In Her Name

outside, but in the tunnel it was so loud that his teeth rattled.

“Come on!” he screamed into the gale of sound, his words carried away as they left his lips. Staggering to his feet, he felt in the darkness for Enya, suddenly terrified that something had happened to her. But his desperately groping hands found her arm, and frantically he seized her and pulled her to her feet. Dazed and deafened by the sound that was now so powerful that it seemed to be jarring his insides loose, he ran through the tunnel, dragging Enya behind him, trusting his feet to guide him down the center of the curved floor, running toward the distant light.

The sound only grew stronger, until he was sure that his eardrums must burst.

“Not much farther!” he shouted to himself, even though he was unable to hear his own voice.

Suddenly, he stumbled and fell sprawling into thin air. “What–” he cried. The fall was not far, less than a meter, but the rock he fell upon struck him a stunning blow, and Enya landed right on top of him. The two of them lay there, dazed, as the voices ebbed and flowed, then slowly died away into silence.

After a few moments, he finally had enough strength to do more than hold his eyes open. “Enya?” he croaked. He was struck with surprise at being able to hear his own voice through the ringing in his ears. He thought he would be totally deaf.

“Here,” came the muffled reply. She was lying beside him now, breathing steadily.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so,” he managed. His head hurt like hell, he had a split and bleeding lip, and he might have twisted an ankle, but nothing was broken. “You?”

“I’m all right. But there are better ways of getting me to fall on top of you in the dark. Where are we?”

Now there was a good question, Eustus thought, smiling at her humor. She was tough. He liked that. “I don’t know. I thought I was running toward the entrance. I could see a light. But… I guess I must have run the other way, deeper into the tunnel.”

Pause. “You saw a light? At the far end?”

“Yeah. But now that I think about it, it wasn’t the right color. Too cool, not yellow like the sun. Bluish, sort of.” He found her face with his hands, held her to him. “I guess the tunnel just ended here… wherever here is.”

“Where’s the light?” she asked. She kissed his hands, glad they were both alive, but increasingly curious about where they were. What was this place?

“Dropped it in the tunnel. We should be able to find it on the way out.”

Still trembling from the force of the voices – or whatever it was – that had struck them, Enya raised herself to her knees, trying to orient herself in the darkness.

But it was not completely dark. Somewhere in front of her, it was impossible to tell just how far, she could see a dim bluish glow like a smudge of watery blue paint on a black canvas. “Is that the light you saw?”

Eustus turned over so he could look where she was, orienting himself with her body. “That must be it, but it was a lot brighter when I saw it. It was a point of light, like a star, not like it is now.”

“What could it be?”

“Some kind of fire, like methane burning? That burns with a blue color, doesn’t it?”

Enya shook her head in the darkness. He felt her hair brush against his hand. “No, we should be able to distinguish the flame clearly. This looks like the light is being diffused, or something. I’m going to see what it is.”

“Wait,” Eustus said, digging into his utility pouch. “We don’t have the light, but we can still get some light in here. I don’t smoke, but this is too handy an item not to carry. Here, use this.”

Enya heard a clicking sound, then saw Eustus’s bruised face in the yellow light of the tiny flame of his cigarette lighter. Behind him, she saw something else. She pitched backward, screaming, her eyes wide with terror.

With reflexes honed through years of combat, Eustus drew his blaster, rolled in the direction of the threat, and fired three times. Only after the crimson energy bolts flashed from the weapon did he get a glimpse of what he was shooting at.

A Kreelan warrior.

He fired twice more for good effect before he noticed that there were others, all around him. His nerves jangling with dread, he reluctantly took his finger from the trigger. If they had wanted to kill him, he would have long since been dead.

“Give me the lighter,” he said in a shaking voice, still holding his pistol at the ready. His nose filled with a strange odor from the work his blaster had done, but it was not the customary stench of charred meat. It was more like burned dirt or dust, with a tang of molten metal.

Enya reluctantly surrendered the tiny lighter, then scrambled to her feet, following Eustus as he stepped closer to the warrior he had killed.

They saw immediately, however, that she was already dead. Long dead.

“Lord of All,” Enya whispered as she stepped around Eustus, kneeling beside what remained of the corpse. “It looks like a mummy.”

The skin, where it showed through the extensive armor the Kreelans wore, was desiccated and shrunken over the bones. The eye sockets were empty, the silver-flecked orbs that had once filled them long since shriveled to nothing. The hair, still meticulously braided after all this time, clung tenaciously to the skull. The hands were skeletal, making the talons look all the more deadly.

“Let’s look at that one,” Eustus suggested, interested in examining a whole specimen. The one he had shot was missing its entire torso, and the smell, while not terrible, was very unsettling.

“Why are they still standing?” Enya asked quietly. As far as the light could reach, there were corpses standing at attention in what looked to be a circle, facing inward. Facing what? “Did someone somehow prop up the bodies?”

“From what I’ve seen, they were probably this way when they died,” Eustus said. “I’m sure no one touched them after they were dead. Kreelan anatomy’s a lot different than ours. It could be that their skeletal structure is more durable after they die, breaks down slower, maybe.” They sure seem that way on the battlefield, he thought. “Besides, Reza told me once that the Kreelans remove the collars from their dead, kind of a last rites thing. These ladies still have their collars on.”

“Except, my love, that these aren’t ladies,” Enya said.

“What? Of course they–”

“Look at the breastplates,” she said, pointing to the dust-covered armor of the nearest intact warrior. The dark metal followed the contour of the massive rib cage that once must have supported a formidable mass of muscle, but the form was clearly that of a male. “No breasts there.”

“Hold this,” Eustus said, handing her the lighter, his heart pounding with excitement. Humans had never encountered a male Kreelan, even a dead one.

“What are you going to do?”

“Check this guy out,” he said, taking his knife from its sheath and cutting away the armor from the mummy’s waist. “I’ll be damned,” he breathed. “Will you look at that. This Kreelan has an honest-to-goodness mummified pecker. The Confederation Academy of Sciences is going to love this.”

“What does it mean?” Enya felt slightly embarrassed, looking at the alien’s exposed genitals, shriveled though they were. Remarkably similar to a human’s, this one must have boasted a penis in life that would have been any man’s envy.

“Well, for one thing, we might be able to figure out how the Kreelans reproduce and how often. Kind of give us an idea of the Empire’s demographics, I suppose.” He shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know, except that it’s something no one’s ever seen before.”

“After seeing what you’ve got, I’m not very interested in an alien mummy’s privates,” Enya said lightly. The knowledge that they had found a potentially very important piece of the answer to the puzzle posed by the enemy thrilled her beyond the fear that still nagged at her from being in this strange chamber.

“Yeah,” Eustus quipped, “especially since mine’s a first sergeant.”

They both laughed, shedding some of their fear in the process. They were on an archeological dig now, not running for their lives from some unknown terror.

Now that they knew their would-be enemies were dead and crumbling with age, incapable of attacking them,