Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

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 goodbye. 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