In Her Name: The Last War

by Michael R. Hicks

  Despite his earlier joking about not wanting to get into her knickers, he couldn’t deny the attraction he felt toward her. He hadn’t been with another woman since Emmanuelle had died, and he felt a warm shiver ripple down his spine.

  Now’s not the time, you fool, he counseled himself. She’d kick your arse.

  He couldn’t suppress a grin at his own foolishness. Valentina cocked an eyebrow at his change of expression, but she didn’t offer up a smile in return.

  “Fair enough.” He let out a sigh. “You caught me. The truth is, I did come here to pay a social visit, but it’s...business, as well.” His grin disappeared and his expression grew serious. “I’m putting a team together, Valentina. It’s a special recon team that’s tasked to go in ahead of an assault force to scout Kreelan positions and report back. The Kreelans keep defeating our technology, or at least selective bits of it, and they completely bugger every kind of technical reconnaissance, seemingly at will. Satellites, drones, even the stealth microsats the CIS has come up with. They just stop working. Poof. The boffins don’t have a clue how the blue girls are doing it.”

  “All of them fail?” Valentina leaned back as she considered the dreadful implications of what Mills was saying. Any combat force that was blind to what the enemy was doing was already halfway to being defeated.

  “No.” Mills shook his head. “That’s what makes it even stranger. Sometimes they work fine, but if they seem to touch on something the enemy doesn’t want them to see, the sensor or weapon just dies. Drones fall from the sky. Satellites just stop working. Guided missiles lose their guidance and merrily sail off course.

  “And sometimes things don’t really go dead, but just stop working for a while. Data-links will drop, then come back on sometime later. It’s like the Kreelans just wave some sort of magic wand when they don’t want us peeping in on them or don’t like the weapons we happen to be using,” he snapped his fingers, “and we’re bollixed.”

  “Jesus.” Valentina hadn’t fought the Kreelans on Saint Petersburg, as she had been injured before they aliens had attacked. She had heard of their seemingly supernatural powers, but that had only been rumor. Until now.

  “Ships can help a bit from orbit,” Mills went on, “as the Kreelans don’t seem to hamper them so much, but our Navy is usually too busy trying to beat back Kreelan warships to help much with the ground battle. But on the ground, our boys and girls are dead without decent battlefield intel.”

  “So what is it that you have in mind?”

  “We need boots on the ground,” he told her firmly, “people who can put eyes and ears on the target area, sort out what’s going on and report back, and who can move quietly and quickly through enemy territory without being seen. I also need people who are good enough to fight their way out of a tough scrap if things turn–”

  “I’m not going back to Saint Petersburg.” She said it before he could finish, a haunted look shrouding her face. She would never go back there.

  Mills shook his head. “It won’t be Saint Petersburg. The target for the first operation hasn’t been announced yet, but I know it won’t be there, or any of the six other worlds the enemy attacked in the first round after the invasion of Keran.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he went on grimly, “those worlds are as good as lost. That’s obviously not being trumpeted from the Presidential Complex, but it’s the truth. The fighting will probably go on for some time yet, maybe even a few more years, but the Kreelans are too well entrenched on the ground, and the Navy can’t prevent the enemy from bringing in reinforcements.”

  He took a sip of tea, noting Valentina’s shocked expression. “Every so often a Kreelan task force appears and drops another big load of warriors to the surface. The big transports jump out, while their warships rough up the Navy until our ships finally wipe them out. Meanwhile, the warriors they leave behind continue hacking and chopping away at us on the ground.

  “Don’t get me wrong. We kill them in droves, even without using the really high-tech weaponry that they somehow bedevil. But there are always more of them to kill, and they have to be killed, because they don’t surrender. Ever. We haven’t had one single prisoner, Valentina, in all the battles being fought now across over a dozen worlds. Not one. And we haven’t been able to break them psychologically, get them to rout or retreat in a single battle. All the things we’ve always taken for granted as part of warfare amongst humans,” he flicked his fingers in the air, “is good for nothing at all. They come at us like they’re berserkers and just go on fighting until they die. Then more come to replace them.”

  “This operation you’re talking about, is it part of the strategic offensive that President McKenna has been alluding to?”

  Natalie McKenna was the first president of the newly formed Confederation. Working under incomprehensible pressure and driving herself mercilessly, she had managed to forge a working interstellar government amidst a massive alien invasion, using the industrial might of Earth and the worlds of the Francophone Alliance to forge an arsenal that could defend humanity.

  “Yes.” Mills nodded. “It was originally going to be launched months ago, but the second wave of attacks set back the timetable. And now there’s been a third.”

  “How many colonies have been hit so far?”

  “Fifteen,” Mills told her. “The Empire attacked seven, including Saint Petersburg, in the first wave of invasions after Keran was wiped out. A few months later, while you were still in a coma, they attacked six more. And just last week they attacked two, Alger’s World and Wuhan. The couriers came in this morning with that news.

  “McKenna’s tired of letting the blues having the initiative, and she’s given the green light for a full counteroffensive to take back one of our worlds so we’ll have some good news. So we can give people hope. Because frankly, love, we’re getting our arses pounded.”

  He took a long sip of tea, then set the glass down. “Now we’re just trying to put the last pieces together. I’m to lead one of the recon teams that’ll be first on the ground.” He paused, looking at her pointedly. “I have one slot on my team left to fill. I need a sniper, and God strike me dead if you’re not the best shot I’ve ever seen, with that circus shooting you did on Saint Petersburg.

  “On top of that, you know all about intel, and I know you’ve had extensive training in first aid and communications. Plus,” he added with a playful leer, “you’ll bring up the average for good looks on the team by quite a few points.”

  “How much do you know about my background?” Valentina narrowed her eyes at the mention of her background in intelligence. Only two people had ever seen her complete file and knew everything about her. One was Vladimir Penkovsky, the Director of the Confederation Intelligence Service. The other was her controller, Robert Torvald. There was information in there that she would never want anyone else to know, information that was dangerous enough that she would kill someone, even a friend, to keep it secret.

  Mills held up his hands toward her, seeing the change in her expression and the sudden tension in her body that he knew could erupt into lethal violence. He was far larger than she was, but despite his size advantage and experience in close combat against the Kreelans, he wouldn’t have wagered money on his own survival in a fight against her. From what he had been told and seen in her file, she could tear him to pieces without breaking a sweat.

  “Hold up, Valentina. Your old friend Torvald briefed me on your training and abilities that were pertinent to our mission needs. That was all. Nothing about your past or what you’ve done; nothing about any of that spooky stuff from your former life. I don’t care, and I don’t want to know. Confirm it with him if you like.” He chuckled. “Director Penkovsky had to order Torvald to talk to me, and even then it was like pulling teeth to get the bugger to tell me anything useful. He’s a bit of a constipated sod, isn’t he?”

  With that, Valentina relaxed. She would double-check what Mills had told her with Torvald, wit
h whom she’d kept in periodic contact, but she could tell Mills wasn’t lying. And thinking about his ribald description of Torvald, she couldn’t help but chuckle herself. It was too close to the mark.

  “All right. I guess I won’t have to kill you. This time.”

  “Whew!” Mills puffed some air through his lips and theatrically wiped a hand across his brow, but inwardly he was relieved. Torvald had warned him that if he lost “Scarlet’s” trust and she thought Mills knew too much about her past, she wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. “So that brings us to the big question of the day. Will you do this?”

  Valentina looked out one of the kitchen windows at the woods beyond, considering. She had given up everything for her career with the CIS. She had traded away her true identity and had made a profession of spying on and killing other human beings. Sometimes it had been justified, sometimes it had simply been necessary.

  But with every life she had taken, she had felt like a piece of her soul had been carved away and cast into Hell. Even now that she was no longer officially in the employ of the CIS, her past guaranteed that she would never be able to live the ordinary, normal life that so many others took for granted. She was still young, and often wished for a man to share her life and her bed, but that, too, had been something she had decided could never happen. She could never expose anyone else to the risks that she and the Sikorskys already lived under, the perpetual fear that her identity might be compromised and the demons of her past deeds would come to claim their vengeance. She did not have to worry about such threats to any children she might have, for the bullets that had ravaged her body at Saint Petersburg had put an end to that possibility.

  She had more than paid her dues to the Confederation government, she knew, and to the Terran government before that. She had even paid the price for getting Mills and his fellow Marines away from Saint Petersburg, spending months in a coma that wasn’t dreamless, but had been a never-ending nightmare until the day she finally awakened. She owed nothing more to humanity.

  But the threat now was not from another group of human beings with which her star nation was in competition or conflict, but from an alien menace that seemed determined to wipe her kind from the Universe.

  Turning her eyes to the beautiful samovar on the counter, she realized that everything good that humanity had ever done was now at risk. Humanity had a dark and ugly side, and she had seen far more than her share of it. But she believed there was far more that was good, that was worth saving. Things of beauty like the samovar, and things that money could not buy, like the love and devotion of Dmitri and Ludmilla as they waited for her to wake from her coma.

  If the Kreelans had their way, all of that, and so much more, would be erased, gone forever.

  She knew that she couldn’t prevent that from happening single-handed. But standing on the sidelines, comfortably tucked away on this little horse farm in the deep woods, wouldn’t help win the war.

  And Mills was right. There was probably no one, anywhere, who was more qualified for what he needed than she was.

  With a deep sigh, Valentina turned back to him. “Okay, Mills, I’m in.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Allison spent the first three days after the invasion in the shelter. She heard strange sounds on the second day, muffled and indistinct through the concrete and earth above her. The third day was quiet.

  By the fourth day, she had to get outside to take a look before she went crazy.

  Waiting until the clock told her night had fallen, she crept up the steps to the thick shelter door and tried to open it, but it was stuck. She checked the counterbalance mechanism to make sure it wasn’t jammed. As far as she could tell, it looked fine.

  That meant that something was blocking the door.

  It took her nearly fifteen minutes of desperate pushing and shoving before she finally managed to get the door open far enough to see what was blocking it.

  Charred wood. It wasn’t hot or smoking, but the smell of it was so strong it made her cough.

  An hour of hard, messy work later, she had cleared the wood away by poking and prodding it through the slim opening with long screwdrivers and the pry bar.

  Finally able to open the door enough to stick her head outside, she could see in the starlight that the barn was nothing but a burned out ruin. The front half had collapsed, with some of the rafters falling across the door to the shelter. That’s what had been blocking her way.

  She suppressed a gasp when she saw someone sprawled on the dirt floor toward the rear of the barn, which still stood.

  Letting the door close quietly behind her, Allison crept over to the person.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?”

  She flicked on the tiny flashlight she carried, and bit back a cry of

  It was a man wearing a Territorial Army uniform. She didn’t recognize him, but he was clearly dead, a deep gash through his throat. His eyes stared, unseeing, at the underside of the ruined barn’s loft.

  She looked around with her flashlight, but couldn’t see any other bodies. Afraid now that one of the aliens might see the light, she switched it off and sat there in the dark, shivering.

  Some soldiers must have hidden in the barn, she thought, and then the Kreelans found them. That would explain the noises she’d heard earlier. They were the sounds of a battle taking place right over her head. A battle that the humans had again lost, and during which the barn had been set ablaze. She was only amazed that the whole structure hadn’t burned to the ground.

  Moving back toward the front of the barn, picking her way carefully through the wreckage, she found a spot that had a clear view of the house.

  Or where the house should have been. She stared open-mouthed at the sight of her home. It looked like it had been destroyed by a tornado of fire. There was wreckage everywhere, like the house had blown up, and everything was singed and blackened.

  Moving slowly, she made her way to what was left of the porch where she’d been sitting only a few days ago, enjoying her birthday party.

  Clambering up on the burned and broken wood, she could only get as far as where the door would have been, because it ended in a big hole that had once been the basement.

  Allison sat down, her legs dangling into the hole, wanting to vomit from the smell of smoke.

  After sitting there a while, she thought of the body back in the barn, and knew she couldn’t just leave the man as he was.

  “That wouldn’t be right.” Her father spoke those words when he used to talk to her about making choices, and she fought back a sudden hot flash of tears as she thought of him.

  As she returned to the barn, she saw with dismay that the vehicle shed, too, had been destroyed. Moving to the rear of the barn, which was still largely intact, she looked and listened for any signs of the enemy.

  Nothing moved in the starlit darkness between the barn and the nearby creek, beyond which lay the woods. The night creatures made their normal chirruping and occasional hoots, and she knew that nothing was hiding out there, waiting for her.

  Already exhausted from prying open the door to the shelter, she knew that what had to be done would only be harder the longer she waited. The body hadn’t begun to smell yet, but she knew it would.

  Taking hold of the dead man’s wrists, she pulled him outside the barn and into the nearest corner of the family garden where the earth was soft.

  After retrieving a shovel from the mess in the barn, she began to dig.

  * * *

  Not content to stay put in the shelter and wait for rescue that she now doubted would ever come, Allison ventured out at night to learn what she could of the enemy. While many children her age were still afraid of the dark, especially in the woods, she had spent enough time hunting with her father and brother that the woods held no fears for her other than the packs of Kreelan warriors that sometimes passed by.

  The first night, she was able to reach a place where she could see into the town. There wasn’t a single light shining from
any of the buildings. The power was out, which didn’t surprise her.

  But it wasn’t completely dark. In the town square she could see the flickers of what must have been a number of fires, and off in the woods beyond the town she could see the faint glow of what must have been many more. The dark shapes of warriors moved here and there, the glow of the firelight sometimes glinting from their shiny black armor.

  She also noticed that the landing ships had all gone.

  “At least they can’t go around shooting horses.” She thought bitterly of poor Race.

  She stayed in the shelter on the second night when a storm passed through. Allison had cracked the door to the shelter, but rain was pouring down outside. After a moment's consideration, she closed the door and went back inside.

  On the third night she had reached the edge of town when she was stopped cold by a Kreelan patrol. She had come around the corner of a big storage building where the town kept its communal equipment, which was the farthest building that was generally considered part of the town itself, when she ran into them.

  She had reached the back of the building and moved toward one of the corners. Stopping, she listened for any sounds, and after about thirty seconds she rounded the corner.

  And there they were. For a moment, she just stood there, stupefied, while not ten paces away three alien warriors stood facing her, dark shadows against the star light.

  The warriors stiffened, and two of them began to move toward her. But the third uttered something in their strange language, and the others stopped, flexing their claws in their armored fists.