Based on his actions at Keran that had earned him “the medal,” he had been given command of one of the Navy’s newest heavy cruisers, the Yura. The ship had finished her shakedown trials and was in the yards where the yard hands were making some last minute adjustments while she took on provisions. Ichiro was scheduled to take Yura out on her first war patrol the next morning. It was something most of him looked forward to, hoping he could give the Kreelans some of the death that they had come looking for. The rest of him wanted to stay here, holding close the woman he loved.
Steph, too, would be leaving their home here on Africa Station, one of the massive orbital transit stations for people and cargo traveling to and from Earth. She had accepted a completely unexpected offer by President McKenna to be her press secretary. That had been an incredibly tough decision for Steph: she wanted to go where the big stories were as a journalist. Yet after being around McKenna, she had come to realize that she had an opportunity to become part of something far larger than herself, something that could be vitally important to all of humankind. For her, it was a sacrifice to give up her field work, but after the first few weeks on the job it was a sacrifice she had seen as being a worthy one.
“How long until you have to get ready?” she asked him quietly, kissing one of his hands as she stretched her body slowly, suggestively, against his back.
Ichiro grudgingly eyed the clock display. “An hour,” he sighed.
“Then let’s not waste it,” she told him as she turned over, kissing him hard as she straddled his body in one smooth movement.
Ichiro didn’t argue.
* * *
A few hours later, Commander Ichiro Sato, captain of the CNS Yura, stood on his ship’s bridge as his crew completed preparations to depart Africa Station. He and Steph had said their goodbyes, swearing they wouldn’t cry, then crying, anyway. After they parted and before he stepped through the gangway hatch to board his ship, he paused a moment. Closing his eyes, he took one last look at Steph’s image in his mind, then reverently put it away in a mental box that he closed and locked. He would set aside time to think of her — and write her letters, even though they probably wouldn’t reach her through the slow inter-system mail system until Yura returned home — when he was alone in his quarters. Except for those special moments, he would think only of his ship and her crew, and the perils that might await them. That was the best insurance he could provide that he would return home to the woman he loved.
“All umbilicals and gangways have been cast off, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Raymond Villiers, Sato’s executive officer (the XO) reported. “Africa Station has given us clearance to maneuver. Engineering is ready to answer all bells.”
“Helm,” Sato said as he settled back into his combat chair in the center of the bridge, “give me ten seconds on the port-side thrusters.”
“Ten seconds, port-side thrusters, aye,” Lieutenant Natalya Bogdanova answered instantly. She had served with Sato aboard his previous ship, the TNS Owen D. McClaren, which had been destroyed at Keran. They had become good friends while serving together aboard McClaren, and he was more than glad to have her aboard.
The Yura slowly moved away from her berth in the newly-built docks on Africa Station. Over six hundred meters long, Yura was a radical departure from previous heavy cruiser designs. Instead of having a collection of several modules and numerous protrusions and appendages attached to a rigid latticework keel, Yura’s hull was formed of armor plate that encased her entire internal structure. While she was not aerodynamic (a feat the Kreelans had somehow mastered with their ships), and so could not enter atmosphere, her shape was very streamlined. Her profile reminded Sato of a shark, a likeness that he found intensely satisfying. Like a shark, she had teeth: four triple turrets mounting twelve fifteen-centimeter kinetic guns, another six turrets with single heavy lasers, and enough close-in defense weapons and anti-personnel mortars to cover every approach to the ship, save directly astern because of the drive mountings. To round out her armament, she had ten torpedo tubes and twenty-two torpedoes: large, self-guided and highly maneuverable missiles that had proven effective in the fleet battles at Keran.
Yura and her eleven sister ships had been built in just over three months in the emergency construction program begun by President McKenna after the Keran debacle. It had taken three more months to get her ready for combat, and Sato had done his best to use every minute of it to the fullest to prepare his ship and crew. He had mercilessly drilled the men and women who served under him, but always ensured they understood that their survival and ability to carry out their mission depended on how well they could do their jobs, even under the worst conditions. Following the example of his first commanding officer aboard the old Aurora, Captain Owen McClaren, for whom the ship he served on at Keran had been named, he forged his officers into a well-oiled team of leaders that quickly earned the respect of the enlisted ranks. Sato knew that they still had to improve in many areas, but he was intensely proud of his crew. He knew that many of his fellow commanding officers doubted — some quite vocally — that he was fit for command. Yet Sato had no doubts that his ship and crew were ready for battle.
Watching the tactical display, which was toggled to a mode optimized for departure and showed only the local space around Africa Station, he ordered, “All ahead one-quarter. Make your course two-eight-three mark zero-seven-five.”
Bogdanova echoed his command as her fingers confidently moved over the controls.
While the inertial dampeners theoretically removed any sensation of motion, Sato certainly felt like he was moving as the ship accelerated away from Earth, the great blue marble of Mankind’s home rapidly dwindling behind them.
“Captain,” Villiers informed him as they reached their planned jump point well out of Earth’s gravity well, “the jump coordinates for the squadron rendezvous are verified, and the hyperdrive engines are green for jump. All hands are at jump stations.”
This jump, in addition to being the initial leg of their first combat patrol, was also the final test in the squadron’s operational readiness evaluation trials. Each of the six ships of the 8 Heavy Cruiser Squadron had jumped from Earth separately over the last three days, with Yura being the last. It was a very complex navigational exercise with the ships leaving at different times, briefly patrolling different sets of star systems, and then making a squadron rendezvous at Lorient during a fifteen minute window in twenty-one days.
Sato smiled to himself. It was an incredibly challenging navigation problem that was typical of his squadron commander, Commodore Margaret Hanson. She was something of an odd bird in the Navy, having crossed over from the Terran Army years before. She was as outgoing as she was outspoken, which Sato knew had cost her more than one promotion in the past. Keran, however, had changed things: she had held the rank of commander before that disastrous battle, and had her commodore’s rank pinned on little more than three months later. If there had been any silver lining from the Keran disaster, it was the rapid promotion of competent officers like Hanson.
Sato knew that she had been very skeptical about his command abilities when he took over Yura. She had been very frank with him in their first meeting when he had joined the squadron.
“Handing over a brand new heavy cruiser — of a completely new design, at that — to someone with no real command experience doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” she had told him bluntly. “Admiral Tiernan passed over a lot of fully qualified officers to give you your ship, Sato. He obviously had his reasons, but I don’t need to tell you that you’re probably not the most popular officer in the Navy at the moment, at least among the officers who’ve been waiting in line for a command slot.”
Sato knew quite well that Tiernan’s decision had caused a huge uproar among the command-rank officers, but he was honest enough with himself to admit that he didn’t care what they thought. It wasn’t that he felt entitled to the ship after what he’d gone through on the Aurora making first contact with the Emp
ire, or after what had happened aboard the McClaren during the battle of Keran. He would have been happy and honored to serve on any ship that would take the war to the Kreelans. Yet when Tiernan had given him this unique opportunity, there was no way he would have turned it down. He knew that he could fail and be replaced — Tiernan had made that perfectly clear — but he also knew that he could succeed. It would give him one of humanity’s greatest weapons against the aliens that had murdered the crew of his first ship and an entire planet of fellow human beings.
Despite her misgivings, after seeing his ship perform in her squadron’s exercises, Hanson decided that maybe Admiral Tiernan hadn’t had a screw loose when he put Sato in command of Yura.
“Sato,” she had told him later, “you’re probably the best tactician I’ve ever seen, and Yura beat every other ship in the squadron combat evaluations.” That was the good news. The bad news came next. “But your ship’s administration, commander, is an outright disaster.”
He had no good answer for that, other than he simply had not had the time or the training to learn all the things ship captains had to know. Beyond tactics and ship handling, where he excelled, lay paperwork, policies, procedures and much more: even in war, these things persisted, and a ship could not function without them.
He knew that many officers in Hanson’s position would have been happy to see him fail, for no other reason than because he hadn’t served his time like his peers before getting a command. That, however, was not the sort of officer Hanson was. She saw in him a highly capable junior officer who had the capability to be an outstanding one, and decided to rescue him before he drowned in paper. Taking him under her wing, she brought him up to speed in the more mundane but necessary skills needed to keep a ship running. Sato smiled, remembering some of the commodore’s lessons. Hanson was a tough teacher, and he was a determined student.
When the bridge chronometer being used to log their exercise time counted down to zero, Sato turned to Bogdanova and ordered, “Helm, commence jump.”
Thirty seconds later, Yura vanished into hyperspace, bound for her first patrol station.
* * *
Roland Mills was fighting for his life. His regiment had been annihilated in an orgy of hand-to-hand fighting with the aliens, with but a hundred or so survivors left when the huge warrior had chosen him for single combat. It was the ultimate adrenaline rush that might even help save a few of his fellow legionnaires.
He knew from the start that he could never beat her. He had seen what she had done in the trench where they had fought viciously against the other warriors, watched as her sword and claws tore his comrades apart like a killing machine. He had seen her snatch others from the trench with some sort of whip with several barbed tails, and heard the terrified screams of her victims as they were yanked from the trench like fish from a pond.
Of all of the trained killers his regiment had to offer, she had chosen him. Setting aside her weapons, she fought him hand-to-hand. She battered him to the ground time and again, and each time he regained his feet and charged her. He had landed his share of blows, bloodying her face. He knew that it was only because she had let him, but that was enough. He kept charging her until he could no longer stand. Then he crawled until he could no longer lift himself from the mud.
It was enough. She would spare his fellow survivors. She would spare him. She rolled him over and he looked up, offering her a bloody smile, a measure of defiance. She looked down at him, her blue face bearing an inscrutable expression, her cat’s eyes taking in the measure of his soul.
She should have just walked away with the rest of her warriors. That was what was supposed to happen. But she didn’t.
Instead, one of her massive clawed hands closed around his neck and she lifted him from the ground. Her dark crimson lips parted in a snarl to reveal long white fangs, and an icy chill threaded its way through his heart, eclipsing the pain of his battered body. He suddenly felt a horrible, tearing pain in his chest. Looking down past the alien hand clamped around his neck, he saw his ribs cracked and broken, the flesh torn and bleeding where she had shoved her other hand into his chest. With a smooth motion, she tore out his still-beating heart, holding it up for the other warriors to see, as she bellowed an alien cry of victorious rage. The other warriors howled their approval, and Mills watched in silent horror as they butchered the surviving legionnaires.
He watched the carnage, knowing that he was dead, must be dead, yet he wasn’t. His eyes locked with hers as she turned back to him, and the hand that had been holding his heart — where had it gone? — reached back into his shattered chest. Not for another part of his body, but for his very soul...
“Roland!”
Mills snapped his eyes open. His body was drenched in sweat, his heart — still with him, thank God — hammering in his chest, blood pounding in his ears. He had rolled out of his bunk onto the metal deck, shaking so badly that his teeth chattered. Looking up, he saw Emmanuelle Sabourin kneeling next to him, her eyes wide with concern.
“Roland,” she said again, softly this time. She helped him sit up, then wrapped her arms around him, holding him tight. “The dream again?”
“Yes,” he shuddered, burying his face in the hollow of her shoulder.
Sabourin stroked his hair with one hand as she continued to hold him with the other. Both of them were veterans of Keran, survivors of close and bloody combat. Mills had been serving in the Légion étrangère of the Alliance Française, which had fought on the surface, while Sabourin had been an engineering technician on the Alliance fleet’s flagship. He had fought a now-legendary hand-to-hand battle with a seemingly unstoppable Kreelan warrior, and Sabourin had fought the Kreelan boarders who had taken her ship, saving the few members of the crew who managed to survive. Both had wound up joining the new Confederation Marine Corps. The Legion, what little was left of it, had been transferred in its entirety to the newly formed service, and Mills had gone along with it. Sabourin had joined the Corps through an inter-service transfer from the former Alliance Navy. They had wound up here on the CNS Yura as part of the cruiser’s Marine detachment because Sato had known Mills and made a by-name request for him from the transition team that had been integrating the legionnaires into the new Marine Corps. As for Sabourin, she had been given her choice of assignments as a reward for her performance at Keran. After learning that Sato was commanding a ship with a Marine detachment, she requested to serve under him.
Mills had assumed the post of first sergeant of the ship’s company-sized Marine detachment, and Sabourin was the platoon sergeant for one of the detachment’s platoons. Being the only two veterans in the detachment who had actually fought the enemy, they had immediately gravitated toward one another, and had become lovers not long afterward. They were as discreet as they could be in the confines of a warship, which meant that everyone knew about their relationship, but pretended not to. They both knew that the detachment commander wasn’t happy about their affair, but he had made it clear that as long as they did their jobs and kept their personal lives out of the detachment’s business, he would be willing to turn a blind eye.
“I wish I understood why this is happening,” he whispered. “I wasn’t afraid when I fought her. I wasn’t afraid during the entire battle. It was such a rush. Then when we got back to Avignon the dreams started. They’ve become so...so real. It’s bad enough when she tears my heart out.” He tried to laugh, but it came out a strangled sob. “But when she reaches for me again...” He shuddered. “I could understand having nightmares about something that happened to me, but what’s in the dream didn’t. I just don’t understand.”
“If you were not such a pig-headed bastard and would see a psychologist, they might be able to do something for you,” she chided him. It was an old argument they had gone over many times. She was convinced it was post-traumatic stress. He was convinced it wasn’t.
“I won’t let them pull me from duty,” he said stubbornly.
She held him away j
ust far enough to look into his eyes. “If the dreams keep getting worse, my love, the CO will relieve you, anyway. He would be derelict in his duty if he did not.” She kissed him, then said, “Roland, you are exhausted and irritable much of the time. You have been losing weight, and you use far too many stimulants.” He started to protest, but she put a finger on his lips. “You can lie to the commander, you can lie to yourself, but you cannot lie to me. Do not even try, because I know you too well. Listen to me, first sergeant: you owe it to our Marines to do something about this. If — when — we again go into combat, you must be ready. If you are not, it is not only your life that is at risk. You risk all our lives. Including mine.”
She braced herself for the argument to start getting ugly as it always did, and waited for him to trot out the same tired and illogical reasons that he had used before to avoid treatment.
“I’ll see the ship’s surgeon next watch,” he said quietly, completely surprising her. She saw the stark fear in his eyes as he looked at her. “If the dream gets any more real, it’s going to kill me.”
* * *
“How many stim packs a day did you say you are taking?” the ship’s surgeon asked, eyebrows raised. “I am not sure I heard you right.”
“Twelve,” Mills told her sheepishly. He already regretted his decision to come to see her. Commander Irina Nikolaeva was the oldest member of the crew, and from her expression Mills suspected she’d seen it all, including stim addiction. Stims were normally included in combat rations to help troops stay awake during extended periods of combat, and the temptation to pilfer and abuse them was the reason that ration packs were normally kept under the lock and key of a responsible junior officer or senior NCO like Mills.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 52