In Her Name: The Last War (69 page)

She braced herself for the argument to start getting ugly as it always did, and waited for him to trot out the same tired and illogical reasons that he had used before to avoid treatment.

“I’ll see the ship’s surgeon next watch,” he said quietly, completely surprising her. She saw the stark fear in his eyes as he looked at her. “If the dream gets any more real, it’s going to kill me.”

* * *

“How many stim packs a day did you say you are taking?” the ship’s surgeon asked, eyebrows raised. “I am not sure I heard you right.”

“Twelve,” Mills told her sheepishly. He already regretted his decision to come to see her. Commander Irina Nikolaeva was the oldest member of the crew, and from her expression Mills suspected she’d seen it all, including stim addiction. Stims were normally included in combat rations to help troops stay awake during extended periods of combat, and the temptation to pilfer and abuse them was the reason that ration packs were normally kept under the lock and key of a responsible junior officer or senior NCO like Mills. 

“Twelve,” she repeated in her thick Russian accent, shaking her head. “I am surprised you can stand still. Stims are not normally addictive, but taken in such quantities they can be. There are also other negative side effects.” She looked at him pointedly. “Cardiac arrest is among them.”

“I know all that, commander,” he grated. “I wouldn’t be taking the bloody things if I didn’t feel I had to.”

“The dreams,” she said. 

Mills nodded. He had tried as best he could to explain his recurring dream to her. It had been an uncomfortable, humiliating experience. He knew it wasn’t the surgeon’s fault; it was simply that he had never before felt compelled to confide in someone like this. Even telling Sabourin had been extremely difficult for him. 

“Normally I would say it was nothing more or less than post-traumatic stress,” Commander Nikolaeva told him. She saw Mills roll his eyes and did something others rarely saw: she grinned. “I will not insult your intelligence, Mills,” she went on. “You already know this. That is the most likely answer, the one we fall back on when we believe it to be true. Or when we have no other explanation.”

That caught his attention.

She nodded. “No one else except the captain” — Commander Sato — “has experienced anything like you did on Keran. I have carefully read his account of first contact with the Kreelans, and I believe the warrior you faced may have been the same one he did.”

That came as a surprise to Mills. He had first met Sato on the assault boat that had rescued him and the rest of the survivors of Sato’s destroyer at Keran. As the senior NCO of
Yura’s
Marine detachment, Mills saw Sato fairly frequently. While they had talked about the events at Keran, neither had made the connection about the huge warrior: Sato had never mentioned her from his own experiences, and the dreams had driven Mills to stop talking about his fight with the warrior long before he’d come to the
Yura’s
Marine detachment.

“Does the captain have dreams like this?” Mills asked hopefully. He would have been incredibly relieved if someone else was having a similar experience. 

“You know I cannot answer that, Mills,” she said as she turned to one of the medicine cabinets lining the walls. She pulled out two packets. “This one you already recognize,” handing the first one to him. 

Mills looked and was surprised to see that it was a package of stims. He looked back up at her, confused. 

“These will keep you from raiding the ration packs,” she said sternly. “If you need more, come see me. And I want you to replace the ones you took.”

He nodded, his face flushing with embarrassment. It was an old trick to pilfer stims out of rations, but it left whoever received those ration packs with no stims if they really needed it. Replacing all the ones he’d taken was going to be a bit of work.
Consider yourself lucky, mate
, he told himself.
She could have just as easily turned your arse into the captain on formal charges
.

“And these,” she said, handing him the other packet, “are tranquilizers. You will take one —
only
one — before you sleep. These should knock you out for at least six hours and suppress your dreams. If they do not work, do not take more: come back to see me. Unlike the stims, these can be very addictive, and if you take too many at one time, they will kill you.”

“How long can I take them?” he asked.

She shrugged as she tapped out something on her console. “I hope you will not need them more than a week. That should give you plenty of time to see if the rest of my prescription works.”

“And what is that?” Mills asked, suddenly suspicious.

“A talk with the captain,” she replied.

* * *

Mills had thought Sato would get around to seeing him at some point during the week. He didn’t expect to see him immediately after his visit to Nikolaeva. 

“I’ve got some free time right now,” Sato had told Nikolaeva when she had commed him. “Send him to my cabin.”

 A few minutes later, Mills stood nervously at Sato’s door. He had talked to the captain any number of times during the normal briefings held for the ship’s command staff, which included the commander and senior NCO of the Marine detachment. But he had never been in Sato’s quarters or spoken to him alone. It shouldn’t have bothered him, he knew, but the nervous apprehension wouldn’t go away.

He nodded to the Marine on guard duty outside the captain’s door, standing at parade rest. The Marine nodded back and palmed the control to open the door.

“The skipper’s expecting you, First Sergeant,” was all he said.

Mills stepped through the doorway into the captain’s private quarters, not knowing what to expect. At that moment, he was frightened more than anything else of the captain thinking he was a coward. There was no getting out of it, however. Commander Nikolaeva had made sure the captain knew what the topic of conversation would be.

He snapped to attention and saluted, “First Sergeant Mills, reporting, sir!” The
sir
came out sounding more like
sah
from his British accent.

“At ease, Mills,” Sato said, returning his salute. “Please, come in.” Sato gestured to one of the chairs arrayed around a small table that would have been the perfect size for playing cards, but as far as Mills knew the captain didn’t play.

Dropping his salute, Mills said, “Thank you, sir.” He sat down, but remained rigid as a post.

“Mills,” Sato said as he fished around in a wall locker, “relax. If it helps, that’s an order. Ah!” He held up a bottle and a pair of tumblers that he’d pulled from the locker. “Pure contraband, of course, but rank hath its privileges, as the saying goes.”

When Sato set down the bottle on the table, Mills saw it was a very expensive brand of rum. He knew the captain didn’t drink, and his expression must have given away his surprise.

“I normally only drink tea,” Sato said darkly as he opened the bottle and poured the liquor into the tumblers, “but the topic of this conversation calls for something stronger.” He handed Mills a glass, then leaned back in his chair, his dark eyes fixing the Marine with an intent gaze. “So. Commander Nikolaeva told me you’re having a recurring nightmare about the alien warrior you fought on Keran. Let’s hear it.”

Managing to get over his embarrassment, Mills told the tale of his battle with the alien warrior, describing her carefully, especially the strange ornament on the collar at her throat. Then he spoke of how his dreams had begun, and had recently worsened.

After he had finished, Sato was silent for a moment, looking into his glass as if the answers to all the questions in the universe could be found swirling in the amber liquid. “A good friend gave me some advice once,” he finally said, just above a whisper, “just before he died. He said, ‘There is no dishonor in living.’” He looked up at Mills with haunted eyes. “I agree with Nikolaeva: the warrior you fought, the one you dream about, is almost certainly the same one that I encountered when
Aurora
was captured.”

Taking a gulp of the rum, barely noticing as it burned its way to his stomach, Mills leaned forward. “Do you have dreams, too, sir? Nightmares like this?” he asked, desperate for company in his misery, in his quest for understanding. 

“I have plenty of nightmares, Mills,” Sato replied, “but none quite like yours. I dream of what happened to me, of events that actually took place, but not of things that didn’t happen, or an attack on my spirit or soul.”

“You think I’m going around the bend, do you, sir?” Mills asked, anticipating that Sato’s next words would be to relieve him of duty. 

Sato shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t,” he said frankly. “Mills...” he struggled for a moment, trying to find the right words. “Mills, a lot of people think the Kreelans are like us, simply because they’re humanoid in appearance. In the case of the regular warriors, that might be true. But not
her
. She’s something else entirely. Mills, I watched her walk through a wall that must have been a meter thick, and she acted like she’d been pricked with a needle when she let me run my sword through her.”

“She
let
you, sir?” Mills asked, incredulous.

“Of course she let me,” Sato said disgustedly. He took a tiny sip of the rum, managing to force it down. The burning sensation took his attention away from the memory of the warrior looking down at him as he stood there, his grandfather’s
katana
sticking through her side. Then she had simply pulled it out and handed it back to him. “Otherwise I’d have been dead with the rest of my old crew. She could probably kill an entire planet single-handed.”

“I don’t like to give anyone that much credit, sir,” Mills said uneasily, fearing that it might actually be true. “I know bloody well that she let me go after having her fun. But I didn’t stick it to her with a sword. And we know they’re not immortal. We killed plenty of their warriors at Keran.”

Sato shook his head. “The only way she’s going to die,” he said, “is if she wants to. And I think that’s what makes her so different. It’s not just her physical abilities. There’s something more to her that I’ve never been able to put my finger on, something that goes beyond our experience.”

“That doesn’t exactly reassure me, sir, if you know what I mean,” Mills said quietly before he finished off his rum.

“I know, and I’m sorry,” Sato replied. “But we can’t control our fears unless we seek to understand them.”

Mills nodded, distinctly unhappy. “So where does that leave me, sir?” he asked. “Are you going to relieve me of duty?”

“Not unless you request it or Commander Nikolaeva recommends it,” Sato told him firmly. “I agree with the surgeon’s assessment that they’re probably not a form of post-traumatic stress.”

“If not that, then what?” Mills wondered. “Is it some sort of hocus-pocus psychic link from when she was beating my brains out?” He had meant it as a joke. Sort of.

Sato smiled, but a sudden chill went through him.
What if it was?
He was terrified of the possibilities.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Tesh-Dar slept. She had no true need of it since the Change that had transformed her body when she became high priestess of the Desh-Ka many cycles ago, but after some time, she had found that she missed dreaming. In dreams she found a curious sense of comfort that eluded her while awake, the Bloodsong within her calming from an irresistible river torrent to the gentle swell of an infinite sea. As time wore on, she found that she could sometimes manipulate her dreams to reveal things in the present that were beyond even the reach of her second sight, and sometimes even give her glimpses into the future. And, of course, there were also dreams that were memories from her past. 

Not all such dreams were pleasant.

* * *

“Someday your sword may even best mine, Tesh-Dar,” said Sura-Ni’khan, high priestess of the Desh-Ka and mistress of the
kazha
where Tesh-Dar had grown from a child to a warrior nearly ready to formally begin her service to the Empire. “Yet you shall fall — by my own hand if need be — if you do not learn patience when teaching the young ones. Your talent with a blade, with any weapon you have ever held, is far beyond even most of the senior warriors of the Empire. It is because of your skills that I made you a senior swordmistress here. Your duty is to instruct, to pass on to the
tresh
, the young warriors-in-training, what you know. You may do it as you see fit within the bounds of tradition, but this is a duty you are bound to, daughter. It is not something you may choose to ignore.”

Kneeling on the cold stone floor of the priestess’s quarters, Tesh-Dar’s heart was torn between shame and anger. Shame that the priestess’s words were true, and anger that she should be so burdened. The Bloodsong did not simply echo the chorus of her sisters’ spirits, it burned and raged when she took a weapon in her hand, when she entered the arena. She should not have to teach others, who could not understand what she was able to do; even she did not know exactly how she mastered weapons so quickly and so well. It simply
was
. Born to a race bound to warrior traditions, she was among the best-adapted for the art of killing. She had never taken a life in the arena, for she had no intention of cutting down her sisters. She had fought several ritual combats outside of the arena, but after the last one her reputation was such that no one would challenge her. That in itself was another source of frustration: the only warriors who could face her were the priestesses, and she knew that it would have been a great dishonor to provoke any of them into a ritual battle. She had no peers worthy of her skills, she thought sullenly, and she had not even completed her final Challenge at the
kazha
, this school of the Kreelan Way, after which she would be declared an adult warrior and be free to serve the Empress as She willed.

It was maddening, but Sura-Ni’khan’s word was law, and Tesh-Dar had no choice. She would do as she must, biding her time until she was free to seek out her destiny, expanding the frontiers of the Empire in the name of the Empress.