In Her Name: The Last War (87 page)

Tesh-Dar did not need a sensor suite or computers to tell her what had just happened. She was finely attuned to the space around her, and could in fact pilot a starship by second sight alone. 

And what she felt, the Empress felt.

“Prepare yourselves, daughters,” she warned the others on the bridge, “for we shall be Her sword hand this day, and shall feel Her power in our flesh.”

Then a second nuclear detonation occurred.

“Priestess!” her tactical officer cried as the ship’s sensors localized the two detonations and what appeared to be a mortally stricken human ship, and the vaporized remains of a second one, not far from the target planet.

As Tesh-Dar watched, what she assumed was a second volley of torpedoes was fired from a larger human fleet at a smaller one, to which the two ships that had been destroyed apparently belonged.

“They battle one another,” she said in confused wonder, shaking her head. Here sailed a battle group of the Imperial Fleet to challenge the humans, and they were destroying one another. She could not understand these creatures. 

“The missiles are armed with atomic warheads,” the tactical officer announced.

Tesh-Dar only nodded absently: she already knew. And she could feel a sudden strengthening of the Bloodsong, like a massive storm surge through their souls. “Prepare yourselves,” she whispered as she gave herself up to the power that soared higher, ever higher, in her veins.

* * *

“Whose ships are
those?
” Admiral Lavrenti Voroshilov demanded sharply. 

“Unidentified!” his flag tactical officer barked. On the main display, fifty-seven ships had just jumped into Saint Petersburg space and were displayed in a glaring crimson: assumed hostile. To the Saint Petersburg fleet, any ship that was not known to be theirs was first considered an enemy. “Configuration unknown. They do not appear to be Confederation vessels.” According to the display, the new arrivals were much closer to Voroshilov’s fleet than were the Confederation ships.

“Give them a full salvo of torpedoes,” Voroshilov ordered.

* * *

“Holy shit,” someone muttered on the
Constellation’s
flag bridge in the silence that fell immediately after the new arrivals had been identified by the tactical computers. 

A Kreelan battle fleet
, Hanson thought acidly.
Could this mission get any more fucked up?
The only good news was that the carriers finally reached their emergency jump points and disappeared safely into hyperspace. At the cost of two of her heavy cruisers.

“Twenty seconds to jump,” the fleet navigator announced. 

On the flag bridge tactical display, there was now a second — and much larger — salvo of torpedoes heading toward Hanson’s ships, and the Russians had just launched yet another salvo at the newly-arrived Kreelans.
How many of those bloody torpedoes do they have?
she wondered.

“Fifteen seconds...”

Her ships would be well away before the torpedoes were close enough to present a danger, but she now desperately wanted to see how the Kreelans reacted. While she knew that President McKenna was dead-set against using nuclear weapons, if they would help turn the tide against the Kreelans...

* * *

It took all of Tesh-Dar’s will to keep herself from writhing in the agony and ecstasy of the power unleashed by the Empress through her and the senior shipmistresses in the fleet. The other warriors, even those senior among them, felt only the passing tidal wave, but were not chosen to directly channel it: they would not have survived. 

For a mere instant that was drawn out into eternity, Tesh-Dar could sense what the Empress sensed, glimpsed all that the Empress knew, sensed all that the Empress was, in mind and spirit, and it drove her to the brink of insanity. As great as her own powers were, Tesh-Dar was reminded of how insignificant they were beside those of the Empress. The most shocking thing was that she knew that what the Empress did now was merely a shadow of Her true power.

Tesh-Dar’s body shook and trembled as the Empress reached out through the space around the fleet, to the human ships and missiles, to the planet and its moon, and bent the physical world to Her will.

* * *

“Jesus!” someone on Hanson’s flag bridge shouted as all the ship’s systems, even the artificial gravity, suddenly flickered. 

“Status report!” Hanson demanded. 

“There’s no damage to the ship,” the flag captain told her quickly after conferring with the ship’s captain, “but the emergency jump sequence automatically aborted and had to be restarted.”

“Fleet data-links are down,” the communications officer reported. “Voice and vidcom backup are on-line.”

“So what the devil happened?”

“Some sort of energy spike, commodore,” the flag tactical officer reported. “I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it—” 

“Commodore, look!”

Tearing her eyes away from the swarm of torpedoes heading toward her own ships on the tactical display, she saw that the torpedoes fired at the Kreelan warships were almost in range.

* * *

“Weapons malfunction!” Voroshilov’s flag tactical officer reported, confused, as the first torpedo to reach the new set of enemy ships detonated. Or should have. The Saint Petersburg fleet had just recovered from a bizarre mass electrical problem that had affected all shipboard systems, but that apparently had caused no major damage except for taking down the inter-ship data-links. More torpedoes reached their targets. And failed to detonate properly. “Multiple malfunctions!”

On the screen, he watched as one by one the torpedoes detonated under the control of their proximity fuses, which told the weapons when a target was at the optimal range. The fuses then triggered a sort of “gun” that slammed two chunks of uranium-235 together to produce a fission reaction and the desired nuclear explosion. It was a primitive, but quite effective, design. The fleet’s sensors told Voroshilov that the weapons were fusing properly and the so-called guns inside the warheads were firing, but there were no nuclear detonations. In fact, there was no further trace of radiological emissions from any of the warheads. Every single torpedo was a dud, and these new enemy ships did not even bother to waste any of their point defense fire on them.

“Comrade admiral,” the tactical officer told Voroshilov, “this is simply not possible!”

Voroshilov barely heard. His attention was focused on the other torpedoes that had been streaking toward the Confederation ships, and that now were just coming into range.

* * *

Hanson stared at the torpedoes bearing down on her task force, thinking about what she had just seen happen to the Kreelans. Or, rather, what had
not
happened to them.
Could it be?
She wondered.
And can I take that kind of risk?
She thought of Grishin and his Marines, and Torvald’s precious “asset,” all stranded on the planet. Grishin, no doubt, had fallen into a trap similar to the ones the Russians had sprung on her task force. She hated the thought of leaving them behind, and if there was even a chance of getting them back, she wanted to take it. It was a horrible risk, but she didn’t get paid to make easy decisions.

“Emergency jump sequence complete! Fifteen seconds to jump, stand by!”

“Belay that!” she shouted over the organized bedlam of the emergency jump sequence. “Terminate jump sequence. Stand by point defense!”

Several of her officers gaped at her for a moment before they scrambled to change the fleet’s orders, a process made much more difficult with the data-links out of commission. The jump countdown timer stopped with four seconds left.

Hanson outwardly kept her cool, but rivulets of cold sweat were running down her spine as the tiny icons representing the torpedoes closed with her formation.
Please, God
, she prayed,
let me be right
.

Suddenly the point defense batteries of her ships began to fire, and torpedoes began to die. Several of them got through, and one exploded near enough to the
Constellation
that she could hear fragments of it ping off the ship’s armor. 

But there was not one single nuclear detonation: all of the torpedoes were either destroyed by the point defense systems or produced very small explosions when their nuclear triggers — which were mere conventional explosives — fired.

“Commodore,” her flag tactical officer said, shaking his head, “there’s no longer any trace of radiological elements in those torpedoes. If our calculations are right, the uranium-235 in the weapons is now nothing but...lead. We had solid radiological readings on every single one before that energy spike. Then after that — nothing. It’s like something just changed the uranium into lead, like magic. It’s just...impossible.”

“Well,” Hanson breathed, enormously relieved to be alive, “thank God for Kreelan alchemy.” Then, turning to her communications officer, she said, “See if you can get a channel open to the commander of the Saint Petersburg fleet. If we can convince him to join forces, I think we can knock the Kreelans on their collective asses.”

* * *

Voroshilov stared at Commodore Hanson on his vidcom with undisguised contempt. “Under no circumstances,
commodore
,” he spat, “will we join forces with you, our enemy. This is a trick: those other ships are simply more Confederation vessels. And after we deal with them, we will finish with
you
, if you are foolish enough to remain in our sovereign system. If you want to live, you will depart immediately.” He terminated the connection before the woman could respond. 

“Comrade admiral,” the ship’s chief engineer said, a small image of his worried face appearing in Voroshilov’s vidcom terminal.

“What is it, Stravinsky?”

“We have checked the remaining nuclear warheads aboard this ship, sir,” Stravinsky reported. “All of them have been rendered inert. The uranium cores have been...converted to lead. I believe the other ships will discover the same thing.”

“Sabotage?” Voroshilov demanded.

“No, comrade admiral,” Stravinsky said, shaking his head. “Such a thing, replacing the uranium cores with lead, could only be done at the Central Facility. I have no explanation for what has happened. It is simply not possible!”

“It was the energy spike,” mused the flag captain.

“
Da
,” Stravinsky agreed. “I do not understand how, but that must have been the cause. The timing was no coincidence, for we know that the first salvo of weapons worked against the two Confederation cruisers we destroyed.” 

How could the Confederation have developed such a weapon?
Voroshilov wondered, terrified at the possibilities. If they could neutralize Saint Petersburg’s arsenal of nuclear weapons so easily, the plans of the Party leadership would come unraveled quickly, indeed.

“Your orders, admiral?” his flag captain asked.

Voroshilov glared at the tactical display, quickly weighing his options.
My fleet does not need nuclear weapons to fight and win its battles
, he thought savagely. “We shall destroy the newcomers,” he said. “Then we shall deal with our friend Commodore Hanson.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

“Son of a bitch!” Warrant Officer John Faraday swore above the roar of superheated air that flamed around the cutter as it dove through Saint Petersburg’s atmosphere toward the surface. 

“What is it?” Roland Mills asked him over the small ship’s intercom. His head was now pounding so fiercely that it was difficult for him to do anything, even speak. The pain had become so intense that he had bitten his tongue to keep from crying out, and his mouth was now awash with the taste of blood.

“We lost contact with the
Yura
,” Faraday, the cutter’s pilot, told him grimly. He punched a couple of buttons on his console. On the small display that was part of Mills’s combat seat, Mills watched the last few moments of the battle in space, transmitted to the cutter over
Yura’s
data-link before the signal was lost. There was no mistaking the nuclear detonation that killed the cruiser
Myoko
, and the track Captain Sato had taken toward the remaining torpedo left little to the imagination. “I think she’s gone.”

“Fuck,” Mills hissed. “That just made my bloody day.” He was not by nature a sentimental man, but he had to make an enormous effort to keep tears from welling in his eyes. The loss of Sato himself was a huge blow, not to mention the rest of his Marines and the ship’s company.
Bloody hell
, he thought.
I’ll save that news from the others until we’ve made our pickup.

“It’s going to get a lot worse,” Faraday assured him. The display in front of Mills cleared, then changed to show the planet’s surface, below. Angry red circles pulsed all around the city toward which they were heading: radars that were tracking them, that were now locked on. There were also several tell-tale icons of aerospace interceptors streaking toward them. Faraday wasn’t too worried about interceptors: the cutter’s weapons would be more than a match for them, unless they attacked in large numbers. Heavy ground-based defenses, however, were another story. “Their planetary defense systems are nearly in range. I’m not sure what anybody was really thinking when they ordered us down here, but without the ships upstairs to provide suppressing fire, this is gonna be a really short ride.”

Just when Mills thought things couldn’t get any worse, his headache seemed to explode in his skull. Crying out in agony, he hammered his fists against his temples, writhing in his combat harness.

“
Mills!
” Sabourin shouted as she began to unbuckle her harness to reach him.

“Stay in your goddamn seat!” Faraday, the pilot, yelled at her. “You’ll be killed when we have to maneuver to avoid ground fire!”

With her heart breaking, she watched helplessly as Mills thrashed around in his seat and cried out, his screams carried over the platoon channel for everyone to hear.