Her warriors obeyed, putting away their weapons as Li’ara-Zhurah led them quickly along the path taken by the screaming humans, who shuffled down the passageway, their bodies too weak to carry them faster.
As they passed an open doorway, an unexpected boom filled the passageway and one of her warriors was flung against the opposite wall, a massive hole punched in her chest armor. Three of her other warriors pounced on the human, one of their warriors in vacuum armor, and slashed him to pieces before he could fire another shot.
They encountered more humans in what Li’ara-Zhurah could only think of as a bizarre situation: here they were, warriors of the Empire, marching by the humans in the haze-filled passageways, holding their swords toward the aliens to ward them off, but otherwise offering to do them no harm. Except for one more of the armored warriors, who was killed before he could attack, the humans shrank back and offered no resistance. Li’ara-Zhurah knew this was not because they lacked the warrior spirit, but because their bodies were so weakened from radiation poisoning that most of them could barely move.
At last they reached what she hoped was the command deck. Forcing the door open, she surveyed the humans within. Four of them were conscious, all of them staring at her in amazement; the rest were unconscious or dead, sprawled on the deck. Of the four, one held a weapon, a pistol, pointed at her chest.
The Messenger.
She knelt to the deck before him and saluted, bringing her left fist against her right breast. Normally to salute one not of the Way was forbidden, but a Messenger was an exception. Her warriors in the passageway did the same.
As they did, the Messenger spoke in words that she could not understand.
* * *
“Bogdanova,” Sato croaked, “are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Sato was afraid he was having a hallucination.
“If you mean a bunch of Kreelan warriors, sir,” she replied, shivering from the pain in her abdomen and the fear of seeing Death kneeling a few meters away, “then yes, sir, I am.”
“None of you move a muscle,” Sato ordered. He held his sidearm, unsteadily pointing it at the lead warrior. It felt incredibly heavy, and he was sure that if he tried to fire it the recoil would send it flying from his hand.
The Kreelan simply knelt there, head bowed, and made no move to attack. I’m either incredibly blessed or incredibly cursed, Sato thought tiredly. He almost wished the warrior would kill him with the sword and get it over with. It would be better than the agonizing death he faced from radiation poisoning. He lowered his weapon and let it fall to the deck. He simply had no energy left to fight. All he wanted was to try and save his crew, but knew that virtually all of them were going to die, no matter what happened. The ship’s surgeon had analyzed the radiation absorption data, and they had all absorbed far more radiation than he had initially believed. More than any of the anti-radiation medicines carried by the fleet could deal with. That was before the surgeon himself had collapsed into a coma.
“What do you want?” he asked the warrior. He knew she would probably not understand him, but it was all he could think of to say.
She tentatively raised her eyes, as if she was in awe of him, and then gracefully came to her feet. The other warriors behind her remained on their knees. Approaching him slowly, her head again bowed down, she knelt before him in his command chair. Then she removed a smooth black tube, about as long as her forearm and as big around, from her belt. It looked much like the black scabbard for his sword, and Sato imagined it was some sort of weapon, something special just for him. He nodded, relieved. It will be over soon, he thought. He tried to focus his last thoughts on Steph, calling up an image of her in his mind, but even that much effort was too much. He simply sat there, staring at her as she opened the tube.
What he saw inside was not at all what he expected.
* * *
Li’ara-Zhurah had to concentrate on holding her hands steady as she opened the special vessel containing the healing gel. She wished that she could speak with the Messenger, to reassure him that she meant him no harm. She hoped he would remember the healing gel, for she knew from Tesh-Dar’s recounting of their first contact with the humans that all of them had been treated with it. Normally it was physically bound to a healer until just before it was used, but this was an unusual circumstance, and a vessel such as this could preserve it for a period of days before the gel, a living symbiont, perished.
As she opened the top, revealing the swirling pink and purple mass inside, she glanced up at the Messenger. Even without understanding human body language, she could tell that he was repulsed by it, feared it. She paused, unsure of what to do.
* * *
When he saw what was in the tube, Sato instinctively pushed back in his command chair, his eyes wide with revulsion. He would have tried to turn and run, anywhere, but his body was far past that now. He doubled over, his abdomen a writhing mass of pain as he vomited again. The only thing that came up was blood, and the pain was excruciating. Clasping his arms around his stomach, gasping in agony, he passed out, collapsing into the Kreelan’s outstretched arms.
* * *
Li’ara-Zhurah gently caught the Messenger as he fell, writhing in great pain, and she gently laid him onto the deck. “Alar-Chumah, Kai-Ehran!” she called. “Assist me!”
The two warriors dashed forward, followed quickly by the others, who formed a tight defensive ring around the Messenger and the others trying to save him. The watched the conscious humans on the bridge, who stared open-mouthed at what was happening, but there was no sign of any threats from them or down the passageway leading to the command deck.
“Hold him down and help me remove his clothing,” Li’ara-Zhurah ordered. “Be gentle, and beware your talons against his skin; they do not wear armor as we do.”
In but a moment, using their razor sharp talons, they had stripped his clothing from his body, discarding it to the side. Li’ara-Zhurah upended the vessel with one hand, catching the oozing mass of the healing gel in the other. It shimmered and writhed with life, and she noted absently that the three other humans who were still conscious were clearly repelled by its appearance. She did not understand their aversion, nor did she care. With her heart hammering with the importance of what she was doing, and the glory it brought the Empress, she began to knead and thin the healing gel on the deck, trying to expand its area to cover as much of the Messenger’s body as possible. It was difficult, both because she had no experience doing this, and because she had talons, unlike the clawless healers.
After a few moments of effort, she decided that she would never be able to duplicate what the clawless ones did, covering the entire body with a single thin film of gel. Instead, she carefully cut it into sections, flattened them out, and then draped them over different parts of the Messenger’s body. It was not perfect, but it did not have to be: half a million cycles of evolution and — in the early ages of her civilization’s recorded history — genetic engineering ensured that the gel would itself know what to do, even without a healer to guide it. She watched as the pulsating mass penetrated the Messenger’s skin, completely disappearing into his body after only a few moments.
Normally, the healing gel worked very quickly on nearly any injury, but the healers had warned her that this would take longer, for the gel had to repair every cell that had been damaged or destroyed by radiation. The gel was also not fully attuned yet to human DNA, and she hoped that no unforeseen complications arose: only a healer could interact with the gel to guide it in what to do.
With the other three humans looking on in frightened awe, she waited silently next to the unconscious Messenger as the healing gel did its work.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“No one was aboard her, colonel,” Mills reported to Grishin after getting the information from the squad that had boarded the light freighter they planned to steal. “The ship has power from the field umbilicals,” he glanced at the massive cables that snaked from a terminal on the tarmac near the ship’s fo
rward landing gear and were plugged into various power receptacles, “and looks like she’s had at least some maintenance work done.”
“So what’s the bad news?” Faraday asked. He hurriedly walked between Grishin and Mills, ignoring the pain in his left leg and back from the crash.
“Nothing,” Mills told him matter-of-factly, “except that the sodding buggers physically removed the navigation core.”
Faraday stopped in his tracks. “They pulled the whole core, not just the memory cells?”
“Yes,” Mills confirmed grimly. “There’s nothing but a fucking hole where the core should be. That’s how my chaps found it, not being too clever about such things normally. Whoever pulled it didn’t even bother to seal the socket to keep out the dust.”
“Fuck,” Faraday exclaimed, balling his fists in anger. “Fuck! Well, colonel, even if everything else on this ship is hunky-dory, we’ve just made this trip out here for absolutely nothing.”
“Why?” Grishin asked. He realized that this was a serious problem, but was smart enough to understand that he didn’t know everything. “Can you not still take off and make orbit without it? Our ships may be able to pick us up if we can make it that far.”
“I might, if they’d only taken the memory cells, which contain all the star charts.” He shook his head. “The navigation core itself, though, that’s the brain behind the operation, the processing unit that translates the information we give it through the controls into machine-level language that the ship’s systems understand. Without it...” He shrugged. “Trying to fly without it would be like trying to drive a skimmer on manual without a steering wheel or any other controls. If we had a full crew, we might be able to manage on full manual, although that would be dangerous as hell. But with just me...I’m sorry, sir, but it just can’t be done. It’s just not physically possible.”
“Brilliant,” Grishin muttered.
“Sir?” Mills asked.
“It is a perfect way to ground a ship,” Grishin told him. “It does not matter if you can fire up the engines or other systems manually. If you cannot control them, it makes no difference.” He sighed.
“What now, sir?” Mills asked quietly as Faraday wandered over to the pile of equipment that had been salvaged from the cutter and flopped down, dejected. “We can’t let the troops give up hope.”
“No, Mills, we can’t,” Grishin told him. “Yet I do not have any bright ideas. This ship was our only hope of getting off-planet unless more Confederation ships arrive, which is most unlikely. Even then, I doubt they would be able to fight their way to the surface to retrieve us. We’re going to have to think of something else.”
“Yes, sir,” Mills said, pressing his mouth into a thin line. Dammit, he thought, we came so bloody close!
He and Grishin both looked up at the sound of distant gunfire from near the spaceport’s entrance.
“Well,” said Grishin, “there is some good news, at least. It appears that Major Justin has arrived with the rest of the brigade.”
“And not a moment too soon,” Mills told him, pointing skyward. “We have visitors, I’d say.”
Grishin looked up to where Mills was pointing and his heart sank even further, if that was possible. He saw the tell-tale streaks of inbound assault craft in the high atmosphere, hundreds of them, swarming toward the surface.
Missiles suddenly rose from the ground on pillars of fire and smoke, streaking away toward their targets. They only made it a few kilometers into the air before they were vaporized by defensive fire from the incoming enemy boats. More missiles fired, then more. Saint Petersburg was ringed with dozens of surface-to-air missile emplacements that were now belching missiles into the sky. A few of them actually got through the torrent of defensive fire from the boats, blasting a few of them into fiery shards, but not enough to make any difference.
As the boats came closer, ground-based defense lasers began to fire. Similar to the point defense lasers carried on Confederation warships, these had roughly the same amount of power, but their range was far more limited because of the interference from the atmosphere. But where the missiles had failed miserably, the lasers achieved some success: there was no defense against them except armor or reflective coatings, neither of which the attacking craft had. In ones and twos they began to die. Some exploded in huge fireballs, while others simply spun out of control.
Yet the Kreelans were not content to let the defenders have things their own way. Grishin watched in awe as several waves of what looked like shooting stars blazed through the sky from space, kinetic weapons that passed straight through the weaving cloud of assault boats toward the ground. While most of them impacted on the defense positions on the far side of the city, one group hit a site only a few kilometers from the spaceport: thunder boomed across the landing field, so loud that the men and women who stood outside had to cover their ears. As the alien-made thunder died away, giant clouds of smoke and debris rose above the targets.
“Good God, colonel, what was that?” Major Justin had to shout for Grishin to hear him.
Grishin turned to him, not having heard the final approach of the column of vehicles as he watched the fireworks display unfold. “That, major,” he shouted back, “was the Kreelans suggesting that we find a way off this planet.”
* * *
Inside the ship, Valentina lay quietly in one of the beds in the small but well-equipped sick bay, Dmitri and Ludmilla by her side. The medic tended to her and the seriously injured Marines, thankful that the stocks of plasma and blood expanders had not gone bad. The ship’s autodoc had managed to improve on her field dressings, fully sealing the wounds and even extracting the bullets. It had also managed to isolate and cauterize the arteries and veins that were the most serious contributors to her internal bleeding.
“I’ll be damned if I know how,” the medic said, “but I think she’ll actually live if we can get her to a real surgeon fairly soon.”
“She is yet in danger?” Sikorsky asked worriedly just before Valentina woke up from the surgery.
“Yes,” the medic said, “but I’d say her chances are good. The autodoc fixed the worst of the trauma, and we’ve got plenty of plasma and even whole blood for more transfusions if she needs it. She definitely needs a real surgeon, but...” She shrugged. “It’s a freakin’ miracle, my friend. That’s all I can say.”
A miracle, Sikorsky thought, just as Valentina opened her eyes.
“Don’t look so sad,” she whispered.
“I am not sad,” he told her, wiping his eyes. “I am so happy you aren’t...” He refused to say the word that threatened to come to his lips. “That you are still with us.” He ran a hand over her forehead, brushing her hair back, and the gesture gave him a sudden sense of déjà vu: he had done the same for his daughter many years ago. Ludmilla held one of Valentina’s hands, squeezing it gently.
Sikorsky glanced up as someone else entered the sick bay: the cutter’s pilot. He limped in and slumped into an unoccupied chair. Closing his eyes, he leaned his head back against the wall as if to sleep. Sikorsky noticed that the medic and a couple of the injured Marines give the pilot a long look, then they turned away, stony expressions on their faces.
“Why are you not preparing the ship to leave?” Sikorsky asked.
Faraday sighed in resignation before opening his eyes and turning his head toward him. “Because we’re not going anywhere in this tub,” he said flatly, his usual flippant attitude having evaporated.
“What does that mean?” Sikorsky demanded. “Why not?”
“Because the Russkies took the fucking navigation computer core,” Faraday snapped. “The nav system is nothing but an empty goddamn box. Without it, I can’t control the ship. We’re stuck here.”
“Those explosions we heard outside,” Ludmilla said, her Standard thickly laced with her Russian accent. “Are Red Army troops coming for us?”
Faraday gave her a death’s head grin. “No, nothing that easy. The Kreelans are invading. What y
ou heard were the city’s air defenses being blasted to bits by a huge wave of Kreelan assault boats. We’re probably next on the menu. They won’t pass up a nice, juicy spaceport for long.”
“Did you inspect the nav core?”
Sikorsky was shocked to hear Valentina’s voice, and saw that she was looking intently at Faraday.
“What’s to inspect, lady?” the pilot snapped. “The damn thing is gone. They pulled it.”
“No,” she said tiredly, “not the module they removed, but the housing itself.”
“Of course I did, for what that was worth.” He looked at her more closely, noting that she was obviously intent on something he wasn’t picking up on yet. “What difference does it make?”
“Does it have an RP-911 interface?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“Sure,” he said, curiosity and irritation both evident in his voice. “That’s a standard connector for uploading data and doing system troubleshooting using an external terminal. Why the hell are you asking about it?”
“Because,” she told him in an unsteady voice, as if she had suddenly been chilled by a bone-deep dread, “I can help you fly the ship.”
* * *
“There,” Tesh-Dar said, pointing out the assault craft’s forward window at what could only be a spaceport. “We shall land there and disable the ships.”
“Could we not simply destroy them from the air, my priestess?”
Tesh-Dar shook her great head. “And what challenge would that be?” she chided gently. “What glory to the Empress would it bring? No, destroying ships is the work of the fleet. Ours is to meet the enemy in close combat when we may. With the ships disabled, the humans cannot use them to flee, and there shall be more for us to fight, and more glory to bring to the Empress.”
The young warrior bowed her head in submission.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 75