In Her Name: The Last War (106 page)

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.”

Sato had misgivings about the crew accepting him, but as it turned out, he need not have worried. Despite the information control exerted by Korolev’s government, many Russians — and virtually every Rigan — knew of him as the only survivor from first contact with the Kreelans. His handling of
Yura
during the battle that led to her destruction had also earned the Saint Petersburg Navy’s respect. The worst he had to contend with was learning as much Russian as quickly as he could.

He still felt the ghosts of his dead shipmates with him, especially Bogdanova, but he had never spiraled into depression as he had feared he would. “You can rest when you’re dead, Sato,” Hanson had told him once. “Until then, I’ve got too much work for you to do.”

Sato smiled at the memory. He liked Hanson.

Pushing those thoughts aside, he began to quicken his pace down the gangway. He had brought his ship here for a weapons upgrade, but that would be mostly in the hands of the shipyards, and his XO had shooed him off the ship. He had free time now, at least for a while.

At the threshold there was a gaggle of civilians, mostly reporters, and military personnel waiting to catch a glimpse of him. But there was only one he cared about. Standing there in the red dress she had been wearing when he had first met her was Steph, his wife. While they had been in touch as often as possible, President McKenna had been keeping her press secretary — Steph — as busy as Hanson had been keeping him, and Steph hadn’t been able to come see him for those long months. 

But that was all in the past now. Running to him, her face streaked with tears of joy, she leaped into his arms. As he twirled her around, his own heart rejoicing in the feel of her warm body against him, her scent, in the sound of her tearful laughter, their lips met in a passionate kiss. 

Captain Ichiro Sato was finally home.

* * *

Dmitri and Ludmilla Sikorsky were living a life that they could not even have dreamed of on Saint Petersburg. For the service that Dmitri, in particular, had rendered to the Confederation, the Confederation Intelligence Service had offered them a chance at a new life. They owned a small horse farm in what had once been the state of Virginia, with Ludmilla working from their new home as a consultant for relations with the Pan-Slavic Alliance, while Dmitri tended the farm. It had been a bittersweet decision for the Sikorskys: on the one hand, both of them were patriots, and wanted to do what they could to help Saint Petersburg repel the alien invaders. On the other hand was a very personal consideration for both of them: Valentina.

After Faraday had landed
Mauritania
on Riga, they had disconnected her from the ship’s computer interface, but she had never regained consciousness. Her eyes and mouth had closed, as if she were asleep, but that was all. The Rigans had taken her to a local hospital, but before any doctors could evaluate her, President Roze himself had called and, obviously with great unwillingness, told them she was to be given what she needed for her body to stay alive, but otherwise was not to be examined or treated.

Dmitri had been furious, but there was nothing any of them could do. A day later, a man named Robert Torvald came for her, giving orders to the hospital staff that they were to prepare for transport back to Earth aboard a special courier ship. 

“What is to become of her?” Dmitri, standing over her like a sentinel, asked him pointedly.

“That, Mr. Sikorsky,” Torvald said with cold detachment, “is none of your business. She is a Confederation Intelligence Service asset, and that’s all you need to know.”

Unlike Valentina, Torvald had never been a special operative, only a field handler, and had no special self-defense training. He was totally unprepared for Dmitri’s work-hardened fist slamming into his mouth, followed by a powerful uppercut that lifted Torvald from the ground and slammed him against the wall of Valentina’s hospital room.