In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  Looking down at the young Navy lieutenant, Gunnery Sergeant Pablo Ruiz couldn’t help but feel a sense of admiration for him. That was something the big gunnery sergeant, or “gunny,” as the rank was known, would say about very few of the Navy officers he’d met in his sixteen years as a Marine.

  * * *

  Formerly of the United States Marine Corps, or USMC, Ruiz was a plank owner, among the very first members of the recently formed Terran Marine Corps. The USMC had been the last amphibious force to be maintained by any of the former nations under what was now the Terran Planetary Government. Through disuse and the virtual elimination of war on Earth after the final series of conflicts that would have destroyed Mankind had it not been for the advent of interstellar travel, the Marine Corps had been left with no real purpose, and had been reduced to little more than a curious anachronism, a pale reflection of bygone years. In truth, it had been retained not for any military function in the post-Diaspora world, but because so many people who still lived in the former United States steadfastly refused to let go of it as a tradition. During one phase of this long twilight of its history, the Corps was even funded by donations from private citizens.

  So the Marines had stubbornly lingered on, an institution with warrior traditions that had no more wars to fight.

  In the aftermath of the Aurora incident, however, President McKenna had other ideas. Based on the analysis of Sato’s information, it was clear that the ships of the fleet she was building would need a force of trained soldiers aboard to defend against Kreelan boarding attempts. Such soldiers should also be able to take the fight right back to the enemy. They would also have to become accustomed to serving aboard ships, rather than just being carried by them. Longer-term plans, assuming the Kreelan threat actually materialized, even envisioned divisions of troops traveling with the fleet for planetary assaults.

  The Terran Ground Forces commander, General Jaswant Singh, naturally felt that this was a function of his arm of the service. Admiral Tiernan, Chief of the Naval Staff, was not so sure. While he and Singh got along well and generally saw eye to eye, he had a hard time believing that soldiers brought up in the Ground Forces could quickly be transplanted into this new role.

  As it happened, Tiernan’s youngest brother was a colonel in the USMC, and had been at a briefing where some of the fleet plans were being discussed, the topic of “fleet infantry” among them. Two weeks later, he had called his older brother, the admiral, and invited - begged might have been a more accurate, if somewhat demeaning, term - him to come to Quantico to see a demonstration. While Tiernan was loathe to do anything that might smack of nepotism, his brother had made a very convincing argument, and Tiernan had finally given in.

  When he arrived at Quantico, he was taken to a large hanger that had once been used to house USMC aircraft, a facet of their force that they had long since lost. Inside, he found that the industrious Marines had put together a life-size mockup of the main sections of one of the candidate destroyer designs, almost entirely from scrounged materials. Tiernan cautiously followed the eager Marines inside for a quick tour. Four stories tall and two hundred feet long, it lacked all the details a real ship would have, but it didn’t need them. The twisting passageways, stairs, elevators, and hatches were what mattered, for these formed the “terrain” on which the battle would be fought. Video cameras had been placed at key locations throughout the ship to monitor the action during the demonstration battle. After the tour of the mock ship’s interior, they led Tiernan to the improvised control room inside a ramshackle trailer that squatted next to the mockup.

  Tiernan’s brother explained the demonstration engagement: a platoon of Marines would simulate the Kreelans as closely as they could, based on Sato’s information. Inside the mockup, a number of Marines played the role of “helpless” sailors, while a platoon in armored suits, led by one Gunnery Sergeant Pablo Ruiz, defended the ship. The suits worn by the defenders were simple mockups of combat vacuum suits the Marines had designed after several intense brainstorming sessions. While the mockups were rough around the edges, Tiernan had to admit to himself that, if made a reality, such suits would be quite lethal.

  The Marines showed him the computer that would keep score, and Tiernan’s brother swore that it was as accurate and fair as they could make it. In fact, they had programmed in a level of bias against the defending Marines.

  Having been in the military for four decades, Tiernan had seen violence exercised across a wide spectrum, and did not expect to be surprised by a group of what he thought of as little more than highly innovative military enthusiasts. But by the time the simulated attack was over, he had to redefine his concept of “violence,” at least as it pertained to close-quarters combat. The defending Marines suffered heavy casualties, but they stopped the simulated Kreelan attack, which was quite spirited, right in its tracks. More importantly, they were able to protect the crew and the ship’s vital compartments, which would have allowed a real ship to stay in the fight with the rest of the fleet.

  The combat armor, which Ruiz had helped design, was a key ingredient in the success of the first exercise. But even in the second exercise, which Tiernan’s brother ran with the defending Marines only wearing standard body armor, the Marines were still able to hold the ship. They suffered far more casualties, and some of the simulated crewmen were also killed, but the determined Kreelan attackers were again defeated.

  After a review of the two “battles,” Tiernan was ferried out to one of the handful of ships that the Terran Navy still maintained just for the Marines, showing him how the Marines were more than just soldiers carried by ships. They were truly adapted to shipboard life and coexistence with the Navy in a Corps tradition that literally spanned centuries, back to the time of tall-masted sailing ships.

  The admiral was sold. Selling the idea to the defense minister through the uproar caused by General Singh wasn’t nearly as easy. In fact, the Marines had to stage a second demonstration for the minister himself. Over General Singh’s very strenuous objections, the minister took the idea to the president, who after a brief pointed discussion with the minister and all the service chiefs, approved the proposal Tiernan and the Commandant of the Marine Corps had drawn up. She signed an executive order federalizing the United States Marine Corps and officially changing its name to the Terran Marine Corps. As its predecessor had been, the “new” Corps was nominally subordinate to the Navy.

  Singh was furious that a “second bloody army” was being formed, but the president was adamant: the Army and the Aerospace Defense Force would mainly be responsible for planetary defense and provide follow-on combat forces, while the Corps would protect the fleet and eventually have responsibility for planetary assaults.

  It had been many years in coming, but the Corps had a real mission again. And when the Terran ships sailed for Keran, every able-bodied Marine, save a training cadre at Quantico that was already flooded with volunteers, shipped out with the fleet.

  * * *

  Standing here now on the stricken McClaren, Ruiz realized how much they really owed to Lieutenant Ichiro Sato. He had unknowingly saved the entire Marine Corps. Should make him an honorary Marine, Ruiz thought to himself. “Orders, sir?” Ruiz asked.

  “Engineering,” Sato said immediately. “We need to sort out how badly the ship’s damaged. And find Lieutenant Commander Pergolesi.” He paused. “Both the captain and the XO are dead. Commander Pergolesi is next in line.”

  Ruiz’s expression darkened. “I got some bad news for you, sir,” he said, his low voice dropping even lower. “The chief engineer bought it when the ship got nailed. Broke her neck.”

  Sato closed his eyes, mentally damning their luck. He had been counting on Pergolesi not only to know how to put the ship back in order, if it was possible, but to take command. Because of the surviving officers...

  “As I reckon it, lieutenant,” Ruiz finished the thought for him, “that leaves you as the skipper.”

  “Right,” Sato m
anaged. For just a moment, he felt a crushing weight on his shoulders, and in that brief flicker of time, the only thing he wanted to do was to run and hide somewhere, to cower in a closet like a child. He wasn’t prepared for this. But who ever is? he asked himself.

  He suddenly felt a real weight on his shoulder, and opened his eyes to see the Marine gunny’s hand there. The older man gave him a brief reassuring squeeze and said quietly, “We’re with you, sir. What are your orders?”

  “Thanks, gunny,” Sato said, and the Marine nodded and stepped back with the others. “Right,” the McClaren’s new commanding officer said, shoving his insecurities into a tiny box in his mind and slamming the lid shut. He had a crew to save and a ship to get back into the fight. “The first thing we have to do is get to anyone else who’s trapped and free them. Gunny, that’s a job for your Marines, since they’re already spread around the ship and you have communications. We’ll show you how to get the hatches open manually, but you may have a tough time for compartments where the passageways are in vacuum.”

  “Naw,” Ruiz said, “every compartment has those beach ball survival things. We’ll just make sure everybody’s in those, then open the hatch and take them to the main starboard airlock. The passageways are pressurized all the way back here.”

  Sato nodded. “Good. Next is engineering. Can you patch me through to one of your Marines there to talk to whoever’s senior?”

  “Sure thing,” Ruiz said. After a few seconds of talking to the squad leader in engineering, Sato heard the sound of Chief Petty Officer Antoinette DeFusco.

  “Lieutenant,” she said from the speakers in Ruiz’s suit, “you heard about Commander Pergolesi, right?”

  “Yes, chief,” Sato said. “What about the other officers?”

  “They were in the forward engine room with the commander when we were hit, sir,” the chief answered. Normally a blindingly perky woman, her voice now was ragged. “A shell punched clean through. Nobody made it.”

  “Damn,” Sato whispered. Not only were the deaths of the officers and crew in the compartment a tragedy, but the forward engine room housed the jump drive. McClaren wouldn’t be leaving the Keran system without a lot of time in space dock. And unless the battle had gone well, he doubted that was going to happen.

  “How are the main drives?” he asked, wanting to cross his fingers.

  “The mains are up, sir,” she told him. “Everything aft of the forward engine room seems to be fine.”

  “Up forward is a mess,” he told her. “We haven’t been able to do a damage control survey yet, but I’m guessing about a third of the main compartments on the port side have been breached, with most of the passageways in vacuum on that side. Starboard’s not so bad.”

  “Let me guess,” DeFusco said, “you’ve got artificial gravity but nothing else?”

  Sato and Ruiz looked at each other with expressions of amazement. “Good guess, chief,” Sato told her. “How’d you know?”

  “Because of that fucking pulse cannon, if you’ll pardon my saying so, sir,” she explained. “It takes up the central conduit that most of the primary circuits would normally use in this ship design. But they had to move them around to make room for that hog. So they decided to put the main buses for the artificial gravity in the starboard cable runs, and everything else in the port side. The ship should have had redundant circuits, but they dropped that to meet the commissioning schedule.”

  “Do we still have the pulse cannon?” Sato asked.

  “Green as a Christmas tree, sir,” she told him, “at least for one shot. After that, who knows? The main energy buffers are in forward engineering, too. They show green, but the way that thing drains them, I don’t know.”

  “Okay, chief, listen,” he told her quickly. “That means we’ve got propulsion and we’ve even got something to shoot with. We’ve got to get the other main systems, especially life support, navigation, and sensors, back up. Then communications and the other weapons if we can.”

  “We’d love to, sir, if we could just get out of here to get forward!”

  Sato looked up at Ruiz.

  “Consider it done, sir,” he said gruffly before barking a string of orders to his Marines.

  * * *

  Six tension-filled hours later, Sato again stood on the bridge. The bodies of the crew had been laid out under shrouds in the upper galley, awaiting proper burial, assuming the survivors were able to stay alive themselves. The surviving engineers, with the help of the rest of the crew, worked themselves to exhaustion to patch the ship’s systems back together. Two of them died when a hatch, weakened by an explosion in an adjacent compartment, gave way. But at last Chief DeFusco, scraped, bruised, and dirty, rasped that she thought they were ready to start bringing the main systems back up.

  The bridge was still dark and the stench of the smoke persisted, despite the fans the Marines had hauled up from one of the damage control lockers to try and clear it. Using one of the hand-held induction communicators that the Marines had brought up from the armory, Sato said, “Okay, chief, let there be light.”

  The bridge lights suddenly flickered on, then quickly died.

  “Wait one,” the chief said after a flurry of curses. A few minutes later, she came back on. “Hold on to your shorts, lieutenant...”

  The dim and gloomy darkness was peeled away as the standard lighting flickered on, then held. On the bridge, the computer displays at the various control stations lit up and began their self-diagnostic routines.

  A tired but exuberant cheer went up throughout the ship. The McClaren was alive again.

  * * *

  Sitting in the captain’s chair was an experience that Sato had only dreamed of. Even on the rare occasions when Captain Morrison had let him and the other junior officers con the ship, he had never let anyone sit in “his” chair. Now, for better or worse, the ship was Sato’s.

  Looking around the bridge, it was clear to him that the ship was still terribly wounded: several of the main consoles remained dark, with no one to man them. Only half the crew had survived, and it was no small miracle the ship hadn’t been completely destroyed. Of those control stations that were lit and active, every single one had crimson warnings and tell-tales glaring, but there were far fewer than before. Glancing at the navigation display, which right now was based on passive sensors only, he could see the McClaren’s long ballistic trajectory from where she had been hit, taking her out just beyond the orbit of Keran’s moons. The ship had drifted perilously close to the Kreelan force in high orbit, shown on the tactical display as a cloud of red circles where the passive sensors believed their ships to be, but had been ignored as another dead hulk. Sato and the others on the bridge had watched as a much smaller Kreelan force had climbed out of the gravity well of the planet toward high orbit, even as another group split from the main force to head down toward Keran.

  As for the human fleet, they were just visible on the far side of the planet, also trying to regain the orbital high ground after what must have been an uncomfortably close run to low altitude. Unless the sensors were off, there were far fewer human ships than when McClaren had originally jumped in. It was difficult to tell from what the passive sensors could make out, as they were not nearly as sensitive or accurate as the active sensors, but if he was guessing right, Admiral Tiernan and the Alliance admiral were maneuvering to engage the Kreelan force that was staying in high orbit. Sato couldn’t be sure of the number of ships on each side, but he could tell that it was going to be close enough that even a single destroyer might be able to make a big difference. He had no intention of letting McClaren miss this fight.

  Setting his fears and reservations aside, Sato tightened the straps, the ones that Captain Morrison had neglected to use, on the captain’s combat chair. Opening a channel to the crew, he said, “This is Lieutenant...” Then he stopped himself. He was no longer simply a lieutenant of the Terran Navy. As fate had decreed, he was now the commander of a warship. “This is the captain,” he tol
d them. “As you know, while we have been able to repair much of the critical damage to the ship, we can’t jump into hyperspace and return to the rendezvous point and the repair ships. And even if we could, I wouldn’t: our fleet and that of the Alliance have taken heavy losses, and it looks like Admiral Tiernan,” Sato assumed the admiral was still alive, “is leading an engagement against the enemy in high orbit. We are going to join in that attack.” He paused, thinking about his ill-fated ship’s few minutes in action before they were struck. “The enemy thought they killed our ship and that we are no longer a threat. I plan to prove them wrong. Remember our fallen shipmates, and do your best. That is all.”

  Switching off the ship-wide channel, he said to Bogdanova, whom he had moved to the navigator’s position, “Stand by to maneuver.” The ship was still on a ballistic trajectory, rotating slowly about its long axis.

  “Standing by, sir,” she answered. She was still afraid, but wasn’t terrified as she had been under Morrison’s lashing tongue. Like the others among the crew, she wanted payback from the enemy. More than that, she trusted Sato.

  “Maneuvering thrusters,” Sato ordered. “Bring her straight and level, helm, zero mark zero.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Bogdanova touched the controls, at first with unsure fingers, but she quickly gained confidence as the ship began to respond to her commands.

  For Sato, it was a very tense moment, because they hadn’t been able to test any of the ship’s systems for fear of drawing the enemy’s attention before they were ready. But having repaired the primary kinetics - two of the main batteries were fully functional - along with a pair of medium lasers and the close-in defense lasers on the starboard side, the ship could at least mount a credible defense. And with the pulse cannon, if it were properly used, and a brace of torpedoes, she still packed an offensive punch, too. But the maneuvering systems and the main drives, despite Chief DeFusco’s belief that everything was functional, were still an uncertainty in his mind.