In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  For a mere instant that was drawn out into eternity, Tesh-Dar could sense what the Empress sensed, glimpsed all that the Empress knew, sensed all that the Empress was, in mind and spirit, and it drove her to the brink of insanity. As great as her own powers were, Tesh-Dar was reminded of how insignificant they were beside those of the Empress. The most shocking thing was that she knew that what the Empress did now was merely a shadow of Her true power.

  Tesh-Dar’s body shook and trembled as the Empress reached out through the space around the fleet, to the human ships and missiles, to the planet and its moon, and bent the physical world to Her will.

  * * *

  “Jesus!” someone on Hanson’s flag bridge shouted as all the ship’s systems, even the artificial gravity, suddenly flickered.

  “Status report!” Hanson demanded.

  “There’s no damage to the ship,” the flag captain told her quickly after conferring with the ship’s captain, “but the emergency jump sequence automatically aborted and had to be restarted.”

  “Fleet data-links are down,” the communications officer reported. “Voice and vidcom backup are on-line.”

  “So what the devil happened?”

  “Some sort of energy spike, commodore,” the flag tactical officer reported. “I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it—”

  “Commodore, look!”

  Tearing her eyes away from the swarm of torpedoes heading toward her own ships on the tactical display, she saw that the torpedoes fired at the Kreelan warships were almost in range.

  * * *

  “Weapons malfunction!” Voroshilov’s flag tactical officer reported, confused, as the first torpedo to reach the new set of enemy ships detonated. Or should have. The Saint Petersburg fleet had just recovered from a bizarre mass electrical problem that had affected all shipboard systems, but that apparently had caused no major damage except for taking down the inter-ship data-links. More torpedoes reached their targets. And failed to detonate properly. “Multiple malfunctions!”

  On the screen, he watched as one by one the torpedoes detonated under the control of their proximity fuses, which told the weapons when a target was at the optimal range. The fuses then triggered a sort of “gun” that slammed two chunks of uranium-235 together to produce a fission reaction and the desired nuclear explosion. It was a primitive, but quite effective, design. The fleet’s sensors told Voroshilov that the weapons were fusing properly and the so-called guns inside the warheads were firing, but there were no nuclear detonations. In fact, there was no further trace of radiological emissions from any of the warheads. Every single torpedo was a dud, and these new enemy ships did not even bother to waste any of their point defense fire on them.

  “Comrade admiral,” the tactical officer told Voroshilov, “this is simply not possible!”

  Voroshilov barely heard. His attention was focused on the other torpedoes that had been streaking toward the Confederation ships, and that now were just coming into range.

  * * *

  Hanson stared at the torpedoes bearing down on her task force, thinking about what she had just seen happen to the Kreelans. Or, rather, what had not happened to them. Could it be? She wondered. And can I take that kind of risk? She thought of Grishin and his Marines, and Torvald’s precious “asset,” all stranded on the planet. Grishin, no doubt, had fallen into a trap similar to the ones the Russians had sprung on her task force. She hated the thought of leaving them behind, and if there was even a chance of getting them back, she wanted to take it. It was a horrible risk, but she didn’t get paid to make easy decisions.

  “Emergency jump sequence complete! Fifteen seconds to jump, stand by!”

  “Belay that!” she shouted over the organized bedlam of the emergency jump sequence. “Terminate jump sequence. Stand by point defense!”

  Several of her officers gaped at her for a moment before they scrambled to change the fleet’s orders, a process made much more difficult with the data-links out of commission. The jump countdown timer stopped with four seconds left.

  Hanson outwardly kept her cool, but rivulets of cold sweat were running down her spine as the tiny icons representing the torpedoes closed with her formation. Please, God, she prayed, let me be right.

  Suddenly the point defense batteries of her ships began to fire, and torpedoes began to die. Several of them got through, and one exploded near enough to the Constellation that she could hear fragments of it ping off the ship’s armor.

  But there was not one single nuclear detonation: all of the torpedoes were either destroyed by the point defense systems or produced very small explosions when their nuclear triggers — which were mere conventional explosives — fired.

  “Commodore,” her flag tactical officer said, shaking his head, “there’s no longer any trace of radiological elements in those torpedoes. If our calculations are right, the uranium-235 in the weapons is now nothing but...lead. We had solid radiological readings on every single one before that energy spike. Then after that — nothing. It’s like something just changed the uranium into lead, like magic. It’s just...impossible.”

  “Well,” Hanson breathed, enormously relieved to be alive, “thank God for Kreelan alchemy.” Then, turning to her communications officer, she said, “See if you can get a channel open to the commander of the Saint Petersburg fleet. If we can convince him to join forces, I think we can knock the Kreelans on their collective asses.”

  * * *

  Voroshilov stared at Commodore Hanson on his vidcom with undisguised contempt. “Under no circumstances, commodore,” he spat, “will we join forces with you, our enemy. This is a trick: those other ships are simply more Confederation vessels. And after we deal with them, we will finish with you, if you are foolish enough to remain in our sovereign system. If you want to live, you will depart immediately.” He terminated the connection before the woman could respond.

  “Comrade admiral,” the ship’s chief engineer said, a small image of his worried face appearing in Voroshilov’s vidcom terminal.

  “What is it, Stravinsky?”

  “We have checked the remaining nuclear warheads aboard this ship, sir,” Stravinsky reported. “All of them have been rendered inert. The uranium cores have been...converted to lead. I believe the other ships will discover the same thing.”

  “Sabotage?” Voroshilov demanded.

  “No, comrade admiral,” Stravinsky said, shaking his head. “Such a thing, replacing the uranium cores with lead, could only be done at the Central Facility. I have no explanation for what has happened. It is simply not possible!”

  “It was the energy spike,” mused the flag captain.

  “Da,” Stravinsky agreed. “I do not understand how, but that must have been the cause. The timing was no coincidence, for we know that the first salvo of weapons worked against the two Confederation cruisers we destroyed.”

  How could the Confederation have developed such a weapon? Voroshilov wondered, terrified at the possibilities. If they could neutralize Saint Petersburg’s arsenal of nuclear weapons so easily, the plans of the Party leadership would come unraveled quickly, indeed.

  “Your orders, admiral?” his flag captain asked.

  Voroshilov glared at the tactical display, quickly weighing his options. My fleet does not need nuclear weapons to fight and win its battles, he thought savagely. “We shall destroy the newcomers,” he said. “Then we shall deal with our friend Commodore Hanson.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “Son of a bitch!” Warrant Officer John Faraday swore above the roar of superheated air that flamed around the cutter as it dove through Saint Petersburg’s atmosphere toward the surface.

  “What is it?” Roland Mills asked him over the small ship’s intercom. His head was now pounding so fiercely that it was difficult for him to do anything, even speak. The pain had become so intense that he had bitten his tongue to keep from crying out, and his mouth was now awash with the taste of blood.

  “We lost contact with the
Yura,” Faraday, the cutter’s pilot, told him grimly. He punched a couple of buttons on his console. On the small display that was part of Mills’s combat seat, Mills watched the last few moments of the battle in space, transmitted to the cutter over Yura’s data-link before the signal was lost. There was no mistaking the nuclear detonation that killed the cruiser Myoko, and the track Captain Sato had taken toward the remaining torpedo left little to the imagination. “I think she’s gone.”

  “Fuck,” Mills hissed. “That just made my bloody day.” He was not by nature a sentimental man, but he had to make an enormous effort to keep tears from welling in his eyes. The loss of Sato himself was a huge blow, not to mention the rest of his Marines and the ship’s company. Bloody hell, he thought. I’ll save that news from the others until we’ve made our pickup.

  “It’s going to get a lot worse,” Faraday assured him. The display in front of Mills cleared, then changed to show the planet’s surface, below. Angry red circles pulsed all around the city toward which they were heading: radars that were tracking them, that were now locked on. There were also several tell-tale icons of aerospace interceptors streaking toward them. Faraday wasn’t too worried about interceptors: the cutter’s weapons would be more than a match for them, unless they attacked in large numbers. Heavy ground-based defenses, however, were another story. “Their planetary defense systems are nearly in range. I’m not sure what anybody was really thinking when they ordered us down here, but without the ships upstairs to provide suppressing fire, this is gonna be a really short ride.”

  Just when Mills thought things couldn’t get any worse, his headache seemed to explode in his skull. Crying out in agony, he hammered his fists against his temples, writhing in his combat harness.

  “Mills!” Sabourin shouted as she began to unbuckle her harness to reach him.

  “Stay in your goddamn seat!” Faraday, the pilot, yelled at her. “You’ll be killed when we have to maneuver to avoid ground fire!”

  With her heart breaking, she watched helplessly as Mills thrashed around in his seat and cried out, his screams carried over the platoon channel for everyone to hear.

  “Fuck!” Faraday cursed as a sudden energy spike surged through the cutter. Every system flickered for a moment, and he nearly lost control of the ship in the roaring slipstream around them before the attitude control computers came back on-line. The cutter rolled sickeningly on its back and began to yaw, but he managed to wrestle the craft back on course before it went out of control. Looking at the tactical display, he saw that all of the radars had suddenly gone down, and the tracks of the interceptors had also disappeared, as if they had simply vanished. “Thank you, God,” he whispered as he pushed the throttle forward as far as he dared, desperate to get into the ground clutter where the ship would be far more difficult to track.

  He had no idea where he was going or even why. All that mattered, he had been told — personally — by Commodore Hanson, was to guide on a very peculiar beacon signal and get the Marines on the ground. After that, Hanson had told him cryptically, he would receive further instructions from someone on the ground.

  Sabourin had her eyes glued to Mills. At the same instant the ship’s systems had flickered, Mills had grunted as if someone had bludgeoned him, then he passed out. He now hung slack in his combat harness, his head lolling from side to side as the atmosphere bounced and jolted the little ship. She normally would have been able to tell from her tactical readout what his vital signs were, for every Marine carried equipment that monitored their physical status, but the energy surge had apparently fried the electronics built into her gear. Everything associated with her weapons and basic communications seemed to be fine, but the technology-based “combat multipliers,” the most critical of which was the inter-Marine data-link network, was gone.

  Switching over to a private channel that she and Mills used, she said, “Mills, can you hear me?” More urgently, she said, “Roland? Roland, answer me!”

  “I...I hear you,” he rasped. As he lifted his head up to look at her, she gasped as she saw blood streaming from his nose, with bloody tears in his eyes. It looked as if every capillary in both eyes had ruptured. “Christ, I can’t see a fucking thing,” was all he managed before he vomited over the front of his uniform.

  “Two minutes!” Faraday barked from the flight deck as he suddenly pulled the ship out of its screaming dive, bringing it level just above the massive trees of the endless Saint Petersburg forests.

  The copilot, who also doubled as the cutter’s weapons controller, stared intently at the ship’s defense displays. The ground radars were coming back up, but the cutter was so low now that they couldn’t lock on. There was no sign that the interceptors were still on their way, but that could be good news or bad: they had either been destroyed by the energy spike, or were now playing hide and seek at treetop level, just as the cutter was, or running with their active sensors off, so the cutter’s sensors couldn’t detect them.

  The ride was still incredibly rough, and Sabourin ignored the pilot’s curses as she finally unstrapped herself and carefully made her way across the aisle to Mills.

  “Well,” he said, attempting his trademark devil-may-care attitude, “at least my frigging headache is gone.” He made an attempt at a cheerful smile, his teeth covered in blood from having bitten his tongue again.

  “You are a mess,” she told him, ripping open a field dressing and using it to wipe the blood from his eyes. She followed it up with some water from her canteen, half of which she spilled in his lap when the cutter jolted upward, then sharply down again.

  “Well, that’ll help clear the puke away, then,” he muttered, looking at the mess running down the front of his uniform before hissing at the pain as she poured more water into his eyes. “That’s enough, luv!” he said, gently batting her hands away. “I’m okay.”

  She scowled at him as only a Frenchwoman can. “Imbecile,” she chided, finally putting away her canteen.

  Putting a hand over his tiny helmet microphone, he leaned close to her ear. “She’s here,” he whispered. “Don’t ask me how I know, but that huge bitch of a warrior is here, somewhere on the planet or in the system.”

  Sabourin’s eyes flew wide. “An invasion? Here?”

  He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Let’s just get this job done and get the hell back to the fleet as quick as we can.” Whatever had been plaguing him in his dreams and that had brought on the awful headache was gone now, as if a balloon had suddenly burst, finally relieving the horrible pressure in his skull. Despite the residual pain, he felt much better than he had in days, if not weeks. And as he had told Sabourin, he knew the Kreelans were here somewhere. He was sure of it.

  “One minute!” the pilot called out.

  “Jaysus!” Mills cursed, shoving aside his thoughts about the Kreelans. There were more pressing matters afoot, and Sabourin should have been getting the platoon ready instead of fussing with him. He would have to talk to her about that later. In bed. Assuming they survived this harebrained operation.

  Unstrapping his harness and getting unsteadily to his feet, using one arm to support himself on the forward bulkhead against the cutter’s still-violent flight, he boomed, “First Squad, up!”

  The men and women of First Squad got to their feet in a flurry of clinking buckles and the tell-tale sound of weapons being checked one final time. They shuffled forward toward the two front personnel doors.

  “Second Squad, up!” Second Squad did the same, taking up position behind the Marines of First Squad.

  “Third Squad, up!” The remaining squad stood and faced to the rear and the larger cargo door in the cutter’s starboard side. Their exit would be a little easier, as the door would drop down to act as a ramp. The first two squads would have to jump a bit over a meter to the ground.

  “Thirty seconds!” the pilot called.

  “Bloody hell,” Mills cursed as he leaned forward into the flight deck to look at the tactical display. But what caug
ht his eye was the view through the forward windscreen. “We’re going right fucking downtown, you fool!”

  “Hey, Top,” Faraday said tightly as he maneuvered the cutter between buildings, the ship’s belly a mere two stories above the ground and its sides nearly scraping the buildings on either side. “My orders were to go to the goddamned little bug on this screen, quick like a bunny,” he nodded toward the main tactical display and the glowing green icon representing the beacon they were after. “Nobody told me the fucking thing would be in the middle of the capitol city!”

  Mills got a glimpse of a street flashing by below. It was crammed with people, all staring up at the passing ship with comic expressions of disbelief on their faces. They were flying that low. “So where is the damned beacon?” he asked as Faraday quickly slowed the ship as they approached their destination. With the Marine data-link out of action, there was no way for the pilot to echo the beacon’s location to Mills for him to follow.

  “Looks like it’s on maybe the sixth floor of this building,” the copilot said quickly, pointing to what looked like a run-down apartment complex. “And I think it’s moving.”

  “Disembark!” Faraday shouted as he brought the cutter into a hover above the street. The forward doors slid open and the rear door quickly lowered. The Marines leaped to the ground, forming a defensive perimeter around the ship.

  Mills followed Sabourin and the First Squad out the forward doors. “First Squad, on me!” he bellowed above the roar of the cutter’s engines as he charged toward the apartment building, with the other two squads and the cutter guarding their backs.

  * * *

  Sikorsky felt like a coward, hiding in the bedroom while Valentina fought for their lives and her own. But he was Ludmilla’s last defense, and he was determined, more than at any other time in his life, that she would come to no further harm. Keeping his submachine pistol aimed at the doorway, he felt no fear, only rage, and his hands kept the weapon’s stubby barrel steady.