In Her Name: The Last War (49 page)

Alita
was now streaking toward Keran under full acceleration, leaving the fat carriers far behind. Orbital insertion was going to be tricky, not just because of the courier ship’s speed, but also because the second wave of Kreelan ships, the ones that Admiral Tiernan was going to pound on, were going to be a lot closer than she would like. Low orbit space was going to be awfully crowded for a while.

The admiral’s communications officer had given them coordinates for where the Terran and Alliance troops had been landed, and Sid had programmed the ship’s laser link system to broadcast over as wide an area as possible. They had already started an automated broadcast, just on the off chance that someone might pick it up before they entered low orbit: they had nothing to lose but a bit of power. Some might have thought their chances were about as good as finding a needle in a haystack, with the qualification that they were looking for the needle through a straw about as big around as a strand of spaghetti.

* * *

Amar-Marakh, the senior shipmistress of the Imperial ships around the human planet, nodded in approval as the human ships began to deploy against her second attack wave, even as the surviving ships of the first wave rejoined her. Her blood burned that she herself was not in the force heading toward the planet, for the engagement the humans were planning would be fierce and her heart cried out for battle. But that would yet come. For now, it was up to the shipmistresses and warriors of the second wave to bring glory to the Empress.

She knew the humans could not pass up an attack against the second wave, and that Her warships would be greatly outnumbered. She also knew that the animals would not have things all their own way. While the ships of the second wave would be dropping many more warriors to engage the surviving humans warriors on the surface, they would be keeping nearly a third in reserve to send against the human fleet as they closed to engage. The human ships had proven very vulnerable to boarding attacks, which perfectly suited the desires of Her Children.

Her heart beat rapidly as she watched the unfolding battle on her display, the Bloodsong of her sisters a thundering chorus in her veins.

* * *

Tiernan was proud of his crews as the Terran ships slid into position in the new formation he had worked out with
Amiral
Lefevre. Normally, the data-link systems also provided navigational orders, allowing the ships to closely coordinate their movements. With that information gone, each ship had to maneuver independently, and it would have been a challenge under the best of circumstances to form up over one hundred warships from two different navies, all under manual control. But his crews and those of the Alliance made it look like such feats were easy. 

After more discussion with Admiral Lefevre, they had decided to put the Terran ships at the head of the formation as they engaged the Kreelans. The Alliance ships had already seen an exhausting fight, and some of them were running dangerously low on munitions.
Ticonderoga
herself was the point ship of the third echelon wedge, with a wedge of cruisers ahead, and a flotilla of destroyers leading the attack. The plan was for the destroyers to fire their torpedoes to help distract and, if they were lucky, break up the Kreelan formation, and then have the destroyers peel away to the flanks so that the heavier guns of the cruisers could hammer the enemy ships into scrap.

As Tiernan watched the red icons of the Kreelan second wave near Keran, he saw the solitary blue icon of the
Alita
, which was now sailing ahead of the Kreelan ships. He nodded in approval: the commander of the tiny ship had both brains and guts. Had she tried an orbit that brought her head to head or even flank-on to the Kreelans, they would no doubt destroy her. But sailing ahead of them, as crazy as it seemed, was also safest: unless the Kreelans showed some of the hideously advanced technology that Sato had reported, there was no way they would be able to catch her. 

“Come on, Cartwright,” Tiernan breathed. The only chance the ground forces might have of survival rested with Cartwright and her tiny ship. Otherwise, the troops on Keran wouldn’t even realize a second attack was on its way, and the carriers would have come back for nothing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Coyle was exhausted, but there was no stopping. The 7th Cavalry Regiment, which had started with just over three thousand men and women, had been reduced to a short battalion of a few hundred, including the survivors she had picked up from a few other units. The officers, all of whom had been in or near vehicles that were using the data-links targeted by the Kreelan ships, had been decimated: the senior officer, the
only
combat effective officer, was Lieutenant Krumholtz, the infantry lieutenant she had picked up early on. That would have made him the acting commander, but Sparks had made Coyle a brevet captain once the extent of the disaster for the ground forces had become clear, and she’d found herself in charge of the clusterfuck they were in. After that, Sparks had passed out and had remained unconscious. He was holding on, but only through sheer stubbornness: riding in the back of a civilian vehicle that had been abandoned and put into service as an ambulance, he was being tossed around in what had become an increasingly desperate effort to escape the killing ground of Foshan.

Chiquita
, Coyle’s tank, was one of only four in the entire regiment to have survived the battle to this point. Since the fight to save the colonel, she had found seven other tanks, but three of them had been destroyed by a small but determined pack of Kreelan warriors. Her unit’s progress was slow, both because most of her troops had to move on foot, and because of the successive waves of civilian refugees that were boiling out of the wreckage of the city, usually driven along by more Kreelan warriors. Coyle felt compelled to try and give the civilians as much protection as she could, which further slowed her down and made her tanks easier targets for the Kreelans and their devilish grenades. 

She would have headed out of the city where her tanks would have a much easier time keeping the enemy at bay, but she knew they had to link up with any other survivors of the division, if they could find them. 

After a nightmarish drive farther into Foshan, where she found the smoking wreckage that had been the division command post, she realized that the division, and the corps as a whole, had effectively been wiped out. 

She had picked up a few more troops from some of the division’s other brigades, but only a handful. She had no doubt that there were other pockets of survivors. She could hear sporadic bursts of gunfire in other parts of the city, but she wasn’t going to expend any more effort or lives trying to find them. 

She was going to try and get her people out of the city.

“The corps is well and truly fucked,” she told Lieutenant Krumholtz and the senior NCOs who had gathered in front of
Chiquita
. Coyle hated to risk stopping even for a few minutes, which would let the Kreelans who were hunting her tanks catch up, but she didn’t have any choice. They needed to get a new game plan together. “We’ve got to turn around and head out of the city.”

“We can’t do that,” Krumholtz argued. If anything, he was more tired than Coyle was, having had to slog along with his troops through the rubble and past shell-shocked civilians as the Terran column had slowly made its way deeper into the city. “If we can find General Ray, he’ll be able to-”

“He’s dead!” Coyle snapped. “Look at this, for Christ’s sake,” she said, sweeping her arm around them. The entire block where the division command post vehicles had been hidden had been pulverized, with every single building reduced to ashes and chunks of brick no bigger than her fist. The hammering her own platoon had received from the Kreelan ships had been a love tap by comparison. She knew that it was remotely possible that someone could still be alive in their vehicle, buried under the rubble. But there was no time to search. “The corps CP won’t be any different. Face it, el-tee, we’re on our own.”

The younger officer was about to make a fiery retort when Yuri, her gunner, shouted from his open hatch in the turret, “Coyle! We’ve got a laser-link from the fleet!”

“Hot damn,” she said as she jumped up on
Chiquita
to reach her cupola. Normally she would have been able to take the call through her helmet’s radio, but with all radio communications knocked out she had to physically plug in a cable from the helmet. 

“This is Sergeant...scratch that,” she said hastily. “This is Captain Coyle of the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Go ahead, over.”

“Coyle,” a woman’s voice said quickly, “This is the
Alita
. I only have about ninety seconds before we lose you. The good news is that carriers are inbound for extraction of Terran and Alliance troops, but you have to reach one of the landing zones. The closest one to you will be...” she read off some coordinates that turned out to be near their original combat positions. “You’ve got forty minutes until the assault boats land.”

“Forty minutes?” Coyle cried. “There’s no fucking way we can get back there in forty goddamn minutes!” It had taken over an hour to get this far, wading through the tide of civilian refugees and fighting off the pursuing Kreelans.

“There are two other zones at-” the woman read off more coordinates as if she hadn’t heard Coyle’s outburst. Neither of them was even close to Foshan. “Forty minutes. Pass the word. Be advised that there is also a second wave of Kreelan ships inbound. Expect them in...”

The signal suddenly broke off. 

Yuri was looking at her with disbelieving eyes. Tearing off her helmet, Coyle looked up at the sky, which was still a witch’s brew of smoke and ash from the burning city center. “Give us a
fucking break
, will you?” she yelled at any god or God who might be listening.

“What happened?” Krumholtz asked, following her gaze to the dirty gray smoke overhead.

“They’ve recalled the carriers and are bringing down the boats to extract us,” she told him through gritted teeth, “but we’ve only got forty goddamn minutes to make it back to the landing zone, which is right fucking where we started from. And as if that weren’t bad enough, more Kreelans are on the way.” She slammed her helmet against the cupola in frustration, then stuck it back on her head. “Have your people ditch everything they don’t need, lieutenant. They’ve got to be able to move fast. Drop everything: body armor, water, and anything else they won’t need to survive for the next forty minutes, except for weapons and ammo. Put out a dozen guys up front who can move fast and be our eyes and ears so my tanks don’t get bushwhacked. If there are Kreelans around a corner or sneaking around in buildings, I want to know before they start lobbing those fucking grenades of theirs.”

“You won’t leave us behind, Coyle, will you?” he asked uncertainly.

She looked at him hard. “You’ve got to keep up, lieutenant.” Then, softening slightly, she said, “Listen, I’d have some of your guys ride on the tanks, but we’ve got to keep the turrets and engine decks clear when we run into Kreelans. Otherwise we’ll either kill your guys with the muzzle blast if we have to fire the main guns, or get killed waiting for you to clear off. Now get going. We don’t have a second to waste.”

“Garry Owen,” he replied as he and his platoon sergeant dashed off, frantically shouting orders at the infantry. Many of them hadn’t started the battle as infantry, but if you had your vehicle shot out from under you and you were left on foot with nothing but a rifle, infantry is what you became.

Normally Coyle would have asked the other tank commanders how they were doing on ammunition and taken some time to redistribute as best they could. She was down to ten rounds of main gun ammunition, all of them armor piercing rounds that were totally useless against infantry. Worse, the close-in defense mortar was out of ammo, and she only had a couple thousand rounds for the coaxial gun and her gatling gun: enough for maybe twenty seconds of continuous firing. But there was no time now. None at all. 

“Frederickson,” she said to one of the other tank commanders, “you’ll ride shotgun with me up in the front. Have your tank cover the right side of the road and I’ll take the left. Hoyt, Gagarin, you guys bring up the rear. We’ll keep the bulk of the infantry between us, and I’ll have the lieutenant run out a skirmish line of whoever he’s got who can move fast to scout in front of us. For God’s sake, don’t run over anybody, but don’t let the infantry guys slow you down, either. Keep ‘em moving. If we fall behind schedule, we’re gonna miss the bus, and I don’t need to tell you what that means with more of those blue-skinned bitches about to fall out of the sky on us. Questions?” There were none. “Then let’s haul ass.”

* * *

Steph felt like she was in a surreal nightmare as she struggled to keep up with the tanks. The cavalry troopers had offered to let her ride with Colonel Sparks and Sergeant Hadley in the civilian van they’d picked up along the way, but she’d given up her spot for a trooper whose hip had been sliced open by one of the Kreelan flying weapons. There were others who were wounded, but they had to do their best to keep up. They realized that there was no surrender. So they walked, ran, and shuffled as best they could, troopers who were uninjured helping those who were. 

She wasn’t in the military, but she had seen the elephant, as the ancient saying went, and it had changed her life forever. Her vidcam was still recording every moment, and she even muttered notes now and again when she came across some new vision of horror. But she clutched her rifle to her shoulder, imitating the more experienced infantry soldiers around her, and watched every window and door on her side of the street. She had even killed a number of Kreelans that the other soldiers had missed: being a journalist had given her a lot of experience in noticing small things that others often didn’t see. The infantry squad that she had arbitrarily become attached to had at first looked at her as a burden, but after she blew the first Kreelan out of a window as she rose unseen to throw a grenade, they had shown her more than a little respect.