In Her Name: The Last War (54 page)

Seeing some of the humans she had let live after her own small Challenge earlier with the solitary human, she felt a surge of relief: they were fighting back. Tesh-Dar had not intended it this way, but she would have been bitterly disappointed had they used her earlier magnanimity as an excuse to simply watch as their fellow animals were butchered, thinking themselves safe. Had they done so, they all would have died by her own hand. 

As it was, she reconsidered her original plan to not let any of the humans go. Her thoughts were driven not by pity, for she felt none, but by the knowledge that some of them had proven such worthy adversaries that they might be used another day to bring glory to the Empress. It was a small enough sacrifice for Tesh-Dar to make.

She watched the line of her warriors surging forward toward the humans, and made her decision: if any of the humans were able to fend off her warriors and make their escape in these ships, she would allow them to leave the surface. From there, fate would have to favor them.

One of the humans, however, she would not allow to leave: the one who commanded the armored vehicle. That one’s life belonged to Li’ara-Zhurah.

The warriors howled past the great vehicle to attack the humans who sought to leave without first offering battle.

* * *

Yuri had dropped back down in the turret after alerting Coyle and was firing nonstop at the rapidly approaching mass of howling alien warriors. 

“Where the fuck did they come from?” Coyle asked frantically as she trained the gatling gun around to fire at the enemy.

“I don’t know!” he said, pausing momentarily as he swiveled the turret slightly to try and keep up with the Kreelan line. He’d fired hundreds of rounds already, but the damned warriors seemed a lot more nimble than before, half of them dodging out of his line of fire at the last instant. “It’s like they bloody stood up right out of the ground!”

Coyle squeezed the trigger for the gatling gun, sending a spray of twenty millimeter rounds through a section of the Kreelan line. Half a dozen of them were cut down: it wasn’t easy to avoid being hit by a weapon that fired a hundred rounds per second. 

“Shit!” Yuri shouted. “They’re too close! I can’t hit them!”

The Kreelans swarmed past her tank and the defensive positions of the infantry, ignoring them completely as they headed straight toward the first assault boat.

“Jesus, they’re going right for the first boat!” Coyle cried as she spun the gatling gun around. She watched in horror as the wave of Kreelans reached the ship. The loadmasters had gotten everyone aboard and had closed the side personnel doors. Now they were frantically trying to bring up the rear ramp, which took nearly twenty seconds to close.

It was halfway shut when the Kreelans got there, and Coyle watched in horrified wonder as the lead warriors suddenly turned into acrobats, with a pair of warriors instantly stooping down to act as a jumping platform for a third. They did it smoothly, as if they practiced such a move all the time. Several groups did this, and half a dozen warriors were vaulted over the top of the closing ramp to disappear inside.

Other warriors, again propelled by their sisters, tried to climb up the hull, using their talons to gain purchase in the metal. All of them failed except for one, a smaller warrior who steadily climbed all the way to the cockpit window and began to batter away at the clearsteel with a long dagger. Coyle had no idea if she’d be able to get through, but she wouldn’t have traded positions with the pilots for anything. She’d already had more than her fair share of close encounters.

Around her the legionnaires and infantry from her regiment fired at the enemy, but many of them were now on the far side of the assault boat, protected by its hull.

Coyle decided that there was no point in just sticking around. She felt sorry for the poor slobs in the first boat who were no doubt being cut to ribbons, since most of the fools had no weapons, but she’d take whatever advantage she could. “
Run for it!
” she screamed over the loudspeakers. “Get to the other boat! Mannie, move toward the boat, but don’t run anybody over!”

The squads of her ad-hoc command leaped from their positions and dashed for the second boat, which had already closed the rear ramp and was spooling up its engines. The loadmasters were closing the personnel doors, the ladder already retracting from the ground. 

“Don’t leave us, you fuckers!” Coyle shouted at them as she blasted a few more Kreelans with her gatling gun. In her mind she could hear Lieutenant Krumholtz’s voice, begging the same of her. She brutally shoved the thought to the back of her mind.

Suddenly Mills was at the boat. The big legionnaire jumped up and caught the bottom rung of the ladder as it retracted, then managed to reach up and grab the loadmaster’s ankle as the ladder slid into the hull. The loadmaster tried to shake him off until another legionnaire leaped up and grabbed onto Mills’ legs, their combined weight pulling the loadmaster halfway out of the boat. 

“Take us right up to the hatch, Mannie!” Coyle ordered her driver.

“Shit, look!” Yuri cried.

The other boat, carrying the bastard captain and his gaggle of survivors, was taking off, but only made it a few meters into the air before it began to wobble. The Kreelans on the ground surrounding it ran toward the forest, trying to avoid the heat of the hover engines. Coyle thought for a moment that the pilots were maneuvering intentionally to kill the enemy, until the boat yawed drunkenly and she could see the small cockpit above the forward clamshell doors. The Kreelan who had been there had fallen off, but the inside of the windshield was spattered with blood. Then one of the personnel hatches opened and people started flinging themselves out. The boat wasn’t very high yet, but it was certainly high enough that jumping wasn’t an option. The bodies hit the unyielding ground and lay still.

The boat hit the trees and paused for just a moment, almost as if it might gently rebound to drift back over the LZ. Then it suddenly tipped over and crashed to the ground, its lift and drive engines still roaring, setting the forest on fire.

Mannie swiveled
Chiquita
around and brought her rear engine deck right under the personnel hatch of the second boat where Mills and the other legionnaire still dangled. The legionnaire released his grip and rolled to the ground, dashing out of the tank’s way, as Mills flailed his feet, finally gaining purchase on the vehicle’s rear deck. Then he hauled the loadmaster out of the boat and hammered him once in the face with an already bloodied fist. The man crumpled to the hot armor plate, holding both hands to his face to stem the blood from his shattered nose before Mills grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him off the tank. Then Mills ordered two other legionnaires, weapons at the ready, up into the boat. 

Coyle couldn’t hear what he said to them over the growing roar of the boat’s lift engines: the pilots were trying to take off, the loadmaster and the rest of them be damned. She could see it start to rise, the landing struts extending as the boat’s lift engines went to full power.

Suddenly the boat stopped going up, then settled back down. Coyle looked at Mills, who grinned and put his index finger to his temple, his thumb raised in the air to mime a pistol. 

“Get aboard!” she shouted through the loudspeakers at the others, who were now clustered around
Chiquita
. 

The first ones up were the two injured colonels, who were handed up as carefully as was possible in such a ludicrous situation, followed quickly by the rest of the injured. 

Mills kept order on the back deck of the tank when it came time for everyone else to board the boat, making sure nobody pushed or shoved to try and get aboard ahead of someone else. The couple who tried that were tossed off the tank to wait their turn at the end of the line. 

“Mannie, Yuri,” she said, “up and out. Get in the boat!”

“We’re not leaving you,” Yuri said stubbornly. Mannie said nothing, but he didn’t open his hatch to get out.

“Goddammit, get out of the tank!” she yelled at them. “You can’t do anything else here.”

“Fuck off, Coyle,” Yuri told her, turning around as she dropped back into the turret. Looking her in the eyes, he told her, “We’ve come this far together. When you’re ready to leave, we’ll go with you. Not before.”

She didn’t know whether to punch him or kiss him. In the end she settled for saying, “You’re both dumb fucks, you know that? But I’m glad you’re here.”

Looking back out the cupola, she saw that Mills had almost everyone aboard and was gesturing at her to come. “Okay, you idiots, I think it’s our turn to get on the bus. Let’s-”

Suddenly the huge warrior was simply
there
, right on the tank’s engine deck next to Mills, right in front of the open hatch to the assault boat.

His eyes wide with disbelief, Mills lunged at her, trying to knock her off the tank. She did something - Coyle wasn’t sure what, because it happened so fast her eyes couldn’t follow it - and Mills was down on the deck, lying very still.

“No!” Coyle screamed, as a legionnaire standing in the boat’s hatchway fired a full magazine from his rifle into the alien apparition. The rounds simply passed through her to ricochet off the tank’s armor. 

Baring her fangs, the alien reached up with one arm and plucked the legionnaire who had fired on her from the boat, sinking her talons into his chest before hurling his body to the ground. Then she did something even more unexpected: she picked up Mills like a huge rag doll and handed him up to the disbelieving soldiers crowded into the hatchway.

Coyle didn’t want to believe that she had seen the legionnaire’s bullets pass right through the big warrior, and was tempted to try and blow her away with the gatling gun. But she would’ve hit the boat, and that wouldn’t do. Not after all this.

The warrior stood there, looking at her, then pointed past the front of the tank. A lone warrior stood there, waiting. Coyle recognized her as the leader of the group that had been hunting
Chiquita
during the regiment’s escape from the city.

With a sinking feeling, Coyle suddenly understood. “Yuri, Mannie,” she said in a brittle voice, “get out of the tank and get on the boat. Now.”

“But-”

“
Now
, boys,” she told them. “There’s no more time.” With that, she took her helmet off and dropped it on the ground beside the tank. She wouldn’t need it anymore.

Yuri and Mannie opened their hatches uncertainly, then climbed out on top of the tank. Seeing the hulking warrior at the rear, next to the hatch to the boat, they stopped.

“It’s okay,” Coyle shouted. “Ignore her. Get in the damned boat.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine,” she lied.

She almost had a good laugh at the looks on their faces as they sidestepped past the warrior, who studiously ignored them, her interest focused only on Coyle.

“Goodbye, guys,” she whispered into the roar of the boat’s idling lift engines as her crew climbed into the boat. Mills looked out at her from the hatch, and she nodded to him. She hadn’t believed his tale before, about dueling with the big warrior, but she did now. He nodded back, his face grim, before he hit the button to close the hatch.

The last face she saw as the hatch slid shut was that of the reporter woman, Steph, whose cheeks were wet with tears. Coyle raised her hand in farewell.

With a sigh of resignation, she climbed down from the tank as the boat’s lift engines spooled up again, sending up a storm of dust and debris. After a few seconds the landing struts parted company with the ground, and the ship began to climb quickly. She watched it go, flying low over the burning forest in the direction it had come. The pilots weren’t taking any chances against Kreelan air defense weapons.
Good luck
, she thought.

Then she turned to face the warrior who apparently wanted her head for a prize. It was a small enough price to pay for the safety of the others, Coyle thought. 

As the big warrior looked on, Coyle’s opponent approached and handed Coyle a sword. Coyle looked at it, having to admire the beauty of the craftsmanship and thinking that the Kreelans could get rich by making jewelry if they could only get over their urge to kill everyone in sight.

With a shrug, she held the sword up in a salute, whipping it up so the grip was a hand’s breadth from her chin, the sword’s tip high in the air, then lowering it to her right side, pointing it off at a forty-five degree angle at the ground. It was parade-ground perfect, and she knew that Colonel Sparks would have been proud.

Holding the sword at the ready, her attention focused on the Kreelan as the warrior moved forward into the attack, Coyle never felt the ten centimeter-long sliver of hull plating that killed her as the first assault boat finally exploded, scouring the landing zone with flame and metal debris.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“We’re in range, sir,” Bogdanova said as the tactical display showed the range ring for the pulse cannon intersect the Kreelan ships that were gaining on the Terran and Alliance carriers. 

“Chief,” Sato called to Chief DeFusco in engineering, “I’m going to bring up the pulse cannon.”

“Go ahead, skipper,” she said. “The damn thing should fire. The only thing I’m really worried about is the structural damage we’ve taken. Running the ship at flank speed is starting to stress what’s left of the keel ahead of the forward engineering spaces. I’ve checked the alignment of the central conduit where the pulse cannon is mounted, and it looks okay for now. But I can’t guarantee that it’ll hold when we start maneuvering.”

“I’ll keep it in mind, chief,” Sato told her. Then, to the rest of the bridge crew, “Stand by to engage.” They were trailing the enemy ships now, slowly gaining on them as they closed with the carriers.
It’s going to be close
, Sato knew. With no one available to man the tactical station, he had to take care of the weapons himself. “Pulse cannon, target, designate,” he announced. Aligning the targeting pipper of the pulse cannon with one of the enemy ships, the
McClaren
turned slightly to starboard. Unlike the ill-fated Captain Morrison, Sato waited until the ship had steadied and the targeting computer confirmed a hard target lock and that the ship was slaved to the targeting computer. “Firing.”