Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle by Mark E. Cooper Page A

many had died altogether, but the number was high. A billion dead, two? Such numbers were too huge to wrap her mind around. Shima knew that estimates would be wildly low on homeworld because her people had lived in large cities and most of them had been hammered into nothing but holes in the ground. As a percentage, her guess would be close to 40% dead on homeworld. A terrible number to be sure, but without the Human fleet’s intervention it would have been much worse. The Shan would have become extinct.
    The Alliance had sent Tei’Burgton and the vipers to fight the Merkiaari, but it hadn’t left things all to him. It had dispatched Fifth Fleet together with huge numbers of ground troops, and that had been decisive. The Merkiaari were doomed at that point, though they knew it not. The fighting had taken time; Merkiaari did not surrender, ever, but the end result had no longer been in doubt. Both worlds were free of Merki taint now. The entire system was clean.
    Shima stood. She had been sitting for segs and her legs needed exercise. She wished she could run, but although the harmonies gave her some sense of the world around her, she could only sense live things. She couldn’t run in the city; she would be under the first car that crossed her path. Not a form of suicide that appealed. Besides, if she started running she didn’t think she could make herself stop.
    Shima huffed a long breath out in a pained sigh as blood rushed into numbed legs. She couldn’t run from herself.
    Her blindness forced Shima to live within the harmonies all the time if she wanted to function even at her current limited level, and it had caused an unexpected side effect. Her gifts had always been strong, but constant use had honed her skill to a fine edge. The harmonies could only reveal living things such as animals and people. That had always been true for everyone, but Shima had found that she could discern individual plants now as well. Before going blind, she had only the vaguest sense of life from them, like a background to the more vivid colours of other people or the animals she hunted with her father. She had never thought to try for more, never needed to separate that background into individual sources, but her blindness had forced her to use everything she had to make life bearable.
    The plants bordering the paths allowed her to navigate the grove, like a ground car used street lighting at night to follow the road. In her head, she followed a ribbon devoid of life that in the world was a narrow gravel and shell covered path that crunched pleasantly under foot. The harmonies let her “see” the plants Chailen had planted for her along the path. They were her guide. Shima was grateful, truly she was, but she grieved the need to vandalise her grove. The placement of the guide plants clashed with the natural harmony she had striven to maintain here. They stood out, they had to, but that meant they were not in harmony with her grove. The entire point of a contemplation grove was harmony, and her blindness had blighted hers.
    Shima chuffed her distress, her useless eyes burned hot with the need to cry, but she forced them not to. The Blind Hunter they named her, thinking to honour her deeds not knowing then or now how she hated the title. All of her life she had feared her growing blindness, hated the weakness that made her a cripple among Shan, and they had labelled her with it as if it were nothing. Labelled her and thought they were honouring her.
    Shima paused and took a huge steadying breath. Forced her thoughts away from the anguish and toward other things. She dropped onto four legs, suddenly feeling the need to stretch. She reached forward as far as she could with her forelegs and dug her claws into the gravel enjoying the texture of the shell and gravel mix she had chosen when they bought the house. She lowered the front half of her body, but kept her rear legs straight forcing her spine to bow the wrong way. She groaned in