“-and if it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d as soon not make the trip.”
I blinked, swallowed, then stretched a smile. “Always trying to save the taxpayers a buck, Sergeant Major?”
“Sir, it’s more that I’d like you to be there. And I’m told the Marini do military funerals up quite nicely.”
I mumbled, “Anything. Anything you want.”
“My will’s in my footlocker, upper right corner of the pull-up shelf. It’s up-to-date. Everything goes to the Noncommissioned Officers’ Orphan’s Fund.” He slid folded papers across his nightstand toward me. “GI life-insurance policy. Enough to get me buried, buy a round for everybody at the NCO Club, and-”
I hid my forehead behind my palm, then ran my hand across my hair. “Stop!”
Silence.
“Please. Sergeant Major, you don’t need to worry about that stuff. It will be taken care of. I swear.” I breathed deep. “Do you want to talk about-I dunno-anything?”
He nodded. “There is something. One item of personalty I want to pass outside the will.” He rolled on his side, then reached into his nightstand’s drawer. He drew out a leather-holstered pistol.
I smiled. “Ah. The forty-five.” Weapons had always been a busman’s holiday for Ord, the only “personalty” he valued that hadn’t been issued to him by the government.
The pistol he cradled, in a hand that seemed to have withered even since the preceding day, was his own M1911 Colt automatic. The design was pushing two centuries old. Too heavy, too hard to fire accurately, but Ord wasn’t the only careerist who continued to carry a service.45 into combat as his sidearm. Ord’s was an aftermarket blue steel version that he had souped up with custom-carved grips and hand balancing. And one unique modification made the pistol worth what it cost-a scratch along the receiver where the steel of Ord’s.45 had stopped a bullet bound for his heart.
He drew the pistol from its holster and turned it in his hands. “Saw me through the Second Afghan, sir. Saw you through the Armada business.”
I bowed as I sat, diplomat style. “A loan I was honored to receive. And lucky to repay.”
He gazed at the ceiling, then closed his eyes, nodding as he recited postings and battles. “The Relief of Ganymede. Sudan. Kazakhstan. Peru. Tibet. Headwaters of the Marin. Emerald River. The Tressen Barrens Offensive. Second Mousetrap…”
I eyed the insurance policy flimsy on the nightstand, and a coal-black, ancient trough of a scar on his forearm, a badge of some forgotten heroics, then sighed. “You didn’t get much for that life, Sergeant Major.”
Ord opened his eyes and smiled. “On the contrary, sir. Churchill said all we make by what we get is a living. We make a life by what we give.”
By delegating things I shouldn’t have, cutting out catnaps, and pounding ’Phets like I hadn’t since I was a teenager during finals, I managed to spend most of Ord’s waking hours with him. Our blood matched, so I gave him a pint, then lied to a different nurse about it so that she took another pint a day later. I wheedled a medic for precombat blood boosters, to fool my body into making more red cells, so I could be transfused again, though the medic told me they wouldn’t grow until it was too late.
No matter. Over the next nine days, the bug silently ate Ord alive, from the inside out.
On the tenth day, I sat with him for the last time.
His eyes had sunk into pits in his face. He dragged fingers across gray stubble on hollow cheeks and croaked. “They won’t shave me, sir. It’s driving me crazy.”
In thirty years, Ord had never admitted discomfort to a living soul, so far as I knew.
“I’ll speak to the nurse.” A lie. If he bled out one nick’s worth, there would be nothing left.
He said, “You’re going to outlive me.”
My throat swelled so I couldn’t speak. I waved my hand. “Ahhh.”
“I’m glad. No man should bury his son.”
He had slipped away from reality. I whispered, “Sergeant Major, I’m not-”
“Yes. The way Jude is yours. I’m as proud of you as you are of him.”
“Proud? I never got things right.”
“But you always tried.”
I laid my hand on his arm.
His lips moved. “You’re on your own now, Jason.”
Six minutes later, his skin was cold beneath my fingers.
THIRTY-FIVE
THE CLANS OF BREN cremate their dead on pyramidal pyres of gathered wood, and the time of Ord’s funeral was dictated by the hour at which a pyre of a size appropriate to the departed’s station was completed.
Bassin the First, himself, as a comrade in arms of the departed, would place the last log on Ord’s pyre.
Bassin ruled a kingdom divided against itself, plains hunters and desert nomads against the worldly Marini, and, within Marin itself, abolitionists against slave holders. And none of the clans were crazy about having us neocolonial motherworlders on their soil. But Ord had fought shoulder to shoulder with them all when we had all made common cause and expelled the Slugs from Bren after thirty thousand years.
Therefore, over the next three days, Tassini Scouts carried janga wood from the Tassin desert, Casuni warriors brought scrub oak from the Stone Hills, and Bassin dispatched his royal barge upriver to gather magnolia from the base of the Falls of the Marin. Only when all that had been completed did Ord’s funeral begin, on a clear, cold night in the center of our landing field.
The full White Moon lit the field so that the moon’s light reflected off Earth troops’ Eternad armor. It also reflected off the breastplates of mounted Casuni warriors on reined-in duckbills and off the delicate swords of Tassini Scouts mounted on twitching, ostrichlike wobbleheads. Crowds of civilian freemen and freewomen gathered, too, attracted by the spectacle.
Meanwhile, preparations to retake the Red Moon from the Slugs advanced. I had slept three hours each of the last three nights. I could have slept longer. My staff, the Marini, the Zoomies, and most of all the landing troops had forged and practiced a plan that I believed would succeed. We would retake the Red Moon, we would seek out the Slugs’ home, and we would win the war. Ord had seemed to think that we would, and Ord had never been wrong.
The Red Moon rose above the horizon and silhouetted the fifty-foot-high pyramid that Bassin now climbed. After Bassin placed the last log, actually a ceremonial stick, Ord’s catafalque was borne to the pyramid’s top by a joint honor guard, then set ablaze.
I stood alongside Jude, both of us left of, and a pace behind, Bassin. A Marini band piped a dirge.
Jude whispered, “How are you doing, Jason?”
I shrugged. “I spent these last few days with him. Soldiers don’t usually get to see death coming. I thought we’d talk about things that mattered. Things we hadn’t said. But mostly we watched war movies and told stories. Sometimes we laughed.” I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
The Red Moon, still befogged by the Slug fleet that kept us from it, had risen so high now that its disk intersected the roiling smoke plume that had been Ord.
In the civilian crowd, a murmur rose.
I shot Bassin a glance.
He leaned toward Jude and me and whispered, “It’s nothing. If a warrior’s smoke crosses his enemy’s path before battle, it’s bad luck.”
I whispered, “Sure. It means he’s already dead.”
The dirge ended.
Jude said, “Huh?”
I stared where my godson was staring, up at the Red Moon, which seemed smaller.
The Red Moon shrank in the sky, from basketball-size to melon-size.
The murmur spread to the Casuni and Tassini ranks, then to the more worldly Marini soldiers, and finally to my troops.
Overhead, the Red Moon, our key to victory, had become as tiny as a crimson pea.
Then it winked out altogether.
Now the Tassini and Casuni pointed and shouted. Their mounts pranced and snorted.
Within the old city, miles from us, an alarm bell sounded, then another, then more, until the night echoed with them.