Empire (52 page)

He looked at her for a moment, his brow furrowed in concentration. Then his eyes cleared. In a quiet tenor that made Jodi’s flesh prickle with excitement, he said, “Reza.”

“Reza,” Jodi repeated, smiling as she felt a shudder of nervous relief through her body. Perhaps he was not going to kill her after all. At least she had some hope, now. She might yet leave this room alive. Surely he would not bother with this little game if he had come only to kill her. But then again…

“Say my name, Reza,” she said, moving his hand back to her chest. “Jodi,” she said.

“Jo-dee,” he managed. Even that simple utterance was nearly lost to the guttural accent that filtered his speech.

“Good,” she said, elated by this tiny success. She edged slightly to one side, trying to move closer to the door without him becoming suspicious of her intentions. “Come on, now. Say it again.”

He did, and she nodded, breathing a little easier. As she looked at him, forcing herself to ignore the door that was only a few feet away, but still so far out of reach, she was taken by the moist tracks that ran down his face. With her free hand, she touched them, feeling the wetness against her fingertips. “Why are you crying?” she whispered wonderingly. She did not expect an answer.

Reza worked his mouth, as if he wanted – or was at least trying – to say something more than just repeat her name, but a change flashed across his face, a look of such cunning and knowing in his expression that it frightened Jodi. His eyes narrowed suddenly, and he took hold of her and spun her around in his arms like they were on a dance floor, whirling to some insane waltz. In the blink of an eye, she found herself facing the door to the rectory, staring into Gunnery Sergeant Braddock’s surprised and confused face as he opened the door.

“You, ah, all right there, ma’am?” the regiment’s acting sergeant major asked quietly, a frown of concern turning down the corners of his mouth as his hand gripped his rifle a little tighter.

Jodi spun back around to where Reza was and found… nothing. She was alone in the rectory.

“There was…” she began, then shook her head. “I… I mean… oh, shit.” She looked back at Braddock, her face pale, then reddening from embarrassment. She was shaking. “I think I’m flipping out, gunny,” she said with a nervous smile. “I could’ve sworn I was just talking to a Kreelan that looked like a human, a man.”

“That’d be a bit odd for you, wouldn’t it?” he joked, poking fun at her sexual preference, but he got only an uneasy grimace in return. Jeez, he thought, she’s really spooked. He came up to her and put a hand on her shoulder, offering her a sympathetic smile. “Look,” he said quietly, “I know what you mean, lieutenant. I’ve had some pretty freaky spells myself lately. We’re just strung out a bit thin, getting tired and a little jumpy, is all. You’ll be okay.” He handed her the helmet that had been sitting on the priest’s tiny bed. “We’ve still got a job to do, ma’am. Morning’s on the way, and our blue-skinned lady friends will be along any time, now, I imagine. I’ll get the troops started along while you get your stuff together. Maybe we can have one last formation before the carny starts.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, trying to control the trembling that was shaking her so hard that her teeth threatened to chatter as if she were freezing. “Thanks, Braddock,” she told him.

Favoring her with a compassionate smile, he left her in peace. A moment later she could hear him barking orders in the main part of the church, rousing the remainder of the able-bodied Marines to yet another fight, their last. Shaking her head in wonder, Jodi rubbed her eyes, then stopped.

Her fingertips were noticeably moist. With her heart tripping in her chest, she looked at them, saw them glistening wetly in the candlelight. Cautiously, she put a finger to her lips, tasted it with the tip of her tongue. It was not water, nor was it the bitter taste of sweat. She tasted the soft saltiness of human tears.

“Jesus,” she whispered to herself. “What the hell is going on?”

* * *

She met Father Hernandez as she was moving toward the front of the church and the roughly aligned ranks of her gathered command.

“I see that, yet again, you refuse to have faith, lieutenant,” he said somberly, his eyes dark with concern. He had said the same thing to all of them every morning that they had gone out to fight, hoping that someone would accept his wisdom as the truth and lay down their weapons to let God do the work of feeding them to the Kreelans’ claws. “If only you would believe, God would–”

“Please, father,” she said, cutting him off more harshly than she meant to. But the incident, hallucination, or whatever the hell it had been back in the rectory had really rattled her, and she did not need his well-intentioned mumbo-jumbo right now. “I don’t have time.”

She tried to push her way past him, but he held her up, a restraining hand on her arm. “Wait,” he said, studying her face closely. “You saw something, didn’t you?”

There was no disguising the look of surprise on her face at his question. “What the hell are you talking about?” she blustered, trying to pull away.

“In there, in the rectory,” Hernandez persisted, his eyes boring into hers with an intensity she had never seen in him before. He gripped her arm fiercely, and she suddenly did not have the strength to struggle against him. It reminded her too much of what had happened only a few minutes ago. “I know when people have seen something that has touched them deeply, Jodi, and you have that look. Tell me what you saw.”

“I didn’t see anything,” she lied, looking away toward the crucifix hanging above the altar. The wooden statue of Christ, forever pinned to the cross by its ankles and wrists, wept bloody tears. A shiver went down her spine as she imagined the statue’s eyes opening, revealing a pair of unfathomable green eyes. “Please, father, let me go.” She looked at him with pleading eyes that were on the verge of tears. “Please.”

Sighing in resignation, the old priest released her arm. “You can close your eyes and ears to all that you might see and hear, you can pretend that it never happened, whatever it was, but He is persistent, Jodi,” he said. “Even you cannot ignore God’s Truth forever.” He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead, surprising her. “Go then, child. I do not believe in what you do, but that will never stop me from praying for your safety and your soul.”

Jodi managed a smile that might have been more appropriate on the face of a ten-year old girl who had yet to experience the pain and sufferings of adult life. “Thanks, father. For whatever it’s worth–”

“Lieutenant!” Braddock’s voice boomed through the church over a sudden hubbub that had broken out near the great wooden doors that led to the outside. “Lieutenant Mackenzie! You better take a look at this!”

“Now what…” Jodi muttered under her breath as she made her way through the rows of invalid Marines, running toward the doorway.

“What is it?” she demanded as she pulled up short next to Braddock.

Her voice was all business now, the acting sergeant major saw. She had it back together. Good, he thought. “Look,” he said, pointing through the partially opened doors toward the village gates. “Just who – or what – the hell is that?”

Jodi looked toward where Braddock was pointing. The village gates were at the apex of the semicircular stone wall that formed Rutan’s external periphery beyond the cliff into which the settlement was recessed. The church, located under the protective shelter of the cliff itself, was in line with the gates and elevated by nearly fifteen meters, giving anyone at the church’s entrance an unobstructed view of the approaches to the village. The only approach of concern to the Marines had been the stone bridge that spanned the swift-flowing Trinity River. It was there, along the deforested stretch from the river to the village gates, that most of the battles for Rutan had been fought. The Kreelans had taken refuge in the thick forest on the far side, unable to find any suitable ground closer or to either side of the village, and it was from across the bridge that they attacked each morning. It had not been so in the first week or two, when they had engaged in fluid battles away from the village. But after the humans’ heavy weapons and vehicles had finally been knocked out, the Kreelans had set aside their more powerful war machines and contented themselves with a small war of attrition, virtually forcing the humans into daily fights at close quarters, often hand-to-hand.

“I don’t see…”

Then suddenly her voice died. There, facing the bridge and the Kreelans already advancing across it, was the man who had come to her in the rectory, standing like an alien-inspired Horatius.

“Reza,” she whispered. She suddenly felt very, very cold.

Braddock was staring at her. “Is… is that him?” he whispered incredulously. “He was real?”

“Looks that way,” Jodi replied hoarsely. She did not have enough energy for anything more. “I, ah, think we better get out there and get ready. Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Braddock replied absently as he pulled out his field glasses and held them up to his eyes, focusing quickly for a better look.

But neither of them moved. Behind them, the Marines murmured among themselves, unsure and afraid at their leaders’ strange behavior. A few of them were standing up on pews to see what was happening, peering out the narrow windows and reporting the action to their fellows. The church grew uncharacteristically silent, even for a holy place filled with the injured and dying.

Nearby, Father Hernandez watched the two figures peering out the door. A curious smile crept onto his face.

Fascinated into inaction by what they saw, Jodi and Braddock watched the Kreelan phalanx converge on the mysterious figure that awaited them.

* * *

La’ana-Ti’er stepped forward from the group of warriors who had come in search of combat. Kneeling, she saluted her superior. Behind her, the other warriors kneeled as one.

“Greetings, Reza of the Desh-Ka,” she said humbly. “Honored are we that you are among us, and saddened are we that your song no longer sings in our veins.” She bowed her head. “To cross swords with you is an honor of which I am unworthy.”

Reza regarded her quietly for a moment. He was chilled by the emptiness he felt at no longer being able to hear in his heart what she and the others could, at being unable to feel the Empress’s will as a palpable sensation. Although he had possessed that ability for only a brief period, its absence now was nearly unbearable. The severed braid that had been his spiritual lifeline to the Empress throbbed like a violated nerve.

“Rise, La’ana-Ti’er,” he told her. They clasped arms in greeting, as if they had known each other their entire lives, had been comrades, friends, as if they were not about to join in a battle to kill one another. “It is Her will.” He was left to interpret Her desires from his own memories of what once was. With his banishment to this place, wherever it was, all he had left were his memories and the single, lonely melody that sang to him in the voice of his own spirit.

La’ana-Ti’er looked upon him with respectful and sympathetic eyes. She did not pity him, for pity was beyond her emotional abilities; she mourned him. “Should you perish on the field of battle this day,” she told him, “it will bring me no joy, no glory. I will fight you as I have fought all others, but I pray to Her that mine shall not be the sword to strike you down and cast you into darkness.” She dropped her eyes.

“My thanks, warrior,” he told her quietly, “and may thy Way be long and glorious.” He drew in a breath. “Let it begin.”

* * *

Jodi blinked at the sudden violence that erupted on the bridge. One moment, the Kreelans who had come to finish them off were all bowing in front of the strange man who had come to her. In the next there was nothing to see but a whirlwind of clashing swords and armor. A memory came to her from her days as a child on Terra, when a neighbor boy released a single black ant into the midst of a nest of red ones. The savagery and intensity she had seen in that tiny microcosm of violence was an echo of the bloody chaos she was witnessing now. The church reverberated with the crash of steel upon steel, the cries of blood lust and pain raising gooseflesh on her arms.

“What the hell’s going on?” Braddock whispered, his eyes glued to the binoculars. “Lord of All, they’re fighting each other!”

“Can you see him?” Jodi asked. Her eyesight was phenomenal, but the distance was just too great to make out any details in the raging rabble that had consumed the old stone bridge. All she could see was a swirling humanoid mass, with a body plummeting – hurled might be a better word, she thought – now and again from the bridge like a carelessly tossed stone. She had lost sight of the man after the first second or two as he waded into the Kreelans’ midst, his sword cutting a swath of destruction before him.

“Yeah… No… What the hell?” Braddock wiped his eyes with his hands before looking again through the binoculars. “I see him in one place, then he just seems to pop up in another. Damn, but this is weird, lieutenant.” He turned to her. “Should we go take a closer look?”

“How much ammo have we got?” she asked.

Braddock gave her a grim smile. “After we redistributed last night, three rounds per rifle and a handful of sidearm ammunition that isn’t worth shit. Everybody’s got their bayonets fixed for the rest of it.”

Jodi sighed, still concentrating on the scene being played out on the bridge. It was no worse than she expected. “Let’s do it.”

Braddock turned to the Marines now clustered behind them. “ALL RIGHT!” he boomed. “MOVE OUT!”

Twenty-two Marines and one marooned naval flight officer burst from the safety of the church’s stone walls and began to move in a snaking skirmish line toward where the unexpected battle still raged at fever pitch.

* * *

Reza paid no attention to his eyes and ears, for he had no real need of them at the moment. His spirit could sense his surroundings, sense his opponents far better. He was living in a state of semi-suspended time as the battle went on, his opponents appearing to move in slow motion, giving him time to analyze and attack with totally inhuman efficiency, his body and mind acting far outside the normal laws that governed physical existence. His fellow warriors knew that they would die at his hand, but none of them would ever have dreamed of turning their backs upon an opportunity to face a Desh-Ka in a battle to the death. It was unspeakably rare to engage in such a contest since the Empire had been born; the Empress had sought external enemies to fight, allowing Her children only to fight for honor among themselves in the Challenge, without intentionally killing one another except in the most extreme of circumstances. To face one so skilled, regardless of whether they lived or died, would bring much honor to the Empress and their Way.