And they realized that nothing—no discovery, no miracle weapon, no well-equipped soldier—had ever taken the place of living commanders with a broad and unified vision.
And sometimes that vision was as simple as this: Annihilate the enemy wherever you find him; whoever he might be.
According to the histories, the man who first articulated that simple vision in the Colonnade Wars was Commander Ewing Trekov. Whether or not that’s true is another matter.
What is true—and verifiable—is that Commander Trekov was the most effective leader of the war. He destroyed more enemy strongholds, captured more ships, and killed more soldiers—from all sides—than any other commander in the war.
He was supposed to be at the victory celebration. More important, he was supposed to be at the treaty-signing ceremony. There wasn’t just one treaty to be signed, but dozens—all with various governments (or, as one observer more accurately called them, various survivors). Trekov’s presence wasn’t just symbolic. He had negotiated several of the treaties himself.
Slowly I realize that I could spend the rest of my life reading about the Colonnade Wars and not get to all the details.
But those details don’t concern me. All that concerns me is Commander Trekov.
And he’s there but not there. Mentioned but not quoted. Observed but not really seen.
So I look up Trekov himself—when he was born, where he went to school, where he got his training. I look for family information—both on his family of origin and on the family he left behind.
I find Riya Trekov. She’s significantly younger than I thought—born to Trekov’s childless fifth wife nearly two decades after his disappearance. The other children want nothing to do with Riya—they believe her to be illegitimate, even though her DNA, her provenance (so to speak), is probably surer than theirs.
She has an easily accessible history—with degrees in accounting and business, a long career in high finance, and a personal wealth that’s almost legendary. She accumulated those funds on her own and is known around the sector as one of the most intuitive investors around.
Now she’s invested in me—the first whim I could find in her entire history—and I wonder if this investment will pay off.
It’s certainly turning into a research nightmare on my end.
Because the backstory on Ewing Trekov is confusing. His origins seem lost in time. His education is classified, as is most of his military experience. His battles are well documented, but that’s about the only part of his life that is.
In the official histories, Trekov’s personal history is deliberately vague. Which makes me wonder what’s hidden there, and why no one is supposed to know.
For a while, I pace around the main level, trying to figure out how to discover the man and not the myth. And then I realize I’m researching him wrong.
I need to approach him as if he were a ship, a wreck I’m trying to discover.
I need to go backward—from the last known sighting—and then I need to dig in the unofficial records, the half-hidden reports, and the highlights of his personal past.
Within forty-eight hours, my ship is stocked, my meager belongings on board, and I am heading to a little-known military outpost at what once was the edge of the sector.
The last recorded place anyone saw Ewing Trekov alive.
SIXTEEN
By all rights, this little outpost should be famous. It is not only the last place Ewing Trekov was seen alive, but it is also the place where he and the other commanders planned their strategy.
Military outposts are security minded. They make places like Longbow Station seem lawless. So I’ve come with letters of introduction from a general whom I supervised on tourist dives, a colonel who has known me since I began my career, and an imperial official who testified to the fact that my research is never for public purposes, only to find important “historical information.”
I also have a letter of explanation from Riya Trekov, giving me permission to look into her family’s confidential files. I have no idea if such a letter will open doors for me—I have never researched a human subject before— but I figure such a letter can’t hurt.
This outpost is top-of-the-line. The materials in the public areas are new and smell faintly of recently assembled metal. The lighting is set brighter than any I’ve seen in a commercial outpost, and the environmental systems are running at maximum comfort.
My tax dollars keep these soldiers in relative luxury, at least for space-farers. Most off-duty personnel walk around in shirtsleeves and thin pants. Anyone on Longbow wearing such flimsy clothing would freeze.
I am given a bracelet that opens doors to the sections of the outpost that I’m allowed in. I’ve been given a guest suite—they don’t call civilian quarters “berths” here—and with the suite comes the suggestion that I use it instead of staying shipside.
The suite is larger than the captain’s cabins on most luxury yachts. It doesn’t take me long to find out that I’m in one of the VIP rooms, courtesy, it seems, of my ties with the general. His letter, which I scan after I look at my quarters, asks that the military treat me like one of their own.
Apparently they take that to mean they should treat me like they would treat him.
My rooms—and I have five of them—all have a view of the concentric rings, as well as a private kitchen (along with a personal chef should I not want cafeteria food), a valet should I require it, and a daily cleaning service. I don’t require a valet or room cleaning service (although I know they won’t waive that entirely), and I stress to everyone how much I value my privacy.
My in-room computer system can access the public library of the base, and I start there, sitting on one of the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever used in my life and scrolling through list upon list of recorded information pertaining to Commander Trekov himself.
It takes me nearly three days, but I finally find visual and audio files of his arrival on the base. No holographic files, at least not yet. But the visual and audio ones are the first I’ve found of the commander at all.
He’s imposing, nearly six-seven, which is tall for someone who spent his life in ships. His walk marks him as planet-raised as well, as do his thick bones and well-defined muscles.
He’s not a handsome man, although he might have been once. His face is care-lined and his eyes are sad. His hair is cut short—regulation then as now—and he has a fastidiousness that seems extreme even in this military environment.
I freeze one of the images of his face and frame it. Then I set it, as a holopicture, on the tabletop near my workstation. I used to do this with ships that I was searching for. Ships that had disappeared or whose wrecks existed somewhere in a grid that no one had bothered searching for decades.
The images of the ships were always of them new. I used to compare that image with the wreck when I found it, not to find my way around it but so that I could get a sense of what hopes were lost in the ship’s ultimate destruction.
But the image I keep of Ewing Trekov isn’t of his youth, but of what he looked like toward the end. It’s an acknowledgement that I’m searching for the part of him that’s left over, the skeleton, the frame, the bits and pieces that survived.
I am no closer to getting him out of that Room by staring at his image than I got close to a wreck by staring at the original image of a ship. But I feel closer. I feel like this image holds something important, something I’m missing.