In Her Name

of my life flitting around the galaxy in her, alone.” She shook her head vigorously. “Look, brother, we’re in this together, we stay in this together. If nothing else, we can hold hands as we swing on the gallows.”

Reza nodded, knowing what she would say. He reached over and gently squeezed her hand.

The warning klaxon suddenly blared, announcing that the Pearl was about to drop back into real space. Beyond the wraparound viewport, the streaks of light suddenly quivered, then quickly began to contract and weave, soon becoming discrete points of light. Then they saw the glimmering bulk of Erlang.

But the planet’s beauty was suddenly eclipsed by a Confederation destroyer that was sailing close enough to see the seams in her armor. The sight sent a chill up Jodi’s spine. She instinctively reached for the weapons controls, but Reza stayed her hand.

“No,” he said firmly. “They have been waiting for us.”

“You knew?” she asked incredulously.

Reza nodded. “We have been led here,” he said as he turned his attention to the destroyer.

There was nothing to do but go forward. With a deft movement of her fingers across the console, Jodi brought the Pearl away from her near-collision course with the warship. On the scanner, she noticed that there were three more Confederation ships, a cruiser and two destroyers, orbiting the planet.

“Well,” Jodi muttered as an indicator winked in the display, “it looks like you’re right about them expecting us.” She opened a channel.

“Inbound vessel,” a voice announced from an unfamiliar face that immediately appeared on the console, “identify yourself immediately!”

Jodi felt another tingle as she saw the lock-on indicators on the Pearl’s defense display. The destroyer was tracking them with its main guns, at point blank range.

“This is Commander Jodi Mackenzie, piloting the Golden Pearl,” she replied coolly, “serial B78-4C97101K, bound for Erlang.”

The officer on the destroyer answered immediately. “Commander, you are hereby ordered to rendezvous with the cruiser Furious, where you and Captain Gard will be placed under arrest.” He paused. “Any attempt to escape or reach the planet’s surface will be met with the instant destruction of you and your vessel. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Jodi replied coolly. “We understand and will comply.”

Beside her, Reza’s green eyes were fixed on the gray-hulled cruiser that was even now drawing toward them. The ship that held his son.

* * *

Their reception aboard the Furious was little short of openly hostile. Fitted in the airlock with wrist and ankle binders that would explode if tampered with or opened without the proper electronic key, Jodi and Reza were marched separately, each inside a box of Marines armed with stunners, to the brig. Aside from the rhythmic stomping of their footsteps, the corridors were devoid of activity, the crew having been evacuated from the corridors the escort would use to get the prisoners to their destination.

A sense of uneasy anticipation had taken hold of Reza, not out of concern for his own welfare, but for his son, if he truly existed. For all the years Reza had been in the Empire and all the years since, he had never dreamed that such an honor – a child – could ever be his. But the Change that he and Esah-Zhurah had undergone those long years ago must have made it possible. And it was the fate of that legacy that most concerned him now, even more than his burning fear of what had befallen Esah-Zhurah, for he knew in his heart that in his son lay the key to the survival of both civilizations.

His only hope now was that the humans – he thought of himself as Kreelan again – would allow him at least to see the boy, if not speak to him. His hands clenched with nervous tension as they approached the slate gray armored doors to the brig.

The shielded doors opened as they approached, sliding back into the walls like the shifting jaws of a snake. Reza was led first through the security baffles and into the inner chamber. Along the rear wall were three cells, one of which was occupied.

“Reza!” Eustus called through the force field barrier.

But Reza did not hear him. His eyes and his mind were fixed on the Kreelan child who stood at Eustus’s side, staring with equal fascination at Reza, his father. As if he were adrift in a river, Reza sensed himself being pushed and prodded into the cell. Standing within arm’s reach of one another, father and son looked into each other’s eyes, gauging their similarities, their differences, the miracle of their own unique existence.

Behind them, Jodi pulled Eustus to the side. Their time to speak would come, but not just now.

Slowly, Shera-Khan knelt before his father. Bowing his head, he saluted Reza. “Greetings, priest of the Desh-Ka,” he said in the New Tongue, “my father.”

“Greetings, my son,” Reza choked, tears streaming down his cheeks. “What is thy name?”

“Shera-Khan, my father,” the boy replied solemnly.

“Rise, Shera-Khan, my son,” Reza said. “Let me look upon you.” The boy stood and looked up at Reza, who offered his arms in the traditional greeting of warriors. Shera-Khan accepted, and the two touched one another for the first time, both afraid that the other was an illusion, a cruel hoax played by Fate. But the blood that trickled from the tiny punctures made by Shera-Khan’s claws and the strength of Reza’s grip on his son’s arms convinced them both that each was very real. “Blessed be Her name,” Reza whispered. “How much of thy mother do I see in thy face.”

Shera-Khan trembled in mourning at his mention of his mother.

“The Empress now is she,” he told Reza, sending a burning flare of apprehension through Reza’s heart. “Oh, Father, She lays dying. Broken is Her heart, silent is Her spirit. We are lost!”

Instinctively, Reza pulled Shera-Khan close, wrapping his arms around him as his mind grappled with the boy’s words.

It was then that he heard another voice, old and familiar, speak to him in the language of the Old Tongue. “Come to me, my son.”

Turning to the left, toward the far wall of the cell, he saw the great warrior who had been so much a part of his life, who had given him her legacy of knowledge and power, who had given him her love.

“Tesh-Dar,” he whispered, rocked by her state of mourning and her weak condition. Holding Shera-Khan close at his side, he swiftly knelt beside her, taking her great hands in his, her skin cold to his touch. “My mother.”

Her wise eyes took in his face, and she smiled in the Kreelan way, an expression of joy in such an hour of sorrow. “Reza,” she whispered, “my son, you are alive. The animal…” She stopped herself. “No. Your friend’s words were true.” She pulled him close to her, his head to her breast, and smelled his skin, his hair. Running her hands across his braids, pausing at the seventh that had been severed and where the hair had ceased to grow, she said, “Great was my fear, my child, that the human’s words that you yet lived were false, that the sword of your love did take your life. I would have killed him, had I not sensed that he spoke truly.” In but a few words, she described to him how Eustus had saved her and Shera-Khan, and how she had discovered that Reza was still alive, or at least had been given the hope that he was.

“And that has been my only hope, my son,” she told him painfully, “for Shera-Khan, for the Empire. For without you, we are doomed.”

“What has happened?” Reza asked quietly, watching with alarm as Tesh-Dar struggled for breath. Beside him, Shera-Khan pressed close, his body shivering with a grief no human could ever imagine. Reza would have felt it, too, except that his connection to the living Empress had been severed. He had lived the years since then in acute spiritual loneliness, but he had also been spared the horrible fate of the peers.

Tesh-Dar closed her eyes, and Reza feared that she had lost consciousness, perhaps for the last time.

But then she began to speak of the legend of Keel-Tath.

* * *

Long ago, so the legends say, after Keel-Tath cursed Her people for their treachery and what She believed to be the murder of Her lover, the First Empress was filled with anger and grief, sorrow and melancholy. The breath of life no longer appealed to Her, and so it was that She decided to hasten Her soul unto the Dark Place, where She could lament Her fate in solitude, forever. With a trembling hand, she raised a dagger over Her heart to steal away Her life, and that of Her people.

But a young priestess, Dara-Kol of the Desh-Ka, beseeched the heartbroken Empress for a chance for Her Children, now fallen from grace, to redeem themselves in Her eyes. So passionate was the young priestess’s plea