In Her Name: The Last War (62 page)

* * *

On La Seyne, Emmanuelle Sabourin saw the news about the formation of a new interplanetary government, the Confederation of Humanity, that would bring together the Alliance with Earth, and any other worlds that wanted to join for mutual protection against the Kreelan menace. 

Sitting in a café on a side street in the capital city of Rouen, sipping at a cup of strong coffee, she watched the reaction of the people around her as the news was broadcast over the planetary web. Most, she saw, were happy about the news. It gave them some hope that humanity might have a chance against the aliens.

Of that, Sabourin was not so sure. She herself should not have been here, relaxing like a tourist. She should be dead with the rest of the crew of the
Jean Bart
. But in an ironic twist of fate, when
Amiral
Lefevre was distributing the Terran Marines among the Alliance ships, someone had miscounted and the team earmarked for one of the destroyers was short by two people. Sabourin had volunteered to go with them. Emotionally drained as she had been, she wasn’t about to sit by and leave one of their ships with a weak ability to defend itself against the horrid boarders. As fate would have it, the destroyer, while damaged by enemy fire, had managed to survive the last frantic engagement and had jumped to safety. 

What caught her eye in the news report was the proposal to formally merge the combat forces of all constituent planets into a unified Confederation military, including a navy, ground forces (which people had begun to talk about as a Territorial Army), an aerospace arm, and a marine force that would fight from the ships of the fleet as the Terran Marines had at Keran. As she herself had. The report said that the new Confederation Marine Corps (the name had not been officially blessed, as the new government did not technically exist) was in desperate need of any personnel with combat experience to help train the wave of volunteers that was flooding into military recruiting centers across Earth and the Alliance worlds.

Sabourin only considered the thought as long as it took her to finish her coffee. Then she picked up her satchel and headed down the street toward the naval headquarters building where she had been temporarily posted. Her new commander had told her in no uncertain terms that she could have whatever assignment she wanted. But she had been unable, unwilling, perhaps, was more accurate, to decide on what her next posting should be.

Until now.

* * *

Sergent Chef
Roland Mills felt very conspicuous wearing the red ribbon of the
Légion d'honneur (Commandeur)
on his uniform as he strode off the Earth-orbit shuttle from Africa Station onto the tarmac at the newly renamed Confederation Marine Corps Headquarters at Quantico in what was once the United States. The
Légion d'honneur
was the highest award the Alliance had for gallantry in the face of the enemy, much as the Medal of Honor was for the Terran military forces. Precious few legionnaires had won it in recent history, and few of those had been awarded a class higher than
Chevalier
. The reason Mills felt self-conscious about it was that he really had no other decorations to speak of, other than a couple of deployment medals. The bright red ribbon blazed from the drab camouflage of his battle uniform.

He was among the advance party, led by Colonel Grishin, sent by the Legion to coordinate its incorporation as a regiment in the new Marine Corps. Mills knew that the bureaucratic battles fought to keep the Legion as a separate entity had been every bit as fierce in their own way as the Battle for Keran, as it was now known. But in the end the Legion’s leadership had been given a simple choice: become part of the new Marine Corps and continue to fight as an elite unit, or be dismantled and absorbed into the new Territorial Army formations that were being formed for homeland defense on every planet that was planning to join the nascent Confederation Government. 

Faced with such an ultimatum, and after suffering the near-total loss of every single existing combat regiment, they had chosen for the Legion to become part of the Corps.

Mills shook hands with the greeting party, a group of Marines who, like him and most of the other legionnaires present, were veterans of Keran. But the term “veteran” was relative: none of the Marines here had actually fought the enemy, while Mills and the other legionnaires had seen more than their fair share of combat against the Kreelans. The Marines -
the
other
Marines
, Mills corrected himself - were eager to make up for that shortcoming, and wanted to take advantage of the legionnaires’ experience.

As with nearly everyone he had met who knew what had happened on Keran, the very first thing they wanted to hear about was the famous hand-to-hand battle Mills had fought against the huge Kreelan warrior. 

Mills had always thought that telling the tale would get easier over time through sheer mindless repetition of his greatest adrenalin rush. But it hadn’t. It had only gotten more difficult with every telling. He had never been one to have nightmares, but after returning home the warrior began to haunt his dreams. More often than not, he woke in a cold sweat, breathing as if he had run a marathon, with the memory of her snarling blue face and ivory fangs fading like an afterimage in his eyes. He was smart enough to know that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress, but he was too proud to seek counseling. He also knew that the Legion and the Corps needed him and those like him who had survived, and there simply wasn’t time to waste kibitzing with a head doctor. And he would lose any chance he might have to go back into combat. Of that, more than anything else, was he afraid.

As he began to tell his latest group of eager listeners of his exploits, he put his hands on his thighs under the table so no one could see how badly his tightly clenched fists were shaking.

* * *

Lieutenant Amelia Cartwright, now an officer of the Terran (soon to be Confederation) Navy, sat in the pilot’s chair of the recently commissioned military courier
Nyx
. Her hands tensed on the controls as the navigation computer went through its litany of announcements prior to the ship’s reemergence into normal space. This would be the sixth mission she had flown in as many weeks from a support ship that had been positioned roughly a day’s jump from Keran: far enough to hopefully avoid detection by Kreelan ships in the system, yet close enough to minimize the travel time for the couriers. 

The design of the
Nyx
and her sisters emphasized speed and maneuverability above all else, and they were being used to monitor what was happening to Keran. The news they brought back was increasingly grim.

Any hopes the human sphere had of retaking Keran any time soon, if ever, had quickly been dispelled after the first few reconnaissance missions had returned. Keran was being transformed with frightening rapidity. While the changes being made appeared to be compatible with human life, the fundamental features of the planet were being reshaped by alien hands. The atmosphere was being altered with a combination of compounds that gave it a slight magenta hue. On the ground, large areas of the planet’s deserts were turning dark, as if they were being transformed into black seas whose composition eluded every attempt at analysis. 

It was increasingly difficult to ascertain the fate of Keran’s people, but everyone expected the worst. Every reconnaissance mission brought back fewer and fewer recordings of transmissions from the surface, and every single one of them was a cry of agonizing despair. The Kreelans were killing them. All of them. As best anyone had been able to piece together, the aliens herded groups of them into arenas built for the purpose, to fight and die exactly as the crew of
Aurora
had. Men, women, children: it made no difference. They were forced to fight, and if they didn’t, they were simply killed. Humanity was now in a war for survival, and the loser would become extinct. 

“Standby for transpace sequence,” the navigation computer purred. Cartwright had programmed a very close emergence this time, using the data from her last jump to refine the coordinates. It would be right on the theoretical edge of where the planet’s gravity well would pose a major danger during their reemergence.

As the computer counted down the last seconds, Cartwright wondered how many ships would be in-system this time. The average had been a hundred ships, about half of them cruisers and the rest destroyers. What no one had been able to figure out was how the Kreelans were managing to change the planet so quickly without having a huge number of ships hauling in the necessary materials and machinery. It was as if they were simply doing it by magic. And that wasn’t possible. Was it?

“...three...two...one,” the computer said. “Normal space emergence.”

Hyperspace dissolved into a panorama of the deepest black, and where Keran should be was...

“Holy Mother of God,” Sid, now a lieutenant, junior grade in the Navy, breathed beside her. 

The surface of Keran, the outlines of its continents where land met the sea, had changed. The deserts that had been turning dark were now gone, replaced by plains of grass. The ship’s telescope array hunted the unfamiliar landscape for the major cities. Even during the last mission, they had still been clearly visible, even as burned out scars in the landscape. Now...they were gone, erased as if they had never existed. 

“Jesus,” Cartwright whispered. “How is this possible?”

“I don’t know,” Sid told her, his eyes wide, frightened by the changes in the planet below. “And it looks like they have more ships.”

The tactical display showed nearly two hundred ships in near-Keran space and around its moons. The ship’s telescope array took images of them, as well. As with the planet’s deserts earlier, both moons were being consumed by a sea of blackness, some unknown and unfathomable material that denied its secrets to human science.

“Just a suggestion,” Sid told her tightly as
Nyx
sped ever closer to the planet and the warships sailing around it, “but wouldn’t it be a good idea to jump out?”

“Not yet,” she said, adjusting the ship’s course minutely. “I want to get all the data we can. Are you picking up any signals?” On previous missions, they had always been able to contact someone on the surface.

Sid didn’t answer her right away as he worked the ship’s instruments. After a few precious minutes, he said, “Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.”

They shared a glance, then looked back at the globe of the planet, now alien and forbidding. Cartwright’s hands clenched as she fought to keep her emotions under control. She knew that there were most likely still survivors on the planet, fleeing or fighting for their lives. But during the last reconnaissance mission they had picked up
hundreds
of different transmitters, radio and laser-links. Now there was nothing but shattering silence. Survivors there might yet be, but the silence on the airwaves told how effective the Kreelans had been in hunting them down.

Nyx
flew onward for another minute, then two, when half a dozen of the cruisers that were headed to intercept her were almost close enough to fire.

“Time to go, boss,” Sid reminded her.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Cartwright said grudgingly as she hauled the ship around in a tight chandelle turn. 

Five long minutes later they reached their jump point, and
Nyx
disappeared into hyperspace.

* * *

Tesh-Dar stood upon the central dais of one of the arenas on this, the newest world to be claimed for the Empire. Reshaping this planet was a a reflection of the compulsion of her race to bend the universe to their will. It was not for want of more living space: the Empire was so vast that Tesh-Dar could have traveled most of her life in the swiftest of starships, and still not reached from one far frontier to the other. The Empire spanned ten thousand suns and even more planets. When there had been need of a world for a particular purpose, or in a particular place as suited the Empress, often as not the builders had simply created it. Such was the power of Her Children.

But her race lived and breathed for battle. And here on this planet, in this arena, the final battle was being fought, pathetic though it had become. A brace of her warriors, using only the weapons they had been born with, faced off against the last human survivors. They had been very adept at evading their hunters, but at last Tesh-Dar had called an end to the game. Great wheels were turning in the heart of the Empire, and this first great combat between humans and Her Children was to be brought to a final ending.

The humans before her were dirty and starving. A ten of males and half as many females were all that remained of the planet’s original population. In the many matches Tesh-Dar had watched as the humans had been sacrificed to the demands of the Way of her people, she had seen many fight bravely; some had clearly cried for mercy, of which there was none; others stood with what she admired as a quiet dignity, refusing to fight, until they at last were painlessly put to death. None were tortured or forced to endure pain beyond what was experienced in battle in the arena. Tesh-Dar understood the concept of cruelty, but did not believe it applied to her people. Their Way was extraordinarily difficult, and death came all too easily. But pain was never inflicted needlessly, or as an end unto itself.

One by one, the humans fell to her warriors. But these humans, the last upon this planet, did not give up, and did not surrender. They fought to the last, and died with honor.

* * *

In the capital city on his home planet of Nagano, Commander Ichiro Sato ignored the veiled stares he received as he made his way along a crowded street that led to his childhood home. He wore his dress black uniform, which made him stand out even more among the dour salarymen in cheap suits and the women in colorful kimonos, eyes downcast, who streamed past him. Around his neck he wore the Terran Medal of Honor, the only one to be granted for the battle of Keran that wasn’t posthumous. He hadn’t known most of those who had received “The Medal,” as it was often called. But his own decoration served to remind him of the one he had: Gunnery Sergeant Pablo Ruiz. Sato’s recommendation to award Ruiz The Medal had been taken up-chain almost without comment, followed by Silver Stars for bravery in the face of the enemy for every man and woman of
McClaren’s
Marine detachment. Ensign, now Lieutenant, Bogdanova and Senior Chief Petty Officer DeFusco also wore Silver Stars, and every single survivor of the
McClaren
had received at least a Bronze Star. They had all earned it. And more.