In Her Name: The Last War (56 page)

A pause. “We estimate five minutes.”

“What about
McClaren
? When can she engage?”

A longer pause. “She’d be able to attack by now if she still had her forward weapons,” the controller finally answered. “It looks like they’re going to try and ram.”

Steph slumped down to the deck, wanting to vomit up the bitter coffee in her stomach as she imagined Ichiro’s destroyer slamming into the Kreelan ship, both of them disappearing in an expanding cloud of white-hot plasma. “No,” she whispered. “Please, God, no...”

* * *

The only reason
McClaren
survived as long as she did was that she was directly astern of the Kreelan ship, in her baffles as the wet navy sailors used to say. While the analogy was inexact, the same basic principles applied: almost every ship had reduced sensor effectiveness directly behind it due to interference caused by the drives. The stern was also usually the weakest area in terms of weapons that could be brought to bear, and it was also generally highly vulnerable. 

In the case of the Kreelan ship, either they had nothing mounted in the stern to shoot with, or they hadn’t seen
McClaren
. Sato couldn’t credit the latter notion, and so he kept his fingers crossed that they didn’t have any weapons that could be trained directly aft. On the other hand, maybe they wanted
McClaren
to come close so they could fling boarders at her. If they tried, they’d be in for a very unpleasant surprise.

“We’ve got two minutes, sir,” Bogdanova said nervously. They were measuring their closure rate by having one of the Marines, perched in the wreckage at the front of the ship, take range readings to the Kreelan vessel at intervals with a laser rangefinder. Combining the distance readings and information from the ship’s chronometer told them how fast they were approaching, and how long they had left before impact.

“Remember the plan,” he told Ruiz, who only nodded in his armored suit. While the crew originally thought Sato was just going to make a suicide attack, he had a different idea. “We’ve got to hit hard enough to damage her drives so she can’t pursue the boats. That’s the main objective. If we manage to survive that, Ruiz will lead the Marines aboard to take out her weapons or, better yet, destroy her completely. We can’t get away from her while her weapons are still functional, since all we have to fight back with is the aft ventral battery. She’ll blow us to pieces if any of her weapons are intact.” He looked at the others, then said, “Any questions?”

“What if they send boarders at
us?
” DeFusco asked pointedly. 

“That’s why I had all of you draw weapons,” Sato said grimly, conscious of the weight of the assault rifle slung over his shoulder, and the
katana
hanging at his side. Miraculously, his quarters hadn’t suffered any damage and he had been able to retrieve it. And the newly commissioned warships that had come on this expedition, unlike the
Aurora
, had well-stocked armories and weapons lockers in several key locations, not just a handful of weapons concentrated in one place. “The Marines have to take the enemy ship. We have to defend our own.”

“Any more questions?” Sato asked. Heads shook all around. “Then let’s do it.”

* * *

Ruiz thought the idea the lieutenant -
captain
, he reminded himself - had come up with was bug-fuck crazy, but he had to admit the boy had style. And as far as dim-witted stunts that could get you killed went, it appealed to his inner nature. Perched here among the twisted beams and torn plating that was now the “bow” of the ship, watching the Kreelan ship’s drives grow ever larger as the
McClaren
charged right up her ass, he didn’t doubt that he’d be smashed into paste before he had a chance to shoot one of the aliens. He hoped otherwise, but he’d never been a Pollyanna optimist. He hated people like that. 

In the meantime, it was an awesome view. The planet below was a gorgeous blue and brown ball that got bigger as he watched, studded with swirling white clouds in the halo of the atmosphere. The stars shone like a million tiny beacons, and even the Kreelan ship was in its own way beautiful, her flowing lines an elegant contrast to the pragmatic ugliness of her human counterpart. Ruiz hardly thought himself a renaissance man, but seeing a sight like this made him appreciate how someone might be captivated enough to become an artist and put scenes like this on canvas with a brush. 

But he’d leave that to others. His art was killing, and his preferred brush was the recoilless heavy assault rifle he clutched in his right hand. 

“Stand by,” he told his Marines on the platoon channel as he watched their approach to the enemy ship. They were dispersed in the wreckage of
McClaren’s
fore end on the side opposite where they hoped to smash into the Kreelan vessel. He had divided them up into eight combat teams of four Marines each, hoping they could reach the hull of the enemy ship quickly after impact, spread out, then plant explosive charges on her gun mounts and anything else that looked vital. And if the enemy wanted to come out and play, the Marines were more than ready to oblige.

Then he switched over to a secondary channel on the induction circuit that linked him back to engineering. “We’re ready, sir,” he reported. “Jesus, we’re getting close.” The Kreelan ship was growing at an alarming rate. Ruiz had spent plenty of time in open space, training both for assaults on other ships and to repel boarders. But this was a lot closer than they’d ever come in training, and the alien ship suddenly seemed a lot bigger than he’d thought it would be.

“Hang on, gunny,” Sato’s voice, tinny-sounding over the induction circuit, said.

“Three hundred meters,” one of his Marines reported from a check of his laser rangefinder. “One-fifty...”

“Oh, Christ!” Ruiz cursed as the
McClaren
slammed into the other ship with the force of thousands of tons of mass moving at nearly ten meters per second. There was no sound, of course, but he could feel the screeching of the hulls grinding together through his hands and feet as he clung desperately to a pair of girders that had once been part of the ship’s central conduit. 

He saw that somehow the navigator, Bogdanova, had yawed
McClaren
to starboard at the last second so they didn’t run right up the Kreelan ship’s stern, then reversed the yaw to slam into the target. None of his men flew off into space, so he figured they all managed to survive. 

“
Go, go, go!
” Ruiz yelled to his Marines. He could see that a number of protruding girders from what was left of
McClaren’s
bow had impaled the other ship through its thin armor. But there was no way to tell how long the unholy union would last. They had to get aboard the Kreelan ship fast and do as much damage as they could. Everything else was gravy.

“Heads-up, gunny!” one of his men shouted. “Here they come!”

Dark shapes had begun to emerge from what must have been one of the enemy ship’s airlocks in the shadow of
McClaren’s
battered hull. Ruiz knew then that the enemy must have seen
McClaren
coming all along. Knowing she was impotent after losing her forward section, the Kreelans had been waiting for the human ship to get close enough, probably figuring they were trying to ram.
Holy Christ
, he thought to himself.
They could have blown us out of space a hundred times, but pulled this shit, instead.

“Take ‘em!” Ruiz ordered, dropping any attempt to comprehend idiotic alien behavior as he brought up his rifle. The head-up display, or HUD, in his helmet was painting over two dozen targets in red, with his Marines highlighted in blue. He took aim at the nearest Kreelan and fired, watching as the projectile streaked toward its target.

A specialized weapon, the type of rifle the Marines were using had been rushed into production from a hurriedly fabricated prototype. In testing it had turned in an outstanding performance, and Ruiz wasn’t disappointed now. Firing small rocket projectiles to minimize recoil that could send the Marines spinning out of control in space, the weapons packed a much bigger punch than the standard assault rifles carried by the Ground Forces troops. The projectiles didn’t travel as fast as bullets, and so weren’t as accurate over longer ranges against moving targets, but this range, less than a hundred meters, was right in the middle of their sweet spot.

He watched with satisfaction as his round hit his target square in the chest, the semi-armor piercing projectile punching through her suit’s armor before exploding inside. The suit instantly puffed up from the pressure of the small detonation, the faceplate turning red with blood as the Kreelan’s body was blown up from the inside. “Die, motherfucker!” he hissed.

“Ruiz!” Sato’s tinny voice interrupted his concentration as he picked out another target, a Kreelan who had just shot one of his Marines. “You’ve got to get to the ship! She’s starting to pull free!”

With a start, Ruiz snapped his head up to look at where the two ships were joined, and sure enough, the Kreelan was trying to pull away to port. “Fuck,” he cursed to himself. “Yes, sir!” he told Sato. Switching to the platoon channel, he boomed, “Marines!
Follow me!
” 

Coiling his legs beneath him, he leaped toward the upper hull of the struggling enemy ship, firing at any warriors he saw as he flew over them. Most of his Marines jumped after him, but he could see more than a handful of suits bearing the names of his men and women spinning away, lifeless, from the battle.

Without warning, he was surrounded by three or four warriors that in his eyes looked more like giant black spiders than humanoids. They had him by the arms and legs, pulling at him as if they were trying to draw and quarter him. One of them drew a sword, his eyes couldn’t credit the sight, and was about to try and run him through when all four of the aliens suddenly exploded in a cascade of gore as a fusillade of recoilless rifle fire tore through them.

“Christ, gunny!” he heard one of his Marines said as two of them grabbed his arms and propelled him with their micro-thrusters to the Kreelan ship, while two more provided covering fire. “That was too fucking close.”

Shaking free of his Marines as he settled close to the hull, annoyed with himself for letting the Kreelans surprise him more than anything else, Ruiz said, “Get those damn charges planted! We don’t have time to fuck around!”

“Check,” the team leader said, and they took off toward the stern of the ship, skimming over its surface like bloated dark gray birds. 

Other Marines tried to break contact with the Kreelans and get to the enemy ship. Some made it, some didn’t. Others were simply fighting for their lives as more Kreelans poured out of the ship’s airlocks. Ruiz’s targeting system was painting at least four dozen enemy targets swarming his people who were still pinned down in the wreckage of
McClaren’s
bow.

“Oh,
shit!
” one of his female Marines cried out. “Gunny, the ship-”

Her signal broke off as the
McClaren
sheered away, stripping away a fifty meter long piece of hull plating from the Kreelan ship and venting the enemy vessel’s guts to vacuum. Atmosphere exploded in icy clouds into space, carrying along several dozen of the ship’s crew, none of them wearing vacuum suits, and other debris. 

“Ground!” he ordered as he used his micro-thrusters to slam his suit down on the already-shifting hull of the enemy ship. “Latch on or you’ll get left behind!” He activated the magnetic grips in the palms of his armored gloves and the soles of his boots, praying that the ship’s skin had enough ferrous metal to hold onto. Luckily, it did. 

The good news, such as it was, was that he had good communications with his men and women again. It was a small consolation as he watched the ship pull away from the
McClaren
, most of his Marines left tumbling in her wake. The few Marines left defending
McClaren
went down fighting under a swarm of enemy warriors. Ruiz wondered if Sato’s luck had just run out.

“Gunny,” one of the team leaders said after Ruiz had taken a head count of the dozen Marines who had made it across, “we don’t have enough charges left to take out half the weapon mounts on this bitch. What are we gonna do?”

“Get in close and fuck with ‘em,” he said. Then he led them over the side of the hull and into the ship through the section ripped open by
McClaren
as she had pulled away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Admiral Tiernan watched the tactical display with quiet admiration as the
McClaren
took down the three Kreelan warships that had gone after the carriers, then drove off and pursued the fourth.
Morrison
, he thought about the ship’s captain, whom he’d had the displeasure of knowing from a previous command,
as much of an asshole as you are, I’ll pin the Medal of Honor on you myself for pulling off that stunt
.

They hadn’t even realized
McClaren
was still with them until the
Ticonderoga’s
sensors picked up her drive signature not long after the destroyer had quietly sailed behind the Kreelan fleet. Tiernan had wanted to contact her, but had decided not to risk drawing any more attention to her than necessary after it became clear that she was headed after the Kreelans pursuing the incoming carriers. That would have been what Tiernan ordered Morrison to do, anyway. The admiral only hoped that the destroyer would be able to keep the last Kreelan ship from doing too much harm to the carriers or the boats that were now rising from the surface with whatever was left of the ground forces.

“Engagement range in two minutes, admiral,” his flag captain reported quietly. 

On the tactical display, the two opposing fleets raced toward one another and what Tiernan knew would be a final orgy of destruction that would decide the outcome of the battle for Keran. He knew he was taking a huge risk: he was under direct orders not to lose his fleet as a fighting force, but was counting on more than a little luck to favor him in this engagement. He knew that he might very well lose everything in the next few minutes. But as the old saying went, “who dares, wins.” An entire planet and millions of people were at stake. Neither he nor
Amiral
Lefevre were about to abandon them.