In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  Grishin, on the other hand, appeared to be what one might expect of a competent colonel in any army, with a very significant exception: of the twenty regiments of the Légion étrangère, he was the only regimental commander not seconded from one of the Alliance armies. One of those exceedingly rare individuals who had worked his way up the ranks from a lowly legionnaire to commander of a combat regiment, Grishin was a veteran of the St. Petersburg war. In fact, he had joined the Legion right after the armistice, and rumor had it that he was one of the few communists who had managed to escape the final destruction of the Red Army. But in the Legion, no one cared. His past, whatever it truly was, was left behind and gone. And if he was good enough to make it through the political battlefield that controlled Legion officer assignments, then maybe he would be a good match for the Kreelans, as well.

  Turning her attention back to the discussion around the map table, she heard Sparks say, “Our biggest problem as I see it is intelligence. We have absolutely no idea what we may be up against, or which direction they’ll be coming from.”

  “Surely, sir,” said Grishin’s adjutant, “they’ll have to come from the south, over here.” Foshan was situated in a forested area, with the western side of the city along the shore of one of Keran’s freshwater seas. On the map, the adjutant indicated a large open area in the forest to the south. “That’s the only decent nearby landing zone that’s not in direct sight of our weapons here. There just aren’t many other choices unless they want to drop right into the city, which...” He shrugged. “That would make no sense to me, but I do not know how they think.”

  “That is the problem,” Grishin sighed. “We have no idea what they might do, what they could do. And what if they do drop directly into the city? Our tanks are made for fighting in the open. In the city they would be very vulnerable without more infantry support. And half of Foshan’s streets are too narrow for our tanks, let alone yours.” The Alliance-made wheeled light tanks that were used by the 1er REC were not terribly dissimilar from vehicles used long in the past, for a very simple reason: the combination of mobility, lightness, and firepower was extremely effective for the types of low-tech opponents the Legion typically faced. The Terran heavy armor units, by contrast, were equipped with vehicles that weighed upward of one hundred metric tons and were marvels of every facet of human engineering. They were incredibly powerful, well-protected, and amazingly fast for something so heavy, but were totally out of their element in close-in street fighting.

  “Yeah,” Sparks agreed grimly. “We’d have to blow half the goddamn city down just to move through it. On the other hand, we’re cavalry: if we have to dismount, every trooper in my regiment’s got a rifle and he knows how to use it.”

  Grishin thought it would be ridiculous to use tank crews as infantry, but as far as he could tell, Sparks wasn’t joking.

  “Mobility has to be the key,” Sparks said, finally. “It’s the only thing we’ve got against so many unknowns. And the first thing I’d recommend,” he went on, “would be to send a company of tanks forward, with some of your men, colonel, as guides, to this nice open patch your adjutant pointed out. That way if our friends do show up there, we can give them a warm welcome.”

  Thinking it over, Grishin nodded. It wouldn’t cost them anything, since they had absolutely no idea what the enemy might do. If the Kreelans did try to land there, one of the 7th Cav’s tank companies could give them a difficult time. “I agree, colonel,” he told him. “I will detach one of my reconnaissance teams to you: they have been out to that area several times and know the route and commanding terrain well.”

  “Outstanding,” Sparks told him. “My tanks will be outside your door here in thirty minutes. You’ll know they’re here when the ground starts shaking.” He held out his hand. “Colonel, it’s been a pleasure, and I’ll definitely be in touch. But I need to get back to get the rest of my regiment squared away.”

  “My pleasure, sir,” Grishin told him, meaning it, as he shook the Terran cavalryman’s hand and they once again exchanged salutes. “We will be standing by.”

  On the brief trip back to the reconnaissance vehicle that had brought them over, Steph walked beside Sparks. The two staff officers who’d accompanied him were walking behind, already setting the colonel’s orders into motion over the comm sets built into their uniform harnesses. She saw a look of unusual concern on his face. “Colonel,” she asked quietly, “may I ask what you’re thinking?”

  He glanced over at her. “On or off the record?” he asked sharply.

  That took her by surprise. One of the whole points of having journalists embedded with the forward units was that everything was “on the record” unless it might compromise the safety of friendly troops.

  “Okay, colonel,” she said guardedly as they reached the vehicle and she turned to face him. “Let’s start with off the record.”

  Taking a look around them, with the city behind and the dense forest in front that led to the hills protecting the possible landing zone, he told her, “Unless I’m badly mistaken or the enemy really disappoints me, we may be in for the biggest defeat since Custer got his ass handed to him at the Little Big Horn.”

  “What?” Steph blurted. Sparks’s comment was totally out of place from what she’d understood of his conversation with Grishin. “Why?”

  “Listen, Miss Guillaume,” he told her, beckoning her to the front of the vehicle and away from the droning of his staff officers as they continued issuing orders, “this is probably the first battle in modern history where at least one side - that would be us - knows virtually nothing about the enemy. Nothing. We don’t know jack about their weapons, tactics, motivations, objectives: zippo. For Christ’s sake, we don’t even know what they look like aside from what that young boy Sato could tell us. And if you don’t understand what your opponent wants, it’s pretty damned hard to keep him, or her, in this case, I suppose, from getting it. And because we don’t understand them, we can’t take the initiative and force the battle on our terms: we can only make assumptions about what they want and try to prepare for it, react to what they do. But all our assumptions could be wrong. For all I know they might just start dropping nukes on the cities here and be done with it. Or what if they use a biological weapon? For the love of God, they attacked the French ships with boarding parties, just like Sato said they did to the Aurora. Who the devil would expect such a thing in this day and age? And the French paid the price for it from the reports I saw on the way down: they lost over a dozen ships just to that. And the enemy could do something as unexpected here that will throw us totally off-balance. We just don’t know. And that just bothers the hell out of me.” He dug his heel in the ground in a sign of frustration. “So we’re all just guinea pigs right now, I guess,” he sighed. “We just have to wait for them to show up at the party and take the lead.”

  Steph couldn’t say that what Sparks said made her happy, but she understood his point well enough. “Well,” she prompted, “how about what you think on the record?”

  He looked at her, his blue eyes bright and his mouth set in a hard line. “On the record, if those alien witches come down here looking for trouble, the 7th Cav will be damned happy to oblige them.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Having bled the humans in low orbit to her content, Tesh-Dar withdrew the remainder of her ships to the larger formation in orbit near the planet’s moons. In part it was to give some rest to her crews; in part it was to see what the humans would do. Taking into account the losses each side had suffered, plus the recently arrived human ships, the two fleets had rough parity numerically. She was curious to see if the humans would try and take the initiative and attack her formation. Thus far, they had been content to consolidate their hold of lower orbit space and cover the vulnerable troop transports as they finally finished disgorging their cargoes of warriors and war machines. Tesh-Dar made no effort to intercept the huge ships as they broke from orbit for their jump points: killing them would offer no chall
enge. Her main interest now lay in the troops they had sent down to the surface.

  In the meantime, she had sent some of her smaller warships to recover as many warriors as possible from the hulks adrift in the system, both from Imperial ships that had been destroyed and from human ships her warriors had boarded. Only two of the recovery ships had been molested when they probed overly close to the human formation, but they had escaped easily enough. She was happily surprised to see that so many of her warriors, particularly those who had boarded the human ships, had survived. She was especially relieved to see that Li’ara-Zhurah remained alive. A blood daughter of the Empress, she was a fine warrior who had well-proven her honor this day. Tesh-Dar had known Li’ara-Zhurah since she had arrived from the nursery world to enter training at Tesh-Dar’s kazha, the school of the Way that focused on the teachings of the Desh-Ka. She had fought well against what was clearly a set of fine opponents on the human ship she had boarded. Tesh-Dar had been most pleased.

  “My priestess,” Li’ara-Zhurah asked, flexing her arm where the healers had repaired the bullet wound in her arm, “I would request the honor of the first wave to attack the surface.”

  Tesh-Dar turned to look at her. “Child, have you not had enough this day?” she asked gently. While she wanted to give her warriors every possible chance to prove themselves and bring honor to the Empress, she did not want to waste them needlessly. Despite the power of the Bloodsong and the primal need to fight that was ingrained in her people, she knew quite well the physical toll that combat exacted. And what Li’ara-Zhurah had survived this day had been brutal, even by Kreelan standards.

  The younger warrior averted her eyes. “My apologies, priestess,” she whispered, her voice quivering. “But my blood burns now as never before, even during the Challenge in the arena. I cannot see or think beyond it. It consumes me.”

  Tesh-Dar understood quite well. The Bloodsong, the spiritual bond that tied their race together and to the Empress, was normally like the sound of the sea washing upon the shore, a ceaseless background murmuring that every one of Her Children sensed since birth. In times of heightened passion, particularly during personal combat in the arena during one of the many Challenges that the warriors faced in life, the Bloodsong burned like holy fire. It could be harnessed and channelled by some, as if it were a source of spiritual adrenaline. To those like Tesh-Dar, who had a vastly greater understanding, the Bloodsong was far more: it was a spiritual river that bound the living even unto the spirits of the dead. It was through the Bloodsong that those such as she could even sense the Ancient Ones, the warriors of the spirit who had passed from life. For they, too, were bound to the Empress and Her will.

  But this feeling of which Li’ara-Zhurah spoke was something more. It was the intensity of so many warriors engaged in life-and-death struggles in such a short time, triggering an emotional tidal wave surging through the Bloodsong that had begun to overwhelm some of the younger warriors. Not just here, but throughout the Empire, for the Bloodsong was universal. The effect of the emotional surge on Tesh-Dar had been profound, but as a priestess gifted with powers that even most of her disciples would not understand, she was easily able to control it. The younger ones would adapt in time, as well, for this war would likely go on for many cycles, but they would need help now that only the senior priestesses and clawless mistresses could provide. The healers who had studied the Books of Time recounting earlier encounters with other sentient species had told Tesh-Dar and the other priestesses that this would likely happen, and had prepared them to deal with it.

  “Come to me, child,” Tesh-Dar said gently as she stood up from her command chair. “Do not kneel,” she said as Li’ara-Zhurah made to kneel down before her. “Stand. Try as best you can to clear your mind.”

  “I...cannot, my priestess,” she said softly, her eyes fixed on the deck at her feet. “My thoughts tumble as if caught in a great storm, beyond my control.”

  “I understand,” Tesh-Dar told her as she brought her hands up to rest on either side of Li’ara-Zhurah’s face. The young warrior sighed at her touch, her body shivering involuntarily. Tesh-Dar closed her eyes and focused her concentration on the young woman’s spirit, seeing it as a ghostly image, glowing brightly in her mind. Her spirit appeared to be caught in the center of a storm that made it flutter like a pennant snapping in a stiff wind. With the power of her own will, using her control of the Bloodsong, Tesh-Dar forced the storm to quiet, to be still. Her ears heard a shuddering sigh from Li’ara-Zhurah’s lips, and her arms felt the caress of the young warrior’s hands as the two of them stood locked in a spiritual embrace for but a moment that itself was timeless.

  Looking deeper still into the young warrior’s spirit in that infinite moment, Tesh-Dar discovered another reason for Li’ara-Zhurah’s spiritual confusion: her time for breeding would again soon be upon her. Among their race, the need to mate was far more than a physiological condition, for it had its roots in an ancient curse of the spirit. As decreed by the First Empress many generations before, the clawless ones and those warriors with black talons had to mate every great cycle of the Empress Moon or they would die in terrible agony. Those like Tesh-Dar, who were born sterile, could only stand as silent witnesses to the continuity of their species, at least for the few centuries they had left. A part of Tesh-Dar deeply lamented that she could never bear children. But another part secretly rejoiced, for the act of consummation was not a pleasant affair: the males of their species, cursed along with the females by the First Empress so very long ago, now only existed as mindless tools for mating. And having done so once, they died in great pain, without even understanding what was happening to them, or why.

  Pushing away those melancholy thoughts, she brought herself back to the pleasant warmth of the spiritual embrace she shared with Li’ara-Zhurah, letting it wash away the sense of despair that had momentarily taken hold of her heart.

  And then it was done. Taking in a deep breath, Tesh-Dar opened her eyes and lowered her hands from the young woman’s face, as Li’ara-Zhurah reluctantly released her light grip on Tesh-Dar’s arms. The young warrior stood still for another moment, as if meditating, before opening her eyes. She met Tesh-Dar’s gaze for a few beats of her heart, then lowered them in reverence.

  “Thank you, my priestess,” Li’ara-Zhurah breathed, the churning storm in her soul now stilled, Tesh-Dar’s power echoing through her veins like the ripples of a great stone cast into a shallow pond.

  “It is Her will,” Tesh-Dar told her gently. “Go now. Eat and rest to restore your body. Then I will grant your wish.” Turning to the display that showed the human deployments on the surface of the planet, at least what could be gleaned from the sensors of her ships in high orbit, she said, “You will accompany me in the attack on the planet.”

  * * *

  Tiernan had no idea why the Kreelans had offered the humans a respite, their fleet now brooding in high orbit, but he and Lefevre had tried to put it to good use. The Terran fleet’s Marines had been redistributed to provide some protection for the Alliance ships, and the Marines themselves had sorted out how to get at least a fire team aboard every single French ship, with a short platoon on each of the surviving cruisers. While Tiernan hesitated to use the example, the Terran Marines had been welcomed aboard the French ships like American troops must have been when they helped liberate France herself during the Second World War.

  After dropping off the Marines, the cutters began to search through the scattered debris and hulks looking for any survivors. They found a few from some of the destroyed Alliance ships, but not very many.

  The senior engineers of the two fleets had been working non-stop on trying to integrate the different data-link systems since the low-orbit battle had been decided. But that was a problem that could only be solved by the system designers working together: there were too many safeguards and security measures built into each system to allow any field expedient integration measures. So the admirals and captains had to rely on basic
voice and video communications to relay orders and information to one another. It was a dangerous way to handle things in modern space combat, where the tactical situation could change completely in a matter of seconds, but they had no other choice.

  On the ground, things were much the same. Tiernan had just spoken to General Ray, who reported that his divisions had deployed without incident (aside from the diplomatic démarche, which the ambassador was handling planetside), and were taking up defensive positions as best they could, given that they had no idea from where or how the Kreelans might attack. The Legion troops had been very accommodating, even before Lefevre issued their Général de division very explicit orders about coordinating with the Terrans.

  As with their naval counterparts, the ground forces had been completely frustrated in trying to get the data-link systems to talk to one another. This was perhaps even more critical for the ground units because the Terran forces had heavy artillery and aerospace defense weapons that could be used to help support the neighboring Legion regiments, which themselves had few such weapons. Without effective integration of their combat data networks to share intelligence and targeting information, however, the overall effectiveness of employing the Terran heavy weapons outside of their own formations was going to be significantly degraded.