In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  “Mills,” Sato said through his bridge vidcom, his face betraying his concern, “we’ll be over the horizon and out of support range for ninety minutes. You’ll be on your own.”

  “Understood, skipper,” Mills told him as the cutter slipped away from the Yura. Outside of her parent ship’s gravity field now, he was overtaken by the familiar but queasy sensation of weightlessness. Ahead loomed their destination, the glowing surface of Saint Petersburg. Sato had called him only a few minutes ago to brief him on their new mission, to rescue a Confederation agent in Saint Petersburg City. It was a completely insane mission that fit perfectly with Mills’s thrill-seeking personality. If only the fucking headache would go away, he cursed to himself, this might even be fun. None of the meds he had taken had made a dent in it. He shrugged inwardly. He would have to make do. “Don’t worry, sir,” he said. “We’ll make the grab and be back for more fun before you sail ‘round again.”

  Sato nodded, but did not smile. “Godspeed, Mills,” he said before terminating the connection.

  “Okay, Faraday,” Mills said to the warrant officer who piloted the cutter, “let’s get on with this little party, shall we?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Even though everything appeared to be calm and orderly, every hair on the back of Grishin’s neck was at stiff attention, screaming that there was something wrong. Here he was with a brigade of troops deployed in a hasty defensive perimeter around a gigantic concrete apron, painted to blend in with the forest, that easily accommodated all of his assault boats at one time, exchanging pleasantries with the man who claimed to be the commandant of the facility. A storage facility, yes, the man, a brigadier, had told him.

  “But not for nuclear weapons,” the brigadier said, laughing, as if Grishin was mad to even think such a thing.

  Grishin had sent the special teams, men and women trained in disarming nuclear weapons, into the gigantic tunnel, accompanied by an entire battalion of Marines. He could have sent a smaller escort, but he had plenty of troops and had no idea how big the complex was. He intended, however, that if they ran into any trouble, they would be able to defend themselves.

  He had arranged the rest of his Marines around the inside of the huge wall. He had been sorely tempted to take over the walls and the security positions there, but without any sign of resistance from the “host” military, he under very strict orders to avoid provoking them without cause.

  Fuck, he thought savagely. There is something wrong here, but—

  “Colonel!” one of his men cried, pointing toward the tunnel entrance. The door, a gigantic plug of hardened steel that was easily three meters thick, was closing. The Marines inside would be cut off, trapped.

  “Brigadier,” he said, turning to the alleged commandant, “what is the meaning of this?”

  “My apologies, colonel,” the man said calmly as he drew his sidearm with one hand and with the other casually rolled a hand grenade onto the ground in the midst of Grishin’s nearby staff. Unbelievably, he made no attempt to escape.

  “Alarm!” Grishin screamed as he knocked the Russian officer’s gun arm to the side, then stabbed his right hand, fingers held rigid like a knife, into the brigadier’s throat, crushing his larynx. Grishin grabbed him by the collar and web gear, and with a desperate prayer and a massive heave, threw the gagging Russian to the ground on top of the grenade just before it exploded. His body didn’t absorb the full force of the explosion, for two of the staff officers were riddled with shrapnel and killed instantly. But Grishin’s quick reflexes had saved the lives of the others. For the moment.

  In those few seconds, bedlam erupted around the facility. The formerly peaceful Russian soldiers atop the massive wall turned inward and opened fire on the Marines, who were now caught out in the open with nowhere to hide across hectares of bare concrete. A volley of hypervelocity missiles lanced out, almost too fast to follow with the unaided eye, from points along the wall, obliterating most of the assault boats on the ground in massive fireballs. Two boats actually managed to get airborne, struggling skyward amidst the flames, smoke, and debris from the others that had been destroyed outright. One of them only made it a dozen meters above the concrete before it was skewered by a missile. The other, piloted by either a genius or a maniac, managed to avoid four missiles before it was destroyed. The four boats that Grishin had on patrol overhead were hit simultaneously. Three exploded, while the last plummeted toward the ground, trailing smoke. That boat’s pilot guided her stricken craft over the heads of her fellow Marines and straight into the closed gate at the entrance to the facility, blasting a huge hole in it.

  That may be our only way out, Grishin thought quickly as he surveyed the carnage around him. The surprise assault on the boats had resulted in a shower of flaming debris that had crushed or burned to death dozens of his Marines, and scores more had already fallen to the murderous fire from the walls.

  “Return fire!” he barked over his comm set to his battalion commanders, although most of the Marines had already begun to return fire on their own. He got acknowledgments from all of his commanders except the one who had been swallowed up by the mountain: they didn’t have any communications gear that was powerful enough to penetrate the mountain’s shielding. They were on their own.

  Around the facility, the Marines fought back fiercely, blasting away at their attackers with everything they had.

  Grishin knew that it would not be enough. They were totally cut off and surrounded, with the only possible way out being the hole blown in the main gate by the suicidal boat pilot. And judging by the increasing amount of fire coming from the wall, he suspected that there were fresh troops being brought up from some subterranean barracks.

  “Camarón.” He breathed the name of the famous last stand, from centuries before, of the French Légion étrangère that had been his family and country for the last twenty years before the Confederation was founded. He had said it once before during the Battle of Keran when he was sure he was about to die. He had never expected to say it a second time. “Follow me!” he ordered the surviving members of his headquarters staff as he snatched up a rifle from a fallen Marine and headed toward the burning wreckage of one of the assault boats, trying to find some cover from the withering hail of fire from the enemy soldiers on the walls. “And patch me through to Commodore Hanson!”

  “Colonel,” one of his staff shouted, pointing at the pile of wreckage that was all that was left of their ad-hoc command post, “the FLEETCOM terminal is gone...” Without the terminal or the boats, they had no way to contact the fleet.

  “Merde,” he said savagely. Grishin knew that their chances of survival had just dropped to near-zero.

  * * *

  “We’ve lost contact with Colonel Grishin, commodore,” the flag communications officer reported suddenly. The icons for Grishin’s units deployed on the surface suddenly became transparent on the display that showed a map of the underground facility: the real-time feed that updated the information from the sensors the Marines carried was gone.

  Hanson took a closer look at the display. Losing all communications with the Marines on the surface should be nearly impossible: even if the FLEETCOM units were destroyed, any of the boats could relay Grishin’s transmissions. The bulk of the task force was in a stand-off orbit, far enough from the planet that no planetary defense weapons could reach them without fair warning. The carriers and their two escorting heavy cruisers, including Sato’s Yura, were in low orbit, now on the far side of the planet. The single small moon was also on the far side of Saint Petersburg, effectively screened from the sensors on the ships with her here, but visible to the carriers.

  She suddenly felt a sickening sensation in the pit of her stomach. Losing communications with the Marines was no coincidence. They were going to hit the carriers first, she thought, a cold spear of dread lancing up her spine, from the goddamn moon! “Contact the carriers and have them get the hell out of there—”

  It was too late. A sudden blo
om of yellow icons erupted from the moon, echoed by the sensors on board the carriers and their cruiser escorts, and in only a few seconds all of them turned to red: warships, believed to be hostile.

  Hanson held her breath as the tactical computer counted the enemy ships and did its best to identify them by class. Seventy-three warships, she told herself, shocked. Worse, thirty-eight of them were classed as heavy cruisers. Hanson’s entire force amounted to only six heavy cruisers and ten destroyers, plus the two carriers. It would be a slaughter.

  “Radiological alarm!” her flag tactical officer shouted as the lead Russian ships fired a brace of what could only be torpedoes at Hanson’s carriers and their escorts, now frantically trying to escape Saint Petersburg’s gravity well so they could jump into hyperspace and escape. “Nuclear warheads, inbound!”

  “Extend the fleet formation,” Hanson snapped. “Stand by for emergency jump.”

  “What about the Marines, commodore?” her flag captain asked quietly.

  She turned to him, a stony expression on her face. “I said to stand by for emergency jump.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am,” the flag captain said, turning away to issue the necessary orders.

  Hanson stared at the screen, her gut churning at the butcher’s bill if they were forced to jump.

  On the display, as the carriers accelerated hard away from the inbound torpedoes, Yura and her sister turned to fight.

  * * *

  “Stand by point defense,” Sato ordered. Inside, he was quivering from adrenalin, both from fear and excitement. But his voice only gave away a faint trace of what he was feeling. He was the captain, and his crew would follow his lead. He wanted them calm and level-headed as they charged directly into the teeth of the torpedo salvo, knowing they were fitted with nuclear warheads. We can do this, he told himself. “Main batteries, engage on my mark...” The range rings showing the effective range of the ship’s main guns intersected the rapidly approaching torpedoes. “Fire!”

  With the data-link connecting Yura with her sister ship Myoko, the two ships became a single virtual weapon, able to more effectively coordinate their targeting and firing. With a measured cadence, their fifteen-centimeter guns began to fire. Unlike the projectiles they normally fired at other ships, which were armor piercing explosive rounds, these shells contained thousands of ball bearings surrounding a large explosive charge. At a distance determined by the targeting computers, the shells detonated, sending a hail of metal into the path of the incoming weapons.

  The designers of the torpedoes, however, had anticipated this. The torpedoes were smart weapons, and began individual rapid evasion patterns to confuse the defending targeting systems and dodge around defensive fire.

  At a point designated by the targeting computers, Yura and Myoko did a hard turn-about. Now, instead of heading directly toward the torpedoes as they fired, they were running away from them, continuing to fire astern. The torpedoes were significantly faster, but this maneuver ensured that the two cruisers had the maximum amount of time for defensive fire before the torpedoes caught up to them or, worse, passed them by to strike the nearly helpless carriers.

  The Saint Petersburg ships had fired ten torpedoes, and all but two fell to the defending fire of the two cruisers before their basic load of ammunition ran out and the main guns fell silent. The ships’ laser batteries thrummed as they fired, but the wildly maneuvering torpedoes were nearly impossible to hit.

  “Godspeed, Sato,” Myoko’s captain suddenly said through the vidcom terminal on Sato’s combat chair, just before his ship disappeared in a blinding fireball. In space, there was no atmosphere to transmit shock waves that could tear a planet-bound structure or ship to bits. Nor were there thermal effects that could incinerate people or structures, as there was no air for the explosion to heat. There was only a massive blast of neutron and gamma radiation that seared Myoko and her crew into oblivion. The blast from the torpedo itself was overshadowed by the detonation of the cruiser’s main drives.

  “Sir!” Sato’s tactical officer cried. One torpedo remained, just pulling abreast of Yura and clearly locked onto the fleeing carriers.

  “Helm, bring us ten degrees to starboard, all ahead flank!” Sato ordered, telling Bogdanova to steer the ship closer to the weapon. “Ready point defense!”

  “Point defense, standing by!” the tactical officer reported, his voice tight.

  The entire bridge crew waited in tense silence as the next few seconds brought them closer to what they knew was almost certain destruction. The tactical computer had generated an estimated yield of twenty kilotons for the weapon that had just destroyed Myoko. The torpedo had managed to penetrate the ship’s close-in defenses and detonate at a range of two kilometers, spearing the ship with over ten thousand roentgens of radiation; as few as five hundred were required to incapacitate, and sometimes kill, a human being.

  Yura would not be that close, but she would be close enough.

  “Stand by...” Sato said. Then: “Point defense, fire!”

  The lasers and gatling guns of the cruiser’s close-in weapons systems spat beams of coherent light and streams of explosive shells at the wildly maneuvering torpedo. The weapon danced across the star field as it tried to avoid the incoming fire, but with Yura sailing on a parallel course, the torpedo had lost its speed advantage. In one brief moment, three laser bolts converged on the weapon.

  Sato suddenly saw a blossoming of new ship icons, all of them red, on the tactical display, just before the universe went white.

  * * *

  The fleet was just making its transition from hyperspace to the target human system when Tesh-Dar sensed it: the massive spike of energy and radiation that heralded the detonation of an atomic weapon. Such weapons, of course, had been known to the Kreela for ages, since long before the First Empire. They were far from the most powerful weapons the Empire had at its disposal, but like its far more destructive cousins, it was a class of weapon that the Empress disdained to use. Were the Empire seriously threatened, She would not hesitate to use everything at Her disposal to protect it. Yet, even the greatest of the Empire’s weapons and warships were as nothing compared to the power that dwelt within the Empress Herself.

  The Kreela had encountered such weapons as these before in the course of the Empire’s expansion across the stars: all of the races the Empire had fought and vanquished in the ages-long search for the First Empress had used atomic weapons — very briefly. While the Empress condoned combat with ship-board weapons as long as they were, in essence, controlled by the enemy’s warriors, such weapons of mass destruction were an abomination in Her eyes: they took away the opportunity a warrior had to bring Her glory in battle, and to seek the One who might save them all.

  Tesh-Dar did not need a sensor suite or computers to tell her what had just happened. She was finely attuned to the space around her, and could in fact pilot a starship by second sight alone.

  And what she felt, the Empress felt.

  “Prepare yourselves, daughters,” she warned the others on the bridge, “for we shall be Her sword hand this day, and shall feel Her power in our flesh.”

  Then a second nuclear detonation occurred.

  “Priestess!” her tactical officer cried as the ship’s sensors localized the two detonations and what appeared to be a mortally stricken human ship, and the vaporized remains of a second one, not far from the target planet.

  As Tesh-Dar watched, what she assumed was a second volley of torpedoes was fired from a larger human fleet at a smaller one, to which the two ships that had been destroyed apparently belonged.

  “They battle one another,” she said in confused wonder, shaking her head. Here sailed a battle group of the Imperial Fleet to challenge the humans, and they were destroying one another. She could not understand these creatures.

  “The missiles are armed with atomic warheads,” the tactical officer announced.

  Tesh-Dar only nodded absently: she already knew. And she could feel a sudden stre
ngthening of the Bloodsong, like a massive storm surge through their souls. “Prepare yourselves,” she whispered as she gave herself up to the power that soared higher, ever higher, in her veins.

  * * *

  “Whose ships are those?” Admiral Lavrenti Voroshilov demanded sharply.

  “Unidentified!” his flag tactical officer barked. On the main display, fifty-seven ships had just jumped into Saint Petersburg space and were displayed in a glaring crimson: assumed hostile. To the Saint Petersburg fleet, any ship that was not known to be theirs was first considered an enemy. “Configuration unknown. They do not appear to be Confederation vessels.” According to the display, the new arrivals were much closer to Voroshilov’s fleet than were the Confederation ships.

  “Give them a full salvo of torpedoes,” Voroshilov ordered.

  * * *

  “Holy shit,” someone muttered on the Constellation’s flag bridge in the silence that fell immediately after the new arrivals had been identified by the tactical computers.

  A Kreelan battle fleet, Hanson thought acidly. Could this mission get any more fucked up? The only good news was that the carriers finally reached their emergency jump points and disappeared safely into hyperspace. At the cost of two of her heavy cruisers.

  “Twenty seconds to jump,” the fleet navigator announced.

  On the flag bridge tactical display, there was now a second — and much larger — salvo of torpedoes heading toward Hanson’s ships, and the Russians had just launched yet another salvo at the newly-arrived Kreelans. How many of those bloody torpedoes do they have? she wondered.

  “Fifteen seconds...”

  Her ships would be well away before the torpedoes were close enough to present a danger, but she now desperately wanted to see how the Kreelans reacted. While she knew that President McKenna was dead-set against using nuclear weapons, if they would help turn the tide against the Kreelans...

  * * *

  It took all of Tesh-Dar’s will to keep herself from writhing in the agony and ecstasy of the power unleashed by the Empress through her and the senior shipmistresses in the fleet. The other warriors, even those senior among them, felt only the passing tidal wave, but were not chosen to directly channel it: they would not have survived.