Read Online In Her Name: The Last War by Michael R. Hicks - Free Book Online

fierce determination lighting up his eyes even as tears streaked down his face. “I accept that I will die here. But I will not dishonor him. Nor will I dishonor my shipmates.”
    She leaned forward and gently kissed him on the lips. Anna had entertained fantasies about being more than friends with Ichiro, but she realized now they would never have the chance. “Let’s go,” she said quietly.
    They left his quarters and moved quickly down the main passageway that would eventually lead them toward the bridge, Anna still clutching the alien knife, Ichiro holding his grandfather’s katana at his side.
    Turning a corner that would lead them to a set of stairs that would take them up to the level the bridge was on, they nearly collided with two aliens coming in the opposite direction.
    Ichiro, simply reacting on instinct, brought his sword up over his head for an overhand slashing attack, while Anna backed away slightly: her knife had no business in this particular fight.
    The alien easily parried his amateurish attack with her own sword, then casually moved in close to slam her opposite elbow into his jaw. 
    Dazed, Ichiro was sent flying to the deck. The only thing he was conscious of was that he had managed not to drop his grandfather’s sword. Anna moved to a position between him and the two aliens, holding her knife in an underhand grip. 
    “Come on,” she hissed at them. “ Come on! ”
    As one of the aliens made to step forward, an ear-splitting roar filled the passageway, and her head disappeared in a spray of bone and gore.
    Quick as a cat, the other alien went for something on her shoulder that looked like some sort of throwing weapon, with several wicked blades attached to a central hub, but she never reached it. 
    There was another roar, and the second alien pitched forward, a hole the size of a dinner plate in her chest. 
    Her ears ringing, Anna looked around to see what, who , had done this, when Lieutenant Amundsen stepped around the corner from the direction the aliens had come, smoke streaming from the muzzle of the M-22 Close-In Assault Rifle he was holding. Pausing just long enough to give each of the aliens a spiteful kick, Amundsen quickly made his way to Ichiro and helped him up.
    “Lieutenant...” Anna said, so grateful to see him that she nearly burst into tears. 
    “Are we ever glad to see you!” Ichiro finished for her, his jaw aching fiercely. 
    “You’re the only two I’ve found so far who are alive,” he told them grimly. “The rest...” He shook his head slowly.
    After leaving Kumar behind, an act that threatened to crush him with guilt, particularly once he saw what had happened to most of the rest of the crew, he had gone to the ship’s small armory. Amundsen couldn’t fight worth a damn with his hands, but he knew how to handle a rifle. He wasn’t an Olympic marksman by any stretch, but at the ranges afforded by the ship’s passageways and compartments, he didn’t have to be. 
    The main problem had been getting into the armory, which was no more than a small locked closet inside one of the ship’s storage holds that held a few “just in case” weapons and ammunition that the ship’s designers had put in as an afterthought. But he didn’t have to use his knowledge of astronomy, physics, or engineering to open the armory. Some problems yield themselves quite satisfactorily to the judicious application of a crowbar and hammer.
    After that, moving through the ship had been a nightmare. He hadn’t gone through all the compartments, of course, but from what he’d found so far, Aurora had become an abattoir. He had vomited after stumbling across the first butchered bodies, and periodically had been beset by dry heaves ever since. He had never seen a dead body before, let alone one of someone he’d known and worked with. Some bodies had been decapitated. The heads were strewn about the deck, expressions of terror forever fixed to their faces. Some bodies had arms or