In Her Name: The Last War (19 page)

“I’m sure there’s a perfectly logical explanation to what’s happened that doesn’t involve aliens,” Burke said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. “We’ve had stranger things than this happen over the years. There’s not going to be any alien invasion. That’s ridiculous.”

“Excuse me, but how can you possibly assume that?” 

Burke and Sidorov turned to see a civilian woman in an eye-popping red dress stalk forward as if she wore the stars of an admiral. 

“And who the bloody hell are you?” Burke demanded hotly. “Security! Get this civilian out of here!”

“Captain,” Steph said quickly, recognizing the woman’s rank and knowing she only had seconds before she would be bodily thrown out of the command center, “I’m a journalist,” she quickly flashed her press ID, “and I can tell you that the secret’s already out of your hands. The best you can do is control it and spin it the way you want. And I can help you do that.”

“Bullshit!” Burke spat, motioning to the same two guards who had let the mystery woman into the command center. The captain’s expression left no doubt that they would get the ass-chewing of their lives later.

“I was up in one of the transit lounges when
Aurora
came in,” Steph rushed her words out as the two men gently but firmly took her by the arms and started hauling her out, “and there were dozens of people on their vidphones a minute later talking about it, with their noses pressed up to the observation windows,
looking at the fucking ship and talking about an alien invasion!
” 

Burke glanced at Sidorov and saw the indecision on his face. Again, if she was anything, she was direct. “Commander?”

“Ma’am, she may have a point,” he said as the guards continued to haul the woman out. “If she’s a legit journalist...”

“Hold it!” Burke suddenly ordered the guards. “Take her in there.” Burke pointed toward a small briefing room at the rear of the command center. “We’ll join you in a moment.”

* * *

Steph’s heart was hammering, not with fear but with excitement. She didn’t have a “yes” from the captain, but she had at least put off being tossed out on her ass.

The guards led her into the conference room and left her there for a few minutes before the captain, Burke was her name, according to the name placard embedded in her khaki uniform, and Commander Sidorov came in. The guards closed the door and waited outside.

“You’ve got precisely one minute to convince me why I shouldn’t put you under arrest,” Burke ordered brusquely. 

A minute
, Steph thought.
Please
. “Captain,
Aurora’s
arrival is news already. Look at any of the info channels and I’m sure you’ll see it. And somebody heard something to make them worry about an alien invasion. I don’t know where that angle came from, but that’s why my bloody editor called me: because he’d gotten wind of it from someone else!” She leaned closer. “And even if the invasion bit isn’t true, people are thinking and talking about it. The cat was already out of the bag before you took the station data networks down.” 

That elicited a stage-perfect “I-told-you-so” look from Sidorov to the captain. 

Her frown deepened. “Thirty seconds.”

Thirty seconds, my ass
, Steph thought.
You know I’m right
. “Listen. I’m a legitimate journalist,” she flashed her ID again, holding it right under the captain’s nose, “not some idiotic independent blogger. I can help you spin this the way you want, tell the story the way you want it told. Otherwise,” she nodded her head back toward the station core where thousands of people were still gawking at the
Aurora
and murmuring angrily about their lost network connectivity, “those idiots out there are going to fuck it up royally for you. I’ll bet there are a hundred journalists and five thousand bloggers who just bought tickets to come up and visit Africa Station to see for themselves.”

“Give me a break, lady,” Burke growled, not impressed. “No news hound is going to give us a free ride. What’s in it for you?”

“All I want,” Steph said in a rare moment of total and absolute truth, “is exclusive access. I’ll agree to any conditions you want, as long as they’re legal, but I get access to the ship, your personnel, the survivor,” her mind conjured up the image of the haunted-looking young man, wondering at the tale he had to tell, “and whatever else I may need to tell the story that wouldn’t normally be classified. Your way. In exchange, you keep all the other newsies out.”

“And why shouldn’t we just hold the usual press conferences and not tell any of you anything?” Burke countered.

“Because you won’t have control of shit,” Steph replied bluntly. “People are going to talk, and you can either make it look like the Navy is being up front and honest, or we can play the usual stupid government cover-up game. And you know how those end up.”

Burke looked at Sidorov, who only nodded. The captain suddenly leaned down and slapped the controls of a nearby comms terminal. 

“Yes, ma’am?” a young navy rating answered. 

“Get me Admiral Schiller,” Burke told her, directing the call to the commanding officer for public relations at Terran Navy Headquarters. “He’s expecting my call.” She turned toward Steph, her lips twitching upward in what might loosely be called a smile. 

Steph’s eyes widened as she realized that Burke had played her. The bottom line hadn’t changed: Steph would still get the exclusive access that she had wanted. But instead of negotiating from a position of strength and possibly getting out from under a pile of restrictions that Burke would probably slap on her story, she had practically begged for it. She felt a flush of anger and embarrassment at being manipulated so easily by the captain. It was a sensation she wasn’t used to, and definitely didn’t like.

“Schiller.” A middle-aged man with an olive complexion and a hawk nose appeared on the screen. “Has she agreed?”

“Yes, sir.” Burke glanced at Steph again. “We’ve got what we need.”

“Then get moving, captain,” Schiller ordered. “We’ve got to get on top of this situation before we have an interstellar panic.” He leaned closer, his eyes narrowing. “We need to know exactly what happened out there. And fast.”

CHAPTER TEN

Once over the initial shock, the Navy moved quickly. Burke decided to keep Sato on board
Aurora
for now, both to contain any further revelations and to quarantine him physically until they could make sure the ship hadn’t brought back any pathogens or other alien oddities that could pose a direct threat. Two tugs arrived and quickly maneuvered the big ship to a berth in a space dock that had been hurriedly emptied. Several compartments in the dockway were quickly converted over to sterile rooms to accommodate a team of military medical and hazardous materials specialists. And a small team of psychiatrists and physicians had been assembled to debrief and examine Sato.

As all this was going on, Burke, Sidorov and Steph sat around the table in
Aurora’s
main briefing room. It was uncomfortable wearing full vacuum gear, but until the biohazard team arrived with more appropriate suits, it would have to do. Admiral Patrick Tiernan, Chief of the Terran Navy Staff, had given Burke direct orders to start debriefing Sato immediately and determine if the whole thing was some sort of bizarre hoax, or if his claims of possible alien invaders were real. They didn’t have time to waste.

No one else was present as Sato told his story for the first time. Burke and Sidorov knew that he’d be telling it a hundred more times to the debriefing team and others later on. But for now it was a closed first-time session. 

Steph listened, enraptured as the young midshipman told his tale in a briefing that he’d carefully prepared during the long months he’d been alone on the ship. Burke had ordered that they all hold their questions until Sato had gone through his briefing the first time. As he spoke, Steph noticed that the expressions of both Navy officers grew more and more intense. Despite their initial incredulity, Sato’s briefing was extremely convincing. Despite her own natural skepticism, Steph found she believed him, especially when he brought out the dog tags of the captain and crewmen who had died in the arena. She could see him fighting for emotional control as he detailed the ordeal that left him as the sole survivor.

And then he showed them the artifacts, which he’d intentionally saved for last.

“This is the disk,” he told them, taking the shimmering cyan disk, his “ticket home,” from a pocket in his uniform and passing it to Captain Burke. He had kept it with him the entire trip, and he only gave it to the captain with the greatest act of will. 

Burke took it gingerly, finding it difficult to hold while wearing the bulky gloves. “Did you run any tests on it?” she asked him as she handed it to Sidorov.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sato told her. He tapped a few buttons on the briefing console and a close-up of the disk appeared on the main screen. “I ran a full battery of basic tests, using everything I either knew how to do or could learn in the time I had, and came up with almost nothing.” He nodded at Burke’s frown. “I realize that such testing isn’t my specialty, ma’am, but basic spectrographic analysis, which is one of the first tests I ran, with the equipment we have aboard is something I was taught early on by Lieutenant Amundsen. But look at the results.”

A chart appeared on the display. Most materials were made up of a variety of basic elements, each of which would appear as a line of data showing each element and the amount of that element as a percentage of the whole. But in this case, there were only two lines. The first indicated
Fe
, or iron, with a composition of 0.05183%. The remainder of the material was lumped under the ominous heading of
Unknown
.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Burke told him as she passed the disk to Sidorov. After turning it over gingerly in his hands, he passed it to Steph, who stared at it, fascinated.

“I know, ma’am,” he replied. “But I assure you, it’s accurate. I ran it a dozen times, using different equipment, calibrating everything carefully. I also performed as many other tests as I could think of that were non-destructive, all with the same results.” He shook his head. “I know someone here will conduct many more tests, but I will be surprised if the results differ. This,” he retrieved the disk from Steph, who parted with it only reluctantly after becoming transfixed by the shimmering cyan surface, “is a completely new material to our science.”

Steph noticed that he automatically put the disk back in the pocket of his uniform tunic.
He’s going to have a tough time parting with that little souvenir
, she thought.

“But it’s nothing compared to
this
.” An insulated box that was big enough to hold a basketball had been on the table the entire time. He removed the lid, setting it aside on the table. Then he reached in with both hands and pulled out the globe of the planet Keran. 

His audience gasped. 

“This is what is most important now,” he told them, holding it up so they could look at it closely. “I believe this represents the planet Keran, and is some sort of countdown timer to an invasion there.” He handed it to Burke.

“Goddamn suits,” she grumbled, having difficulty holding it. “I can’t seem to get a grip on it.”

“It’s not the suit, captain,” Sato told her. “It’s what the globe is made of. Or, perhaps, what it is
not
.”

“What do you mean?” Steph asked, fascinated by the incredibly sharp detail of everything shown on the globe, from the lights of the larger cities showing on the planet’s dark side, to the deltas of the major rivers emptying into the seas.

“I don’t believe that it is a physical object,” he explained. “It is more like an...energy capsule of some sort. That is why it’s so difficult to hold. It seems to have mass, but I haven’t been able to measure it accurately. And you can’t actually touch it: it’s almost like trying to handle some sort of self-contained repeller field.” He shook his head. “I’ve tried everything from pressing against it with my hand to a low-intensity laser to try and get an accurate measurement of its size. But the results are all inconsistent. The harder you press against it, the harder it presses back. I don’t have the necessary physics knowledge to explain, but I believe that what we’re seeing here
is
Keran, perhaps reflected in some sort of space-time bubble, and we are seeing it in real-time.”

“Impossible,” Sidorov breathed, gingerly taking the object. 

“What do you mean, ‘we’re seeing it in real-time’?” Steph asked.

“I believe that the cloud formations and other phenomena you see here on this object, at least the parts that aren’t reflections of what the aliens want us to see of the invasion, are actually happening, now, on Keran,” he replied, taking the globe back from her. He set it on a ring on the table that acted as a stand. “I have actually studied the cloud patterns, and in the months it has taken me to return home they haven’t repeated. I don’t think this is some sort of replica that the aliens produced from the ship’s navigational records. It is real.”

“How can you be sure?” Burke asked.

“It should be simple,” Sato told her. “I have made three-dimensional recordings of the object, and the files have been dated. If we can get meteorological data from Keran for those times, comparing them should be a trivial matter.” He tapped a few buttons on the console, bringing up the information on the files.

The thought sent a chill snaking down Burke’s spine. “If what you’re saying is true, the bastards must have a ship in the Keran system, spying on us and relaying this somehow.”

Reluctantly, Sato shook his head. “That is a possibility, captain, but...”

“Spit it out, midshipman,” she told him. “Now isn’t the time to hold back any ideas.”

“As I said, ma’am, I think this is more than some sort of transmitted image from a ship or sensor platform in the system. I think what we are seeing here really
is
Keran, as if it was contained in a separate bit of space-time.”