In Her Name

by Hicks, Michael R.

  Jodi shook her head in wonder. Borge was using both his political position and his influence with the military – she hoped unwittingly – to boost his own power, employing his biological son as an agent any time he needed a dirty job done. And he was getting away with it at an untold cost in terms of human lives and suffering.

  And in the case of Erlang, she discovered, President Belisle had not only been a tyrant, but he had also received kickbacks from Millennium Industries, presumably as a payoff to keep the Mallorys in line and ensure that Millennium got its cut of Erlang’s mineral production. But, according to the figures she saw here, Belisle had not only failed to keep production at an acceptable level, he had lately been demanding more and more money from Millennium for his cooperation and silence. But when Reza appeared, soon assisted by Melissa Savitch, the role of Millennium – and Borge – in the rape of Erlang and the Mallorys could have become public. Borge had not sent Thorella there just to bring the Mallorys to heel and take care of Reza; he had been sent to kill Belisle, and had murdered Savitch because she happened to be in the way.

  “They set you up, Reza,” she murmured. That was the only way Thorella could have gotten any valid imagery of Reza killing Belisle, because Reza would have killed the good colonel, too, had he had the chance. Thorella had known what Reza would do, and he had set a very good trap for him, using Belisle as bait. In one stroke, Borge and Thorella were able to both get rid of Belisle and frame Reza for murder. And now, even though the Mallorys, who were now legally in charge of Erlang, insisted that the Confederation government not only drop the charges against Reza but give him a medal for what he had done, Borge somehow had bought enough influence to make the charges stick.

  But they could not try him until he had recovered from his coma. And that was where she began to run into real problems. While the worm program she had been running was more than a match for the basic security codes that had been put on the older files, the more recent ones having to do with the Erlang incident and its aftermath were much better protected. In her last half hour at the research center, she had only been able to gain access to one document: the list of medical personnel who had participated in Reza’s care over the last six months. And she was not terribly surprised to learn that one of the most frequent visitors had been Dr. Deliha Rabat.

  She glowered at the screen, willing the current ACCESS DENIED warning to go away.

  Trying again with the last bypass algorithm the worm program had been written to attempt, the words disappeared.

  “All right,” she said eagerly. “Maybe we’re getting somewhere.”

  But what echoed on the screen was not at all reassuring:

  VIOLATION OF SECURITY LOCK

  128904-34-23341

  USER 527-903-482-71 ACCESS SUSPENDED

  SECURITY MANAGER ALERTED

  REMOTE STATION DISCONNECT

  The screen suddenly went blank and the terminal refused to respond to her frantic hammering on the keyboard.

  “Oh, shit,” she muttered. She quickly tossed everything but the data card with all the information she had downloaded into her shoulder bag. The card she put in her boot. It would not escape anything more than a cursory search, but it might make the difference.

  Opening the door just a crack to see if anything unusual was going on, she saw that the center, crowded as always, remained quiet. She made her way toward the main lobby at a brisk walk, her eyes alert for any sign of trouble.

  Because she was in trouble. She just did not realize yet how much.

  Forty-Three

  L’Houillier’s eyes opened unwillingly at the urgent beep coming from the General Staff comm link beside his bed. Beside him, his wife rolled over, burying her head in her pillow in a reflex she had developed over many years of being married to a Navy officer constantly on call.

  He rolled over and slapped the machine, nearly knocking it from the nightstand. “L’Houillier,” he said groggily. Unlike many of his contemporaries, the ability to become alert immediately upon awakening had always eluded him.

  “Forgive intrusion, admiral, but something most urgent has come up.”

  Zhukovski, L’Houillier thought. Of course. Did the man never sleep? “I’ll be there in thirty minutes, Evgeni.”

  “Pardon, admiral, but matter cannot wait thirty minutes,” Zhukovski’s voice shot back. “I am on my way to you. Five minutes.”

  Before L’Houillier had a chance to protest, Zhukovski had terminated the transmission. “Merde,” he muttered.

  “Evgeni again?” his wife asked, fully awake.

  “Who else?” L’Houillier said grumpily. She could fall asleep in five minutes, be awake instantly, and fall asleep again without missing a beat. The same cycle took him hours, if he could manage it at all. He was terribly jealous.

  “I’ll start the coffee and tea,” she said crisply as she got up, donned a robe, and disappeared out of the room.

  Forcing himself out of bed, he had just managed to go to the bathroom and put on his own robe when he heard Zhukovski hammering on the front door, pointedly ignoring the more pleasant doorbell.

  A few minutes later, L’Houillier was indeed awake, and not because of his wife’s special version of Navy coffee.

  “Evgeni, this is fantastic,” he said as he reviewed again the message from Commodore Marchand aboard Furious. “A willing Kreelan prisoner and a child they think belongs to Reza Gard?”

  “So Commodore Marchand reports, sir,” Evgeni said as he took another sip of the excellent tea proffered by L’Houillier’s wife. For Zhukovski, that was enough incentive to rouse his commander from sleep for an impromptu visit. “We have great opportunity here, admiral. But we can do nothing without translator.”

  “Gard, you mean?”

  Zhukovski nodded. “Correct, sir. This is our chance to find out more. We must bring all of them together.”

  “What if the Kreelans – or Reza – do not wish to help?”

  Zhukovski shrugged. “Then we have lost nothing but time courier ship needs to bring prisoners to Earth.”

  L’Houillier did not hesitate. “Make it so, Evgeni.”

  ***

  The situation in the sick bay on board Furious was tense, Eustus thought, but it was under control. For the moment. The huge warrior stood a silent vigil over the Kreelan child, watching with the greatest trepidation every move made by the ship’s surgeon as she began to work on the girl.

  Eustus remembered little between passing out in the tunnel after the warrior started carrying him and waking up here on the Furious. But he had apparently managed to keep the Navy boat and the surviving Marines from shooting the Kreelan woman and the child, and Commodore Marchand had been ecstatic about their capture.

  But no one on the ship who’d seen the warrior was under any delusions that she was truly a prisoner. Wisely, no one had tried to take her weapons. Even if someone had, her physical strength and her rapier claws would have wrought havoc in the close quarters of the ship before she could have been brought down. But there were no human weapons here, no Marines or armed sailors. The sickbay had been sealed off, the surgeon and two assistants tending to the girl as the warrior looked on, while Eustus was left to the accurate but less-than-tender ministrations of one of the automated aid stations that could easily repair the damage to his leg. But a platoon of fully armed Marines in battle armor waited tensely outside the door.

  The surgeon was busy pulling away the lower part of the black undergarment to check on the girl’s legs.

  “Lord of All,” she whispered. The two nurses gawked in astonishment.

  “What is it?” Eustus asked just as Marchand’s voice cut in over the intercom with the same question. The commodore, along with half the ship’s officers, was glued to a screen in her ready room, watching the video feed from the operating theater.

  “This isn’t any girl,” the surgeon pronounced. “We’ve got ourselves a male child here, people.”

  “Jesus,” Eustus breathed. It was cer
tainly a day of firsts.

  The warrior looked at Eustus uncertainly, her great hands flexing in a gesture Eustus knew well from Reza. She was nervous, anxious.

  “It’s all right,” he said quietly, hoping that a reassuring tone would suffice for words he did not know. “We just expected a girl, is all.”

  She frowned, but seemed to relax slightly. If a figure as imposing as she could be said to relax.

  The surgeon worked on the boy for nearly two hours, doing the best she could to repair the damage to a kind of body she had never worked on before. She spliced bone and muscle, fused blood vessels closed. Thankfully there did not appear to be any injuries to the child’s internal organs, the functions of some of which the surgeon wasn’t sure.

  “All right,” she said finally, wiping her arm across a brow that had been sweating profusely the entire time, despite the nurse’s best efforts to blot it away, “that’s it. I think he’ll make it.”

  There was a burst of applause from the comms terminal as the officers and crew gathered around similar sets throughout the ship offered their congratulations. At first, the warrior was terrified that something had gone wrong. Eustus quickly reassured her that the boy would live, reaching out a hand to hold hers. That, and the smile on his face, was enough to reassure her that the child was safe.

  It was perhaps the first victory in the war in which a life from the opposing side had been saved, and Eustus could only hope that what they had accomplished here today would set a precedent for the days yet to come.

  Forty-Four

  President Nathan slept fitfully, alone in the president’s quarters in the Council Building. His wife slept without him, as she often did, in their home in the country. He missed her and she him, but the affairs of state, as it had so many times in the many years of their marriage, took precedence over their personal lives. It was a sacrifice that very few of his countrymen truly appreciated.

  The previous few days had been an unending political nightmare as he sought to fend off repeated attacks by Borge and his growing retinue of virulent supporters. While Nathan agreed that the current situation presented a historic opportunity, the military had not yet given him a plan with which he felt comfortable, a plan that did not expose every single colony – even Earth itself – to possible counterattack and destruction. For probably the first time in his life, Nathan was truly afraid, not for himself, but for his people. The decision he made had to be right. The consequences were simply too awful to contemplate if he was wrong.

  But that was not good enough. The Council was rapidly swaying toward Borge’s arguments that the time to strike was now, and that they should strike with everything. Borge was quietly branding anyone who opposed the idea as a traitor, and had come within a word of calling Nathan a coward in the middle of the heated debate. Actually, he had done better than to state it explicitly. He had painted a picture with related words, leaving it to the listener to see the final portrait, false though it might be. Nathan was determined that Borge would not have his way, and so far he had managed to maintain enough support for his administration to thwart the ambitious senator’s machinations.

  Imagine, Nathan had thought, mutely horrified, what would become of the democracy that had ruled the Confederation for the last century if this man came to power. Borge had made no secret of his reactionary attitude toward the military and scientific communities, not to mention what he thought – and claimed he would do – with regard to his political rivals. The man was nothing short of a megalomaniac, the kind who is spawned only in times of intense political crisis and in places resonating with corrupting power. In his mind, he had so much to gain by stepping up to Nathan’s position; and in Nathan’s mind, humanity everywhere had so much to lose. He would have arrested Borge if he could, just to shut him away from the power he so craved and would do anything to gain more of. But Nathan could not do that. He had lived his life by the constitution he had sworn to uphold, and he did not feel himself above the laws that guided the common man and woman in this time of perpetual crisis.

  And that was the source of Nathan’s frustration: his inability to effectively combat Borge, for the senator was an enemy every bit as tenacious and far more inhuman even than the Kreelans. Nathan vowed to fight him tooth and nail in the Council chambers and wherever else he could claim as a battleground, but he knew that unless something drastic happened very soon, he would lose. It was inevitable. In his dreams, the president of the Confederation hoped for a miracle.

  He did not hear the stealthy footsteps of the man who entered his room. The electronic guardian, the eyes and ears located throughout the large apartment, lay dormant, deactivated. The guards downstairs were alert, at their posts, but saw nothing. In the president’s bedroom it was dark, but the intruder had no difficulty seeing. This was what night vision lenses were made for.

  The dark form paused for a moment at the president’s bedside. A smile passed across the intruder’s face under the black mask as he considered his next move, one that he had rehearsed numerous times. He silently extracted a wicked looking dagger that had been fashioned by Kreelan hands, but whose most recent owner had been human. It was Reza’s dagger, his most prized possession.

  He moved close to the bed. He wanted to see Nathan’s eyes. The intruder nudged the slumbering president. The older man’s eyes snapped open wide.

  The blade flashed down in a lethal arc as Nathan’s mouth made an “O” of surprise. He raised his arms in a defensive gesture that was too slow, too late. The knife, which was made of the sharpest and most durable metal known, speared Nathan’s chest directly over the heart, slipping through his ribs to rupture the vital muscle that pulsated beneath. A small ring of blood appeared on the sheet, but that was all.

  With a gasp and shudder, the president of the Confederation, and democracy itself, died.

  The intruder stood and watched the dead man for a few moments, savoring the feeling of the kill. He was sorely tempted to massage the massive erection in his pants to fruition, but he knew from experience that it would have to wait. This time. There had been others when waiting had been unnecessary. And he was sure there would be still more.

  His erection grew harder. It was time to leave.

  With the barest sigh of his rubber-soled boots on the plush carpet, the man made his exit. After he left the building through an exit that the guards thought was secure, the electronic guardian reactivated, its internal memory already adjusted to account for the moments it had been fooled: the horrified guards watched as Reza Gard appeared out of thin air, plunged a knife into their president’s heart, and then just as quickly disappeared as the alarms began to sound.

  ***

  While she did not realize it at the time, walking home very likely saved Jodi’s life. She normally took the transit shuttle from the government complex to the rural hub four kilometers away that, in its turn, served the outlying areas where Nicole and Tony had their house. But after what she had discovered at the research center, she needed some time to think about what she had learned and had decided to take one of the many nature trails that wound their way through the countryside. It was dark, of course, but the sky was clear, the stars and waning moon lighting the way. Besides, she was not afraid. Even had she not been competent in Aikido and the street-style fighting Tony Braddock had taught her, she still could do more than her share of damage with the pocket blaster she carried under her tunic.

  She was actually enjoying the cool smell of the night, the sounds of the crickets chirping and the high chittering of the bats that flew from the trees in search of their evening meal.

  Fear did not take hold until she was within sight of the house and saw the three security skimmers pulled up in front.

  “Not very subtle, are you?” she murmured to herself as she moved behind a fortuitously positioned hedge to conceal herself from the half dozen Internal Security troops wandering around the front yard. “Shit,” she whispered.

  In the doorway, she could see Tony
gesticulating angrily at what must have been the head IS man, who gestured back. She could hear their voices, but they were still too far away to make out. But she did not doubt the reason for the IS presence here: her “research” had set off some big alarm bells.

  Then she saw the gun. Silence suddenly descended on the house.

  “Jesus,” Jodi gasped. The IS man had pulled a gun on Tony, a junior senator and member of the Council, no less! “What the fuck is going on?” she murmured as she forced herself even lower behind the hedge.

  The rest of the security troops wasted no time, pushing roughly past Tony on their way in to search the house, no doubt for Jodi. Tony had been trying to fend them off, she thought, because they probably did not have a warrant to search the house. But a gun against an unarmed man was quite persuasive, if not exactly legal.

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Tony,” Jodi pleaded under her breath.

  Braddock just stood there quietly, his arms raised, his face twisted in a mask of fiery anger as the IS man held his gun leveled at Tony’s chest.

  Suddenly, Jodi heard a female voice from within the house, screaming angrily at the intruders in what could only be French. Nicole. They had probably been in bed when the storm troops came knocking, Jodi thought, and Tony had gotten up to answer the door. Surprise.