In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  His two escorts expertly landed him in the hatchway burned into the ship’s flank, but he hung back, unwilling to step farther into the ship. What lay before him was suddenly striking home: a months-long voyage alone in a death ship. He began to shiver, remembering the blood and gore strewn about the galley where they had been herded together after the boarding. And Lieutenant Amundsen’s gruesome description of what had happened to the rest of the crew. He didn’t want to be trapped in here with Aurora’s rotting bodies, with her ghosts.

  The aliens weren’t concerned with his fears. Taking him gently, but firmly, by the arms, they led him down the passageways that led to the bridge.

  Soon, he began to relax. The interior of the ship was just like the outside: pristine. The lights were on as they normally would be, and the strange blue glow of the walls after the aliens had killed the ship’s power was gone. There was no sign of struggle, no traces left of the homicidal mayhem that had taken place only a few hours before. No smell of blood and death. Except for what he remembered, the ship was like new.

  They led him to the bridge, where one of the aliens in the dark blue robes, one of the ones who had recreated the ship’s computer systems, stood waiting. She gestured at him, and then the primary command console, then made pushing motions with her hands toward him, as if warding him off.

  “Don’t touch, I assume,” he said aloud. The alien made no reply, but simply repeated her gestures. Then she bowed her head to him, and the warriors turned him about and led him off the bridge.

  They walked him through the whole ship, although he wasn’t really sure why. Possibly to see that they cleaned up all the mess. Not only was everything clean, but even a few minor imperfections, like some dents that had been made in one of the bulkheads from an accident two years before with some heavy repair equipment, were gone. He wondered how deep this “fixing” went, and if some of the ship’s systems hadn’t been improved.

  Finally, the warriors led him back to the hole cut in the hull. The alien in blue robes hovered in open space outside the hull as if she were pinned in place. Turning to him, the two warriors bowed their heads, and then stepped outside the hull, taking up position next to the blue-robed woman. He wasn’t sure how they managed that, because their momentum should have kept them moving once out of the hull’s gravity distortion field. But apparently the basic laws of physics didn’t apply to these people. Humanity’s enemy.

  The alien in the blue robes closed her eyes and raised her hands, palms out, toward the edges of the hole. Ichiro watched in wonder as what looked like dust motes from the hull of the alien vessel suddenly began to flake off and float toward the Aurora. Soon it was like a blizzard of tiny particles heading toward the robed alien, and they swirled around her before coming to rest on the edges of the hole.

  He suddenly realized that he was seeing a form of the black matrix material they had used to recreate the ship’s computers, and this woman was taking mass from the hull of the gigantic warship and converting it for use to patch this hole in the Aurora. But it wasn’t just a patch: she was actually recreating the missing section of the hull, all the way through. The outer metal alloy, the insulation layers, the cabling and conduits: all of the bits and pieces of technology that was buried in this segment of Aurora’s hide was being remade.

  In only a few minutes it was done. He stood gaping at a solid bulkhead and the lettering on a small hatch that read, Pressure Valve 87. There was absolutely no trace of there ever having been a hull breach here. No seams. No marks. Nothing.

  He was suddenly startled by a familiar voice.

  “Interlock engaged,” Aurora’s navigation computer suddenly announced. “Transpace countdown commencing. Primary energy buffer building. Two minutes remaining.”

  Still clutching the tiny effigy of Keran, Ichiro ran for the bridge. He made it in plenty of time. “Bridge display, full,” he ordered the computer. The wraparound display sprang to life, showing the alien ships now moving off to give the Aurora a wider berth.

  “Primary energy buffer threshold achieved,” the navigation computer told him. In a way it reminded him of Chief Harkness’s voice, from the times when she had sat down with Anna and himself to teach them the finer points of being leaders. “Transpace sequence in ten...nine...”

  He clutched the globe of Keran tighter as the sequence wound down.

  “...three...two...one. Transpace sequence initiated.” Pause. “Jump.”

  On the bridge display, the alien ships and the bright stars that were the planets that originally drew his captain here suddenly swirled into nonexistence as Aurora disappeared into hyperspace, headed for home.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Terran Navy Commander Pavel Leonidovich Sidorov had a splitting headache. The shift commander for coordinating customs inspections for starships inbound to Earth, he was responsible for orchestrating the actions of over three dozen cutters that shuttled dozens of inspection parties from one merchantman to another, looking for contraband. Even with that many inspection parties, it was a daunting task: Earth had more ships to handle than any two other planets, with hundreds of ships arriving and departing every day. Customs control had several gateways at different orbital nodes spread around the equator, but all the inspection operations were run from this one command center, located at the primary Earth-orbit transfer node located over Africa. Attached to the “bottom” of Africa Station’s massive docking and embarkation facility, Sidorov and his crewmen were located in an expansive enclosure of clearsteel that gave them an unrestricted view of the space around them: Earth below, and dozens of starships spread out in orderly rows pointing toward the station.

  While this type of duty was normally performed planetside by civilian customs officers or the wet-fleet Coast Guard, outside the atmosphere it was a Terran Navy show. Funded by the Terran Government, which was loosely based on the ancient United Nations but with funding and executive authorities that never would have been conceived for the UN, the Terran Navy had exclusive purview for security matters beyond the atmosphere. Ironically, that had come to include customs inspections after a few nasty incidents of incoming “merchantmen” turning out to be armed raiders. So rather than form a new bureaucracy, the Terran Government simply expanded on the existing one. As a general rule, it had turned out to be a good compromise: the customs inspections were run with Navy efficiency, and there was only one major tax burden to be maintained for exo-atmospheric defense.

  But Sidorov wouldn’t have minded shoving the job onto someone else on occasion, like right now. “Negative,” he grated, his Russian accent barely creeping into his otherwise excellent Standard as he spoke into his microphone to the captain of the bulk cargo transport Manzanar, “you are not cleared to maneuver beyond customs until you have been cleared by one of the inspection teams. This has already been explained to you, captain.” About fifty times already, Sidorov added to himself.

  “This is outrageous!” the captain of the other vessel sputtered. “We have been waiting here for two days, and have precious cargo that must be delivered immediately! You have no idea what an inconvenience this is for us, commander.”

  Sidorov put his face in his hands and shook his head, eliciting grins from the other members of the inspection control crew and the civilian harbor masters who directed the ships in and out of Earth space. The Manzanar’s captain had been ranting at customs control every two hours on the dot since the ship had arrived two days before, with the man cursing the Navy and customs through both shifts. The man must never sleep, Sidorov lamented. And according to the ship’s manifest, the cargo that had to be delivered “immediately” was a load of old-growth lumber that had been harvested on Kelsey’s World and had been in transit for a month. Chances are it could wait a few more hours. With a sigh, Sidorov said, “Captain, as you have been told repeatedly, you will stay in queue, you will-”

  “Holy shit!” one of the senior harbor masters shouted as he and several others suddenly stumbled back away from the massiv
e viewports around the cylindrical command hub.

  Outside, not more than one hundred meters away from where Sidorov stood gaping in shock, a ship had emerged from hyperspace almost directly below Africa Station. Such a navigational feat was unheard of, and coming out of hyperspace this close to a planetary gravity well was not only suicidal, it should have been mathematically impossible.

  After the slightest pause where everyone was in utter shock, total pandemonium broke out. The comm panels were suddenly flooded with frightened or angry calls from the ships in queue, a hundred, and quickly far more, calls from passengers in the station who’d seen the ship appear, and the station commander, who had a dedicated channel.

  “Chyort vozmi!” Sidorov cursed in his native Russian. “Get cutters 12 and 17 over to that ship, and I want her captain on the comm right now!”

  “Aye, sir!” one of the controllers replied, still in shock.

  “Sidorov,” the station commander, Captain Rhonda Burke, demanded from his primary video console, “what the hell is going on?”

  “You know exactly as much as I do, captain,” Sidorov told her. “I’ve got two cutters on the way and am trying to raise her captain. I’ll let you know as soon as I have something.”

  “Understood. Out.” With a brusque nod, Burke signed off so he could get to work.

  “Harbor masters,” he shouted above the din, “make sure those merchant ships understand that if they break out of line they’ll be fined until doomsday and if we catch them I’ll throw their captains into the brig!”

  “Commander,” another controller called, “her telemetry’s active. It’s the Aurora, sir.”

  Sidorov didn’t need the telemetry to tell him what ship it was. He could see the house-sized letters of her name from where he stood: TNS Aurora. “That’s Captain McClaren’s ship, isn’t it?” he asked. The controller who was monitoring the ship’s signals nodded. “What the devil is she-”

  A face suddenly appeared on the central video monitor. It belonged to a young man, but his eyes had the distant look Sidorov had once seen on the faces of the old veterans of the war twenty years before on the Russian colony of Saint Petersburg. Those eyes, set in a gaunt face that wore a haunted expression, gave him a bone-deep chill. His hair was far too long for a man serving in the Navy; while it was clean and brushed out, it looked like it had been growing wild for months.

  “Africa Station,” the young man said, “this is...I am Midshipman Ichiro Sato of the TNS Aurora...commanding. I...”

  “What do you mean, ‘commanding,’ Midshipman Sato?” Sidorov demanded. “Where is Captain McClaren?”

  “Captain McClaren is dead. As is the entire crew. All but me. Sir.” He struggled a moment for control of his emotions.

  “Midshipman, if this is some sort of joke, you’ll wish you were never-”

  “Sir,” Sato interrupted, his voice choked with emotion, “I wish to report that Aurora made first contact with a sentient race...” He paused again, his face assuming a cold mask of hatred before continuing, “and that human space is about to be invaded.”

  There was total and utter silence on the control deck as everyone suddenly tuned in to what Sato was saying. Not just there in customs control, but throughout the station and among the waiting merchantmen, for Sato was communicating on an open channel.

  For a second time in as many minutes, pandemonium erupted.

  * * *

  Stephanie Guillaume was standing in line with all the other human geese who were waiting for the next orbital transfer shuttle to take them down to the surface when the call came through on her vidphone.

  “Stephanie!” her editor and boss at TransCom News, Simon Whyte, shouted at her from the tiny high definition screen. She always went by Steph. He never called her Stephanie unless she was about to get a bonus or a major ass-chewing. “Where are you?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked sarcastically. “I’m still stuck on Africa Station because the Transit Authority boneheads can’t make the shuttles run on time.”

  “Thank God,” Simon breathed, practically in tears.

  “Simon,” she said, suddenly concerned, “what the hell’s going on?” She had never particularly liked the man, but he’d given her a chance when she’d been stiffed by most of the other news organizations she’d tried for. An attractive, if not quite beautiful, brunette with inquisitive brown eyes and a personality to match, she knew she was good enough, both in terms of looks and brains, for a spot on one of the major news-zines. The only real challenge was getting the break she needed to get into the big leagues. Simon was a pushy jackass, but she knew she could do a lot worse. At least he had never tried to push her toward his bed or pulled any other crap on her. As jackasses went, he really wasn’t so bad. Maybe one of his fifty thousand relatives has died or something, she thought, trying to come up with a reasonable facsimile of sympathy. It was hard.

  “Listen,” he went on in a rush, completely ignoring her, “something’s happened. Something big. Right there on the station. We got a tip - shit, a pile of tips now - that a mystery ship suddenly appeared and there’s talk of an alien invasion.”

  “What?” Steph exclaimed. “Oh, come on! How many times have we been sent on wild goose-”

  “It’s the Aurora,” he said, cutting her off. “The research guys say it’s one of the newest survey ships that went out almost a year ago. Go find her. Find out what happened.”

  Fuming, Steph grabbed her bags and stepped out of line, tossing them angrily against a nearby wall. That’s when she noticed that a lot of people were on their vidphones. More people than usual. Listening closely, she made out phrases that sounded an awful lot like what Simon had told her: “ghost ship” and “alien attack” among them. She saw a growing number of perplexed, amused, and even frightened expressions.

  “Listen, Simon-”

  “Just do it, dammit! This could be the biggest story since Christ got nailed to the cross-”

  Her vidphone suddenly went blank. Then her vid screen filled with an unfamiliar message: “Network connectivity lost.”

  Around her, everyone else who was using their phones must have experienced the same “connectivity problem,” because she heard a lot of cursing and people just staring into their blank vidphones.

  “Network problem, my ass,” she muttered. Their connection had been cut off intentionally.

  “Information,” she demanded of the console embedded in the wall. It still was working. “What can you tell me about an inbound ship called Aurora?”

  “I’m sorry,” the disgustingly deferential female voice replied, “that information is restricted.”

  Steph felt her pulse quicken with excitement. There might really be something to this! “Okay, who do I need to talk to for information on inbound ships?”

  That information apparently wasn’t restricted. After she got what she needed, she bolted down the corridor toward the central elevators as fast as her high heels could carry her. She left her bags behind, completely forgotten.

  * * *

  “Cutters 12 and 17 are in position, sir,” one of the harbor masters reported through the din of frantic pleas and threats being made by the other controllers to keep the merchantmen from scattering in the wake of Aurora’s spectacular arrival and Sato’s equally spectacular claims of invading aliens. The two small vessels, looking like remoras alongside the much larger survey ship, had approached the main port and starboard gangway airlocks.

  “Commander...”

  Sidorov shifted his attention from updating the station commander back to the face of the midshipman who appeared to be Aurora’s only survivor.

  “Sir,” Sato told him, “I strongly recommend that you consider first contact safety protocols before boarding. I don’t believe the aliens left any contamination. That wouldn’t fit with what I saw of how they do things, but...”

  “Don’t worry, Sato,” Sidorov told him, “the boarding parties will be wearing full vacuum gear.” And weapons, he add
ed silently. He didn’t know whether to believe the young man or not. He had said little before Sidorov had gotten him switched over to a secure circuit, but first contact? Alien invasion? He sounded delusional, and Sidorov half expected the boarding parties to find some sort of massacre that would wind up being made into a holo vid show for lunatic teens.

  On the other hand, Sidorov couldn’t take any chances. If the midshipman’s wild story did seem to check out, things were going to get dicey very quickly. The station commander had already put through a call to the customs fleet commander, who wanted verification before he woke up the Chief of Naval Staff half a world away. Everyone was thus far taking the story with a big grain of salt, but one thing was indisputable: Aurora’s reappearance simply should not have happened the way it did, and they wanted an explanation. Fast. “I hate to say it, but you’ll probably be in quarantine for a while if this story of yours checks out.”

  “Understood, sir,” the young man replied. “Sir, I have opened the outer gangway hatches and the inner hatches are unlocked. The cutters may send in their boarding parties.”

  Sidorov noticed the change in Sato’s speech as he said boarding parties, almost as if he were gritting his teeth.

  “Thank you, midshipman,” Sidorov told him. He glanced at the tactical controller who sat before a wide-screen console, who nodded in return: he had contact with the boarding parties, and both teams reported they were aboard and moving quickly to secure the bridge and engineering.

  After a few minutes the team leader from Cutter 12 reported in. “Sir, so far as we’ve seen, there’s nobody here. Not a soul. No sign of a struggle, no bodies, no nothing. Just a spanking new-looking ship.” His video feed confirmed it. Empty passageways. Empty cabins. Empty work spaces. Nothing.

  “Same here, commander,” the leader of Cutter 17’s team reported as he reached engineering. “There’s nobody home but the kid on the bridge.”

  Sidorov could hear the stress in their voices. There were always people aboard a ship in orbit. The passageways might not be teeming with people, but a Navy ship returning from a long cruise would have half her crew at the airlocks, chomping at the bit to get off to shore leave. And there was always someone on the engineering watch, even if a ship was in space dock. Always. But this ship had just completed a hyperlight journey of who knew how long with no one but a midshipman aboard. It gave Sidorov the creeps.