In Her Name: The Last War (145 page)

Those things, McKenna had decided, the public did not yet need to see. 

With Steph’s help from her hospital bed where she was recovering from her leg wound, the raw footage had been transformed into a documentary that had left McKenna with her heart in her throat, overcome with pride in the men and women she had sent there, and in the people of Alger’s World who had fought to survive.

Most of the planet’s population had survived, although the butcher’s bill had still been enormous. Fifty thousand civilians and Territorial Army soldiers had died. Another eight thousand sailors and Marines had been killed in the fighting, with hundreds more wounded. 

But it could have been far, far worse.

“The reconstruction effort on Alger’s is moving along well,” Barca continued. “A number of other worlds have even stepped forward, volunteering to send workers and supplies to assist in the effort.” He cocked an eyebrow at the president. “That, Madam President, is a first.”

“They feel confident enough to send some of their own resources off-world in troubled times,” said Vice President Navarre. “That is indeed a good sign.”

“How are things going on the production front?” McKenna turned to Defense Minister Sabine and Admiral Tiernan. 

“Aside from some supply problems we’re having with certain components, things are actually going amazingly well,” Joshua Sabine told her. 

“Supply problems?” McKenna leaned forward. “Who do I need to lean on?”

Tiernan and Sabine exchanged grins. “No one this time, Madam President,” Tiernan told her. “The problem is simply that our growing building capacity has outstripped our ability to produce certain parts, mainly for the hyperdrive engines. We had anticipated that problem and were already establishing additional production facilities, but our shipwrights and yard workers have been, shall we say, excessively efficient.”

“So what’s the projection for the fleet’s strength?” McKenna asked.

Sabine smiled. “We’ll double the number of ships and nearly triple our warship tonnage in the next eighteen months.”

“And that’s a conservative estimate,” Tiernan added. “More importantly, by that time we’ll have naval shipyards established in sixteen systems, four times what we have now. So in case the Kreelans give us another sucker punch, we won’t have to worry so much about its impact on our shipbuilding.”

McKenna nodded, impressed. “And what about the Marines and Territorial Army?”

“We’ve found a candidate world that we’d like to set up as a primary Marine training facility,” Tiernan told her. “We’ll expand the Corps as the Navy builds its transport capacity, as that’s really the limiting factor beyond raw manpower. We certainly don’t have any shortage of volunteers.”

“And the Territorial Army is rapidly expanding, as well.” Sabine paused, considering how far they’d come from the chaos three years before. “We’ve got cadres fully established on every Confederation world now, and some of the bureaucratic interference we were starting to get from the governments considering secession has pretty much vanished since the Alger’s World operation.”

McKenna nodded in satisfaction. They had bought the Confederation some time to bind itself together and better prepare its defenses. It was time she desperately needed, because she had no doubt that this war, more than any other ever fought by humanity, was going to be a long, bloody affair.

We’ll win in the end
, she thought. There was no other option. Because in this war, the only alternative to victory for humanity would be its extinction. 

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

If you’ve enjoyed this trilogy from the
In Her Name
series so far, don’t miss the story that started it all,
Empire
!
 

Set one hundred years after the
First Contact
,
Empire
begins the tale of the climax of the human-kreelan war. 

To give you a taste of what’s to come, here’s the first chapter of
Empire
— enjoy!

* * *

The blast caught Solon Gard, an exhausted captain of New Constantinople’s beleaguered Territorial Army, completely by surprise. He had not known that the enemy had sited a heavy gun to the north of his decimated unit’s last redoubt, a thick-walled house of a style made popular in recent years. Like most other houses in the planet’s capitol city, this one was now little more than a gutted wreck.

But the Kreelan gun’s introductory salvo was also its last: a human heavy weapons team destroyed it with a lucky shot before the Territorial Army soldiers were silenced by a barrage of inhumanly accurate plasma rifle fire.

The battle had become a vicious stalemate.

A woman’s voice suddenly cut through the fog in Solon’s head as he fought his way out from under the smoking rubble left by the cannon hit. He found himself looking up at the helmeted face of his wife, Camilla. Her eyes were hidden behind the mirrored faceplate of the battered combat helmet she wore.

“Solon, are you hurt?”

“No,” he groaned, shaking his head, “I’m all right.”

She helped him up, her petite form struggling with her husband’s greater bulk: two armored mannequins embracing in an awkward dance.

Solon glanced around. “Where’s Armand?”

“Dead,” she said in a brittle voice. She wiped the dust from her husband’s helmet, wishing she could touch his hair, his face, instead of the cold, scarred metal. She gestured to the pile of debris that Solon had been buried in. The wall had exploded inward a few feet from where he and Armand had been. The muddy light of day, flickering blood-red from the smoke that hung over the city, revealed an armored glove that jutted from under a plastisteel girder. Armand. He had been a friend of their family for many years and was the godfather of their only son. Now… now he was simply gone, like so many others.

Solon reached down and gently touched the armored hand of his best friend. “Silly fool,” he whispered hoarsely. “You should have gone to the shelter with the others, like I told you. You could never fight, even when we were children.” Armand had never had any military training, but after his wife and daughter were killed in the abattoir their city had become, he had come looking for Solon, to fight and die by his side. And so he had.

“It’s only the two of us,” Camilla told him wearily, “and Enrique and Snowden.” Behind her was a pile of bodies in a dark corner, looking like a monstrous spider in the long shadows that flickered over them. The survivors had not had the time or strength to array them properly. Their goal had simply been to get them out of the way. Honor to the dead came a distant second to the desperation to stay among the living. “I think Jennings’s squad across the street may be gone, too.”

“Lord of All,” Solon murmured, still trying to get his bearings and come to grips with the extent of their disaster. With only the four of them left, particularly if Jennings’s squad had been wiped out, the Kreelans had but to breathe hard and the last human defensive line would be broken.

“It can always get worse,” a different female voice told him drily.

Solon turned to see Snowden raise her hand unenthusiastically. Platinum hair was plastered to her skull in a greasy matte of sweat and blood, a legacy of the flying glass that had peeled away half her scalp during an earlier attack. She looked at him with eyes too exhausted for sleep, and did not make any move to get up from where she was sitting. Her left leg was broken above the knee, the protruding bone covered by a field dressing and hasty splint that Camilla had put together.

Enrique peered at them from the corner where he and Camilla had set up their only remaining heavy weapon, a pulse gun that took two to operate. Its snout poked through a convenient hole in the wall. From there, Enrique could see over most of their platoon’s assigned sector of responsibility, or what was left of it. In the dreary orange light that made ghosts of the swirling smoke over the dying city, Enrique watched the dark figures of the enemy come closer, threading their way through the piles of shattered rubble that had once been New Constantinople’s premier shopkeeper’s district. He watched as their sandaled feet trod over the crumpled spires of the Izmir All-Faith Temple, the most beautiful building on the planet until a couple of weeks ago. Since the Kreelans arrived, nearly twenty million people and thirty Navy ships had died, and nothing made by human hands had gone untouched.

But beyond the searching muzzle of Enrique’s gun, the advancing Kreelans passed many of their sisters who had died as the battle here had ebbed and flowed. Their burned and twisted bodies were stacked like cordwood at the approaches to the humans’ crumbling defense perimeter, often enmeshed with the humans who had killed them. Enemies in life, they were bound together in death with bayonets and claws in passionate, if gruesome, embraces.

Still, they came. They always came.

Solon caught himself trying to rub his forehead through his battered helmet.
Lord, am I tired
, he thought. Their company was part of the battalion that had been among the last of the reserves to be activated for the city’s final stand, and the Territorial Army commander had brought them into action three days before. Three days. It had been a lifetime.

“One-hundred and sixty-two people, dead,” he whispered to himself, thinking of the soldiers he had lost in the last few days. But they had lasted longer than most. Nearly every company of the first defensive ring had been wiped out to the last man and woman in less than twenty-four hours. Solon and his company were part of the fourth and final ring around the last of the defense shelters in this sector of the city. If the Kreelans got through…

“Hey, boss,” Enrique called quietly. “I hate to interrupt, but they’re getting a bit close over here. You want me to light ‘em up?”

“I’ll do the honors,” Camilla told Solon, patting him on the helmet. “You need to get yourself back together.”

“No arguments here,” he answered wearily, propping himself against the remains of the wall. “I’ll keep on eye on this side.”

Camilla quickly took her place next to the gunner. “I’m glad you didn’t wait much longer to let us know we had company, Enrique,” she chided after carefully peering out at the enemy. “They’re so close I can see their fangs.” She checked the charge on the pulse gun’s power pack. A fresh one would last for about thirty seconds of continuous firing, an appetite that made having both a gunner and a loader to service the hungry weapon a necessity.

“Yeah,” Enrique smiled, his lips curling around the remains of an unlit cigarette butt he held clenched between his dirt-covered lips. He had tossed his helmet away the first thing, preferring to wear only a black bandanna around his forehead. His grime stained hands tightened on the gun’s controls and his eyes sighted on the line of advancing Kreelans. “Looks like they think we’re all finished, since we haven’t shot back at ‘em for a while.” He snickered, then snugged his shoulder in tight to the shoulder stock of the gun. “Surprise…”

Solon was hunched down next to a blown-out window, looking for signs of the Kreelans trying to flank them, when he noticed the shattered portrait of a man and woman on the floor next to him. He picked up the crushed holo image of the young man and his bride and wondered who they might have been. Saying a silent prayer for their souls, he carefully set the picture out of his way. Somehow, the image seemed sacred, a tiny reminder of the precariousness of human existence, of good times past, and perhaps, hopes for the future. These two, who undoubtedly lay dead somewhere in this wasteland, would never know that their own lives were more fragile and finite than the plastic that still struggled to protect their images.

He turned as he heard the coughing roar of Enrique’s pulse gun as it tore into the alien skirmish line. He listened as the gunner moderated his bursts, conserving the weapon’s power while choosing his targets. Solon was glad Enrique had lived this long. He was as good a soldier as could be found in the Territorial Army. They had all been good soldiers, and would make the Kreelans pay dearly for taking the last four lives that Solon had left to offer as an interest payment toward humanity’s survival.

As he looked through the dust and smoke, the thermal imager in Solon’s visor gave him an enhanced view of the devastation around him, the computer turning the sunset into a scene of a scarlet Hell. He prayed that his seven-year-old son, Reza, remained safe in the nearby bunker. He had lost count of the number of times he had prayed for his boy, but it did not matter. He prayed again, and would go on praying, because it was the only thing he could do. Reza and the other children of their defense district had been taken to the local shelter, a deep underground bunker that could withstand all but a direct orbital bombardment, or so they hoped. Solon only wished that he had been able to see his little boy again before he died. “I love you, son,” he whispered to the burning night.

Behind him, Camilla hurriedly stripped off the expended power pack from the pulse gun and clipped on another. She had come to do it so well that Enrique barely missed a beat in his firing.

Solon saw movement in a nearby building that was occupied by one of the other platoons: a hand waving at him from a darkened doorway. He raised his own hand in a quick salute, not daring to risk his head or arm for a more dashing salutation.

He made one more careful sweep of the street with his enhanced vision. Although he had spent his life in service to the Confederation as a shipbuilder, not as a hardened Marine or sailor, Solon knew that he needed to be extra careful in everything he did now. His body was past its physical limit, and the need for sleep was dragging all of them toward mistakes that could lead them to their deaths. Vigilance was survival.

As he finished his visual check, he relaxed slightly. All was as he had seen it before. Nothing moved. Nothing changed but the direction of the smoke’s drift, and the smell of burning wood and flesh that went with it. He felt more than heard the hits the other side of his little fortress was taking from Kreelan light guns, and was relieved to hear Enrique’s pulse gun yammer back at them like an enraged dog.