“Twelve,” she repeated in her thick Russian accent, shaking her head. “I am surprised you can stand still. Stims are not normally addictive, but taken in such quantities they can be. There are also other negative side effects.” She looked at him pointedly. “Cardiac arrest is among them.”
“I know all that, commander,” he grated. “I wouldn’t be taking the bloody things if I didn’t feel I had to.”
“The dreams,” she said.
Mills nodded. He had tried as best he could to explain his recurring dream to her. It had been an uncomfortable, humiliating experience. He knew it wasn’t the surgeon’s fault; it was simply that he had never before felt compelled to confide in someone like this. Even telling Sabourin had been extremely difficult for him.
“Normally I would say it was nothing more or less than post-traumatic stress,” Commander Nikolaeva told him. She saw Mills roll his eyes and did something others rarely saw: she grinned. “I will not insult your intelligence, Mills,” she went on. “You already know this. That is the most likely answer, the one we fall back on when we believe it to be true. Or when we have no other explanation.”
That caught his attention.
She nodded. “No one else except the captain” — Commander Sato — “has experienced anything like you did on Keran. I have carefully read his account of first contact with the Kreelans, and I believe the warrior you faced may have been the same one he did.”
That came as a surprise to Mills. He had first met Sato on the assault boat that had rescued him and the rest of the survivors of Sato’s destroyer at Keran. As the senior NCO of Yura’s Marine detachment, Mills saw Sato fairly frequently. While they had talked about the events at Keran, neither had made the connection about the huge warrior: Sato had never mentioned her from his own experiences, and the dreams had driven Mills to stop talking about his fight with the warrior long before he’d come to the Yura’s Marine detachment.
“Does the captain have dreams like this?” Mills asked hopefully. He would have been incredibly relieved if someone else was having a similar experience.
“You know I cannot answer that, Mills,” she said as she turned to one of the medicine cabinets lining the walls. She pulled out two packets. “This one you already recognize,” handing the first one to him.
Mills looked and was surprised to see that it was a package of stims. He looked back up at her, confused.
“These will keep you from raiding the ration packs,” she said sternly. “If you need more, come see me. And I want you to replace the ones you took.”
He nodded, his face flushing with embarrassment. It was an old trick to pilfer stims out of rations, but it left whoever received those ration packs with no stims if they really needed it. Replacing all the ones he’d taken was going to be a bit of work. Consider yourself lucky, mate, he told himself. She could have just as easily turned your arse into the captain on formal charges.
“And these,” she said, handing him the other packet, “are tranquilizers. You will take one — only one — before you sleep. These should knock you out for at least six hours and suppress your dreams. If they do not work, do not take more: come back to see me. Unlike the stims, these can be very addictive, and if you take too many at one time, they will kill you.”
“How long can I take them?” he asked.
She shrugged as she tapped out something on her console. “I hope you will not need them more than a week. That should give you plenty of time to see if the rest of my prescription works.”
“And what is that?” Mills asked, suddenly suspicious.
“A talk with the captain,” she replied.
* * *
Mills had thought Sato would get around to seeing him at some point during the week. He didn’t expect to see him immediately after his visit to Nikolaeva.
“I’ve got some free time right now,” Sato had told Nikolaeva when she had commed him. “Send him to my cabin.”
A few minutes later, Mills stood nervously at Sato’s door. He had talked to the captain any number of times during the normal briefings held for the ship’s command staff, which included the commander and senior NCO of the Marine detachment. But he had never been in Sato’s quarters or spoken to him alone. It shouldn’t have bothered him, he knew, but the nervous apprehension wouldn’t go away.
He nodded to the Marine on guard duty outside the captain’s door, standing at parade rest. The Marine nodded back and palmed the control to open the door.
“The skipper’s expecting you, First Sergeant,” was all he said.
Mills stepped through the doorway into the captain’s private quarters, not knowing what to expect. At that moment, he was frightened more than anything else of the captain thinking he was a coward. There was no getting out of it, however. Commander Nikolaeva had made sure the captain knew what the topic of conversation would be.
He snapped to attention and saluted, “First Sergeant Mills, reporting, sir!” The sir came out sounding more like sah from his British accent.
“At ease, Mills,” Sato said, returning his salute. “Please, come in.” Sato gestured to one of the chairs arrayed around a small table that would have been the perfect size for playing cards, but as far as Mills knew the captain didn’t play.
Dropping his salute, Mills said, “Thank you, sir.” He sat down, but remained rigid as a post.
“Mills,” Sato said as he fished around in a wall locker, “relax. If it helps, that’s an order. Ah!” He held up a bottle and a pair of tumblers that he’d pulled from the locker. “Pure contraband, of course, but rank hath its privileges, as the saying goes.”
When Sato set down the bottle on the table, Mills saw it was a very expensive brand of rum. He knew the captain didn’t drink, and his expression must have given away his surprise.
“I normally only drink tea,” Sato said darkly as he opened the bottle and poured the liquor into the tumblers, “but the topic of this conversation calls for something stronger.” He handed Mills a glass, then leaned back in his chair, his dark eyes fixing the Marine with an intent gaze. “So. Commander Nikolaeva told me you’re having a recurring nightmare about the alien warrior you fought on Keran. Let’s hear it.”
Managing to get over his embarrassment, Mills told the tale of his battle with the alien warrior, describing her carefully, especially the strange ornament on the collar at her throat. Then he spoke of how his dreams had begun, and had recently worsened.
After he had finished, Sato was silent for a moment, looking into his glass as if the answers to all the questions in the universe could be found swirling in the amber liquid. “A good friend gave me some advice once,” he finally said, just above a whisper, “just before he died. He said, ‘There is no dishonor in living.’” He looked up at Mills with haunted eyes. “I agree with Nikolaeva: the warrior you fought, the one you dream about, is almost certainly the same one that I encountered when Aurora was captured.”
Taking a gulp of the rum, barely noticing as it burned its way to his stomach, Mills leaned forward. “Do you have dreams, too, sir? Nightmares like this?” he asked, desperate for company in his misery, in his quest for understanding.
“I have plenty of nightmares, Mills,” Sato replied, “but none quite like yours. I dream of what happened to me, of events that actually took place, but not of things that didn’t happen, or an attack on my spirit or soul.”
“You think I’m going around the bend, do you, sir?” Mills asked, anticipating that Sato’s next words would be to relieve him of duty.
Sato shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t,” he said frankly. “Mills...” he struggled for a moment, trying to find the right words. “Mills, a lot of people think the Kreelans are like us, simply because they’re humanoid in appearance. In the case of the regular warriors, that might be true. But not her. She’s something else entirely. Mills, I watched her walk through a wall that must have been a meter thick, and she acted like she’d been pricked with a needle when she let me run my sword thro
ugh her.”
“She let you, sir?” Mills asked, incredulous.
“Of course she let me,” Sato said disgustedly. He took a tiny sip of the rum, managing to force it down. The burning sensation took his attention away from the memory of the warrior looking down at him as he stood there, his grandfather’s katana sticking through her side. Then she had simply pulled it out and handed it back to him. “Otherwise I’d have been dead with the rest of my old crew. She could probably kill an entire planet single-handed.”
“I don’t like to give anyone that much credit, sir,” Mills said uneasily, fearing that it might actually be true. “I know bloody well that she let me go after having her fun. But I didn’t stick it to her with a sword. And we know they’re not immortal. We killed plenty of their warriors at Keran.”
Sato shook his head. “The only way she’s going to die,” he said, “is if she wants to. And I think that’s what makes her so different. It’s not just her physical abilities. There’s something more to her that I’ve never been able to put my finger on, something that goes beyond our experience.”
“That doesn’t exactly reassure me, sir, if you know what I mean,” Mills said quietly before he finished off his rum.
“I know, and I’m sorry,” Sato replied. “But we can’t control our fears unless we seek to understand them.”
Mills nodded, distinctly unhappy. “So where does that leave me, sir?” he asked. “Are you going to relieve me of duty?”
“Not unless you request it or Commander Nikolaeva recommends it,” Sato told him firmly. “I agree with the surgeon’s assessment that they’re probably not a form of post-traumatic stress.”
“If not that, then what?” Mills wondered. “Is it some sort of hocus-pocus psychic link from when she was beating my brains out?” He had meant it as a joke. Sort of.
Sato smiled, but a sudden chill went through him. What if it was? He was terrified of the possibilities.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Tesh-Dar slept. She had no true need of it since the Change that had transformed her body when she became high priestess of the Desh-Ka many cycles ago, but after some time, she had found that she missed dreaming. In dreams she found a curious sense of comfort that eluded her while awake, the Bloodsong within her calming from an irresistible river torrent to the gentle swell of an infinite sea. As time wore on, she found that she could sometimes manipulate her dreams to reveal things in the present that were beyond even the reach of her second sight, and sometimes even give her glimpses into the future. And, of course, there were also dreams that were memories from her past.
Not all such dreams were pleasant.
* * *
“Someday your sword may even best mine, Tesh-Dar,” said Sura-Ni’khan, high priestess of the Desh-Ka and mistress of the kazha where Tesh-Dar had grown from a child to a warrior nearly ready to formally begin her service to the Empire. “Yet you shall fall — by my own hand if need be — if you do not learn patience when teaching the young ones. Your talent with a blade, with any weapon you have ever held, is far beyond even most of the senior warriors of the Empire. It is because of your skills that I made you a senior swordmistress here. Your duty is to instruct, to pass on to the tresh, the young warriors-in-training, what you know. You may do it as you see fit within the bounds of tradition, but this is a duty you are bound to, daughter. It is not something you may choose to ignore.”
Kneeling on the cold stone floor of the priestess’s quarters, Tesh-Dar’s heart was torn between shame and anger. Shame that the priestess’s words were true, and anger that she should be so burdened. The Bloodsong did not simply echo the chorus of her sisters’ spirits, it burned and raged when she took a weapon in her hand, when she entered the arena. She should not have to teach others, who could not understand what she was able to do; even she did not know exactly how she mastered weapons so quickly and so well. It simply was. Born to a race bound to warrior traditions, she was among the best-adapted for the art of killing. She had never taken a life in the arena, for she had no intention of cutting down her sisters. She had fought several ritual combats outside of the arena, but after the last one her reputation was such that no one would challenge her. That in itself was another source of frustration: the only warriors who could face her were the priestesses, and she knew that it would have been a great dishonor to provoke any of them into a ritual battle. She had no peers worthy of her skills, she thought sullenly, and she had not even completed her final Challenge at the kazha, this school of the Kreelan Way, after which she would be declared an adult warrior and be free to serve the Empress as She willed.
It was maddening, but Sura-Ni’khan’s word was law, and Tesh-Dar had no choice. She would do as she must, biding her time until she was free to seek out her destiny, expanding the frontiers of the Empire in the name of the Empress.
“Yes, my priestess,” she said, trying mightily to inject a note of humility into her voice and calm the fire that raged in her veins. She did not wish to disappoint her mentor, but she felt chained away from her destiny.
“My child,” Sura-Ni’khan said quietly. “I believe you have the makings of greatness about you. Someday...someday I believe you may be worthy of wearing one of these.”
Tesh-Dar glanced up to see Sura-Ni’khan’s fingers touching the dazzling ruby-colored eyestone, taken from a monstrous genoth she had killed long ago, in which was carved the rune of the Desh-Ka order. It was affixed to her collar, the rune matching the one on her breastplate that blazed in luminous cyan. Of all the warrior sects their civilization had known, even before the founding of the Empire, the Desh-Ka was the oldest, its priestesses the most powerful. But after the Curse laid upon their race by the First Empress, the great orders were dying out.
“I am the last of my kind, Tesh-Dar,” the priestess said sadly, “and my time grows short before I must pass into the Afterlife. But I would rather the order end its existence and take my leave to join the Ancient Ones than surrender my powers to one who was not ready, or unworthy.” She paused. “Do not disappoint me, young swordmistress.”
“I will obey, priestess,” Tesh-Dar told her, tightly clenching her silver-taloned hands.
After brooding over the priestess’s words that evening, Tesh-Dar had an epiphany: she would do what the Desh-Ka and the other warrior priestesses did, and take up a single disciple. She would train a promising young warrior to a level of mastery that would see them easily through their next Challenge, when the tresh fought amongst themselves for the honor of besting their peers. That would see her through her own final Challenge, after which she could leave this place and be free to seek the glories that lay beyond the confines of the Homeworld.
“Your Bloodsong rejoices,” a soft and welcome voice said from behind her.
Quickly getting up from her bed of animal hides, Tesh-Dar knelt and saluted. “Mistress,” she said happily. Seeing Pan’ne-Sharakh never failed to lift her heart.
With a sigh, the old armorer slowly knelt down on the young warrior’s skins. “The priestess spoke with me about you, young one,” she said. Her voice was serious, which was unusual for her. “I am concerned.”
Tesh-Dar again felt a wave of burning shame, a sensation that was alien to her. Disappointing the priestess was bad enough. Disappointing this ancient clawless one, who stood so high among the peers and had played a major role in Tesh-Dar’s young life, was far worse. “I have a plan, mistress,” she said humbly. She explained what she planned to do. “I will choose Nayan-Tiral,” she went on. “I believe she has great promise. I shall teach her all that I can.”
Pan’ne-Sharakh was silent for a time, considering. Then, she said, “It is not unheard of, to train a tresh in such fashion. Yet careful you must be, child,” she warned gently. “Teach her, yes, but mind the power of your sword hand, the fire of your Bloodsong. You must stay in the here and now, and not let your spirit merge with your sword, or lost shall you be.”
Tesh-Dar nodded in understanding. When the most t
alented warriors fought, they lost all sense of self beyond their weapon and the battle. It was the ultimate state of mind for combat, but could be deadly in the wrong circumstances. Tesh-Dar fell into such a state almost instantly, using the power of the Bloodsong as a source of strength and speed. It was an ability of which she was exceedingly proud, for few warriors had ever attained this state at any age, let alone as a youth. “I shall not fail, mistress,” she promised.
Pan’ne-Sharakh nodded, then offered Tesh-Dar her characteristic mischievous grin. “Then come, child,” she said, “it is time for us to eat.”
* * *
With the next dawn, after the morning rituals were complete and training was to begin all around the kazha, Tesh-Dar took Nayan-Tiral aside and explained her plan.
“Honored am I,” the young warrior, whose next Challenge would be her third, said gratefully as she saluted Tesh-Dar.
“Then let us begin,” Tesh-Dar told her, anxious not so much to teach Nayan-Tiral, but to prove to the priestess that she could indeed train the young tresh, and do so better than anyone at the kazha other than the priestess herself.
As the days passed, Tesh-Dar’s talents at teaching were revealed in the dramatic improvements Nayan-Tiral made in her swordcraft. Both the priestess and Pan’ne-Sharakh were impressed: it seemed that the headstrong young swordmistress had found her path to enlightening others. It was not the traditional way of teaching those of Nayan-Tiral’s age, but it was certainly not unheard of, and Sura-Ni’khan let the pair be.
Then, just as Pan’ne-Sharakh had originally feared, it happened. With the priestess and many of the tresh looking on, as was often the case these days, Tesh-Dar began sparring with Nayan-Tiral, demonstrating a new technique with combat weapons that bore a sharp deadly edge. This in itself was no cause for concern, for tresh at Nayan-Tiral’s level began to train with such weapons; it had its dangers, but danger was the constant companion for any warrior. While Nayan-Tiral was well below Tesh-Dar’s skill level, she had learned much from her young mentor, and her pride and love for Tesh-Dar echoed in her Bloodsong. The two danced a deadly ballet, with the younger warrior pressing her attacks with impressive skill and aggression.
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