’s falling behind!”
Tiernan looked down at the vidcom and punched the control to ring up Amiral Lefevre. There was a long pause before the system connected, the laser array having to search through the cyclone of wildly maneuvering ships to find the Jean Bart.
When Lefevre’s image at last appeared on Tiernan’s console, the Terran admiral suppressed a grimace at his Alliance counterpart’s appearance. Lefevre’s face was covered in blood from a deep gash that ran from above his left eye to his left ear, and there was also a line of blood from the corner of his mouth. His uniform was tattered and scorched. Behind him, the video monitor showed a scene of chaos and smoldering devastation on the Jean Bart’s flag bridge.
“Mon ami,” Lefevre wheezed, a weak smile on his face, “I fear I will not have the opportunity to beat you at a game of poker. Our ship is nearly finished.”
“Sir, if one of your ships is unable to reach you, I’ll send a destroyer to take you and your crew off-”
“No, amiral. You must not risk any more ships.” He paused, gathering his breath as the Jean Bart shook from another hit. “I am sure the fleet that is here now is not all the enemy has. They would not send everything to invade another system. They must have reserves. And if our two fleets are destroyed here, our homeworlds will not be able to defend themselves.”
“I’m not sure it would matter, admiral,” Tiernan told him. “The Kreelans don’t seem to care about their losses. Fighting like this, they could take Earth with a fleet half this size.”
“Which is why you must save every ship that you can,” Lefevre emphasized. “The loss of Keran will be a terrible tragedy. But if we lose Earth or any of the other core worlds like La Seyne, we will lose the industrial capacity to defend ourselves-”
In the background of the vidcom, Jean Bart shook furiously as she took a full broadside from an enemy warship, the impact sending Lefevre sprawling from his combat chair.
The signal broke off.
Tiernan looked at his tactical officer, but didn’t have to ask the question: the man’s expression told him what he needed to know. Jean Bart and all aboard her were gone.
“Contact every Alliance ship you can reach in this mess,” Tiernan ordered his communications officer, “and let them know that we’re jumping out as soon as we’re clear of this furball. I have no idea who may be senior after Lefevre, but if they have any sense at all they’ll get the hell out of here.”
Ticonderoga shuddered again, and more alarms sounded from the bridge.
* * *
Tesh-Dar stood in the burned-out clearing where so many warriors had been killed by the small human ship when it had crashed. It was an irony of war that the actions of a few of their fellow warriors, in reaching for glory for the Empress in attacking the crew of the vessel, accidentally took many of their sisters’ lives. At this, she grieved, but not as a human would understand it: she did not lament the loss of their company in this life, for even in death were they bound to Her will, and Tesh-Dar could yet sense their spirits. She mourned their loss because they could no longer serve the Empress in the most glorious conflict the Empire had seen in millennia, in what Tesh-Dar had begun to think of as the Last War. The humans had proven themselves to be worthy enemies, and they would be given many cycles to bleed among the stars to see if one among them had blood that would sing.
Or so Tesh-Dar hoped. The knowledge that her race had only a few human centuries left before it would die out in a single generation was a heavy weight upon her soul. That all her species had accomplished in half a million human years of civilization, and all the more that had been done in the last hundred thousand since the founding of the Empire, would disappear into dust and ash in an uncaring cosmos was a fate she dared not contemplate. Her great fists clenched in anxiety at the thought, her ebony talons piercing the flesh of her palms, drawing blood.
Pushing away her fears for the future, Tesh-Dar turned her attention back to Li’ara-Zhurah. The young warrior had built a traditional funeral pyre for the human female who had commanded the metal genoth, just as the other warriors had built similar pyres for their fallen sisters. She gathered the wood from the nearby forest and stacked it precisely as custom demanded, often staggering in pain. She would not let other warriors help her, nor would she let the healers, who had been sent by the Empress from the Homeworld in an act of will, their bodies materializing here out of thin air, treat her injuries. The explosion of the human ship that had killed Li’ara-Zhurah’s human opponent had nearly killed her, as well. A shard of metal, not unlike that which killed the human warrior, had stabbed through Li’ara-Zhurah’s abdomen, and was still lodged there. Tesh-Dar sensed the great pain she was in, but was more concerned about her spiritual distress, the discord of her Bloodsong. It was more than mere disappointment at not being able to claim victory over the human after pursuing her so ardently. It was almost as if Li’ara-Zhurah had lost her tresh, one to whom she was bound for life as a young warrior. The death of one’s tresh was one of the most traumatic events in the life of Her Children, a time of great mourning.
Again Tesh-Dar tore herself away from such melancholy thoughts. They were difficult to avoid, for while her race had conquered this part of the galaxy, spreading across the worlds of ten thousand suns, their Way, the spiritual path of their existence, was a difficult one.
She thought of the Messenger, and the curious twist of fate that had brought him here. Knowing that he was on the tiny human ship that now approached the still-raging battle in space, the warriors of the fleet knew that the craft was not to be molested. Tesh-Dar could not directly assist him in returning home, but the fleet would not interfere in any attempts to join with one of the other human vessels now fighting for their lives.
* * *
Li’ara-Zhurah set the last bundle of wood in place. She fell to her knees for a moment, the loss of blood from her wound taking its toll. She did not understand the depth of her sense of loss over this human animal. The mourning marks, where the skin of her face had turned black under her eyes, flowed as if she had shed tears of ink. It was how her race displayed inner pain, unlike the wetness she had seen streaming down the cheeks of some of the humans. Including this one.
Waving away the warriors who came to assist her, she struggled to her feet, willing her body to obey, controlling the pain with the discipline of many cycles spent training in harsh conditions.
Steadying herself, she reached out a hand to touch the face of the human woman who had sacrificed herself for the others, the cool flesh so alien to her touch, yet so achingly familiar. Perhaps the creature was an echo of her own soul, she thought. If so, then Li’ara-Zhurah had done well in honoring the Empress.
Reverently, she took a lock of the human’s hair, cutting it cleanly with one of her talons. She carefully placed it in the leatherite pouch at her waist. It was traditionally used to carry trophies earned in combat, almost always a lock of hair. These strands of light colored hair, too, were a trophy, but one to remember and honor this human and those like her. They may not have souls that could sing to the Empress, but their warrior spirit was no less than that of Her Children.
Stepping back, she took the torch held out by one of the younger warriors. Walking slowly around the pyre, she set the wood alight. Then she moved away to the side, facing the rising flames, close enough that the heat nearly scorched her face.
She did not feel the priestess’s arms fold around her as she collapsed into unconsciousness.
* * *
“You’re out of your fucking mind, sir!” the pilot cried, looking at Sato with wide, disbelieving eyes. “I don’t ca
re if you monkeys stick a gun to my head again, but we are not flying into the middle of a goddamn fleet battle.”
“If you want to get home, we have no choice,” Sato told him, too tired to argue anymore. The fact of his own survival had come to feel like a millstone around his neck. “The enemy won’t fire on us.”
“How do you know?” Mills asked, his voice carrying no trace of argument, only curiosity.
“Because...” Sato struggled for words as he looked out the cockpit window, his eyes lost in the glare and flash of hundreds of ships trying to destroy one another. “Because for some reason I’m not to be touched.” He looked at Mills. “They let me go from the Aurora, and somehow that made me special to them. I don’t understand how or why. But those warriors on the McClaren recognized me somehow. They let us go because of it. And I’m convinced that they know I’m on this boat, and they won’t do anything to harm us. Besides,” he looked at the pilot, who was staring at him as if he were a rabid dog, frothing at the mouth, “we have no choice. Keran is lost, at least for now. If we want to leave, we’ve got to link up with one of the fleet’s ships before they jump out. And that’s going to be soon.”
The fleet battle was still on the edge of the boat’s sensor array, but Sato could tell that Admiral Tiernan had suffered heavy losses. He would have no choice but to jump out before the fleet was completely gutted. Sato knew that the Kreelans could sustain the loss of the fleet they had sent here, which he suspected had been “dumbed down” to the current level of human technology. Otherwise they probably could have destroyed the human fleet with just one of the gigantic ships that had met the Aurora.
“It’s our only chance,” Steph told the pilot. “I don’t want to go back to Keran.” She tightened her grip on Sato’s hand as the sight of Coyle waving at her as the boat lifted off rose again in her mind, unbidden.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 45