In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  * * *

  While more and more skirmishes broke out in the passageways of Victorieuse, Lefevre was desperately trying to extricate the fleet from what could easily turn into a colossal disaster. As the close-in slugging match with the Kreelan ships here in lower orbit intensified, Lefevre recalled the two squadrons that were streaming around the planet to engage the larger Kreelan force in high orbit. He ordered the remaining two squadrons, those that had the misfortune of being closest to the larger Kreelan group, to pull back. His goal was to try and achieve sufficient local superiority that he could smash the smaller Kreelan group Victorieuse and her sisters were fighting before facing off against the larger group of Kreelan ships.

  Destroying the larger group or forcing them to withdraw, he knew, was little more than wishful thinking. While he had rough parity at the moment with the enemy here in low orbit, they had at least fifty more ships in the larger group near the moons than he had in his entire fleet. It appeared that the Kreelans were perfectly positioned to destroy the Alliance squadrons that were closest to the larger Kreelan force.

  However, to his shock and surprise, they didn’t. The Kreelans allowed the other Alliance squadrons to retreat back toward Lefevre’s position near the planet. Some Kreelan ships pursued them, but only made harassing attacks, nothing more.

  “What are they doing?” his flag captain asked.

  Lefevre shook his head, completely confused. “I have no idea. Why do they not simply destroy our ships? They have overwhelming superiority.”

  The Victorieuse suddenly rocked with a hit, throwing both men off balance. They should have been in their combat chairs, but Lefevre had perversely always refused to sit in one. More alarms blared, signaling yet more damage to the ship, but Lefevre ignored them. That was Capitaine Monet’s job.

  “Are they simply toying with us?” he wondered aloud.

  * * *

  Tesh-Dar grunted with satisfaction at the humans’ response. Realizing their tactical error, they were now trying to reconsolidate their forces. She would allow them to do as they wished - to a point. But only as it suited her. Much of this first battle was simply to study, to learn. Had this been an enemy that posed a true threat to the Empire, she would have clawed them from the skies in minutes, even with ships of a design as ancient as this.

  But the humans were not a threat. They were an opportunity to glorify the Empress. They would die and this system would be taken into the Empire, yes, but she would allow them to fight on even ground. For the first time in several thousand cycles did the Children of the Empress have a worthy enemy, and she would take her time to blood her warriors properly and let the humans learn, as well. For the more they knew, the better they would fight.

  She ordered that the formation in high orbit detach half its ships to follow the two closest human squadrons back toward the planet, harassing them without making many outright kills. Ships that could be crippled would be boarded, so her warriors could fight the humans face to face. But it was better for her purposes if the human ships were gathered in more closely together. She was sorely tempted to join the young ones in the bloodletting, but the time would soon come when the battle on the planet’s surface would begin. Then she would indulge herself.

  With that in mind, she had one of the warriors working a sensor console - Tesh-Dar was still amazed that their forebears had extended the Empire across the stars with the aid of such primitive devices - show her the progress of the human ships carrying troops to the surface. Clearly not designed for war, the odd assemblage of vessels were surrounded by a host of small shuttles that were equally ill-designed for ferrying troops and equipment quickly. It would take many trips for the small craft to carry all the humans aboard those ships down to the surface. And then it would no doubt take them some time to prepare their defenses.

  It was just as well, Tesh-Dar thought as the guns of her command ship thundered. She was in no hurry.

  * * *

  Sabourin and her team stared at the handful of Kreelan warriors who had gathered in the compartment beyond the improvised airlock, and the Kreelans stared back.

  But only for a moment.

  “Nique ta mere!” Sabourin cursed at the Kreelans as she snatched one of the grenades from her utility pouch, mashed down on the activator and hurled it into the airlock bubble. “Take cover!” she cried before ducking behind the stairs.

  One of her comrades made it to the safety of the stairs with her, but the remaining three never had a chance: three of the Kreelans threw some sort of weapons through the membrane. Like miniature buzz saws, the weapons whirred through the air and caught the three crewmen in mid-stride as they tried to dash out of the way. The weapons cut through the thick fabric of the vacuum suits as if it was made of rice paper, and did the same to the flesh and bone beneath. One crewman clutched at his chest before he fell to the deck; the second, who was hit in the neck, simply collapsed to the floor like a rag doll. Sabourin could see that he had been decapitated, just before his faceplate was covered in blood that still spewed from the carotid artery. The third weapon caught the last crewman in the back, severing his spine just below the shoulder blades. His screams of agony rang from the speakers in her helmet.

  Then the grenade went off, and Sabourin held onto the metal skeleton of the stairs for dear life as the air in the passageway was explosively vented into space. The crewman who had managed to take shelter with her behind the stairs didn’t have a firm hold and suddenly found himself carried out through the hatch into the adjoining compartment by the force of the explosive decompression. He would have been carried out into space except for the artificial gravity, which was still strong enough to hold him to the deck. But his good fortune was short lived as one of the surviving warriors leapt upon him, and they grappled with one another even as two more warriors clambered through the hole in the hull, dropping nimbly to the deck in spite of their bulky armored suits. Then another appeared to join them.

  With tears of hate and anger clouding her eyes, Sabourin threw her second grenade into their midst.

  * * *

  Gritting her teeth in pain, Li’ara-Zhurah leaned against the bulkhead, waiting for a break in the weapons fire coming from the humans around the corner and down the passageway. She and her small band of warriors had already killed over a dozen members of the crew when they had run into this determined - and, for once, well-armed - group of defenders. They were proving a worthy challenge, and beyond the pain of the bullet wound in her left arm, her blood sang in blissful fury. She turned to look at one of her companion warriors, who knelt on the deck behind her, blood running from her mouth: one of the human projectile weapons had hammered against her chest armor and shattered several of her ribs, which in turn had punctured a lung. “You must rest, Ku’ira-Gol,” she counseled the younger warrior. “This is merely the opening battle in a great war. You need not spend yourself in the first of it. Let the healers tend to you once we finish this. A host of humans yet await the attention of your sword and claws.”

  Looking up at Li’ara-Zhurah with eyes that bore the pain not of her body, but of her spirit, Ku’ira-Gol shook her head. “No, my sister,” she said quietly. She had been a late arrival, and happened to discover the hole Li’ara-Zhurah had made in the hull, then followed her and the others here. “You speak with truth and wisdom, but my sword has not yet been blooded. Many combats did I fight in the arena for the honor to be here. I will not spend a moment in the company of a healer until I have spilled the blood of our enemy.”

  Li’ara-Zhurah understood completely. Not just the younger warrior’s words, but the flame of her emotions, the melody of her Bloodsong. Ku’ira-Gol’s answer she had expected, but honor demanded that Li’ara-Zhurah offer counsel as she had. “So has it been-” she whispered.

  “-so shall it forever be,” the others echoed in a simple timeless prayer to the Empress.

  With one last look in Ku’ira-Gol’s silver-flecked eyes, seeing that her face was now serene with the accept
ance of what was soon to be, Li’ara-Zhurah nodded. “May you find a place among the Ancient Ones, my sister.”

  “In Her name,” Ku’ira-Gol whispered just before she leapt out into the passageway to draw the humans’ fire. She rolled nimbly to her feet before leaping into the air, hurling her last shrekka at one of the human animals.

  The passageway was suddenly filled with the staccato roar of assault rifles as they poured fire into her. The bullets from the rifles, able to penetrate the Kreelan’s armor, shattered Ku’ira-Gol’s body even as her shrekka found its mark, severing the head of one of the defenders.

  As Ku’ira-Gol’s lifeless body fell to the deck, Li’ara-Zhurah and the four remaining warriors broke from cover and charged down the passageway, hurling their own shrekkas. They had not thrown them with the intent to kill, but to force the humans down, to give the warriors a few more precious seconds to get close enough to use their swords and claws. Baring their fangs and roaring with fury, they flung themselves into the group of half a dozen humans, blades flashing and claws tearing.

  The humans put up a spirited fight, but it was all too brief. It had been clear to Li’ara-Zhurah from her first encounter with the humans aboard this vessel that even though they appeared to be soulless creatures, many of them had great courage and fighting spirit. But they were ill-trained and poorly equipped to engage properly in battle with Her Children. Perhaps their warriors who fought on the ground would prove more of a challenge. If she managed to survive the battle here in space, she would seek to find out.

  Her sensitive nose filled with the unpleasant coppery scent from the human blood that now covered her like haphazardly splashed paint, she continued to lead the remaining warriors to her ultimate destination: the ship’s bridge.

  * * *

  Alone now, the rest of her team dead, Sabourin was also cut off from the rest of the crew. There was no way she could enter the pressurized sections of the ship from here, for there was no airlock: having destroyed the one the Kreelans had made to the adjoining compartment where they had penetrated the hull, she had cut off her own escape route. Now, she had no choice but to head out through the hole the Kreelans had made in the ship’s hull and try to find another one of their improvised airlocks, or one of the ship’s main airlocks. She would settle for whichever was closer.

  Clamping the shotgun to a utility sticky patch on her suit, she stepped into the compartment filled with the bodies of the Kreelans and the member of her team that she had killed with the grenade. She tried to console herself with the thought that there was no way she could have saved her fellow crewman, but another voice quietly reminded her that she hadn’t even tried. She hadn’t known him very well; she hadn’t known any of the people on her short-lived team, as they had all been sent from different sections of engineering. She had killed him, and now she couldn’t even remember his name. Kicking the mangled bodies of the Kreelans out of the way, she knelt by his lacerated suit for a moment, looking at his face. His expression was oddly peaceful, although his features were distorted from the swelling of his tissues as the fluids tried to turn to vapor in the pure vacuum of the compartment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said dully, squeezing his dead hand gently. Then she let go. There was nothing else to say.

  Turning to the body of one of the warriors, she took the alien’s sword. She had no training in how to use it, but it couldn’t hurt to have such a weapon handy, especially since the shotgun didn’t seem to do much to their armor. She slid the gleaming weapon into its scabbard, having wrenched it from the belt the alien wore, then attached it to another sticky patch on her suit. After a moment’s consideration, she checked the rest of the warrior’s belongings. Most of it she either could not figure out or could not use, but she found a small pouch that, when she squeezed it, suddenly popped out and expanded into one of the portable airlocks. That could be useful, she thought. Finding another warrior who still had hers, Sabourin took it and stuffed it into the utility pouch on her belt. She also found a wound-up strip of taffy-like material, packed together with a small electronic unit in a pouch. It dawned on her that this must be the explosive material that they had used to make the holes in the hull. She had no idea what she might do with it, but since it was small and no inconvenience, she stuffed that in her utility pouch, as well.

  Looking at her suit’s telltales in the head-up display on her visor, Sabourin saw that she only had an hour of air left. She had to find a way back into the pressurized parts of the ship.

  Getting out onto the hull would be a bit tricky, only because the hole the Kreelans had made was in the “ceiling” of this compartment. And since the artificial gravity was still working, she couldn’t just jump. Fortunately, this was one of the ship’s many equipment storage areas, and after about fifteen minutes of grunting and heaving, interrupted frequently by either the vibration of the ship’s kinetics firing or the compartment shuddering as Victorieuse took another hit, she had managed to push together enough pallets and other flotsam to build a platform high enough for her to reach the outside of the hull with her hands.

  It took her a couple of minutes of frenzied scrabbling in the awkward suit, made worse by the shotgun and sword protruding at odd angles, but she finally made it. She rolled over on the outside of the hull, panting at the effort and holding on with a magnetized glove to keep from drifting away. The artificial gravity field actually stopped mid-way through the hull’s thick skin, and it was a queasy sensation as she lifted herself through the hole to have part of her body still sensing gravity and the rest of it sensing weightlessness.

  Looking out, the infinite blackness of space was lit with a cascade of fireworks as ships fired upon one other. While the engagement range for space combat was normally judged in thousands of kilometers, she could see at least two dozen ships - some of them very close aboard, within hundreds of meters - with her naked eye. Most were moving far slower than they normally would, either because of battle damage or just to hold formation with their wounded sisters. She saw a pair of ships, one clearly human, the other not, that had collided at some velocity slow enough that they had not been destroyed outright. She saw small shapes swarming over the human ship, and knew with bitter anguish exactly what they were. More boarders.

  A shadow suddenly fell across her face, something breaking the glare of the system’s star. Glancing to her left, she saw another Kreelan warrior floating through space, drifting directly toward her. With a growl, Sabourin ripped the shotgun from its sticky patch. While the weapon was not exactly optimized for space combat, its designers had at least ensured that the chemical composition of the propellant in the cartridges did not need oxygen to fire. The Kreelan was already reaching for one of the flying weapons attached to the outside of her armored suit, but Sabourin had no intention of letting the alien use it. Bracing the shotgun against the hull, holding it as if she were firing from the hip, Sabourin pulled the trigger.

  The heavy shot caught the Kreelan warrior square in the chest. While the heavy shot didn’t penetrate her armor, it gave proof to Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The hit sent the warrior flying backward into space, tumbling head over heels.

  Shaking with yet another surge of adrenalin, Sabourin managed to get back on her feet, locking the magnetic pads on her boots to the hull. Trying to ignore the distractions of the silent space battle going on around her, she first tried to spot any more Kreelan warriors on the hull or floating nearby. There were none that she could see. For a moment, she stood there, lungs heaving. Her orders had been clear before, if rather broad: repel the enemy and defend the ship. If her team’s experience was any indication, the enemy must be gaining the upper hand, and she wasn’t sure which way to go or what to do.

  “Bridge,” she called as she caught her breath.

  There was a long pause, and she was about to call again when the same communications tech as before answered.

  “Bridge,” the tech said, somewhat b
reathlessly.

  “This is Sabourin. I am outside the hull, roughly forty-five minutes of air remaining.” She paused, not wanting to say what must be said. “I...I have lost the rest of my team. I need orders.”

  “Stand by.”

  The silence that followed was interminable. At one point Sabourin was nearly knocked to her knees by an explosion near the stern of the ship. The stars and the fireflies that were fighting and dying ships wheeled crazily around her before the ship gradually came back under control. But Victorieuse was clearly badly damaged. The ship was still in the fight, but she suffered from a constant starboard yaw and downward pitch that the helmsman must be trying to control with thrusters. That meant the main engines had been very badly damaged, and no doubt the rest of the ship was faring no better. She gritted her teeth in frustration. There must be something more she could do.

  “Sabourin,” the captain’s voice suddenly echoed in her earphones, “you must make for the main starboard airlock and do what you can to hold it against attack. We need to get off what is left of the crew, and the port side is controlled by the enemy.”

  “We are abandoning ship, sir?” she asked, mortified.

  A long pause. “Oui,” he answered heavily. “I was about to inform the amiral when you called. We have no choice.”

  He paused again, as if unsure what to say next. Her heart bled for him: while she did not know him very well personally, he had been a good and fair captain during her time aboard the ship. And to lose Victorieuse - the fleet flagship! - this way must have been horrible.

  “Listen, Sabourin,” he went on quietly, as if he did not want anyone else near him to hear, “aside from the officers’ sidearms, which are useless, you have the only weapon left that can kill these beasts. All the other defense teams are gone. You must hold the starboard airlock. If you do not, the crew will be trapped in the ship and at the mercy of these creatures. We have no way of fighting our way past them.”