In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  She was about to force herself to eat a huge bite of cake that would have brought an indignant rebuke from her mother about poor table manners when she saw them. White trails in the sky, streaking across the horizon.

  The invasion alert siren continued its mournful wail, the changes in pitch eerily in step with the wide S-turns made by the white streaks.

  Dropping the fork, she stood up and moved to the porch railing for a better look. Some of the streaks were moving north and south, quickly fading from view. Another group, maybe a dozen, spiraled in toward Breakwater.

  The house was shaken by what sounded like explosions, but she realized were sonic booms as some of the streaks passed right overhead.

  It dawned on her what those streaks were. Kreelan ships, coming in to land. The only other time she’d seen streaks in the sky like that was when her father had taken her to one of the space ports when her uncle had come to visit a few years ago.

  A few moments later, the streaks that circled high over the town in graceful arcs resolved into tiny specks as the ships lost their contrails and dove for the ground.

  Allison gasped as three small pillars of fire rose from where the town was, each followed by a crackling roar. The anti-air missiles flew unbelievably fast, aimed at three separate landing ships. Two of the missiles exploded well short of their targets, the noise loud enough to force Allison to put her hands over her ears.

  The third missile found its target, tearing one of the stubby wings of one of the incoming ships. The craft tumbled out of control, and as she watched a group of smaller things fell away from it like seeds from a pod.

  Parachutes fluttered from the tiny things, and they began gliding toward the town, following the other ships that had passed out of view beyond the low rise between the Murtaugh farm and Breakwater.

  Over the roar of the ships’ engines, Allison heard a sudden eruption of pops from the direction of town.

  Rifle fire.

  “Oh, no.” She stood there, gripping her new hunting rifle, uncertain about what she should do. If her parents were here right now, she knew they would be terribly upset that she wasn’t hunkered down in the shelter with the door bolted shut. But they weren’t here. They were over there. In trouble.

  Before she even realized she was doing it, she was running for the barn. Not for the shelter, but for her horse.

  “Easy boy,” she soothed as she quickly slipped the bridle on old Race. He was a nine year-old Percheron with a midnight black coat who’d carried Allison since her father had first set her in a saddle when she was four. Race was descended from the genetically modified stock brought by the original colonists to help with clearing and working the land. While most farming tasks were now done with machines, horses still had abundant uses on Alger’s World, especially on small farms like this one.

  Not to mention they were fun for young girls to ride.

  Allison didn’t bother with a saddle. There wasn’t time. Slipping the rifle’s sling over her shoulder, she grabbed a handful of Race’s thick mane and jumped up, folding herself over his broad back before sitting up, her legs on either side of his wide rib cage.

  Race huffed and tossed his head up and down as the sound of a thunderous explosion rolled across the farm, making the timbers of the barn shake.

  “I know, boy,” she said as she signaled him forward. “Don’t be afraid. I’ve got to know what’s happening.”

  With one last toss of his head, as if telling her this was a terrible idea, Race dutifully trotted out of the barn, then hit a full gallop as Allison squeezed him with both legs and leaned forward on his back.

  She gasped as she looked toward town. Smoke billowed upward, black greasy snakes that curled and undulated into the sky.

  The roar of the ships’ engines died away as the aliens shut them down, and Allison’s ears were filled with the non-stop pops and cracks of even more rifle fire.

  Race flew across the fields, taking the shortest route to where Allison could get a glimpse of the town.

  To her left, a truck roared over the small hill on the road from town, so fast that the wheels momentarily lost touch with the ground as it sailed over the top.

  It was burning. As Allison watched, a web of what looked like lightning arced across the vehicle’s body. There were three people in the cab and five in the back, desperately holding on. All of them wore Territorial Army uniforms.

  When the lightning touched them, they screamed.

  The scene played out like a slow-motion horror vid as the web of lightning grew more intense, wrapping around the entire vehicle. The body of the truck began to melt, and the people writhed in agony as they were electrocuted and charred black.

  She was shaken from the horrific scene when the truck finally swung off the road into one of the fields, rolled over and exploded.

  “Oh, God. Oh, God.” She murmured the words over and over as Race took her up over the rise, where she brought him to a sudden stop with a firm pull on the reins.

  The alien ships were in a rough ring around the town, and dozens of black-armored figures were making their way along the streets and alleyways. She immediately saw that almost all the gunfire was coming from her people. None of the Kreelans even seemed to have rifles. Instead, as the news reports had said, they held swords and strange throwing weapons.

  She witnessed just how deadly the throwing weapons were when she saw a man poke his head around a corner, rifle at his shoulder. He got off a shot at a warrior, who crumpled to the ground. But before the man could duck back behind the corner, another warrior threw one of the things at him.

  Allison saw it pass by him, but it didn’t seem to hit him. The man stood there for a moment, as if stunned. Then his face and the front half of his head simply fell away as the warrior who’d killed him ran by, snatching up the weapon she’d thrown before moving deeper into the town.

  The horror was overwhelming, and for a moment Allison simply sat there, tears streaking down her face and her mouth open in numb disbelief.

  Then she saw them. Two men and a woman lay near one of the missile launchers. Dead. She remembered Shaun bragging about how important his job was, loading one of the fancy missile systems the Confederation had brought in. The helmet of one of the men had come off, and while the body was covered in blood, she could see enough of her father’s red hair to know it was him. Her father, her mother, and her older brother. All dead.

  “No.” The word caught in her throat as she saw a warrior near one of the ships happen to turn her way.

  Only then did she realize that she was completely exposed, silhouetted on the top of the rise. And sitting astride a horse, yet. Every warrior in town would be able to see her.

  But at that moment, she didn’t care. A flare of rage, the likes of which she’d never known, flowed through her at the thought of her murdered family.

  The warrior called to one of the others near the ship, and the two of them bolted toward where Race and Allison stood.

  “Come on, then.” Allison raised the rifle Shaun had given her. It wasn’t fancy, but it was incredibly accurate out to three hundred meters. It was also powerful enough to stop a neo-bear.

  She had never fired from horseback before, but knew that Shaun had fired his rifle while riding Race, and the big horse had barely flinched.

  Laying the sights on the chest of the first alien, who was running flat out toward her, Allison let out her breath and stroked the trigger.

  Sitting on Race without a saddle or stirrups, she had no way to absorb the rifle’s recoil, and it nearly knocked her backwards off the horse’s back. She grabbed his mane just in time and managed to pull herself upright.

  “Good boy!”

  Race had stood rock-steady, but snorted at her compliment, clearly unhappy to be there.

  Her target was down, a crumpled heap of black armor and blue skin on the ground. But the second one was gaining fast, and other warriors had turned around at the sound of the shot.

  Allison aimed and
fired.

  This warrior was smarter, pitching herself to the side at the last instant.

  Allison fired again and missed, then once more. Another miss.

  The warrior grabbed one of the throwing weapons from her shoulder and cocked her arm back as Allison squeezed the trigger a fourth time, cringing as the warrior’s head exploded in a shower of blood and gore.

  More warriors were now heading her way.

  Time to go, she thought.

  “Come on, boy!” She turned Race around and squeezed him hard with her legs. The big horse ran as fast as Allison could ever remember him moving.

  She wasn’t heading back toward the farm and the safety of the barn and the shelter. Not yet. As fast as the warriors ran, they’d be able to see where she was going if she went straight back home. Her only chance was to make it to the woods that lay a couple hundred meters to the north, then work her way back home.

  Glancing behind her, praying that the aliens wouldn’t top the rise before she made it into the trees, she urged Race on.

  She was almost to the woods when she heard one of the ships starting its engines.

  Looking back, a shiver of fear ran up her spine as she saw the black ship, its shimmering black sides covered with strange alien writing in the same color as the lightning that had killed the people in the truck, rise above the hill and turn toward her.

  “Come on, boy! Come on!”

  She didn’t see the laser blast that killed Race. She only heard a brief thrumming sound before the horse make a strange grunt and he fell. Allison went sailing over his head as he went down, and the rifle flew from her hand.

  Rolling as she hit the ground, just as her father had taught her, she quickly got to her knees and looked back at her fallen horse.

  Race stared at her with dead eyes. His body had been sheared in half, just behind where she’d been sitting. Smoke rose from the blackened ends of his severed body, and she smelled the stench of burning meat and hair. His rear hooves twitched.

  The tree next to her crackled with heat and burst into flame as the ship fired again, and she caught sight of several warriors running toward her. She couldn’t see how the ship could have missed her with the laser as she knelt there. They must have killed Race just to keep her from getting away.

  “Goodbye, boy,” she whispered before she turned and fled into the woods.

  * * *

  It took Allison nearly six hours to make her way home. Kreelans were scouring the area, and Allison had been forced to hide in a secret spot along the creek until the aliens went away. Waist deep in the burbling water of the creek, she cowered in a tiny cave formed by a group of rocks. Before her father had built the shelter, it had been her favorite hideaway when she played with Elena and the other girls, although her parents and Shaun knew perfectly well where it was.

  But the Kreelans didn’t. She heard them moving around in the woods outside, but stayed put until late at night, long after the voices of her alien pursuers had faded away.

  There, in the dark, she had listened to the continued sounds of gunfire coming from town. The defenders weren’t giving in easily. She didn’t know anything about armies and fighting, but she knew the Territorial Army, her townsfolk, would probably lose. A lot of Kreelans had come out of those boats.

  At last, she forced herself out of the little cave. She was afraid that if she didn’t go now, she never would.

  After looking and listening carefully for any sign of the aliens, she made her way along the creek that formed the northern boundary of the farms on this side of town, careful not to make any noise.

  Finally reaching her own farm, she paused again. Kneeling in the gently burbling water, she carefully watched the barn, which was only a short run from the creek, and listened.

  There was nothing but the sounds of battle coming from town. She also heard more shots being fired from the west and south.

  Getting up, Allison crept across the open ground to the rear of the barn, then slipped inside. The other animals were still there, and after a moment’s deliberation, she freed them. The four cows and two horses wandered out the open doors and began grazing, unconcerned that aliens had invaded their world.

  Opening the door to the shelter, Allison entered the stairwell, then closed and locked the door behind her, shutting away the awful sounds of the fighting.

  Leaving the lights off, as if the aliens could somehow see them here underground, she crawled into the small bed that was hers. She didn’t bother to take off her wet clothes.

  After a moment, shivering with cold and the agony of all she’d lost that day, Allison quietly wept in the darkness.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Ku’ar-Marekh, high warrior priestess of the Nyur-A’il, walked alone on an airless world whose existence in the cosmos was unworthy of an entry in the Books of Time, save that she had set foot upon it.

  She stopped a moment and looked up at the protostar that was forming far above, an accretion of gas and dust that someday would achieve sufficient mass for fusion to begin, for a star to be born. It was a swirling, glowing cloud whose beauty had never been witnessed by any sentient being other than herself.

  Her armor, a light-drinking black that was so smooth it could be used as a mirror, except for the cyan rune of the order of the Nyur-A’il in the center, reflected the subtle hues. The reds and yellows and blues that she could see, but whose beauty could not touch her soul.

  Her jet black hair, woven into the braids that were an ancient tradition of her people, hung down to her waist, glistening in the ghostly light. Her eyes, flecked with silver, looked at the scene through slitted pupils. Her skin, a cobalt blue, in this light was so dark as to be nearly black. Black as the empty space around her, a reflection of the emptiness within her.

  Around her neck she wore the black collar of living metal that every one of Her Children wore, the many rows of pendants that hung from it proclaiming her accomplishments for the peers to witness. The front of the collar also bore an oval device of glittering metal, the same living steel from which Kreelan swords were made, with her order’s rune etched into the surface. It proclaimed that she was a priestess, although the warriors around her knew who and what she was through their very blood. They could sense her spirit in the Bloodsong that united their people across the ten thousand suns of the Empire, and across the boundary that separated life and death.

  Indeed, she was a high priestess, but it was an empty honor, the name of her order ash on her tongue. The Nyur-A’il was not the oldest of the orders that served Her, the Empress, for that honor was accorded to the Desh-Ka and its last living disciple, the great priestess Tesh-Dar.

  But while the Desh-Ka might be considered the most powerful in the Empire, it could be said that the Nyur-A’il were the most feared.

  Yet fear was an emotion that Ku’ar-Marekh no longer felt. Nor was love, joy, or anger. Among the peers she had heard whispers of a name that some had for her. They called her Dead Soul.

  Had they spoken the name to her, she would not have taken them to task for it, for it was too close to the truth.

  Reaching out her hands toward the protostar, she yearned to touch it, to become one with it over the ages yet to come. The invisible energy bubble surrounding her body flexed, matching her movement. It held the air she needed to breathe and shielded her from the radiation of the star-to-be, but it was not an artifact of technology. It was an act of will, a gift of the Change that had made her far more than a mere warrior, just as was the ability to flit among the stars, merely by wishing it so. Few high priestesses had that particular power, for the sacred crystals which powered the Change were fickle, their gifts not easily predicted.

  For her, the Change had not been as expected. While it had brought her powers that made her greatly feared, even among the other warrior priestesses, it had robbed her of much more.

  She knew she could not touch the cloud, but yearned to be part of it, to be reborn. To have been chosen to take her place as a warrio
r priestess among the Children of the Empress had been a great honor, the greatest to which any of the peers could aspire.

  But for Ku’ar-Marekh, it had been the end of her happiness. The great cloud of glowing dust at which she longingly stared would know more of happiness than did she.

  For long cycles after the Change, after she had become her order’s highest and last priestess, she had wandered the galaxy far beyond the Empire’s vast domain. She had walked upon a hundred worlds such as this, had floated through great rings of fire and ice, and had seen sights among the stars that no other of her race had ever glimpsed. She sought to find something, anything, that would kindle the faintest emotion in her heart, the tiniest sense of wonder or awe. Even fear or loneliness.

  Yet she had felt nothing. Views that would have paralyzed her sisters with their celestial grandeur left her unmoved.

  All she could do was live, to survive from day to day without hope or solace. She breathed the air she took with her during her leaps through space. She ate and drank when her body demanded, rested when her endurance was at an end. She existed. No more.

  Even the Bloodsong, the emotional river that flowed from the Empress and bound Her Children together, was like a fire that cast light but not the warmth that Ku’ar-Marekh remembered from before the Change. She could sense her sisters, their joys and sorrows, the fierce ecstasy of those fighting the far-distant humans. But their fates were bound to the Universe around her, and in the end did not matter to Ku’ar-Marekh. Nothing did.

  Nothing...except the Empress Herself. From Her alone could Ku’ar-Marekh sense in the Bloodsong a trace of the love that she had once known, as if the Empress were a great star, now far distant. That was the only reason Ku’ar-Marekh had not surrendered her honor and taken her own life. Even the eternal dark beyond the love of the Empress could not be worse than the dark and empty torment of her existence.