“You stunned your own husband.”
“Sure did.” Then she whispered behind her hand. “And I nailed him a couple of extra times for good measure while he was still wiggling. Just to pay him back for stunning me the same way last month.”
“You and your husband are from the two rival factions?”
Jerena shrugged. “It makes it very convenient to always have members of both factions present. The wheels of government adjust, and barely stop turning.” Jerena whispered behind her hand again. “And between us gals, the make-up sex after all of that stunning is out of this world. I call that a win-win!”
Naero had to ask. “Does this same process go on on all of your worlds?”
“Oh, don’t worry. The blues now control 189 of our 256 worlds!”
Naero smirked. “I don’t think that is my only concern.”
She strongly suggested to the Sa’shom that they stabilize their political system slightly more, especially with the threat of an alien invasion that they had yet been unable to slow down or stop.
Even Prime Minister Jerena of Zekad-1 admitted that might be a very wise course of action.
Naero kept noticing the faces of their hosts and the general tittering that was going around. “Prime Minister, I’m sorry that your people find the scent of my people…so unpleasant and intrusive. Perhaps were can find some way to mask or reduce that effect.”
Jerena smiled and offered Naero he hand again. “I’m so glad you’ve addressed that. Our people will work with yours and we’ll see what we can come up with. Sa’shom sensory organs for smell are incredibly sensitive. I’m sorry that this is an issue.”
“What do we smell like to you?” Naero asked.
Jerena’s ever-present smile faltered a bit. “I’d rather not say. It’s pretty foul. But we’re allies now. We’ll work toward a solution.”
An aide brought in what appeared to be a large bottle of Sa’shom perfume or cologne.
“Would you mind if we sprayed you and your party with this scent blocker?”
Naero laughed. “How can we refuse? Spray away.” Even her own sensitive nose could barely detect anything when they did so.
The aide with the perfume hosed down Khai pretty good with the stuff.
After that slight humiliation, the rest of the negotiations went remarkably smooth and without obstruction, although the Sa’shom had a penchant for talking over every little detail. Naero considered them very legalistic.
After they returned to Naero’s Flagship, it was very late, and she felt exhausted once more. She allowed Khai to carry her back to their quarters at a certain point. She liked being in his arms.
“Should I retire to the Admiral’s bathroom?” Ra asked.
“No, Ra,” Naero said. “I’m sorry. That won’t be necessary. I just want to sleep, if that’s all right, Khai?”
“I’m a bit worn out by diplomacy, myself, N. A snuggle fest it is then. I’ll probably zonk out before you do.”
Naero grinned. “Alas, the romance is dead,” she said with a laugh.
Khai kissed her, chuckling. “Not dead. Just taking a break.”
“I understand…the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak, as they say.”
“Who was it who said that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Like all of that Old Earth stuff, someone got around to saying stuff like that at some point.”
Naero sighed and they settled in together. “We still have to solidify the final agreements with the Amavar and the Lish. I can’t wait to meet S’krin’s people, although she sent me a cryptic message both to not mention her by name, and to beware somewhat. That her people could be, as she put it–‘a bit much.’”
“Hmmm…” Khai muttered.
“They can’t be any worse than the rest. Khai. Khai?”
Her amazing paramour was already asleep, true to his word.
Naero tried to drift off.
Finally she sighed and whispered out loud to no one in particular. “I hope she’s all right. We must find them. I just hope they’re all right.”
Time and time again their ruthless enemies had proven that they were capable of anything, no matter how twisted or vile.
20
Naero and her fleets were forced to heed another distress call, this time on a Sa’shom world called Kudosha-5, that came under heavy attack by the enemy. As allies with the snake people now, it would have not been good form to refuse and simply keep going.
She assessed the situation as they went in and called for back up from Admiral Yamamoto Toshio, assigned as her reserves at that time. Naero had great admiration for her friend Toshi, the oldest son of one of the Spacer High Admirals, who was clearly following in his father’s traditions.
A disciplined, cultured warrior poet, who like Naero herself, actually wrote poetry and was a fine painter. He was also a deadly swordsman, as he had proven time and time again during the wars, and at several duels and incidents with non-Spacers who made the mistake of drawing steel or energy blades against him.
Naero always felt safe with Toshi on her side. They had met and become good friends ever since the Annexation War, where both of them had proven themselves to be amazing leaders and tacticians.
As for their current mission, the enemy picked their targets well, going after worlds that were vulnerable and unprepared for war.
They did not simply lay siege to Kudosha-5, but they also attacked the next nearest world over, Sasson-2, that could have normally sent aid to the other system.
Kudosha-5 was a warm, but not hot world, with smaller temperate zones and lots of savannah, prairie, and grasslands. The Sa’shom also had a fondness for swamps and marshes. A thin band of very arid desert surrounded the equator.
With any possible help from Sasson-2 cut off, the Kudoshans were on their own, against a very determined invader. The enemy had the planet completely blockaded by almost two dozen fleets that wiped out anything the planet had to send up against them.
Then the ground attacks struck the hapless cities. The Spacers monitored the enemy chatter and the grim reality that evolved on the ground.
The enemy sent in shock troops of mindless numbers of captured or cloned Lish and reprogrammed Mechans. Then came waves of Kodarian suicide bombers of all ages, drones loaded with explosives, programmed to run in and detonate. The foe even sent in other Sa’shom with control collars around their necks, forced to kill their own kind. The collars exploded if they were removed.
While the defenders were pinned down dealing with the shock troops, the Ejjai and the Dakkur would outflank the Sa’shom and cut them down from the side or behind.
Dakkur liked eating sentient heads. Again and again, they argued with the Ejjai, commanding them to save them the heads, before flinging the bodies into the meatships.
The Ejjai protested, because that was both time consuming and it killed their captives outright. One of the slasher’s favorite entertainments was to feed helpless civies into the spinning blades, hooks, and choppers of the robotic meat processing ships to see the bodies ripped apart.
Many Ejjai had to be killed, and their heads harvested, before they were forced by their masters to comply.
Kudosha-5 had a population that was less than one billion, and the small, ill-equipped military forces they did have were quickly worn down, leaving only hasty militia forces to defend the gigacities with whatever weapons they could find. Large waves of refugees and the helpless quickly complicated everything and were caught in the open.
Things turned grim very quickly.
Naero rendezvoused with Admiral Toshi and several Sa’shom fleets, who though competent, would not possibly stand a chance against the twenty-three enemy fleets massed around Kudosha-5. She commended them for their gallantry for being willing to go in on their own, if need be. She asked them if they would accept the honor of fighting beside and with her own ships. They accepted.
Even worse news reached them. Several more enemy fleets joined those around Kudosha-5, and th
e enemy began broadcasting the atrocities to all of the other Sa’shom worlds, making it clear that they were all next.
Naero despised such terrible displays. She ordered those transmissions jammed as soon as the counterattack commenced.
Although outnumbered, Naero still devised a very daring plan of attack. Toshi disagreed with her on several elements, and proposed ten different attack vectors that were both more flexible, and got them in closer to the enemy much faster.
“Naero, our rate of fire is far superior to that of the enemy, currently,” he said. “The sooner we can close with them, if we bunch up their numbers and hem them in, we will devastate them in short order.”
Naero smiled at her good friend, as they both folded their arms side by side and studied the holo arrays.
“Look at their poor grouping and lackluster formations,” Toshi continued. “They’re too bunched up. Too close to the planet. They haven’t left themselves sufficient room to shift their naval forces for battle.”
Naero nodded. “I see that, Toshi. But it’s almost as if they’re begging us to attack them. What if this is another of their traps, trying to draw us in? They could jump in and have us cold. I’m just trying to be cautious.”
“We have seen this incompetence of the enemy many times before,” Toshi argued. “There are always risks. We have a good, solid plan of attack. I say it is worth the risk. If they spring a trap on us, we call in more of our ships and fight our way out. But they do not have the stomach to fight us face to face. We will drive right down their throats and blast out their burning entrails.”
Naero snickered. “Well, when you say it like that, it just sets my heart all a twitter, Toshi.” They both laughed together.
“This is your show, Toshi. I’m going to help out on the ground. You run things up in the black.”
They were on top of the enemy fleets and firing before the foe could react of form up.
Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship, The Musashi, formed an attack wedge with his other four bigs, The Nagato, The Shinano, The Haruna, and the Kirishima on his flanks, leading Fleet 100, and Fleets 99 through 90 on optimized attack vectors around them.
They uncloaked at attack speed and opened fire.
Shields and entire warships melted before a withering wall of hyper fire from the main guns of the Spacer battleships.
Toshi’s assault wedge gutted the packed arc of the enemy fleets like a gigantic, flaming spear of death. He drove through the burning hulks of the enemy and concentrated the fire of his fleets on target after target.
Soon they were surrounded by burning, exploding enemy warships.
Naero and her supporting forces came in the very next moment, as the routed enemy tried to regroup or simply flee, in any direction available. She and her forces closed the legs of their spider formations and effectively cut off and trapped the foe.
The enemy could still fight to the last, but within the hour, those fleets would be annihilated. The Spacers went on the hunt, but pulled back slightly, allowing the Sa’shom fleets with them to take the lead.
When Naero, Khai, Ra, and Tarim joined a Marine armored regiment on the surface, there was still heavy fighting around and in some of the gigacities. They were positioned around the gigacity of Galim, where millions of refugees had fled into the cover of the high grasslands all around.
But a ring of enemy gravtanks and shocktroops was closing in, burning and driving all before them toward the eventual center kill zone. They cut down and killed anything living.
From the huge black circles of scorched earth and corpses visible from the air, the enemy had repeated this tactic several times around Galim.
Three enemy meatships were already harvesting the corpses left on the ground.
“I want those meatships blown completely to hell, as soon as we attack,” Naero commanded.
The enemy swept in, continuing to gun down droves of civilians running before their guns.
The Spacer Marines jumped straight down on them hard, face to face, shooting them down, ramming into them hard, and knifing them up close to tear out their guts and spines.
The meatships went up in flames as the enemy advance stopped cold. They even piled into each other, the halt was so abrupt.
Then the Marine meks and gravtanks swirled in counter-clockwise at top speed, pouring deadly, concentrate fire into the packed enemy ranks.
A full unit of Marine meks in battle was a stirring sight to behold: guns blazing, tearing through the enemy lines, and stomping and hurling the enemy in several directions.
As they passed on, more Marine strike teams descended on gravwings, and beat down any of the enemy who had enough sense to try to get away.
Then it was matter of enveloping pockets and arcs of the enemy ring of death and wiping them out. Khai simply chose to go one way, and Ra the other, buzzing through the enemy lines, destroying as they went. Tarim, as always, stayed with Naero to cover her back.
Naero saw a kill team of Dakkur, led by a Dakkur champion begin to transform from the possession wyrms, glowing in the night. They tore into the civilians and began fighting with the Marine gravtanks also.
“Tarim, follow me in,” she said.
They fell upon the possessed Dakkur champion. Naero used her blades to slice him into pieces until he exploded.
She transported her and Tarim up into the air above the evolving battle, she opened her third eye and ensnared the thirty Dakkur drones in tendrils and snakes of Cosmic force.
Tarim shredded several Ejjai who tried to spring at them from behind.
“Stand back from the possessed!” Naero warned. Then she detonated all thirty at once, leaving the same number of blackened craters in the ground.
The Spacers took on the enemy wherever they could be found that night and rammed them into the earth dead and bloody, or blasted them to dust.
By dawn, the vast majority of the enemy had been exterminated, and the remnants were being hunted down.
In the aftermath there were countless wounded and dying locals.
Admiral Toshi led a strike force to Sasson-2 and drove off the attackers there with great loss to the enemy. Help finally came to Kudosha-5 from their own people. Naero brought in clouds of medical fixers and other fixers, to help with all of the wounded and the massive damage that seemed to be everywhere.
It was estimated that one fifth of the total population had been killed.
Naero and her people were still helping collect the wounded and the survivors. They marked the dead for later collection. The point now was to save the living.
But she came across the terrible sight of a young Sa’shom girl of about five, with long jet black hair and brown eyes, sobbing and pulling at her dead mother, calling and shrieking to her. Trying to get her mother to get back up.
To Naero who had lost her own mother, and did not know where her own child was, it was particularly heartrending.
She tried to put her hands on the child to comfort her. “Come away, little one. Your mother is gone. I’m sorry.”
The small sobbing child shrieked and went into a rage, resisting Naero with a desperate strength, trying to stay with her mother. “No, no! She just fell down. She fell on me when the shooting started again.”
“She’s gone, little one. I’m sorry. She gave her life protecting you with her own body. You must live on for her sake, and remember how brave she was, and how much she loved you. She wanted you to live, even if she could not.”
The shattered child went limp in Naero’s hands. Naero held the little one close and stroked her long hair. She was a pretty little thing. Instinctively, the small child clung to Naero’s warmth, regressed to putting a thumb in her mouth, and curled her black and green scaled tail around Naero’s right arm for comfort and security.
“What is your name, little one. You are very beautiful.”
“Zida,” the child told her, and then went back to sucking her thumb, and closed her eyes tight.
Another Dakkur champion spra
ng up out of the ground right in front of Naero.
Before anyone else could react, Naero sent out three concussive beams from her eyes, sliced the Dakkur down its length, and then blew it up, shielding everyone behind her against the force of the blast.
No further harm was going to come to this child while Naero protected her.
Damn the enemy. In her young life, Naero had seen too many scenes such as this play out, with all of their senseless loss and cruelty.
Little Zida was sleeping when Naero handed her off to the Sa’shom aid workers. They took the child from her with great tenderness, and gave her and her people many thanks. “Praise you,” one of the nurses said to her. “You are the great leader of the Spacers, many say. Admiral Naero? It is said that you are a legend even among you fierce kind, and that you fight with the strength of a thousand warriors.”
“We are allies of the Sa’shom,” Naero said. “We were happy to help out here. Together, we shall put an end to our enemies and the terror they inflict upon your worlds.”
The nurse smiled. “That is well. Pardon, great Admiral. But the rumors also say that you are a healer, as well. We have many wounded who could use your skill.”
Naero sighed. “My skill in healing is only about average,” she said. “And I must return to my ships soon, to make sure these worlds are safe once more. I’m sorry.”
The nurse bowed, but placed a gentle hand on Naero’s arm. “I understand, but please, come with me. It will only take a little of your time. Please help us.”
Naero and her people followed out behind the makeshift hospital tent. Under emergency lights that had been set up, the grasslands were covered with dead, dying, and wounded on strips of cloth and emergency foil.
They were everywhere.
The nurse brought her to where most of the children were being kept.
There must have been hundreds, with more being carried in each second.
“Please,” the nurse said. “If you can even help a few of them, we would be eternally grateful.”
Naero sighed very deeply.
If only she had Shalaen with her.
Naero's War: The Citation Series 3: Naero's Trial Page 17
