In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  Tiernan, though, was most concerned about one thing: taking the initiative. Aside from the initial surprise his fleet had given them upon emergence, the Kreelans had largely enjoyed a free ride in how the battle had been fought. Now that the two opposing fleets had rough parity in numbers and tonnage, he and Lefevre intended to take the fight to the enemy.

  The Kreelans, however, demonstrated an impeccable sense of timing.

  “They’re moving, sir!” the flag tactical officer reported, pointing to a sheaf of red icons that was separating away from the main body of the Kreelan fleet.

  Tiernan held his breath. The temptation of some would have been to curse that the Kreelans had acted out of turn. But if they were splitting their forces, it might give him and Lefevre an opportunity to defeat them, concentrating their own massed squadrons against either smaller Kreelan force.

  After a few minutes of watching the new trajectory traces on the tactical display, Tiernan cursed. It was clear where the Kreelan ships, sixty-seven of them, almost all of them cruiser-sized, were heading: directly for Keran.

  * * *

  “Fight them as you would, Amar-Marakh,” Tesh-Dar said to the image of the senior shipmistress, a warrior priestess of the Ima’il-Kush order who remained with the formation in high orbit as she herself led the other ships in the first wave of the planetary assault. She knew that the shipmistresses had chafed somewhat at not being allowed to fight unfettered in the initial battles; Tesh-Dar was not unsympathetic, but it had been necessary at the time. But now, as the battle was about to open on the ground, she saw no reason to hold back anymore in the fighting that must erupt once more in space. The humans had proven themselves capable opponents, and would be treated as such. “We have bled them to learn what we would, and to give them the opportunity to do so, as well. Now challenge them to survive.”

  “Yes, my priestess,” Amar-Marakh answered, clearly pleased. In the first battles, the ships had been used mainly to get the boarders close to their targets. Now they would be used to their fullest. “We are moving to engage now.”

  Tesh-Dar nodded. “In Her name, let it be so...”

  * * *

  “Admiral,” Tiernan said, addressing Lefevre, “I believe our best choice would be to move to intercept the enemy ships heading toward the surface.”

  “I agree, amiral,” Lefevre said at once over the vidcom. He, too, had seen the opportunity opened by the Kreelans splitting their forces. Attacking the group heading toward the planet was certainly the optimal choice: the human forces would have the advantage of being higher in the gravity well and a nearly three to one advantage in tonnage. Being able to intercept the enemy before they could land troops on the ground was simply icing on the cake. “I recommend that we-”

  “Admiral,” Tiernan’s flag captain said tensely.

  Tiernan told Lefevre, “Just a moment, admiral,” and turned to see what was going on. His flag captain merely pointed at the tactical display, which now showed the larger Kreelan force reforming and starting to move. “Admiral Lefevre, are you seeing this?” Tiernan asked.

  “Oui,” Lefevre said gravely. “Shall we make a wager that they are headed our way?”

  Tiernan snorted. “No takers here on that one, sir. You know bloody well they are.” He didn’t need the tactical computer’s analysis for that. Taking a closer look at the trajectory for the enemy formation heading for the planet and doing some mental projections, he said, “So, do we go meet them head-to-head, or do we play a hand that’s a bit riskier?”

  Lefevre smiled. He had known Tiernan only this short time, but already had come to like the man. “Tell me what you have in mind, amiral.”

  * * *

  Senior shipmistress Amar-Marakh hissed as she saw the human ships begin to deploy. Her reaction was not one of fear, but of annoyance. She had wanted to meet the human fleet head-on, but it was clear the humans had something else in mind. The great staggered wedges of their fleet were arrowing toward the planet, plunging downward with the clear intent of intercepting Tesh-Dar’s force.

  “I see them,” came Tesh-Dar’s voice, as if the great priestess had read Amar-Marakh’s mind. “They come for us.”

  “We cannot intercept them before they reach you,” Amar-Marakh warned. “They will have superiority.”

  Tesh-Dar shook her head. “They will not reach us,” she reassured her senior shipmistress. “They are thinking in terms of their own vessels, not of ours. Be prepared for them when they realize their mistake and climb to engage you.”

  Amar-Marakh saluted and said only, “As you command, Tesh-Dar.”

  * * *

  “We’re missing something,” Tiernan murmured to himself. The combined human fleet was speeding toward the planet on a course that would intercept the Kreelan ships now plunging down for what Tiernan believed could only be a planetary assault.

  It was a perfect opportunity: the Kreelan ships would have to sail close to Keran to drop their troops. The human fleet would be in a perfect position to smash the enemy ships as they climbed up away from the planet, struggling against gravity. The combination of superior firepower and tactical positioning should let them pound the Kreelans into scrap, he had thought. Then the human fleet could deal with the larger enemy force still holding near Keran’s moons.

  It had been a good plan.

  Except it wasn’t going to work. With a sudden shock he realized why: the Kreelan ships were heading in too low. Tiernan had thought the streamlined nature of the enemy vessels was merely an alien aesthetic preference. Now he realized that they were streamlined for a specific reason: the aerodynamic shape, no doubt combined with more powerful electromagnetic shields and high-heat alloys so the ships could withstand the heat of reentry, would allow them to enter atmosphere and drop their troops without the need for assault boats. Not only that, but they’d likely be able to bring the main weapons of the ships to bear on ground targets, which put the human troops in extreme jeopardy.

  “Get me Admiral Lefevre,” he ordered the flag communications officer.

  “Oui, Amiral Tiernan?” Lefevre answered immediately.

  “They surprised us again,” Tiernan told him. “Those ships are going to enter the atmosphere, possibly even land.” Looking at the tactical plot, he shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll be able to catch them.”

  Lefevre frowned and spoke to someone off to the side. A moment later he said, “I agree with your assessment of their intentions, my friend,” he said, “but not that we cannot catch them. If we depress our trajectory slightly and increase our speed, we should be able to give them a broadside at extreme range as we pass.”

  Ticonderoga’s flag tactical officer, who was speaking at the same time with his counterpart on Lefevre’s flag bridge aboard the Jean Bart, brought up a new set of navigation traces on the display. Tiernan saw that there was absolutely no margin for error. Even under the best of circumstances, it was likely that at least some of his ships were going to sustain damage from contact with the upper fringes of Keran’s atmosphere. “That’s cutting it awfully close, admiral,” he said.

  “It is, amiral,” Lefevre replied grimly. “But if the Kreelans are able to use their ships to fire directly on our ground forces...” He shook his head: the troops on the planet would not stand a chance.

  “Agreed, sir,” Tiernan said, the decision made for lack of any better choices. “My navigation officer is uploading the new maneuvering orders to our ships. We’ll await your signal to execute.”

  “Stand by,” Lefevre told him as he waited for his own flag tactical officer to do the same. “Now, amiral.”

  Tiernan nodded to his tactical officer, who flashed the instructions to the rest of the fleet over the data-link. As one, the four dozen ships of Tiernan’s force and the hundred-odd remaining ships of Lefevre’s fleet accelerated and nosed down even further toward Keran.

  Satisfied that the maneuver had been executed properly, Tiernan turned to his communications officer. “Get me General
Ray immediately,” he told him. “There’s a lot of bad news headed his way.”

  * * *

  “Sir, let me make sure I understand you properly,” Ray said, fighting his disbelief. “They are bringing a force of cruisers and destroyers into the atmosphere?”

  “That’s right, general,” Tiernan’s image said from the vidcom. “There’s no question of it at this point: they have sixty-seven ships inbound, and trajectory projections have a good third of them coming your way.”

  “Do we have any estimates of how many troops these ships might carry,” Ray asked, looking helplessly at his operations and intelligence staff officers, who both had mortified expressions on their faces, “or what weapons they have to hit us with?”

  “We don’t know anything about troop capacity, general,” Tiernan answered, “but the larger ships are roughly the size of the Ticonderoga here. If they really crammed warriors in like sardines, they might be able to fit a thousand or so in each ship over and above what we estimate for the crew complement. But that would be a damn tight squeeze. I’m figuring not more than a couple of divisions’ worth, and they’ll be spread out fairly thin based on the trajectories we’re seeing.

  “As for the weapons,” Tiernan went on grimly, “that we have more information on based on the fighting we’ve been through up here. At a minimum, expect heavy rapid-fire kinetics in the twenty centimeter range and lasers that can kill destroyers. They have a variety of lighter weapons, but those are the ones to worry about.”

  Ray sat back at the admiral’s understatement. Twenty centimeter shipboard kinetics were equivalent to heavy artillery on the ground, and the naval guns could spit out half a dozen rounds that size in a few seconds. Per tube. And cruisers mounted roughly a dozen such weapons. The lasers were as lethal: any laser that could burn through the hull of a destroyer, even at close range, would be more than a match for his tanks. And he had absolutely nothing that he could fight back with except his tanks in direct fire mode: all of his heavy aerospace defense weapons were intended to hit much smaller targets. He could, and would, fire them against ships in the atmosphere, but they would need incredible luck to get past their point defenses. Even if the weapons hit, they would cause little damage to a destroyer, let alone a cruiser. His real concern was the tanks: if he used them to attack the ships, they would become easy targets themselves. “This will make things a bit more exciting than we had planned, admiral,” Ray deadpanned.

  Managing a mirthless smile, Tiernan told him, “I know. Listen, Arun, we’ll do everything we can to screw up their day as they ingress. But the geometry is against us and a lot of them are going to get through. They’re going to have a big advantage in firepower, yes, but hopefully they won’t be able to mass enough warriors anywhere to achieve local superiority over your troops.”

  It was Ray’s turn to smile. Like a shark. “Even if they do achieve local superiority somewhere in our sector,” he said, “that just gives my tanks more targets to shoot at.”

  * * *

  Tesh-Dar watched as the human ships adjusted their trajectory. “More credit are they due,” she murmured approvingly. The human leader was clearly taking a major risk: while she - or would it be a he, she wondered? - would temporarily be safe from the rest of Tesh-Dar’s fleet, their ungainly ships could easily suffer damage, and possibly destruction, from the upper atmosphere. Their strategy, however, held merit: while they would not be able to force a decisive engagement with Tesh-Dar’s ships, they would nonetheless have a single pass where they would be able to bring most, if not all, of their weapons to bear, but Tesh-Dar could not. Her ships would already be committed to reentry and would only be able to employ those weapons mounted on the upper hull.

  Her shipmistress humphed appreciatively, flexing her fingers, her talons digging grooves into the palms of the armored gauntlets she wore. “Courage, they lack not,” Elai-Tura’an, the shipmistress of Tesh-Dar’s flagship, said. “It seems we will have to pass through a rain of fire to reach the surface.”

  “A fitting way to begin the battle on the ground, is it not?” Tesh-Dar said as the ship began to roll and shudder as it kissed the outer fringes of Keran’s atmosphere. “Alert the warriors that they may be prepared.”

  “In Her name,” Elai-Tura’an said as she saluted, “it shall be so.”

  Turning her attention back to the tactical display, Tesh-Dar watched the rapidly approaching human ships, eagerly anticipating the coming clash.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Shit,” Sparks cursed vehemently as he got off the vidcom with General Ray. The Terran ground forces commander had just held a remote conference with his division and brigade commanders. It had been brief and brutally to the point. “We’ve got incoming heavies, people,” he told his staff, nodding toward the tactical display embedded in the forward wall of the command vehicle’s tactical center. Traces of the Kreelan ships racing for the surface were being echoed from the Ticonderoga, and a good twenty of them were headed toward Foshan where the Terran divisions and some of their Alliance counterparts were deployed. “We need to get our vehicles under cover, pronto, and get the regiment ready for full EMCON on my command.”

  While the vehicles, particularly the tanks, provided a huge amount of firepower, they had one major tactical drawback: they were so large that they were extremely difficult to conceal. With the sensors carried by warships, the Kreelans would have no difficulty finding armored vehicles out in the open. And if they could find them, they could kill them.

  As for going to full EMCON - emission control, or “radio silence” as it was once known - Sparks had argued during the vidcom with General Ray that it would be more advantageous to minimize the electromagnetic signature generated by the various data-link systems that networked the units together. Every single vehicle and soldier was networked to help provide a much greater sense of situational awareness of the battlefield and to coordinate their weapons use. It was a tremendous force multiplier, but it was also a major vulnerability if the enemy could use it to help pinpoint the locations of their units. Worse, many commanders had become so dependent on the rich battlefield detail provided by the networked warfare concept that if the network was lost, they would be, too. That was one of the reasons that Sparks routinely trained his men and women in how to fight under severely degraded network and communications conditions, to the point where his vehicle commanders knew how to use signal flags to communicate basic information and orders to one another. Most of Sparks’s contemporaries thought he was insane, but no one could contest his results: his brigade was consistently at the top of the corps’ combat readiness ratings.

  In the end, General Ray had said, “Sparks, I agree there is a risk. But I feel the advantage we gain from the network outweighs the potential weakness.”

  And that, as the saying went, was that. Sparks wasn’t happy about it, but he was a soldier who knew how to follow orders. But he was going to make sure his troopers were ready to take their data-links off the air if necessary.

  “Sir,” his operations officer asked, a puzzled expression on his face as he looked at the map display of the regiment’s area, “where the devil do we have our people hide? We’ve got some forest cover to the front, for what little that might be worth. Other than that, the only place to find cover would be to drive into the buildings...” He tapered off, looking at Sparks’s expression. “You don’t really mean...”

  “I do,” Sparks said. “Get ‘em moving, major. We’ve got about ten minutes before we’re going to have Kreelan ships overhead. And make sure Grishin’s gotten the word, too, would you?”

  * * *

  Staff Sergeant Patty Coyle couldn’t keep herself from grinning. Part of her felt bad for what she was about to do, but the tanker in the soul of the petite blonde and blue-eyed woman, the absolute antithesis of what a tank commander might be expected to look like, was having a fucking orgasm. This was one of the things every tank commander dreamed of doing, but so few ever got a chance to do it. And her
e she was being ordered - ordered! - to do it.

  Fuckin’-A, she thought as she called to her driver, “Okay, Mannie, back her up, a bit to the left.”

  Her driver, Corporal Manfred Holman, grunted in reply as he applied more power to the M-87 Wolfhound’s tracks, slewing the hundred and twenty-five metric ton vehicle slightly, just as Coyle wanted.

  “Perfect,” Coyle told him as a crash, deafening even here inside the tank, rang out as the tank backed through the huge front glass window of a bakery. She watched through her cupola’s vision displays as the massive hull crushed the displays of neatly arranged cookies, pastries and bread, then proceeded deeper into the shop to pulverize the tables and chairs. Above the din of shattering glass, plastic, and wood, she could hear the hysterical shouts of the shopkeeper and his wife, safe on the street outside.

  She couldn’t believe it when the operations officer had issued orders for all vehicle commanders to immediately find cover inside nearby buildings. The units had to pay for any damage they did to personal property if they deployed outside of their regular training areas. She was sure the Terran Government would pick up the tab for the huge mess the tanks were making, but the promise of a fat paycheck wouldn’t have made the locals any happier as they watched the armored monsters drive into their shops and living rooms.

  After getting the orders from regiment, Coyle had led her platoon down this street and found a three-story building whose first floor was tall enough to clear the tops of the turrets. Then she and the other tank commanders had gone in and asked - nicely at first, and then not so nicely - the occupants to clear out. Even with the raid sirens still wailing, most of the owners and quite a few patrons were still in the shops, living life as if nothing was different. That changed as soon as Coyle pulled out her sidearm and started shooting into the ceilings of the shops, finally getting her point across. A local cop had come running over to see what the fuss was, brandishing his pistol, but ran away even faster after Coyle’s gunner, Sergeant Yuri Kirov, rotated the turret in his direction and pointed the main gun at him.