And now, watching Remko stare from the com screen at that same officer, Yoshinaka understood the inarticulate flag captain's need to offer Trevayne something.
"Sir, the carriers are what matters. A scout doesn't have enough armament to hurt us much . . . and the missiles are still under shipboard control . . . it ought to be possible to . . ."
Trevayne also understood, but he turned to the screen and calmly cut Remko's stammering short. "Fight your ship, Captain," he said.
Then he settled back in the comfortable admiral's chair. The drumbeat was back, but he ignored it. There were decisions to be made in the next few minutes, and there was no time for anything else. No time to examine the new sensation of being utterly alone in the cosmos but for the cold companions Duty and Self-Discipline. No time for grief, or self-hatred, or nausea. Plenty of time for all of that, later.
ALLIANCE
Xanadu averaged slightly warmer than Old Terra, and its axial tilt was less than fifteen degrees, giving it short and mild seasons. Prescott City, on the seaboard of the continent of Kublai, lay just inside the northern temperate zone and was enjoying a typical winter as Ian Trevayne stepped from his shuttle. The day was blustery but only mildly cool; the chill was in his soul.
He spent a moment acclimating himself. (Weather of any sort was always a little startling to a man who spent most of his working life in artificial environments, and the 0.93 G gravitation was perceptibly different from the TFN's statutory one G.) Then he crossed the ceramacrete to greet Genji Yoshinaka. The dapper ops officer saluted and fell in beside him.
"Good afternoon, Admiral. Your schedule's been arranged for the evening. In the meantime, your skimmer is waiting. The pilot is a Prescott City native; he says Ms. Ortega's address is a good kilometer from the nearest public landing platform, so I've laid on a ground car to take you the rest of the way."
Trevayne looked around him. Low clouds scudded rapidly across a sky of deep blue crystal. For the first time in months, he made a completely impulsive decision.
"Cancel the ground car, Genji. I'll walk."
Yoshinaka, struggling to keep pace with his long-legged boss, was startled. In the week since the engagement people were beginning to call the Battle of the Gateway, Trevayne's days had been regimented almost to the second. It was inevitable, of course, especially given the new responsibilities which had fallen to him when Sergei Ortega had died with his flagship. But Yoshinaka understood why the admiral had attacked his work with such furious energy. There were too many ghosts, and Trevayne sought to hold them at bay in the only way he knew. Knowledge made his impulsiveness, his willingness to waste time, all the more startling. But, then, Yoshinaka reflected, the admiral had never been a predictable man.
Trevayne had visited Xanadu before, but only for brief conferences at the base itself. Now, for the first time, he looked down from the skimmer and saw the planet's chief city not as an abstraction to be defended, but as a bustling urban sprawl. He couldn't recall what Prescott City had been called when it was founded during the Fourth Interstellar War-probably something else outré from Coleridge. The old name didn't much matter anyway, for it had soon been renamed in honor of Rear Admiral Andrew Prescott, whose statue and column dominated the lawn before Government House, and his older brother, Fleet Admiral Raymond Prescott. It was a fitting tribute to the two brothers who had done so much to win that war: Andrew, the survey officer who had died to provide the Terran/Orion alliance with the information it needed to win that war, and Raymond, who had commanded the fleet which had done so much to forge that victory. There were persistent rumors that the Zephranese had wanted to use Raymond Prescott for their statue, but Raymond had survived the war and gone on to become Sky Marshal, and no one had quite dared to suggest such a thing during his lengthy life. By the time he died, Andrew's statue had become a comfortable and treasured part of Xanadu's history, and no one had even suggested making a change.
Well, making a change of statues, anyway. Trevayne's mouth twisted with the wry grimace that now served him for a smile. He hoped Winston Churchill had been wrong about the bad luck that attends nations which change the names of their cities.
It was hard to quarrel with Xanadu's choice of the name, though. Time after time, the war had brought large-scale space combat to this system. At the touch of the destructive energies those battles released, a living planet would wither like a leaf in a flame. Thanks to Andrew and Raymond Prescott, the people of Xanadu had finally awakened one morning and known they could live and bear children without that fear.
Until now, Trevayne thought, and the bile rose in his throat. Now the fear was back, but this time it was fear of the rebellious ships of the TFN itself, the TFN which for centuries had stood between all the worlds of Man and that horror! As Sergei had stood. . . .
His controlled face tightened as his vivid imagination pictured the loathsome mushroom clouds once more. Only the consuming demands of responsibility had kept him functioning under the shocks of the mutinies and the deaths of his wife and daughters. And then Colin. . . .
His mind shied away from the thought like a wounded, skittish horse. In the aftermath of battle, Trevayne had deliberately filled the little free time he might have had with a hectic round of self-imposed duties. Such as this one: a call on Sergei's daughter to express his condolences. It ought to fill the time between now and tonight's round of appointments and paperwork. And the time wouldn't be totally wasted. She was, after all, politically influential.
The wind gusted as he turned into Miriam Ortega's street, and he cursed as he nearly lost his cap. Then the gust died and he straightened his cap, glancing around at his surroundings.
The street skirted the broad estuary of the Alph, running down to a seawall and the azure, white-capped harbor. This was one of Prescott City's oldest residential districts, and the houses were on the small side but well-built, mostly of stone and wood, as first-wave houses tended to be. High-rises and fused cermacrete came later, as did the premium on space which would have doomed the large old native trees surrounding the houses. The architecture was vaguely neo-Tudor, and he suspected it had developed locally; it certainly fit the materials and the setting.
He drew a deep, lung-filling breath of the salt-tinged air and decided he'd been right to take the time to walk. Sensory deprivation was an ever-present danger in space; it had probably begun to catch up with him. In the midst of artificiality, the mind tended to turn inward on itself. His native Old Terra might be out of reach, but here he could at least touch the soil of a world humans had made their own.
A few children were at play, and at the sight of them a shadow chilled his mind just as the low-flying clouds periodically blocked out the warmth of Zephrain A. A small boy looked up and smiled at him. Trevayne hurried on.
Miriam Ortega's house wasn't far from the seawall. He stepped through the old-fashioned gate in the low, stone wall along the street, noticing the faint rime of salt clinging to the seaward stones. He climbed the steps and rang for admittance, and the door swung open.
The woman in the doorway was in her middle to late thirties, he decided. She was of medium height and rather sturdy build, with thick black hair pulled back in a severe style which accentuated her high cheekbones. Those cheekbones reminded Trevayne of Sergei, but the rest of her features, including the strongly curved nose, seemed to owe more to Sergei's late wife. Ruth Ortega had been from New Sinai, and her genetic heritage was strong in her daughter's face. Miriam Ortega, he thought, was no beauty.