In Her Name: The Last War (53 page)

After the heaves passed, Steph and one of the other soldiers helped Coyle from the cupola, and she made her way through
Chiquita’s
human passengers, finally reaching the ground on shaky legs. Despite the lack of any Kreelan warriors, even the ones who had been pursuing them out of the city, none of the infantry wanted to leave the perceived safety of the tank’s menacing bulk.

Coyle tried not to sway too much as she walked to meet the approaching legionnaire. “
Bonjour
,” she said, using the only word she knew in French that wouldn’t start a bar fight. “Staff Sergeant Patty Coyle, 7th Cavalry Regiment.”

The man offered her a smile through his battered face, and extended a paw that was equally mauled, with raw, broken knuckles and at least a couple of broken fingers. His grip, though, was still strong, and he didn’t even wince when she applied gentle pressure, not wanting to appear to be a wimpy female to him. 

“Happy to see you, Sergeant Coyle,” he said in an accent she recognized as British, although he had a bit of a lisp from several missing teeth. He sounded far too perky for someone in his condition, particularly in contrast to the exhausted men around him. Then she realized that he was probably so high on painkillers and other drugs that she could have hit his foot with a sledge hammer and he’d only ask her for more.

“She’s a brevet captain,” Steph corrected him from where she stood behind Coyle. 

The legionnaire raised his eyebrows, or would have if his face had not been so swollen. “Outstanding!” he said, saluting. “
Soldat 1e Classe
Roland Mills and the remainder of the
Légion étrangère
- well, two regiments of it, in any case - at your service. If you might like to meet our commanding officer?”

Coyle returned the salute, then turned around to give Steph her best evil eye. The reporter shrugged unapologetically before following Coyle, uninvited, after Mills.

When they reached the small circle of legionnaires clustered around one who was lying on the ground, Coyle bit back more bile. Both of the man’s legs were badly burned, as was his left arm. 

“
Mon colonel
,” Mills said, “this is brevet Captain Coyle of...” Mills turned to her, leaving the rest of the sentence hanging.

“Of the 7th Cavalry Regiment,” Coyle said. “Our commander, Colonel Sparks, is still alive, but very badly injured.”

“A common theme among the officers, it would seem,” the man on the ground said, a humorless smile touching his lips. “I am
Lieutenant-Colonel
Grishin, commander of the
1er REC.
I am glad your colonel survived. A most interesting man.” Peering up at Steph, he added, “And I see the lovely Miss Guillaume survived thus far, as well. I am happy this is so.”

“Thank you, sir,” Steph replied, not sure what else to say. So many others, trained to be soldiers, had died, and yet she had somehow survived. It didn’t make any sense. Then again, this entire war didn’t make any sense.

“Our colonel’s in very bad shape, sir,” Coyle said. “He was run through with a sword and has severe internal injuries. I just hope he can make it back to the fleet.” She looked to the sky. “There are boats coming in to pick all of us up, your people, as well. They should be here very soon if they stayed on schedule.”

Grishin frowned, almost as if he were disappointed. “We did not know. I had thought this would be our Camarón.”

Coyle had no idea who or what Camarón was, but from his tone of voice it sounded like it was the Legion’s equivalent of the Little Bighorn for the 7th Cav. 

Before she could say anything else, Grishin asked her, “Coyle, I am placing you in command of my men. We have no officers remaining, and I am in no shape to command. Will you do that?”

She looked at the weary hard-faced men around her, then up at Mills, who nodded slightly. “Yes, sir. If they’re willing to follow my orders.”

“They will,” he said with a hint of a smile. “They have not followed the orders of a woman before, but with you commanding the only functional armored vehicle here, they can hardly argue, yes? And Mills will make sure they do not misbehave.”

The big legionnaire nodded gravely. Coyle noticed that the other men regarded him with obvious awe. He was an impressive-looking man who had clearly managed to take a savage beating and survived to tell about it, but the expressions on the faces of the others said that there was more to the story. She’d have to find out about it later, assuming any of them survived.

“Then we should get into defensive positions,” Coyle said. “All your men are clustered in one spot.”

“We have no need,” one of the other legionnaires said pointedly through a heavy German accent. “We are safe.”

“What do you mean?” Steph said hotly. “Nobody’s safe here.”

The legionnaire pointed to Mills. “He fought one of the aliens, a huge one. She let us go. The aliens went away, let us live.”

“It’s true,” Mills said. “I know it sounds absurd, but that’s what happened. They were slaughtering us, then this giant of a female warrior came and tagged me for a bit of fun.” He gestured at his face. “I guess I entertained her well enough. Then after beating me into the bloody ground, she and all her vixen friends trotted off somewhere else. They didn’t give us a second thought after that.”

“Well, you may be safe,” Coyle said, not sure she could buy a story like that, “but we sure as hell aren’t. We’ve been hounded from the start, and there was a group of warriors hunting us all the way out of the city. They disappeared, but I can’t believe they followed us all that way to just give up right at the end.” She glanced worriedly behind her, noting with some relief that Yuri, as tired as he was, had the foresight to turn the turret around and was constantly scanning the approaches to their position. The infantry on the rear deck had hopped, and in some cases simply tumbled, to the ground as the main gun swept back and forth. “I don’t think they’re just going to let us walk away when the boats get here.”

That’s when she heard a sound like thunder: sonic booms from the boats as they made their approach.

“It’s about fucking time,” she whispered, relief suddenly flooding through her.
We can do this
, she told herself.
Just a few minutes
.

“Coyle,” one of the infantrymen called to her. She turned and looked where he was pointing. More uniformed figures were coming down the road, running, shuffling, and staggering. There were hundreds of them. As they got closer, she could see that it was a mix of men and women from the rest of her parent 31st Armored Division and a sprinkling of Alliance troops. No vehicles. But maybe there would be a real officer who could take charge of this fuckup. 

As it turned out, there was. One of the company commanders from a different brigade, someone she had never met before, was the ranking officer. After she briefly explained what she knew, he did exactly what she should have figured would happen: he officially put her in charge of securing the perimeter, using her tank and “her” infantry. In the meantime, he began to organize the rest of the survivors into groups to get onto the boats, and completely ignored the legionnaires. 

Coyle had seen that most of the new arrivals had thrown down their weapons after they’d run out of ammunition, so they weren’t even armed. She tried to get at least some of them to run over and grab weapons from the dead Legion paratroopers, but they refused. The captain ordered her to attend to her duties, although in not very polite terms. 

Disgusted to the point she was sure she would shoot the man, she ordered the survivors of the 7th Cavalry to gather weapons and ammunition. And like the professionals they were, they obeyed. But if looks could kill, the nameless captain would have died a hundred deaths.

As the cavalrymen trotted toward the paratroopers’ former positions to hunt for weapons, Mills said to his comrades, “Once the boats get here, our blue lady friends will be back, and the honeymoon, lads, will be over.” Then, with a nod to Coyle, he led them after the Terran troops to pick up more ammunition for their own weapons. He had no illusions that their survival to this point had been anything more than a stay of execution, and thought the Terran captain was an incredibly ignorant ass for not making sure everyone was armed before the boats arrived.

Coyle was willing to put up with the garbage the captain from the other brigade had dished out to that point, but when he tried to move Sparks, Hadley, and the regiment’s other injured soldiers out of the battered civilian van that had carried them out of Foshan and arrange them in the group with the other survivors of his own brigade, she rebelled. 

“I am
ordering
you to get your colonel and the other wounded in the first boat,” the captain told her. He had been forced to come over and deal with the situation directly after Coyle and the other 7th Cav troopers who hadn’t gone with Mills had faced off against the enlisted men the captain had sent over to take Colonel Sparks and the others away.

“Excuse me,
sir
,” she told the captain icily from her cupola, “but my colonel stays with his regiment. We’ll load him and our other wounded when it’s our turn to board. Whenever that may be.”

“Are you disobeying a direct order, soldier?” the officer said, his soot-covered face reddening with anger.

Looking down on him from the height of the tank’s turret, Coyle thought tiredly,
What a jackass
. “Yes, sir, I am. With all due respect.”

“Sergeant!” the captain snapped to the senior NCO of the gaggle of soldiers he’d brought over to take the wounded and deal with any insubordination. “Place this woman under arrest and escort her to the boat.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said, saluting smartly, a grin on his face. 

The grin vanished as he turned and found himself staring down the muzzles of a dozen assault rifles. Looking up, he saw that Coyle’s gatling gun was pointed straight at him.

“This is mutiny,” the captain breathed. “Sergeant, take her!”

“Sir,” the NCO said quietly, staring at the tense 7th Cav troopers, “we don’t have any weapons. You ordered us to ditch them all when we ran out of the city.”

The captain, his face turning a deep purple, turned back to Coyle. “I’ll have you shot for this, soldier,” he grated.

“You know, captain,” she told him, “that would probably be a relief for me right now.” Her finger was shaking over the controls of the gatling gun. Part of her really wanted to shoot him, just for being such a prick. But another part didn’t want to waste the ammunition, because she knew they’d need it. Soon. “But I think it’d just be best if you and your crunchies just left us alone so we can save your asses when the Kreelans come after us.
Sir
.”

Without another word, the captain turned and stalked off, shouting orders at his troops, taking out his frustrations on them. 

Meanwhile, the cavalry troopers and legionnaires worked quickly to pick up weapons and enough ammunition to try and defend the LZ. When they were finished, Coyle had about a hundred and twenty troops altogether, about the size of an infantry company. The survivors of the equivalent of two combat brigades. 

Without bothering to consult the captain, she had her NCOs break the group down into ad-hoc squads that took up positions around the LZ, facing in the direction of the smoldering city. 

“I wish we had more ammo,” Yuri lamented as he redistributed the rounds between the tank’s coaxial gun and Coyle’s gatling gun, giving her most of it. “We’re going to be nothing but a pissed-off pillbox pretty soon.” They hadn’t fired any more rounds from the main gun, so they still had ten left in the magazine. But the anti-tank rounds were useless for killing anything but other armored vehicles. 

“We’ll do what we can,” she said, hearing the roar of the boats as they came in. She couldn’t see them yet, as they were making a low approach over the forest behind them, trying to stay masked by the terrain as long as possible.

“There they are!” someone shouted, and everyone stood up and whooped with joy as the dark gray Navy assault boats came in to land in the open area in the rear of the position originally occupied by the
1er REC
. 

Steph snorted. “We don’t have enough people to fill up one of them,” she said. “Why’d they send two?”

“Without comms,” Coyle told her, shouting now over the deafening scream of the boats’ engines, “they wouldn’t have any idea how many survivors there might be. Better there’s too much room than too little.”

Steph nodded, shielding her eyes from the dust kicked up by the big assault boats. “Boat” was perhaps a misnomer, as the vessels now settling down on their massive landing struts massed roughly two thousand tons and were over half as long as a football field. Each could carry a full company of Wolfhound tanks or an entire battalion of mechanized infantry. Despite their size, they carried no armor or weapons, sacrificing those traits for more lift capacity.

As the ships settled low to the ground, the boats’ engines throttled back to a muted howl. The main rear ramps began to descend and the side personnel doors opened, with ladders sliding from the hull to drop to the ground. The loadmasters came out to help get everyone aboard.

“Coyle!” she heard Yuri shout from the top of the turret. She turned and saw him pointing in the direction of the city.

As if they had simply appeared out of nowhere, hundreds of Kreelan warriors stood on the slight rise, just over a hundred meters away, between the landing zone and the outer edge of Foshan. In the center stood a huge warrior, her body and face an odd maroon color. 

It took Coyle a moment to realize that it was blood. Human blood. 

“
Open fire!
” she screamed as the shock of adrenaline once more hit her system and she bolted for
Chiquita
.

The infantry nearest to her, the only ones who had been able to hear her order, began to fire.

With the first shot the Kreelans, all but the huge warrior and two others, charged.

* * *

Tesh-Dar held back Li’ara-Zhurah and Kamai-Utal from the massed attack, not to deny them glory, but to have them learn and, in Li’ara-Zhurah’s case, to rest for a moment. The young warrior had given glory enough to the Empress simply in the passion of her pursuit of the human machine and its wily crew, and the great priestess would not see her blood spent here. Not yet. The charging warriors knew that the vehicle was to be left to Li’ara-Zhurah, and they ignored it, concentrating on the other humans.