In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  Beyond the view screen, the fiery streaks of cannon fire rose to greet them.

  * * *

  With the rough battle plan made, Sparks’s officers dispersed to their own vehicles to rush off to their units.

  The tanks didn’t wait, knowing that the infantry could quickly catch up in their fighting vehicles. After their orders were passed down, the big vehicles spun around in place and tore their way across the farms and fields toward their new positions, the air filled with the sounds of the racing turbine engines and the creaking of hundreds of tracks.

  A few minutes later, half the infantry vehicles followed, carrying the Marines who had survived the first battle.

  The infantry vehicles manned only by the drivers and vehicle commanders divided into two groups and headed toward their positions to form the mouth of the U, into which Sparks hoped the Kreelans would fly. Their orders were simple. Train their gatling guns toward the center of the formation, elevating them high enough that the shells would fall beyond the vehicles on the far side if they didn’t happen to hit a Kreelan ship, and open fire on order.

  “About time.” Sparks squinted into the sky as he heard the rumble behind him, heralding the arrival of the rest of his Marines. The assault boats were streaking down toward the landing zone the logistics officer had set up five kilometers behind the line of tanks facing the Kreelans, right where he’d wanted.

  “Looks like we beat them.” The voice of his XO, who was now with the reserve tank company behind the main line, said in his headphones as the first boats, still smoking from the heat of their reentry, set down and quickly began disgorging their troops and vehicles.

  “Incoming!” The operations officer broke in from his command vehicle. “One of the forward observation posts has sighted incoming enemy ships.”

  Sparks had sent out three infantry fighting vehicles well ahead of the main battle line to give warning of the Kreelans. The ships in orbit had been providing the intel officer with a rough plot of the Kreelan attack ships, but being voice only, it lacked the clarity of the datalink-fed displays. Besides, Sparks liked to have human eyeballs on the target, not just orbital sensors.

  “Count?” Sparks demanded.

  “Stand by…”

  There was a sudden series of explosions in the direction of the approaching Kreelan ships.

  After a long pause, the operations officer said, “Sir, the OPs just went off the air.”

  “Damn.”

  At the landing zone, the first wave of assault boats lifted while more came in to land. The sky beyond the LZ was thick with the ungainly ships, but somehow the logistics officer was keeping them organized. Vehicles quickly formed up into their company formations and headed off at full speed to their assigned combat positions along the edge of the landing zone.

  But there were so many more boats to get down. So many.

  “Sir! Look!” Sparks’s gunner had been keeping watch in the direction of town. The general looked at the display in his cupola, which was slaved to the tank’s main gun sight.

  Hundreds of enemy ships were now streaking toward them, their rakish prows and gaudily painted flanks reflecting the glow of the afternoon sun.

  “Well,” Sparks muttered to himself, “at least they’re coming from the direction we wanted.” He just hadn’t anticipated so many of them. Just more to kill, he told himself.

  Thumbing his radio control to the corps command frequency, which would broadcast to every vehicle in the formation, he said one word. “Fire.”

  The land echoed with thunder as the brigade’s guns opened fire.

  * * *

  “Fire.” Ku’ar-Marekh’s order to her pilot was not relayed through the formation by voice or data, for there was no need. Every warrior sensed her will.

  As one, even as they entered the curtain of steel thrown up by the defending human vehicles on the ground, the attack ships began firing. Not at the enemy warriors on the ground, or even the boats bringing in more humans, but at the ships leaving the battlefield. It was a small honor compared to besting a foe with sword and claw, but it gave those who piloted the attack ships an extra chance to bring Her glory while the humans landed more of their own warriors.

  Around her, ships and warriors died. The cannon fire the humans were putting into the sky was brief but incredibly intense. Many of the attack ships were destroyed as they passed through the stupendous barrage, but those that survived were free to wreak havoc among the humans behind their main battle line.

  Those ships that were mortally wounded found glory in destroying their foes on the ground, guiding their ships in as they might a sword, striking at the enemy’s heart. Three tens of ships fell in the brief span of time the formation passed through the humans’ fire, but nearly all of them destroyed at least one of the greatly prized human vehicles.

  Ku’ar-Marekh caught Selan-Kulir’s look of exhilaration.

  On impulse, she reached out to the young warrior, gripping Selan-Kulir firmly on the shoulder. Selan-Kulir's eyes widened in surprise. “May thy Way be long and glorious, my daughter.”

  Then Ku'ar-Marekh turned to the pilot. “Now!”

  The sides of the craft disintegrated except for the framework. The warriors, a fierce battle cry on their lips, leapt into the air. Moments later, flying wings sprouted from packs on their shoulders, and they began to glide rapidly to the ground.

  Ku’ar-Marekh leapt with Selan-Kulir, but when the younger warrior’s wing deployed, the priestess simply vanished from the sky to reappear on top of a human war machine on the ground below, and the priestess again began to kill.

  * * *

  “Move, move, MOVE!”

  On Sparks’s shouted order over the radio, the tanks and infantry fighting vehicles turned and began racing away from the cloud of warriors descending on top of them.

  Sparks was tense, but unafraid that this battle would devolve into a debacle as had been suffered by the Légion étrangère on Keran.

  This type of attack had become typical for the Kreelans when making assaults from orbit against massed human defenses, and Sparks had been counting on them repeating it here. While the tactic had proven devastating in every instance thus far, it had one major weakness. The parawings could only carry the warriors so far before they reached the ground. Once the Kreelans jumped from their ships, always at low altitude, their ability to maneuver was extremely limited. The descending warriors couldn’t cheat gravity.

  Most of the fighting in the war thus far had been in urban areas on more populated worlds, because the Kreelans attacked where they could find the most people. Unfortunately, the most powerful human land weapons, the tanks, were highly vulnerable in the confined streets of a city.

  But here, outside a small town on a backwater planet, Sparks had found a near-perfect fighting ground for his tanks, and he intended to make the most of it.

  His head sticking out of the cupola as his tank tore across the fields, he watched with satisfaction as the other vehicles around him maneuvered at breakneck speed away from the center of the Kreelan drop zone.

  Every gatling gun and assault rifle in what was now over a division, with more boats coming every minute, swept across the sky to kill enemy assault ships and warriors before they could touch the ground. Dozens of Kreelan ships fell in flames, and Sparks gritted his teeth in anguish as many of them became lethal weapons, guided by their dying pilots to destroy his tanks and infantry fighting vehicles.

  A swirling battle involving the assault boats developed as the Kreelan ships that had dropped their load of warriors swept in to attack.

  Massive explosions shook the battlefield as ships on both sides died.

  Above, warriors spun crazily in the air, trying to avoid the streams of cannon and rifle fire coming from the ground. Those warriors who were close enough hurled their lightning grenades at the fleeing armored vehicles. Some hit their targets, turning tanks and fighting vehicles into flaming pyres.

  But most missed their mark, and the w
arriors found themselves landing in a field that was empty, save for the ships that had crashed and a couple dozen destroyed vehicles.

  Sparks took it all in, his mind tallying up the butcher’s bill as his driver guided the big Wolverine to their destination. The gunner kept up a steady stream of fire from the top-mounted gatling gun, firing it remotely. He punctuated the gatling’s fire with shots from the main gun, flechette rounds aimed into the densely packed cloud of descending warriors.

  The sky rained blood as the enemy was ripped to shreds.

  “They’re committed now, by God,” Sparks told his operations officer as the last of the Kreelan ships dropped its warriors, then turned to attack an assault boat.

  The boat’s defensive lasers fired, and the Kreelan ship dove straight into the ground, sending up a tremendous pillar of flame. Warriors who had been coming down nearby burned like mosquitos on an electric grid.

  Sparks keyed his microphone again. “Have the logistics officer shift our remaining boats to land three kilometers to the east. That’ll keep them from taking too much fire, and we’ll use those troops as a reserve. The rest of the formation here is to keep moving outward from the LZ until we’re clear of the Kreelans’ drop radius. Then we’re going to turn back on them in a full envelopment and blow these blue-skinned bitches to hell.”

  “General, we’ve just gotten word that the fleet can provide direct fire support from Conqueror and Monarch!”

  That news sent an electric shiver of relief through Sparks. “Are our people clear of the center of the LZ?”

  “Aside from a few stragglers, yes sir. All units have made it beyond where the warriors landed.”

  Sparks spared a quick prayer for the few Marines who might be left in the ant’s nest of warriors the former landing zone had become. They’d likely be dead long before the first shells from the fleet arrived.

  “Have the fleet open fire on the center of the drop zone with a kill radius of three kilometers.” Sparks raised his field glasses to his eyes, thankful that the driver had stopped. The Wolverine now stood facing the landing zone. It was swarming with thousands of warriors, running toward the iron ring encircling them.

  Surrounded by two Marine heavy divisions, the enemy was being systematically annihilated.

  Sparks was pleased. But he was also a man who believed in using all available firepower. He wanted the enemy dead.

  “Have the fleet open fire.”

  * * *

  Ku’ar-Marekh beheaded the human who had been sitting half-out of a hatch in the vehicle she’d chosen to land on. Kicking the corpse down into the bowels of the machine, she sheathed her sword and leaped down after it. Using only her claws, she made short, bloody work of the humans inside, even as the vehicle continued to race across the land.

  Climbing back out, her armor covered in blood and the scent of it filling her sensitive nose, she jumped from the vehicle just before it went over a small hill and overturned, its tracks thrashing at the empty air.

  Rolling gracefully to her feet, she surveyed the carnage around her. While some of the human vehicles were burning and tremendous pyres marked the final resting places of many ships, both human and her own, precious few humans remained in the kill zone.

  The ones being killed now were her warriors. Nearly twenty-thousand had been dropped over the human positions, but the animals had run away as her warriors drifted down from the sky. And as the warriors descended on the flying wings, the humans raked them with fire.

  On the ground, her warriors were trapped within a ring of weapons. The circle of human vehicles and troops surrounded them like an armored hand that would squeeze the life from Ku’ar-Marekh’s legions.

  Over the ceaseless roaring of the human guns, Ku’ar-Marekh heard the screams of pain from the dying, and rage from those who even now charged toward the humans, spending their lives fruitlessly. The Bloodsong echoed their feelings, a bright stream of cold light in Ku’ar-Marekh’s heart.

  “My priestess.” Selan-Kulir appeared at her side, gasping. A hunk of flesh was missing from her right shoulder, and she shivered with pain and loss of blood.

  Ku’ar-Marekh saw that there was blood on the young warrior’s blade, as well, and nodded in satisfaction. She had found at least one human to kill.

  “There is no honor in this!” Selan-Kulir dodged behind Ku’ar-Marekh as a fiery stream of cannon shells swept over their position, blasting divots of dirt from the ground. Three of the shells fell to the ground in front of the priestess, sizzling and burning.

  “I agree.” Ku’ar-Marekh did not feel fury or anger. It was merely duty that motivated her. It was honorable to give advantage to the enemy in battle, to prove one’s worthiness against a superior opponent; this was a fundamental part of the Way by which Her warriors lived.

  But there had to be balance. Just as the warriors of the fleet had learned when making boarding attacks against ships armed with the hellish anti-boarding weapons, Ku’ar-Marekh had to redress the overwhelming advantage the humans had, just as she did during their initial attack against the human forces earlier in the day.

  Honorable advantage was one thing. Even waves of warriors dying for the honor of slaying the monstrous vehicles was a worthy way to die, as long as the warriors had at least a slim chance.

  Slaughter, without a chance to even come within sword range of the enemy, was something entirely different.

  Raising her hands out to her sides, palms up, Ku’ar-Marekh closed her eyes. Unlike the Empress, her own powers were finite. Even Tesh-Dar, great as she was, nearly died when her powers failed in her last battle with the humans. She would have died, had the Empress not intervened by sending Pan’ne-Sharakh to save the great warrior.

  Ku’ar-Marekh silently prayed that the Empress would not show her the same mercy when Death’s hand closed around her own heart.

  Selan-Kulir watched in awe and fear as the smoke and dust around them stopped swirling upon the wind and began to move outward. Above, the sky darkened as the tiny motes in the air gathered together, blocking out the sun.

  The circle of the wall of smoke and dust expanded. Slowly, at first, and then with gathering speed, darkening with every passing moment as it grew less transparent, more opaque. The warriors it passed felt nothing more than a brush of air, but the shells fired by the human weapons simply fell to the ground when they touched the expanding wall.

  Sensing in their blood what their priestess was doing, the warriors ran as fast as they could toward the humans, whose weapons were now all but useless.

  Dozens of streaks appeared in the sky, falling toward the battlefield like fiery meteors.

  Selan-Kulir hissed as she realized that they were massive shells from the human ships in orbit. She held her hands up to her ears in anticipation of the sonic booms before closing her eyes, awaiting death.

  But neither sound nor destruction came. Looking up again, she saw the shells, each as big as a several warriors, stop as they hit the darkening shield Ku’ar-Marekh had spawned over the battlefield. The weapons did not explode or even melt, they simply fell from the sky, great lumps of inert metal that the warriors easily evaded as the shells dropped to the ground.

  Looking back at her priestess, Selan-Kulir saw that blood now trickled from Ku’ar-Marekh’s nose and eyes, and her body trembled.

  While she knew that the priestess might have considered it an affront, Selan-Kulir knelt beside Ku’ar-Marekh and reverently placed a hand on one of her sandaled feet.

  The physical contact brought a surge of power through the Bloodsong from the priestess that overwhelmed Selan-Kulir. The young warrior cried out, lost in an ecstasy that she had never before felt, and never would again.

  * * *

  “What the devil?” Sparks whispered as he saw the dust and smoke that shrouded the battlefield begin to move toward him. As it did, moving faster and faster, it became opaque, a black wall expanding outward from the center of the Kreelan positions. It was like the shield the alien warrior witch
had used in the previous fight, and the rounds from the Marines’ weapons fell to the ground as the wall swept onward.

  Behind the wall, he knew with chilling certainty, would be the warriors. He switched to the corps broadcast frequency. “Marines, prepare for close contact! The warriors are going to be right behind that…” He was at a loss for words. What exactly was that thing?

  “General, fleet reports incoming fire!” The voice of his operations officer, coming to him over the staff channel, diverted his attention.

  Sparks looked up as the contrails from the shells fired by the battleship guns signaled their imminent arrival. He raised his field glasses again, hoping he could see the shells when they detonated. They would be submunition rounds, the big shells nothing but containers for thousands of smaller bomblets that would turn any living thing in the target zone into mincemeat.

  The shells came in…and stopped in mid-air. Then they just fell toward the ground. He couldn’t see them hit because of the ever darkening wall that was racing toward him.

  “Dammit!” To his crew, he said, “Be ready. There’s going to be a lot of pissed-off warriors right on top of us when that thing blows past. We’ll have to be quick.”

  After one last look to either side, seeing that the crews in the other tanks and fighting vehicles had buttoned up, he reluctantly gave in to his own apprehension and dropped into the cupola, slamming the hatch shut above him.

  The wall was racing at them now, so thick it was nearly black. He only hoped that his theory was correct and the thing would pass by them, rather than simply smashing them to pieces.

  “Steady, now…”

  Closer it came.

  Sparks could feel the big tank trembling as the ground shook, and tightened his grip on the handholds inside the turret, wondering what could possibly create such a phenomenon.

  “Steady…”

  His last thought was that the dark, swirling mass looked as if it were alive.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

  “That’s the last of them, commodore. We did it.”