In Her Name: The Last War (26 page)

“And the captain has been declared a casualty because he wasn’t in his combat chair,” the XO added meekly, waiting for the spontaneous human combustion that he knew would result.

Morrison didn’t disappoint him. 

“Incoming from Commodore Santiago, sir,” the communications rating announced in the middle of the captain’s impressive stream of invective. Her voice was perfectly neutral, but Sato had no trouble identifying the underlying tone of vicious glee.

Morrison threw himself into his chair and snapped, “On my console.” Sato knew that normally the captain took any calls from senior officers in private in his ready room adjacent to the bridge, but he couldn’t get away with that in an exercise, especially since he’d just become a casualty for being out of his command chair. Even on the small console screen that was embedded in the chair, the entire bridge crew would be able to hear the admiral, even if they couldn’t see his expression. All exercise communications were recorded for later analysis during the debriefing and lessons-learned discussions, and no one had any doubt that the recording of this particular discussion would make its way to the entire crew.

“Scott,” Commodore Rafael Santiago, who commanded the flotilla to which
McClaren
was assigned, appeared on the vidcom and demanded, “what the devil is going on over there?”

“My apologies, sir,” Morrison answered evenly. “We’re having some difficulties adapting the pulse cannon to our tactics. It’s playing hell with our energy buffer allocation, and our tactical officer lost the shot on target Charlie. I was trying to get that sorted out when the kinetic attack came in, but the XO failed to maneuver clear.” He put a sympathetic but determined look on his face. “We’ve only had a couple weeks to hammer this crew together, commodore. We’re not as tightly integrated yet as the other ships.”
McClaren
was the only newly-launched ship in Santiago’s flotilla; the other five ships had captains and crews that had served together for more than a year. 

Santiago frowned. “I realize that, Scott,” he sighed. “And training is where we’re supposed to make our mistakes. Let’s just make sure we all learn from them, because we won’t get a second chance at this.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Morrison replied, resolution evident in his voice. “We won’t let you down.”

“Good enough,” Santiago said. “Carry on.” The screen went blank.

* * *

Sato and some of the other junior officers from
McClaren
sat around the table at the back of Nightingale’s, one of Africa Station’s less reputable bars, enjoying their last bit of off-ship time before the expeditionary force prepared to deploy. While open twenty-four hours a day, the bar’s schedule was really slaved to Universal Standard Time, which was now sixteen-hundred. Before the dinner hour the bar was fairly quiet and not too crowded, but business would pick up soon, with raucous music blaring over the bodies packed onto the dance floor and seated at the surrounding tables.

“We’re fucked,” Ensign Kayla Watanabe sighed. She was the ship’s junior navigation officer, and had more than once been on the receiving end of a rebuke from her captain for things that weren’t her fault. That didn’t bother her so much; she could take the tongue lashings. What she couldn’t take was the certain knowledge that their ship couldn’t fight worth a damn.

Heads around the table nodded glumly. They had managed to do better during the rest of the exercise, but Sato attributed that to luck as much as anything else. Commodore Santiago had positioned
McClaren
in a support role during the following engagements, giving the other ships the lead in the flotilla’s attacks while
McClaren
cleaned up the scraps. The ship had managed to survive, but the entire crew felt humiliated.

“What do you think, Sato?” Watanabe asked. “Are we going to get our asses reamed by the Kreelans?” In unison, the others turned to him, dejected, but eager to hear what he had to say.

It was odd, Sato thought, that here he was, again the youngest and least experienced officer on the ship, much as he had been on the
Aurora
as a midshipman. Yet, they were looking to him for an answer, for leadership. It was true that he outranked most of those around the table, but there was more to it than that. He was the only one aside from Pergolesi, the chief of engineering, who continued to stand up to the captain. Even during the shit-storm of their after-action review, when the captain had found fault with virtually every one of his officers, Sato had stood firm and said what needed to be said about his perceptions of the crew’s performance - both the things they had done well, and those they hadn’t - respectfully but firmly.
For the record, if nothing else
, he’d thought at the time. He had absorbed a lot of abuse from the captain after making contradictory observations on the actions of some of the other members of the bridge crew. It had been incredibly difficult to not spell out all the captain’s mistakes, but he knew that wouldn’t help. There was no way the commodore would replace Morrison at this late date unless he made some sort of flagrant violation, and the captain was too savvy for that. As with his conversation with the commodore during the exercise, he was an expert at taking just enough blame to make himself look responsible, while shoving the bulk of it off on the alleged inadequacies of his junior officers.

Sighing, Sato looked around the table at their expectant faces, the faces of people he’d only known for a couple weeks, but on whom his life would depend in the coming battle. He wished he had some good news for them, some way to give them some confidence. “Look,” he told them, “I’ll be honest and say that I don’t think the expeditionary force is going to be nearly enough to stop them when they come, even if we had the best captain in the fleet. I don’t think the Kreelans will be using ships like the ones that attacked
Aurora
, but they don’t have to. Somehow they’re going to level the playing field with us, but...” He shook his head. “I think Keran is going to be a much bigger version of the arena that my old crew fought and died in. I don’t think they’re going to let us win this battle.”

“So all this is for nothing?” one of the others asked, disgusted. “We just go out there and get our asses kicked by an enemy we can’t touch?”

“No,” Sato replied forcefully. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t think we’ll be able to save Keran from whatever the aliens plan to do. But I do think that they’re going to give us a chance to show them what we’re made of. I think if we fight hard and well, we’ll buy humanity extra time to build its defenses. If we don’t...” He shook his head. “If we don’t meet their expectations, I believe they could wipe us from the universe without even trying.”

“But what the hell do we do about Captain-fucking-Queeg?” someone asked.

“Nothing,” Sato sighed in resignation. “The only thing we can do is our very best as individuals, and to try and work hard as a team. The captain’s used to playing the department heads against each other, instead of having them work together.” It was common knowledge that very few officers aboard a ship would ever qualify for command in what was a relatively small fleet. So the competition for top ratings on their first ship tour was critical: only the officers in the top one or two slots stood a chance at ever earning command wings. And the way most captains accomplished this winnowing of their junior officers was to pit them against each other, promoting those who wound up with the fewest marks against them. It was generally a divisive and corrosive way to run a ship, but only a few captains, such as Ichiro’s old skipper, Owen McClaren, saw beyond it to cultivate a close sense of teamwork, basing officer evaluations primarily on how well they worked with one another. Almost all of McClaren’s former junior officers qualified for command later in their careers, and Ichiro knew that the Navy was very shortly going to wish it had a great many more command qualified officers. “So,” Ichiro went on, “we’ve
got
to do our best to work together. Forget all the career advancement garbage. That’s not going to mean a thing if we get vaporized a few weeks from now.”

Everyone agreed with that: what was the point of coming out in the top one or two position on your ratings when you were dead?

Sato picked up his glass and drained it, savoring the cold tea. Unlike the others, he didn’t drink alcohol. “Okay, I’ve got to go.” Standing up, he said, “I’ll see you all back aboard tomorrow morning.”

Watching Sato leave, Watanabe remarked, “Well, maybe when we go into combat the first time, the captain will forget to stay in his chair...”

* * *

Ichiro was covered in a fine sheen of sweat as he went through the various
katas
he had been taught, the movements to attack and defend with the
katana
. It had become an obsession, and the closest thing he had now to religion.

One of the first things he had done to fill up what little free time he had after being released from quarantine aboard the
Aurora
was to seek out a
sensei
to teach him how to use his grandfather’s weapon. It was a difficult task for two reasons: he had no idea even where to look for someone with the right skills, and among those he found very few were really willing to offer what he truly wanted: a crash-course in how to kill with a sword. He wasn’t interested in the finer points of swordsmanship, because he knew that he would never make a great, or probably even good, swordsman: that process took many years, and he only had a little over one year to learn what he could. The teachers he spoke to didn’t understand that he didn’t want to learn for sport or for some higher personal purpose. He wanted to learn how to kill.

Then one day a man appeared at the door of his cabin on Africa Station. When Sato opened the door, the man, who was of Japanese descent, bowed and then gestured for Sato to go with him. The man refused to say a word. Frustrated by the man’s bizarre behavior, Sato was nonetheless curious and decided to follow him. The man took him to the station’s sports complex, where they entered one of the many exercise rooms. It was empty except for two items: a pair of wooden swords,
bokken
, that lay in the center of the floor.

The man, who Sato judged to be in his late fifties, knelt gracefully on one side of the two
bokken
. Sato, shrugging, knelt opposite him. Giving in to ingrained habit from his childhood, he lowered himself to the floor in a deep bow, and the older man did the same. Then he handed Sato one of the
bokken
, and wordlessly began to teach him how to use it.

The scene repeated itself every day that Sato was on the station. Regardless of whether he was there early or late in the day, the old man magically appeared on his doorstep. Sato had tried everything he could think of to get some sort of information from him about who he was and what he was doing there, beyond the obvious of teaching Sato swordsmanship, but the old man calmly ignored him and simply got down to business as soon as they arrived at their designated workout room. Sato tried to find out who scheduled the room, but in every single case, it was listed as open. He tried finding out who the man was from the shuttle transit services, but they couldn’t release passenger information, and even Steph couldn’t dig her way to the bottom of it. It was maddening.

But aside from the strange circumstances, Sato could clearly see that the man, his silent
sensei
, knew what he was doing. The many hours they spent together were hard and challenging, and more than once Sato went back to his quarters sporting a number of welts where the
sensei
had underscored some of Sato’s shortcomings. But that only made Sato want to train harder, because he knew that if his teacher had been a Kreelan wielding a real sword, Sato wouldn’t just be bruised, he’d be dead.

After about eight months, they began to train with real
katanas
, but with their edges blunted. Sato knew that he didn’t have the refinement or overall abilities of someone who had trained for years, but he now had confidence that he could fight. He knew that he would lose against a Kreelan warrior who had probably been trained since birth for combat, but he would never again be completely helpless as he had been in the arena aboard the Kreelan warship, seemingly so long ago.

Then, two weeks ago, his
sensei
suddenly stopped coming. Sato was worried that something had happened to the man - he still didn’t even know his name - until a package arrived. It was a tube about fifty centimeters long and maybe fifteen in diameter. Carefully opening it, he was stunned at the contents: a
wakizashi
, the shorter companion sword that samurai warriors traditionally carried with the longer
katana
. But this wasn’t just any
wakizashi
. It was the companion to his grandfather’s sword. 

Wrapped inside the tube was a brief handwritten note in flowing Japanese characters:

I regret the odd circumstances of our relationship, young Ichiro. But after your journalist friend sent word to Nagano of your adventures and mentioned your wish to learn the ways of the sword, your mother sent me. She swore me to silence, for she did not wish your father to find out for fear he might somehow learn what your mother had done. He is a most unworthy man, unlike his son.

She knew me through your grandfather, you see, who was an honored friend, and my
sensei
long ago. She wanted you to have this, your grandfather’s
wakizashi
, when you completed the training I could give you. Your father had spitefully hidden it before you left home, but your mother found it again soon after, and kept it safe since then. 

You are a fine young man, Ichiro. Your mother is so very proud of you, as would be your honored grandfather.

- Rai Tomonaga

It was a revelation for which Ichiro was totally unprepared. He simply sat in his quarters for most of that evening, staring at the note and the short sword that had come with it. Finally, he spent the next few hours, well into the night, composing a note to his mother, the first he had sent since he had left home.