'Jesus, you're a mess,' said Midnight, caught between tears and laughter. 'I'll get you to the infirmary.'
'No time. You guard that hole in the wall while I finish regenerating. And if you see them setting up another disrupter cannon, pick me up and run like hell, because there's no way I could survive another blast like that.'
'You got it,' said Midnight Blue. 'If anyone gets past me, bite their ankles.'
She moved back to the wall, stepped into the great hole, and defied the Hadenmen to get past her. She stood there with her ax in her hands, ready to stand her ground till the battle was over, till the death, or hell froze, whichever came first.
The two Sisters of Glory were seemingly everywhere at once, luring their leper charges on, leading from the front, singing hymns and psalms as they killed everything that came against them. The leper colonists fought with the souls of warriors, holding their own against the Hadenmen for as long as they could. For all their strength and speed, their implanted armor and steelmesh, the augmented men couldn't stand against enemies who threw themselves into the fray not caring whether they lived or died. One leper would cling to a Hadenman's sword arm, holding it down while another leper went for the throat. Some deliberately took a sword in the belly, trapping the blade so others could drag the killer down. The Hadenmen were efficient, but the lepers were inspired. The battle surged back and forth, toward the Mission and away again, with neither side able to hold the advantage for long.
Sister Kathleen saw the bomb first. Caught for a moment in a quiet eddy, she looked around for a new opponent, and saw six Hadenmen carrying a heavy explosive device among them, heading slowly for the main gate of the Mission. A bodyguard of six more Hadenmen surrounded the bomb, using their disrupters to clear the way before them. Kathleen recognized the device, having worked in mining before she came to the Church. She called out to Marion, naming the new threat, and together they carved a path through the surging crowd toward the bomb.
The two Sisters reached the bomb's honor guard together, and threw themselves at the unsuspecting Hadenmen. Their guns exhausted, the augmented men stood their ground with naked steel and would not be moved. The Sisters of Glory fought savagely, but they had been fighting for so very long, and they were after all very sick women, their strength and stamina eaten away by leprosy, as with everything else. The servomotors in the arms of the Hadenmen never grew tired. The progress of the bomb had been stopped, not far from the edge of the clearing, but the Sisters couldn't reach it.
They battled on, their faith pushing them forward when any other might have retired, or dropped from sheer exhaustion, but in the end only Kathleen saw what was needed. She said a last prayer to God, and forced her way between two Hadenmen by throwing everything she had into an attack that left her totally defenseless. She burst through, heading for the bomb, and two swords hit her from behind at once, slamming into her back and kidneys. She cried out once, blood spraying from her mouth, but kept going, the headlong momentum of her last desperate charge bringing her to the bomb. She flailed wildly about her with her sword, killing one of the Hadenmen carrying the bomb, and the device crashed to the ground. And then it was the simplest thing in the world for Kathleen to reach forward and activate the five-minute timer.
Sister Marion saw what she'd done, and cried out helplessly as Kathleen threw herself over the bomb, clinging to it determinedly so that the Hadenmen couldn't get to it and undo what she'd done. Sister Marion turned and ran for the Mission, yelling to the lepers to retreat. Others took up the cry, trusting her decision, and soon all the defenders of Saint Bea's Mission had broken away from the battle and were sweeping back across the clearing, heading for the main gate and the larger holes in the outer wall. At first the Hadenmen pursued them, but they quickly realized something was wrong, and stopped, suspecting a trap or a trick of some kind.
Back at the bomb, the Hadenmen cut and hacked at Kathleen, trying to force her to let go, but she clung to it with the last of her strength, crying out at the horrid pain of her wounds, but refusing to release her grip. Kathleen had positioned herself very carefully. The Hadenmen had to be cautious where they hit her, for fear of damaging the bomb. In the end she died, though it took the augmented men some time to realize that. They pried her hands off the bomb, breaking her fingers to do it, and threw the dead nun aside. And only then did they see the timer, and realize what Kathleen had bought with her stubborn, defiant death. The Hadenmen turned to run, and the bomb went off.
The blast killed every Hadenman still in the clearing, flattened some of the trees on the periphery, and shook the walls of the Mission. The lepers had made it inside and secured the main gate in time, and though there was some structural damage among the smaller buildings, the colonists and their champions survived. After the last tremors of the explosion had died away, and the walls and the ground had stopped shaking, Sister Marion opened the main gate and looked out. All that remained of the attacking army were a few half-melted metal shapes here and there. The Hadenman force was gone as though it had never been. There was no trace at all of Sister Kathleen. Sister Marion sighed and sniffed loudly.
'Teach those metal bastards to play with dangerous toys. God bless and keep you, Sister Kathleen, and damn all the Hadenmen to Hell.'
After the battle came the cleaning up. The holes in the outer wall had to be repaired or barricaded, the injured were taken to the infirmary, and the dead were piled up in one of the storage huts. There would be time for funerals later. Hopefully. Each of the dead had to be identified first so that friends and loved ones could say a last good-bye. Sometimes the bodies were so damaged or disfigured that identification was difficult. Those unfortunates were laid out in lines in a separate hut, and tearful survivors moved slowly down the narrow aisles between the bodies, looking for someone familiar.
Collecting the dead, and either identifying or laying them out, was a disturbing, depressing business, but it had to be done. Most of those who'd gone out to fight were in no shape to do it, physically or mentally, so the duty fell to those who'd stayed within the Mission as a last line of defense to protect those too ill to fight. Colonel William Hand and Otto had ended up guarding the main gate and overseeing tactics, much to their disgust, and now used their military experience to deal with the business of the dead. There were always more, as men and women died waiting to get to the infirmary.
Hand and Otto weren't bothered by the dead. They'd seen enough bodies in their time to know the trick of treating them as objects rather than the people they'd been. Tobias Moon worked with them. He hadn't been allowed to go outside and fight, because he might easily have been mistaken for one of the enemy. So now he carried the dead into the long, narrow hut and laid them out in neat rows, his augmented arms carrying the load long after even the most determined of the lepers had been forced to give up through sheer exhaustion. He was glad for a chance to be doing something to help. The dead bodies didn't bother him at all. He'd been there.
William Hand walked slowly up and down the ranks, giving each body a number and making notes of things like personal jewelery, to help in identification. Otto staggered in and out with blankets wrapped around collections of body parts. They'd be matched up later, if possible. For now he just dumped them all in a pile in one corner, and thanked God there were no rats on Lachrymae Christi. He dropped his last load onto the chest-high pile with an emphatic grunt, turned around, and pulled a face.
'Jesus, this place stinks, Colonel. Couldn't they at least have chosen a hut with windows?'
'Splash some disinfectant around,' said Hand, not looking up from his clipboard. 'And if you see anything small and wriggling, hit it with something heavy.'
'Can't,' said Otto. 'Saint Bea's commandeered all the disinfectant for the infirmary. She's even rounded up all the booze in the camp as backup. Next time, Colonel, let's not get distracted from the fighting. I'd rather take on a whole army of Hadenmen with my hump on backward than go through this shit again. Too much like working for a living.' The dwarf looked around him and was quiet for a long moment. 'We lost a lot of good people out there, Colonel. Fifteen, maybe twenty percent of us. And a lot more'll be dead by morning.'
'Hadenmen lost a damn sight more.'
'Yeah, but let's face it, that was just a preliminary skirmish. An advance force sent in to test the defenses. That's what I'd have done. The real army is still out there in the jungle somewhere, digesting the lessons it's learned. And they could come at us anytime.'
'You know, Otto, it's your cheerful personality that keeps me going. Don't you have any work to do?'
'Nope. No more body parts. I had to use a shovel and a bucket for the last lot, though how you're planning to match up things like ears and teeth and red and purple blobby bits is beyond me. Don't know what we'll do with them if they're not claimed. Except maybe make soap out of them. Or soup, if things get really desperate.'
The Colonel looked up from his clipboard. 'Of course, your people were cannibals, weren't they?'
'Only on holy days. And only if we really didn't like someone.'
