In Her Name: The Last War Read Online Free Page A

McClaren’s question having caught him completely off-guard.
    The captain felt momentarily guilty for putting Sato on the spot first, but he had a reason. “Relax, Ichiro,” McClaren told him. “I called this meeting for ideas. The senior officers, including myself, and the chiefs have years of preconceived notions drilled into our heads. We’ve got years of experience, yes, but this situation calls for a fresh perspective. If you were in my shoes, what would your decision be? There’s no right or wrong answer to this one.”
    While Ichiro’s features didn’t betray it, the captain’s last comment caused him even more consternation. He had been brought up in a traditional Japanese family on Nagano, where, according to his father, everything was either right or it was wrong ; there was no in-between. And more often than not, anything Ichiro did was wrong . That was the main reason Ichiro had decided to apply for service in the Terran Navy when he was sixteen: to spite his father and escape the tyranny of his house, and to avoid the stifling life of a salaryman trapped in the web of a hegemonic corporate world. Earth’s global military services accepted applicants from all but a few rogue worlds, and Ichiro’s test scores and academic record had opened the door for him to enter the Terran Naval Academy. There, too, most everything was either right or wrong. The difference between the academy and his home was that in the academy, Ichiro was nearly always right . His unfailing determination to succeed had given him a sense of confidence he had never known before, putting him at the head of his class and earning him a position aboard the Aurora .
    That realization, and his desperate desire not to lose face in front of the captain and ship’s officers, gave him back his voice. “Sir. I believe we should stay and greet the ships.”
    McClaren nodded, wondering what had just been going on in the young man’s mind. “Okay, you picked door number one. The question now is why?”
    “Because, sir, that is why we are here, isn’t it?” Loosening up slightly from his steel-rod pose, he turned to look at the other faces around the room, his voice suddenly filled with a passion that none of his fellow crew members would have ever thought possible. “While our primary mission is to find new habitable worlds, we really are explorers, discoverers, of whatever deep space may hold. With every jump we search for the unknown, things that no one else has ever seen. Maybe we will not find what we hope. Perhaps these aliens are friendly, perhaps not. There is great risk in everything we do. But, having found the first sentient race other than humankind, can we in good conscience simply leave without doing all we can to establish contact, even at the risk of our own destruction?”
    The captain nodded, impressed more by the young man’s unexpected burst of emotion than his words. But his words held their own merit: they precisely echoed McClaren’s own feelings. That was exactly why he had spent so much of his career in survey.
    “Well said, Ichiro,” he told the young man. The two midshipmen on either side of Sato grinned and nudged him as if to say, Good job . Most of those seated at the table nodded or murmured their agreement. “So, there’s an argument, and I believe a good one, for staying. Who’s got one for bailing out right now?”
    “I’ll take that one, sir,” Raj Kumar spoke up from the bridge, his image appearing on the primary screen in the ready room. “I myself agree with Midshipman Sato that we should stay. But one compelling argument for leaving now is to make sure that the news of this discovery gets back home. If the aliens should turn out to be hostile and this ship is taken, or even if we should suffer some unexpected mishap, Earth and the rest of human space may never know until they’re attacked. And we have no way to let anyone know of our discovery without jumping back to the nearest