In Her Name: The Last War (67 page)

“Okay,” McKenna conceded, “we don’t have any choice about accepting Riga. That still doesn’t answer my question: how will Korolev’s government react?”

“Despite the armistice conditions that made Riga independent,” Barca told her, “Saint Petersburg has never really accepted it. They’ve made placating noises and done the minimum required to observe Rigan sovereignty, but that’s it: they still believe that Riga is nothing more than a breakaway state that will someday be brought to heel.” He scowled. “Frankly, I’m surprised Riga was able to get an envoy here. If Korolev had known...”

“There would have been no envoy,” Penkovsky finished for him.

“Just how far is Korolev willing to go on this?” McKenna asked. “We can’t afford to have a second front, a civil war, going on while we’re trying to save ourselves from the Kreelans!” Fortunately, the enemy had made no further major moves against human space in the months since the fall of Keran. There had been unverified reports of Kreelan ships in many sectors, but most of them were thought to be either erroneous or even fabricated. The only attacks on shipping had been from pirates, and none of the colonies had reported anything unusual. In some quarters, this long lull was being called the “phony war,” and an increasing amount of the Confederation government’s efforts were being devoted to keeping the Kreelan threat foremost in the mind of a public that was easily distracted. McKenna, however, didn’t believe that this lull was going to last much longer: she thought of it more as the calm before the storm.

“If we arm Riga and provide them a guarantee of protection — which applies to
any
external threat, not just the Kreelan Empire — as written in the Confederation charter,” Penkovsky said with a look at Barca, “Korolev will simply not allow it.”

Barca nodded in agreement. 

“He’s willing to go to war with the Confederation over this?” she asked Penkovsky. 

“I believe so, yes.”

“Bloody hell,” McKenna breathed.

“There may be worse,” Penkovsky ventured, clearly uncomfortable about what he was about to say. “I happened to have a report flagged for my review this morning that we recently received from a new source on Saint Petersburg. I...can barely credit the information, but in light of this discussion I cannot in good conscience not mention it.”

“Spit it out, Vlad,” McKenna ordered tersely.

“You must keep in mind that we have not yet had time to validate this source or the content of the report,” he went on hesitantly. “The source indicates that Saint Petersburg has been secretly building a stockpile of thermonuclear weapons.”

There was stunned silence around the room. Terran forces had nuclear weapons, as did the Alliance, but the stockpiles amounted to only a few hundred weapons. None had been used, anywhere, since the last wars on Earth before the Diaspora. After the devastation Earth had suffered, the hundreds of millions who had died, no one had ever wanted to unleash them again. With the threat from the Kreelans, McKenna had very reluctantly given authorization to increase the Confederation’s weapons stockpile, but only slowly. If the Kreelans used them first, she would give the Navy all the nukes they wanted. But she would not be the first one to open Pandora’s Box in this war.

“I do not believe it,” Navarre said carefully. “Saint Petersburg has very little in the way of accessible uranium deposits, and what nuclear material they import for their power industry — virtually all of it from the Alliance in the form of pre-manufactured fusion cores — is carefully tracked by an Alliance regulatory commission. I do not see how Saint Petersburg could be getting the uranium and plutonium they would require without smuggling it in. That would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, with the tight controls over uranium mining and production of fissile materials.”

“That is what I thought, too,” Penkovsky told him, “until I read this report. Tell me, Laurent,” he said, “with a power industry that has been based on fusion, solar, and wind generation for generations, why would they have built a few dozen massive coal-fired power plants in the last seven years? And why put them in out of the way locations that must make getting power to the grid extremely costly and difficult?”

Navarre sat back, thinking. He knew a great deal about the planet, having been stationed there as part of the peacekeeping force after the armistice. “Saint Petersburg has a great deal of coal, formed just as it did on Earth, and with very similar qualities. It is easy, if ecologically devastating, to mine it. But I cannot think of why they would need coal power plants: the fusion plants alone give them a net excess of electrical power. As for why they would put them in odd places, I cannot say.”

“I must have missed something,” McKenna interjected drily. “I thought we were talking about nuclear weapons here, not fossil fuel for electricity.”

“Madam President,” Penkovsky said, “a fact that was previously unknown to me is that coal typically contains between one and ten parts per million of a particular element that, theoretically, can be captured from the fly ash, which is a byproduct of burning coal.” He looked her in the eyes. “That element is uranium. And of that, just under one percent is uranium-235, which is the key ingredient for making nuclear weapons. They would need to burn a lot of coal to get what they need. But if the source’s information is correct, the coal burning facilities they have could produce several metric tons of uranium-235 per year. They would still need to refine it, but based on the enormous quantity of coal these plants are reportedly burning, and assuming they have been producing uranium-235 for at least the last three years, they may already have a stockpile of several hundred weapons.” He grimaced before he went on, saying, “My analysts also say that this is a very conservative estimate. The information also suggests they are manufacturing tritium, which is a key ingredient for making fusion weapons, but the source did not know where or how they were doing it.”

“Good God,” Barca breathed. 

“Vlad,” McKenna said, careful to keep her voice level, “we simply
cannot
have a nuclear war in the human sphere. I would say that under any circumstances, but especially with the Kreelan Empire stalking us.” Penkovsky made to speak, but McKenna silenced him with a raised hand. “I know the information isn’t verified. I understand that. But you’ve got to pin this down. If the Confederation has to defend Riga against Saint Petersburg, I don’t want our forces facing nuclear weapons. Nor do I want to give Korolev the chance to use them to terrorize other worlds beyond Riga. Pull out all the stops on this one, Vlad. We have
got
to know if this is true and how far they’ve gotten. And if it’s true, we’ve got to find a way to stop them in their tracks.”

Penkovsky, his face grim, nodded. “Yes, Madam President.”

Turning to Navarre, McKenna said, “Get with Defense Minister Sabine and Admiral Tiernan on this right away and put together a contingency deployment plan. If we get hard confirmation that this information is true, I want a Navy task force and Marines ready to go in right away...”

* * *

Lost in thought as his limousine whisked him from the presidential complex back to the newly constructed Confederation Intelligence Services headquarters building, Penkovsky came to the rapid conclusion that their best chance of finding out what was happening on Saint Petersburg lay with a particular special asset.

Her codename was Scarlet.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“So, what trouble are you going to get into while I’m gone?” Confederation Navy Commander Ichiro Sato said as he ran a finger down his wife’s nude back. 

“Who says I’m going to let you go?” Stephanie Sato — Steph to her friends — purred as she arched against her husband’s chiseled body, goosebumps breaking out over her skin at his touch. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, her back to his chest, burying his face in her hair. “And I never get into trouble,” she said primly.

“Liar,” he said, playfully nipping her shoulder. 

She laughed, but then settled back against him, quiet. Thoughtful. “I’ll miss you,” she whispered.

“I’ll miss you, too,” he breathed.

The two of them were an unlikely pair in some ways, but had been brought together by events that had shattered humanity’s view of the universe forever. Ichiro had been a young midshipman aboard the survey ship
Aurora
when Mankind made its first contact with another sentient species: the Kreelans. He was the only survivor of that encounter, and had been sent back in his ship by humanity’s new enemy to warn his people of the coming war. A year and a half later, the Kreelans had attacked the human colony on Keran, occupying it after a brief but vicious battle with the human defenders. Ichiro had been there, too, on a destroyer of the Terran fleet in the battle that had raged in space. And there he had again lost most of his shipmates, and again the Kreelans had spared his life when they could easily have taken it. It was something he had managed to come to grips with, but he had never truly decided which troubled him more: having so many others die around him, or the enemy letting him live. He had gone to see several counselors to help him come to grips with all that had happened, but in the end the best therapy had been Steph.

She had been a journalist hungry for the big break she needed to make it into the major leagues. Before she met him, Steph had thought nothing of shamelessly using her body to advance her career as a journalist. When then-Midshipman Sato came back to Earth on a ghost ship with his improbable story of bloodthirsty aliens, she had been at the right place to get an exclusive story from the Navy, and his fame had taken her higher than she had ever imagined. She could have taken terrible advantage of him, but that temptation had fallen away when she first met him as a lonely, guilt-ridden soul. They soon became friends, and just before the battle of Keran, they became lovers. After the nightmare of that battle, which she had experienced first-hand as a journalist embedded with the ground troops, they had returned home to Earth, marrying soon thereafter. 

Ichiro was Japanese by descent, born and raised on Nagano. Five centimeters shorter and nearly ten years younger than Steph, he was a handsome young man with a lean muscular body and a mind that had been keen enough to record everything he had learned of the enemy on his long, lonely return to Earth aboard the ill-fated
Aurora
. His knowledge had not saved Keran, but it had given humanity the only edge it had in preparing for the coming war. His body was young, but his eyes might have belonged to someone far, far older.

Prior to the war, he would have been considered absurdly young to hold the rank of commander in the Terran Navy. But his performance under fire and the heavy losses among command qualified officers at Keran had changed the rules, and rapid promotion of promising junior officers had been necessary to fill the many new critical positions opening up as the new Confederation’s fleet rapidly expanded. Ichiro had also had the benefit of the sponsorship of the Navy’s Chief of Staff, Admiral Phillip Tiernan. Some might have thought that Ichiro’s rank had been bestowed by the admiral as an act of favoritism. But the Medal of Honor on Ichiro’s uniform told a different story.

Based on his actions at Keran that had earned him “the medal,” he had been given command of one of the Navy’s newest heavy cruisers, the
Yura
. The ship had finished her shakedown trials and was in the yards where the yard hands were making some last minute adjustments while she took on provisions. Ichiro was scheduled to take
Yura
out on her first war patrol the next morning. It was something most of him looked forward to, hoping he could give the Kreelans some of the death that they had come looking for. The rest of him wanted to stay here, holding close the woman he loved. 

Steph, too, would be leaving their home here on Africa Station, one of the massive orbital transit stations for people and cargo traveling to and from Earth. She had accepted a completely unexpected offer by President McKenna to be her press secretary. That had been an incredibly tough decision for Steph: she wanted to go where the big stories were as a journalist. Yet after being around McKenna, she had come to realize that she had an opportunity to become part of something far larger than herself, something that could be vitally important to all of humankind. For her, it was a sacrifice to give up her field work, but after the first few weeks on the job it was a sacrifice she had seen as being a worthy one. 

“How long until you have to get ready?” she asked him quietly, kissing one of his hands as she stretched her body slowly, suggestively, against his back. 

Ichiro grudgingly eyed the clock display. “An hour,” he sighed. 

“Then let’s not waste it,” she told him as she turned over, kissing him hard as she straddled his body in one smooth movement. 

Ichiro didn’t argue.

* * *

A few hours later, Commander Ichiro Sato, captain of the
CNS Yura
, stood on his ship’s bridge as his crew completed preparations to depart Africa Station. He and Steph had said their goodbyes, swearing they wouldn’t cry, then crying, anyway. After they parted and before he stepped through the gangway hatch to board his ship, he paused a moment. Closing his eyes, he took one last look at Steph’s image in his mind, then reverently put it away in a mental box that he closed and locked. He would set aside time to think of her — and write her letters, even though they probably wouldn’t reach her through the slow inter-system mail system until
Yura
returned home — when he was alone in his quarters. Except for those special moments, he would think only of his ship and her crew, and the perils that might await them. That was the best insurance he could provide that he would return home to the woman he loved.

“All umbilicals and gangways have been cast off, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Raymond Villiers, Sato’s executive officer (the XO) reported. “Africa Station has given us clearance to maneuver. Engineering is ready to answer all bells.”