In Her Name: The Last War (41 page)

Ignoring the chaos around him, Mills leaped to his feet, drawing his combat knife in the same motion, intending to cut the man free of this thing that attacked him.

But in the blink of an eye and with a howl of terror the legionnaire was bodily snapped over the top of the parapet, as if he were a small fish that a fisherman had snatched from the water. 

Trying to erase the image of the man’s terrified expression from his mind, Mills ducked in time to avoid having his head taken off by a Kreelan warrior’s sword. Marveling for just an instant the he was facing an alien, he lunged forward, blocking her sword arm with his left fist as he drove his knife into her gut below her armored breast plate. 

The warrior screamed in pain, but was far from mortally stricken. She slashed at him with the claws of her free hand, tearing the cloth camouflage cover from his back armor. Kneeing her in the groin to throw her off-balance, he pulled his knife from her belly and rammed it up under her throat, the knife’s tip burying itself in her brain. 

Whip-crack! 

Another legionnaire shrieked as he was seized by the devilish weapon and heaved by some unseen force from the trench.

But this time Mills had seen something he had not the first time: he saw where the tendrils had come from over the parapet. Pausing only for a moment to pick up a rifle and shoot a warrior in the back of the head, he threw a hand grenade over the parapet in the direction the legionnaire had disappeared.

* * *

Tesh-Dar bared her fangs in a sort of primal ecstasy that she had not felt since the Change, since the day she was accepted as a priestess into the order of the Desh-Ka. Having trained for combat since birth, she was finally experiencing war in its true form, without any of the rules that governed the challenges in the arena. Great would be the glory she brought to the Empress.

While her warriors occupied the humans in the trench, she allowed herself a minor indulgence. She knew that she should not be standing in the open as she was, focused on her prey. But it was an entertainment that she would allow herself. For now. With the whips wrapped around her next victim, she gripped the
grakh’ta
with both mighty hands and threw her entire body into the motion of snapping the whip back, reeling in the hapless human warrior. The human came flying out of the trench, arcing through the air toward her. As the creature drew to arm’s length, her left hand snapped to her short sword in a move no human being could match. Twirling aside as her victim flew by, the sword sang from the sheath at her waist and neatly decapitated the human without the blade touching the tendril of the
grakh’ta
that was wrapped about its neck. She flicked the blade with her wrist, ridding it of most of the human’s blood before she replaced the sword in its sheath.

She was just snapping her weapon free of the body when she sensed the small object sailing toward her. Abandoning the
grakh’ta
, she leaped clear as the grenade went off, shredding both the whip and the legionnaire’s body. Had she not been a warrior priestess with her heightened senses, she would have been killed.

With her blood singing glory to her Empress, Tesh-Dar leaped into the trench to find the one who had come close to killing her, to honor him with death.

* * *

Mills’s world had become a snarling orgy of stabbing, hacking, kicking, and grappling with the alien warriors. Few rifle shots rang out now, as the enemy was in so tightly among the legionnaires that a bullet was as likely to kill a friend as a foe. Besides, the enemy was simply too close: at one point, while Mills was fighting one alien, he suddenly realized that he had his back pressed up against another alien who was doing her best to strangle a legionnaire. Suddenly, all four of them were blown into a struggling heap as a grenade went off nearby. Mills was the only one to get to his feet alive.

In addition to his knife, which was by now soaked with blood and had a blade that was nicked in a dozen places, he held a Kreelan sword. He had never received training in how to use any edged weapons but his knife and bayonet, but he had nonetheless put it to good use. About as long as his arm and slightly curved, the sword had proved to be an excellent weapon in trench fighting.

A Kreelan warrior suddenly came staggering backward toward him, two legionnaires clutching at her arms, and he stabbed the alien in the back of the neck with the sword.

“
Down!
” he yelled at his two newfound companions as he saw another legionnaire, badly wounded, hurl himself into the midst of at least half a dozen warriors who had cornered two more legionnaires and were hacking them to death. Mills had seen that the man clutched a grenade in each hand, and the resulting explosions sent bits of bodies, shredded clothing, and twisted body armor for fifteen meters in every direction. 

As he got back to his feet, helping up his compatriots, he saw something that made his skin crawl. Looking down the trench toward the end of the regiment’s line, perhaps twenty meters away, was what looked like nothing so much as a living threshing machine. But it wasn’t a machine. It was an alien warrior. She was huge compared to the others, and bigger than Mills, who stood a full two meters tall and weighed in at one hundred kilos of solid muscle. In one hand she had a short sword, and both it and the claws of her other hand were soaked with blood.

Eyes wide with disbelief, he watched as a legionnaire emptied an entire magazine from his rifle into her chest. But it was as if the bullets simply passed through her; he could even see the spray of dirt they kicked up from the trench wall behind her. 

The warrior strode right up to the legionnaire and with what Mills thought must be a look of contempt stabbed her claws into his chest, right through his torso armor. Screaming in agony, blood spraying from his lips, she lifted him from his feet and tossed him from the trench as if he weighed no more than a piece of paper.

Suddenly, he realized what had been behind the whip-like weapon that had snatched some of the legionnaires from the trench earlier. It had been her.

The other Kreelan warriors moved aside as she passed, rendering what appeared to be some sort of salute. Killing every single legionnaire who stood before her with flashing steel or outstretched claws, she finally came to a stop directly in front of him, her strange cat’s-eyes blazing, her entire body spattered with human blood.

As if it were some sort of signal, the rest of the Kreelan warriors in the trench eased away from their human opponents. The exhausted legionnaires used the unexpected respite to catch their breath, wondering just what was happening.

“What does she want, Mills?” one of the legionnaires next to him whispered, afraid to break the spell that had suddenly fallen over them all. 

The warrior herself answered, but not with words. Raising her right arm, she pointed at Mills. Then she handed her weapons to one of the other warriors, who took them for safekeeping.

“I think,” Mills said slowly, “she wants a bloody duel. But why me?” He wasn’t the biggest or toughest man in the regiment, or the best close-in fighter. On the other hand, he was probably the biggest and toughest who was still standing. Of the regiment’s roughly thirteen hundred men, he guessed that maybe a hundred, if that, were still alive.

“We’ll fight with you,” the legionnaire said. Mills didn’t remember his name, as he was from one of the other companies. 

“No,” Mills told him, dropping his own weapons. “Let’s see where this leads.”

“But-”

“Quiet,” one of the others, a
sergent
, ordered. “Mills, do what you need to do.”

You always wanted the ultimate thrill
, Mills chided himself.
Well, it looks like you finally found it
.

* * *

Tesh-Dar knew the one before her had thrown the grenade that had come close to killing her earlier. She had never seen him, did not recognize him by scent, and had not seen him with her second sight. But among the gifts she had was the ability to sense some of the threads of time and action, cause and effect, that were woven together into the river of destiny. She could not read the future and predict where that river might lead. However, she could sometimes see a murky vision of the past that she had not witnessed through her other senses, a place where the river had once flowed. She could not see the river’s trace for others, only for those events directly tied to herself. 

And so it was that she now stood before this human. She had not had any idea what he would look like, or how fiercely he would fight. She only knew that he was the one she sought. 

Around her, the other warriors gave the surviving humans some respite. Few were left now, but they had fought well and with great honor. Many of Her Children had died at their hands, and Tesh-Dar mourned their deaths deeply; not that they had died and were no longer with her, but that they could never again glorify the Empress in battle. For Tesh-Dar’s people, death, honorably won, was the completion, the fulfillment, of life in Her eyes, and meant an eternal place in the afterlife among the Ancient Ones.

She pointed to the crude steps leading from the trench to flat ground above and led the human there. What motivated these creatures to burrow like sand-worms she did not know or care to understand. All she knew was that it would hardly serve as an impromptu arena.

* * *

Mills followed the huge warrior out of the trench and onto the ground behind it, his feet leaving small clouds of dust as he walked. He happened to see the alien’s feet, shod in sandals, and noticed that she left no tracks at all. Nothing. A chill ran down his spine, wondering if she was some sort of supernatural creature. Perversely, that thought gave him even more of a high. He wasn’t afraid, he was completely “juiced” as some of his friends might have said.

Behind him, a silent and altogether unnatural procession followed: the hundreds of Kreelan warriors and the comparative handful of surviving legionnaires, mixed together. The latter did not exactly seem to be prisoners, for the Kreelans did not seem to care if they came along or not, or if they kept their weapons, as long as they did not use them (the few who had were quickly butchered). But the legionnaires went anyway, for they had no idea what else to do, and few wanted to risk trying to take their leave of the Kreelans. As word spread that Mills would be facing off against the big warrior, all of them wanted to see the spectacle as much as the Kreelans apparently did. 

The warriors formed a large circle around Mills and his opponent. The legionnaires, somewhat emboldened now by the mere fact of their continued survival, pressed up close behind the warriors who formed the inner edge of the circle so they could see. 

Mills stood about two paces from the warrior, who kept her eyes locked on his. He had no idea what to do to get this particular ball rolling, so he simply waited for her to make the first move.

* * *

It was time. The human clearly had no idea what to expect or what to do, which was understandable, as he was not of the Way. He had no way of knowing that this challenge, defined by what may have been nothing more than a lucky throw of a grenade, would determine not only his fate, but that of his fellow animals, as well. She would not show him leniency, but she would show him fairness. She would use none of her special powers, for that would be no challenge in such a match, and would bring the Empress no glory. Even her claws, she would not use, for the human had none. She would not give the match away, for she knew that she could hardly lose, but she would measure him by his determination and will to survive.

Assuming one of many choices of combat stances, she opened the challenge with a restrained open-handed strike against the human animal.

* * *

Mills shook his head to clear his brain as he got to his feet, his ears ringing from the blow the alien had just landed on him. He knew intellectually that it had been little more than an open-handed slap, but it came at him like lightning and felt like a freight train had slammed into the side of his head. 

“Get the
salope
, Mills!” one of the legionnaires suddenly yelled, tossing any remaining caution about the warriors surrounding them to the wind. His shout of encouragement led to a groundswell of others, and in but a moment every single legionnaire was shouting for him.

It was what he needed. He didn’t expect to win against this alien killing machine, but he would do his best to make her remember the men of the
2ème REP.

He raised his hands to protect his face, elbows held in tight to his sides, and moved closer to her. One of her arms shot out, but he was ready this time. He managed to grab hold of her arm and pull her slightly off-balance. As she grabbed for him with her other hand -
Damn those claws!
He cursed to himself - he pulled her in even closer and suddenly slammed his forehead into her chin. 

With a surprised grunt she roughly shoved him away, and he couldn’t escape the feeling that she had simply allowed him to get away with it. He had seen some of the things she could do, and he could hardly accept that his skills were a match for hers. But he didn’t care. He moved in again quickly, leaving himself largely open to attack as he concentrated on his own offense.

* * *

While the human was no match for her skills, he was clearly determined, and continued to come after her no matter how many times she batted him away or threw him to the ground. His face was bruised and bleeding now, and he wheezed when he breathed. The knuckles of his hands were bloodied, with both her blood and his own, and no doubt some of his bones were broken.

But the human doggedly continued to attack her, even as he approached complete exhaustion. At one point they were locked in an embrace after he had moved in close to her, sustaining a rain of blows to get close enough to try and throw her to the ground. She had actually found herself holding him up for a moment as he clung to her, panting for breath. Sensing he had regained enough energy to at least stay on his feet, she released him, sending him back with another set of blows to the head that again knocked him to the ground.