In Her Name: The Last War (45 page)

“What do we do?” Mannie croaked, terrified that she was going to tell him to move forward through this mass of people.

“Sit tight, Mannie,” she told him. “Yuri,” she said to her gunner, “watch for those bitches coming along behind them.” Based on their first encounter with the Kreelans driving the civilians along, she figured there must be a ton of them behind this mob.

After a few minutes, though, the stream of people started to taper off, with no sign of the enemy behind them. The civilians on top of her tank, having decided that she wasn’t going to invite them inside, had hopped off and followed their fellow scared-shitless citizens down the street. 

“Okay, Mannie,” she said, popping the hatch and sticking her head back out into the smoke-filled air again, “let’s move it.” The firing she’d heard earlier had tapered off drastically, then suddenly stopped. “And let’s hurry...”

* * *

Only Sparks, Hadley, and, by some miracle, Steph were still alive. Two Kreelans had reached around the edge of the window and hauled the operations major off his feet: wielding his combat knife, he disappeared in a frenzied mob of tearing claws and slashing swords. Hadley lobbed his last grenade into the scrum of Kreelan warriors tearing at the fallen officer. The two other cavalry troopers had been killed by warriors who had managed to get in through the window, much like the one Steph had killed, and been quicker with their swords than the other cavalrymen had been with their rifles. 

“Out!” Hadley cried: he was completely out of ammunition, even what he had gathered up from the other fallen soldiers. Steph was out, too: while she had been shooting non-stop, she had shared her spare magazines with Hadley, and had since then been crouching on the floor behind the cover of the counter, feeling like a coward. No longer worrying about the threat from the flying weapons, which the Kreelans had only used at first, he moved around the counter, holding his rifle now as the base of his bayonet.

“Out!” Sparks called, throwing down his empty rifle as half a dozen warriors clambered through the window. He quickly drew the big pistol he carried and emptied the magazine into them, killing five outright before more warriors came through, forcing him back. 

Without time to reload his pistol and unable to reach his rifle now, Sparks had only one card left to play. While it was centuries out of date, an anachronism in this age as he himself was, he drew his saber from the scabbard at his side after dropping the now-empty pistol on the floor. 

While a sword was still used as part of Terran Ground Forces ceremonial dress, the weapon Sparks held in his hand wasn’t made of the inexpensive low-grade and brittle metal of the ceremonial weapons: it was a faithful replica of the last saber ever issued to the United States Cavalry, the Model 1913 that was designed by a young Army lieutenant by the name of George S. Patton, Jr. Made with a strong and flexible steel blade, it had cost Sparks a small fortune and had always been his most prized possession. He had even paid for formal training on how to use it, both from the back of a horse and dismounted. But even in his wildest dreams he had never thought he would actually use it in battle. Yet here he was. 

With a confident thrust, Sparks stabbed the nearest Kreelan, who was turned toward Hadley as he charged from behind the wooden counter. He drove the blade into her armpit where there was a gap in her armor, the weapon’s tip going deep into her chest. With a cry of shock, she fell to the floor, dead.

The impact on the other warriors was instantaneous and totally unexpected: they stopped their attack. Had Steph not been peering over the top of the counter, no longer content to cower behind it as Hadley had told her to, she would not have believed it. The half dozen warriors who had already come through the window stepped back away from the two cavalrymen, their swords held in what Steph took to be defensive positions. The warriors outside, having seen Sparks draw his sword, immediately backed away from the window, clambering past their many dead sisters who were stacked up in front of the devastated shop.

Hadley, in what otherwise might have been a comical moment, stopped in mid-charge, his war-cry dying on his lips. 

Sparks, after tugging his bloodied sword from the side of the fallen Kreelan, backed farther away from the aliens, unsure of what was going on. He watched with disbelieving eyes as the Kreelans inside the shop warily retreated, moving to join the others who now stood outside in what looked like a wide circle open to the storefront. A Kreelan warrior, bloodied and injured, stepped into the center of the circle. In what he recognized as what must be a universal gesture, she beckoned him forward toward her.

“I’ll be damned,” he breathed. 

“What do we do, colonel?” Hadley asked him.

Sparks glanced at him, then said, “We go kill as many as we can before we die.”

* * *

Shanur-Tikhan stood in the circle of the gathered warriors as the humans unblocked the door to their small redoubt, apparently a shop of some kind not unlike those found in the cities of her own people. She was senior among her gathered sisters, and although she was already grievously injured, she would not be denied the privilege of matching her sword against the human’s. While the warriors of Her Children were versed in the ways of weapons of many kinds, the sword was the ultimate balance of physical form and spirit. That this human possessed one spoke well of him and his kind, even if he was a soulless animal whose blood did not sing.

She grunted in appreciation as the human bearing the sword emerged from the doorway, walking with dignity instead of clambering awkwardly through the smashed window. Two others, a male and a female, accompanied him. The male, unarmed, stooped next to a fallen warrior to pick up her sword before coming forward to join the male who appeared to be the senior of the two. Shanur-Tikhan and her sisters took no offense at his taking the sword, for it was unbound from the dead warrior’s spirit. The female human merely stood by and watched, which Shanur-Tikhan found highly curious.

The two males approached her, the dominant without fear, his subordinate with some obvious trepidation. The former held his weapon confidently, while the latter did not. If they meant to fight her two on one, she would accept such a challenge. Her wounds were serious and would soon kill her if she did not seek out a healer, but that was inconsequential. All that mattered was the challenge. 

Opening her arms wide, she invited them to make the first move.

* * *

“Hadley,” Sparks asked quietly, “do you have a damn clue what to do with that thing?”

Gripping the alien sword tightly, Hadley answered, “No sir, I don’t. But if I’m going to die, I’m not going to die without a weapon in my hands.”

“Well-spoken, son,” Sparks told him. “For what it’s worth, you’ve been a helluva soldier.”

“Thank you, sir,” Hadley said, his throat tightening up. He had been with Sparks for two years, and had been given his share of ass-reamings by the colonel. But the man had never done anything, even dressing down a man or woman under his command, without the goal of making him or her a better soldier. And he had always treated his soldiers with respect. “It’s been an honor, sir.”

Nodding, Sparks said simply, “Shall we, soldier?”

“Garry Owen, sir!”

Together, the two cavalrymen attacked.

* * *

“You saw
what?
” Coyle exclaimed, unable to believe what she was hearing.

“You heard me, sarge,” the lieutenant said. “It’s the colonel and another soldier fighting one of the Kreelans with swords! And that reporter is there, too. Surrounded by a few hundred hostiles.”

The lieutenant’s infantrymen had been scouting ahead, peering around the corners to make sure Coyle’s tanks didn’t get ambushed. They’d been heading as fast as they could in the direction from which they’d heard the firing, but the “crunchies” - the infantry - couldn’t go nearly as fast as her tanks, and she dared not leave them behind. The woman on point had come running back to the lieutenant, telling him what she’d seen. Unable to believe what she’d said, he had gone forward himself for a look. And now he was relating the same ridiculous tale to Coyle. 

It was so bizarre that it had to be true. 

“We’ve gotta do something, sarge,” the lieutenant said earnestly. 

And there sat the big, fat and ugly problem: what to do. She had plenty of firepower to blast the Kreelans to bits, but she wanted to rescue the survivors of the headquarters company if she could. If she came in, all guns blazing, there’s no way she could keep them from being killed in the crossfire.

Calling up a map of the neighborhood, she had an idea. “Okay, el-tee,” she told him, “here’s what we do...”

* * *

Sparks was gasping for breath, and his right shoulder was burning like fire from holding and swinging the saber. It wasn’t a heavy weapon, but he wasn’t used to fighting with it, and his body was exhausted after the frenetic firefight they had just gone through. But he was nothing if not determined, and he ignored the pain, willing his wiry body to stay in the fight.

Hadley, beside him, wasn’t in any better shape. While bigger and physically stronger, he had no training at all with a sword in his hand, and had suffered a brutal cut to his upper left arm. He could still swing the sword with his right, but the pain and loss of blood were telling.

Their opponent, Sparks realized, was drawing out the affair. Even gravely wounded, as she clearly was from the amount of blood seeping from beneath her armor, he knew that she probably could have killed both of them in the first few seconds. He merely gave thanks for her sense of fair play, because it just gave him that many more opportunities to kill her.

Steph watched as the two men battled the Kreelan warrior, furious with herself that she was unable to help them. She could try picking up a sword and dive into the melee, but she figured she would last about five seconds. Instead, she focused on doing her very best to capture the battle. She had forgotten about the Pulitzer. This was about posterity, assuming any of them actually survived.

Suddenly, she became aware of something that was totally out of place in this shattered street, filled with hundreds of alien warriors watching an uneven battle of survival: music. It was an instrumental of a song she didn’t immediately recognize that sounded like something someone might hear in an old-style Irish pub.

But the effect of the music on the two cavalrymen and the aliens alike was profound: the Kreelans turned to look down the street to see what this strange noise was, while Sparks and Hadley charged their opponent as if they had been shot full of adrenaline.

Then Steph saw the first of the tanks belonging to the 7th Cavalry Regiment round the corner up the street with the regiment’s official tune, the
Garryowen
, booming from the lead tank’s external speakers.

* * *

Coyle’s plan was straightforward: she would take the tanks straight in to try and draw the enemy’s attention, which was something tanks were very good at, while the young lieutenant took his infantry platoon down the next street as fast as he could to get in position behind the Kreelans. Her hope was that most or all of the Kreelans would head toward the tanks, giving the infantry a chance to grab the colonel and the others, literally behind the enemy’s back. 

The tanks made very little noise when they moved, as the electric motors were practically silent. The only thing one could hear from any more than a few yards away was the tracks. Even that, with vehicles maintained as well as those of the 7th Cav, was lost in the background noise of the burning city. And Coyle wanted to make something of a grand entrance that wasn’t potentially lethal to the colonel and the others.

So she decided on something a bit unconventional. The colonel loved the damned
Garryowen
, the Irish drinking song that was the regiment’s official air, and every vehicle had a copy of it that could be played at his whim. She knew that to Sparks, and most of the rest of the regiment, even if many wouldn’t admit it,
Garryowen
was a battle hymn that took him back to the era he wished he had been born in. “And the stupid song gives me goosebumps, too,” she confessed quietly to herself. She switched on the external public address system that was standard on all the regiment’s vehicles and cranked up the volume.

Rounding the corner, she saw that her efforts had met with good effect: the bulk of the Kreelans were now standing there simply staring at her tank, while the colonel and the other soldier charged the enemy warrior facing them.

With
Chiquita
taking up position in the center of the street, the two other tanks moved up beside her. Taking up virtually the entire width of the street, the three tanks moved forward to meet the Kreelans.

* * *

Shanur-Tikhan was shocked at the sudden surge of strength and determination in the humans she fought as soon as the strange noise washed over them. Breaking contact for a precious moment by shoving them both away, she turned to see three large vehicles moving toward her warriors. Why their war machines made such a noise, she could not imagine, but the threat to her warriors was clear. 

The challenge, then, was finished.

* * *

Steph looked on in horror as the warrior, wounded though she was, easily parried a slash from Hadley’s sword and then, with a brutal attack with her own weapon, opened him up from his left hip to his right shoulder, the sword cutting right through his armor as if it were made of cloth. With a startled cry, he crumpled to the ground.

Sparks attacked the Kreelan with a series of savage thrusts with his saber, but on the last he slightly over-extended himself, and the Kreelan took full advantage. Knocking his sword aside, sending him off-balance as if he were sprawling forward, she pirouetted and brought down her sword, stabbing him through the back. The colonel gasped in agony as the sword’s blade ran him all the way through, the bloodied tip hissing through the armor of his breast plate. As he fell to the ground, the warrior yanked the sword from his body and flicked the blood from it.