In Her Name: The Last War (39 page)

With a smile on her lips, her heart enraptured by the glory it would bring to the Empress, she slammed her cruiser into the very center of the city of Foshan.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Of the sixty-seven Kreelan ships that attacked Keran, fourteen suffered serious damage and six were destroyed outright from the humans’ daring attack. Seven of those that had sustained damage would have to land, for they were in no shape to climb back into space with the other ships. And, of course, Tesh-Dar’s ship had come to its own glorious end as it struck the human city.

The senior surviving shipmistress of the attack wave knew of Tesh-Dar’s wishes regarding the humans, and observed over the shoulder of the warrior who served as the equivalent of a human tactical battle officer. While the human data-links had been effectively severed, there were still many human combat units that were broadcasting data, even though their companion units could no longer receive it. 

Nodding to herself, the shipmistress designated targets for the tactical officer. “The humans at these locations,” she said. “Destroy them.”

With a brief flurry of her fingertips over the controls, the guns of the Kreelan ships fired as they flew over the human positions, then began the long climb through the atmosphere to reach open space. While most of their shells and lasers found their targets, the devastation seemed inconsequential after the spectacular detonation of Elai-Tura’an’s cruiser.

* * *

One moment, Steph was sitting in the regimental command vehicle as Sparks barked orders to his battalion commanders over the vidcom after the strange Kreelan missiles took down the data-links. The next, she found herself lying on the floor of the vehicle, groggily looking up into Colonel Sparks’s concerned and bloodied face. The command compartment was dark except for the red combat lights that shone dimly through swirling dust and acrid smoke. She thought it made Sparks look like Satan.

“Are you hurt, Miss Guillaume?” he said as if from very far away. 

Steph’s ears were ringing, the sound so loud she could hardly hear a thing. “No,” she said, her tongue feeling like it was three sizes too big. She tasted blood. “At least...I don’t think so.” As she came to, she took stock of her body: aside from some scrapes and bruises, plus a big knot on the back of her head, she couldn’t feel anything wrong. “What happened?”

Sparks nodded and helped her to her feet. “The Kreelan ships hit us as they passed over, and one of the bastards crashed right into the middle of the city.” He had already been outside and seen the huge mushroom cloud rising from Foshan’s center. It hadn’t been a nuclear explosion, for there was no trace of ionizing radiation on the command vehicle’s sensors, but with a ship that must have massed on the order of a hundred thousand metric tons, with power cores that could propel it through space, it didn’t have to be a nuclear weapon. The energy release of something like that hitting the surface, even at a comparatively low velocity, combined with the engine cores breaching would still be measured in hundreds of kilotons of explosive power. “Foshan has pretty much been wiped out,” he told her grimly. He felt a terrible rending in his heart at the civilians who must have been killed, the people he and his regiment had been sent to try and save. 

But at the same time he was indescribably relieved that his men and women had been deployed on the outskirts of the city. Most of the blast had been absorbed by the buildings between the crash site and here, although the command vehicle had still been tossed around like a toy, and the building they had hidden in had largely collapsed on top of them. Ironically, that had provided some incidental protection from the salvoes the other Kreelan ships had fired at them when they passed overhead. Built on the chassis of the M-87 Wolfhound tank, the command vehicle had been hammered hard, but had managed to protect its occupants from serious harm. “We’ve also lost contact with everyone, including division and corps, which definitely isn’t good news.”

“So what do you plan to do?” she asked, taking a drink of water from her canteen.

Sparks looked at her with fire in his eyes, glinting in the red combat lighting. “As soon as I can reestablish contact with at least some of my units and figure out where the hell the enemy is, I plan to attack.”

“Sir,” the driver called back to him as he struggled out of the cramped forward compartment. “This bitch is history. Oh,” he said, embarrassed as he noticed Steph. “Sorry, ma’am,” he mumbled.

“I’ve heard the term before, corporal,” she reassured him with a tired smile. 

“Uh, yes, ma’am. Anyway, sir,” he went on, “the left track is busted and we’ve got half a dozen faults on the drive panel. Without the guys in the repair track working on this tub for a day, after they haul us out of this rubble, we’re stuck. So if we need to go anywhere, we’re gonna have to walk.”

“Had our horse shot out from under us, have we?” Sparks said, already gathering up his personal combat gear. “Hadley,” he called to the vehicle commander, “grab one of the extra rifles and give Miss Guillaume a crash-course in how to use it, then give her a combat harness and ammo. No grenades. You’ve got five minutes.”

“But, colonel,” Steph protested, “as a journalist, I can’t carry a weapon. I’m legally a noncombatant.”

Strapping the belt that held his cavalry saber to his waist, Sparks told her, “Not anymore, Miss Guillaume. Do you think for an instant that the Kreelans are going to give a damn about your legal status? They just nose-dived a starship into the center of the biggest city on the planet. That tells me a lot about their articles of war.” He drew the massive pistol from its holster under his left arm and checked that the magazine was full. “I don’t expect you to be a trooper, but you need to be able to help defend yourself.” Turning to his ops officer, he said, “Do we have contact with
anybody
yet?” 

“Yes, sir,” the woman told him. “Colonel Grishin just came up on the tac-com.” They had just had time to lay a tactical communications line between the 7th Cavalry and
1er REC
command posts before the Kreelans attacked. By a small miracle it hadn’t been affected by the weapons the Kreelans had fired or the cruiser’s explosion. “He says they have incoming enemy paratroops.” She paused, a glint of fear in her eye as she heard a terrified shriek in the background. “They’re coming in right on top of his positions.”

* * *

The scream had come from one of the crewmen of Grishin’s vehicle, who had been bodily wrenched from the rear hatch by what looked like an alien version of what was known as a “cat o’ nine tails,” a multi-tailed whip. One moment the man was telling Grishin there were alien paratroopers falling on top of them, the next he was gone. Grishin was sure that he had heard the hapless man’s skull and legs shatter against the metal hatch coaming, even with the protection of his helmet and leg armor. 

Beyond his broken body, which had landed in the dirt a few meters from the vehicle, stood a huge alien warrior that made a mockery out of the verbal descriptions and artist’s renderings the Terran military attaché had provided the Alliance. With a snap of her arm the whip’s barbed tendrils detached from the dead legionnaire as if they were alive, and her demonic eyes were fixed on him as she bared her ivory fangs and snapped the whip back, preparing for another attack.

“
Go, go, go!
” Grishin shouted through the intercom to his driver, reflexively pushing himself deeper into his seat to get away from the ferocious-looking warrior. The driver didn’t need any encouragement: the command vehicle suddenly roared out of the pit the engineers had dug for it, snapping the thin tac-com cable that had connected Grishin with the Terran regimental commander. In any normal battle, being dug-in would have given their vehicle some cover and concealment from an approaching enemy. But when the enemy was literally landing right on top of you, the only thing the pit was good for was a grave. 

The command vehicle shared the same wheeled chassis as the light tanks of the
1er REC
’s combat squadrons, but had no turret and no main gun. One of the legionnaires was manning the vehicle’s only weapon, the modern-day equivalent of a machine gun on a flexi-mount on the vehicle’s roof, and was firing rounds non-stop at the warriors that were now landing all around them.

“Conserve your ammunition, you fool!” the vehicle commander shouted at him. But the legionnaire continued to hold down the trigger. The weapon’s barrel was red hot.

Suddenly the firing ceased, and Grishin was relieved that the gunner had come to his senses. If he had kept firing that way, they would be out of ammunition in a matter of a few minutes, if that.

“
Putain!
” the vehicle commander swore, and Grishin looked up to see the legionnaire gunner slide back into the vehicle. Headless.

Focus
, Grishin told himself as he fought back a wave of nausea. It wasn’t the headless legionnaire that bothered him, for he had seen that and much worse in his career in the
Légion
. It had been the enormous enemy warrior about to snare him with that hellish whip.
Let the crew fight the immediate battle. You’ve got a regiment to worry about. You’re their leader: so lead!

That thought brought him back to his senses. Unfortunately, he had no communications right now with anyone: all types of radio communications were out, and the
Légion
did not have the funding for the latest vehicle-to-vehicle laser communications. 

That left the old fashioned method. “Turn around,” he ordered the driver. To this point, they had been barreling down the road that led toward the rear of the regiment’s deployment area, and then to the Terran regiment, if any of them had survived the crazy cavalryman’s idea of stuffing their huge tanks into buildings. He could see the mushroom cloud over Foshan through one of the vehicle’s armored viewports, the orange and black writhing as if it were a living thing. All around it, the city was burning fiercely, and it was difficult for him to imagine the devastation. He wished Sparks and his troops good luck. But now he had to make some luck of his own. He needed to get back to his regiment.

“Sir?” the driver asked, his voice shaking. While they had all been told that aliens might come, none of them had really believed it. And none of them had been truly prepared for the sight of thousands of alien warriors dropping from the sky.

“Turn us around,
soldat
,” Grishin ordered. “Without radio, I must make direct contact with our units. I’ve got to at least get to the squadron commanders.”

The driver made no move to respond to Grishin’s order.

“Tomaszewski,” the vehicle commander said in a low voice over the intercom, “turn us around or I’ll blow your fucking head off.” 

“
Oui, sergent
,” the driver replied shakily, slowing the six-wheeled vehicle around enough to turn it without tipping them over.

Pulling the gunner’s headless body out of the way, the vehicle commander took his place at the gun on the roof, hiking up his chest armor to try and protect his neck as they headed back toward the rest of their besieged regiment.

* * *

Tesh-Dar and the other warriors had been badly buffeted by the explosion as the cruiser hit the human city. But like many of the human warriors, they had received some protection as the buildings around the city absorbed much of the blast wave. A number of the warriors had lost control and crashed, with some of them no doubt killed. But the majority from her ship, nearly eight hundred, had survived. Around them, thousands of other warriors dropped by the other ships plummeted toward the human city and its defenders.

As they fell rapidly toward the ground, Tesh-Dar saw that they were almost perfectly positioned against one of the groups of human warriors. Almost all of this group were in large, boxy vehicles that were clearly heavily armed. Her blood thrilled with the challenge, for it would be difficult to kill the humans in vehicles such as these. She did not need to look around her to know that her warriors felt the same way, for their emotions sang from their very blood. But she looked anyway, turning to see Li’ara-Zhurah and Kamal-Utai flying beside her, their fangs bared in excitement.

Then it was time for the warriors to deploy their wings. Similar to a human-designed parafoil, they were actually much more akin to a natural wing: mounted to the warrior’s back, with the wing supported by a thin but strong framework much like the bones of a bat’s wing, it provided exceptional maneuverability. 

While expressions of amazement and disbelief at Tesh-Dar’s abilities were nothing new to her since she had become high priestess of the Desh-Ka order, she took some bemused enjoyment from the astonished looks on the faces of her warriors as they deployed their wings and she did not. Yet she continued to fly alongside them as if she did. The powers that she had inherited as part of the acceptance of the ways of the Desh-Ka were not infinite, and were nothing compared to the power of the Empress. But controlling her body above the earth was one of the gifts she had received, as was walking through solid objects. She herself did not understand how such things were possible, only that they were.

By now the humans had seen them swooping down upon their positions and began to fire projectile weapons. A number of warriors fell, stricken, while others fired back with weapons akin to those the humans were using. Tesh-Dar preferred close combat, but in this type of attack she would not have let her warriors be exposed at extended ranges to human weapons without being able to fight back. Challenge, she sought; wanton slaughter of her warriors, she did not. 

Easing ahead of the other warriors, she arrowed toward a group of vehicles near the center of the area occupied by larger groups of spread-out vehicles. Touching down lightly near one of the vehicles, her sandals leaving no mark upon the dusty ground, she uncoiled her
grakh’ta
, the seven-barbed whip, from her belt.

A human momentarily stared at her open-mouthed from a hatch in the rear of the vehicle, then he turned away to say something in what was, to Tesh-Dar, one of their incomprehensible languages to someone inside. Baring her fangs, she snapped the
grakh’ta
behind her, then whipped it forward. It was a terribly difficult weapon to handle with precision, but Tesh-Dar had many, many cycles of practice and was expert in its use. The whip cracked as the seven barbed tips reached into the vehicle, wrapping themselves around the hapless human. With a titanic heave, she yanked the alien’s body from the vehicle with such force that it smashed its head and legs to splinters against the armored interior.