In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

“Just stay close to me!” she yelled back as she viciously slammed her elbow into the jaw of a wild-eyed man who otherwise would have run right over her, knocking him to the floor. She jumped over him without pausing, dragging Sikorsky behind her.

  Finally, they reached the back edge of the crowd. Sikorsky cringed at the screams: they were no longer just of people who were frightened and panicking, they were screams of pain. He knew that dozens were probably being trampled on the floor and crushed to death against the wall near the door.

  Valentina ignored the chaos around them. Sikorsky watched as she drew a small case from her tiny purse.

  “Makeup?” he asked incredulously. “What...”

  His voice died as he saw her flip it open to reveal a miniature computer display.

  “Current location,” she said into the device. “Emergency exit routes.” In a fraction of a second, details of the building they were in and what lay beyond it appeared. She turned the device upside-down, projecting the image on the floor so both of them could see it. Sections of the wall and floor were highlighted in yellow, with dotted paths marked in red from each yellow section into the warehouse district beyond. “This way,” she told him after she scanned the map for a few seconds. Then she snapped the device shut and slipped it back into her purse. “Quickly!”

  She broke into a run, with Dmitri struggling to keep up with her. She led him to the women’s restroom, which was in the right rear corner of the building. Just as they dashed through the door, he heard the doors to the loading docks along the rear wall start to open. As the door to the bathroom swung shut, he looked back just long enough to see men in dark uniforms come pouring through the loading dock doors. They carried clear body shields and wielded electrified truncheons.

  “What are we going to do?” he whispered, looking around the room where they were now trapped. “There is no way out of here!”

  “Have faith, Dmitri,” she said. She stripped off the thin leather jacket, then took out her microcomputer and connected it to a metal tag on the inside of it. With a slight popping sound, the seams of the jacket disintegrated. After quickly pulling the leather apart along the front edges, waist, and the seams of the arms, she was rewarded with several thin ropes of gray material.

  “Is that explosive putty?” Dmitri asked, shocked. It looked much like the plastic explosive compound his teams used for blasting out sections of rock or concrete at building sites. It could not be detonated easily, which made it comparatively safe. But he could not imagine wandering around in clothing loaded with it.

  “Yes,” she said as she pressed the material against the floor, making a dotted circle of small blobs of putty. “Stand back.”

  There were suddenly shouts outside, very close and clearly audible against the continued screams from the crush of people trying to get away.

  “They are coming!” Dmitri warned, pressing his ear against the door to better hear what was going on outside. A simple wooden wedge lay near the corner of the door, a prop to keep the door open when the bathroom was cleaned. He jammed it under the door with his foot, hoping to give them a few extra moments when the men on the other side tried to get in.

  Valentina peeled off the small metal plate from her jacket, the one she had temporarily connected the microcomputer to, and put it in the center of the circle of explosives. She ran over to Dmitri, and they both put their faces toward the wall to protect their eyes.

  “What are you waiting for?” he hissed as Valentina stood next to him, still holding the microcomputer, which now acted as a detonator.

  A shot echoed from outside, then more. The screaming rose even higher, and more shots followed. The voices of the men who had been heading toward them turned to frantic shouts that retreated into the general bedlam beyond the door.

  “They’re murdering those people!” Dmitri cried.

  Valentina said nothing as she pushed him against the wall, then activated the detonator. Behind them, sounding much like the gunshots booming beyond the door, the explosives went off, blowing a ragged hole through the floor into a dark, cramped corridor filled with pipes dripping condensation.

  Without another word, she grabbed Dmitri and, now using the tiny microcomputer as a glorified flashlight to illuminate their way, jumped into the darkness below.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “I know I don’t have to say this, but I’m going to say it, anyway,” Commodore Hanson said grimly to the ship captains gathered around the conference table in her flagship, the heavy cruiser CNS Constellation. “Make sure you review all the nuclear combat protocols with your crews. We’ve never fought a war in space with nuclear weapons, so the procedures are all theoretical, but they’re all we’ve got.”

  “Most of the protocols cover weapon handling, launch procedures, and targeting, commodore,” Sato said quietly. “They don’t have much on what to do if someone is shooting nukes at you, other than to keep the ships spread wide apart and to destroy the incoming weapons before detonation. If possible,” he added, with an ironic grin.

  His comment drew a few muttered comments from around the table.

  “I know, Sato,” Hanson said, nodding, “but review the damn things again. All of you. The flag operations officer is working up formation options for us that will be downloaded to your ships, then we’ll work on those in simulation exercises before we have to jump in. By then the rest of the task force will be here. I hope.”

  Needless to say, the orders to prepare for an assault on Saint Petersburg had come as a complete surprise to everyone. Naval couriers had managed to catch up with all the ships of the squadron, directing them to this isolated volume of space that was a day’s jump from the target system. Hanson had been gratified and relieved to see that all six ships of her squadron had made the rendezvous, all within twenty-four hours of one another. A flotilla of ten destroyers and a pair of Marine troop carriers were already there when Constellation, which was the first of Hanson’s ships to arrive, jumped in. The fleet orders said that another heavy cruiser squadron and destroyer flotilla were assigned to the task force, but they hadn’t arrived yet. They were to have sailed from Earth with a single patrol stop at Edinburgh, but according to the schedule in the operations orders transmitted by the couriers, they were a full day late. Based on what Sato had reported from Kronstadt about his encounter with the Kreelans there, Hanson suspected that the other ships may have run into trouble at Edinburgh.

  “We’re also going to set up contingency orders and simulations for an assault with the forces we have on hand,” she said. “You’ve all read the orders we received: I have absolutely no discretion in terms of action. If we receive the go order, we must deploy. That one comes straight from the commander-in-chief.”

  While she didn’t show it to her subordinates, Hanson was deeply worried. Not because she was the ranking officer of the naval forces here and would be leading the mission, rather than the two-star admiral who was with the missing cruiser squadron, but because their intelligence information on Saint Petersburg military forces was so sketchy. And that was never a good thing when nuclear weapons were potentially involved. “Intel,” she said, turning to a lieutenant commander sitting on her left, “what have you got for us?”

  The man grimaced. “Not a hell of a lot, ma’am,” he said as he stood up, taking a position next to the briefing room’s main screen. Information suddenly flashed into existence, bright text and diagrams showing various types of military vessels and their vital statistics. What few were known. “This is what we have on the Saint Petersburg Navy,” he said. “As you can see, a lot of the information is either unavailable, very dated or considered unreliable. I guess after the war, nobody thought we’d have to worry about this particular problem again.” That elicited a few grumbles from around the room. Two of the captains at the table had been junior officers during the Saint Petersburg war, and they had been among the few who were not surprised by what was happening. The focus of intelligence gathering after the war was on political
and economic concerns; there had been little interest in or resources assigned to monitoring Saint Petersburg’s military capabilities. “The main problem is that Saint Petersburg built new naval facilities on their moon after the main demilitarization provisions of the armistice expired. No inspection teams could be sent there, and according to what little I’ve got, foreigners aren’t exactly welcome, anyway. We know that they have shipbuilding facilities there, but have almost no information on what those facilities have been doing. And since they don’t conduct any joint exercises with any other navies or invite naval visits, there’s been virtually no direct observation of Saint Pete naval units. Just their coast guard vessels, which are about the size you’d expect, but are armed to the teeth.” The main screen changed to show an ugly, bulbous vessel that was a quarter the size of the Constellation, but that packed a punch roughly equivalent to one of the new Confederation destroyers. “So I think it’s highly likely that they have more and better ships than what this,” he gestured disgustedly to the sketchy information on ship types and numbers that had replaced the image of the ugly coast guard ship, “is showing.”

  “That would be a safe assumption,” the task force Marine commander said with a slight Russian accent. Colonel Lev Stepanovich Grishin, formerly of the Légion étrangère and a veteran of Keran, was in command of the Marine expeditionary force that was made up of four battalions from the new 12 Marine Regiment, and that was deployed aboard the two assault carriers. Grishin was a native of Saint Petersburg, and had fought in the war twenty years before: on the wrong side. He had escaped the final destruction of the Red Army by Coalition forces and the ensuing witch hunt by the winning side, the White Army, to root out any remaining neo-communists. He had eventually found himself in the Legion, where he had risen from a lowly recruit to become the commander of an armored regiment that had been wiped out at Keran.

  The irony of the current situation had not escaped him: in the intervening twenty years since the war, the Whites had lost the battle to rebuild the economy. In the resulting social chaos they had been replaced in a quiet and outwardly bloodless revolution by “rehabilitated” communists. Grishin even knew many of the ruling senior Party members, including Chairman Korolev, under whom Grishin had served when Korolev had been a junior political commissar. Over the years since then, Grishin had received subtle entreaties from several of his one-time comrades to return to his former motherland. These, he had studiously ignored, never returning their messages. He had given up his nationality and his past for the Legion, and had willingly given his loyalty to the newly formed Confederation Marine Corps, which now incorporated what little was left of the Legion after the debacle on Keran. The Legion was redesignated as the 12 Marine Regiment, and six battalions had already been formed and trained. While it did not apply to new recruits, one important caveat that had applied to all former legionnaires who transitioned to the new Marine Corps was that they would not be required to take the Confederation service oath. Like most of his surviving comrades, Grishin would never again give his allegiance to any nation or government. His true loyalty was now to the Corps, as it had been to the Legion, and to the men and women who served with him. He knew that many of the officers around the table did not trust him, both because of the side on which he had fought during the war, and because he was from the Legion: the legionnaires, while respected for their sacrifices and combat prowess, were nonetheless the black sheep of the new Confederation military.

  “Would you care to elaborate, colonel?” Commodore Hanson asked coolly.

  Grishin knew that she had her doubts about his loyalty: she had flat out told him her misgivings when he had first come aboard Constellation, but she had no grounds to take any action against him. Piss on her, Grishin thought, making sure his face did not betray the inward smile he felt. Her feelings did not anger him. He had endured far worse. “I have no specifics, commodore,” he said. “As you well know, I have not been to the planet of my birth since the end of the war. Yet I know some of the men in power there: they are heartless, ruthless bastards. Just like me.” He offered up a humorless smile. “Behind their propaganda of equality and brotherhood, they are unapologetic imperialists. They hold Riga under their thumb, and they aspire to claim more worlds as their own. They wish to become a great star nation, superior to the Alliance, and no doubt superior to the Confederation, as well.” He glanced around the room, his gaze settling on Sato, whose expression was not clouded or veiled by suspicion: Sato had helped save Grishin’s life and those of his legionnaires at Keran, and he owed the young commander a great debt of honor. And Sato was probably one of the few people in this room who did not doubt Grishin’s loyalty or question his motivations. “As you all know, the key to becoming a star nation is to have a superior navy. Korolev has been in power now for a number of years, and I am sure has not wasted his time in this arena. While he served as a political commissar during the war and has no naval experience, he well understands what is necessary to build an empire.” He turned his gaze back to Hanson. “You have not seen the true face of their navy because they do not wish you to see it. If we have to jump in, however, you will. Even if we bypass Saint Petersburg and sail directly to Riga, they will fight, for they consider Riga their territory; I believe that an image of Korolev’s expression when he found out that Riga had applied for Confederation membership would have been priceless.” No one smiled at the joke. With a sigh, he went on, “I fear that our naval encounter will not be pleasant, commodore, even under the best of circumstances.”

  “Don’t they realize that the Kreelans are out there?” one of the ship captains asked quietly. “They should be joining forces with us, not fighting us!”

  Grishin shook his head sadly. “I am sure that Korolev and his minions believe that the Kreelan threat is merely Confederation propaganda, designed to draw in gullible worlds like Riga,” he replied. “The men in power on Saint Petersburg live in fear and suspicion of all that is beyond their control, my friends. They do not see the same reality that we do.”

  “So what can we do about their navy, colonel?” one of the other captains asked hotly.

  “Not a damn thing,” Hanson interjected before Grishin could say anything more. The last thing she needed was an open conflict among her commanding officers. “Remember, ladies and gentlemen, we have zero leeway in this one. When the mission clock counts down to zero, if we haven’t received the order to abort, we jump in, weapons hot. It doesn’t matter if they have a hundred heavy cruisers waiting for us: we still go.” Turning back to Grishin, she said, “So, colonel, now that we have such a reassuring understanding of their viewpoint, perhaps you’d care to outline the operations plan for the Marine contingent?”

  Grishin realized that Hanson probably hadn’t intended to come across as being sarcastic, but she certainly sounded that way. He shrugged inwardly. If she wanted to become an expert at sarcasm, she should take lessons from the French officers he had once served under in the Legion. “Certainly, commodore,” he said easily as he stood and replaced the intelligence officer at the front of the room. “As you know, our primary mission is to capture or destroy any nuclear weapons Saint Petersburg may possess,” he began. “In the task force, we have an entire brigade of Marines, in addition to the shipboard contingents, which we can call upon to form an additional ad-hoc battalion, if necessary. The basic plan is to conduct a rapid exo-atmospheric assault on their storage site or sites, employing enough Marines and shipboard fire support to achieve overwhelming local superiority. Each Marine assault group will have a technical team whose responsibility will be to assess whether the weapons can be rendered safe and extracted, or whether they need to be destroyed in situ. If the latter, the teams have a wealth of demolitions available, and we are also authorized to employ orbital bombardment, if necessary.”

  “Once the weapons are secured or destroyed,” Hanson interjected, facing her ship captains, “we are to take up defensive positions around Riga. We are not to engage in battle with
Saint Petersburg naval forces unless we have no other choice. I want to make this very clear: we are not here to make war on Saint Petersburg. We are here to take care of the nukes and then defend Riga from any potential punitive action. That’s it. Even if the Saint Petes have nothing more serious than a dozen coast guard cutters to throw against us, I don’t want a major naval battle. Stick to the job at hand.” Turning to Grishin, she said, “Thank you, colonel.”

  “The real problem,” the intel officer said as Grishin took his seat, “is that the entire operation for going after the nukes is based on intelligence information that we’re supposed to receive shortly after we jump into the system.” He rolled his eyes, showing what he thought of that part of the plan, eliciting a few snickers from the others.

  “If we don’t receive that information,” Hanson added, shooting the intel officer a mild glare, “the nuke part of the mission is scrubbed. We can’t search the entire system, and we’re not going to provoke Korolev by taking up orbit around Saint Petersburg if we don’t have anything firm to go on. So, if we don’t get the intel we’ve been promised, our mission is to sail straight to Riga and take up a defensive posture. Any questions?”

  Around the table, heads shook to a chorus of “No, ma’am.” There would be questions in the next hours before the task force jumped, but right now everyone wanted to get back to their ships.

  “That’s it, then,” Hanson said. The other officers stood to attention as she got up from her chair. “We’ve got less than twenty-four hours, people. Let’s make the most of it.”

  * * *

  “It’s good to see you again, sir,” Sato said as he walked beside Grishin on the way to the boat bay to return to their respective ships. The last time Sato had seen Grishin was when he was taken off the Ticonderoga after the Battle of Keran: Grishin had been on a gurney headed for the sickbay on Africa Station for the severe injuries he had received.