Empire (2 page)

But beyond the searching muzzle of Enrique’s gun, the advancing Kreelans passed many of their sisters who had died as the battle here had ebbed and flowed. Their burned and twisted bodies were stacked like cordwood at the approaches to the humans’ crumbling defense perimeter, often enmeshed with the humans who had killed them. Enemies in life, they were bound together in death with bayonets and claws in passionate, if gruesome, embraces.

Still, they came. They always came.

Solon caught himself trying to rub his forehead through his battered helmet.
Lord, am I tired
, he thought. Their company was part of the battalion that had been among the last of the reserves to be activated for the city’s final stand, and the Territorial Army commander had brought them into action three days before. Three days. It had been a lifetime.

“One-hundred and sixty-two people, dead,” he whispered to himself, thinking of the soldiers he had lost in the last few days. But they had lasted longer than most. Nearly every company of the first defensive ring had been wiped out to the last man and woman in less than twenty-four hours. Solon and his company were part of the fourth and final ring around the last of the defense shelters in this sector of the city. If the Kreelans got through…

“Hey, boss,” Enrique called quietly. “I hate to interrupt, but they’re getting a bit close over here. You want me to light ‘em up?”

“I’ll do the honors,” Camilla told Solon, patting him on the helmet. “You need to get yourself back together.”

“No arguments here,” he answered wearily, propping himself against the remains of the wall. “I’ll keep on eye on this side.”

Camilla quickly took her place next to the gunner. “I’m glad you didn’t wait much longer to let us know we had company, Enrique,” she chided after carefully peering out at the enemy. “They’re so close I can see their fangs.” She checked the charge on the pulse gun’s power pack. A fresh one would last for about thirty seconds of continuous firing, an appetite that made having both a gunner and a loader to service the hungry weapon a necessity.

“Yeah,” Enrique smiled, his lips curling around the remains of an unlit cigarette butt he held clenched between his dirt-covered lips. He had tossed his helmet away the first thing, preferring to wear only a black bandanna around his forehead. His grime stained hands tightened on the gun’s controls and his eyes sighted on the line of advancing Kreelans. “Looks like they think we’re all finished, since we haven’t shot back at ‘em for a while.” He snickered, then snugged his shoulder in tight to the shoulder stock of the gun. “Surprise…”

Solon was hunched down next to a blown-out window, looking for signs of the Kreelans trying to flank them, when he noticed the shattered portrait of a man and woman on the floor next to him. He picked up the crushed holo image of the young man and his bride and wondered who they might have been. Saying a silent prayer for their souls, he carefully set the picture out of his way. Somehow, the image seemed sacred, a tiny reminder of the precariousness of human existence, of good times past, and perhaps, hopes for the future. These two, who undoubtedly lay dead somewhere in this wasteland, would never know that their own lives were more fragile and finite than the plastic that still struggled to protect their images.

He turned as he heard the coughing roar of Enrique’s pulse gun as it tore into the alien skirmish line. He listened as the gunner moderated his bursts, conserving the weapon’s power while choosing his targets. Solon was glad Enrique had lived this long. He was as good a soldier as could be found in the Territorial Army. They had all been good soldiers, and would make the Kreelans pay dearly for taking the last four lives that Solon had left to offer as an interest payment toward humanity’s survival.

As he looked through the dust and smoke, the thermal imager in Solon’s visor gave him an enhanced view of the devastation around him, the computer turning the sunset into a scene of a scarlet Hell. He prayed that his seven-year-old son, Reza, remained safe in the nearby bunker. He had lost count of the number of times he had prayed for his boy, but it did not matter. He prayed again, and would go on praying, because it was the only thing he could do. Reza and the other children of their defense district had been taken to the local shelter, a deep underground bunker that could withstand all but a direct orbital bombardment, or so they hoped. Solon only wished that he had been able to see his little boy again before he died. “I love you, son,” he whispered to the burning night.

Behind him, Camilla hurriedly stripped off the expended power pack from the pulse gun and clipped on another. She had come to do it so well that Enrique barely missed a beat in his firing.

Solon saw movement in a nearby building that was occupied by one of the other platoons: a hand waving at him from a darkened doorway. He raised his own hand in a quick salute, not daring to risk his head or arm for a more dashing salutation.

He made one more careful sweep of the street with his enhanced vision. Although he had spent his life in service to the Confederation as a shipbuilder, not as a hardened Marine or sailor, Solon knew that he needed to be extra careful in everything he did now. His body was past its physical limit, and the need for sleep was dragging all of them toward mistakes that could lead them to their deaths. Vigilance was survival.

As he finished his visual check, he relaxed slightly. All was as he had seen it before. Nothing moved. Nothing changed but the direction of the smoke’s drift, and the smell of burning wood and flesh that went with it. He felt more than heard the hits the other side of his little fortress was taking from Kreelan light guns, and was relieved to hear Enrique’s pulse gun yammer back at them like an enraged dog.

He glanced back toward the building occupied by the other platoon just as a massive barrage of Kreelan weapons fire erupted on the far side. He watched in horror as the structure began to crumble under the onslaught. The human defenders, sensing the futility of holding on, came boiling out into the street, heading for Solon’s position, only to be cut down in a brutal crossfire from further down the lane.

The firing tapered off, and Solon saw shadows rapidly flowing toward the other platoon’s survivors: Kreelan warriors silently advancing, swords drawn. They killed with energy weapons when they had to, but preferred more personal means of combat.

“Oh my God,” Solon whispered, knowing that his own final stand would soon be upon him: they were surrounded now, cut off. His throat constricted and his stomach threatened to heave up the handful of tasteless ration cake he had eaten earlier in the day. He flipped up the visor for a moment to look at the scene with his own eyes, then flipped it back down to penetrate the smoky darkness.

Suddenly, a lone figure darted across the street, plunging suicidally into the raging battle. Under the figure’s arm swung what could have been an oversized doll, but Solon knew that it was not. The little arms clung to the neck of the madly running soldier and the rag doll’s little legs kicked at empty air. With a sinking sensation, Solon realized who it was.

“Reza!” he shouted, his heart hammering with fear and joy, wondering how in the Lord’s name the boy had gotten here.

With a crack of thunder, the soldier’s luck ran out as a crimson lance struck him, spinning him around like a top. He collapsed into the rubble, shielding the boy’s body with his own.

Solon roared in the protective fury only a parent can know, his voice thundering above the clamoring of the guns. Camilla turned just in time to see him leap through the blasted wall into the carnage raging beyond.

“Solon!” she screamed, struggling up from her position next to the hammering pulse gun.

“No!” Enrique yelled at her, grabbing for her arm. He was too late to stop her as she bolted from the pit. “Dammit!” he hissed, struggling to change the empty and useless magazine himself. He pried the heavy canister off the gun’s breech section with blind, groping hands while his bloodshot eyes tracked the rapidly approaching shadows of the enemy.

Solon suddenly staggered back over the shattered wall. His breath came in long heaves as if he had just finished running a marathon, and his armor was pitted and smoking from half a dozen glancing hits. In his arms was a small bundle of rags. Camilla nearly fainted at the sight of Reza’s face, his skin black with soot and streaked with tears of fright.

“Mama,” the boy cried, reaching for her.

“Oh, baby,” she said softly, taking him in her arms and rocking him. “What are you doing here?” Camilla asked.

Solon collapsed next to her, wrapping his arms around his wife and child.

“What happened to the bunker?” Snowden shouted in between bursts from her rifle as she tried to kill the Kreelans who escaped Enrique’s non-stop firing.

“The same thing that’s going to happen to us if you guys don’t start shooting!” Enrique screamed hoarsely, finally slamming a new – and the last – magazine into his pulse gun. “The Blues are all over the place out here!”

Reluctantly letting go of his wife and son, Solon grabbed up his rifle and thrust its muzzle through a hole in the wall. Gritting his teeth in rage and a newfound determination to survive, to protect his wife and son, he opened fire on the wraiths that moved through the darkness.

Camilla, after a last hug, set Reza down next to Snowden. “Take care of him,” she begged before taking up her station next to Enrique.

Snowden nodded and held Reza tightly as the thunder of gunfire surrounded them.

* * *

The sky was black as pitch, black as death, as the priestess walked alone over the arena this world had become. Her sandaled feet touched the ground but left no sound, no footprint. She looked up toward where the stars should be, yearning for the great moon that shone over the Homeworld. But the only sight to be had was the glowing red smears of the fires that were reflected by the wafting smoke and dust.

As she made her way across the field of carnage, she touched the bodies of the fallen children to honor them as they had honored their Empress. They had sacrificed their lives to show their love for Her. She grieved for them all, that they had died this day, never again to feel the flame that drove them to battle, the thrill of sword and claw, never again to serve the Empress through their flesh. Now they basked in the quiet sunset of the Afterlife, someday perhaps to join the ranks of the Ancient Ones, the warriors of the spirit.

She moved on toward her destination. It had once been a human dwelling, but now was a mound of ashen rubble. It squatted impetuously in the wasteland created by weapons the Kreela disdained to use. The humans had never realized that the destruction of their worlds was caused by their own predilection for such weaponry, to which the Kreela sometimes had to respond in kind. The warriors of the Empress sought battles of the mind, body, and spirit, of sword and claw, and not of brute destruction.

Watching the battles rage here for several cycles of the sun across the sky, she had become increasingly curious about these particular humans who fought so well, and at last had decided that perhaps they were worthy of her personal attention. She bade the young warriors to rest, to wait for her return, before setting out on her own journey of discovery.

She paused when she reached the back of the crumbled structure that hid the humans she sought. She listened for their heartbeats, smelled their pungent body odor, and felt for their strange alien spirit with her mind. After a moment she had an image of them, of where they sat and stood within.

Silent as the dead around her, she moved to a chosen point along the wall. Her breathing and heart stilled, she concealed everything about herself that made her presence real. Unless one of the humans looked directly at her, she would be utterly invisible.

Then she stepped through the wall, her flesh and armor melding with the essence of the barrier as she passed through without so much as a whisper.

* * *

“Is that all you remember, honey?” Camilla asked Reza softly, brushing his unruly hair back with her hand, which was temporarily freed from the armored skin she had been wearing for the past several days.

“Yes, Mama,” he replied. The fear had mostly left him, now that he was with them again, and that they thought he had done the right thing. “All I remember was lots of smoke. Then someone started to scream. People ran, hurting each other, because they were afraid. Someone, Madame Barnault, I think, led me out, but I lost her after we got outside. I remembered where Papa said you would be, so I came here to find you. I almost made it, except the Kreelans were everywhere. That’s when Kerry–”

“That’s enough, son,” Solon said gently, not wanting to force the boy to describe the death of the soldier, who had been another friend of their family. “It’s all right, now. You’re here and safe, and that’s all that counts.” He exchanged a quick glance with Camilla.
Safe
was hardly the word to use, he knew, even though the Kreelans had apparently given up for the day. Reza would now have to suffer whatever fate was in store for the rest of them. Solon could not justify risking someone else’s life for the boy’s benefit. One had already died for him.

“Reza,” Camilla told him, “I want you to stay with Snowden and help her find more ammunition for us.” She leaned close to his ear and whispered, “And I want you to watch out for her and protect her. She’s hurt and needs a big boy like you to care for her.”

Reza nodded vigorously, glancing in Snowden’s direction, the horrors of the past few hours fading. He had a mission now, some responsibility that helped to displace his fear. “I will, Mama,” he said quietly so that Snowden would not hear.