Antonov said, “It is a trick, comrade colonel. Maskirovka. This...” he gestured at the video monitor, “this is a charade.”
The both turned suddenly as they heard a sound like a string of firecrackers going off, but heavily muffled by distance and many tons of reinforced concrete. Gunfire.
“Sir!” one of the controllers cried, as he quickly changed to a different video feed. “The guard detachment at the main door reports they are under attack!”
The camera view switched just in time to see the alien warrior finishing off the last of the eight men assigned to guard the inside of the blast door. She then turned and moved on down the massive entrance tunnel, her sword at the ready.
“The reserve company is moving to block her,” Rusov informed Antonov, “although I doubt they will fare no better than the troops outside.”
“I will not tolerate defeatism, colonel,” Antonov warned sharply.
“It is not defeatism, comrade marshal,” Rusov told him, looking him squarely in the eyes. “It is the simple truth.” He played back part of the battle on the surface, again watching as the alien butchered his men.
Antonov visibly paled. “You must stop that creature, colonel,” he ordered. “Use every man you have, including yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” Rusov said quietly, trying to keep the resignation out of his voice. He had faced his share of danger during his service in the military, and had even been in situations where he had faced the possibility of dying. But this was the first time that he knew with complete and utter certainty that he would not survive. “Men, get your weapons and come with me,” he told the controllers as he headed for the door, drawing his sidearm from its holster.
They quickly followed him out, each of them taking a last fearful glance at the alien apparition on the security monitors as it tracked her movements.
* * *
Tesh-Dar was breathing heavily now, her heart racing to keep enough blood pumping through her system. She was still bleeding heavily from the wounds the human warrior had given her at the spaceport, but her own blood would have been indistinguishable from that of the humans she had killed, covering her from head to toe in wet crimson. Her muscles burned, weakened to the point where her entire body was vibrating like a taut string that was being repeatedly plucked.
Inside the human hive, she continued to slaughter the soulless creatures, but the passionate fire to kill that had burned so brightly only a brief time before was guttering, dying. As was she. Yet this last thing — killing the humans here in this underground warren — would she accomplish before her life ended. The rest she had killed in murderous rage; these she killed to honor the Empress and, in a small way, pay for her lack of obedience. A sliver of her mind, the rational part that was slowly reasserting its dominance as she grew weaker, was cloaked in the fearful certainty that her soul would rot in the Darkness for all eternity: she had stepped from the Way, essentially defying Her will and falling from grace.
More of the human warriors charged at her, a large group this time, and she began to kill them, but not as before, when the fire in her was at its peak. Then she had been a raging genoth, a great dragon and the most-feared creature that dwelled on the Homeworld. Now, her powers drained, she was only an extraordinarily powerful warrior. Even her ability to pass through objects, and let objects pass through her, was waning. Their bullets stung as they passed through her, and soon they would pierce flesh and shatter bone.
Baring her fangs in rage, at herself as much as the humans, she swept her sword through their ranks. They closed with her, throwing themselves upon her, until her sword was useless. Dropping the weapon, she resorted to the weapons she had been born with, and reached for them with her talons.
* * *
Voroshilov stared, disbelieving, at the vidcom and its projection of Chairman Korolev’s panicked image. “Comrade chairman,” he said, “what you ask is impossible. Our ships — all of them — are engaged in battle near lunar orbit. Even if I could detach a destroyer and with a microjump closer to you, it could not possibly reach you—”
“Stop making excuses, comrade admiral,” Korolev hissed at him. “You will come here, right now, or you will face the most severe repercussions! We have been monitoring your communications, even as you ignored our calls, and know that you have been in collusion with the Confederation enemy that even now comes to kill us!” He paused in his tirade, before suddenly shouting, “I will have your family shot!”
Voroshilov turned away to look at the tactical display, an uncharacteristically stony expression on his face. There were very few red icons left now, the combined human fleet and the minefield having done their work. He was deeply surprised that the enemy ships chose to stay and fight to the death, rather than jump to safety, where they could live to fight another day. It was as if they simply did not care, or perhaps is was a point of honor that they fight to the bitter end.
A point of honor, he thought coldly, was something that the likes of Korolev would never understand.
Turning back to his so-called superior, he said quietly under his flagship’s still-thundering guns, “Your threat is an empty one, comrade chairman. As I am sure you and that chekist in charge of the secret police know, my wife and children are on Riga, visiting her brother’s family. I doubt that President Roze will let any harm come to her.” Glaring at Korolev, he told him, “The Confederation commander has some ships that are not yet engaged with the enemy. I will ask that she send one to your aid, with the understanding that if you fire on them, they should fire back with everything they have and leave you to rot. If you survive, you can have me shot, should you wish. Yet even you should see now that your time is over.” He paused, a scowl deeply etched on his face. “I do this not because you threaten me, comrade, but because saving some of our planetary leadership may allow us to better repel the many aliens that now roam free on our world. Remember that.”
Korolev, his face contorted in cold rage, was just opening his mouth to speak when someone off-camera screamed, followed by a sudden eruption of gunfire close by. The chairman looked up at what was happening, then turned back to the vidcom, his face a mask of terror. “The alien is here!” he screamed.
Voroshilov watched silently as the last few seconds of Korolev’s life played out before him.
* * *
Korolev turned away from his argument with Voroshilov as someone screamed. He turned to see the giant alien drop what was left of one of the communications technicians, blood pouring from his throat where she had ripped it out with her huge claws. She had not come through the door, which was locked and guarded: she had come right through one of the reinforced concrete walls!
Standing behind Korolev, who was now frozen with fear in front of the vidcom terminal, Marshal Antonov calmly drew his sidearm and fired at the alien, which focused her attention on him. Every round hit her, but she simply shrugged them off and kept coming.
Terrified, Korolev turned back to the vidcom and Voroshilov, screaming, “The alien is here!”
* * *
Tesh-Dar was running now on nothing more than force of will. She had finally dug her way out of the mass of humans who had tried to overwhelm her, stabbing and slashing them to death with her talons, biting them with her fangs, ignoring the revolting taste of their blood.
This room, the last in this warren that she was able to find with her rapidly failing mind’s eye that contained living humans, was her last challenge. She knew the door was guarded, so she chose to penetrate the wall. She almost did not make it: the power within her that made such things possible was now little more than a flickering spark. She was halfway through the thick wall when she nearly lost control. Had that happened, she would have been entombed there, dead, the molecules of her body interspersed with that of the concrete.
Yet with one last agonizing push, she emerged into a large room, brightly lit with many screens and consoles, with a small number of humans. The closest to her was the first to die as she snatched th
e surprised human from his chair and slashed his throat before tossing him aside.
Another drew a gun and began shooting at her while the handful of others panicked. For the first time, her powers failed completely and the bullets slammed into her. Slowed and deformed by the strength of her armor, they still had enough energy to penetrate her skin and rend her flesh. She ignored the pain as bullet after bullet found its mark in her chest and abdomen, struggling forward the last few lengths to reach the human shooting at her.
With a roar of fury, she grabbed his gun hand as he was trying to reload and ferociously yanked it up and back toward her, tearing the arm from its socket. She slammed her other fist with all her remaining might into the human’s skull, crushing it and driving his body to the floor.
The human next to him, who might have been able to get away had he not clearly been paralyzed with fear, babbled at her in one of the incomprehensible human tongues. She stood there for a moment, observing with disgust what she thought must be a form of supplication, perhaps begging for mercy.
“No mercy shall you be shown, animal,” she hissed before driving the talons of her right hand into the creature’s rib cage, piercing its heart. She hurled the still-writhing body against one of the nearby control consoles. She was rewarded with a cascade of sparks as his body smashed into the console, shorting out the circuits within and starting a fire that began to blaze fiercely.
Such is my funeral pyre, she thought sadly, knowing that it was the closest to the death ritual she would receive now. When her spirit passed from her body into the Darkness, there would be no one to take her collar. She felt the love of the Empress crashing upon her through the Bloodsong, but Tesh-Dar turned away from Her call, shame filling her heart for having lost sight of the Way, of losing control of her rage after the death of Li’ara-Zhurah. She could not bear the thought of again facing her sovereign.
Taking one last look around the room, now quickly filling with smoke and flames, she saw that the remaining handful of humans had escaped. No matter, she thought. It is done. She wanted now only to die, for her life to be finished.
As her eyes closed and she collapsed to the floor, Tesh-Dar opened her spirit to the cold of the Darkness that she knew awaited her.
* * *
“Now,” the Empress whispered.
Pan’ne-Sharakh held her eyes firmly closed. This was not the first time she had been whisked across the stars by Her will, but it was a mode of transport that she had never been entirely comfortable with. She much preferred the feel of her sandaled feet against the earth.
She sensed infinite cold and dark around her for an instant that seemed to stretch forever, yet was only a tiny stitch in the fabric of time. She felt the air change around her, and when she breathed in her sensitive nose was assaulted with the vileness of smoke from burning plastics and metal, intermixed with the unmistakable scent of blood, Kreelan and — she surmised — human.
Opening her eyes, she saw that Tesh-Dar lay deathly still upon the cold floor, her body laying in a pool of blood that glittered with reflections of the flames that roared from the strange bank of devices next to her.
Rushing to her side, Pan’ne-Sharakh knelt beside her. She was aghast at the damage that had been done to Tesh-Dar’s body, the many holes piercing her armor and her flesh. Pan’ne-Sharakh still sensed Tesh-Dar’s Bloodsong, but it was fading quickly. Lifting the great priestess’s head, holding it to her breast, Tesh-Dar opened her eyes. Pan’ne-Sharakh could clearly see the dark streaks of the mourning marks under Tesh-Dar’s eyes in the flickering light of the flames.
“Pan’ne-Sharakh,” the priestess whispered, her voice nearly lost to the crackling of the fire burning around them. “This is...no place for you, ancient one.”
“I come in Her name,” Pan’ne-Sharakh said urgently in her ancient dialect of the Old Tongue, lovingly stroking Tesh-Dar’s battered and blood-smeared face, “for She feared forcing you to come home, that you would spite Her and truly fall from grace. Neither of us could let that happen, child. Too important are you.”
Tesh-Dar groaned, both in physical and spiritual agony. “I have already fallen from Her grace...I am...lost.”
“No, child,” the ancient armorer said, gazing deep into Tesh-Dar’s eyes. “Do you believe that the Empress would forsake you, among all of Her children? That She would send me here to you if She did not want you to return home? There will be penance for what you have done, priestess of the Desh-Ka, but only to prepare you for the future. For on you shall our race someday depend, Tesh-Dar.”
Tesh-Dar said nothing, her face twisted in indecision and pain as she fought for breath, a trickle of blood spilling from her mouth from her pierced lungs.
“Let Her take us home,” Pan’ne-Sharakh begged, taking one of Tesh-Dar’s hands. “I will not leave you here, alone to die.”
“Will She forgive me?” Tesh-Dar whispered.
“She has already forgiven you, child,” Pan’ne-Sharakh said. The fire was now so hot that it was scorching her ancient skin, but she would not move from Tesh-Dar’s side, even if the flames took her and she burned alive. “Surrender to Her love.”
Tesh-Dar finally nodded, opening her spirit to the power of the Bloodsong.
Her heart stopped beating just as the two of them disappeared in a swirl of smoke and flame as the Empress brought them home.
EPILOGUE
Former Commander, now Captain, Ichiro Sato came down the gangway of the CNS Oktyabr'skaya Revolyutsiya where she had tied up to Africa Station in Earth orbit. Six months had passed since he had taken Yura to Saint Petersburg, months in which a great deal had happened.
With the decapitation of the planet’s government, Voroshilov had taken command of the Russian military forces in an effort to exterminate the tens of thousands of Kreelans who had been seeded across Saint Petersburg by the alien invasion force. He was, however, unwilling to accept the role of leader of the government. “I was a Party man because I had to be to serve as I wished in the military,” he had explained to Commodore — now promoted to rear admiral — Hanson after the last Kreelan ships in the initial attack had been destroyed. “I am not suited for it. But I know someone who may have some interest in the job, and would certainly be well qualified.”
That is how his brother-in-law, Valdis Roze, President of Riga, found himself elevated from leading a planet struggling for political survival, to leading a star system that was immediately accepted into the Confederation under a hastily drawn-up charter as the Pan-Slavic Alliance. Riga, formerly Saint Petersburg’s dumping ground, suddenly became both a safe haven for Russian refugees fleeing their parent world, and a base for the Confederation’s efforts to eradicate the Kreelans. Roze had managed to masterfully set the formerly at-odds populations working together toward a common goal: survival.
The long-term outlook for Saint Petersburg was uncertain. Despite the generous terms of the Confederation charter for supporting member worlds with training, weapons, and equipment, the bureaucracies and industries to support those terms were still being put into place. For now, aside from shipments of smaller weapons and light equipment, of which there were plenty in stock and more quickly made, the Russians and Rigans in the system largely had to make do with what they had. This was the only silver lining to Korolev’s despotic rule: Saint Petersburg had built and stockpiled a tremendous quantity of weapons over the years. These were now being put to good use.
While the Confederation fleet, which now incorporated Voroshilov’s forces, had retained control of the system, the Kreelans continued to make what Sato considered probing attacks. Unlike the attack on Keran, where they came and quickly subdued the system and eliminated the human populace in a matter of months, with Saint Petersburg they seemed content to play cat and mouse. Kreelan squadrons would appear in the system, drop more warriors to the surface, and then brawl with the human ships. But each attack seemed to be slightly stronger, and Sato wondered if there would come a tipping point when the Kreelans would
finally put enough into their attacks to drive the human fleet out.
A further oddity was that they had left Riga completely alone. Not a single Kreelan ship had ventured there. It was as if they wanted to give the humans a safe base to operate from, and were using Saint Petersburg as the designated battleground.
“It’s nothing more than a gigantic arena where they can fight us,” he had told Hanson before he left the system to return to Earth. It was like a massively upscaled version of the arena aboard the first Kreelan ship humanity encountered, where Sato’s shipmates from the Aurora had died.
They had received news from courier ships that six other systems had been attacked in a similar fashion, although none of them had suffered the spectacular damage that had been inflicted on Saint Petersburg’s primary spaceport. There had also been no reports of any incredible feats by the Kreelans like the tale told by Voroshilov about Korolev’s death. The senior officers and civilian leadership listened to him intently, but quietly dismissed what they heard. It was simply too fantastic.
On Riga, Sato had not had any time to get depressed over the loss of Yura. With the blessing of Admiral Phillip Tiernan, Chief of Naval Staff, Hanson had promoted Sato to captain, and Voroshilov had promptly given him a ship to command: the Oktyabr'skaya Revolyutsiya (October Revolution). Voroshilov had been forced to remove a number of ship captains who were Party hard-liners and had refused to accept the “new order” after Korolev’s death. That had left a number of slots open with too few officers to fill them. October Revolution’s captain was both highly competent and loyal to his people above the Party, and Voroshilov had promoted him to take a squadron command. The ship needed a new captain, and Vorishilov had felt that Sato would be an excellent choice.
“You commanded your ship, Yura, bravely against my fleet,” Voroshilov had told him, “and your commodore speaks very highly of you. I cannot bring back your dead, but I can give you a new ship to command.”
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