In Her Name: The Last War (42 page)

The humans intermingled with her warriors, a strange phenomenon that she would never have expected, shouted their encouragement in gibberish, and she had to credit them with spirited support. Soulless creatures they might be, beyond Her love and light, but she could not fault their warrior spirit. Truly, she thought, the Empire had found a worthy race to bring honor to the Empress in battle.

She let the human continue to batter himself senseless against her, until at last, finally, he simply had not the strength to rise again. But even then, exhausted and beaten, he still struggled to rise, to fight. 

“Enough,” she murmured to herself, bringing the ritual challenge to an end.

* * *

“
Kazh
,” the big warrior said softly. 

At least that’s what Mills thought she might have said, whatever it meant, over the ringing in his head and the sound of his own gasping for air. The legionnaires continued to shout their encouragement, their voices hoarse and frayed from yelling so long. Lying face down in the dirt, his body was totally, utterly exhausted. Every muscle quivered, and he could hardly move at all. He was bruised everywhere, and he knew that at least a few bones must be broken, mostly in his hands where they had hit the Kreelan’s jaw, which was as hard as steel plate. Blood was running into both his eyes from cuts on his forehead from where she had hit him or her claws had lightly cut him, and he had dozens of other cuts everywhere that wasn’t covered by his body armor. But he knew those cuts were merely incidental: she had clearly not used her claws as weapons, or he would have been dead in the first few seconds of the fight.

“Fuck,” he gasped through lips that looked like crushed tomatoes, streaming blood down his chin. He didn’t have to poke his tongue along his gums to know that he’d lost a few teeth: one he’d accidentally swallowed right after the Kreelan’s fist had knocked it loose; the rest he’d managed to spit out.

He tried to get up, but simply couldn’t. Finally, he gave up and simply lay there. There was nothing more he could do.

Suddenly, he felt a hand grip his arm and turn him over. It was the warrior. He offered up a bloody smile, knowing that she, too, had her own set of cuts and bruises, and he was the proud culprit. At this point he didn’t care if she had gone easy and let him have some mercy hits against her. He’d managed to bloody her up a bit, and that was all that mattered.

The legionnaires fell silent as they waited for the axe, literally, to fall on Mills. 

Much to their surprise it didn’t. The big Kreelan merely nodded her head, then reached out with her hands to snip off a bit of his hair, which was no mean feat, considering that it was barely a finger’s breadth in length. This she tucked into a small black leather pouch on her belt. 

Then, standing up, she said something in her language loud enough for all the gathered warriors to hear. They all said something back in unison, and hammered their left fists against their right breasts. 

With that, the huge warrior turned and walked away. The other warriors quietly followed after her, leaving eighty-seven very confused but infinitely relieved Legion paratroopers behind.

CHAPTER TWENTY

After the connection to Grishin had broken, Steph followed Sparks as he led the staff and crew of his command vehicle through the rubble of the building and out into the street. While many of the buildings looked fairly intact, most of them had suffered at least superficial damage from the blast when the cruiser had crashed, and there wasn’t a single unbroken pane of glass in sight. The air was still heavy with smoke and dust from the shells the Kreelan ships had fired at his command vehicle and the other vehicles that made up the regiment’s field headquarters. But the other vehicles had not been quite so lucky as his: the other three command vehicles of the headquarters company were smoldering wrecks. She looked up as what looked like snow started falling around them, carried by the artificial wind generated by the firestorm that was consuming the inner part of the city. 

“Ash,” Sparks said in a low voice, answering her unasked question as his eyes warily scanned the street. There had still been a lot of civilians out in the open when the Kreelans struck, despite the best efforts of Sparks and the other members of the company to convince the locals to find some sort of shelter. Sparks himself had been the last one under cover, staying until the very last second in the street to try and convince even a single civilian to get to safety. But all they were concerned about was the damage his vehicles were causing. 

The air was filled with the cries and wails of the injured and the bereaved. Bodies were strewn haphazardly along the sidewalks, mostly victims of the Kreelan guns that had targeted the command vehicles. Others were victims of the titanic blast that had torn out the heart of the city, but they were far enough away here that most of those casualties were from flying debris. Still others were curled on the street or wandering, helpless, their hands covering their eyes from the pain of being flash-blinded. 

Steph captured it all on video, as always making voice notes. But she noticed that her voice held an uncharacteristic flutter: she had never seen devastation on this scale, and the shock of it had deeply unsettled her. She momentarily focused the view on an Arab-descended woman near the center of the street, next to a car that she must have been in before the attack. She was sitting on the rough cobblestones, cradling a young girl, perhaps four years old, in her lap. Steph didn’t know Arabic, but she didn’t need to: the woman was shrieking with the anguish only a mother can truly know. From the amount of blood on the child’s body, it was clear to Steph that the young girl was dead.

Steph had seen anguish and horror before, but never quite like this. Suddenly, it was too much. Dropping the rifle she now carried, she fell to her knees and vomited.

“Come on, miss,” Sergeant Hadley, now her personal bodyguard, told her as he gently took hold of her arm to help her up. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

Nodding, wiping the foulness from her mouth with one hand as she picked up the rifle with the other, Steph got to her feet. On unsteady legs, she let Hadley help her along to keep up with the colonel’s pace.

“First Battalion shouldn’t be more than half a block from here,” the operations officer was saying. “We ought to be seeing tanks popping out of buildings all over the place.”

“I’m not so sure, major,” Sparks said as he checked the corner of a cross street, peering around the corner to make sure there weren’t any enemy waiting for them. “I think the damn Kreelans pounded everything that was-”

“
You!
” 

All of them turned at the sound of the voice. A middle-aged man, bloodied and dressed only in torn rags that once must have been nice clothes of the style the Chinese wore here, stood in the street holding a young man, what was left of him, in his arms. 

“It was
you!
” the man cried. “This is your doing!” Then he yelled at them in Chinese, then in Arabic. Other survivors, up and down the street, took notice of the commotion. “
They
came because of
you
,” the man went on, moving slowly toward them with his grisly burden. “My son died because of
you!
”

More people were gathering now, their faces ugly as they muttered in a mixture of Arabic and Chinese. 

“Shit,” Steph heard Hadley whisper. “Get behind me.” Without asking questions, she slid behind him, noticing that while he wasn’t pointing his rifle at anyone, he wasn’t exactly pointing it away, either. 

“The aliens were coming anyway,” Sparks told the man calmly. Raising his voice so the crowd could hear him, he said, “The aliens have been planning this attack for over a year. We came to help protect you. We-”

“
No!
” The man screamed as he staggered closer with his son’s limp form. “Your ship found them and led them to us,” he cried. “A
Terran
ship gave away our world to them. You played us for pawns as your kind always has. Then you came with your weapons of war to fight them on our world.
Our world!
”

By now, the crowd had grown to well over a hundred people, with more coming to see what was going on. 

“Listen, mister,” Sparks tried one last time, frustration clearly evident in his voice. “We’ve got to reach my tanks before the enemy gets here-”

“
You
are the enemy!” the man cried, and the crowd’s murmuring grew to an angry growl.

Steph noticed through her video pickup that people were picking up bricks, broken cobblestones, even big shards of glass. She was holding her rifle with a white-knuckled grip. She had fired a weapon before, but had never actually shot at anyone. And she sure as hell didn’t want to shoot any of these poor people. 

As the crowd began to close in, a new noise rose above their jeering: screaming. It wasn’t the wailing of those who had lost their loved ones, or those who were in agony: it was a scream of fear, echoing from a multitude of voices. 

Suddenly a handful of people rounded a corner about a hundred meters down the street in the direction of the city’s burning center. All young men, they were running flat out toward where the crowd now surrounded Sparks and his troops. Then a torrent of people, not able to run quite as fast, surged around the corner, all of them screaming in terror. There were hundreds of them, then thousands, a river of terrified people that quickly filled the street. 

Sparks knew what was coming. Walking up to the man who led the crowd surrounding them, he grabbed him by the arms and leaned over the man’s dead son until their noses nearly touched. “The aliens are coming. Now. Let us go so we can fight them or you’re going to all die right here.”

The man didn’t move, but simply stared at Sparks with accusatory eyes. 

But the others crowded around them got the message. Even those who didn’t understand English knew that something terrible was behind the crush of people stampeding toward them. Dropping their bricks and bits of glass, they turned to run.

“Get inside!” Sparks ordered as he let go of the man and dashed to the side of the street, kicking down the still-standing door of a shop. The others followed him. 

Inside, Steph looked at the man who suddenly stood alone in the street, still holding his son. Then, in the blink of an eye, he was gone, shoved to the ground and trampled by thousands of screaming people.

Somewhere farther down the street, in the direction the mob was headed, a tank’s main gun fired.

* * *

“Fuck,” Coyle said as she wiped the blood from her lip. The unexpected shock wave that preceded the shells that hit her platoon’s position had slammed her head against the commander’s miniature control console. Its edges were padded, but even that didn’t help when your lips were rammed into it full-force. “Status!” she barked. 

“Green,” Sergeant Yuri Kirov, her gunner, replied. “Weapons are up and ready.”

“We can move,” Mannie, the driver, told her, “but I’ve got two caution lights on the right-hand drive. Shouldn’t be a problem unless you want to go flying cross-country.”

“Let’s just see if we can dig ourselves out of this shit,” she told him. She had tried opening the hatch, but couldn’t: it was blocked by rubble. Shifting views from her cupola sensors to the gunner’s sight, then to the driver’s sensors, it was clear that her Wolfhound was completely buried by the building they were in. “Mannie...” she paused. She wasn’t sure if it would be smarter to try and move out of the rubble slowly to minimize the risk of damaging the tracks and the other equipment on the outside of the hull, or just gun it and get it over with. Normally, she would have gone slowly, but if there were Kreelans around, she’d be a sitting duck until the turret was clear. “Shit. Mannie, we’re going to have to risk throwing a track. If there are bad guys out there, I don’t want them to shoot the crap out of us while we’re being all careful-like getting out of this dump.”

“Roger that,” he said, squirming a bit deeper into his seat as he gripped the controls. “Hang on to your hats, boys and girls,” he warned as he gently goosed the Wolfhound’s accelerator. Less experienced drivers might have just stomped on it, which Mannie knew would have most likely made a spectacular display of spinning the tracks and spewing debris everywhere, while not moving them a whit. Driving a heavy armored vehicle really well required more finesse than most people realized. He felt the meter-wide tracks pull tight, just to the point where the big tank lurched. Then at just the right moment he goosed the accelerator, sending a hundred and twenty-five tons of fighting steel through what was left of the building, scattering bits of brick and glass everywhere into the street beyond.

“Jesus!” Coyle cried as the vision displays showed what was ahead of them: the street was filled with people. 

“Oh, fuck,” Mannie whispered, slamming on the Wolfhound’s brakes, rocking the huge vehicle to a hard stop. “God help me...”

“Take it easy,” Coyle said, her voice brittle. “It’s my responsibility, Mannie,” she whispered as the close-in display showed her the bodies that had been crushed under her tank’s tracks. There must have been at least half a dozen. If she listened closely, which she desperately tried not to, she could hear the screaming from at least one person whose legs were pinned under them. “Listen, I’ll go out and help-”

“Stay put,” Yuri, the gunner, said quietly. “Look at them all. They’re running.” 

“You’d run, too, if somebody had just run over a bunch of your friends with a tank, you bastard!” Mannie shouted at him, tears in his eyes.

“No, Mannie,” Yuri said. “They’re not running from
us
; they’re running from
them
.” He hit the controls that echoed his gunsight display to the driver and commander stations. In the magnified view, it was clear that something far more horrible than their tank was stalking the people outside. For the first time, they saw the real-life version of the artist’s renderings they had all laughed at during the pre-drop briefings, thinking the female warrior aliens had been a great joke.