In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  “...and so, Mr. Ambassador,” Barca concluded, “we would like to offer our unconditional support in the defense of your world, including direct military assistance should you so desire. The president made it very clear to me that there were absolutely no strings attached, no quid pro quo.”

  Bin Sultan’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. There were always strings, always conditions, he thought, even though they were often invisible.

  “When the enemy invades,” Barca told him, “we want to try to stop them cold.”

  Leaning back in his chair, bin Sultan regarded Barca for a moment before he spoke. “Mr. Secretary,” he said finally, his mellifluous voice carrying only the hint of an accent of his native Arabic through his Standard English, “I do not wish to appear ungrateful, because the offer made by your president is truly generous. I also wish to express condolences, on behalf of my government and myself, for the loss of your ship’s company, among which was a citizen of our world, as I am sure you know. As with ships that sail upon the seas, the loss of a crew or a vessel on such a long and perilous journey is always a terrible tragedy. All that aside, Mr. Secretary, I will of course convey your government’s kind offer immediately to my government.” He paused for a moment, clearly grappling with what he was to say next. “But I also cannot help but feel that President McKenna may be reacting with, if you will forgive me, some small haste in the matter. It has barely been a full day, and complete analysis of the information has barely begun. I feel very strongly for the young man who returned alone from this ill-fated expedition, but asking us to go to a war footing based solely upon his account and some interesting artifacts is...precipitous, let us say.”

  Barca grimaced inwardly at the diplomat’s choice of words. In diplo-speak, it was the rough equivalent of bin Sultan shouting that he thought the president was fucking crazy. But Barca couldn’t help but agree to some extent with what bin Sultan was saying: the president had been incredibly quick off the mark on this one, and two cabinet members had already resigned after her little in-house pep talk. But to Barca, she was still The Boss, and if she wanted to go balls to the wall to prepare for an alien invasion, he would do everything in his power to help her. Because, God forbid, she just might be right.

  “I completely understand, Mr. Ambassador, believe me,” Barca said. “We fully realize how much of a shock this must be, and how...well, how incredible it all seems. But the president is fully convinced by the available evidence and is committed to having Earth do whatever we can, as quickly as we can, to prepare for whatever may come. Eighteen months leaves us very little time.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Secretary. And please rest assured that I will contact you personally the moment I have a response from my government.” The ambassador smiled and stood up smoothly, signaling an end to the meeting, and Barca did the same. Shaking the bigger man’s hand, bin Sultan told him, “I appreciate your coming here, Mr. Secretary. Please keep us apprised of your findings, and I will contact you soon.”

  “Always a pleasure, Mr. Ambassador,” Barca replied formally.

  A few minutes later, Barca settled into the limousine that would take him on to the next of half a dozen visits to other embassies to try and drum up support for the war effort against an enemy that only one man had encountered and survived. Sighing, he put a call through to the president to give her an update. He expected one of her executive assistants, but his call was answered immediately. It was the president herself.

  “How did it go, Ham?” she asked him expectantly.

  “He said, in a most dignified manner, of course, that he thinks you’re a loon and that we’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” he told her bluntly. “He’s going to pass the offer along to his government, of course, but...” He sighed and shook his head.

  She puffed out her cheeks and rubbed her temples. “I know,” she said, trying to rein in her frustration, “and I don’t blame him. And the others will be the same, I’m sure, at least right now. There are huge questions that we can’t answer, and precious little evidence-”

  Barca snorted. “Ma’am, a five hundred meter ship with a missing crew is plenty of evidence of something. It’s just that people don’t want to believe Sato’s story about the aliens. Not so much that there are aliens, although there are a lot of folks who won’t believe that, either, but that they don’t even know us and yet they’re coming to look for a fight. If the ship’s records had been intact and had shown some reflection of the attack, anything to support Sato’s story other than the physical artifacts, it might be different. Might be. But even at that,” he shrugged, “people have an incredibly powerful sense of denial.”

  “I know,” she said, a trace of strain in her voice, “I know. But I feel this in my gut, Ham. We can’t afford to be wrong. We’ve somehow got to make them see that there’s a threat. And get them to do something about it.”

  He paused before he answered. He had known Natalie McKenna for over twenty years, and had found her to be one of the most noble, intelligent, sensible, and downright tough human beings he had ever encountered. He also remembered that she’d had quite a few “gut feelings” in the time he’d known her, and she had never once been wrong. Not one single time. Call it intuition, call it blind luck, call it whatever you want. It all boiled down to the same thing. If something inside her was telling her that this was the real deal, something beyond the incontrovertible evidence embodied in what the Aurora had brought back, then he believed it. And it was starting to scare him to death.

  “I’ll do my very best, Madam President,” he told her solemnly as he flexed his massive arms, stressing the seams of his suit. “Even if I have to pound it into their thick heads.”

  That won him a tentative smile from his commander-in-chief. “I know you will, Ham,” she replied. “And thanks...”

  * * *

  Three weeks later, Ichiro Sato was finally released from medical quarantine aboard the Aurora. He had stoically endured the endless poking and prodding for blood samples and biopsies, provided urine and stool samples every few hours, had a variety of two- and three-dimensional scans done every week, and suffered even more intrusive and humiliating tests to satisfy the army of doctors and nurses in biological warfare suits. He knew it was in a good cause, both for himself and for his fellow humans, but being released from quarantine was almost as emotional an experience as had been his return to Africa Station.

  With the scientists and engineers finally losing interest in him or, in the case of the doctors, having no excuses to continue holding him, Sato had finally been freed from quarantine aboard the ship. But as soon as he stepped out the airlock, he first had to sit through some very tough questioning from the board of inquiry about what had happened to the ship and her missing crew. After surviving that, he was plunged into an endless series of meetings planetside with senior officers and civilians who demanded his story in person. As he was shuttled from venue to venue, he discovered that his image was plastered everywhere. He was an overnight celebrity across the planet, and that was spreading rapidly to the other planets of the human sphere. Some pundits considered him a heroic survivor, but some weren’t so kind. A few even went so far as to accuse him of somehow engineering the deaths of the crew so he could return home, overlooking the fact that Earth wasn’t his home, and the navigational feat of Aurora appearing right next to Africa Station was simply impossible with available human technology. Others were convinced that his body secretly harbored some sort of alien parasite that would suddenly burst forth and begin the process of eliminating his fellow humans.

  The only saving grace in his time planetside was Steph. She and her network, which had shot to the top of the ratings charts, had an exclusive, and no other reporters were allowed access to Ichiro unless her network agreed to it. They had made some exceptions, but for the most part Steph had kept them out of his now properly cut hair. She went with him to all of the sessions with the senior brass, and made it all look good in the public eye. While she was doing
it for obvious professional reasons and Sato essentially had no choice, they found each other to be pleasant company and had become good friends. In a way, Sato wished it might become something more, but he found that there was a deep emotional emptiness inside him that concealed a sense of guilt that the psychologists and psychiatrists had been unable to expunge. On balance, he was happy enough just having a friend who seemed to understand him.

  Today, though, was something special: the courier had finally returned from Keran with the meteorological data he had requested to compare with the images he had taken of the cloud formations circling the alien replica of the planet. That information was what the powers that be had been waiting for before holding the final review of what had come to be called the “Aurora Incident.”

  Sitting at the front of the main briefing complex at Terran Naval Headquarters with the other presenters, Sato listened as Admiral Tiernan, Chief of the Terran Naval Staff, delivered short opening remarks before a battery of experts, including Sato, was called upon to deliver their findings to a joint council that included everybody who was anybody in the Terran military. The meeting was chaired by Tiernan, but representatives from every service were present, as were Defense Minister Joshua Sabine and several other key cabinet members. The president had decided to wait for the executive summary version from her cabinet representatives: in the meantime, she had more battles to fight with congress.

  “Because we have a lot of ground to cover,” Tiernan told the attendees, “I’d like to ask that you hold your questions until the breakout sessions after the main presentation. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Dr. Novikov to begin.”

  Dr. Anton Novikov was the director of the medical staff that had examined Sato. “After the most exhaustive test battery we’ve ever run,” Novikov explained, “our findings on examining Lieutenant Sato were completely negative in terms of any identifiable pathogens.” On the main screen in the expansive conference room, a bewildering list of tests, dates, results, and other information scrolled from bottom to top. But no one paid it any attention: everyone’s eyes were riveted on Sato.

  “However,” Novikov went on, “we did find clear evidence of physiological manipulation.” On the screen, the blinding list of tests disappeared, replaced by side-by-side bioscans of Sato’s jaw line. “In this case,” Novikov went on, “the cracks that Lieutenant Sato had in two of his lower teeth, sustained during his first year at the academy-” the hairline fractures were highlighted in the bioscan on the left, “-have disappeared, as you can see in the bioscan on the right.” The audience murmured as they examined the two images. While the cracks were subtle in the “before” image, they were nonetheless clear. And they were plainly gone in the “after” image. “We examined them extremely closely, and they are definitely the original teeth, not replacements. But there are no indications of any type of repair: no fusing or any other technique. It’s as though they were never damaged in the first place.”

  A new set of bioscans flashed onto the screen, this time of Sato’s left ankle. “Lieutenant Sato had mild scarring of his left achilles tendon from a childhood accident,” the doctor continued. An easily visible mass of tissue at the base of his achilles tendon was highlighted in red. “Again, the evidence of this injury is completely gone in the bioscans we made after his return.” The image on the right showed Sato’s achilles tendon again, but this time in pristine condition. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no medical application or science we have available to us today that would repair these injuries and leave absolutely no trace behind. There are also other, more subtle, differences that we detected in Lieutenant Sato’s physiology that indicate some sort of medical intervention.” He paused, looking across the audience. “Without a sample, we obviously cannot corroborate Lieutenant Sato’s report of an alien ‘healing gel.’ However, based on our findings, we can certainly say that something happened to him that is beyond our ability to satisfactorily explain. And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes the medical portion of this briefing.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Novikov,” Admiral Tiernan told him. “And now I’d like to move on to-”

  “What about psychological aberrations?” someone interrupted.

  Tiernan frowned. Someone always didn’t get the message about what “hold your questions” meant, but he let the question stand. Novikov hadn’t touched on the psychological aspects, and Tiernan himself was curious.

  Novikov shook his head. “We ran an extremely intensive series of psychological tests,” he said. “The reason I did not include the results here is that, aside from some understandable emotional trauma, we could detect no unexpected or unreasonable variations from normal.”

  There were some sidelong glances around the room, Sato noticed. More than a few people were concerned that he might have been psychologically influenced or brainwashed by the aliens and made into a spy or assassin. He didn’t really blame them: it was a lot easier to believe that than face the truth.

  “Any other questions?” Tiernan asked, the tone of his voice making it clear that there had better not be. Heads shook around the room. “Very well. Captain Bennett, if you please.”

  The woman sitting next to Sato rose and took up a position behind the podium. Captain Leona Bennett was the chief engineer that had led the team that had taken Aurora apart from stem to stern. When she looked at the audience, she didn’t smile. She had not liked what her team had found.

  “As Dr. Novikov’s team did with Lieutenant Sato himself,” she nodded at him from the podium, “we conducted extended forensics tests of the Aurora, including her hull, interior, and all ship’s systems.

  “We found that Aurora herself was completely free of any suspicious microorganisms, particles, or devices. However,” she went on, “as Dr. Novikov found with his patient, there were a number of oddities about the ship that we are at a complete loss to explain.

  “The first,” she said as a projection of the ship appeared on the screen, the camera panning from the bow toward the stern, “is that there was no evidence at all of any holes having been cut anywhere in the hull. Even microscopic examination of several specific areas that Lieutenant Sato pointed out to us revealed nothing.

  “However,” she went on, “the microscopic scans revealed something completely unexpected, and led to a detailed metallurgical sampling of the hull and interior components.” She flashed a chart up on the display screen. “These are spectrographs of samples of the ship’s outer hull plating during her last refit. As you can see, there are tiny variations in the composition of the alloy. This is normal from slight imperfections in the production processes. This, however,” she said as she changed the display to a new chart, “is not.” Where the previous chart showed slight differences among the samples, the samples in the new chart were eerily identical. “These samples were taken from the same plates in the hull as those in the chart you just saw. Not only are they all identical, but they’re all slightly different than the samples taken during Aurora’s last refit.” She paused, her face taking on a grim expression. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is flat-out impossible unless someone completely remade, on a molecular level and with a precision that we cannot match - the entire ship.”

  That sparked an uproar until Tiernan ordered everyone to silence so Captain Bennett could continue.

  “That’s not all,” she told them. “More perplexing to us were the findings from the analysis of the ship’s engines. As most of you know, certain components have a limited operational life because of heat, friction, or a variety of other factors and must be periodically replaced.

  “But everything in Aurora’s sublight and hyperdrive systems looked brand new,” she explained. “And I have to emphasize that some of the components are normally extremely difficult to get to, and require very special tools. It took my engineers a full week working around the clock to pull the hyperdrive core. And it was clear from the part identification markings and three-dimensional scans that they weren’t replacements: they were the v
ery same parts as installed on the ship’s last refit. But somehow made new.”

  Looking directly at Admiral Tiernan, she summed up her findings and her fears. “Sir, I can’t confirm Lieutenant Sato’s story from what we found on the ship. But I can definitely confirm that something incredibly strange happened to that ship, something that’s centuries beyond our current engineering capability.”

  Those around the room fell silent. Bennett had a reputation for being an engineering genius, and many had long thought her talents wasted in the Navy. Her last words sent a haunting chill through the senior military officers and civilian officials who sat around the table at the center of the room.

  “Thank you, captain,” Tiernan said into the resounding silence. He had already read the summary and most of the details of Bennett’s findings, but was nonetheless disturbed. While she made it clear that there was no indication that the ship itself posed any danger, whoever had manipulated the vessel was clearly in a league of their own in terms of technology.

  “Dr. Larsen will now present the results of the study of the substance, believed to be blood, found on Lieutenant Sato’s sword,” Tiernan said, nodding toward a tall, thin man with thinning blonde hair who sat on the other side of Sato. “Doctor, if you would, please.”

  Larsen was nervous as he took the stage. Unlike many academics who had a lot of experience in front of people, even if just students in a classroom, Larsen had very little: his life was spent in the laboratory. He was widely published, but had generally avoided giving public talks himself. Instead, he almost always trusted it to one of his understudies.