In Her Name: The Last War (18 page)

Fuming, Steph grabbed her bags and stepped out of line, tossing them angrily against a nearby wall. That’s when she noticed that a lot of people were on their vidphones. More people than usual. Listening closely, she made out phrases that sounded an awful lot like what Simon had told her: “ghost ship” and “alien attack” among them. She saw a growing number of perplexed, amused, and even frightened expressions.

“Listen, Simon-”

“Just do it, dammit! This could be the biggest story since Christ got nailed to the cross-” 

Her vidphone suddenly went blank. Then her vid screen filled with an unfamiliar message: “Network connectivity lost.”

Around her, everyone else who was using their phones must have experienced the same “connectivity problem,” because she heard a lot of cursing and people just staring into their blank vidphones.

“Network problem, my ass,” she muttered. Their connection had been cut off intentionally.

“Information,” she demanded of the console embedded in the wall. It still was working. “What can you tell me about an inbound ship called
Aurora?
” 

“I’m sorry,” the disgustingly deferential female voice replied, “that information is restricted.” 

Steph felt her pulse quicken with excitement.
There might really be something to this!
“Okay, who do I need to talk to for information on inbound ships?”

That information apparently
wasn’t
restricted. After she got what she needed, she bolted down the corridor toward the central elevators as fast as her high heels could carry her. She left her bags behind, completely forgotten.

* * *

“Cutters 12 and 17 are in position, sir,” one of the harbor masters reported through the din of frantic pleas and threats being made by the other controllers to keep the merchantmen from scattering in the wake of
Aurora’s
spectacular arrival and Sato’s equally spectacular claims of invading aliens. The two small vessels, looking like remoras alongside the much larger survey ship, had approached the main port and starboard gangway airlocks.

“Commander...” 

Sidorov shifted his attention from updating the station commander back to the face of the midshipman who appeared to be
Aurora’s
only survivor. 

“Sir,” Sato told him, “I strongly recommend that you consider first contact safety protocols before boarding. I don’t believe the aliens left any contamination. That wouldn’t fit with what I saw of how they do things, but...”

“Don’t worry, Sato,” Sidorov told him, “the boarding parties will be wearing full vacuum gear.”
And weapons
, he added silently. He didn’t know whether to believe the young man or not. He had said little before Sidorov had gotten him switched over to a secure circuit, but first contact? Alien invasion? He sounded delusional, and Sidorov half expected the boarding parties to find some sort of massacre that would wind up being made into a holo vid show for lunatic teens.

On the other hand, Sidorov couldn’t take any chances. If the midshipman’s wild story did seem to check out, things were going to get dicey very quickly. The station commander had already put through a call to the customs fleet commander, who wanted verification before he woke up the Chief of Naval Staff half a world away. Everyone was thus far taking the story with a big grain of salt, but one thing was indisputable:
Aurora’s
reappearance simply should not have happened the way it did, and they wanted an explanation. Fast. “I hate to say it, but you’ll probably be in quarantine for a while if this story of yours checks out.”

“Understood, sir,” the young man replied. “Sir, I have opened the outer gangway hatches and the inner hatches are unlocked. The cutters may send in their boarding parties.” 

Sidorov noticed the change in Sato’s speech as he said
boarding parties
, almost as if he were gritting his teeth. 

“Thank you, midshipman,” Sidorov told him. He glanced at the tactical controller who sat before a wide-screen console, who nodded in return: he had contact with the boarding parties, and both teams reported they were aboard and moving quickly to secure the bridge and engineering.

After a few minutes the team leader from Cutter 12 reported in. “Sir, so far as we’ve seen, there’s nobody here. Not a soul. No sign of a struggle, no bodies, no nothing. Just a spanking new-looking ship.” His video feed confirmed it. Empty passageways. Empty cabins. Empty work spaces. Nothing.

“Same here, commander,” the leader of Cutter 17’s team reported as he reached engineering. “There’s nobody home but the kid on the bridge.”

Sidorov could hear the stress in their voices. There were always people aboard a ship in orbit. The passageways might not be teeming with people, but a Navy ship returning from a long cruise would have half her crew at the airlocks, chomping at the bit to get off to shore leave. And there was
always
someone on the engineering watch, even if a ship was in space dock. Always. But this ship had just completed a hyperlight journey of who knew how long with no one but a midshipman aboard. It gave Sidorov the creeps.

“We’re at the bridge, sir,” the leader from Cutter 12 said quietly. There was Sato in the man’s video display, standing rigidly at attention. Sato saluted the ensign who stood before him. “Midshipman,” the ensign told him as he saluted, “you stand relieved.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Sato replied hoarsely, tears suddenly welling from his eyes. “I stand relieved. The
Aurora
is yours.”

With that, Sato collapsed to his knees and wept.

* * *

Steph stood at the back of the command deck near the access portal from the central elevator shafts, staring in disbelief at the drama playing out on the video monitors around her. Dressed in a tight red dress that didn’t leave all that much to the imagination - she was damned if she’d look like a frump while traveling first class on the company’s dime - she stood out like a collision beacon among the starched khaki uniforms of the Navy crewmen. But that dress and her press ID had gotten her past some tough gatekeepers before, and certainly hadn’t failed her this time: the Navy security people she had to get past to get in here had both been men, and had been easily manipulated into believing that she’d been summoned there by the commanding officer, but she was to keep a low profile until he had a free moment to speak with her. She figured it wasn’t
too
far from the truth. The dress and her curves distracted them, while the ID and a sharp tongue gave her credibility. She looked harmless enough, so they let her through.

She watched as the young man on the main screen, the sole survivor of the ship’s crew, broke down in tears after the space-suited figure of a member of one of the boarding teams officially assumed control of
Aurora
. For a while she simply stood against the back wall of the command center, about a dozen paces behind where the person in charge, Commander Sidorov, one of the guards had said, stood watching the main monitor. She could see and hear everything, and so could the mini vid-cam array that was clipped to her ear, the video array and microphone on a wire-thin boom that extended forward next to her cheek. With the network shut down she couldn’t get her data off the station, but an idea was churning in her brain to not only get around the little problem of censorship, but to make it work to her advantage. She added audio notes quietly, whispering so as not to draw attention to herself too soon.

* * *

A part of Sato was ashamed for breaking down and crying like a child in front of everyone who might be watching him, but the greater part of him pushed it away. It was an emotional release from the burden he had borne alone for the last few months. He hated to admit it to himself, but it was the first time since the slaughter of the ship’s crew that he had felt a positive emotion of any kind. In this case, it was simply relief. Relief that he was back among his own kind. Relief that he was no longer alone on a ghost ship with the nightmares that plagued his sleep each and every time he laid down.

The voyage back had been entirely uneventful and mind-numbingly boring. As he had suspected, the aliens had made more than simply cosmetic changes to the ship: they had modified some of her systems to allow her to function entirely on her own. The things the crew normally had to do to keep her systems in good working order were no longer required, at least for the months it had taken to get back to Earth.
Aurora
had sailed for six months from her last port of call on the Rim to reach the alien system, but had taken about four months to return to Earth. It should have been impossible for the ship to go that far in only four months, even taking a direct transit. So the aliens must also have altered the ship’s engines in some way, making her faster in hyperspace than should have been possible. He had tried to learn about the course settings and what the ship was doing, but while the blue-robed alien had warned him away from the command console, the warning appeared to have been unnecessary: he could get no navigation information from the ship’s computer at all, no matter what he tried. He couldn’t retrieve any information that could even corroborate his story of where the
Aurora
had been since she left the Rim: all evidence of the aliens had apparently been stripped from the ship’s records. And the aliens had locked him out of everything that had to do with the ship’s drives, navigation, sensors, everything. About the only thing he had free access to were the educational and entertainment sections. 

And their sense of navigation...Sato had cried out in surprise when the ship had emerged from hyperspace, literally right next to Africa Station. It was impossible for at least half a dozen reasons. Not just the accuracy - how could they have known that
Aurora
wouldn’t intersect another ship when she emerged? - but because of how close they were to the Earth’s gravity well. The formulas were complex and handled directly by the navigation computer, and of course varied depending on the gravity index of a planetary or stellar body, but the nearest safe jump radius for Earth was well beyond the orbit of the moon. But the aliens had somehow brought the ship right
here
, matching the orbit with a moving object from an unimaginable distance. It wasn’t just a coincidence. It wasn’t luck. They had done it intentionally.

At the start of the lonely months aboard the ship, after he realized that he had been locked out of everything he wanted so desperately to know, he became listless, falling into a dark depression. Had there been liquor aboard, he had no doubt he would have spent most of the trip in a drunken stupor, even though he didn’t normally drink alcohol. 

What shocked him out of it was his obsession with watching the replica of Keran. Three months after leaving the alien system, he noticed that the northern pole had turned from its previous pristine white to a dirty gray as it had when the big warrior had shown him how the globe would change as the time for war drew closer. That’s when it struck him that he had only four pieces of evidence to prove what had happened: the alien clothes he’d worn back aboard; the changes the aliens had made to the ship; the cyan-colored disk that had been his “ticket home”; and the replica of Keran. There appeared to be nothing in the ship’s computer memory, and certainly no trace that aliens had been aboard the ship. 

That meant that everything else,
everything
, was in his head. Everything to show how his shipmates had died. And that was when he finally got a grip on himself again and started acting like the young Navy officer he wanted to become. He started to log all his impressions, everything he could remember, down to the tiniest detail. Then he broke it down into sections, organizing the information into logical categories and cross-checking it for accuracy and consistency. He drew diagrams of what he could remember of the alien ships, outside and inside; of what the warriors and the robed aliens looked like, and how many different kinds of robed aliens there were. Sights, smells, sounds, the taste of the food they’d been given, the texture of things he had touched. Everything. In the end, it was not only a vital exercise in giving humanity some intelligence information on the foe they would soon face, but helped him deal with the crushing survivor’s guilt he felt, and the penetrating sense of loneliness and isolation. 

But that horrible voyage was finally over. His tears expended now, he stood up and faced the ensign who led the forward boarding party. “My apologies, sir,” he said, gathering himself again to the position of attention. “It has been a...difficult trip home.”

* * *

Steph watched as several Navy officers suddenly burst into the room, led by a stern-faced female officer who was all business. Steph frowned to herself, because women like this one were almost impossible to manipulate. She sometimes felt guilty about pulling strings on people, but it wasn’t a question of morality, it was a question of getting the job done. It was a part of her job that she wished she didn’t have to do, but that’s not the way life was. Not hers, at least.

She directed the microphone pickup toward the woman and waited to see what would happen next.

* * *

“I’m not sure how to handle this, captain,” Sidorov told Captain Rhonda Burke quietly as the boarding teams quickly finished scouting through the rest of the ship. He had muted the audio channel with
Aurora
so they could speak in relative privacy in the hubbub of the harbor masters working around them.

“I don’t see the problem,” Burke replied sharply. “You’ve implemented the first contact quarantine protocols, and fleet is up to speed on the situation for now.”

Sidorov didn’t take offense, because he knew that she wasn’t impugning his judgement, just making a direct observation. She was direct about everything. But sometimes she didn’t see problems that came at her from an oblique angle. “I’m not worried about that part, ma’am,” he told her. “I’m worried about containment of any sensitive information. I don’t want to speculate, but if news of some sort of ‘alien invasion’ gets out, there could be some ugly repercussions.”