In Her Name: The Last War (28 page)

“Thirty seconds,” his flag captain said quietly into the mounting tension on the flag bridge. All the ships of the fleet had been at general quarters for the last two hours, as no one was sure how accurate the timer might be. Lefevre’s mouth compressed into a thin line as he stared at the flag bridge tactical display that showed the disposition of his ships. Without having any idea of what the enemy planned or was capable of, his tactical options were very limited. He didn’t want to put his ships in low orbit, deep inside Keran’s gravity well, because even with reactionless drives gravity was a source of drag on a ship’s acceleration potential: ships farther away from the planet were subject to far less gravity influence and had a tactical advantage when maneuvering. But he also couldn’t put his ships too far out from the planet, or they might not be able to respond rapidly in case the enemy was planning on an orbital bombardment rather than an assault on the surface with ground forces. Having no information about their intentions and capabilities was maddening.

So he had been forced to compromise. He had divided his fleet into five task forces and placed them around the planet in high orbit to cover the most important population centers on the surface. In low orbit were twenty-four civilian starliners, each carrying a heavy combat brigade and tended by dozens of shuttles that would get the troops down to the surface as quickly as possible if he received permission to deploy them. A flotilla of six destroyers was tasked with protecting the starliners, forming a protective globe around the formation of huge civilian vessels.

“Fifteen seconds,” the flag captain breathed. Lefevre shot the man a look, more bemused than annoyed, and his flag captain rewarded him with a sheepish grin. None of them wanted to believe anything was going to happen, but the Alliance was deeply worried, or they would not have been willing to absorb the enormous cost of deploying this many ships here. Lefevre watched as the timer counted down:
three...two...one...

“Zero,” he said to himself. “
Capitaine
Monet,” he said into a comms screen to the ship’s captain who stood tensely on the ship’s bridge, “there are no changes in sensor readings, I assume?”

“
Non, mon amiral
,” he replied. “Nothing but merchant traffic coming into the normal inbound jump zones. Three ships in the last two hours.”

Lefevre sighed.
All a wild goose chase
, he thought.
But it’s just as well
. “Very well,” he said. “We will remain at general quarters for another two hours, then resume our planned training-”

“
Amiral!
” the flag captain shouted, pointing at the flag bridge tactical display. The ships of the fleet were tied together in a data net, with the sensor readings and targeting data from each ship automatically distributed to the others to maximize situational awareness and coordinate their attacks. One of the task forces on the far side of the planet had picked up a set of bogies - unidentified contacts, presumed hostile - jumping in.

Lefevre looked up at the display and paled at what he saw. “
Oh, mon Dieu...
”

* * *

Aboard the two-person Terran
Hermes
class diplomatic courier ship
Alita
, pilot Amelia Cartwright was just settling down to a delicious dinner of reprocessed steak and potatoes from a foil packet when her copilot, Sid Dougherty, suddenly stiffened like he’d been hit with about ten thousand volts. They were on the modified courier run that had been established a number of weeks before, where at least one courier ship was in orbit and one was in transit at all times.
Alita
had just arrived the previous day, where she was supposed to remain for a week until their relief arrived. 

“Sid?” she asked, then turned to see what he was staring at. On the monitor that had been installed a few weeks before as part of the ship’s instrumentation upgrade, a wave of red icons had suddenly materialized roughly half a million kilometers from Keran. Inbound enemy ships. 

“Shit!” she exclaimed, tossing her food onto the deck and strapping herself in. “Come on, Sid! Get on the departure checklist and let’s get the hell out of here.” They should be able to get underway in only a couple of minutes. She only hoped they had that long.

“Got it,” Sid replied, tearing his eyes away from the screen. A tall, lanky Texan who always insisted on wearing a ridiculous-looking cowboy hat, she had never seen him rattled before. “Damn,” he drawled as he quickly punched up the remaining pre-flight checks, “I just never believed this would happen. Look at all those bastards! There must be two hundred ships!” 

“Keran control,” Cartwright called over the planetary navigation network, “this is Terran diplomatic courier ship
Alita
, requesting emergency departure clearance, outbound vector radial three-five-one mark zero.” The ship’s computer was also sending the information in a more detailed format to its counterpart at Keran control, but it was longstanding tradition to establish positive human-to-human contact, as well.

“
Alita
, this is Keran control,” a heavily accented but very pleasant voice replied immediately. “Please hold current position. Alliance fleet elements are on exercise in your sector, and have requested all vessels to remain clear. We will notify you immediately when we can grant departure clearance.”

Sid glanced at her and shook his head.
No goddamn way
, he mouthed silently.

Cartwright paused for just a moment. In the fifteen years that she had been in the diplomatic courier service, she had never once disobeyed a controller. But this time she had no choice: her orders were very explicit, and they were signed by the Secretary of State himself. “Negative, Keran control,” she said as Sid completed the last of the checklist items and gave her the thumbs-up that the ship was ready. She took the controls and poured power to the massive engines, breaking out of her assigned orbital position for open space. “My sincere apologies, but we have to depart immediately. Please inform the Alliance fleet that we’re an outbound friendly. They have enough targets to worry about without wasting munitions on us.” 

She broke off the connection before the controller could reply. “Get me the ambassador,” she told Sid.

“Already done,” he told her, nodding to a secondary view screen on the console, where the face of a regal-looking older woman calmly looked out at them.

“Madam Ambassador,” Cartwright said formally, “this is
Alita
. Be advised that a Kreelan fleet has - repeat,
has
- arrived in-system, and Alliance fleet units are maneuvering to engage. As you know, we have orders to jump out immediately. You should be receiving a download of all the data that we get until we jump, and if you have any last-minute information you want to send out with us, I request you transmit it immediately.”

“Thank you,
Alita
,” Ambassador Irina Pugachova replied. “Our final communiques are being uploaded as we speak, and I thank you for the sensor data. I have instructed our military attaché to provide it directly to the Keran military liaison. What is your assessment of the situation as it stands now?”

Cartwright tried not to cringe. “Ma’am...there are roughly two hundred enemy ships now in the system. I don’t know how they stack up against what the Alliance has in terms of tonnage and weapons, but the Frenchies are going to have their hands full.”

Ambassador Pugachova nodded gravely. She looked to the side briefly as someone spoke to her, then turned her attention back to Cartwright. “The invasion alert is being broadcast on the media. At least that did not take too long.” She looked back at Cartwright. “Get to the fleet rendezvous as quickly as you can. Good luck and godspeed, pilot.”

“Same to you, ma’am,” Cartwright said. The ambassador’s face disappeared as the screen went blank. The connection was closed.

“Five minutes to jump,” Sid informed her as
Alita
fled toward open space. Fortunately, the vector Cartwright had chosen was largely free of Alliance ships, and the Kreelans were on the far side of the planet. She watched the sensor display as two of the Alliance task forces that were closest to the mass of Kreelan ships maneuvered, trying to optimize the geometry for deploying their weapons. Two of the other task forces were quickly accelerating around the planet to join the fray, while the last task force remained on station opposite the battle, probably in case the Kreelans tried to flank them with another inbound force.

In low orbit, the cloud of shuttles hovering around the starliners began to plunge toward the surface, desperately trying to ferry nine heavy divisions to the ground as quickly as possible. 

“One minute,” Sid said quietly, and Cartwright could hear the low thrum of the hyperdrive capacitors spooling up. 

On the sensor screen, the nearest of the Alliance task forces had closed to within weapons range, and ships began to die. The sensor suite was not powerful enough to tell them anything about the weapons being employed, but icons representing both Alliance and Kreelan ships began to flare on the screen, then disappear. 

Just before her ship jumped, Cartwright saw another cloud of red icons appear right on top of the lone Alliance task force guarding the far side of the planet.

* * *

Tesh-Dar’s blood burned like fire as she felt the emotional surge from her sisters throughout the fleet as they began to engage the humans. Having no information on how many forces the humans may have gathered or how they might be deployed, she had settled on a simple strategy that was most likely to ensure rapid contact with at least some of the human ships, assuming there were any. While they knew a great deal about the humans after fully absorbing the information contained in the data of the primitive vessel on which the Messenger had come, there was much about these aliens that remained intriguing unknowns. She had divided the main attack fleet into two groups. The first, with about one hundred and fifty ships, would jump into the target system near the planet’s two small moons to engage any forces there. The second formation of roughly fifty ships, including her flagship, would jump into low orbit. 

She was not disappointed. The group bound for the moons in high orbit arrived first, and Tesh-Dar could feel in the Bloodsong the thrill of the warriors as they found human warships awaiting them. The fleet the humans had assembled was unimpressive, but would provide her warriors with an acceptable challenge. Tesh-Dar could only be pleased.

As her own group emerged in low orbit, she gasped with pleasant surprise: they had materialized right on top of a formation of human ships!

“Elai-Tura’an!” she called to the shipmistress, the warrior who was the rough equivalent in human terms to the ship’s captain. “Send forth the boarding parties, then engage at will!”

“Yes, my priestess!” Elai-Tura’an responded instantly as she carried out Tesh-Dar’s orders.

Throughout the ships of the second attack group, hundreds of warriors clad in what were to them primitive vacuum combat suits leaped from airlocks arranged along the ships’ flanks, steering toward the human ships that were even now turning to meet them.

* * *

“Primary kinetics,
fire!
”
Capitaine de vaisseau
Pierre Monet, captain of the Alliance heavy cruiser
Victorieuse
ordered over the orchestrated chaos of the bridge. The ship was rocked down to her keel as a set of twenty rounds of two hundred millimeter armor-piercing shells was fired from the ship’s five main gun turrets. While the current generation of lasers were generally more effective, kinetic weapons, not too far removed from the shells fired by wet navy ships centuries before, were far less expensive and could still be extremely lethal. 

Just after the main guns fired, a low humming sound echoed through the ship, one of the smaller close-in defense lasers firing at incoming Kreelan projectiles.

Amiral
Lefevre stood silently on the flag bridge, trying to make sense of the chaotic information on the tactical display. The task force to which
Victorieuse
was attached was involved in the equivalent of a knife fight with the second group of Kreelan ships that had jumped in. While this Kreelan force was only slightly bigger than his own task force, his formation had essentially lost any semblance of tactical integrity. The Alliance datalinks were still up, allowing their ships to coordinate their fire, but the targets were so close that the French ships were now in danger of committing fratricide. 

“
Triomphante
reports she’s being boarded!” one of the tactical officers shouted. 

“
What?
” Lefevre demanded, incredulous. He had heard the report of the Kreelans boarding the Terran survey ship, but had dismissed the notion. It was a ridiculous concept in modern space warfare.

“Boarders, sir!” the officer repeated. “They report aliens in vacuum suits are aboard, attacking the crew.”

“Sir,”
Capitaine
Monet interrupted, worry lining his face as he looked out from the view screen on the flag bridge, “sensors are showing a cloud of objects directly in front of us, on a direct vector from one of the enemy ships.” 

Boarders
, Lefevre thought again.
What kind of enemy are we fighting who would throw away their people in such a fashion?
But he didn’t hesitate. “Fight your ship, captain.”

Monet nodded, then ordered his weapons officer, “Put the forward batteries under manual control. Sweep those damn things from our path.”

* * *

Li’ara-Zhurah floated through space with the dozens of other warriors of the attack group she led, trying to reach one of the many human ships that were maneuvering wildly in the fierce melee taking place around her. She hated the primitive vacuum suit she had to wear, but had fought a series of fierce challenges for the honor of wearing it, and would have done so again without a second thought. Her blood sang with the rapture and pain of her sisters who now fought and died in the battle raging above the human planet. Her hands clenched reflexively in anticipation as her chosen target, one of the larger human cruisers, swept toward her, belching fire at the attacking warships of the Imperial fleet.