In Her Name

accidentally abused during her interrogation.”

Reza said nothing, but kept staring at Thorella, who sat behind a wall of armorglass. Reza retained his weapons because no one dared challenge him for them, and Thorella was content to let him have his way, as long as he himself was safe.

So you believe, Reza thought, imagining the look on Thorella’s face if Reza stepped through the wall, as he easily could. Part of his mind was with Enya, who sat in a large interrogation room downstairs with a number of her friends. If Thorella decided to go ahead with his threat, Reza’s period of waiting would be over.

“No,” Thorella said after a moment’s consideration. “The only women you ever cared about were Carre and Mackenzie, the frigid bitch and the dyke. Maybe I’ll make Ms. Terragion my mistress while I’m here. That would make Camden happy, I know. At least, until it comes time to execute her.” He smiled. “You’re going to the gallows, Gard. You know that don’t you?”

“I shall not go alone.”

Thorella laughed. “No,” he said, ignoring the implicit threat, “no, rest assured that you won’t. There will be plenty of Mallorys swinging beside you. But that’s beside the point.” He leaned closer to the glass. “I just want to know what that thing is out there, that could chew up half a mountain. We’ve probed it and run drones around it, and it doesn’t even register. Some kind of Kreelan energy source?”

You could say that, Reza answered silently. “I have nothing to say to you, Markus Thorella.”

“Guards!” Thorella suddenly barked. Six of Thorella’s best men, Reza’s guard force, stepped forward from where they had their weapons trained on Reza’s back. “Put him with the others. If he tries anything, kill them all.” That was what Thorella believed would be an effective tool to enforce his will on Reza: the threat of death to the others.

As he turned to leave, Reza glanced again at the unearthly glow of the mountain.

Soon, he thought. Very soon.

* * *

“We’re starting over it now, sir,” Emilio Rodriguez reported as he began to turn his skimmer over the top of the glowing crater. He had been circling it for ten minutes, gathering more information – which meant no information, he thought sourly – before actually flying over it.

“Hurry it up, Rodriguez,” Major Elijah Simpson, the regiment’s intel officer, snapped. Many said that his intelligence was directly proportional to his patience. He was a very impatient man.

“What an asshole,” Lauren Nathanga, a tech from the regiment’s intel company who was Rodriguez’s passenger, said over the intercom.

“No arguments here,” Rodriguez sighed.

Their little jeep crossed over the lip of the crater about one hundred meters above the glass-smooth rim.

“This is really incredible,” Nathanga said. “The power it must have taken to do this, and yet we don’t have a single reading except some residual heat from whatever cut through the rock.”

“Anything yet?” Simpson interjected.

“Still scanning, sir,” Nathanga replied, shaking her head. “We’re… What is that?”

“What’s going on?” Simpson demanded over the radio, but neither Nathanga nor Rodriguez heard him.

The two explorers had suddenly found themselves encased in a web of blue light that seared their flesh. They thrashed and writhed, screaming in agony as their skin began to burn, as if they had suddenly been cast into a furnace. The last thing Lauren Nathanga saw was Rodriguez’s smoking body bursting into flame. Then Nathanga was herself consumed by the cleansing fire.

Back at the command post, Major Simpson watched and listened in horror to the screams and the nightmarish video coming back across the comms link. First Rodriguez, and then Nathanga suddenly exploded into human torches, burning so bright and hot that the jeep’s control panel must have begun to melt, because the video abruptly cut off. Thankfully.

Simpson got exactly two paces across the regimental command post before he retched on the floor amid the other shocked members of the intel section.

Undamaged except for the crew compartment that lay smoldering from the flames that had left only husks of carbon where once there had been human beings, the skimmer continued on its way across the crater, eventually crashing into the ocean over two hundred kilometers away.

* * *

“So,” Nicole said, “what you are telling us is that we will be too late.”

The Gneisenau’s chief intelligence officer nodded grimly. “I’m afraid that about sums it up, CAG. Even if the Kreelans don’t have any ships heading to Erlang that might be closer than the ones our scouts have detected, the estimated on-orbit time of the first enemy battle group will still be at least an hour ahead of our own ETA.”

The faces around the table, real and projected, frowned. That meant the Kreelans would have time both to start their assault on the planet and array their ships in a defensive posture for a Confederation counterattack that they knew must be coming. While the humans still had some degree of tactical surprise on their side, it probably would not be enough to make a difference. While the Tenth Fleet task force – of which Sinclaire’s Gneisenau was the flagship – had eleven battleships, two carriers, and a host of cruisers and destroyers, the Kreelan defenders would hold most of the cards in what was shaping up to be the biggest fleet engagement in decades.

If only we had more bloody ships! Sinclaire cursed to himself. “What do you think, Nicole?” he asked her. He hated calling Fleet Captain Carre “CAG” – Commander, Aerospace Group. He respected the position and the tradition, but to him the acronym sounded like some kind of affliction.

“It all depends on what we are up against,” she said, noting the Hood’s CAG nodding agreement. Nicole and Jodi had only recently completed their tours as instructors at the Fighter Weapons School on Earth, and had both accepted combat assignments on the newest fleet carrier, Gneisenau. Jodi had taken over one of the new ship’s squadrons, finally accepting the responsibility and grade that she had so long avoided, while Nicole had assumed the post of senior pilot and aerospace group commander. “We have one-hundred sixty-three fighters and attack ships on Gneisenau ready to fight, plus another one-hundred and thirty-five on Hood. But we have no idea what the enemy will show up with other than the seven capital ships – two in the superdreadnought category – that STARNET was able to confirm before the Kreelans jumped. And we do not know, out of those, how many carry only guns and how many carry guns and fighters both.”

“I would venture to say,” said Captain Amadi, Gneisenau’s commander, “that we should expect the worst. There is some compelling and unknown reason why the Kreelans are going to Erlang. They have never done this before, spontaneously converging on a colony from so many different quadrants. I suggest that we go in with the fighters and destroyers screening forward, followed by the main combatants in wedge abreast, and the attack ships and cruisers held in reserve to the rear.”

Sinclaire nodded. It was a standard tactical formation, and for good reason. It would give them a lot of flexibility in an unknown situation, meaning that they could bring a lot of power to bear in any quadrant very quickly. Or retreat with a minimum of losses, he thought grimly. “Comments?”

“What about sending a recon in ahead of the van?” the captain of one of the destroyers, a young woman who was always looking for a fight with the enemy, said.

Sinclaire smiled at her eagerness. She was a good destroyer captain, aggressive and fearless, one of a breed that was increasingly hard to find. Destroyer captains and their crews did not usually live very long. “Given that we know little of what we’ll be facing,” he said, “I don’t think we can afford to give the enemy the least advantage over us, more than they have already. Surprise is all we’ve got right now, and I won’t surrender it without good reason. Maybe next time, Captain Dekkar.”

The woman frowned, disappointed, but she nodded understanding.

“Have we been able to contact the colony yet?” someone else asked.

“No,” the intel officer answered. “The comms people believe that the subspace signals are being blocked by