“No, sir, I wouldn’t think so.”
Odd. A chivalrous gesture toward the enemy. Geary waited a decent interval, then requested that Desjani visit his stateroom at her convenience. “I didn’t get a final assessment from you on our plans,” he said when she arrived.
“My apologies, sir,” Desjani replied. “It’s the best of a bad situation. That’s my assessment. I can’t think of any better courses of action.”
“Thank you. I wanted to be sure of that.” He paused. “I understand you escorted the Syndic commander to the brig.”
Desjani gave him an impassive look, betraying nothing. “Yes, sir.”
“It’s strange, isn’t it? If we ever want a chance at ending this war, officers like that are the people we need to deal with. Officers willing to keep their word with us and who care enough about their crews to put aside uncompromising orders. But in order to get the Syndics to the negotiating table, we need to keep doing our best to kill officers like that.”
“I suppose ‘strange’ is one word for it.” Desjani’s expression was still impossible to read. “If people like that weren’t fighting so hard for a government that they fear, then the war might have ended a long time ago. It’s not like we can trust the Syndics as a group to negotiate in good faith anyway. You know that now, after seeing how many times they tried to double-cross this fleet as we headed toward home.”
“That’s true,” Geary agreed. “Can I ask a personal question?”
Desjani looked down, then over at him and nodded.
“Why did you escort that Syndic commander through the passageways of your ship?”
Instead of answering immediately, Desjani looked down again, then eventually shook her head. “She acted with honor. I was granting honorable treatment in return. That’s all.”
“She was willing to sacrifice herself to save the surviving members of her crew,” Geary pointed out. “I know that impressed me as a former ship captain myself.”
“Don’t push me on this.” Desjani met his eyes, her own expression hard. “I still hate them for what they’ve done. Even that one. I’m certain she hates us, too. If she were truly honorable, why did she fight for the Syndics?”
“I can’t answer that. I just see some common grounds, that’s all. With her, anyway.”
“Did we kill her younger brother?” Desjani closed her eyes after that slipped out, then drew in a long breath through clenched teeth. “Maybe we did. At what point do the hate and the killing no longer make sense?”
“Tanya, hate never makes sense. Killing is sometimes necessary. You do what must be done to protect your home and your family and what’s precious to you. But all hate does is screw up people’s own minds, so they can’t think straight when it comes to knowing when they have to kill, or when they don’t have to kill.”
She gazed back at him, her face still hard, but her eyes searching his. “Did the living stars tell you that?”
“No. My mother told me that.”
Desjani’s face slowly softened, then she smiled with one corner of her mouth. “You listened to your mother?”
“Sometimes.”
“She—” Desjani broke off the sentence, her half smile vanishing.
Geary didn’t have any trouble knowing why. Whatever Desjani had been planning on saying about his mother, she’d realized that Geary’s mother had been dead for a very long time. Like so many others in his life, Geary’s mother had aged and died while Geary drifted in survival sleep amid the wreckage of war in the Grendel Star System. Because the Syndics had attacked, because the Syndics had chosen to start this war.
“They took your family from you,” Desjani finally said. “They took everything from you.”
“Yeah. That’s occurred to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
He forced a smile. “It’s something I have to live with.”
“Don’t you want revenge?”
It was Geary’s turn to look down for a moment as he thought. “Revenge? The Syndic leaders who ordered the attacks that started this war are themselves long dead and beyond any vengeance I can manage.”
“Their successors are still in power,” Desjani argued.
“Tanya, how many people do I kill, how many people do I ask to die fighting, in the name of avenging a crime committed a hundred years ago? I’m not perfect. If I could somehow get my hands on the Syndic bastards who started this war, I’d make them suffer. But they’re all dead. Now I’m damned if I can figure out what this war is still about aside from avenging the latest defeat or atrocity. It’s turned into a self-sustaining cyclic reaction, and you and I both know the Alliance as well as the Syndicate Worlds are starting to crack from the pressure of a war without end.”
Desjani shook her head, walking over to a chair and sitting down, her eyes on the deck. “I spent a long time just wanting to kill them. All of them. To get even and to stop them from killing anyone else. But it’s never even, it just goes back and forth, and how many Syndic deaths would it take to equal my brother’s life? Every single one of them dead wouldn’t bring Yuri back, and then at Wendig I saw a Syndic like Yuri, and I wondered what the point would be of killing somebody else’s brother to avenge my own. To make them hurt, too? Once that would have been reason enough. Now, I’m starting to wish that no one else’s brother or sister or husband or wife or father or mother had to die. But I don’t know how to make that happen.”
Geary sat down opposite her. “We may have a chance, once we get home, and you’ll have played a big role in making that chance happen.”
“Once we get home, you’ll have other things to deal with, too. I wish I knew how to make that easier.”
“Thanks.” He gazed to one side, eyes focused on nothing. “It still doesn’t feel real to me, that everyone I once knew is gone. At home, I’ll really have to face it. I wonder if I’ll hate the Syndics then as much as you have.”
She gave him an annoyed look. “You’re supposed to be better than us. That’s why the living stars gave you this job.”
“I’m not allowed to hate the Syndics?”
“Not if that gets in the way of your mission.”
He looked back at her for a moment. “You know, Captain Desjani, it has just dawned on me that every once in a while you give me orders.”
Desjani’s annoyed expression deepened. “I’m not giving you orders, Captain Geary. I’m just telling you what you need to do.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Of course there’s a difference. It’s obvious.”
Geary waited a few moments, but Desjani didn’t elaborate on what was apparently obvious to her. Debating the issue didn’t seem likely to produce a win for him, so he finally made a noncommittal face.
“All right. But…” He hesitated, wondering if he could bring up something that had haunted him, then deciding that if he could ever speak of it, then it should be now with Desjani. “I’m worried about how I may react. It hasn’t really hit me, I think, on some level. I was so stunned when I was awoken from survival sleep, and I went numb when I learned what had happened, how long it had been.”
“You looked like a zombie,” Desjani agreed, her voice much softer now. “I remember wondering if Black Jack really still lived.”
“I don’t know about Black Jack, but I did.” Geary looked down at his hands and inhaled deeply before being able to speak again. “But I had to put that aside when I had to assume command of the fleet. I put it aside. I don’t think I really resolved it. What’s going to happen when we get home, when the reality of everyone I once knew being dead and gone hits me because I’ll see the changes and know that I’m alone?”