In Her Name: The Last War (16 page)

“Ichiro...” a voice rasped from his other side.

He turned to find Yao, clutching the shimmering blade of the alien’s other sword, the one that looked like a
katana
, that had speared through him, just below the heart.

“
Yao!
” Ichiro cried as he scrambled over to his friend and mentor. “No! No, you can’t die...you can’t-”

“Remember what I told you,” Yao whispered, gripping Ichiro’s hand tightly. “There is no dishonor...in living.” With a final squeeze of his powerful but gentle hand, Yao Ming was gone.

The big warrior stood a pace or two away, her hands at her sides, intently watching Ichiro.

“Why?” he screamed at her. “
Why?
Goddamn you!
Goddamn you to hell!
” Without thinking, he reached back and picked up his
katana
, a weapon he’d never learned how to use, a weapon that had gone unblooded while his friends and shipmates had died around him. The blade of his grandfather’s sword held before him, he charged the alien in his last great act of defiance.

* * *

Tesh-Dar did not have to understand his words, for she was beginning to sense the emotions of the aliens, and to understand them. Her comprehension was far from perfect, but what this young creature was feeling now, she understood all too well. This one gift she could give him.

As the alien charged, she made no move to step aside. Instead, as he came within range she reached out, faster than the eye could see, and guided the tip of the human’s blade toward a weak spot in her armor, just under the breastplate and to one side. The sword pierced the underlying leatherite armor and stabbed through her abdomen. Carried by the young alien’s momentum, the tip emerged out her back. 

She hissed at the pain, but it was not a new sensation for her: she had endured far worse many times in her long life.

* * *

For a moment, Ichiro simply stood there, frozen in time as he held the handle of the
katana
. His eyes were wide in shock, fixed on where the blade had entered the alien warrior’s body. His momentum had run the sword all the way through her, the warrior’s blood running in a dark crimson stream from the wound. He looked up to meet her eyes, sure that she must be about to kill him. But she met his gaze with what he knew must be understanding, and perhaps even a trace of empathy. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, for he couldn’t read her facial expressions. But he knew that’s what she felt. He had absolutely no doubt.

She brushed his hands away from the sword’s handle, and then in a single smooth motion pulled it free of her body. It was slick with her blood, and he could see blood running down the armor on her legs from the wound. But if she felt any pain, she certainly wasn’t showing it. With a practiced twist of her wrist, she flicked off most of the blood from the blade onto the sand. One of the other warriors stepped forward with the scabbard, and the big warrior slid the sword’s blade home. Then she held it out to Ichiro.

He reached out and took it with shaking hands, still unable to believe that she was going to let him live. Blinking away the tears that came to his eyes, tears of shame that he had lived while the others had died, tears of joy that he might be able to go on living, he looked up at her once more.

But there was nothing for him to see but the contemplative faces of the thousands of aliens still crowding the arena. The huge warrior had simply vanished.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kneeling in the sand, flanked by a pair of alien warriors, Ichiro watched silently as the funeral pyres consumed the remains of his friends and shipmates. After the huge warrior had mysteriously disappeared, a procession of warriors had poured through the portals into the arena bearing kindling wood. Where it had come from, Ichiro couldn’t guess, even had he been of a mind to try. They built a pyre for each of the victims of the bloody fight, alien and human alike, using practiced ritual motions that made it appear as if he were watching a well-rehearsed play. Part of his dead heart warmed as he saw a group of healers enter, and carefully, reverently, even, prepare his dead shipmates for their final voyage. Wrapping each of them in a pure white shroud that didn’t allow any of the blood to show through, they carried the bodies to their individual pyres and placed them carefully on top, all at once. 

In what Ichiro thought was an odd thing for the aliens to do, they removed the dog tags from his dead shipmates. After washing the tags in a clay bowl, carefully cleaning off any blood and then drying them, one of the warriors stepped up to him and bowed, then handed the plastic tags to him. All twenty-two sets. He noticed absently that the same ritual was being performed using the collars from the dead warriors.

His gut churning in a mix of anger, shame, fear, and uncertainty, Ichiro forced himself to read every one of the tags, burning the names into his memory. The alien garment he wore had no pockets, so he simply slid them inside his shirt with the cyan disk, trusting that the elastic material would hold it all in place.

When all the bodies were prepared, one of the warriors barked an order, and the assembled thousands stood up as one. After a moment, Ichiro did, too: he came to attention and saluted. Flames suddenly sparked to life under all of the pyres, and the wood, if that’s really what it was, began to burn bright and hot. Watching the smoke from the flames rise high into the sky above, it was hard for him to believe he was on a starship. 

In only a few minutes of fierce burning, the fires generating so much heat that Ichiro felt like he was in an oven himself, the pyres collapsed into flickering coals. The bodies that had been upon them were nothing more than ash and smoke. Ichiro, his right arm trembling from holding it up the entire time, dropped his salute.

As the aliens in the seats began to file out, his two guards, one of whom was the same warrior who had handed him his sword before the fight, gestured for him to head toward the portal through which he’d entered a lifetime ago. It was time to leave.

With one last look at the charred remains of the
Aurora’s
captain and crew, he turned and followed them out of the arena.

* * *

The two warriors led him down a different set of passageways than before, although they were as big. The main difference now was that they were filled with aliens bustling to and fro. Their reactions to seeing him were universal: a slight bow of the head, as if he were someone of at least modest importance. 

Despite the leaden weight of the survivor’s guilt that had settled onto his shoulders and the crushing physical and emotional exhaustion he felt, Ichiro automatically absorbed everything he saw, everything he smelled, everything he heard and could touch. He wanted to catalog every sensation so that he could recall it when he returned home, if that truly came to pass, and help humanity mount a defense against these monsters. Any and every detail might be vital.

But most importantly, focusing on what was around him took his mind away from his battered soul. He was only nineteen, but he had aged decades in the few hours since they’d first seen the enemy ships. Only a few hours. It had been an eternity.

His escorts made no detours this time, showed him no rooms pulsing with mysterious technology. They took him straight back to the semi-organic airlock through which he and the others had originally been brought into the ship. 

The huge warrior was waiting for him. He glanced at her side, expecting to still see the wound made by his sword and traces of the blood she had lost, but there was nothing: the leather-like armor was like new, and so was the gleaming metal armor. It was as if his stabbing her had never happened.

Feeling no fear, for that had been burned out of him, he approached the towering warrior who stared at him with her silver-flecked eyes.

* * *

Tesh-Dar watched as the youngling was brought before her. He had proven to be a hardy creature, for which she was thankful: the task of the Messenger was a difficult one, and while she knew little yet of his species, she suspected his worst trials were yet to come. 

In her right hand she held out a sphere that was roughly the same size as the young animal’s head. It was the physical image of one of the worlds of his race, captured and held in an energy capsule. She held it forth for him to see, and it was evident he immediately understood what it represented. The image was of a planet that she had chosen for the first large-scale battle between their civilizations. After her warriors and the builders had studied the records of the primitive alien computing machines, they identified all the worlds the animals had colonized. After a great deal of consideration, they had presented Tesh-Dar with several choices, and she had picked this one. It was not so important that its loss would shatter their will, nor was it so small that it would pose no challenge. It was heavily industrialized, yet not located too near their primary core systems. It had a large population, but not so large that its loss would strike a crippling blow to their ability to repopulate. 

“What do they call themselves in their own tongue?” Tesh-Dar had earlier asked those who now worked to understand the language of the aliens.

“They have many tongues, my priestess,” one of the builders, a senior mistress, had replied, “although one is dominant. In that tongue, the animals refer to themselves as
human
.”

“And this world,” Tesh-Dar asked, staring at the image of the planet that she had chosen, “what is its name?”

“They call it
Keran
, priestess.”

Now, standing before this young human, Tesh-Dar saw that he recognized the planet, for his lips made the sound of the word the builder had spoken to her.

* * *

“Keran?” Ichiro said out loud as he looked at the incredibly lifelike globe the warrior held in her huge hand. It was as if the planet had been shrunken down to the size of a bowling ball. He recognized it, because that was Yao’s home planet, and the older man had spent many hours regaling Ichiro and Anna with exceedingly unlikely tales of his youth, usually to explain the origins of one of his poetic expletives. Ichiro felt his eyes burn again, but willed the tears away. “Is that where I’m to be sent?” He didn’t expect the alien to understand him, but he had to ask the question.

She seemed to understand, or perhaps just guessed. She reached forward and put the palm of her free hand on his chest, right where the cyan disk was, then gestured out the circular hatch toward where the
Aurora
waited for him. Then an image of the Earth, as lifelike as the globe of Keran she held in one hand, appeared over one of her shoulders, and she pointed to that.

Then she held up the globe and drew her palm across the face of it, as if her hand was the curtain of a play, and he watched in horror as the bright blue and comforting browns of the seas and land were suddenly stricken with what could only be the smoke and ruin of burning cities, with ships overhead, blasting at the surface and at one another. 

She was telling him what planet they were going to invade first. “No,” he murmured, shaking his head. “No. You can’t...”

Taking her hand away, the replica of Keran returned to the way it had been before, the land, seas, and sky at peace.

With trembling fingers, he reached out to put his hand on the sphere, but he couldn’t feel anything. It wasn’t solid; it was simply as if his hand was being repelled. He’d never felt anything like it. But the flames of war didn’t ignite under his touch as it had hers.

“When?” he asked her. “How long do we have?”

She only looked at him, her eyes narrowed. After a moment of consideration, she moved her hand over the globe in a different fashion, her hand flat as if she were pressing down on something. Starting at the north pole of the globe, her hand held just beside it, she slowly moved her hand toward the equator, then the south pole. As her hand moved, the planet’s image took on the ravages of war.

Suddenly, he understood.
The globe is a countdown timer
. The alien couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him how long they had in any measure of time he would understand. But he knew now that when the globe she held had fully transformed into a world at war, the aliens would come. The invasion would begin.

* * *

Tesh-Dar could tell from his emotional reaction that the alien, the
human
, understood the meaning of the sphere. Their people would be given some time to prepare, although if the legends of past encounters in the Books of Time were to be believed, they likely would not use it wisely. The Messenger was never believed at first. In the meantime, the preparations now beginning in the Empire for waging war against this new race would be at their peak. The human could not know it, but the sphere was attuned to the will of the Empress, and was not a mere mechanical timer in a sophisticated case. 

She handed it to him, and he took it with obvious care, no doubt concerned that it might break. She smiled inwardly, knowing that little could disturb the device short of a release of energy on a scale that would sear half a planet.

For the last time, she looked in the young human’s eyes. “Far must you travel, young one,” she said to him, “and much have you to do. Go now...” she paused, nodding to him, “...in Her name.”

* * *

Ichiro took the globe of Keran from the warrior’s hand as if he were a timid god holding the planet itself. He looked at the globe, amazed at the clouds that slowly swirled across the surface, their shadows passing across the land and seas. 

Looking up at her once more, she spoke to him in her language for a moment, then paused. Nodding to him, she then said “...
uhr Kreela’an.
”

He had no idea what any of it meant, but he knew he had heard that particular phrase several times before in the arena. Was it important? He had no way of knowing.

The two warriors who had come this far with him gently took his arms and launched themselves into the invisible energy bridge between the two ships. Looking at the
Aurora
, Ichiro saw with some amazement that the holes the enemy boarders had made were gone. The one in the side of the hull that was their destination was still there, but the rest of the ship somehow looked newer. He thought it was only an illusion, but then it struck him: just like some of his comrades whose physical ailments had been cured by the healing goo, the aliens had done something to the
Aurora
. The pitting left by small particle impacts that had dulled the gloss of her hull over time was gone. It was as if she had just been launched from the yards.