Warrior-Woman Read online

  Warrior-Woman

  Mary Ann Steele

  Warrior-Woman

  Copyright © 2006 Mary Ann Steele

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing Inc. of Markham Ontario, Canada.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from Double Dragon Publishing Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  ISBN-10: 1-55404-407-3

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55404-407-8

  First Edition November 22, 2006

  Also Available as a Large Type Paperback

  Now Available as paperback and hard cover

  A Celebration of Cover Art: 2001 to 2006

  Five Years of Cover Art

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  Warrior-Woman: The Forging of the Legend

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to Wayne F. "Bear" Steele, the friend, husband, lover, and soul mate whose unfailing support the author deeply appreciates.

  Character is destiny.

  --Heraclitus of Ephesus, 540-480 B.C.

  Chapter One

  Down the formidable length of the corridor fronting the locks, the dead outnumbered the living. Contorted bodies sprawled singly, or lay across others: mortal foes intertwined in a final, grim embrace. Black-clad, still forms littered the deck in far greater plenitude than did those shrouded in dull slate blue. Pools of crimson glistened wetly. Smears of the same gaudy hue accented the uniform drabness of the walls. A brooding silence hung in sweat-tainted air lately vibrating with shouts, shrieks, sharp cracks of electronic weaponry, the dull thudding of boots on metal plates, the ringing chime of sword on red-streaked sword.

  Feet planted wide apart, lithe body quivering with passion, blue eyes blazing, sword-arm and bright blade splashed with life-blood not her own, Signe glared in regal wrath at the pressure-proof door of the now-airless lock, well aware that the Commander of the Third Columbian Military Corps at this very moment ascended unscathed into the black void of interworld space. Sharply conflicting emotions warred in the Gaean leader's mind. Norman still lives ! she raged inwardly. The instigator of this costly war escaped unhurt--damn his slime-rotted black soul! But he's in transit back to Columbia--soundly defeated!

  We've achieved our foremost goal--driven the invaders off our world, over the broken bodies of these poor bastards Norman abandoned. Knowing that their leader just callously sacrificed their lives, these Columbian spacer-fighters absolutely refused to surrender--died to give the brute the precious time he needed to battle his way to this lock, board his ship and escape. Well, our ten-Earthyear-long struggle on the surface just ended, but a new challenge lies ahead. Norman started this war, but I'll fight it to a finish he and his imperialistic countrymen can't conceive possible!

  Two tall figures strode up to stand on either side of the Commander. As the elder man laid an arm in a purely comradely gesture across Signe's shoulders, bleached blue eyes deeply set in a seamed visage disfigured by an old, slanting, sword-cut scar mirrored the emotions racking the victorious world leader. As if some momentary flash of mental telepathy united the minds of the two veteran fighters, Signe sensed that Conor's train of thought paralleled her own. When she turned to meet his glance, he drawled softly, "Too high a price, these gallant fools paid. Norman should be lying dead on this deck."

  "I agree," Signe rasped.

  "He would be, had these men surrendered," Morgan acknowledged, won to grudging admiration of intransigent foes bent on extracting a final measure of revenge even as they drew their last rattling breaths. His fluidly expressive face swiftly changed as he surveyed the carnage. Contempt flashed across an open, comely countenance spattered with caked gore slowly dissolving in sweat. Having sheathed a long, rapier-like blade, the younger man ran a hand through a thatch of thick auburn hair in an habitual, unconscious gesture. "Norman didn't step out of character when he made his exit, that's for damned sure," he observed acidly.

  Circumventing the huddled corpse of a fallen foe, Eric silently studied Signe's expression. Sensing her acute frustration, sharing it, the Senior Captain sought to master the anger inseparable from the fierce delight engendered by the victory.

  His joy outweighing his wrath, Sean wordlessly squeezed Morgan's shoulder, prompting that exhausted warrior to smile with manifest satisfaction at his first cousin.

  Behind the five swordsmen whose prowess at wielding those gleaming blades in hand-to-hand combat exceeded that of any of their subordinates, two other members of Signe's core staff now appeared. Theo and Jassy took no time out in which to gloat over the magnitude of the victory. The two veteran combatants detached massive electronic handweapons from slings at their waists, pulled off goggles equipped with imagers for aiming the bulky devices, and issued orders to the men and women threading their way through piles of dead, searching for any survivors: friends or foes. The victory culminating a bitter revolt spanning a decade of Earthyears produced no tumultuous rejoicing. The victors stoically set about the nerve-wrenching task of clearing the final battleground.

  An hour later, two husky Gaean corpsmen strode by their captain bearing the last of the fallen. Indifferently tailored slate blue uniforms clinging damply to perspiring bodies exuded a pungent aroma, offering Theo tangible evidence that the adjustment of the fabric had long since failed. Bleak gray eyes followed the pair hustling the black-garbed corpse towards its destination: the refrigerated antechamber where it would lie waiting its turn in a crematorium direly overworked of late.

  We ought to hold a brief mass memorial for the Columbian dead , the scholar-turned-warrior reflected, struck of a sudden with overwhelming conviction. Those Third Corpsmen fought with fanatical valor until the last man fell. If they granted no mercy, neither did they beg for any. I'll see that they aren't simply incinerated like non-recyclable offal.

  A mind contemplative by nature stilled the impulse prompting an active, compact body to hasten down the deck defiled by rusty smears, and join in the work of clearing barricades from passageways in the habitat below. The historian in Theo objected, demanding that this moment not pass without comment by an intellect schooled to analyze the significance of epochal changes in human affairs.

  Staring unseeing into the distant reaches of the cavernous corridor, the veteran officer recalled the twenty-hour span constituting all the warning of imminent attack afforded the horrified civil leaders of the citizenry scattered over thirty-nine inhabited planetoids within the Gaean Group. A student of logic applauded the prodigies of organization achieved on Main World after Sigurd and his Council of Ministers deduced that a peace-loving society--one possessing no means of retreat and little of offense--faced invasion by a heavily armed force led by a Columbian military careerist. That enemy, bent on conquest, the Gaean leaders accurately judged to be motivated by a compelling lust for power allied to elemental greed.

  The selfless patriot reliving the past thrille
d anew to the call to arms issued by Sigurd's daughter. Pride surged as Theo recalled how swiftly Signe's impassioned appeal rallied the nucleus of a force of fighters around a charismatic athlete who even then possessed amazing skill with a sword: proficiency rare among the Gaean rebels. Admiration rose uppermost as he visualized the heroic struggle she mounted so as to overcome an all but insuperable disadvantage: the lack of skill at swordsmanship almost universally exhibited by a populace imbued with pacifistic ideals.

  We faced enemies who grew up employing the one weapon that Columbian custom traditionally allowed any citizen to wield for the purpose of settling personal quarrels in legally sanctioned duels, the veteran recollected somberly. That initial deficiency cost us heavily in lives.

  His eyes remote, the former professor of history reviewed the factors precipitating the violent conflict now entering a new phase. >From the moment Johann made his landfall in this star-system one hundred fifty-one Earthyears ago, the Columbian majority among his settlers proved themselves treacherous allies to the Gaean contingent, Theo ruminated sadly. You'd think all factions of the Triple Alliance would have learned something from the wars that devastated Earth's colonies of spacefaring settlers, but no such enlightenment occurred.

  Johann--warrior, pirate, visionary, colony-founder--forged that agreement by the sheer force of his personality. His mercenary spacer-fighters married the sisters and daughters of a creative elite: colonial scientists and engineers far too ruggedly individualistic to feel comfortable rejoining the packed horde of easily led, mindlessly gregarious, bureaucratically controlled humanity indigenous to Earth. Those two groups of hardy adventurers--ancestors of the present-day Columbians--allied themselves with the first Gaeans: clannish pacifists plentifully endowed with the courage required to join Johann in a venture of incalculable risk.

  Three great ships, tethered together, utilized some awesome, hitherto untested power external to themselves, which flung them into a near-light-speed journey that perhaps took them temporarily outside our universe. That time-dilated Jump landed our forebears in the environs of a giant gaseous planet of a star in the same spectral class as Sol--a star located an unimaginable distance across the galaxy from the birthplace they knew they'd left forever.

  You'd think in their sobering, irreversible isolation from the civilization that spawned them, those refugees from a system devastated by two space wars would have gotten along. But the Columbians never changed that mercenary fighter's mentality, even if Johann rose above it, nor did the Gaeans ever lose their stubborn belief that safety lay not in armament, but in insularity. When the Columbians sought to appropriate Johann's Flagship, he vanished in his fabulous warship. Our ancestors left shortly afterward: lifted the Gaea one last time, and made the transit to an aggregation of dense metallic rocks clustered about the second of two stable libration points in Dyson's orbit around the gas giant.

  The first Columbians remained entrenched on Johann's original colony-site. That airless captive asteroid appealed to the leader making his landfall, not only because its density causes its gravity to approach that of Earth, but also because the rock forms one of a pair of binary bodies revolving around the same point in space within the Columbian Group. The second rock of the pair--the Ice World--provides a priceless abundance of water ice.

  The Gaeans, settling upon planetoids located at L-4, thought themselves safe from aggression on the part of their treacherous former allies at L-5. Well, they erred mightily. So here we are, those of us who lived to throw Norman off Main World of Gaea: pacifists turned combatants--victors in countless battles waged hand-to-hand through habitats and corridors separated from the vacuum of the void only by the negligible width of steel-plated, water-filled, double hulls. Chancy, our lives, in the best of times--even during that peaceful pre-war existence we nostalgically recall as idyllic.

  The man unwounded, but suffering from a severe case of battle fatigue, absently wiped a sleeve across a brow to which curly brown hair clung damply. A faint shadow of beard darkened the pale skin of cheeks that had never known the direct light of the distant sun. Lines of strain temporarily aged the sensitive face so expressive of whatever thoughts animated its owner's intelligent, compassionate mind. Sorrow, relief, revulsion generated by an innate horror of slaughter, however necessary: all showed on the grave, cleanly chiseled features of the officer in his mid-thirties. One emotion failed to register. Theo possessed a nature incapable of harboring virulent hatred, even for so rapacious an enemy as Norman.

  On the day following the culminating battle of the surface war, Signe waved her six captains into seats in an office in the habitat that formerly served as Norman's headquarters. Examining faces nakedly attesting to bone-weariness, the premier warrior saw superimposed over warm, live flesh the ghostly images of men and women sacrificed to insure final victory. Pride contended with still-raw pain.

  We're old hands at the sort of fighting we face now--a disciplined, combat-seasoned force of veterans lacking only one crucial skill , she exulted. Well, we'll remedy that deficiency in short order . The voice the rebel leader could pitch to carry above a hand-to-hand battle sent galvanic impulses flashing along nerves sensitized to its nuances. "Gentlemen, we're going to steal a Columbian ship."

  You might know , the Senior Captain groused inwardly. Twenty-four hours after she watched Norman's fleeing vessels fade into nothingness on the screens in this very cabin, Signe's planning a raid. Sorrowful shades of our multitudinous dead, girl, take a day or two to savor your victory! Rest up!

  Although no hint of the master swordsman's disapprobation showed on his face, Signe intuitively divined her oldest captain's thoughts. "Eric, there's nowhere to go from the pinnacle we've reached, but down, if we keep our boots firmly planted on this rock," she reminded him levelly. "We can't afford that luxury. This hard-won peace will prove short-lived, if we sit back in smug complacency. We're going up--contest the Columbians' supremacy in interworld space."

  She reads minds. Mine, at any rate . Eric managed a wry smile even as his gut knotted.

  "Twenty-four hours of peace. I enjoyed this brief spell of knowing I won't need to gear up for tomorrow's battle, but I'm damned well certain that this state of affairs won't last. You're right, Signe. It's time we went mobile in the void!" With a fluid gesture of a hand, Morgan punctuated that boldly unqualified acceptance of a daunting order.

  "Peace, hell. All we've won is a pause that lets us catch our breath. Until we match Columbia in fighting power across interworld space, we'll remain as tempting a target for invasion in the eyes of any power-crazed Columbian as we were for Norman." Conor made that assertion adamantly, consciously forcing from the screen of his inner awareness a vivid portrait rising unsummoned, of the beloved wife who fell dead of a lethal electronic pulse as she fought at his side a scant five weeks earlier.

  "To fly…take them on in the void! I'm ready."

  As ready to fight them on any ground--against whatever daunting odds--as you've been since you joined at sixteen, Sean.

  Noting that Signe's face at that moment plainly revealed her thoughts, her youngest captain smiled warmly at the Commander, his response generating an upwelling of pride in the woman silently commending a warrior she honored.

  To fly. Could I learn what that feat will require, and then force myself unflinchingly to target manned vessels armed with Earth-built weaponry? Learning to fight hand-to-hand--to kill--took a toll on my emotional balance, Theo acknowledged, nowise afflicted by self-delusion. But I mastered the art. Signe's right. Sitting back complacently now will lose us everything our best and bravest died to gain. The struggle isn't over. I can't quit until we achieve a peace that will last beyond our lifetimes. As that conclusion grew inescapable, the scholarly Captain's steadfast gray eyes conveyed a mute but welcome message to his superior.

  "Whatever it takes to finish what we started, I'm ready to tackle," Jassy growled, no abstruse ethical considerations troubling his stalwart soul. Jaw jutting, bulldog face creas
ed into a black frown, the man renowned as much for his expertise at electronics as for his prowess in battle spoke his thought with characteristic bluntness. "Damned if I can see how we'll fly the ship we steal, though. Surely you don't plan to trust your life to a tamed Columbian captain, do you, Signe?"

  "Hardly," the Commander retorted vehemently. "We'll learn to operate a ship. I've spent the bulk of what little free time I managed to gain over the past six Earthyears, studying the theoretical aspects of navigation. The sequences for lifting a vessel and making a transit are for the most part automatic. The calculations an operator needs to insert into those programs, I've learned to perform. I've developed strategies for augmenting that basic knowledge: strategies I'll implement myself. The problem confronting us now is that of acquiring a ship. A prize, this one will be: one of the original twenty-four carried to this system from Earth. A vessel armed with the irreproducible weaponry."

  An impulsive exclamation burst from Morgan. "What a coup that would be!"

  Signe's got her plan of attack laid out to the last detail , Eric conceded glumly. She'll lead the cream of her warriors on this fearsomely dangerous strike. We could lose the highest echelon of our military leadership if her venture fails. Signe, don't cast away all we've gained at so heavy a cost! Your life especially. Our world can't afford to lose you…

  Imperious blue eyes raked the man whose thoughts the war-leader seemed unerringly able to read. "Vacillation constitutes the main danger now, Eric. This opportunist who seized autocratic power over Columbia two Earthyears ago still has his hands full, dealing with the other four military commanders he outmaneuvered. I don't intend to give Arlen the least advantage while he finishes consolidating his power, so he can turn his full attention to us. We'll waste no time before taking to space."