In Her Name: The Last War (61 page)

As if on cue, the door opened quietly and one of her aides poked his head in. 

“He’s here, Madam President,” he said.

“Show him in, please.” McKenna watched her companions as they all looked toward the door, curiosity evident on their faces.

Ambassador Laurent Navarre of Avignon stepped into the room, and the others came to their feet in surprise. All but President McKenna, of course.

“Mr. Ambassador,” Barca said, taking Navarre’s hand, “what a pleasant surprise.” With a slight but unmistakeable emphasis on the last word, he glanced over his shoulder at the president, who remained silent.

“Please, Hamilton,” Navarre told him as he took the big man’s hand and shook it, “you may blame me for the cloak and dagger antics. I specifically requested that President McKenna keep my presence here a secret, even from you.”

“Especially from me, you mean,” Barca told him with a smile as Navarre shook the hands of the others. 

“Madam President,” he said as he came to McKenna. She stood, and he took her hand and kissed it. “Always a great honor.”

“The honor is all mine,” she told him, smiling despite herself at the man’s charm.
You can take the Frenchman out of France
, she thought,
but you can’t take France out of the Frenchman
. “But I have to admit we’re all curious about the, as you put it, ‘cloak and dagger antics.’”

“Yes,” he said heavily as he waited until she had regained her seat, then sat down with the others around the table. He glanced at the information on the wall display, but only briefly. What it showed came as no surprise to him. “I come unofficially as a representative of the Alliance,” he told them. “I am here so soon because my government arranged for a series of couriers to relay news as quickly as possible. Very expensive, but in this case a bargain.” He licked his lips, clearly upset about what he had to tell them. “Madam President, my friends, the Alliance is in a state of near-panic. As you know, the fleet led by
Amiral
Lefevre was the greater part of our space combat power, and the ground divisions that were lost on Keran were our best troops. The opposition in the parliaments of every planet of the Alliance is calling for a vote of confidence against the Alliance Prime Minister, saying that the current government has left the entire Alliance open to alien invasion.”

“But the opposition parties were the strongest proponents of sending the fleet in the first place!” Tiernan blurted, looking at Barca, who was shaking his head, not in disbelief, but in disgust. The opposition’s reaction came as no surprise to him.

“Too true,
amiral
,” Navarre said, “but they are equally free to blame the current government for any disasters. And what happened to
Amiral
Lefevre’s fleet and the ground forces can only be considered a disaster. The greatest defeat in a single battle, perhaps, since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.”

“How many ships did you lose?” McKenna asked.

“Lefevre sailed with just over one hundred and fifty warships, including half a dozen resupply ships,” he told her, the pain of Lefevre’s loss clearly written on his face. “Only fifty-seven returned, most of them damaged. And all ten ground divisions were virtually wiped out, although the
Légion étrangère
suffered the worst: of the twenty combat regiments deployed to Keran, only a few hundred legionnaires survived.”

“It wasn’t just about the numbers,” Tiernan interjected. “We did the right thing, making a stand there and not just letting the enemy walk in with their swords swinging. Even with the second fleet the Kreelans sent in at the end, if we had only had a few dozen more ships and a better idea of what to expect before we went in, I think we might have been able to hold them off. Our two fleets worked extremely well together, even without tightly linked command and control.”

“No one would agree with you more than me,
amiral
,” Navarre reassured him. “And that, truly, brings us to why I am here.” He looked at the faces around the room, his gaze finally settling on the president. “The Alliance Prime Minister would like to establish a new government, an interplanetary government that goes beyond the Francophone worlds, beyond the existing
Alliance Française
.”

“Earth constituencies would never agree to become part of the Alliance,” Barca interjected, shaking his head. “No matter how much sense it may make. We went through hell years ago just to form the planetary government.”

“You misunderstand,
mon ami
,” Navarre corrected him gently. “What we propose is the formation of a completely new interplanetary government, a confederation of all humanity, if you will, based on the original principles of the Human Sphere Defense Agreement proposal. In the aftermath of Keran, all of the planetary prime ministers of the Alliance support this, although in secret - for now. We believe that if Earth and the
Alliance Française
formally unite, other planetary governments will follow suit.” He paused. “Especially once word of the Keran disaster reaches all the governments. There is likely to be an interstellar panic, and we must avoid it as much as possible, and concentrate our efforts on building up our defenses.”

“Ambassador,” Tiernan interjected, “with all due respect, before the deployment to Keran we couldn’t even get your government to accept or even consider, even though it was
gratis
, critical hardware and software that would have helped our fleets work together.”

“I assure you,” Navarre told him, “that situation no longer pertains,
mon amiral
. Let me put it to you plainly: both the planetary and Alliance governments - majority and opposition, both - are terrified. And with good reason. We stand no hope of defending ourselves unless we can rebuild our fleet, and quickly. And a unified government with Mankind’s homeworld right now makes a great deal of political sense.” He gave them an ironic grin. “Fear opens many doors that before were firmly shut.”

“It’s going to be a hard sell to the Terran Congress,” Barca told her.

“No, it won’t,” the president said coldly. “I’ve assured every member of Congress who voted against the appropriations bills for the expeditionary force that I’ll make sure every human being on this planet knows that they were against building the fleet that might have saved Keran and held the Kreelan menace at bay. I don’t expect this lovely honeymoon to last long, but for now we can count on a great deal of support from Congress. Right now they’re tripping over themselves to build out our original appropriations, more than tripling the size of the
original
fleet we wanted to build over the next three years. Assuming we have that long.” She turned back to Navarre. “But there will be problems setting up a government such as you propose, the same ones that killed the Human Sphere Defense Agreement proposal.”

“Namely,” Barca said, “who runs the show, and how to keep the leadership position from becoming a political plum for the ‘haves’ in the eyes of the ‘have-nots.’”

“We have a solution for that much of it, I believe,” Navarre said. “We propose that the new government’s leader - president or prime minister - should be nominated from Earth alone. Earth has the greatest industrial capacity of any single planet in the human sphere, and, despite the differences among the various planetary governments, it is a symbolic home to us all. This will not be a hard sell, as you say, in the current climate. The Alliance will need some concessions, of course, but on that point agreement has already been made.” He turned to President McKenna and smiled. “Madam President, I believe you may be in for a promotion.”

“Now that we’ve sorted out that minor detail,” Tiernan said quietly, an uncharacteristically worried expression on his face, “we only have one other thing to worry about.” The others turned to him with questioning looks. “Where, and when, are the Kreelans going to strike next?”

* * *

Colonel Sparks was still in a great deal of pain from his injuries, but it paled in comparison to the sorrow he had endured in the weeks before he was able to bull his way out of the hospital. He had spent the time writing letters, by hand with pen and paper, from dawn until dusk, to the kin of his dead soldiers. Two thousand seven hundred and twenty-three, all told. Most of the letters had been brief; some had not. All of them had been heartfelt. Sparks was in many ways a hard and difficult man, but his soldiers were his family, and he refused to rest until he had reached out and touched the family or loved ones, or in some cases simply a friend, of every man and woman who had died under his command. He had written letters for all of them. All but one.

Among all the 7th Cavalry troopers who had made their final stand on Keran, there was one to whom they all owed their very lives. Standing now at the front porch of an old-style farm house surrounded by acres of golden wheat, in what had once been the American state of Iowa, he knocked on the sturdy but time- and weather-worn front door. In the window next to the door hung a small flag with a white background and red trim around the edges. In the center was a single gold star.

Sparks wore his dress blues, which as fate would have it was of a design loosely based on the uniform worn by cavalrymen when horses were the standard mode of transportation. Today there were no spurs, no flamboyant cavalry officer’s hat. But there was a sword, held reverently in his white-gloved hands.

With him stood Sergeant Hadley, also wearing his dress blue uniform, and Stephanie Guillaume in a trim black dress. She wasn’t here as a journalist, over the vehement protestations of her editor, who went ballistic at her snubbing what he had claimed was a once-in-a-lifetime human interest story. Steph knew that this would hardly be the only opportunity for someone who wanted to follow a story like this: the war would be filled with countless opportunities to report on stories of personal tragedy. She was here purely out of respect for a woman she had known only a very brief time. And to give her thanks to someone she had never met.

After a moment, movement could be heard inside. The door opened, swinging inward on well-oiled hinges. A man in his early fifties, as sturdy and weather-worn as the door to the house, looked out at them through the screen door. 

“Mr. Coyle?” Sparks said, trying to force his voice to be clear. But despite his best efforts, his throat had choked up on him.

The man blinked at the uniforms, and then said quietly, cocking his head toward the flag with the gold star hanging in the window, “The Army already notified us.” 

“I understand that, sir,” Sparks told him. “I was Patty’s commander. I was only released from the hospital today, or I would have come to deliver the news myself.”

“Who is it, John?” said a woman’s voice from deeper in the house. Her face appeared beside her husband, and Steph could barely hold back her tears. Like her husband, the woman was in her fifties, and time hadn’t treated her kindly. But her face was unmistakably that of her daughter.

“I’m Colonel James Sparks, ma’am,” Sparks said through the screen door. “Your daughter, Patty, was under my command when she...when she died.” He bit his lip, trying to stave off his own tears. He had delivered the news of the deaths of his men and women to many other parents and loved ones, but for some reason this was different. “This is Sergeant Jason Hadley and Miss Stephanie Guillaume,” he went on, introducing his companions. “We wanted to come by and pay our respects to you and your husband. The other soldiers of the regiment...well, they all wanted to come, but I figured it had best be just a few of us. I know this must be a terribly difficult time for you, but your daughter...your daughter was a very special woman. A very special soldier.”

John Coyle just stood there staring at them, saying nothing.

Gently pushing past her husband, she opened the screen door. “I’m Elaine,” she told him. “Please, colonel, do come in.” As she led them in, passing by her husband, she told Sparks in a quiet voice that echoed her own pain, “I apologize for my husband, colonel. Patty was always his little girl, even after she joined the Army. And he...he hasn’t been able to grieve for her. He’s still in shock, and I worry about him. I don’t know that he’s really accepted that she’s gone.”

Inside the house, sitting in the living room, Mrs. Coyle offered them something to drink, but they all declined. She sat down beside her husband on a sofa that, like them, had seen better times than these.

“We already know she’s dead,” John Coyle said woodenly.

“I know that, sir,” Sparks told him, holding his gaze steadily. “I didn’t come here to tell you that she died. I simply wanted to tell you about how she lived. How she saved hundreds of her fellow soldiers. Had it not been for your daughter, not a single one of the soldiers of my regiment, including the three of us, would have made it home alive. Us and the survivors of two regiments of the Alliance Foreign Legion. She saved us all.”

Elaine Coyle had her arm around her husband’s shoulders, and she nodded appreciatively at what Sparks was saying. Her eyes misted over, but she had come to grips with Patty’s death. 

John Coyle simply stared at the coffee table.

“I realize that it’s no consolation, but your daughter is being submitted for a Medal of Honor,” Sparks went on. “Lord knows she earned it.

“But I have something more personal I wanted to give you to honor her memory.” He held out the saber he had brought, an exact duplicate of the one he had fought with and lost on Keran. Every bit of the sword and its scabbard had been polished until it gleamed. “This is a cavalry saber, the very same as those last used by the horse soldiers of the 7th Cavalry Regiment centuries ago. Like me, it’s an anachronism, but it’s the most fitting thing an old cavalryman could think of to represent your daughter’s spirit and determination.”

Elaine smiled uncertainly as she made to take the weapon, but suddenly her husband reached out to grasp it, taking the scabbard in both hands. He held the sheathed sword in his lap and stared at it, running a hand along its glossy surface.

Then, for the first time since being told about his daughter’s death, the tears came. Cradling the saber as if it were his little girl so many years ago, yet only yesterday, John Coyle wept with grief.