In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

“It is not a violation of the Way to enjoy great explosions,” Tesh-Dar consoled her with a gently touch on the shoulder, “but we have other work this day.”

  As they approached the spaceport, with a dozen other assault craft flying a loose formation around them, Tesh-Dar sensed something else, an odd stirring in her soul that she did not immediately recognize. It was as if she were looking at a face she had not seen in years, and now was unable to recognize its owner.

  Closing her eyes, she reached out with her mind, her second sight taking her spirit ahead of the ship her body rode. Slowing time to a standstill, she searched the spaceport, seeing the humans frozen as they were in that instant. Through the buildings, across the great expanse of the landing apron, through the ships, she searched.

  Suddenly, she found him. A face that she recognized. He stood before one of the smaller ships, near a craft much like an assault boat that had crash-landed. Larger and, she knew, fiercer than his fellow warriors, he stood a head taller than most of the camouflage-dressed humans around him. She did not know or care to know his name, nor did he have any special standing as did the Messenger. Yet she knew more of him than most of his human companions, for she had fought him in ritual combat on Keran. She had let him live then, for he had fought bravely and well, and it would do the Empress no service to cull from among the greatest of the warriors the humans had. Tesh-Dar knew that his blood did not sing, and he was not the One they sought. Yet she relished the thought of fighting him again, to see if he had learned anything new.

  Drawing her spirit back to her body, time resumed its normal course, and she clenched her fists in anticipation of the combat that was to come.

  * * *

  “You can’t be serious,” Faraday said, clearly dismayed. “Colonel, this is nuts!”

  Colonel Grishin heard the pilot, but his attention was focused on Valentina. She still lay in the bed in sick bay, her haunted eyes staring back at him. “Valentina,” he said, figuring that was as good a name to use as Scarlet, “is this even truly possible?”

  “Yes, colonel,” she told him, “it is. I was specially augmented for black operations, and one of the...modifications was an organic RP-911 interface.”

  “There’s nothing odd that showed up on the autodoc scan,” the medic interjected, not sure to believe what the young woman was saying, wondering if she was suffering from some sort of dementia. “There would have to be connectors, something...”

  “There are,” Valentina breathed. “Believe me, there are. But that’s why the interface is organic: so it doesn’t show up on medical scans.”

  “Then how do you use it?” Faraday asked, looking at Grishin like she was nuts.

  “You have to apply a small electrical current to a specific location at the base of my skull,” she explained in a small voice. “There is a matrix of special material there that will realign to form the interface. Then I just...plug in.” She closed her eyes and shivered.

  “What are you not telling us, Valentina?” Sikorsky demanded, his eyes full of concern. “Why are you frightened of this so?”

  “Because...” she whispered, looking up at him. “Because the machines are so cold, so inhuman. I had to do it once before. I don’t remember much...” She lied, shaking her head, trying to force away the horrible memories. “We have to get out of here, and without the nav core we have no choice.”

  “Let’s see this interface,” the medic demanded. She dug through the medical equipment, coming back with an electrical cauterizing unit. “What sort of current do you need to make this work?”

  “Thirty-seven volts at two point five milliamperes, alternating at one hundred and five kilohertz,” Valentina whispered, her eyes fixed on the cauterizing unit as if it were a dreadful monster.

  The medic looked at her, then at Grishin. The pilot shook his head, circling an index finger around his temple: she’s nuts. Grishin shrugged.

  “That’s, um, a bit of an odd setting, don’t you think?” the medic said as she dialed in the settings. Surprisingly, the instrument accepted them.

  “It was intended to be,” Valentina explained quietly. “You wouldn’t want an interrogator to torture you with electrical current and accidentally discover the interface, now would you?”

  Sikorsky looked up at Grishin and said, “Colonel, stop this! Valentina, I do not doubt that you have this...thing in your body. But this is madness! It is—”

  “It is our only chance, Dmitri,” Valentina pleaded, squeezing his hand tightly. Turning to the medic, she said, “You will find a small mole on the nape of my neck. Apply the current there and you will see.”

  “Well, the current certainly won’t hurt her much,” the medic muttered as she stepped up to the bed and gently turned Valentina’s head. She touched the tip of the cauterizing probe to the designated spot and pressed the button on the instrument. It began to hum. “Nothing’s happen...ing. Oh, Jesus!”

  Before her eyes, a small patch of Valentina’s skin began to reshape itself into the form of a non-metallic electrical interface: instead of metal, it was moist organic tissue, but quite hard and shaped just like a standard jack interface. Looking up at the autodoc’s display of Valentina’s real-time body scan, she could see it taking form. It was not simply an interface, however: tendrils quickly formed from the external connector that led to various areas in Valentina’s brain like a dark, malignant spider.

  “Bozhe moi,” Grishin breathed. He had never had any idea that such things were even possible.

  “Does it hurt?” Sikorsky whispered as he watched the awful thing take shape.

  “No,” Valentina said, “not really.”

  He could tell she was lying.

  “Do we have to keep this current applied?” the medic asked, still unable to believe what she was seeing.

  “Only until the jack is inserted,” Valentina told her. “After that, the auxiliary power lead in the jack will provide enough power to hold the matrix in place. It will remain until the jack is removed.”

  “No,” Sikorsky said angrily, standing up to face Grishin. “This is monstrous, colonel! I will not allow it!”

  Grishin faced him calmly. In Russian, he said, “My friend, she is our only hope. If she does not do this, we will all die. Every one of us, including her. The Kreelans take no prisoners, and this planet will soon be a graveyard: there were no survivors left on Keran after the aliens finished with them. They have come here to exterminate us. You do not wish that for her, do you?”

  “No,” Sikorsky breathed, feeling utterly helpless. “No, I do not.”

  In English, Grishin said to the others, “Let us get her up to the flight deck and—”

  “Colonel!” Mills’s voice suddenly burst over Grishin’s helmet comm unit, “We’ve got Kreelan assault boats coming in over the spaceport perimeter!”

  “Understood!” Grishin told him. “Get going!” he ordered the others in the sickbay. “We are out of time!”

  He ran down the passageway toward the loading ramp, just as the anti-air team perched on top of the freighter began to fire their missiles at the inbound enemy boats.

  * * *

  Tesh-Dar hissed as three assault boats in her formation disappeared in fiery explosions, victims of hypervelocity missiles fired from the ship where she knew her human opponent waited. “Land!” she ordered the pilot tersely.

  The boat instantly plunged toward the ground, followed instantly by the others. The pilot flared her landing at the last moment, bringing the nose up just in time while the jump doors along the boat’s flanks slid open. Warriors leaped to the ground even as the pilot set the ship down on its thick landing claws. The boat’s pilot would not be staying with her craft, but would go with the other warriors: fighting face to face brought greater glory to the Empress.

  Tesh-Dar led the others across the flat landscape of the landing field. The warriors took cover where they could behind the massive landing struts of the ships that now stood between them and their objective. They moved as quic
kly as possible over the flat, open landing apron to avoid the torrent of weapons fire now pouring from the humans surrounding the ship that was their goal. Tesh-Dar did not bother trying to shield her body, for she had no need to: the projectiles from the human weapons simply passed through her without leaving a trace. She strode toward the humans, her mind’s eye fixed on the one that she wanted, the one she had come for.

  * * *

  “Mills!” Sabourin gasped. “Is that her?”

  Next to her, crouching behind the relative safety of the cutter’s wreckage, Mills felt his insides turn to ice. The huge warrior, the one he had fought on Keran and who had let him live, the one who had been the focus of his nightmares, was walking straight toward him.

  “She knew,” he murmured into the cacophony around him as hundreds of Marines fired at the advancing Kreelans. “She bloody knew!” And so had he, he realized. When his headache had abruptly stopped, it was because she had entered the system. He suddenly wondered if the headache itself had been caused by her being in hyperspace, aboard whatever ship that had brought her here. He pushed the thought aside: it was nothing more than idle, useless speculation for a man who had been living on borrowed time. He knew that the sand had just run out of his life’s hourglass.

  “Knew what?” Sabourin asked, her eyes filled with fright. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to her, breaking him away from the advancing alien horror. “Knew what, Roland?”

  “She knew I’d be here,” he told her. “Somehow, she knew. She came for me.” He tried to put on his famous devil-may-care smile for her, the smile she had always thought made him look so young, but it faltered, failed. Pulling her close and putting his lips to her ear, he told her, “I love you, Emmanuelle.” He held her for a moment, kissing her with a passion he had only ever shown during their lovemaking.

  Then he was gone, sprinting across the tarmac toward his destiny.

  “Roland, no!” Sabourin screamed after him, feeling as if her heart had been ripped from her chest. “Come back!”

  * * *

  From his vantage point behind the main forward landing gear of the ship, Grishin saw Mills suddenly break cover and dash straight for the Kreelans. Or, rather, straight for the huge warrior who stalked across the tarmac toward the human positions, totally impervious to their weapons.

  “Chyort voz’mi,” he whispered, instantly recognizing her. She had killed one of his crewmen on Keran, snatching him out of his command vehicle’s rear hatch with an alien version of the cat-o-nine tails, a dreadful multi-barbed whip. Grishin could still hear the wet smacking sound the legionnaire’s body had made when it hit the metal coaming of the vehicle’s open hatch, smashing the skull and leg bones, just before Grishin’s driver had panicked and driven away.

  “Colonel,” Major Justin shouted over the firing, “look!”

  The Kreelans had stopped, taking cover as best they could behind the landing gear and ground equipment of the nearest ships. Only the huge warrior was out in the open now, standing. Waiting.

  “Cease fire!” Grishin called through the brigade command net.

  “Cease fire!” His command was repeated by his surviving subordinate commanders and NCOs, and in only a few seconds there was a sudden silence as the Marines stopped firing.

  Grishin felt more than heard a deep rumble behind him. The Mauritania’s engines were spooling up. He switched over to another channel, linked to Faraday in the ship. “How long?” he asked tersely.

  “Jesus, colonel,” the pilot said, “I don’t know! Five, maybe ten minutes if we’re lucky.”

  “I hope it’s closer to five than to ten,” Grishin told him grimly as he watched Mills warily approach the huge alien warrior. “We may not have that long.”

  * * *

  “I’m doing my best, sir,” Faraday told him. He was panting from having run back and forth twice between the bridge and engineering on his injured leg. “Your Marines are trying to be helpful, but they don’t know shit about running a ship, and I’m having to figure all this crap out on my own.” And it’s a fucking good thing I know some French, he told himself. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to understand what the hell anything was. Since she was a ship out of La Seyne, all of Mauritania’s instrumentation was in French. Slipping into the flight command chair, he frantically typed in a series of commands into the main control console, and was rewarded with a series of green indicator lights on the ship’s main status panel. “All right! We’ve got the main drives up, jump drives check out, and thrusters are green. Sir, if you can get someone to disconnect the umbilicals, that’d be a big help.”

  “Consider it done,” Grishin’s voice informed him.

  “All we need now is navigation,” Faraday said quietly as the medic and the Sikorsky’s appeared, carefully carrying Valentina. They strapped her down in the navigator’s chair, leaning it back as far as it would go. She was white as a sheet, and shivering as if she were freezing. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked her. He had never claimed to have much emotional depth, but his heart ached when he looked at her. Talk about having guts, he thought.

  “Just get us out of here,” she rasped. Turning to the medic and the Sikorskys, she grabbed Dmitri’s arm. “Whatever happens to me after the medic plugs in the jack,” she told him in Russian through teeth that were now chattering with fear, “do not unplug it. No matter how badly you may want to. Do you understand me?”

  Dmitri glanced at Ludmilla, with both of them wearing terrified expressions. They were not afraid of death so much as what was about to happen to Valentina. They could tell she was petrified.

  “Promise me!”

  “We promise,” he whispered.

  Satisfied, Valentina relaxed her grip, sliding her hand down to hold onto his. “Let’s get this over with,” she told the medic, turning her head to the side, toward Dmitri, to expose the back of her neck. “Please hold my hand,” she whispered to him as she felt the tingle of electricity from the cauterizer begin to tease the interface into existence, “and don’t let go.”

  “Okay,” the medic said, simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the interface as it formed in Valentina’s skin, “here we go.” She took the slender cable and gently inserted it into the receptacle, then took away the cauterizer.

  Valentina suddenly stiffened as if she’d been hit with a massive electric shock. Just as suddenly, her body relaxed and stopped shivering. The fearful expression fell from her face, replaced by limp placidity.

  Sikorsky took a deep breath, leaning against Ludmilla. That was not so bad as I had feared, he thought, just before Valentina began to scream.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Mills stood facing the warrior of his nightmares, the warrior he had faced on Keran a lifetime ago. The firing around him had stopped, but he barely noticed. She was his universe now, and he knew they had now come full circle, and she would be the end of him. Part of him was bitter at the thought, not just because he hated the thought of dying, but he had actually found someone he truly loved, a love born in the most unlikely of circumstances. I’ll miss you, Emmanuelle, he thought. But he dared not look back at her. It was too late for that.

  “Well,” he said casually, “let’s get to it, shall we?” She had beaten him to a bloody pulp the last time he had faced her, and he doubted today would be any different. For some reason, that thought eased much of the tension out of his body. Facing one’s destiny was sometimes easier when the outcome was crystal clear.

  Without another word, he launched himself at her.

  * * *

  Tesh-Dar was pleased with the human animal, that he had lost none of his fighting spirit since she had last seen him. He had also learned from their last encounter: he was much better at feinting, trying to conceal his true intentions from her as he attacked.

  She began sparring with him, careful not to injure him severely, again enjoying the thrill of single combat. She did not use any weapons other than her body, for she had no need. Nor did she wish the combat to
be over too soon. She did not yet know if she would allow him to live as she had last time: much would depend on how well he fought.

  So focused was she on the human that she failed to sense what was taking place far above, in space.

  * * *

  “They’re leaving!” the flag tactical officer reported excitedly. On the flag bridge display aboard Constellation, the swarm of red icons orbiting Saint Petersburg suddenly thinned.

  “Recall the cutter!” Hanson ordered. The ship had deployed its cutter to the limb of Riga, allowing its sensors to peer past the planet at Saint Petersburg while the human warships sheltered behind the planet, waiting for the right moment to strike.

  “Aye, ma’am!” the communications officer reported. “The cutter is on its way. ETA three minutes.”

  “Commodore,” Voroshilov’s image said on Hanson’s vidcom terminal, “you see the change in the enemy fleet’s disposition, da?”

  “Yes, admiral,” she said. “It looks like our time has arrived. My ships are ready to jump on your command, sir, once our cutter is back aboard.”

  “Do you have any questions about our strategy, commodore?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” she said. “We make a micro-jump back to Saint Petersburg,” she continued, quickly recapping his instructions, “make a slashing pass against the enemy fleet, and then micro-jump away again before we can become decisively engaged.”

  Voroshilov nodded. “Yes, commodore. Just so. Our opponents are not foolish, however,” he told her. “Do not be surprised if they attempt to follow us, for our exit point for the second jump will leave us in a position visible to them. I do not expect them to let us have a ‘free ride,’ as you might call it, again.”

  “If they do, admiral,” she told him gravely, “we’ll be in serious trouble. The Kreelans have incredible navigation capabilities.” She remembered the reports of the return of the Aurora, the ship that had made first contact with the Kreelans. It had emerged from hyperspace within meters of Africa Station in orbit over Earth after the ship had been traveling in hyperspace for months. It should have been impossible, but it happened. “Even without having carefully mapped the space in this system for any perturbations as you have, if they want to jump after us, they will.”