* * *
Sergeant Emilio Sanchez sat in a small patch of grass in the shadow of his tank. He was on the side facing away from the gruesome mass of dead aliens, leaning against one of the big road wheels. He could make out the smell of the charred paint and scorched metal from what was left of the tank’s skirt, a sheet of relatively thin armor that was meant to protect the vehicle’s vulnerable lower hull.
A Kreelan had thrown a lightning grenade that had stuck to it, and Sanchez had been sure they were done for.
They would have been, had not a lunatic commanding an infantry fighting vehicle driven alongside them, shearing off most of the skirt, the grenade along with it, just as the thing detonated. Both vehicles were scorched, but had survived.
Sanchez had every intention of making sure the crazy bastard got a medal and a case of beer as soon as he could figure out who it had been.
Taking another drag on his cigarette, he stared blankly at the original landing zone, toward the town, idly watching the columns of smoke rise from all the destroyed ships and vehicles there. Behind him, his crew and most of the others around them were hooting and hollering, celebrating their victory.
Sanchez just wanted to find a bar somewhere and get drunk, but he knew there probably weren’t any bars left open on the entire planet, and Confederation warships were “dry,” not allowing alcohol on-board.
“Navy prudes,” he muttered, disgusted.
Taking a last drag on the cigarette, he flicked it away. Following it with his eyes, he noticed something moving in the distance, coming closer.
No, not something, you idiot, he chided himself. Someone.
“Pikula!” Standing up, he called out to his gunner, who was sitting on the turret. “Pikula!” he shouted, louder.
The woman turned around. “What is it, TC?” Her smile faltered as she caught the movement. “Holy shit! It’s a civilian!”
“It’s not just a civvie, it’s a kid!” Sanchez was already running toward the grimy, blood-spattered girl, who was gasping for breath as she staggered more than ran toward him. “Get the medikit and some water!”
As he reached the girl, she collapsed in his arms, her chest heaving.
“Take it easy, kid. I’ve got you.” He sat her down on the ground and knelt in front of her. “You’re okay now. Nobody’s gonna hurt you here.”
She shook her head. “Need…to talk…to General Sparks.”
He leaned back, shocked that she knew of Sparks. “Well, sure. We’ll get you up to see the general when we’ve got you taken care of. You’ve been roughed up a…”
“No, now!” She leaned forward and grabbed his combat webbing with both hands and shook him, a look of desperation in her eyes. “I have to talk to him…right now!”
Sanchez rubbed his chin, thinking for a moment as Pikula dropped to her knees beside him, offering the girl a canteen.
Taking her hands off Sanchez, the girl grabbed it and took a single, greedy swig, before handing it back.
“Now,” she begged him. “Please, there’s no time! My friends are dying, or already dead. They need help.”
“Right.” Sanchez clicked the control for his unit’s general channel. “Captain Kamov, this is Sanchez. I’ve got a civilian here who needs to talk to General Sparks.” Looking into the girl’s pleading gaze, he added, “It’s an emergency, sir.”
“Roger that.” Kamov’s response was instant. Sanchez had had his disagreements with the man, but one thing the captain wasn’t was indecisive. “Stand by.”
Barely a few heartbeats had passed when a voice came over Sanchez’s headset. “This is Sparks. Go.”
Sanchez took off his helmet and gently set it on the girl’s head. “Just talk, honey. The general will hear you.”
* * *
Hands on hips, Sparks stood at the ragged edge of the killing field where tens of thousands of dead Kreelans lay, his cavalry hat shading his eyes from the sun. While on the whole it had been a massacre, the aliens had managed to kill another three thousand of his Marines. He shuddered to think what they could have done if they had chosen to fight with more modern weapons. In some battles, they did, and others they didn’t.
Like everything else about the Kreelans, Sparks didn’t understand it, and that bothered him more than anything else. How can we ever defeat an enemy we don’t understand at all? The thought further depressed him as he looked at the carnage.
“Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” The operations officer, his face bandaged where a piece of shrapnel had sliced his cheek, murmured the words spoken by the Duke of Wellington centuries before.
“At least at Waterloo the end was in sight.” Sparks gestured at the mass of bodies that lay sprawled in death. “This here was just a sideshow.”
“Maybe so, sir, but we still won. That counts for something.”
“I wonder,” Sparks murmured. Turning to the other man, he said, “I assume you didn’t just come over here to cheer me up, especially since you didn’t bring a damn beer with you.”
The operations officer smiled. “No, sir. I just wanted to pass on that Commodore Sato’s coming down to pay his respects.”
“And look for his wife, I imagine.” Sparks had worked with Sato during the planning for this mission, but held him in high regard for another reason. Sato had saved Sparks’s life, and that of his men and women, during their escape from the Keran disaster. And Sato’s wife, Steph, had been right with Sparks and his regiment there, and had in her own way been very much a hero. Sparks planned to render every assistance to Sato to try and find his wife’s body. He owed both of them that much. “Damn, that was an awful thing.”
“Yes, sir. I won’t argue with that.” He looked out at the battlefield, following his general’s gaze. “God, what a mess that’ll be to clean up.”
Sparks was about to reply when a voice sounded in his comm headset that was draped around his neck.
“Sir, I think you need to take this,” his communications officer told him.
“What have you got?”
“Sir, it’s an emergency call for you. I’m cutting you over to Sergeant Sanchez, a track commander in the 47th Armored Regiment.”
There was a pause, then a beep, indicating the channel was open.
“This is Sparks. Go.”
He was surprised to hear the voice of a young girl.
* * *
“General, sir, my name is Allison Murtaugh…” She paused, not sure how to say the right words to this stranger. The voice on the other end, the man, seemed as hard as steel.
“Go on, honey,” the voice said, much softer. Even though his accent was different, one she had never heard before, his voice reminded her of her father’s.
“Sir, my friends need help. Sergeant Mills and Valentina are terribly hurt, and Steph is, too. They’re dying. Mills told me to run here and get you, so I did. Please help them!”
There was a brief pause before the general spoke again, the steel back in his voice. “You can count on it, Allison. Now please put Sergeant Sanchez back on.”
Relieved to be rid of the weight of the helmet, Allison handed it back to Sanchez, who quickly slipped it on.
“General, sir?”
“Sanchez, crank up your track right now. Take Allison and have her show you where Mills and the others are. And if there are any corpsmen nearby, take them, too. If not, have your medikit handy. I’ll be with you as soon as I can. Got all that, son?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Then ride hard and fast, trooper! Sparks out.”
Sanchez pulled Allison to her feet and headed toward the tank. Pikula was just disappearing down the hatch to her position in the turret.
“Tibbets!” he called to the driver over the tank’s comm link, “crank her up!”
As he helped Allison climb up the front of the tank, vibrating now from the power of the vehicle’s big turbine engines, he told her, “Little lady, you’re about to have the wildest ride of your l
ife.”
* * *
Sato sat in the passenger compartment of the shuttle from the Orion, desperately trying to shut off his brain, to banish the dark thoughts that clouded his mind.
With Orion severely damaged, he would be shifting his flag to Conqueror. Before he did, however, he had one last duty to perform as Orion’s acting captain, burial services for his dead crew members. It was a task he dreaded, but like his other duties, he would perform it to the very best of his abilities. Semyonova and the others deserved no less.
In the meantime, a duty much closer to his heart called. He had to look for Steph’s body. He had to bring her home. It would be a grisly task, looking over the thousands of bodies around the town of Breakwater, but he would do it. No matter how long it took or what he might find, he would do it.
He couldn’t tell himself that she never would have come here had he not pushed her away, because that wouldn’t be true. Steph was an adventurer, as he was in his own way, and she probably would have come, anyway.
“Commodore?”
He turned to see the copilot, standing in the doorway to the cramped flight deck.
The copilot handed him a headset. “Sir, General Sparks is calling for you.”
“Thank you.” He took the headset and slipped it on. “Sato here, general.”
“Ichiro, get your ass down here. Steph and some other members of her team may have survived. I’ve got some troops on the way to them now. Head toward the western edge of Breakwater, and I’ll send you exact coordinates as soon as I have them. You’ll have to evac them. We don’t have any boats left down here that can fly. You got that?”
Sato sat, staring wide-eyed at the forward bulkhead, not believing his ears.
“Sato?”
“Yes…yes, sir! We’re on our way.”
“Let’s hustle, son. Sparks, out.”
“Pilot!” Sato ordered. “Take us down, now! Emergency descent!”
* * *
Allison didn’t know if she should be terrified or elated. She was standing in the commander’s position in the big tank as it raced along, going so fast it sometimes went completely airborne when they came over a rise in the ground. The commander, Sanchez, stood behind her on the engine deck, clinging to handholds on the turret for dear life.
“A little to the left!” Sanchez had fitted her with an extra helmet so she could talk over the tank’s intercom and guide the driver. She pointed to a spot about a hundred meters away now, where a few figures were visible on the ground.
“It’s them!” Sanchez told the driver. “Pull up close and stop.”
The tank slowed at the last possible moment, then slewed to the side and came to a stop. The driver was careful to make sure that the dust and dirt the vehicle kicked up didn’t hit the blood-soaked bodies.
“This is Sanchez. We found ‘em.” He didn’t wait for his company commander to respond before he linked the coordinates to the division’s net. Sparks would be able to find them easily now.
Sanchez helped Allison out of the turret, then hopped down to the ground. Pikula and Tibbets, both with medikits, were right behind him.
“Holy Jesus,” Sanchez whispered, crossing himself. The blond-haired woman, who he knew by sight was Commodore Sato’s wife, lay on her back, eyes closed. The only major injury he could see was her leg, but that was enough. It was a mass of dried and matted blood.
The other two were far worse. A huge Marine - Mills, he must be, from what the girl had said - lay on his back. There was a horrible wound in his right shoulder, as if he’d had a run-in with a bandsaw and lost. His face was covered in blood.
In his left arm he cradled a woman who had been stabbed clean through with a sword, with another set of stab wounds in one shoulder.
There was blood everywhere.
“Sanchez…” The tone of Pikula’s voice echoed his own thoughts. They were all dead.
Allison stood there beside Sanchez, shivering as tears brimmed in her eyes. “I was too late.”
Sanchez knelt down next to Steph first and reached out with a pair of fingers to her throat to feel for a pulse. “She’s alive. Barely.” He gestured to Tibbets. “Get a fresh bandage on the wound and shoot her up with some antibiotics and stims.”
Then he turned to Mills and the other woman. “What’s her name?”
“Valentina.” Allison slowly knelt beside her two entwined friends. She had been too slow. Too slow. Steph was still alive, but they were dead. “No.”
Again reaching his fingers out, he touched Valentina’s throat.
He shook his head and was just pulling his fingers away when he stopped. “What the hell?” He tried again, waiting longer. “Son of a bitch! It’s slow as hell, but she’s got a pulse! Pikula, get a patch on the wound in her back, then we’re gonna roll her off this guy.”
Then he checked Mills for a pulse. “I don’t believe it. He’s still alive, too.”
Ripping open the medikits, Sanchez and his crew did what they could to patch up Mills and the two women.
As they worked, Allison heard another sonic boom and looked up. A small ship glinted in the sky, and as she watched, it headed right for them.
Rescue had come.
Smiling, hope rekindled that her friends might yet live, she turned back to watch as the tankers gently rolled Valentina off Mills and put a dressing over the wound in her stomach.
That’s when she noticed that the Kreelan who had nearly killed them all, the one with the dead eyes, was nowhere to be seen. Steph’s knife was still stuck in the ground where she had impaled the warrior’s foot, just as it had been, but there was no sign of the alien’s body.
She was gone.
* * *
The first thing Steph noticed was the vibration. It was rhythmic and steady, but seemed…hurried.
After a moment, she realized that she was being carried.
The second thing she noticed was her left hand. Someone was holding it, and she could tell just by touch whose hand it was.
Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked up to see a familiar face looking down at her. It was the face of the man she loved. Beyond him she could make out the interior of a small ship, and the shapes of people she didn’t know, carrying her along.
“Ichiro,” she breathed as she was gently lowered onto a foldout bunk in the ship. “I knew…you’d come.”
“The whole Empire couldn’t have kept me away.” His hand tightened on hers. “And I’ll never leave you again.”
Just before she drifted off into a painless, dreamless sleep, she felt the warmth of his lips on hers.
EPILOGUE
On the open plain of Ural-Murir, an island continent in the southern hemisphere of the Homeworld, stood the temple of the Nyur-A’il.
As with all the temples of the seven orders from the ancient times, it had long since fallen into ruin. The stone of which the buildings were made was eroded and crumbling, the runes and glyphs of the Old Tongue long since erased by wind and rain.
The dilapidated state of the temple was an illusion, however. For the true nature of this place, as with the other ancient temples, lay beyond mere stone. It was in the spirit of the Ancient Ones, the high priests and priestesses now dead, whose spirits dwelled here.
The Empress stood on the worn dais of the temple’s Kalai-Il, Her white robes and hair reflecting the gentle magenta hue of the sky as the sun began to set. Around the edges of the massive central stone base, torches flickered in anticipation of night’s fall.
Before Her lay Ku’ar-Marekh’s body on a carefully constructed pyre of wood. Each piece had been brought by one of the warrior priestesses and clawless mistresses who now stood upon the weathered stone rings of the Kalai-Il. They had come from all over the Empire, brought here by the will of the Empress.
As had Ku’ar-Marekh’s body. She was the first high priestess to fall in battle since the last great war with a soulless enemy among the stars. And, as She had done since the time of Keel-Tath, the body of a high pri
estess would always be given the last rites, and would never be left behind for an enemy.
The difference between this ceremony and those in ages past was that Ku’ar-Marekh was the last of her kind. This had never before happened in the long history of the Empire. There would be no more disciples to follow in her footsteps, to keep alive the Way of the Nyur-A’il.
For this, the Empress mourned, and the skin below her eyes was black with the tears of Her soul.
Around the pyre stood five high priestesses of the surviving orders. The sixth, she who would have stood at the right hand of the Empress representing the Desh-Ka, was absent. Tesh-Dar, the greatest living warrior of the Empire, remained cloistered in her temple, and there would remain until the Empress again summoned her. When it was time.
To the left of the Empress stood Pan’ne-Sharakh, the oldest and wisest of the clawless ones. All of the high priestesses had weapons crafted by the ancient armorer, who could shape the living steel of their blades like no other, and make each a unique work of art worthy of display in the throne room on the Empress Moon.
Her hands clasped in the sleeves of her black robes, Pan’ne-Sharakh stood, head bowed in silent thought. The Empress knew that she mourned for Ku’ar-Marekh, but that the ancient mistress’s heart mourned far more the silence in the Bloodsong of Tesh-Dar. The two had long been close, perhaps closer than the Empress had been to the great warrior before ascending to the throne, even though Tesh-Dar and the Empress were sisters by blood, born from the same womb.
Around the high priestesses, filling the dais, were the senior clawless mistresses of the castes from among Her Children. From porters of water to the builders, they represented the spirits of those who had been most loyal to the First Empress in Her darkest hour. All now stood in honor of the fallen high priestess of the Nyur-A’il.
Beyond the massive platform of the Kalai-Il, on the concentric raised rings of ancient stone stood the hundreds of warrior priestesses and acolytes of the five orders. There were none from the Desh-Ka, as Tesh-Dar had no disciples.
An even greater tragedy, the Empress thought darkly, before turning Her gaze upon the warriors watching from above, remembering from ages past how there once had been many thousands.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 110