In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  “We’re at the bridge, sir,” the leader from Cutter 12 said quietly. There was Sato in the man’s video display, standing rigidly at attention. Sato saluted the ensign who stood before him. “Midshipman,” the ensign told him as he saluted, “you stand relieved.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Sato replied hoarsely, tears suddenly welling from his eyes. “I stand relieved. The Aurora is yours.”

  With that, Sato collapsed to his knees and wept.

  * * *

  Steph stood at the back of the command deck near the access portal from the central elevator shafts, staring in disbelief at the drama playing out on the video monitors around her. Dressed in a tight red dress that didn’t leave all that much to the imagination - she was damned if she’d look like a frump while traveling first class on the company’s dime - she stood out like a collision beacon among the starched khaki uniforms of the Navy crewmen. But that dress and her press ID had gotten her past some tough gatekeepers before, and certainly hadn’t failed her this time: the Navy security people she had to get past to get in here had both been men, and had been easily manipulated into believing that she’d been summoned there by the commanding officer, but she was to keep a low profile until he had a free moment to speak with her. She figured it wasn’t too far from the truth. The dress and her curves distracted them, while the ID and a sharp tongue gave her credibility. She looked harmless enough, so they let her through.

  She watched as the young man on the main screen, the sole survivor of the ship’s crew, broke down in tears after the space-suited figure of a member of one of the boarding teams officially assumed control of Aurora. For a while she simply stood against the back wall of the command center, about a dozen paces behind where the person in charge, Commander Sidorov, one of the guards had said, stood watching the main monitor. She could see and hear everything, and so could the mini vid-cam array that was clipped to her ear, the video array and microphone on a wire-thin boom that extended forward next to her cheek. With the network shut down she couldn’t get her data off the station, but an idea was churning in her brain to not only get around the little problem of censorship, but to make it work to her advantage. She added audio notes quietly, whispering so as not to draw attention to herself too soon.

  * * *

  A part of Sato was ashamed for breaking down and crying like a child in front of everyone who might be watching him, but the greater part of him pushed it away. It was an emotional release from the burden he had borne alone for the last few months. He hated to admit it to himself, but it was the first time since the slaughter of the ship’s crew that he had felt a positive emotion of any kind. In this case, it was simply relief. Relief that he was back among his own kind. Relief that he was no longer alone on a ghost ship with the nightmares that plagued his sleep each and every time he laid down.

  The voyage back had been entirely uneventful and mind-numbingly boring. As he had suspected, the aliens had made more than simply cosmetic changes to the ship: they had modified some of her systems to allow her to function entirely on her own. The things the crew normally had to do to keep her systems in good working order were no longer required, at least for the months it had taken to get back to Earth. Aurora had sailed for six months from her last port of call on the Rim to reach the alien system, but had taken about four months to return to Earth. It should have been impossible for the ship to go that far in only four months, even taking a direct transit. So the aliens must also have altered the ship’s engines in some way, making her faster in hyperspace than should have been possible. He had tried to learn about the course settings and what the ship was doing, but while the blue-robed alien had warned him away from the command console, the warning appeared to have been unnecessary: he could get no navigation information from the ship’s computer at all, no matter what he tried. He couldn’t retrieve any information that could even corroborate his story of where the Aurora had been since she left the Rim: all evidence of the aliens had apparently been stripped from the ship’s records. And the aliens had locked him out of everything that had to do with the ship’s drives, navigation, sensors, everything. About the only thing he had free access to were the educational and entertainment sections.

  And their sense of navigation...Sato had cried out in surprise when the ship had emerged from hyperspace, literally right next to Africa Station. It was impossible for at least half a dozen reasons. Not just the accuracy - how could they have known that Aurora wouldn’t intersect another ship when she emerged? - but because of how close they were to the Earth’s gravity well. The formulas were complex and handled directly by the navigation computer, and of course varied depending on the gravity index of a planetary or stellar body, but the nearest safe jump radius for Earth was well beyond the orbit of the moon. But the aliens had somehow brought the ship right here, matching the orbit with a moving object from an unimaginable distance. It wasn’t just a coincidence. It wasn’t luck. They had done it intentionally.

  At the start of the lonely months aboard the ship, after he realized that he had been locked out of everything he wanted so desperately to know, he became listless, falling into a dark depression. Had there been liquor aboard, he had no doubt he would have spent most of the trip in a drunken stupor, even though he didn’t normally drink alcohol.

  What shocked him out of it was his obsession with watching the replica of Keran. Three months after leaving the alien system, he noticed that the northern pole had turned from its previous pristine white to a dirty gray as it had when the big warrior had shown him how the globe would change as the time for war drew closer. That’s when it struck him that he had only four pieces of evidence to prove what had happened: the alien clothes he’d worn back aboard; the changes the aliens had made to the ship; the cyan-colored disk that had been his “ticket home”; and the replica of Keran. There appeared to be nothing in the ship’s computer memory, and certainly no trace that aliens had been aboard the ship.

  That meant that everything else, everything, was in his head. Everything to show how his shipmates had died. And that was when he finally got a grip on himself again and started acting like the young Navy officer he wanted to become. He started to log all his impressions, everything he could remember, down to the tiniest detail. Then he broke it down into sections, organizing the information into logical categories and cross-checking it for accuracy and consistency. He drew diagrams of what he could remember of the alien ships, outside and inside; of what the warriors and the robed aliens looked like, and how many different kinds of robed aliens there were. Sights, smells, sounds, the taste of the food they’d been given, the texture of things he had touched. Everything. In the end, it was not only a vital exercise in giving humanity some intelligence information on the foe they would soon face, but helped him deal with the crushing survivor’s guilt he felt, and the penetrating sense of loneliness and isolation.

  But that horrible voyage was finally over. His tears expended now, he stood up and faced the ensign who led the forward boarding party. “My apologies, sir,” he said, gathering himself again to the position of attention. “It has been a...difficult trip home.”

  * * *

  Steph watched as several Navy officers suddenly burst into the room, led by a stern-faced female officer who was all business. Steph frowned to herself, because women like this one were almost impossible to manipulate. She sometimes felt guilty about pulling strings on people, but it wasn’t a question of morality, it was a question of getting the job done. It was a part of her job that she wished she didn’t have to do, but that’s not the way life was. Not hers, at least.

  She directed the microphone pickup toward the woman and waited to see what would happen next.

  * * *

  “I’m not sure how to handle this, captain,” Sidorov told Captain Rhonda Burke quietly as the boarding teams quickly finished scouting through the rest of the ship. He had muted the audio channel with Aurora so they could speak in relative privacy in the hubbub of the harbor masters wor
king around them.

  “I don’t see the problem,” Burke replied sharply. “You’ve implemented the first contact quarantine protocols, and fleet is up to speed on the situation for now.”

  Sidorov didn’t take offense, because he knew that she wasn’t impugning his judgement, just making a direct observation. She was direct about everything. But sometimes she didn’t see problems that came at her from an oblique angle. “I’m not worried about that part, ma’am,” he told her. “I’m worried about containment of any sensitive information. I don’t want to speculate, but if news of some sort of ‘alien invasion’ gets out, there could be some ugly repercussions.”

  “I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation to what’s happened that doesn’t involve aliens,” Burke said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. “We’ve had stranger things than this happen over the years. There’s not going to be any alien invasion. That’s ridiculous.”

  “Excuse me, but how can you possibly assume that?”

  Burke and Sidorov turned to see a civilian woman in an eye-popping red dress stalk forward as if she wore the stars of an admiral.

  “And who the bloody hell are you?” Burke demanded hotly. “Security! Get this civilian out of here!”

  “Captain,” Steph said quickly, recognizing the woman’s rank and knowing she only had seconds before she would be bodily thrown out of the command center, “I’m a journalist,” she quickly flashed her press ID, “and I can tell you that the secret’s already out of your hands. The best you can do is control it and spin it the way you want. And I can help you do that.”

  “Bullshit!” Burke spat, motioning to the same two guards who had let the mystery woman into the command center. The captain’s expression left no doubt that they would get the ass-chewing of their lives later.

  “I was up in one of the transit lounges when Aurora came in,” Steph rushed her words out as the two men gently but firmly took her by the arms and started hauling her out, “and there were dozens of people on their vidphones a minute later talking about it, with their noses pressed up to the observation windows, looking at the fucking ship and talking about an alien invasion!”

  Burke glanced at Sidorov and saw the indecision on his face. Again, if she was anything, she was direct. “Commander?”

  “Ma’am, she may have a point,” he said as the guards continued to haul the woman out. “If she’s a legit journalist...”

  “Hold it!” Burke suddenly ordered the guards. “Take her in there.” Burke pointed toward a small briefing room at the rear of the command center. “We’ll join you in a moment.”

  * * *

  Steph’s heart was hammering, not with fear but with excitement. She didn’t have a “yes” from the captain, but she had at least put off being tossed out on her ass.

  The guards led her into the conference room and left her there for a few minutes before the captain, Burke was her name, according to the name placard embedded in her khaki uniform, and Commander Sidorov came in. The guards closed the door and waited outside.

  “You’ve got precisely one minute to convince me why I shouldn’t put you under arrest,” Burke ordered brusquely.

  A minute, Steph thought. Please. “Captain, Aurora’s arrival is news already. Look at any of the info channels and I’m sure you’ll see it. And somebody heard something to make them worry about an alien invasion. I don’t know where that angle came from, but that’s why my bloody editor called me: because he’d gotten wind of it from someone else!” She leaned closer. “And even if the invasion bit isn’t true, people are thinking and talking about it. The cat was already out of the bag before you took the station data networks down.”

  That elicited a stage-perfect “I-told-you-so” look from Sidorov to the captain.

  Her frown deepened. “Thirty seconds.”

  Thirty seconds, my ass, Steph thought. You know I’m right. “Listen. I’m a legitimate journalist,” she flashed her ID again, holding it right under the captain’s nose, “not some idiotic independent blogger. I can help you spin this the way you want, tell the story the way you want it told. Otherwise,” she nodded her head back toward the station core where thousands of people were still gawking at the Aurora and murmuring angrily about their lost network connectivity, “those idiots out there are going to fuck it up royally for you. I’ll bet there are a hundred journalists and five thousand bloggers who just bought tickets to come up and visit Africa Station to see for themselves.”

  “Give me a break, lady,” Burke growled, not impressed. “No news hound is going to give us a free ride. What’s in it for you?”

  “All I want,” Steph said in a rare moment of total and absolute truth, “is exclusive access. I’ll agree to any conditions you want, as long as they’re legal, but I get access to the ship, your personnel, the survivor,” her mind conjured up the image of the haunted-looking young man, wondering at the tale he had to tell, “and whatever else I may need to tell the story that wouldn’t normally be classified. Your way. In exchange, you keep all the other newsies out.”

  “And why shouldn’t we just hold the usual press conferences and not tell any of you anything?” Burke countered.

  “Because you won’t have control of shit,” Steph replied bluntly. “People are going to talk, and you can either make it look like the Navy is being up front and honest, or we can play the usual stupid government cover-up game. And you know how those end up.”

  Burke looked at Sidorov, who only nodded. The captain suddenly leaned down and slapped the controls of a nearby comms terminal.

  “Yes, ma’am?” a young navy rating answered.

  “Get me Admiral Schiller,” Burke told her, directing the call to the commanding officer for public relations at Terran Navy Headquarters. “He’s expecting my call.” She turned toward Steph, her lips twitching upward in what might loosely be called a smile.

  Steph’s eyes widened as she realized that Burke had played her. The bottom line hadn’t changed: Steph would still get the exclusive access that she had wanted. But instead of negotiating from a position of strength and possibly getting out from under a pile of restrictions that Burke would probably slap on her story, she had practically begged for it. She felt a flush of anger and embarrassment at being manipulated so easily by the captain. It was a sensation she wasn’t used to, and definitely didn’t like.

  “Schiller.” A middle-aged man with an olive complexion and a hawk nose appeared on the screen. “Has she agreed?”

  “Yes, sir.” Burke glanced at Steph again. “We’ve got what we need.”

  “Then get moving, captain,” Schiller ordered. “We’ve got to get on top of this situation before we have an interstellar panic.” He leaned closer, his eyes narrowing. “We need to know exactly what happened out there. And fast.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Once over the initial shock, the Navy moved quickly. Burke decided to keep Sato on board Aurora for now, both to contain any further revelations and to quarantine him physically until they could make sure the ship hadn’t brought back any pathogens or other alien oddities that could pose a direct threat. Two tugs arrived and quickly maneuvered the big ship to a berth in a space dock that had been hurriedly emptied. Several compartments in the dockway were quickly converted over to sterile rooms to accommodate a team of military medical and hazardous materials specialists. And a small team of psychiatrists and physicians had been assembled to debrief and examine Sato.

  As all this was going on, Burke, Sidorov and Steph sat around the table in Aurora’s main briefing room. It was uncomfortable wearing full vacuum gear, but until the biohazard team arrived with more appropriate suits, it would have to do. Admiral Patrick Tiernan, Chief of the Terran Navy Staff, had given Burke direct orders to start debriefing Sato immediately and determine if the whole thing was some sort of bizarre hoax, or if his claims of possible alien invaders were real. They didn’t have time to waste.

  No one else was present as Sato told his story for the first tim
e. Burke and Sidorov knew that he’d be telling it a hundred more times to the debriefing team and others later on. But for now it was a closed first-time session.

  Steph listened, enraptured as the young midshipman told his tale in a briefing that he’d carefully prepared during the long months he’d been alone on the ship. Burke had ordered that they all hold their questions until Sato had gone through his briefing the first time. As he spoke, Steph noticed that the expressions of both Navy officers grew more and more intense. Despite their initial incredulity, Sato’s briefing was extremely convincing. Despite her own natural skepticism, Steph found she believed him, especially when he brought out the dog tags of the captain and crewmen who had died in the arena. She could see him fighting for emotional control as he detailed the ordeal that left him as the sole survivor.

  And then he showed them the artifacts, which he’d intentionally saved for last.

  “This is the disk,” he told them, taking the shimmering cyan disk, his “ticket home,” from a pocket in his uniform and passing it to Captain Burke. He had kept it with him the entire trip, and he only gave it to the captain with the greatest act of will.

  Burke took it gingerly, finding it difficult to hold while wearing the bulky gloves. “Did you run any tests on it?” she asked him as she handed it to Sidorov.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sato told her. He tapped a few buttons on the briefing console and a close-up of the disk appeared on the main screen. “I ran a full battery of basic tests, using everything I either knew how to do or could learn in the time I had, and came up with almost nothing.” He nodded at Burke’s frown. “I realize that such testing isn’t my specialty, ma’am, but basic spectrographic analysis, which is one of the first tests I ran, with the equipment we have aboard is something I was taught early on by Lieutenant Amundsen. But look at the results.”