In Her Name: The Last War (9 page)

Suddenly he became aware that he could move his arms again. Not only that, but his eyes seemed clear. He blinked them open to see the four robed aliens looking at him attentively. He held up one of his hands to look at it, and saw the last traces of slime as it sank into his flesh, as if it had melded with him on a cellular level. He ran his hands over his chest, his upper thighs: the slime had disappeared.
Right into his skin
.

He lay there for a few more moments before he felt a tremor in his chest. The terror suddenly returned, with visions of some nightmarish apparition bursting from his rib cage, but fortunately he was disappointed. Another moment of increasing discomfort passed, and then suddenly the entire mass of slime forced itself back out of his lungs, oozing out of his mouth. 

“Agghhh!” he gagged as the thing’s keeper retrieved it. He had no idea how the whole thing had managed to get into his lungs. It was as if it had somehow penetrated his body like some sort of biological scanning device, then gathered in his lungs for convenient extraction.

The robed alien, who seemed distinctly more pleasant than the warriors, gestured for him to get up. He made to return to the others, but she gently stopped him. Standing behind him, she ran her hands professionally (he had no other word for it) along his lower spine. Then she gripped one of his hips and put her opposite hand on a shoulder, gently pushing him forward, apparently trying to get him to bend forward at the waist. He did so, and after she ran her fingers over a few of his lumbar vertebrae, she gestured for him to straighten up, which he did. She exchanged a few quiet words with the warrior who had spoken earlier, and then gestured for him to return to the others.

As McClaren rejoined his elated crew, who pointedly ignored his nakedness, something struck him as odd: his lower back, where he had felt the surge of painful heat earlier, now felt fine. Better than fine. It felt perfect. And he knew that it shouldn’t, because he had a very mild case of arthritis in his lumbar region that the ship’s surgeon had warned him would ground him at the end of this deployment. It didn’t interfere with his duties, and consistent exercise helped keep it at bay, but it was a constant source of mild discomfort. Now it was gone. And the robed alien had known it would be; that’s why she examined that particular area. Somehow, that blob of slime had communicated to her whatever it had done, or seen, in his body. 

The fucking alien bitches, as Harkness had called them earlier, had completely cured him.

* * *

The warriors looked on as the animal who was dominant convinced the others to come to the healers without further struggle. One by one, and then in groups of four, they came to be tended. The healing gel was the only instrument used by the healers other than some specialized potions; it was the only instrument needed. A product of forced evolution millennia long past, the gel was at once an organism unto itself, yet also a part of the healer to which it was bonded. It had no intelligence of its own, yet could perform the most complex tasks to heal or repair another organism, even a completely alien species.

Through this unique symbiont, the healers could “see” the bodies of the aliens down to the sub-cellular level. While the purpose of the healers here was primarily to learn all there was to know about the aliens’ physiognomy, they also employed the gel to seek out any pathogenic organisms and compounds that could be harmful to Her Children. At the same time, the gel immunized the aliens against potentially harmful pathogens carried by the denizens of the Empire, and also did for them what it was normally meant to do: heal disease and repair injury.

Once the healers had finished their task with the living humans, they communed with another group that had studied the remains the warriors had left behind. Pooling the gel together, each symbiont exchanged its information with the others. The healers, their minds conditioned to assimilating such information, now understood the human body and its inner workings far better than all of humanity’s physicians combined.

In the human sphere, such information would have to be communicated elsewhere by technology. But an outside observer would have seen no technology in evidence here: once the symbionts had digested the information about the aliens and been merged together, other symbionts throughout the Empire began to spontaneously mutate, reflecting this new knowledge.

The final task of the healers was to transfer the genetic knowledge from the symbionts to the members of their own race to immunize them. This was accomplished for the warriors and other castes simply by placing a small piece of the symbiont on any convenient patch of skin: it merged into the flesh of the patient and made any necessary alterations. The symbiont regenerated itself by merging with its parent healer, whose body provided the necessary nutrients for recovery. This immunization was accomplished quickly throughout the Empire, not just to those here in this system.

For while the final test of the aliens had yet to be performed, the Empress had sensed enough through the blood of Her Children here to know what lay ahead: war.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Lord of All,” McClaren breathed as the alien gently shoved his naked body through the perfectly circular hole, about three meters across, that they’d cut in the side of his ship. He had thought at first that they were going to push him into hard vacuum through some sort of invisible barrier, for there was nothing visible between the
Aurora’s
hull and that of the enemy vessel that now stood very close alongside. But he had seen that there were warriors at a few spots along the invisible gangway that somehow linked the ships, and that had held his fear in check. Barely.

But my God, the view
, he thought as he crossed over the threshold from the metal deck into the void. Suddenly leaving the ship’s artificial gravity behind, his stomach momentarily dropped away as he became weightless. He could see down the
Aurora’s
flank, noting the holes where the enemy warriors had burned through the hull to board his ship. 

Then there was the enemy ship -
huge!
- that didn’t look a thing like any spacecraft ever made by humankind. The smooth metal (he assumed it was metal) of the hull gleamed a deep but brilliant green, with contoured dark gunmetal-colored ports and blisters where he assumed some sort of hatches or weapons were mounted. Unlike a human ship, which was a patchwork of plates, the surface of the alien ship’s hull was as smooth as a still pond: he couldn’t see any joints or welds, rivets, screws or other fastenings as he got closer. It was as if the hull was one gigantic sheet of...whatever it was made of. The craft was all graceful curves, as if it were designed to fly in an atmosphere, with none of the boxy fittings and other angular projections typical of human ships. Looking forward, he saw that giant runes were inscribed along its raked prow, perhaps proclaiming the ship’s name, whatever it might be.

And all around him: the stars. As if his hand had a will of its own, he reached out to touch them. He knew they were billions of miles away, but they seemed so close. The alien sun burned brightly mere millions of miles away, and a point of light far brighter than the other stars proclaimed itself the planet from which the four warships had come. He had been on plenty of spacewalks, but this wasn’t the same. Maybe it was the emotional exhaustion of the last few hours since the alien ships had been spotted. So little time on the scale of his life, but an eternity for those who had lived through it. 

The stars. Part of him knew that this would be the last time he would ever see them. He looked outward, and the unfeeling Universe returned his gaze.

He felt one of the warriors take his arm, amazingly gently, he thought, to propel him onward to his destination. With one last heartbroken look at
Aurora
, he turned toward the open maw of the alien ship that awaited him. 

Behind McClaren, the other survivors of the
Aurora
were ferried along, naked and still dazed from the emotional and physical trauma of the healing gel. Even though a number of them had performed spacewalks countless times, they gawked in awe at the great Void around them, and felt a deep tremor of fear at the huge alien warship that seemed in their eyes as big as a planet. 

As McClaren approached the “hatch” of the alien ship, he looked closely at the smooth petals of the material (he was less and less convinced that anything on this ship was metal as he understood it) that had irised open. He had no doubt that when this aperture was closed, it would be totally invisible against the hull. Or maybe the aliens could open an aperture like this anywhere, if needed. 

His professional curiosity warred with the fear of what would happen to humanity if these creatures were able to trace the path
Aurora
had taken here. His failure to ensure the navigation computer core had been destroyed ate at him like a bitter acid in his gut. And with his crew now removed from the ship, any opportunity -
Not that there really had been any,
he thought bitterly - to somehow break free of the warriors and destroy the core had been lost. His only hope now was that the
Aurora’s
computer technology was sufficiently alien that they couldn’t figure it out. But after seeing what the aliens with the goo did with his body, and the heart-stopping technology he saw in this ship, he knew that hope was truly a vain one. It was a disaster of literally stellar proportions, and he knew his name would go down in history as the man who had unwittingly opened the human sphere to invasion. The thought was a crushing blow to his soul.

He floated across the threshold into the alien ship, and a gentle artificial gravity gradient allowed him to land gracefully on his feet. There was a phalanx of warriors waiting for the humans to arrive, and a pair escorted McClaren down the connecting passageway that, like everything else on this ship, was huge: it could have easily accommodated a pair of elephants walking side-by-side, with room to spare.

As on the
Aurora
after the aliens had attacked, the walls themselves gave off a soft light. Unlike the dark blue glow on the
Aurora
, however, this was near the color humans viewed as normal sunlight, although tinged with magenta. It gave him the impression of an everlasting sunrise, a thought that struck him as supremely ironic given the very questionable nature of his fate.

The deck felt soft and warm to his bare feet, its dark gray surface pebbled to provide a superior grip. Like the rest of the hull, he had the impression that this wasn’t any sort of metal, and he was struck by the thought that perhaps the ship was semi-organic. The thought of such radically advanced technology chilled McClaren to the bone.

By contrast, the walls and ceiling appeared to be nothing more sophisticated or high-tech than stone, perhaps a type of granite that was a very pale rose color. He thought for a moment of the ancient burial places like the Pyramids on Earth, where the walls and rooms of the dead were decorated with ancient writing. For that’s exactly the way these walls appeared: there was writing everywhere in the form of alien runes, as if the walls and even the ceiling were part of a giant book that someone had written. Chancing that his guards wouldn’t notice or perhaps care, he drifted to one side of the passageway and stretched out a hand to touch the wall’s surface. While it could certainly be artificial, to his touch it felt like nothing more sophisticated than very finely polished granite. But how the aliens made it give off light to illuminate the passageway, and why they would have something like stone for the interior of a starship, he couldn’t even guess.

Making sure he kept pace with the warriors, who seemed content not to harass him, he glanced back to check on the other members of his crew. Like him, each of them had a pair of warriors as escort, except for Yao Ming, who was surrounded by four warriors. McClaren’s people were spaced out evenly behind him at five meter intervals. Those who saw him looking nodded back, fear written plainly on their faces. After the slaughter on the
Aurora
, there was no reason to think anything pleasant awaited them here.

* * *

Like the rest of the crew, Yao Ming had been appalled at the wanton murders of the rest of the crew. But unlike the other survivors, he had seen such horrors before. The colony world on Keran where he had been born and raised had been settled by an unlikely mix largely made up of ethnic Chinese and Arabs. The two communities, while maintaining distinct cultural identities, interacted peacefully and had rapidly expanded from the original towns they established on landing to intertwining cities and villages. While not a rich world compared to many, it was prosperous and generally peaceful.

But when Yao Ming was eleven years old, an ethnic Chinese gang that had been brutalizing the local Arabs and that local authorities in his town had been unable to control finally went too far: they kidnapped, gang-raped and murdered three young Arab girls. What turned out to be the final insult that made a violent confrontation inevitable was that they stuffed the girls’ mouths with pork before they killed them.

Citizens of both communities were shocked and horrified. A local mullah wasn’t satisfied with the claims by the police that the gang would be brought to justice, since they never had before. He led the grief-stricken worshippers in his mosque, nearly two thousand of them, including the parents of the murdered girls, on a rampage through the adjacent Chinese district. 

While the violence was localized and didn’t affect the overall population, Yao Ming’s neighborhood became a killing ground as the frenzied mob surged through the narrow streets. Armed with everything from fists and knives to assault rifles (authorities later determined that more than a few of the perpetrators had gone to the mosque bearing concealed firearms), they grabbed, mutilated, and killed anyone in their path who couldn’t run away fast enough. They surged into shops, homes, and apartments, leaving a trail of bloody carnage: nowhere was safe. Some of the Chinese tried to stand and fight, but they were simply overwhelmed by numbers.