In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Thanks, mate.” Mills said quietly, blinking away the wetness from his eyes.

  But Danielson couldn’t hear him. He was gone.

  Mills waited a few minutes, scanning the approaches from town to make sure there were no more Kreelans about. Then he wearily gathered up the remaining rifle magazines from Danielson’s combat gear. As an afterthought, he took his grenades, as well.

  Picking up the sniper rifle, Mills slung it over his shoulder. Then, holding his assault rifle at the ready, he moved out the rear of the barn and followed after the others toward the creek.

  He wasn’t quite halfway there when he heard the sound of gunfire and children screaming.

  * * *

  Valentina waded silently through the water, looking into the forbidding darkness of the woods on the other side of the creek. She stepped slowly onto the soft soil on the opposite bank, taking care that the water in her boots and trousers made no noise.

  After she reached the other side, she moved about ten meters into the trees. She paused for a moment behind one of the larger trees and opened up her senses to her surroundings. Nothing suspicious appeared in the computer-generated image of the night vision optics as she looked around, nor did she hear anything unusual over the hammering of Mills and Danielson firing their weapons. Her nose wasn’t attuned to the unique smells of the plant and animal life on Alger’s World, but she couldn’t pick out anything like the faint musky scent ascribed to the Kreelans.

  It looked clear. And yet...

  The firing at the barn stopped, and she knew that she’d run out of time. If Mills and Danielson survived, they would catch up. The analytic part of her mind told her that she’d probably never see Mills again. Her heart wanted to tear her mind to pieces.

  “No time,” she whispered to herself. Then she whistled, a low, soft sound amazingly similar to one of the species of birds she’d heard the morning before, welcoming the sun.

  Looking back toward the creek, she saw small shadows crossing the water. They stopped and looked back toward the barn as alien screams echoed across the field before a larger shadow, Steph, urged them onward.

  Faster now, the children crossed the creek, and Valentina gestured for them to kneel down behind her. She wanted to gather them all together before they moved farther into the woods and make sure she didn’t lose any of them.

  Seeing that Allison was crossing the creek, followed by Steph, Valentina turned to lead her charges deeper into the woods where they might find a defensible position.

  That was when the warrior with the dead eyes appeared right in front of her, out of thin air.

  Valentina didn’t allow surprise to overcome her. She simply reacted. With barely a conscious thought, she squeezed the trigger on her rifle, whose muzzle was a mere hand’s breadth from the warrior’s armored chest.

  The gun spat rounds at the alien, but the bullets simply fell to the ground in small bubbling pools of molten metal.

  Forcing herself to accept the impossible as fact, Valentina swung the rifle in a brutal butt stroke that would have shattered the jaw of a human opponent.

  The Kreelan warrior danced out the way, barely, and then held out her hand as if she was going to place her palm on Valentina’s chest.

  “Oh!” Valentina gasped as she felt her heart pierced by frozen spikes. To anyone else, the pain would have been unimaginable and instantly debilitating, but few human beings had ever endured pain such as Valentina had and survived. It slowed her down, but didn’t stop her.

  She lunged at the alien, feinting with a lightning-fast open hand strike to her armored chest with her left hand before lashing out with her right elbow at the Kreelan’s head.

  The alien was taken by surprise, apparently convinced that Valentina would go down from the ethereal attack on her heart. The warrior parried the feint and tried to dodge the strike to her head, but didn’t move quite fast enough.

  Valentina grinned savagely through the searing pain in her chest as her elbow smashed against the Kreelan’s temple, knocking her backward.

  But the warrior moved with the force of the blow, pirouetting around to again face Valentina, and the icy grip around Valentina’s heart intensified.

  Despite all that the implants given her by the Terran Intelligence Service when she had become a covert agent could do, she was still a mortal human. Her heart constricted so far now that it was barely beating at all, Valentina collapsed into the loamy soil, unconscious.

  Behind her, the children ran screaming, but they didn’t get far. A line of warriors appeared from the woods, clawed hands outstretched toward their victims.

  Still in the middle of the creek, Steph watched in horror as Valentina went down and the children were taken. The warriors had some sort of stunning device, and the children crumpled to the ground after being touched with it.

  Allison, who had stayed back with Steph to let the younger children cross, was the first to react. Grabbing Steph’s hand, she ran back the way they had come, in the direction of the barn, which had fallen disturbingly silent.

  Without a word, Steph followed her, the two of them splashing noisily through the water as they ran. In half a dozen steps they had reached the shore.

  Then she appeared out of nowhere, right in front of them. Steph raised her rifle to fire, but dropped it as her heart felt as if it was being ripped from her chest by an icy hand.

  With a cry of agony, she collapsed to the ground and lay still.

  “No!” Allison screamed in terrified rage as she charged right into the warrior. She had no weapon, nothing to fight with except the satchel with the precious radio, which was now useless. There would be no one to operate it.

  Taking the strap off her shoulder, Allison threw the satchel at the warrior, who simply plucked it from the air and tossed it aside.

  Screaming in fury at the loss of her parents, her world, the children she had saved, and now the friends who had come to save them, Allison hammered against the warrior’s armor with her fists until they bled.

  The Kreelan simply stood there, looking down at Allison her face a dark mask against the night sky.

  Finally spent, Allison fell to her knees, sobbing.

  She didn’t see the warrior take a small wand from her belt. Leaning down, the warrior touched it to Allison’s shoulder, and she slumped to the ground beside Steph, unconscious.

  * * *

  “Lord God, no,” Mills breathed as he watched the warriors wade through the water from the woods, bearing Valentina and the children.

  Two more picked up Steph and Allison from near the feet of the warrior that he knew must be her.

  He had dropped to the ground in the field behind the barn as soon as he’d heard the gunfire from across the creek. He quickly exchanged his assault rifle for the larger sniper rifle and its advanced scope while his gut churned with fear and something worse. Self-loathing. He knew the right decision was to stay alive. But it took all his will not to pull the trigger and kill as many of the Kreelans as he could, starting with the warrior who had taken down Steph and Allison, before they came for him.

  The thing that stayed his hand was that he had seen the strange warrior toss aside the satchel that contained the precious radio. That was the key to everything, and was more valuable than his honor or his life, because it represented the only chance for Valentina and the others, for any of the surviving humans on this planet.

  He watched the aliens through the sniper rifle’s scope as the warriors formed a line and slowly marched off through the field to his left, bearing the children and the two women.

  When he turned back to look for the warrior with the dead eyes, he found her standing where she had been on the bank of the creek. Except now she was staring right at him.

  He pulled his eye away from the scope for a moment to make sure he wasn’t imagining things, then looked again.

  She was still there, looking right at him, and a shiver of dread ran down his spine.

  He had fought another warrior
like her who had one of the strange devices affixed to her collar, which seemed to signify some sort of special warrior or class of warriors. That warrior had been huge, nearly a giant compared to Mills, who himself was a big and powerful man. He had fought her twice in hand to hand combat, once on Keran and once on Saint Petersburg. He knew that she had only been toying with him, but he had learned that any warrior wearing a device like that on her collar was one to be feared. This one perhaps more than the big warrior he had fought before. Just as Allison had said, this one seemed to be completely devoid of expression, and looking into her face made him want to turn and run.

  She continued to stare at him, but when he blinked his eye, she was gone. He pulled his eye away from the scope, thinking that she was rushing toward him across the field, but there was nothing. No one. She had just vanished.

  “Bloody hell.” He got to his knees to get a better look, sweeping the scope along the creek and the woods.

  There was no sign of her.

  His heart in his throat, he turned to watch the line of warriors bearing away their captives. They were heading in the direction of where Valentina had thought the Kreelans had a big encampment in the woods on the far side of town.

  After they disappeared down the road, he wearily got up and trudged to the creek to retrieve the satchel. Taking out the cobbled-together radio and the small console, he breathed a sigh of relief as he turned it on and the indicators glowed green. The radio was working, and when the fleet arrived, he would hopefully be able to communicate with them.

  Checking his chronometer, he saw that only fourteen hours remained before the fleet was scheduled to jump in.

  Switching the radio off and carefully replacing it in the satchel, he strapped the bag to his combat belt and then slung the sniper rifle over his shoulder.

  Picking up his assault rifle, he stood for a moment, alone in the empty field, feeling like he was the last free human on the entire planet.

  He needed to find a place to hide so he could plan his next move. After a moment’s hesitation, he broke into a jog, following a parallel path to the ones the Kreelans and their captives had taken.

  * * *

  From her vantage point in the shadows of the charred ruins of the human building where the skirmish line of warriors had earlier fought the two humans, Ku’ar-Marekh watched the large human warrior move at a fast trot across the open field.

  He had Tesh-Dar’s mark upon him, something that the rank and file warriors could not discern, but that to a warrior priestess such as herself was like a mental scent. That he had fought Tesh-Dar in personal combat did not mean that Ku’ar-Marekh could not challenge him. It simply meant that he might prove more worthy of her skills.

  She had let him go as an entertainment, to see what the human warrior might do, just as she had indulged herself by following and being followed by the female pup. Such indulgences were all that she had left.

  As for the rest of the human pups taken this night, Ku’ar-Marekh had come to the conclusion that her First had been misguided in believing that they should not be put to the arena until they had matured. If the One they sought were here, he - for it had to be a male, Ku’ar-Marekh knew - would stand out in the arena. They sought one not of their race, but whose blood would sing.

  There was no trace of the Bloodsong in any of these creatures, and there was no reason to spare them from the blade. Perhaps they would be more worthy to die by a warrior’s hand if they were older and stronger, but Ku’ar-Marekh was not inclined to make the conquest of this world into an experiment.

  After reaching that conclusion, she had ordered that the children and the humans who had come from the sky be gathered up from their hideout. Unless their blood sang, they would die in the arenas, for that was the will of the Empress.

  Waiting until the big human had crossed the road, Ku’ar-Marekh closed her eyes, imagining her spartan quarters in the woods near the Kalai-Il.

  Then her body vanished, leaving behind only the silent darkness that would soon give way to dawn.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  Lionel Jackson watched through hooded eyes as the alien warriors continued to sweep through the concentration camp in a whirlwind of building and cleaning.

  They had come late the night before, hundreds of them, seemingly hell-bent on a sudden “do right” campaign to ease the suffering of their human prisoners, and had worked tirelessly by torchlight. The warriors mucked out the human waste and built proper latrines, quadrupled the size of the camp by extending the fences, brought in a supply of fresh water, and now were building what passed for primitive housing.

  They’d also brought in a great deal of food, an odd assortment of vegetables and fruits that they must have collected from the farms around the town, along with game animals that they distributed throughout the compound. They even built fires over which the meat could be cooked.

  But what came as the greatest shock was that they dropped a few knives, every one of which looked to be unique and with the incredibly sharp blades shared by all of their edged weapons, with each animal they brought, apparently expecting the humans to use them to gut and skin the carcasses.

  Of course, a few enterprising souls had gotten the idea that they could use the knives as weapons to fight the Kreelans.

  Unfortunately for them, the aliens enjoyed this development immensely. Every time someone had tried to attack one of the warriors, other warriors formed a ring around the combatants, who then fought in a battle to the death.

  In two cases, the humans had won, and the Kreelans let them go about their business after hauling away the bodies of the dead warriors.

  As for the humans who weren’t so lucky, their bodies were hauled out along with the rest of the waste.

  The first glow of the rising sun was just visible on the horizon when the gates swung open and a group of warriors entered, carrying two women and eleven children.

  Curious, Jackson made his way toward them. He ignored the bustling alien warriors, just as they ignored him.

  The warriors shooed away some people who had occupied one of the newly built shelters and carefully, almost gently, lay the two women down on the bed of leaves, then lay the children down beside them before turning and marching away, back through the gate.

  Pushing his way through the sudden crowd that had gathered around the new arrivals, Jackson felt his pulse quicken as he looked at the two women. They were wearing Marine combat uniforms.

  The fleet’s here, he thought, or it’s coming. Has to be.

  He knelt down beside one of them, a blond, and did a double-take as he got a better look at her face in growing light.

  “I don’t believe it,” he whispered.

  Someone else pointed at the woman. “Isn’t that Stephanie Guillaume?”

  A low murmur ran through the circle of people, expanding through the camp as more people came to see what was happening.

  “What’s she doing here?”

  Steph’s eyes fluttered open at the sound.

  “Miss Guillaume?” Jackson asked. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” she groaned, rubbing her temples. “My head’s killing me.”

  Jackson grinned, but there wasn’t any humor in it. “It’ll pass in half an hour or so.” He reached toward the woman next to her, intending to give her a gentle shake to wake her up.

  Steph grabbed his hand, stopping him. “Bad idea.” Mills hadn’t been the only one to read Valentina’s psych profile. With Steph’s clout and habit of always getting what she wanted, she’d actually seen more than Mills had. “Let her wake up on her own. Otherwise you’re likely to wind up dead.”

  Propping herself up on her elbows, she wrinkled her nose and muttered, “My God, what’s that horrible smell?”

  “Us.” Jackson gesturing at the filthy clothes, rags really, that he and the other prisoners were wearing. While there was now enough to eat and drink, and latrines had been dug, there weren’t any showers or other means to wash their clothes o
r their bodies.

  Beside her, Valentina shot to her feet with a startled cry, instantly assuming a combat stance. Everyone around her stumbled backward in surprise.

  “Easy,” Steph told her quietly as Valentina looked around, wild-eyed. “Easy. We’re in a prison camp, it looks like.”

  “You’re okay,” Jackson added, impressed and not just a little frightened at the dark-haired woman, her body tight as a steel spring. “You’re safe. For the moment.”

  After taking a deep, shuddering breath, Valentina relaxed. Slightly. “We’re in the camp near Breakwater, aren’t we?” Her eyes flicking rapidly across the faces around her, then settling on a group of warriors that marched by, carrying yet another load of materials to build more shelters. “My God,” she whispered.

  “That’s doing the Almighty a bit of an injustice.” Jackson favored her with a wry smile as he followed her eyes.

  “Work of the Devil’s more like it,” someone in the crowd spat.

  Steph took a closer look at Jackson. She judged him to be in his mid-fifties, with close-cropped hair and a body that, despite the deprivations he’d suffered, was lean and tough. It matched the look in his eyes. “Former military?”

  He nodded. “Twenty-six years in the Terran Army. I saw enough during the first war with Saint Petersburg and some other actions, and Alger’s World looked like the perfect place to start a quiet new life. The homesteading provisions let me settle down on a nice chunk of land.” He looked wistful. “It was a nice place until the Kreelans burned it to the ground.”

  “You weren’t in the Territorial Army here, were you?”

  “Yes, I was. I was the first sergeant for one of the companies up north, near Gateway.” He shook his head. “We killed a lot of warriors, but there were just too many. We got as many people out of the city as we could before it was surrounded and cut off. Most got away, but not all.”

  He paused a moment, remembering the screams and pleas for help of those who’d been trapped, an eerie, distant keening of the doomed. “The corridor we were holding was the last passage out of the city. But we finally had to get out of there. There were a few more lucky souls who somehow managed to break through the enemy cordon and followed us out, but that was it.” He gestured at the people around them in the camp. “I thought everyone we’d left behind had been slaughtered, but they weren’t. They’re bringing them here.”