In Her Name

Lieutenant Josef Weigand sipped at a cup of scalding, bitter coffee as he struggled to stay awake and alert.

Lord of All, he thought, how I hate this job. He almost laughed at himself. He thought the same thing at least a hundred times a day, but he had refused every opportunity to give it up.

He took a moment to look through his ship’s forward viewport, giving his eyes a rest from scanning the battery of instruments that surrounded the command console, as if he would notice anything before the computer did. Outside lay a seemingly endless nebula of swirling gas and dust that danced to a rhythm measured in millennia, giving off light and radiation in brilliant displays that surely could have been the inspiration for Dante’s Inferno. This was why he always decided to sign on for yet one more tour, one more mission as a scout: the bloody view.

Weigand was one of eight men and women crammed into a tiny ship that only had a number, SV1287, for a name. At least that is how she appeared on the Navy’s ship registry. But to her crew, she was the Obstinate, a name that applied equally well to her maintenance and operation, as to her defiance in the face of the enemy.

Defiance, however, was not the mission of Obstinate’s crew. A scoutship, she was a specialist in the fleet, packed with every passive scanning instrument her tiny hull could accommodate. Her unarmored skin bristled with dozens of telescopes and antenna arrays to pick up the faintest trace of the enemy without betraying her own position. She carried no weapons, and the only time she activated any radiating sensors or shields was when she was in friendly space or in the direst emergency. Her job was to watch and listen, but to be neither seen nor heard herself. The only contact she had with human space was through the secure tight-beam communications gear she used to communicate with the STARNET intelligence network and fleet command.

Another benefit of scout work, Weigand thought wryly as he refocused his attention on the signal monitors. There was no brass to worry about, no additional duties to drive a junior officer crazy, no ass-kissing. Nothing but him, his little crew, his ship, and the stars. And if the Kreelans wanted to find him… well, they’d have to catch him first. Obstinate was one of the fastest ships in the human fleet, and with her big ears and eyes, she would know long in advance about any Kreelan ship coming her way.

He heard a few muffled moans coming from the back and smiled. Stankovic and Wallers again, he figured. With eight people crammed into a tiny tin can for three to six months at a time, some allowance had to be made for romance. Or outright lust. Whatever. At least that’s the way Weigand looked at it. As long as things didn’t get out of hand and jeopardize their mission – which he did, in the end, take seriously – he let nature take its course. Personally, he preferred to remain celibate while on patrol, not out of any lip service to some mythical superior morality, but because it was simply too complicated. People who thought they loved one another or just wanted to play grab-ass one day all too often hated each other the next, and the last thing a scoutship commander needed was an overly neurotic crew. And the crew could not afford a commander who was a few newtons shy of full thrust mentally, or involved in some emotional skirmish with one or more crewmembers. The possibilities for disaster were simply too great out here, all alone. Among the crew, he had his ways of straightening things out, just as long as he didn’t get involved himself.

No, Weigand preferred looking out the viewport to wrestling under the covers, at least until port call and the mandatory month-long crew stand-down. With a sigh, he chose to exercise his only viable option: he would have to make do with the ship’s coffee. It was a poor trade for months without sex and a decent drink, but there was nothing to be done about it.

More moans, louder this time. Buddha, he thought, didn’t these kids ever sleep?

Then he heard the thunk of a boot against a bulkhead panel and another voice admonishing the young lovers to keep it down in language that was far from romantic.

Here we go again, Weigand thought. The other seven members of Obstinate’s crew were all in the crew section, trying to sleep – or whatever – through the transition shift. Weigand preferred to have his little crew rotate shift partners periodically, to keep anyone from either getting too attached or too hateful of any one person. The transition shift was when he made them all eat, sleep, and crap on the same schedule for twenty-four hours until the new cycle came up and they switched partners. He took the twenty-four hour duty himself, while the crew battled it out in back. It was his favorite part of the cruise: he got to be alone for a whole day, to sit and watch over the computer as it sniffed through the thousands of cubic light years around them for traces of the enemy.

He glanced at the main intel display, which presented the computer’s slow-witted human controllers with an easily assimilated visual representation of the space around them, and whatever it had found within it. Scouting was a lot like fishing, he thought, checking out each fishing hole in turn to see if you got a bite. He had been on some missions where they had not spotted a single Kreelan ship or outpost in three months. Other times, they had to extend the tour weeks on end to wait out Kreelan warships that prowled the scout’s patrol area. But most patrols were somewhere in between, with Kreelan activity present in some spots, and absent at others.

In this case, a few light years into the QS-385 sector – a quaint name for a zone of space that no one otherwise cared about, far beyond even the human-settled Rim colonies – Josef Weigand the interstellar fisherman had gotten more than a nibble. After jumping into the nebular cloud to conceal her arrival, Obstinate’s sensors had immediately picked up three separate sets of Kreelan activity, all within a radius of about fifty light years. Two were clearly warship flotillas by their rapid movement across the sector, apparently en route to the third, which appeared to be some kind of outpost or settlement with vessels already in orbit. This was the kind of find that the crews of other ships like the Obstinate hoped to discover. Fleet command was keen to go on the offensive somewhere – anywhere – in hopes of drawing the Kreelans away from human settlements, following the maxim that a good defense comprised a good offense. With that in mind, “indigenous” Kreelan outposts such as this one were at the top of the list. Several such worlds had been found, but most were too far away or too well-defended (as far as the scoutships could determine) to be attacked without taking too much from defensive campaigns on human-settled worlds that already stretched Navy and Marine resources to the limit.

From the looks of it, Weigand thought dejectedly, this world fell into the same category. While the computer had only been able to identify three of the dozen or more ships out there by class, what it told Weigand was depressing: they were all dreadnoughts. Battleships, and big ones, too. Even if a human fleet could get here, he told himself, they would have a hell of a fight ahead of them before the jarheads even hit dirt.

He watched another display in silence as the computer busily worked away at identifying the remaining ships, comparing their signatures with known Kreelan ship profiles and playing an extraordinarily complicated guessing game for those that did not fit. Unfortunately for Confederation Navy analysts, the Kreelans did not build their ships in classes – each comprising one or more ships of similar construction and characteristics – like the humans did. It was as if they hand-built every ship from scratch, tailoring it to serve some unknown purpose in an equally mysterious master plan. Some tiny ships carried a tremendous punch, while a few of the larger ones were practically defenseless. And so, the analyst who needed to categorize the Kreelan ships as something settled for a generalization: fighter, corvette, destroyer, cruiser, battleship, super-battleship, and so on. The only advantage to their ships being unique, of course, was that once identified, they could be tracked just as men in ships and submarines on long-ago Earth had tracked one another, using the unique sonic signature produced by each vessel.

None of these ships, however, matched any of the thousands of entries in the computer’s database. More depressing news, Weigand thought. More ships we’ve never even seen before. More ships to fight.

The display flashed three times to alert him that it had completed another identification, showing him everything it had determined about the ship and its postulated class.

“Oh, great,” he murmured. “A super-battleship this time. Isn’t that special.” That made it two battleships identified in one flotilla, plus another battleship and this super-battleship in the second. He pitied the human squadron that ever had the misfortune of running into either of these groups. And the Lord of All only knew what was in the squadron orbiting the outpost.

“Well,” he said, reluctantly setting down his coffee in the special holder someone had glued to the console, “I