In Her Name

brute force, Eustus was secured in the aft seat, holding Reza’s body.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said as Jodi dropped down into the pilot’s seat and began the takeoff sequence, slapping on her helmet as the canopy whined into place.

Thirty seconds later, they were airborne.

* * *

“We’re reading a ship ascending from the surface, sir,” the intel officer reported. “Checks out as a Corsair.”

“Mackenzie,” Sinclaire growled.

“Looks like it, sir.”

Sinclaire only grunted in response. On the tactical display, a tiny blue wedge detached itself from the planet and set course for the fleet, now hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. And everywhere, crowding the display, were red wedges accompanied by a few lines of elaborating data that identified the Kreelan ships that were appearing around Erlang like salmon about to spawn. “How many Kreelan ships, now?”

“Eighty-seven major combatants, sir, plus scores of smaller ships,” the intel officer reported. “STARNET is reporting as many more still on the way.”

“Bloody hell,” Sinclaire whispered. It was the largest Kreelan battle fleet that had ever been assembled in Sinclaire’s lifetime, and more ships were still arriving; humanity would never have been able to amass such a fleet in one location so quickly. “How long to the jump point?”

“Nine minutes and forty-seven seconds, sir,” Captain Amadi replied.

“And how long for Mackenzie’s ship to reach us?”

Intel shook her head. “Almost eleven minutes, admiral, at the Corsair’s top speed.”

A little over a minute too late, he thought glumly. “Has anyone been able to contact her yet?”

“No sir,” Amadi said. “Nothing since she left the ship.” They had no way of knowing that Jodi had disabled the command datalink in her fighter that might have allowed Sinclaire to recall it on autopilot, overriding Jodi’s own commands. And along with the datalink went the voice and video communications.

“She’s on her own, then,” Sinclaire said. “I won’t risk the fleet for a single person.”

“Sir,” a yeoman called from the FLEETCOM position, “it’s Commander Ivanova. She’s in trouble.”

* * *

Commander Ludmilla lvanova, captain of C.S.S. Gremlin, a destroyer guarding the fleet’s rear as it withdrew, was more than in trouble.

“Admiral, we’re taking heavy fire from a cruiser that just dropped in-system,” she said quickly as her ship rocked under the impact of another salvo.

“Captain!” the engineering officer reported, “We’ve lost the starboard aft-quarter shields!”

“Helm, roll us nine-zero degrees to starboard!” she ordered quickly. The destroyer responded immediately, rolling its exposed side away from the withering fire from the heavier Kreelan ship. “Make your course zero-five-zero mark eight-zero. All ahead flank!” While Gremlin was outgunned and out-armored, she was still faster and more maneuverable, and had her own set of fighting teeth.

Focusing again on Sinclaire’s concerned image, she said, “We’ll try to draw them off, sir.” She smiled. “Wish us luck, admiral.”

“Good luck, Ludmilla,” he said. It was a paltry farewell to the captain and crew of a good ship. Both of them knew that Gremlin would not be returning to port. The Kreelan cruiser had the uncanny luck to have dropped in right behind the retreating human fleet, where none of the heavy ships could bring their main batteries to bear, and where they themselves were most vulnerable to enemy fire. It was Gremlin’s job to hold off any Kreelan ships long enough for the fleet to jump out; if she could not, and Sinclaire was forced to turn any of his other ships to face the oncoming threat, he stood to lose a lot more than a single destroyer. “Godspeed, captain.”

On Ivanova’s display, his image faded, disappeared.

An explosion rocked the ship, throwing her forward against the combat restraints of her command chair. “Damage report!” she shouted into the chaos that was the bridge.

“Hull breach in engineering!” someone replied. “Main drives off-line!”

“Weapons,” she ordered the crew manning the weapons stations, “ready torpedoes, full spread, home-on- target mode.”

“Torpedoes ready, captain!”

In the main viewer, she could see the Kreelan cruiser gaining rapidly. Her skin tingled as she could almost sense the enemy ship’s main batteries charging, almost ready to gut her wounded destroyer…

“Shoot!”

Just as the Kreelan cruiser’s guns erupted with lethal energy, Gremlin’s eight torpedo launch tubes jettisoned their own destructive cargo. Seven of them cleared the ship before the final Kreelan salvo tore into the thinly armored destroyer, boring into its reactor core. The Gremlin disappeared in a huge fireball that consumed Ivanova and her crew.

The eighth torpedo, not quite free of its tube, suffered minor, but significant, damage to its guidance system before it cleared the blast and debris that was all that remained of the Gremlin. As its siblings began their dance of death with the Kreelan cruiser, the eighth torpedo wandered off on its own. Its electronic brain damaged, no longer able to distinguish friend from foe, it circled through space, looking for a target.

Any target.

* * *

“Somebody just bought it,” Jodi said as she watched the fireball fade to the residual glow that was all that was left of whatever ship it had been. Not far from it, she saw several smaller explosions silhouette a larger ship that passed through the first fireball, only to explode in its own turn. Torpedoes, she thought to herself. Somebody nailed that Kreelan fucker.

“How much farther?” Eustus asked. He had loved Reza as a friend and commander, but was losing patience with him as a corpse. His uniform was soaked with Reza’s blood, and Reza’s crushing weight in the already cramped cockpit was giving him a case of claustrophobia. The smell was none too pleasant, either.

Jodi checked her instruments. It was going to be a lot closer than she cared to admit. And the margin was not in their favor. “About six minutes,” she said. She was not about to worry him with details, like they were going to be almost a minute short of the fleet’s projected jump-out time. Unconsciously, her left hand pressed forward on the throttles, which were already pegged against their stops. The Corsair was giving her all it had.

All around them, the weapons of the dozens of Kreelan warships in the area were trained on them, but none had fired.

A warning buzzer suddenly went off in Jodi’s ear. “Oh, shit,” she hissed, craning her head, scanning the space around her.

“What is it?” Eustus asked, looking around frantically, although he did not even know what he was looking for.

“A torpedo’s got a lock on us,” Jodi said urgently. “There it is!” Highlighted on the holo display as the ship’s targeting computer calculated the weapon’s trajectory, the torpedo was coming at them from almost directly ahead. “Son of a bitch! It’s one of ours! Hang on!”

She pulled up in a wrenching, twisting corkscrew, hoping to throw the torpedo off, to make it break its lock on her ship. She watched in the display as it passed beneath them, swung around, and began tracking them from astern.

Goddammit, she thought angrily. She could clearly see the human ships now, Gneisenau’s enormous drives shining like a friendly star. But they were too far, much too far away.

“Jodi!” Eustus cried. He was propped up in his seat, looking aft at the torpedo. Forgetting for a moment that he was looking at his own death, he was mesmerized by the sight of the thing, the weapon’s speed sufficient to induce fusion of the hydrogen in space on a molecular level, generating a bow wave of ghostly reddish radiation.

He did not see Reza’s eyes flicker open.