In Her Name: The Last War Page 4

  The compartment they were in, which in everyday use served as the lower crew galley, had one peculiarity that was shared by only a few other compartments in the ship: it had a real viewport, a window to the universe outside the ship, and not just a video display.

  After the inexplicable electrical hurricane had swept through the ship, killing all the electrical systems and leaving Aurora’s crew in darkness without gravity, Amundsen had pushed himself over to the viewport to look outside. He could see the huge alien warship off of Aurora’s bow. His eyes, which reflected more anger now than fear, took in the thing’s smoothly curving flank, which was adorned with great runes that stretched from the pointed prow toward the slim-waisted stern. He guessed that the ship must be at least four, if not five, kilometers long. It would have been a beautiful marvel of engineering if its purpose had not been so openly malevolent.

  That’s when he saw them: roughly two dozen tiny forms that launched themselves from a bay that had opened like a biological sphincter. Sailing across the few hundred meters that now separated the two ships, he had no doubt as to their purpose.

  “Commander Kumar!” he called out to the XO, who had been trying to locate an emergency locker in hopes of finding a light that worked. “Sir, you need to look at this!”

  “What is it, Jens?” he replied quickly, making his way over to the viewport.

  “Look...” Amundsen pointed at the figures who drew rapidly closer. Over a dozen were going to land on the main habitation section, with the others spreading out to cover the rest of the ship. “Boarders.”

  Kumar stared, openmouthed, at the approaching aliens. He didn’t want to believe it, but there could be no other explanation after what had just happened to the ship. “Bloody hell,” he whispered. He turned and leaped away across the compartment, back toward the still-dead damage control console, just as the walls, floor, and ceiling began to glow.

  “What the devil?” Amundsen gasped as he pushed himself back from the bulkhead, wondering at this latest horrific display of alien technology. Outside the viewport, the boarding party rapidly approached.

  Then the gravity came back on. Amundsen heard a loud thump and a brief cry of pain from Kumar as the man slammed down on the deck. Amundsen fell awkwardly, but managed to roll on his back to absorb most of the impact as he landed. He looked across the compartment and saw the XO sprawled next to one of the tables, his right leg twisted under him. A gleaming white sliver of bone protruded from his left calf muscle: a compound fracture.

  He quickly made his way to Kumar’s side.

  “Commander...” It was then that he saw the pool of blood spreading from beneath Kumar’s head. He felt for the man’s pulse and was rewarded with a faint but steady beat: he was still alive, but clearly badly injured and in need of immediate medical attention.

  Kumar’s condition left Amundsen in a very difficult situation. In a battle, which this clearly had become, his duty was to stay at his post until or unless relieved: if engineering could get the electrical system back up, he needed to be here to help the damage control parties get to where they were most needed. Or do what he could to help repel boarders.

  He was normally the only one posted here during a jump sequence, to act as a partial backup to the bridge and engineering in case something went wrong with a jump. Kumar had only been here because the captain had wanted a bit of extra human redundancy for this particular jump contingency. But none of the half dozen ratings who had their battle stations here had arrived after the captain had hurriedly sounded general quarters. Amundsen figured they had either become lost when the lights and gravity went off-line, had been trapped by the sealed compartment doors, or had been injured like Kumar.

  For now, at least, Amundsen was on his own.

  He knew that he should first try to get help for Kumar, but he also desperately wanted to get in contact with the captain. Despite the mysterious blue glow that provided enough light to see by, and the convenience the return of artificial gravity afforded, there was no doubt that these were engineered somehow by the aliens. There was absolutely no question that they were now Aurora’s masters.

  The thought suddenly made him uncharacteristically angry. No, more than that: he was enraged. Amundsen had never been an excitable man, nor had he ever been prone to anger, even in the most provocative situation. But these aliens had attacked his ship, the ship he had been with since her keel had been laid. The ship they were playing with like a toy and treating her crew, men and women who, while not really his friends, he had come to deeply respect, like rats. And now they had the balls to send over a boarding party...

  Something in him suddenly melted and flowed away like white-hot steel. He hated to leave Kumar and knew that he was doing what The Book clearly said he shouldn’t. He knew he could be shot if a court-martial found him guilty of abandoning his post in the face of the enemy.

  But when he heard the shouts that suddenly rang out down the passageway that led to the rest of the ship, he knew that he had no more time to consider. The boarders had arrived.

  Moving quickly, he left the galley compartment and headed down the passageway in the direction opposite from where he heard the shouting. He knew exactly where he needed to go.

  The ship’s armory.

  * * *

  “Damage report!” McClaren’s voice cut through the sudden darkness and eerie sensation of weightlessness. He didn’t shout, nor did his voice contain any trace of fear. He had always been a problem solver. This was a problem, albeit an incredible one, and he focused himself on finding a way to solve it.

  “Everything’s off-line, captain,” Raisa Marisova reported quickly from somewhere in the absolute darkness. With Kumar down in damage control, she was the acting first officer on the bridge. Her voice expressed her nervousness, but she was on top of it. “All systems, including the battery-powered backups, are dead.” She paused. “No communications, nothing. As far as I can guess, the hull hasn’t been ruptured. I can’t hear any air escaping.”

  Despite himself, McClaren smiled. Here we are, he thought, in a ship that’s a marvel of modern technology, and in the blink of an eye we’ve been reduced to relying on some of Mankind’s oldest sensors. He knew that engineering would be working on trying to get the ship’s power back up, but he had to reestablish contact with the crew. And find out what the devil the aliens were up to.

  “Captain!” the yeoman at the communications station yelped. Her console, followed by every surface of the bridge, began to radiate a deep blue glow.

  It gave McClaren the creeps, but at least it peeled back the darkness as he floated next to his command chair. “Take it easy,” he soothed. “Maybe the aliens are just giving us a hand-”

  The return of gravity came as an unwelcome surprise. Some of the crew had been strapped into their positions, some hadn’t. There were several meaty thumps as those like McClaren, who hadn’t been strapped in, unceremoniously fell to the deck. Fortunately, no one had any injuries more serious than bruised dignity.

  “Let’s get the door open,” he ordered gruffly as he stood up with as much grace as he could manage, “and find out what’s going on in the rest of the ship.”

  Marisova led two of the other bridge crew to the door and directed them in removing the manual access panel on the wall near the floor. It was a cumbersome, if straightforward process of first unlocking the door (all the major compartments of the ship automatically sealed themselves when the hyperspace jump interlock had been engaged), and then turning a crank to open it.

  The door was open almost enough to squeeze through when McClaren heard angry shouts and screams of fear coming from both directions down the passageway that led fore and aft. He shoved himself sideways into the still-widening gap in the doorway, determined to find out what was happening. Looking down the passageway toward the bow, he couldn’t see anyone. They’d be in the compartments, not running around in the passageways, but that’s where most of the screaming was coming from.

  Su
ddenly he felt what could only be Marisova’s powerful grip around his arm, yanking him bodily from the doorway, back into the bridge.

  “What the devil-” was all he had time to say as the blade of a sword cleaved the air where he had just been.

  “Close the door!” Marisova barked at the two stunned crewmen who were still cranking the door open. “Shut it now!” She had seen the alien rush up behind the captain as he struggled in the doorway, and hadn’t paused to think. She had just reacted, grabbing her skipper and using her considerable strength to pull him back just as the creature attacked.

  McClaren faced the thing that stood on the other side of the doorway, baring its fangs at him. It pointed its sword at his chest, and he noticed the black rapier claws on its hands flexing just as the door slid closed.

  * * *

  Ichiro Sato fought to control his fear. It was an oily, slippery sensation that coiled and uncoiled in his gut. It wasn’t because of whatever had happened to the ship that had cast them into darkness and shut down the artificial gravity. It wasn’t the fear that the aliens might be hostile.

  It was the dark. It was always the dark. His roommates at the academy had always thought him strange for keeping a tiny flashlight by his bedside. He claimed that it was simply in case of emergency, a prudent preparation for the unknown. He rarely used it anymore, but even at the age of nineteen the fear would sometimes come back. He would wake up in a cold sweat, panic welling in his chest until his hand found the comforting shape of the light, itself no bigger than his thumb. Just touching it would usually reassure him enough that he could control his raging fear, but sometimes he had to turn it on. Just to peel away the darkness.

  When he was a young boy and his father was particularly displeased with him, which was often, he would lock Ichiro in a tiny closet in their apartment. His father had gone to great trouble to ensure that there was enough air, but that absolutely no light penetrated his son’s prison. And there Ichiro would have to sit, silently, until his father chose to release him. If the boy made so much as a whimper, his father would drag him out and beat him and then throw him in for even longer. Breaking the unwritten law of female submission that was typical for many families on Nagano, his mother had tried to stop her husband once. He had beaten her savagely, and she had been greatly shamed when she had to go out in public. Until the bruises healed. After that...

  Ichiro shook himself. The past is gone, he told himself. Focus on now. Reaching into his tunic with a shaking hand, he removed the tiny flashlight he always kept with him. He squeezed it to turn it on, but nothing happened. Like everything else electrical in the ship, it was dead.

  He felt a wave of panic rise like bile in his throat.

  “Ichiro, are you okay?” a disembodied voice asked quietly from the darkness. He suddenly found a comforting hand on his arm. It was Anna Zalenski, the senior of the three midshipmen. Ichiro was a second year at the academy, she was a fourth year. He felt her hand move down to take his. Ashamed that he needed such comfort, he nonetheless returned the reassuring squeeze she gave him. He also silently thanked her for not bombarding him with any reassuring it’ll be all right platitudes.

  He got his breathing under control. He told himself firmly that it would indeed be all right. The captain would know what to do.

  A burst of what was no doubt a very poetic curse in Chinese filled the compartment as Petty Officer Yao struggled in the dark to get the hatch from auxiliary engineering open. While China and Japan on Earth had never exactly gotten along famously, Ichiro had taken an immediate liking to Yao Ming. It was a feeling that was echoed by the older enlisted man toward the young midshipman, although Yao would never have publicly admitted it. A human encyclopedia of curses (in Mandarin, of course, with happily provided translations into standard English, which had come to be known simply as “Standard”) who always wore a smile, Yao was also a genius with computers. He had been offered the chance to go to officer candidate school numerous times, but had politely declined. “If I did that,” he had said in his very formal Standard grammar, “I can no longer do that at which I am best.” The logic was irrefutable. He had no higher ambitions than to be just what he was.

  Not surprisingly, his post was in the computer operations center, which itself was separate from the physical computer core, down toward the engineering section. And since Ichiro and Zalenski had demonstrated very high aptitudes for applied computing, it had only made sense for the captain to assign them to Yao as a mentor. “Just don’t repeat anything he teaches you in Mandarin in a bar,” the captain had warned them with a smile, “or you’ll wind up with somebody swinging a chair at your head.”

  Yao had taken on the youngsters eagerly, teaching them all he could and enjoying their company immensely. Over the six months they had been together, the three had become close friends (although Ichiro still hid his feelings). The midshipmen reminded Yao of his own children, whom he missed terribly.

  The compartment suddenly began to glow as if it were radioactive, and Yao uttered another passionate stream of expletives.

  Ichiro could see him now, crouched down by the door. The access panel was open, and he carefully cranked the handle a few times, opening the door just a hair.

  “I wished to verify that the passageway was still holding atmosphere,” he told them, almost as an aside. “I had not heard any sounds of decompression, but one may never be too careful.”

  He began to vigorously crank the handle, and the hatch began to smoothly open.

  Ichiro made to get out of his chair (Yao always insisted that both midshipmen strap in for every jump) when the older petty officer admonished him, “Remain in your seat, please, young sir.” It was as if he had eyes in the back of his head.

  “Right, Ming,” Ichiro said sheepishly, calling Yao by his given name as he relaxed back into his combat chair. He noticed Anna smiling at him, and a hot flush of embarrassment crept up his neck as he realized they were still holding hands. With a shy smile, he squeezed her hand once more and then released it. He saw her smile back.

  “Ah!” Yao exclaimed suddenly as the gravity returned. He was already in a semi-crouch next to the panel, holding himself in place with one hand braced against the access panel while he cranked the door open with the other. His feet flexed as they took up his weight, almost as if he had been somehow prepared for it.

  Ichiro felt his weight return, of course, but because Yao had kept them strapped in, he hadn’t been at any risk of injury. Yao looked after his midshipmen like a mother, and of all the duties the man had, it was the one he took most seriously.

  “Perhaps our illustrious engineers have managed to partially repair the ship’s systems,” he said with a big grin as he stood up and turned toward them, the door now fully open. “Now let us seek out the rest of the crew-”

  “Yao!” Anna screamed in warning, pointing past him into the passageway.

  Ichiro, who had momentarily been preoccupied with unfastening his combat harness (even though Yao hadn’t yet given his permission to do so), snapped his head up in time to see a humanoid apparition smoothly step into the compartment. It looked much like one of the pictures of Samurai warriors his grandfather had been fond of showing him. And this warrior, for she could be nothing else in any civilization, was as frightening to Ichiro as fully armored Samurai must have been to simple peasants in long-ago Japan. Clad in shimmering black armor with a sword clutched in her right hand, she fixed the two young midshipmen with the predatory gaze of a big cat.

  Suddenly realizing that Yao was standing right beside her, she spun with unbelievable speed, bringing her sword up to slash at his neck.

  Ichiro watched in awe as Yao, standing still with a serene expression on his face, suddenly moved. Stepping fluidly toward the alien like fast-flowing and deadly water, he blocked her sword arm with his own left arm, breaking her attack. At the same time, he pushed out with his right hand against her upper left arm and chest, momentarily pinning her arm, neutralizing it, before sweepin
g his hand up to hammer the elbow of her sword arm, causing her to lose her grip on the weapon. His left hand smashed into the side of her face in a brutal open-handed attack that stunned her, followed by an open-palm strike by his right hand straight into her face that snapped her head back. Then Yao grabbed her sword arm with both hands and yanked her down along his right side, exposing the base of her skull to a savage strike from his left forearm.

  The alien crashed to the floor, unconscious or dead, her sword clattering to a stop at Yao’s feet. The fight had lasted little more than a second.

  Anna and Ichiro gaped at Yao, completely stunned. “Ming...” Ichiro managed, “...how?”

  The little man, his face still bearing a serene expression, ignored him for a moment as he knelt down to pick up the alien’s sword. Standing up, he assumed a fighting pose, then swung it through the air with professional interest. “Magnificent,” he conceded quietly, impressed by the weapon’s balance and, in truth, its beauty. The craftsmanship that went into making the weapon was astonishing.

  “Ming?” Anna urged, now free of her combat harness. She and Ichiro moved next to the older man, who held the alien’s sword carefully down by his side.

  “It is what I have been teaching you, of course,” he chided gently as he searched the alien for any other useable weapons. She had a long knife and what looked like some sort of shuriken, commonly known as throwing stars. But these alien weapons were different, something that clearly required considerable skill to use. Ignoring them, he took the knife. “Not all the forms of t’ai chi ch’uan are slow and gentle,” he explained as he gracefully stood up. Yao had taken to instructing them in t’ai chi as a way to help them stay in good shape, and as something enjoyable to do together. But he had never let slip the fact that he was, and had been for quite some time, a t’ai chi master whose close-quarter combat skills were lethal.

  Without hesitation, Yao handed the alien’s knife to Zalenski. She was senior to Ichiro, and also had some limited close-combat training.