In Her Name: The Last War (127 page)

The fleet’s here
, he thought,
or it’s coming. Has to be
.

He knelt down beside one of them, a blond, and did a double-take as he got a better look at her face in growing light. 

“I don’t believe it,” he whispered.

Someone else pointed at the woman. “Isn’t that Stephanie Guillaume?” 

A low murmur ran through the circle of people, expanding through the camp as more people came to see what was happening.

“What’s she doing here?”

Steph’s eyes fluttered open at the sound. 

“Miss Guillaume?” Jackson asked. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she groaned, rubbing her temples. “My head’s killing me.”

Jackson grinned, but there wasn’t any humor in it. “It’ll pass in half an hour or so.” He reached toward the woman next to her, intending to give her a gentle shake to wake her up.

Steph grabbed his hand, stopping him. “Bad idea.” Mills hadn’t been the only one to read Valentina’s psych profile. With Steph’s clout and habit of always getting what she wanted, she’d actually seen more than Mills had. “Let her wake up on her own. Otherwise you’re likely to wind up dead.” 

Propping herself up on her elbows, she wrinkled her nose and muttered, “My God, what’s that horrible smell?”

“Us.” Jackson gesturing at the filthy clothes, rags really, that he and the other prisoners were wearing. While there was now enough to eat and drink, and latrines had been dug, there weren’t any showers or other means to wash their clothes or their bodies.

Beside her, Valentina shot to her feet with a startled cry, instantly assuming a combat stance. Everyone around her stumbled backward in surprise.

“Easy,” Steph told her quietly as Valentina looked around, wild-eyed. “Easy. We’re in a prison camp, it looks like.”

“You’re okay,” Jackson added, impressed and not just a little frightened at the dark-haired woman, her body tight as a steel spring. “You’re safe. For the moment.”

After taking a deep, shuddering breath, Valentina relaxed. Slightly. “We’re in the camp near Breakwater, aren’t we?” Her eyes flicking rapidly across the faces around her, then settling on a group of warriors that marched by, carrying yet another load of materials to build more shelters. “My God,” she whispered.

“That’s doing the Almighty a bit of an injustice.” Jackson favored her with a wry smile as he followed her eyes. 

“Work of the Devil’s more like it,” someone in the crowd spat.

Steph took a closer look at Jackson. She judged him to be in his mid-fifties, with close-cropped hair and a body that, despite the deprivations he’d suffered, was lean and tough. It matched the look in his eyes. “Former military?”

He nodded. “Twenty-six years in the Terran Army. I saw enough during the first war with Saint Petersburg and some other actions, and Alger’s World looked like the perfect place to start a quiet new life. The homesteading provisions let me settle down on a nice chunk of land.” He looked wistful. “It was a nice place until the Kreelans burned it to the ground.”

“You weren’t in the Territorial Army here, were you?”

“Yes, I was. I was the first sergeant for one of the companies up north, near Gateway.” He shook his head. “We killed a lot of warriors, but there were just too many. We got as many people out of the city as we could before it was surrounded and cut off. Most got away, but not all.”

He paused a moment, remembering the screams and pleas for help of those who’d been trapped, an eerie, distant keening of the doomed. “The corridor we were holding was the last passage out of the city. But we finally had to get out of there. There were a few more lucky souls who somehow managed to break through the enemy cordon and followed us out, but that was it.” He gestured at the people around them in the camp. “I thought everyone we’d left behind had been slaughtered, but they weren’t. They’re bringing them here.”

“What happened to you after that?”

“They began to hunt us down. After we finally broke contact and retreated from Gateway, I had five-hundred people with me who wanted to fight. I divided them up into five smaller groups and sent them out to cause trouble for the enemy in the nearby towns.” He shrugged. “I never heard from any of them again.

“Our group did well for a while. We killed warriors in droves, but they just kept coming at us, like they enjoyed the idea of getting killed.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Once a group of them made contact with us, they’d stay after us until we wiped them out. They never broke or ran like humans normally would. You know, live again to fight another day? Not them.”

“So how did they get you?”

He laughed. It was a bitter sound. “I guess they finally decided they’d had enough. There were only forty-seven of us left, out of the hundred and sixty-five that I started with after I sent the other groups off. They surrounded us and just came charging in.

“But they didn’t come to kill us. They came to capture us, just like you. They hit us with those stun batons of theirs and that was that. Then they stripped us of our weapons and had us join that little procession down the main road. Most of those folks are from Gateway and the other towns north of here, although there are a lot of people here from Caitlin, the other big town to the south. 

“We marched for three days, day and night,” he went on. “The Kreelans left you alone if you kept up. If you couldn’t and fell out of line, they just killed you. No whips or yelling. There was just one type of motivation. Some of the folks here had to march longer than that.”

About a third of the people in the circle around them nodded, their faces haunted by the horrors they’d seen on the march.

“And that’s when the real fun began.” Jackson looked at a party of warriors that was hauling in fresh dirt to cover up the sodden, waste-strewn areas of the camp. “They shoved us all in here, into what was nothing more than a huge livestock pen with a crude wooden fence. There were at least eight, maybe ten thousand people here when we arrived, literally with room only to stand. There weren’t any latrines, nothing. It was reeking, filthy mass of desperate people. The Kreelans just shoved us in and started closing the gates, and anyone who was in the way, they started cutting them down. That started a stampede, and I don’t have any idea how many were trampled to death.” He took a deep breath. It was the worst experience, even in combat, he’d ever endured. “And a lot of folks couldn’t take it anymore, and decided it would be better to hop the fence and have the warriors put them out of their misery.”

Steph turned to look at the fence that surrounded the camp, beyond which stood a cordon of warriors, their attention riveted to the humans in the camp. 

“That’s when I gave up hope,” Jackson went on quietly. “I could feel it dying inside me. I lost my wife and two sons. My friends. Everything that I’d tried to build here. And I knew I was going to die in this stinking cesspool.” He looked at Steph. “It took me a day to work my way to the edge of the crowd. I was going to have the warriors work their sword magic on me, too. 

“And then, last night, everything changed.” He gestured around him. “There were shuttles coming in all night. Some of them brought more humans, but most of them carried warriors. They and some of the others who were already here started cleaning up this pit.” He managed a smile. “I guess it must’ve been for your arrival.”

“It doesn’t matter,” a woman said as she ceaselessly twirled a lock of her dirty hair through her fingers. “We’re all dead, anyway.”

Everyone else was silent. They looked down at their feet, each a study in total defeat. 

Steph turned to her. “That’s not true. The fleet’s coming.” 

Only a few people looked up at her words. She glanced at Valentina, who shrugged. 

“Didn’t you hear me?” Steph said, louder now. “The fleet’s coming!”

More looked up at her now, out of curiosity, not out of hope. Steph glanced at Valentina again and saw her frown. “What?” 

Valentina didn’t speak until another party of alien warriors had passed, then said, “They may not be able to find us, remember?”

“Goddammit!” Steph got unsteadily to her feet. She stumbled, still suffering from the after-effects of the stun, and Jackson caught her arm to steady her. 

“People, listen to me!” Anger was burning inside her. The children began to wake up from her shouting. “The most powerful fleet the Confederation has ever assembled is coming here!” She wasn’t worried about the Kreelans hearing her. In all the encounters with them so far, there had been no indication that any of them understood any human language, or cared. “It’s on its way right now, and...” She glanced at her chronometer. “...it’s going to arrive in less than six hours. They’re going to wipe the Kreelan fleet from orbit, and then three assault divisions are going to land and do the same to the warriors here on the planet.”

“Why didn’t they come already?” A man in the crowd shouted angrily as he stepped forward to confront Steph. Valentina moved slightly closer in case he decide to get violent. “Look at us!” he shouted. “Just look at us! Look at what they made us go through, how many of us have died at the hands of those beasts!” Tears were running down the man’s face now. “Why should we believe the bloody fleet’s coming now?”

“Because,” Steph said evenly, stepping right up to the man and placing her hands on his shoulders, “my husband is in that fleet.” She looked around at the other faces near her. “Some of you may have heard of him. His name is Ichiro Sato.” 

Recognition dawned on almost every face. Sato’s name was one of the most well-known in the Confederation. While she was estranged from him, she hadn’t lost track of what he had been doing. She still loved him. And believed in him. “He’s commanding the most powerful ships we’ve ever built, battleships that are more than a match for anything the Kreelans have. And he’s not going to leave until every one of these blue-skinned bitches is dead.”

“But why didn’t the Confederation come earlier?” the man asked. “Why did they wait so long, until now?”

“Because they couldn’t,” Valentina answered. “We’ve been fighting and losing battles on almost two dozen colonies. President McKenna is taking a terrible gamble on this attack by pulling ships away from every one of those systems to put together an assault fleet big enough to beat the Kreelan forces here. She’s even stripped Home Fleet over Earth down to the bone.” She stared into the frightened, desperate faces around her. “If the Kreelans attacked Earth in any real force, we could lose it. That’s the risk she’s taking.”

“Too bad for them,” someone sneered. “They’ve had it easy.”

“Too bad for humanity, you mean,” Valentina answered icily. “If we lose Earth, we lose the war. And you should know better than anyone what that would mean. Every colony would be exterminated.”

“So what are we going to do?”

The question came not from the crowd of adults, which by now had become a thick ring of hundreds of people, trying to hear and see what was going on, but from the voice of a tired teenage girl. Allison.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Jackson said quietly. “We just have to...”

“Bullshit,” Steph snarled. “We didn’t go through hell getting down here just to give up.”

“Steph,” Valentina interjected, “we don’t have a lot of options. The radio’s gone. There’s no way to communicate with the fleet. Mills and the others...” 

She bit her lip, unable to say what she knew must be true. That Mills was gone.

“I don’t care,” Steph rounded on her, eyes blazing. “I am not just going to be herded into one of those rings and slaughtered like Ichiro’s first crew was!” More than anyone else, she understood the nightmare that her husband had endured as a young midshipman when humanity had made its first contact with the Kreelans. He still had nightmares, at least the last time they had shared a bed, months ago now. She bitterly shoved the memory aside, wishing more than anything else that he was here right now to hold her. 

But she knew he was coming. And that was enough. 

“If we’re going to die,” she went on, “then let’s die doing something worth dying for.” She looked at Allison and the other children who were riveted to the ongoing discussion. “At least we can try and get the children out of here.”

“
She
won’t let us go now.” Allison’s face, for once, displayed outright despair. While it had been a nightmare in many ways, it had been nothing compared to this awful-smelling place, surrounded by warriors, and knowing that death awaited all of them.

Steph moved over and wrapped her arms around the girl, who returned the gesture, holding on tightly. 

“It doesn’t matter what that warrior wants,” Steph said, her conviction growing with every word. “Somehow, we’re going to-”

At that moment a deep gong reverberated through the camp. It was a mournful sound, and it sent a shiver down Steph’s spine. 

A cry arose from near the entrance to the camp as the gates opened and a phalanx of warriors marched in. Without further ceremony, they grabbed the nearest twenty people before they could run, then herded them out, the gates closing behind them.

Running to the fence near the gates, Valentina, Steph, and Jackson watched the prisoners and their escorts move down the trail that led to the arena complex at the town square. From where the three stood, the top of the large stone construct at the center was just visible through the trees, but they couldn’t see the arenas themselves.

Then they heard it, the low murmur of a great number of voices, coming from the direction of the arenas. It had been masked by the moaning and bustle in the camp. But the humans had fallen silent after their fellows had been taken, not wanting to draw attention to themselves as they moved toward the rear of the camp’s enclosure. 

The Kreelan warriors in the camp continued to work, but all of them periodically glanced in the direction of the arenas.

Fifteen minutes later, as the sun rose full above the horizon, the gong sounded again. Valentina, with her sharp eyes, could see that it was affixed to the top of the stone structure, rung by a single warrior. 

Another warrior stood there, silhouetted against the brightening horizon, a cloak fluttering in the light morning breeze. Valentina knew without a doubt who it was. The warrior, the one who had nearly torn Valentina’s heart from her chest with nothing but a thought, was looking right at her.