In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  Sato had misgivings about the crew accepting him, but as it turned out, he need not have worried. Despite the information control exerted by Korolev’s government, many Russians — and virtually every Rigan — knew of him as the only survivor from first contact with the Kreelans. His handling of Yura during the battle that led to her destruction had also earned the Saint Petersburg Navy’s respect. The worst he had to contend with was learning as much Russian as quickly as he could.

  He still felt the ghosts of his dead shipmates with him, especially Bogdanova, but he had never spiraled into depression as he had feared he would. “You can rest when you’re dead, Sato,” Hanson had told him once. “Until then, I’ve got too much work for you to do.”

  Sato smiled at the memory. He liked Hanson.

  Pushing those thoughts aside, he began to quicken his pace down the gangway. He had brought his ship here for a weapons upgrade, but that would be mostly in the hands of the shipyards, and his XO had shooed him off the ship. He had free time now, at least for a while.

  At the threshold there was a gaggle of civilians, mostly reporters, and military personnel waiting to catch a glimpse of him. But there was only one he cared about. Standing there in the red dress she had been wearing when he had first met her was Steph, his wife. While they had been in touch as often as possible, President McKenna had been keeping her press secretary — Steph — as busy as Hanson had been keeping him, and Steph hadn’t been able to come see him for those long months.

  But that was all in the past now. Running to him, her face streaked with tears of joy, she leaped into his arms. As he twirled her around, his own heart rejoicing in the feel of her warm body against him, her scent, in the sound of her tearful laughter, their lips met in a passionate kiss.

  Captain Ichiro Sato was finally home.

  * * *

  Dmitri and Ludmilla Sikorsky were living a life that they could not even have dreamed of on Saint Petersburg. For the service that Dmitri, in particular, had rendered to the Confederation, the Confederation Intelligence Service had offered them a chance at a new life. They owned a small horse farm in what had once been the state of Virginia, with Ludmilla working from their new home as a consultant for relations with the Pan-Slavic Alliance, while Dmitri tended the farm. It had been a bittersweet decision for the Sikorskys: on the one hand, both of them were patriots, and wanted to do what they could to help Saint Petersburg repel the alien invaders. On the other hand was a very personal consideration for both of them: Valentina.

  After Faraday had landed Mauritania on Riga, they had disconnected her from the ship’s computer interface, but she had never regained consciousness. Her eyes and mouth had closed, as if she were asleep, but that was all. The Rigans had taken her to a local hospital, but before any doctors could evaluate her, President Roze himself had called and, obviously with great unwillingness, told them she was to be given what she needed for her body to stay alive, but otherwise was not to be examined or treated.

  Dmitri had been furious, but there was nothing any of them could do. A day later, a man named Robert Torvald came for her, giving orders to the hospital staff that they were to prepare for transport back to Earth aboard a special courier ship.

  “What is to become of her?” Dmitri, standing over her like a sentinel, asked him pointedly.

  “That, Mr. Sikorsky,” Torvald said with cold detachment, “is none of your business. She is a Confederation Intelligence Service asset, and that’s all you need to know.”

  Unlike Valentina, Torvald had never been a special operative, only a field handler, and had no special self-defense training. He was totally unprepared for Dmitri’s work-hardened fist slamming into his mouth, followed by a powerful uppercut that lifted Torvald from the ground and slammed him against the wall of Valentina’s hospital room.

  “Listen, svoloch’,” Dmitri growled as he grabbed Torvald by the neck and hauled him up from the floor, slamming him against the wall again as the hospital staff looked on in stunned silence. “She is not a machine! She did all she was sent to do, saved all of our lives, and was shot for her trouble. Then she suffered the horror of whatever that thing is that you put in her head to get us here. And you treat her — and us — like we are cattle? I do not know or care who you are, but if you want to walk out of this room alive, you will do as I tell you.”

  “I think you might want to seriously consider it, Mr. Torvald,” Colonel Grishin said casually from the doorway. Many of his wounded Marines were on the same floor, and he had come to see what the commotion was about. “She is a very special young lady,” he said sadly.

  Mills stood behind him, his face an expressionless mask as he glared at Torvald. His hand rested on the pistol that was strapped to his hip.

  Eyes darting from the two Marines and back to Dmitri, Torvald said through bleeding lips, “Just what is it that you want, Sikorsky?”

  And Dmitri had told him.

  Even now, there were days when Dmitri was unable to believe that he had gotten his wish. But thanks to the intervention of Grishin with Commodore Hanson and Admiral Voroshilov, Dmitri’s ”request” had been granted on Hanson’s authority as the senior Confederation representative in the system.

  Torvald had been livid, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it until he returned to Earth. He had the political clout to browbeat President Roze into not having any doctors poke and prod at Valentina, but he had no leverage over the military chain.

  Dmitri’s request had been simple: he wanted to take care of Valentina. Torvald had finally explained that she would probably never come out of her coma. The cerebral implant she carried was a one-of-a-kind prototype that had only been tested once before. Valentina — Scarlet — had suffered so much neurological trauma that she had been hospitalized for weeks afterward. After a thorough and quite secret review, the program had been abandoned as a failure. The implant had never been removed, Torvald had confessed, because it couldn’t be done without causing her irreparable brain damage.

  “As long as the implant was dormant,” he had explained, “there was no danger to her. But as soon as you plugged her into the ship’s navigation system...”

  Torvald had wanted to take her home by himself to try and keep the implant’s existence as secret as possible. He had quickly learned from Grishin while Sikorsky held Torvald pinned to the wall that there was no longer any point: every soul aboard Mauritania knew, and they had passed on the tale to the hospital staff, who in turn had gotten a copy of the Mauritania’s autodoc scans.

  Dmitri forgot all about Torvald as he headed back to the house after feeding their three horses, two mares and a young colt. He had always enjoyed stories and movies involving horses when he was a boy, and it just so happened that CIS’s suggested relocation plan for Ludmilla and himself was here. He could not have planned it better.

  Washing his hands of the dust and grime of the stables, he went to see Valentina. The CIS would not tell him her real name, and he did not feel right calling her Scarlet. So she was Valentina until she told him otherwise.

  His spirits fell at the thought, because she would probably never say another word as long as she lived. I will not give up hope, he admonished himself. At least three times a day, every day, for the last six months he had come to spend time with her. They had a live-in nurse, a pleasant older woman who cared for all of the medical necessities, but she could not tend to the young woman’s mind and soul. Dmitri knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Valentina was still there, trying to escape the damage done by the implant. He hoped that every day would be the day, the day she came back. He would not stop trying to guide her and comfort her. Never.

  He came in and nodded at the nurse, who smiled and left to give them some privacy. Dmitri gently brushed Valentina’s hair and fluffed up her pillow, then sat down and took her hand in his. Sometimes he would read to her, sometimes tell her about the latest antics of the horses, or just chat about anything that came to mind. He grinned at himself, knowing that he
probably spoke more to Valentina than he did to Ludmilla.

  There were other times, like this one, when he simply came to be with her, to hold her hand and let her know that someone was there for her. He gazed out the window at the horses (he had made sure that her room had a good view of the corral), thinking only idle thoughts as time passed. As he sometimes did, he sat back in his chair, still holding her hand, and fell asleep.

  When he opened his eyes again, he was still holding her hand, except that something was different: her other hand was gently stroking the back of his. Holding his breath, not daring to hope, he shifted his gaze to her face to see her eyes open, looking at him. She was smiling.

  “Dmitri,” she said, the sound of her voice filling him with joy, “I knew you wouldn’t leave me...”

  * * *

  Roland Mills stood on the spot where Emmanuelle had died. Beneath his boots, the scorched and blackened concrete of the landing field was a reflection of his soul. This was the only monument, the only remembrance of her death other than some electronic forms filed by the Corps. There was no monument, no headstone or other marker that others might know that she had died here.

  While the Marines had taken back the spaceport months ago, there had not been enough engineers available to clear the wreckage from the field until an engineering regiment had been sent from La Seyne. This was the first time he had been able to come here. There was no marker, nothing special about this patch of concrete, but he knew it was the place where she had given herself up to save him. As hardened to the horrors of war as he had become in the last six months, as dead as he had thought his heart to be, he found himself kneeling down. Just this once, he didn’t try to fight it, but let the tears come. She deserved at least that much.

  Still serving under Grishin, Mills had been one of the first Marines to return to Saint Petersburg, and had been fighting there ever since. The battles had ebbed and flowed as they rooted out the Kreelans who had been dropped across the planet. But he held out little hope that they would ever succeed in fully driving back the enemy: it seemed that every time they cleared out one area, more Kreelan ships would arrive to drop in more warriors somewhere else.

  That was fine with him. It gave him more of them to kill. He knew that even if he killed every single one of them, it would not bring Emmanuelle back to him. But it was all he had left.

  “I love you,” he whispered, placing his palm on the ground where she had fallen.

  Then, wiping the tears from his face, he stood up and silently walked away.

  * * *

  President McKenna set down the stylus pad and the electronic copies of the reports she had retrieved earlier. Of necessity, her staff controlled every minute of her day, ensuring that she met the right people and made the necessary decisions to keep the Confederation running. One thing that she had insisted on, however, was at least a full hour each evening that she could spend doing the one thing she had little time for during the rest of the day: thinking.

  She rubbed her eyes and then rose from her desk, stretching out the stiff muscles of her legs and back. Another casualty of the war, she thought ruefully as she massaged her aching neck, was her daily exercise routine. Moving over to stand before the windows that looked out on the gleaming lights of New York City, she silently pondered the information she had just reviewed.

  Let’s review the bad news first, she told herself. A total of fifteen human colonies had been attacked in the six months since the Kreelans reopened their offensive against humanity with the invasions of Saint Petersburg and six other worlds. The number of casualties was uncertain, but Penkovsky’s intelligence analysts put the figure at roughly half a million dead. That was a horrible figure, but still paled in comparison to the millions who had died on Keran in the first attack.

  Unfortunately, the enemy seemed bent on a long-term war of attrition, committing just enough warriors and ships to keep the humans fully engaged in a multi-front war, but without delivering any knockout blows. As Ichiro Sato had told his commanding officer in a report that had eventually reached McKenna’s desk, it seemed as if the Kreelans intended to make the entire human sphere a collection of arenas in which they could satisfy their alien bloodlust.

  McKenna wanted to push the enemy back, to give them a brutal kick of strategic proportions, beyond simply defending the worlds under attack. But there had not been enough ships or trained personnel available to do anything more than to throw them into desperate local defensive actions. Under enormous pressure from Joshua Sabine, her defense minister, she had grudgingly authorized the use of nuclear weapons in the hope that what had happened at Saint Petersburg had been a design flaw in the Russian weapons. But in three separate engagements where Confederation ships had used them, the Kreelans had somehow disabled the warheads. Forensic examination of six recovered warheads confirmed the unbelievable findings reported by Admiral Voroshilov: the fissile material had somehow been changed into ordinary lead. It was impossible, yet it had happened. Once those reports reached her, she decided to recall the remaining weapons from the fleet and had them returned to storage. If they were no threat to the Kreelans, she wanted to at least make them protected from potential loss or even theft by some of the colonies that steadfastly refused to join the Confederation.

  In the meantime, the military high command had been working out the details for a strategic offensive. She had been impatient for them to finalize their plans, but they had needed time to build the infrastructure necessary to provide the Confederation with the weapons and ships it needed, and time to train the men and women who would use them.

  And that brought her to the good news: the military and the industrialists who had been charged with putting the Confederation on a war footing had used those intervening months well. Beginning with Earth and the Alliance worlds, they had transformed the peacetime industrial base, and now several dozen worlds were churning out enough weapons to fully arm the Territorial Army units that were being formed on the Confederation’s one hundred and thirty-seven member planets. The Marine Corps was growing at a rapid pace, with a massive new training facility established on a previously unsettled world that was now called Quantico, named in honor one of the training facilities used by the old United States Marine Corps.

  Best of all, she thought, were the ships. Just two weeks before, the first of a new class of warship had been launched from the orbital shipyards annexed to Africa Station. The Lefevre class battlecruisers were twice as large as the latest heavy cruisers like the one Ichiro Sato had commanded at Saint Petersburg, and had nearly four times as much firepower, plus berthing for a full battalion of Marines. Twenty three more battlecruisers were under construction in various shipyards across the Confederation, and would be launched within the next two weeks. Over one hundred smaller warships, from frigates to heavy cruisers, were being built at the same time, and the shipyards were still being expanded.

  Two more months, Admiral Tiernan, her Chief of Naval Staff, had promised her, and the Confederation would be ready to launch its first major strategic offensive campaign against the Empire. McKenna knew that throwing the aliens out of human space would not be easy, nor would it be done quickly.

  But by God, she promised herself, we’ll do it. However long and whatever it takes, we’ll do it.

  * * *

  Tesh-Dar rode silently on her magthep, a two-legged beast that had been used as common transportation by her people since before the first Books of Time had been written. Save for her mount and two others of its kind that carried provisions, she was alone on this trek, as alone as any of her kind could truly be. For the Bloodsong in her veins was a link to her sisters across the Empire. And to the Empress.

  Making the decision to return to the Empire had been the most difficult thing Tesh-Dar had ever done in her long life. The wounds to her body, while grievous, were yet trivial for the healers to mend. The injury she had done to her honor was far worse, or so she had thought.

  When she regained consciousnes
s, wrapped in a cocoon of soft and warm animal skins in the kazha in which she had grown up, Pan’ne-Sharakh had been at her side. As was someone else.

  “My Empress,” Tesh-Dar whispered, averting her eyes. “Please...forgive me.”

  The woman who had once been her blood sister gently stroked her face and held her hand. “All is forgiven you, priestess of the Desh-Ka,” She said softly. “The powers within you are great, Tesh-Dar, greater, perhaps, than any of your forebears, yet you have never had cause to tap them to the full. You could not have known what would happen; you were not prepared to control it.”

  “I did not want to,” Tesh-Dar told her. “I chose not to.”

  “This, too, I know,” She said. “Obedience and duty, even to the Way, may sometimes waver when one’s heart is broken.”

  Her spoken reminder of Li’ara-Zhurah’s death sent a fresh wave of anguish through Tesh-Dar’s heart. “You could have saved her,” she whispered.

  “With great honor did she die,” the Empress told her. “It would have been a disservice to Li’ara-Zhurah to deny her sacrifice. You know this.”

  Unwillingly, Tesh-Dar nodded, realizing that her thoughts had become so clouded by her own emotions that she had completely lost sight of the path, of the Way. “I am lost, my Empress,” she said.

  “No, my child,” the Empress told her, “you have merely come to a part of the Way that you have never before traveled, where the path is not clear. Children can follow the Way as a path of stones laid out in a line, but they could not find their way in a dark forest. It is this forest that you must enter now, Tesh-Dar, a place where your wisdom and faith will be tested. Few have reached so far as you; even Sura-Ni’khan, powerful as she was, had not come this far.

  “What must I do, my Empress?” Tesh-Dar asked.

  “You must return to your roots,” She told her, “to the temple of your order. There shall you learn how to follow the Way, not as would a child in spirit, but as the great warrior that you are.”