an ion storm that came up within the Grange cloud. Until we’re past it, we won’t be able to reach them.”
“Any other ideas? No? Then that’s it. We’ll go with the overall attack plan as suggested by Captain Amadi. The flag ops officer will issue formation and launch orders to your commands by twenty-two forty-five Zulu for the jump in-system at oh-five seventeen tomorrow.” He looked at the chronometer on the wall of the conference room. “That gives us a tad over nine hours from now until we arrive at Erlang, people. Let’s not waste a second of it.”
“Brooding isn’t going to help,” Enya said.
Reza opened his eyes and looked at her. He seemed utterly calm. “I am not brooding,” he said quietly, offering her a gentle smile. “I am thinking.” He looked to Ian Mallory, who sat against the wall across from him. Mallory’s left eye was swollen shut, his split lip still bleeding slightly. The Territorial Army contingent that had arrested him and the other seniors of the Mallory Council had beaten them badly. “We must find a way to get a message to your people,” Reza told him. “They must get out of the cities and towns, away from anywhere the Territorial Army or Thorella’s troops might stand and fight the Kreelans.”
“What difference would it make?” the older man said quietly, his open eye blazing with anger and bitterness. “They’ll be slaughtered either way. I’m not like most of this flock,” he said, gesturing with a hand that boasted two broken fingers. “I’ve been off-world. I’ve seen what happens during a Kreelan attack. The TA has oppressed us for many years, but I can’t justify asking our people to abandon the only hope they may have for survival. The Territorial Army troops are the only defense any of my people have.”
“Listen to me, Ian Mallory.” Reza said urgently. “If they do not leave, if they are anywhere near troops who will fight the Kreela, you condemn them to certain death. The Kreela do not come to your world now to fight as they usually do, seeking to honor the Empress in battle. They come to take the First Empress home. Any resistance will bring instant devastation. There will be no landings or ground battles. Kreelan warships will simply obliterate every defensive position on this planet from orbit, and every defended human settlement will be annihilated. This is more important to them than any other event in the last hundred thousand years, and they will take no chances. They will spare nothing, no one, who raises a hand against them.”
“And they’ll spare unarmed people?” someone scoffed. Reza had noticed that the mood of the Mallorys had changed dramatically since he had appeared in his Kreelan garb, the aura they projected verging on open hostility. Only Enya’s word and their own fears of what he might do in retaliation held them in check.
“If you do as I say, yes, your people will be spared.” He looked at Ian. “But there is a price that must be paid.”
“I knew there must be a catch,” Ian grumbled. “How much blood need be spilled?”
“Seven hundred,” Reza said. “If you wish your people to live, you must find exactly seven hundred souls who are willing to fight and die for the rest. Men or women, it makes no difference. They must assemble in a single line upon the plain on the far side of the mountain of light, with no weapons other than those that may be hammered in the forge or carved from wood.”
“Why seven hundred?” Enya asked. “And what are they supposed to accomplish other than satisfying Kreelan bloodlust?”
“There must be seven hundred because that is the number of the host that accompanied the First Empress here after she died, after her spirit inhabited the vessel, the crystal heart that was awakened by your touch,” Reza explained. “The Seven Hundred who brought her here were the ones you found in the burial chamber, the Imperial Guard. The number will not be lost on the warriors who are coming here; they will understand.” He looked around at the others in the room. “As for what your volunteers are to accomplish, they will fight for your world,” Reza said, “against an equal number of Her warriors, similarly armed. Theirs shall be a sacrifice for the rest of your people, those who survive the destruction of the cities.”
“We could not hope to win against trained warriors,” Ian said.
“It is not a battle that is meant to be won, Ian Mallory. It is a sacrifice, a showing of the honor of your people, that the Kreela will understand and respect.”
“I take it, then,” Ian asked darkly, “that the seven hundred who go forward onto the Plain of Aragon may all expect to die?”
Reza nodded. “It is the only way.”
The room was deathly silent. As they spoke, the others of the Council had gathered around the trio, the uninjured helping those who were. Even imprisoned and under sentence of death without a formal trial, the Mallory Council still held the future of their people in their hands.
“I say we put it to a vote,” Enya said, looking at Ian. “We’ve got nothing left to lose, except the lives of everyone on this planet, Raniers and Mallorys alike.”
“Let the Raniers die!” someone hissed like acid eating through metal.
“Don’t say that!” Enya retorted. “Not all of them are like Belisle. There are–”
“You cannot save them,” Reza said quietly. “If you give them warning, Belisle will find a way to turn it against you. He would confine the Mallorys in the cities where they would be killed, and evacuate the Ranier families to the forests, although that would not save them in the end. Only those who choose to fight on the plain have the power to save your world, but the Raniers must also bear their share of the price of your planet’s survival; it is they who shall be sacrificed to the guns of Her warships.”
The faces around him were grim. Even the most hardened of the Mallorys here knew that there were innocents among the Raniers, people who had helped them in some way, or who simply had no control over the planet’s course as Belisle led them through tyranny. Men, women, children, they would all die in the cities. They would have to, that the rest of Erlang’s people might live.
“I say do as he says,” growled an older woman who had suffered more hardships than she cared to recount. “Better to make a stand than to just wait and get shot, either by the aliens or by our own.”
Ian nodded respectfully. Her words were well thought of in this circle. “And you, Markham?”
“Aye,” a big man, an equal in physique to Washington Hawthorne, said easily, as if he made these kinds of decisions every day. “I’ll raise an ax and a little Cain any day. All the better that it be for a good cause.”
“Waverman?”
“Aye.”
And so it went, around the room. The vote was unanimous. They would fight.
“Does that meet with your satisfaction?” Ian said to Reza after the last of the council had nodded her head. “Will that be enough blood for you?”
“Ian!” Enya said, dismayed. “He offers us a way to survive, after trying to help us against Belisle. You have no right to treat him that way.”
“We’re the ones who’ll be dying, girl. He has no stake in this.”
“You are wrong, my friend,” Reza said gently. He could feel Ian Mallory’s pain and trepidation, and was not resentful that he was the focus of the man’s anger. Mallory did not – could not – understand the Way or the fulfillment of the Prophecy. But there was no other course for them to take.
“How’s that?”
“Because I am the one who will lead your people into battle.”
Ian only looked at him.
“Why you, and not one of us?” someone else demanded.
“Because only one who wears the collar of the Empress may declare such a combat,” he explained.
“How much time do we have?” Enya asked in the silence that followed.
“I do not know exactly,” Reza said, “for I do not know where the closest Kreelan warships might be. But I would say that we only have a few hours to act.”
“A few hours isn’t enough time,” Ian said pointedly.
Reza fixed him with a stony gaze. “It is all that you have.”
The next step, getting the Council’s instructions out of the Parliament building and to the Mallorys outside, was not as difficult as Thorella or Belisle would have liked. One of the guards was a Mallory sympathizer known by Ian to be trustworthy, and he was passed a message in code, written on a stained sheet of paper that had once been a shopping list for the company store in Laster, a town far to the north. The guard, in turn, passed it to the servant of Mallory City’s mayor, who passed it to someone heading out of the building. In less than an hour, the
