In Her Name: The Last War (2 page)

“Boxed Set” Collections

In Her Name (Omnibus)

In Her Name: The Last War

Thrillers

Season Of The Harvest

Visit
AuthorMichaelHicks.com
for the latest updates!

FIRST CONTACT

CHAPTER ONE

Captain Owen McClaren was extremely tense, although a casual observer would never have thought so. Commanding the survey vessel
TNS Aurora
, he was one of the best officers in the fleet, and to his crew he had never appeared as anything but calm and in control. Even when one of the ship’s newly refitted reactors had suffered a breach during their last run into dry dock, McClaren’s deep voice had never wavered, his fatherly face had never betrayed a hint of fear or apprehension as he personally directed the engineering watch to contain the breach. A man of unusual physical and moral courage, he was the perfect captain for the exploratory missions the
Aurora
and her sister ships mounted into distant space, seeking new homes for humanity.

McClaren had made thousands of jumps in his twenty-year career, but every one was like the very first: an adrenaline joyride. As the transpace sequence wound down to zero, his heart would begin to pound and his muscles tensed like spring steel. It wasn’t fear that made him react that way, although there were enough things that could go wrong with a jump to make fear a natural enough reaction. 

No, what made the forty-three-year-old former middleweight boxing champion of the Terran Naval Academy hold the arms of his command chair in a white-knuckle grip wasn’t fear. It was anticipation. To
Aurora’s
captain, every jump, particularly out here in uncharted space, was a potential winning lottery ticket, the discovery of a lifetime. No matter where the
Aurora
wound up, as long as she arrived safely, there was bound to be a wealth of astrogational information to help human starships travel ever farther from Man’s birthplace: Earth. 

On rare occasions, precious habitable planets were to be found. Finding such systems was the primary goal of the survey ships. McClaren was currently the fleet’s leading “ace,” with twelve habitable planets to his credit in return for nearly fifteen years of ship-time, sailing through uncharted space.

“Stand by for transpace sequence,” the pilot announced, her words echoing through every passageway and compartment in the
Aurora’s
five hundred meter length. 

McClaren tensed even more, his strong arm and back muscles flexing instinctively as if he were back in the ring, preparing to land a solid upper cut to the chin of an imaginary opponent. But his calm expression never wavered. “Very well,” he answered, his dark brown eyes drinking in the growing torrent of information on the navigation display.

“Computer auto-lock engaged,” interjected a faux female voice reassuringly. McClaren always had to suppress a grimace: the one thing he had never liked about
Aurora
was the computer’s voice. It reminded him too much of his first wife.

For the next few seconds, the crew was little more than excess baggage as the ship’s computer guided the transition from hyperspace back into the Einsteinian universe with a precision measured in quadrillionths of a second. While the bridge, which was buried deep in the
Aurora’s
core habitation section, had no direct observation windows, the wraparound display depicted the eerie streams of light that swirled around the ship in complete detail. But what the human eye saw in the maelstrom of quantum physics beyond the ship’s hyperdrive field was an illusion. It was real in one sense, but in another it wasn’t. Space and time as humans commonly understood it did not exist in this realm. As the captain of a starship, McClaren had to understand both the theory and the practical application of hyperspace and the means to travel through it. But he was content in the knowledge that he never could have come up with the breakthroughs that allowed this miracle to happen: he stood on the shoulders of the scientific giants who had made the first test jump into hyperspace long before he was born.

While in hyperspace, the display would normally show the computer’s assessment of the relative location of stars and other known celestial waypoints as the ship moved along its straight-line (relatively speaking) course. But McClaren always cleared the display to show what was really outside the ship just before they dropped back into normal space. It was a sight he never tired of.

“Ten seconds...” the computer’s voice began counting down to the transition. “Five...four...three...two...one....sequence initiated. Hyperspace Engines disengaged.”

The display suddenly shifted, the swirling light streams condensing into a bright yellow sun against a background of stars. McClaren knew that the system had several planets; gravitational perturbations observed from their last jump point had confirmed that much. The question was whether there were any orbiting at a distance from the star where water could exist as a liquid. For where there was liquid water, there was the possibility of carbon-based life. The trick now was to find them. Planets were huge close up, but in the vast expanse of a star system they seemed incredibly small.

“Engineering confirms hyperspace engines are secure, sir,” the executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Rajesh Kumar, reported. “Engineering is ready to answer all bells, and the ship is secured for normal space.”

Nodding his thanks to his exec, McClaren turned to the most important person currently on the bridge: the navigator. “Raisa, what’s the word?”

The navigator looked like she would have given McClaren a run for his money in the boxing ring. Big-boned and heavily muscled, Lieutenant Raisa Marisova had in fact been a champion wrestler in her college years. But it was her genius at stellar astrogation that had won her a place on the
Aurora’s
all-volunteer crew.

“Well...” she murmured as she rechecked her readings for what McClaren knew was probably the fifth time in the few moments the ship had dropped back into normal space. Raisa was always able to confirm the ship’s emergence point so quickly because her calculations for pointing the various telescopes and other sensors at known stars to make a positional fix were always so precise. “It seems we are...right where we are supposed to be,” she said as she turned and smiled at her captain, “give or take a few meters. We’re above the ecliptic plane based on our pre-jump survey information. Now it’s up to the survey team to find your next habitable planet, captain.”

McClaren grinned, then opened a channel to the entire ship. “Well, crew, it looks like we’ve made another successful jump, and emerged right on target. The bad news is that we’re even farther out in the Middle of Nowhere. But that’s what they pay us for. Great job, everyone.” The last few words were more than just a token verbal pat on the back: he truly meant it. Unlike most transits that took regular ships into hyperspace for a few days or even a week or two, the
Aurora
routinely made jumps that lasted for weeks or months. While McClaren’s crew made it look easy, he knew quite well that an amazing amount of planning and preparation went into every jump, and his crew followed it up with painstaking diligence every moment they were in hyperspace. It wasn’t just that they didn’t want to wind up somewhere other than where they had planned, or because their captain expected perfection. It was because they had no intention of settling for second best. Period. “Everybody gets an extra round on me when we get back to the barn. Carry on.”

The bridge crew grinned at one another: the captain ran up a huge bar tab on every mission, but he never failed to deliver when the ship made port.

They had no way of knowing that all but one of them would be dead in a few short hours.

* * *

The stranger’s arrival was no surprise to the Imperial warships that orbited the Settlements on the third and fourth planets from the star. While even the greatly advanced technology of the Empire could not track ships while in hyperspace, they could easily detect the gravity spikes of vessels about to emerge in normal space. The stranger had been detected many hours before, as measured in the time of humans.

While this system was at the distant edge of the Empire, far from the Homeworld and the Empress, its defenses were not lacking: of the dozens of starships in orbit around the two settled worlds and the hundreds plying the asteroid belt, four were battlecruisers built within the last century. Humans might have considered them old, until they understood that the warriors of the Empire had sailed among the stars for over one hundred thousand of Earth’s years. Even the most ancient of Her warships still plying the void between the stars was tens of thousands of years more advanced than the arriving stranger. Humans would barely have recognized them as starships.

But the warriors charged with protecting this far-flung system had no way of knowing the primitive nature of the incoming stranger. Nor would they have cared. The Empire had encountered other sentient races over the millennia, and the first contact protocol was no different now than it had been in ages past: the stranger would be greeted with overwhelming force.

In unison, the four enormous battlecruisers left orbit for the gravity anomaly at maximum velocity, safe behind shields that could protect them from titanic energy discharges and made them all but invisible to anything but direct visual observation. 

Behind them, smaller warships and the planetary defense systems prepared to welcome the new arrival should it prove more than a match for the great warships sent to greet it.

* * *

“Bridge, this is Survey...”

Captain McClaren frowned despite himself. He knew that Lieutenant Amundsen’s survey team worked fast, but they had been in-system less than fifteen minutes. It often took days for them to identify the orbits of any planets in the temperate zone unless they had extensive perturbation data on the star or stars in the system. And that they rarely had: humanity’s rapid expansion to the stars didn’t allow for years-long observations of any given star. His frown deepened as he took in the expression on Amundsen’s face in the comms display. The normally very reserved man was uncharacteristically excited. And just as frightened. “What is it, Jens?”

“Sir...” Amundsen began, his pale blue eyes darting away momentarily to another display. “Captain...we’ve confirmed not just one, but
two
planets in the temperate zone...”

“Hot damn!” McClaren couldn’t help himself. One planet that might have liquid water was miracle enough. Their pre-jump analysis had suggested there was one, but two had been too much to hope for. “That’s fantastic!”

“Sir...they’re both inhabited,” Amundsen said in hoarse whisper. Normally a quiet man, often more at home with the stars and planets than his fellow human beings, the volume of his voice dropped with every word. “We didn’t have to find their orbits. We found them from their neutrino and infrared readings.” He paused. “I’ve...I’ve never seen anything like this. Even Sol system doesn’t have this level of activity. The two planets in the temperate zone are highly industrialized. There are other points of activity throughout the asteroid belt, and on several moons orbiting a solitary gas giant. We have also observed ships through the primary telescope. Hundreds of them. They are...nothing like ours.”

The captain sat back, stunned.
First contact
, he thought. Humans had explored thousands of star systems and endless volumes of space, but had never once encountered another sentient species. They had found life aplenty on the hundred-odd discovered worlds that would support human life or could be terraformed. From humble bacteria to massive predators that would have been at home with Earth’s dinosaurs, life in the Universe was as expansive as it was diverse if you looked long and far enough. But no one had discovered a single sign of sentient life beyond the mark
homo sapiens
had left behind in his celestial travels. 

Until now.

“Jesus,” the captain breathed, conscious now of the entire bridge crew staring at him. They hadn’t heard Amundsen’s words, but they immediately picked up on the captain’s reaction. “XO,” he ordered, pulling his mind back to the here and now, “let’s have the first contact protocols.” He looked pointedly at Kumar. “I want to make damn sure these folks understand we’re harmless.”

“Aye, sir,” Kumar replied crisply as his fingers flew over his terminal. “Coming up on display one.” A segment of the bridge wraparound screen darkened as the standing orders for first contact appeared.

“Lieutenant Amundsen,” McClaren ordered, “let’s see some of these ships of yours on display two.”

“Sir.” Amundsen’s face bobbed about slightly in the captain’s comms terminal as he patched the telescope feed to another segment of the main bridge display.

“Lord of All,” someone whispered. The
Aurora’s
primary telescope was nearly ten meters across, and dominated the phalanx of survey instruments mounted in the massive spherical section that made up the ship’s bow. Normally used to search for and map stellar and planetary bodies, it could also be pressed into service to provide high magnification visuals of virtually anything, even moving objects that were relatively close, such as nearby (in terms of a stellar system) ships. 

But what it showed now was as unlike the
Aurora
as she herself was unlike a wooden sailing ship. While the
Aurora
was largely a collection of cylindrical sections attached to a sturdy keel that ran from the engineering section at the stern to the instrumentation cluster at the bow, the alien ship displayed on the bridge display was insectile in appearance, her hull made up of sleek curves that gave McClaren the impression of a gigantic wasp.