In Her Name: The Last War (83 page)

“All ahead, one quarter,” Sato ordered. “Keep us in tight formation, helm.”

“Inter-ship datalink acquired, captain,” the young tactical officer announced, and information on the nearby planets and ships suddenly blossomed into life on the display. The sensors of all the ships in the task force were linked together, with each ship sending what it “saw” to the other ships. The datalink would do the same for targeting information, allowing the task force to fight as a tightly integrated weapons complex, rather than individual ships. It was a wonderful system, but the Kreelans had proven at Keran that it could be disrupted, with devastating effect. Since then, while it was still used on a regular basis, every crew and squadron trained to function effectively without it.

“Any hostiles?” Sato asked, carefully filtering the tension from his voice.

“Negative, sir,” the tactical officer reported. Unlike Sato, his voice wavered slightly, betraying how tense he was. Like most of the crewmen aboard
Yura
and the other ships of the task force, this was his first combat patrol. “I see three Saint Petersburg coast guard cutters in low orbit, but that’s it for ships in the order of battle database. Everything else is either a freighter or an unknown. None of the vessels has changed course or activated additional sensors. No new emanations from the planet or the moon. There’s no reaction at all that we can see.”

Sato frowned. Something was wrong. Any planet, particularly now that humanity was at war with the Empire, would react to a fleet of warships appearing in their system. They would be insane not to.

He stared at the display, searching for clues. The ships of the task force appeared as blue icons, while every other ship in the system was painted in yellow: not hostile, but not confirmed as friendly, either. If a ship was later confirmed to be a friendly vessel, it would change to green on the display.

And that’s not bloody likely
, Sato thought grimly as the Confederation task force moved in closer to the planet.

* * *

Valentina sped through the forest as fast as she dared. If the fleet had stayed on schedule, they were already in-system, waiting for her signal. She was late.

“Damn it,” she muttered venomously as she gunned the vehicle across a small creek, the oversized drive wheels clawing for purchase in the soft soil of the opposite bank. The distance from the road to where she had buried her cache of equipment had seemed much shorter when she had walked into the train station after she arrived. They had made good time getting here, thanks to everyone’s fear of anything having to do with the secret police, but these last few kilometers had been nerve-wracking.

Then she saw it. She had buried her equipment container near a dead tree that had been split by a lightning strike. “
Slava Bogu
,” she said. “Thank God.”

“God has nothing to do with this,” Sikorsky said as she pulled the vehicle to a stop.

Ignoring him, she jumped out and ran to the spot, seven paces due south from the trunk of the tree, where she had buried her gear. The vehicle they’d stolen had no utility tools like a shovel, so she simply dropped to her knees and began to claw at the ground. “Help me,” she pleaded. “We’ve got to hurry.”

Sikorsky simply stared at her for a moment. Then, with a sigh of resignation, he got down on his knees and began to dig. 

In five minutes they pulled a cylindrical container about as long as Valentina’s arm and as big around as her leg from the ground. Sikorsky put his hand on the small control panel that was inset into the casing.

“No!” she cried, batting his hand away.

“What?” he asked angrily. “I help you, and this is—”

“It’s booby-trapped, Dmitri,” she explained quickly as she moved her hands in a peculiar way over the casing, pressing gently at several points. “The access panel you see here is a fake. If you’d tried to open it that way, it would have exploded and killed you. And me.”

With a faint popping sound, the cylinder opened. She reached in and extracted a black device that was as thick as her little finger and fit neatly in her palm. Swiping a finger across one edge, the face lit up in a small display. 

Sikorsky noticed that the finger she had used to touch the device had come away bloody. 

“It’s validating that it’s my DNA,” she breathed as the face of the device suddenly glowed amber. Then she said in English, “The standard four square is hex. Copernicus. Execute.” Glancing up at Sikorsky, she explained, “It’s a randomly generated code phrase. That, plus my voice print and DNA will enable it.”

The face of the device suddenly glowed green. There were no numbers or other data displayed, just a monochrome green. 

Closing her eyes in concentration, Valentina began dictating a stream of numbers that would tell the fleet about the hidden nuclear weapons facility and where to find it.

* * *

“We are taking a tremendous risk, comrade.” Korolev’s voice was soft, but the threat was clear. 

Marshal Antonov nodded. Despite Korolev’s implicit threat, he was not nervous. It was not that he doubted what would happen to him if his plan failed, it was simply that he knew his plan could
not
fail. “It will work, comrade chairman,” he said confidently. “As long as our friends in the secret police managed to do their job.” He shot a sideways glance at Morozov, who sat quietly at his place at the table. “The Confederation ships that just arrived will either surrender or be destroyed.”

“What if they try to jump out when your trap is sprung?” one of the other ministers asked.

Antonov shook his head. “If what we know about their naval procedures is true, they will not have time. I believe they will try to engage the force of warships we will soon send to greet them. When they do, they will be within range of the
special
,” he glanced sourly at Morozov, “torpedoes. These weapons are very fast, far faster than the Confederation designs: their ships will not have time to cycle their jump engines before they are destroyed.”

Korolev nodded, satisfied. Then he turned to Morozov. “And were you, comrade, successful in your part of this grand scheme?”

“Quite, comrade chairman,” he said with a carefully controlled expression. He had no doubts that Antonov already knew of the disaster at Morozov’s own headquarters, but the defense minister apparently was holding back that bit of news from the chairman to use at a future time when it would prove particularly detrimental. In the end, however, it would do Antonov little good: the goal had been for the two Confederation spies to escape and not be suspicious that their getaway had, in fact, been planned. Morozov had intended for them to be followed so they could be quickly rounded up after they had done whatever they needed to do to contact the Confederation, but that part had not come to fruition.
Obviously
, he thought, cursing the dead colonel who had let things get so out of hand. The fool’s family was already on their way to a labor camp in the far south, where they would spend the rest of their miserable lives. “The spies are away, just as we planned,” he said in a half-truth. “If what we suspect is true, you should see the result soon enough from the actions of the Confederation ships.”

They did not have long to wait.

* * *

When she had finished dictating the stream of numbers, Valentina quickly set the device down on the ground and grabbed Sikorsky with one hand, holding the cylinder in the other. “Come with me,” she said as she quickly walked away. “You don’t want to be near it when it transmits.”

“Why?” Sikorsky asked, stumbling after her as she quickly pulled him along. He kept glancing over his shoulder at the small device, wondering what could be so—

The forest behind him where she had placed the device suddenly lit up, blindingly bright. He shut his eyes and turned away, only to be knocked to his knees by a powerful blast. 

“Does
everything
you brought with you explode?” he demanded as she pulled him back to his feet. 

“The ship that dropped me off left some microsats in high orbit to relay any messages to the fleet,” she said as she led him back to their stolen vehicle. “With a device as small as that transmitter, the only way to generate the power for a strong enough signal is to create a small explosion and a pulse wave.” She looked at him. “Does that make sense?”

“I understand the concept,” he grumbled, “but what if you have to tell them something else? You no longer have a way to communicate.”

“I have a shorter-range transmitter,” she said, showing him the watch she had taken from the cylinder and strapped to her wrist. “It won’t reach the fleet, but when my extraction team comes...”

She stopped as they reached the vehicle, and she turned to Sikorsky. “Dmitri,” she told him, “you can come back with me. The Confederation will grant you asylum, give you a new life.”

He said nothing for a long moment as he stared out at the forest around them. “I cannot leave, Valentina,” he said quietly. They had gone over this earlier, but it would have been a lie to say that he had not been thinking about it. The final answer, however, had not changed. “I am disgusted by what our leaders have done to our people, to my family. I helped you in hopes that, in some small way, it might change things for us, make things better, even if not for me.” He turned to look at her. “I could not live with myself if I simply walked away. That would make me feel like a traitor, and that is something I am not. And what sort of life would I have somewhere else? I know our world is not listed in many tourist guides of the human sphere, Valentina, but this is where I was born and where I have lived my life. It is my home.”

“They’ll kill you, Dmitri,” she said quietly. “And what about your wife? I doubt she’s going to be happy about all this.”

“What about her, indeed,” he sighed.

* * *

Commodore Hanson was in her command chair on the
Constellation’s
flag bridge, which was a special compartment adjoining the ship’s bridge from where her staff could control the actions of the task force.

The door behind her suddenly swished open, and a tall, well-muscled man in civilian clothes stepped quickly to her side. She knew little about him other than his name, Robert Torvald (which she suspected was a pseudonym), and that he was the controller for the Confederation agent whose mission was to get Hanson the information she needed to snatch Saint Petersburg’s nuclear weapons. He had arrived in a special courier at the task force’s rendezvous point, coming aboard
Constellation
at the last minute, when it had become clear that the rest of the task force and the designated mission commander, a two-star admiral, would not be making the party. Hanson had initially been irked at the man’s presence, for he was the only one authorized to make contact with the source, the Navy apparently not being sufficiently trustworthy. He had brought along special communications gear that had been locked away in a small arms locker under the control of two Marine guards. That’s where he had been since two hours before the task force’s emergence here, crammed into the tiny room with his mysterious equipment.

“Here it is,” he told her quietly, handing her a data chip. “I’ve sanitized the information to a classification level that will allow you to use it in any of the ship’s systems.”

“And what did you leave out?” she asked sharply. 

“Nothing that will affect your mission, commodore,” he answered softly, returning her gaze levelly.

She held the tiny chip in her hand, looking at it for just a moment, wondering at the guts of whomever had obtained the data. And how accurate the information was. The lives of her crewmen and the Marines now depended on it. With a scowl, she called over her flag operations officer. “Here,” she said, handing him the chip. “This is the data on the nuclear weapons. Get this analyzed and update our operations plans, pronto.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” he said, taking the chip and hurrying back to his station.

“Commodore,” the flag communications officer said, “we’ve got an incoming message from planetside.”

Hanson frowned. She had wanted to take the initiative in making contact with the Saint Petersburg government or military, but she had been forced to wait until she had the information on the nuclear weapons. “Put it on the main screen,” she ordered tersely, wondering who she would be dealing with.

* * *

“This is Commodore Margaret Hanson of the Confederation Navy,” the woman on the screen said formally. “To whom am I speaking?”

“Commodore, this is Iosef Korolev, Chairman of the Ruling Party Council of Saint Petersburg,” he said amicably. “May I ask why the newly formed Confederation has sent a fleet of warships to our peaceful system?”

“Mr. Chairman,” the woman said evenly, “I was sent here on the orders of the President of the Confederation to carry out an inspection of several facilities on Saint Petersburg. This inspection is in accordance with article fourteen of the long-term armistice provisions, citing that Saint Petersburg may not develop, construct, or possess weapons of mass destruction. My secondary orders,” she went on, “are to conduct a training exercise with the Rigan coast guard and provide supplies and personnel to assist them in forming Territorial Army detachments for common defense. This is required and was agreed to, as stated in the Confederation Constitution, when Riga became a member.”

Korolev relaxed back into his chair. “Well, commodore,” he said, his Russian accent barely evident in his New Oxford-educated English, “welcome to Saint Petersburg. If you would please have your staff coordinate with our naval personnel, we will be happy to arrange for your inspection parties to land.

“As for your proposed exercise with the Rigan coast guard, however,” he went on, wincing slightly, as if the idea gave him indigestion, “I believe your government misunderstands the situation. Riga is a
semi
-autonomous world under our governance. Any claim they may have made to independent status or membership in your interplanetary government is neither legitimate, nor legal. Their defense is well in hand, I assure you, without any involvement by Confederation forces. Please, commodore, I strongly urge you to seek further counsel from your government — preferably with clarification from an envoy I would be happy to send with you — before carrying out those orders. Your ships are welcome in orbit around Saint Petersburg, but we will consider any deployment of your vessels further in-system toward Riga to be an...unfriendly provocation.” He smiled, conveying just the right mixture of warmth and menace.