In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  “How much longer?” he asked his flag captain as he continued to replay the opening sequence of the battle that Alita had recorded, trying to absorb every nuance that he could. This was the only intelligence information they had to work with, their only insights into Kreelan tactics. The decisions he made based on this information would likely decide the outcome of the battle.

  “Three minutes and forty-seven seconds, admiral,” Captain Hans Ostermann replied quietly, his own eyes fixed on the countdown to emergence that was displayed in every compartment of the ship, and in every ship in the fleet.

  Tiernan nodded as he went back to his study of the display, carefully concealing his trepidation. He had allowed himself only five minutes to evaluate the data Alita had transmitted the instant she arrived at the rendezvous point. It was immediately clear to him that they had no time to lose if they were to stand any chance of helping the French. It already might very well be too late.

  His own plan called for splitting his forces, but not in quite the same way as the Alliance had. He had four assault carriers carrying the two heavy ground divisions. They were to jump in as close as they could to the planet, run like hell for low orbit to disembark their troops, and then jump back out to the safety of the rendezvous point. Tiernan had only detailed four destroyers to escort them on their inbound leg; he knew that he was taking a huge risk with that light of an escort, but he simply didn’t have enough ships to go around.

  He planned to commit the rest of his force - eight heavy cruisers, fourteen light cruisers, and sixteen destroyers - in two mutually supporting tactical squadrons. That decision had been easy. The more difficult one was how to use his fleet to best advantage. He only had two viable options: support the Alliance squadrons in high orbit that had begun to engage the larger Kreelan force, or link up with the single Alliance squadron that was facing a substantially smaller Kreelan force closer to the planet. Both options assumed that there would be enough Alliance ships left intact to matter, because his own fleet would not stand a chance against even half the Kreelan ships shown by Alita’s data. His fear was that the Alliance squadrons that had been maneuvering to attack the larger Kreelan force might have already been defeated, since they would have been seriously outnumbered. But the sole Alliance squadron that had been engaged by the smaller Kreelan force was at least on fairly even terms, the unknowns of Kreelan technology notwithstanding.

  Gambling is about numbers, luck, and guts, and Tiernan knew that you might have two of the three in any given hand. He knew the numbers from Alita’s data, at least as of four hours ago, and knew that he and his crews had plenty of guts. The only question was how good their luck might be. He couldn’t afford to take the long odds offered by the big fight going on in high orbit, even though a tactical victory there would likely kick the Kreelans out of the system. That left him with one option: his fleet would attack the smaller Kreelan force and pray that this Alliance squadron, and hopefully some of the others, had survived this long. Then they could regroup to take on the larger Kreelan force.

  “Emergency jump protocols confirmed,” the flag captain reported. If the fleet jumped in and the situation was untenable, Tiernan wasn’t going to waste his fleet. They would immediately jump out again to the rendezvous point. And it wouldn’t take two minutes for the hyperdrive engines to spool up as on the Aurora. That little safety interlock problem had been fixed.

  “Stand by for transpace sequence,” the ship’s navigation computer announced to the crew. “Auto-lock engaged. Normal space emergence in five...four...three...two...one. Sequence initiated. Hyperspace Engines disengaged.”

  Tiernan suddenly found himself staring out at a scene straight from hell.

  * * *

  “Priestess!” called Tesh-Dar’s First, Kumal-Utai. “More human ships have arrived!”

  “Indeed?” Tesh-Dar replied, already feeling the change in tenor of the emotions of her young warriors on the ships around the planet. The Bloodsong had never rung with such fury and passion in her lifetime, and through every member of her race, to the Empress Herself, ran a thread of ecstasy not felt since millennia before. Fighting, killing, and dying in Her name: these were the things for which they all existed.

  “Forty-six ships,” Kumal-Utai reported. “Eight of them jumped in close to the planet and appear to be heading toward low orbit. The rest appeared near the remains of the human ships we fought upon emergence.”

  “Those eight must be transports carrying more warriors to defend the surface,” Tesh-Dar mused. “Allow them to proceed unmolested. As for the newcomers,” she said, her eyes surveying the flat-screen tactical display, “let us see the stuff of which they are made.”

  “Where do you wish our ship, my priestess?” Elai-Tura’an, the shipmistress, asked. Her blood burned for battle, but her mind understood the necessity of prudence. While Tesh-Dar would likely survive anything that happened to the ship, and Elai-Tura’an worried not about her own death, it would be...inconvenient for the fleet command ship to be destroyed.

  The great priestess frowned momentarily. She sensed Elai-Tura’an’s emotions, and felt much the same way. Tesh-Dar wanted to face the humans in a direct challenge, but it was not yet time. Instead, she would give the honor to the young ones. It was they, after all, who had fought so hard among the peers for the right to be here. “Assemble the remaining ships here in low orbit to bleed the newcomers. We shall take up a position at the trailing edge of the formation.”

  “Shall I call in additional ships from the high formation?” Kumal-Utai asked, indicating the larger force of ships that had remained near the orbit of the planet’s moons.

  Tesh-Dar shook her head. “No. Let the humans have the advantage here for now. Let our blood mingle with theirs.”

  * * *

  “Christ!” Captain Morrison cried as McClaren suddenly materialized in normal space over Keran. The twisted and burning stern of a ship - it was impossible to tell if it was human or Kreelan - was hurtling directly for them, spewing air and flaming debris in its wake. “Hard aport, Z-vector minus fifty! All ahead flank!” he shouted at the navigator.

  Like everyone else on the bridge, Ichiro Sato stared with unbelieving eyes as the tumbling wreck came closer, filling the bridge display. Had the McClaren been one of the larger cruisers, there was no way she would have been able to maneuver fast enough to avoid a collision. While Morrison was an imbecile when it came to leadership and tactics, he at least knew how to maneuver the ship. As it was, even with the navigator sending the ship into a sharp left downward turn and the destroyer accelerating like a greyhound, breaking out of their assigned position in the squadron formation, they barely escaped. Turning his eyes back to his targeting console, he saw that the wreckage cleared them by mere meters. But a near-collision was the least of their problems.

  “Multiple contacts close aboard!” Sato called to the captain.

  “Identify them, damn you!” Morrison bellowed as he looked at the tactical display, which was now filled with a cloud of yellow icons representing unidentified ships or the remains of ships. A few of them, then more and more, began to turn orange as the computer categorized them as wreckage that could potentially pose a navigation hazard. Sato felt his stomach lurch at what his display was showing: this side of the system was a charnel house of dead and dying ships. Flaming wreckage from at least fifty vessels was strewn through nearby space, and Sato could see what could only be hundreds, possibly thousands, of bodies. His sensors indicated that some of them were in vacuum suits, blasting away at one another with small arms or grappling in zero-gee hand-to-hand combat.

  “Trying, sir,” Sato replied, “but we don’t have the Alliance identification codes and the inter-ship datalink hasn’t synchronized yet.” That concerned Sato more than anything else. Like the ships of the Alliance fleet, the Terran ships had a datalink capability that, in theory, made the fleet one large virtual weapon. Only it still took time, even if just a few moments, to come up after a hyperspace jump. �
��We’ve got to identify the ships visually or by their emissions signatures.”

  “Well, that’s not an Alliance ship!” the navigator exclaimed, pointing at the bridge screen. A ship that looked like a huge swept-wing fighter, dark gray with cyan runes painted on the bow, arced toward them from the port side. While it maneuvered smoothly, it had not come through the horrendous battle unscathed: its hull was covered with scorch marks and at least half a dozen ragged holes where kinetic weapons had found their mark.

  “Primary kinetics,” Sato called out, “hard lock!” The ship’s targeting systems had painted the enemy ship and were tracking her. At this close range they could use almost any weapon, but the primary kinetics, the destroyer’s main guns, were the best choice for this situation: they could do the most damage quickly.

  “Stand by...” Morrison ordered before giving the navigator orders to twist McClaren hard to the right, unmasking all the ship’s heavy weapons turrets, “Fire as she bears!”

  Sato gave the computer firing authority, and it calculated the optimal firing point out to the twentieth decimal. The ship echoed with thunder as ten fifteen centimeter guns rippled off five rounds each in under two seconds.

  “Clean hits!” Sato cried. None of the bridge crew needed the tactical display to tell them they’d hit their target: the bridge screen, now nearly filled with the image of the enemy ship, showed a cascade of explosions down her flank, blowing off the starboard wing and sending her spinning out of control.

  There was a brief cheer on the bridge before Morrison called out, “Target, designate!” Using the command override on his console, he steered the crosshairs for the pulse cannon onto a distant Kreelan ship, silhouetted against the planet far below, that was roughly the size of a heavy cruiser. To him it appeared to be an easy target of opportunity. As the weapon was fixed along the McClaren’s centerline, the ship altered course automatically to line up her bows with the target.

  “Captain?” Sato asked, not believing what the captain was doing. “Captain, no, wait-”

  “Firing!” Morrison said almost gleefully as he hit the commit button. The lights dimmed and the entire ship thrummed as the pulse gun fired, sending an extremely powerful beam of coherent emerald light streaking toward the target.

  Unfortunately, when Morrison used the command override, locking Sato’s station out of the weapon control cycle, he didn’t realize that it would also bypass the additional target lock cues: he thought that as soon as the commit button was illuminated, the weapon was locked on target and ready to fire. The second half of his assumption, that it was ready to fire, was correct, but the targeting system hadn’t established a hard lock on the enemy ship, and the McClaren’s angular motion from the gentle turn hadn’t completely stopped.

  But an impending miss wasn’t why Sato had tried to stop Morrison from firing. It was the Alliance starliner that was directly in the weapon’s path, well beyond the Kreelan cruiser.

  Expecting to see the enemy ship burst into a gigantic fireball, the navigator increased the bridge screen magnification so they could make a damage assessment. But the Kreelan warship had passed out of view. Now the only thing that was on the screen was an Alliance starliner and a host of shuttles.

  “Oh, my God,” someone whispered into the sudden stillness that took the bridge as the blast from the pulse cannon sheared off the drive section of the starliner, splitting the ship in two and sending the wreckage tumbling. Sparks cascaded from severed electrical conduits and streams of air bled from the compartments that were now suddenly exposed to hard vacuum. Hundreds of bodies, clearly visible with the high magnification of the screen, flew from the wreckage, arms and legs flailing as the blood of the hapless victims boiled in vacuum. Most of them were soldiers waiting to be ferried to the surface, and so they had no vacuum suits. Secondary explosions peppered the side of the ship where the civilian shuttles, still trying to get the rest of the troops down to the surface, were swatted like flies as the huge hull twisted out of control.

  Sato looked away from the carnage, hating the man who now sat in the captain’s chair. Morrison’s jaw opened and closed like that of a fish as he fought to come to grips with what he’d just done. That’s one screwup he can’t blame on the crew, Sato thought bitterly.

  But they clearly weren’t out of it yet.

  “Incoming from starboard!” Sato cried as he saw a volley of projectiles erupt from one of the dozen or more ships embroiled in a huge gunfight that had broken out to the right of McClaren. “Recommend coming to course-”

  “Belay that!” Morrison shouted, throwing Sato a disgusted look. “I’ll handle the ship.” With a brief glance at the display, he said, “There’s no way those rounds will hit us.”

  “But sir-”

  “You are relieved, mister!” The captain screamed at the top of his lungs. The bridge suddenly became deathly quiet except for half a dozen tactical alarms clamoring for attention.

  His face an iron mask, Sato unbuckled from his seat and came to attention. “Yes, sir!” he said before stepping away from his console.

  “Bogdanova,” Morrison snapped, “take over tactical.”

  Without a word, the young female ensign who normally manned communications unstrapped from her combat chair and rushed across the bridge. She had even less experience aboard than Sato, was terrified of the captain, and had very little time training on the tactical position. She looked up at Sato as she slipped into his still-warm combat chair, her eyes wide with barely-concealed terror.

  “Get off my bridge, lieutenant,” the captain ordered tersely.

  Giving Bogdanova what he hoped was a reassuring squeeze on her shoulder, Sato turned to leave.

  Morrison took another look at his own tactical display, and came to the sudden conclusion that the incoming enemy shells were getting uncomfortably close after all.

  “Counter-battery fire, Bogdanova!” Morrison ordered.

  Looking desperately at the tactical display, she replied in a hoarse voice, terrified as much by the captain as the incoming weapons, “We can’t, sir.”

  “Goddammit, what do you mean?” he yelled frantically.

  “Because, you fucking idiot,” Sato told him, unafraid of the captain’s ire with death looming so close, “our close-in defense weapons are all lasers, and you completely drained the energy buffers when you destroyed that starliner with the pulse cannon.” Horrified realization dawned on Morrison’s face. “That’s right, captain,” Sato told him quietly. “The lasers are useless until the energy buffers recharge. Congratulations. You’ve killed us all.”

  Two seconds later the enemy salvo hit.

  * * *

  “Admiral!” the flag communications officer suddenly shouted. “We’ve established contact with Admiral Lefevre aboard the Jean Bart.”

  “About bloody time,” Tiernan said, relieved. His fleet had been in-system a full fifteen minutes, and had managed to clear the remaining Kreelan ships from the immediate area. Terran losses, surprisingly, had been very light: the only major casualty had been the destroyer McClaren. A part of him, a part he never would have admitted existed, was almost glad: he had seen McClaren kill the Alliance starliner. If the destroyer’s captain had been alive, he would have been facing the court martial from hell, and Tiernan would have been standing ready with the noose to hang the bastard. But that unpleasantness, at least, was unnecessary: the destroyer’s dead hulk was adrift among the other shattered hulls. But Tiernan wasn’t looking forward to the formal apology he needed to render to the Alliance commander. “Amiral Lefevre,” Tiernan said into the vidcom, “this is Admiral Patrick Tiernan of the Terran Navy. We are at your disposal, sir.” The last words were hard for him to say, but he had direct orders from the president: unless he had reason to believe that his fleet was about to be defeated and had no choice but to withdraw, he was to place himself under the command of the senior Alliance officer.

  The man who looked back at him from the vidcom smiled. Tiernan thought Lefevre looked
like he’d been through an infantry battle: his face was a mess, and his uniform was in tatters. But the Alliance admiral’s eyes were bright, and his expression showed no loss of determination.

  Lefevre wasn’t a quitter, Tiernan thought. That’s got to count for something.

  “Amiral Tiernan,” Lefevre said, “you have no idea how welcome is the sight of your fleet. We had been told there was a chance of Terran support, but...” He gave a Gallic shrug.

  “Sir...” Tiernan began, the next words sticking in his throat, “We have much to discuss, but first I wish to formally apologize for the destruction of one of your troopships by a destroyer under my command. I take full responsibility, and will ensure a thorough investigation-”

  “Amiral Tiernan,” Lefevre said quietly, holding up a hand, “this is a tragedy, there can be no doubt. But we are at war, and must first ensure that some of us, at least, survive to worry about such matters. Let it be enough for now that I accept your apology with the sincerity in which it was offered.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Tiernan said, inwardly relieved. He had only met Lefevre once during a joint exercise the two navies had held several years ago. He had been favorably impressed with him then, and was more so now. He couldn’t think of many Terran admirals who would have taken such a loss with the same equanimity. “What are your orders, admiral?”