In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  Santiago frowned. “I realize that, Scott,” he sighed. “And training is where we’re supposed to make our mistakes. Let’s just make sure we all learn from them, because we won’t get a second chance at this.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Morrison replied, resolution evident in his voice. “We won’t let you down.”

  “Good enough,” Santiago said. “Carry on.” The screen went blank.

  * * *

  Sato and some of the other junior officers from McClaren sat around the table at the back of Nightingale’s, one of Africa Station’s less reputable bars, enjoying their last bit of off-ship time before the expeditionary force prepared to deploy. While open twenty-four hours a day, the bar’s schedule was really slaved to Universal Standard Time, which was now sixteen-hundred. Before the dinner hour the bar was fairly quiet and not too crowded, but business would pick up soon, with raucous music blaring over the bodies packed onto the dance floor and seated at the surrounding tables.

  “We’re fucked,” Ensign Kayla Watanabe sighed. She was the ship’s junior navigation officer, and had more than once been on the receiving end of a rebuke from her captain for things that weren’t her fault. That didn’t bother her so much; she could take the tongue lashings. What she couldn’t take was the certain knowledge that their ship couldn’t fight worth a damn.

  Heads around the table nodded glumly. They had managed to do better during the rest of the exercise, but Sato attributed that to luck as much as anything else. Commodore Santiago had positioned McClaren in a support role during the following engagements, giving the other ships the lead in the flotilla’s attacks while McClaren cleaned up the scraps. The ship had managed to survive, but the entire crew felt humiliated.

  “What do you think, Sato?” Watanabe asked. “Are we going to get our asses reamed by the Kreelans?” In unison, the others turned to him, dejected, but eager to hear what he had to say.

  It was odd, Sato thought, that here he was, again the youngest and least experienced officer on the ship, much as he had been on the Aurora as a midshipman. Yet, they were looking to him for an answer, for leadership. It was true that he outranked most of those around the table, but there was more to it than that. He was the only one aside from Pergolesi, the chief of engineering, who continued to stand up to the captain. Even during the shit-storm of their after-action review, when the captain had found fault with virtually every one of his officers, Sato had stood firm and said what needed to be said about his perceptions of the crew’s performance - both the things they had done well, and those they hadn’t - respectfully but firmly. For the record, if nothing else, he’d thought at the time. He had absorbed a lot of abuse from the captain after making contradictory observations on the actions of some of the other members of the bridge crew. It had been incredibly difficult to not spell out all the captain’s mistakes, but he knew that wouldn’t help. There was no way the commodore would replace Morrison at this late date unless he made some sort of flagrant violation, and the captain was too savvy for that. As with his conversation with the commodore during the exercise, he was an expert at taking just enough blame to make himself look responsible, while shoving the bulk of it off on the alleged inadequacies of his junior officers.

  Sighing, Sato looked around the table at their expectant faces, the faces of people he’d only known for a couple weeks, but on whom his life would depend in the coming battle. He wished he had some good news for them, some way to give them some confidence. “Look,” he told them, “I’ll be honest and say that I don’t think the expeditionary force is going to be nearly enough to stop them when they come, even if we had the best captain in the fleet. I don’t think the Kreelans will be using ships like the ones that attacked Aurora, but they don’t have to. Somehow they’re going to level the playing field with us, but...” He shook his head. “I think Keran is going to be a much bigger version of the arena that my old crew fought and died in. I don’t think they’re going to let us win this battle.”

  “So all this is for nothing?” one of the others asked, disgusted. “We just go out there and get our asses kicked by an enemy we can’t touch?”

  “No,” Sato replied forcefully. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t think we’ll be able to save Keran from whatever the aliens plan to do. But I do think that they’re going to give us a chance to show them what we’re made of. I think if we fight hard and well, we’ll buy humanity extra time to build its defenses. If we don’t...” He shook his head. “If we don’t meet their expectations, I believe they could wipe us from the universe without even trying.”

  “But what the hell do we do about Captain-fucking-Queeg?” someone asked.

  “Nothing,” Sato sighed in resignation. “The only thing we can do is our very best as individuals, and to try and work hard as a team. The captain’s used to playing the department heads against each other, instead of having them work together.” It was common knowledge that very few officers aboard a ship would ever qualify for command in what was a relatively small fleet. So the competition for top ratings on their first ship tour was critical: only the officers in the top one or two slots stood a chance at ever earning command wings. And the way most captains accomplished this winnowing of their junior officers was to pit them against each other, promoting those who wound up with the fewest marks against them. It was generally a divisive and corrosive way to run a ship, but only a few captains, such as Ichiro’s old skipper, Owen McClaren, saw beyond it to cultivate a close sense of teamwork, basing officer evaluations primarily on how well they worked with one another. Almost all of McClaren’s former junior officers qualified for command later in their careers, and Ichiro knew that the Navy was very shortly going to wish it had a great many more command qualified officers. “So,” Ichiro went on, “we’ve got to do our best to work together. Forget all the career advancement garbage. That’s not going to mean a thing if we get vaporized a few weeks from now.”

  Everyone agreed with that: what was the point of coming out in the top one or two position on your ratings when you were dead?

  Sato picked up his glass and drained it, savoring the cold tea. Unlike the others, he didn’t drink alcohol. “Okay, I’ve got to go.” Standing up, he said, “I’ll see you all back aboard tomorrow morning.”

  Watching Sato leave, Watanabe remarked, “Well, maybe when we go into combat the first time, the captain will forget to stay in his chair...”

  * * *

  Ichiro was covered in a fine sheen of sweat as he went through the various katas he had been taught, the movements to attack and defend with the katana. It had become an obsession, and the closest thing he had now to religion.

  One of the first things he had done to fill up what little free time he had after being released from quarantine aboard the Aurora was to seek out a sensei to teach him how to use his grandfather’s weapon. It was a difficult task for two reasons: he had no idea even where to look for someone with the right skills, and among those he found very few were really willing to offer what he truly wanted: a crash-course in how to kill with a sword. He wasn’t interested in the finer points of swordsmanship, because he knew that he would never make a great, or probably even good, swordsman: that process took many years, and he only had a little over one year to learn what he could. The teachers he spoke to didn’t understand that he didn’t want to learn for sport or for some higher personal purpose. He wanted to learn how to kill.

  Then one day a man appeared at the door of his cabin on Africa Station. When Sato opened the door, the man, who was of Japanese descent, bowed and then gestured for Sato to go with him. The man refused to say a word. Frustrated by the man’s bizarre behavior, Sato was nonetheless curious and decided to follow him. The man took him to the station’s sports complex, where they entered one of the many exercise rooms. It was empty except for two items: a pair of wooden swords, bokken, that lay in the center of the floor.

  The man, who Sato judged to be in his late fifties, knelt gracefully on one side of the two bo
kken. Sato, shrugging, knelt opposite him. Giving in to ingrained habit from his childhood, he lowered himself to the floor in a deep bow, and the older man did the same. Then he handed Sato one of the bokken, and wordlessly began to teach him how to use it.

  The scene repeated itself every day that Sato was on the station. Regardless of whether he was there early or late in the day, the old man magically appeared on his doorstep. Sato had tried everything he could think of to get some sort of information from him about who he was and what he was doing there, beyond the obvious of teaching Sato swordsmanship, but the old man calmly ignored him and simply got down to business as soon as they arrived at their designated workout room. Sato tried to find out who scheduled the room, but in every single case, it was listed as open. He tried finding out who the man was from the shuttle transit services, but they couldn’t release passenger information, and even Steph couldn’t dig her way to the bottom of it. It was maddening.

  But aside from the strange circumstances, Sato could clearly see that the man, his silent sensei, knew what he was doing. The many hours they spent together were hard and challenging, and more than once Sato went back to his quarters sporting a number of welts where the sensei had underscored some of Sato’s shortcomings. But that only made Sato want to train harder, because he knew that if his teacher had been a Kreelan wielding a real sword, Sato wouldn’t just be bruised, he’d be dead.

  After about eight months, they began to train with real katanas, but with their edges blunted. Sato knew that he didn’t have the refinement or overall abilities of someone who had trained for years, but he now had confidence that he could fight. He knew that he would lose against a Kreelan warrior who had probably been trained since birth for combat, but he would never again be completely helpless as he had been in the arena aboard the Kreelan warship, seemingly so long ago.

  Then, two weeks ago, his sensei suddenly stopped coming. Sato was worried that something had happened to the man - he still didn’t even know his name - until a package arrived. It was a tube about fifty centimeters long and maybe fifteen in diameter. Carefully opening it, he was stunned at the contents: a wakizashi, the shorter companion sword that samurai warriors traditionally carried with the longer katana. But this wasn’t just any wakizashi. It was the companion to his grandfather’s sword.

  Wrapped inside the tube was a brief handwritten note in flowing Japanese characters:

  I regret the odd circumstances of our relationship, young Ichiro. But after your journalist friend sent word to Nagano of your adventures and mentioned your wish to learn the ways of the sword, your mother sent me. She swore me to silence, for she did not wish your father to find out for fear he might somehow learn what your mother had done. He is a most unworthy man, unlike his son.

  She knew me through your grandfather, you see, who was an honored friend, and my sensei long ago. She wanted you to have this, your grandfather’s wakizashi, when you completed the training I could give you. Your father had spitefully hidden it before you left home, but your mother found it again soon after, and kept it safe since then.

  You are a fine young man, Ichiro. Your mother is so very proud of you, as would be your honored grandfather.

  - Rai Tomonaga

  It was a revelation for which Ichiro was totally unprepared. He simply sat in his quarters for most of that evening, staring at the note and the short sword that had come with it. Finally, he spent the next few hours, well into the night, composing a note to his mother, the first he had sent since he had left home.

  Now, on his last free evening station-side, he had spent a full two hours practicing the moves Tomonaga had taught him when the door chime rang. Then he heard the door open. Only one person had his access code. Steph.

  “Hey, kid,” she called to him as she came in, the door automatically swishing closed behind her. She always called him that when they were alone, although she was only ten years older.

  Steph leaned against the wall near the door, watching as Ichiro went through the remainder of a ballet of lethal moves with his grandfather’s sword. Bare above the waist, the muscles of his upper body rippled as he slashed and thrust with the glittering weapon, and she marveled at how hard and chiseled his body had become. He hadn’t exactly been in bad shape physically when she’d first met him on the Aurora, but he had totally transformed himself in the last year with the help of the mysterious Tomonaga-san. Admit it, woman, she chided herself, trying to look away but failing, he’s goddamn beautiful.

  After a few more moves, Ichiro sheathed the sword, making even that move graceful and deadly-looking. Holding the katana in both hands, he bowed his head to it, then carefully placed it on a small wooden stand that held the matched pair of swords.

  “It’s too bad the Navy didn’t take you up on your suggestion to make close combat training and swordsmanship mandatory,” she sighed. “Then they’d all be hunks like you.”

  Ichiro grinned at her as he toweled off the sweat. “Don’t you wish,” he quipped. “So, what’s going on?”

  She folded her arms at him and gave him a look that he knew from experience meant that he’d just said something incredibly stupid. “Gee, I don’t know,” she told him, stepping up to take the towel to rub down his back. “Maybe this’ll be the last time I see you before you deploy, you moron.” She paused, then added, “Although maybe I’ll get to see you while you’re on station at the rendezvous point.”

  Ichiro whipped around and took her wrists, not altogether gently. “What?” he exclaimed. “I thought you were staying back here to cover the president.”

  Steph’s career had taken off into the stratosphere after her coverage of the Aurora, and she had been able to pick any assignment she’d wanted. She’d chosen a lead position on the press team that covered the president, and hadn’t been disappointed by the massive battle that had been waged in the following months between the executive and legislative branches. While the fighting had only been waged in words and manipulation of governmental processes, it had been as fierce in its own way as men and women grappling on a battlefield.

  “I know, Ichiro,” she told him, reaching her hands up to touch his face, his own hands still wrapped around her wrists. “But I asked for an embed position in the expeditionary force. That’s where the action’s going to be, and I want to be in the middle of it.”

  “Stephanie,” he nearly choked, looking as if he’d been sucker-punched, “you mustn’t go. Please.” He had never called her by her full name since she had told him she went by Steph.

  She smiled up at him. “Trying to be Mister Chivalrous, are you?” she told him gently. “Listen, I know how to take care of myself.” She moved closer, her nose almost touching his. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Most of us won’t be coming back, Steph,” he whispered, his dark almond eyes glittering. “Maybe none of us. I don’t want...I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Nothing will,” she whispered before bringing her lips to his. For just a moment, he didn’t react. They had always been “just friends,” never thinking that their relationship would ever be anything more. Then he returned her kiss, tentatively at first, and then with growing passion. When Steph felt his powerful arms wrap around her, drawing her body tight against his, a wave of heat rushed through her core. Suddenly, she wished that they’d done this a long time ago.

  Without another word, Ichiro effortlessly picked her up and carried her to the bedroom.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Communications between ships, like everything else that was taken for granted in the normal universe, was impossible in hyperspace. But Tesh-Dar needed no machines to communicate with the warriors and shipmistresses of the fleet that now approached the end of the voyage to the human world of Keran. Distance and space were immaterial to the Bloodsong that linked her with the billions of her sisters and to the Empress. It was not the same as the spoken word, but Her will was clear. War was upon them.

  Tesh-Dar thought back to the tim
e before her fleet was launched, to the gathering of the warrior priestesses and mistresses of the guilds and castes on the Empress Moon. Orbiting above the Homeworld, the Empress Moon was the home of the Imperial City and dwelling place of the Empress, a physical monument to Her power. In the heart of the city lay the Great Tower, atop which was the throne room. Kilometers high in terms of human measure, the Great Tower was thousands of years beyond anything humans could build, yet it had been created by Kreelan hands untold centuries before. The throne room itself surpassed any human’s imagination of magnificence: larger than all the palaces ever built by humankind and enclosed in a pyramidal ceiling of diamond-hard crystal, the room itself was a breathless work of art with giant frescoes and tapestries telling the great tale of the First Empress and the Unification.

  This gathering was the first of its kind in many great cycles of the Empress Moon about the Homeworld, for this was one of the rare events that affected the entire race of Kreela. Upon the hundreds of steps to the great throne stood representatives of all the castes of Her Children, from the lowliest bearers of water to Tesh-Dar herself, greatest of the Empire’s warriors. It was a trek the Empress made, from step to step, taking into account the needs of each and every caste, of all of Her Children from the lowliest to the mighty.

  On this special day, She sat upon the throne as Her Children knelt before Her, Tesh-Dar foremost among them, kneeling upon the first step from the throne.

  “My Children,” the Empress began, Her voice carrying clearly across the great expanse of the throne room to the multitudes who knelt below, the crews and warriors of the ships that were about to go into battle against the humans, “today is a day that long shall be remembered in the Books of Time. For once again we have found a race worthy of our mettle, an alien species that in flesh is like us in many ways, but is yet soulless. Make their blood burn, My Children, in the fires of war. For if their blood sings to us, they may be saved. If it does not, then let them perish as animals without knowing the light or the love that awaits us among the Ancient Ones.