Befuddled for a second as protocol and emotion short-circuited his brain, Michael recovered in time to half turn and salute as the two four-ring captains stopped in front of him; his salute was returned by the pair with military precision. Bill Chen stood a pace behind with a half smile on his face as he watched Michael recover from his momentary confusion.
The older of the two, Captain van Meir of the Al-Jahiz, a broad-shouldered woman with startlingly deep blue, almost violet eyes set in a dark face the color of aged teak, was the first to speak, reaching across as she did to shake Michael’s hand. “Helfort. It’s an honor to meet you.”
“It is indeed,” said Captain Chandra, his grip painfully strong, clear hazel eyes boring right into Michael’s. “You did well, very well.”
“Thank you, sirs. But what a price.” He nodded at the line of gun carriages. “I still have trouble coming to terms with it all.”
Van Meir nodded sympathetically. “We all do, believe me, we all do. I really hoped we’d taught the Hammer enough of a lesson the last time around, but apparently not. Sadly, there are times when we have to stand up and be counted, and this was one of them. But it still hurts, especially when you knew the people. Chief Kazumi was one of mine on Warhammer, and Corporal Meritavich was with me on Qurrah when I was her XO. I’ll miss them. They were good people.”
The small group stood in silence for a moment as memories crowded in, the clinking of harnesses and the soft breathing of horses the only sounds breaking the intensity of the moment.
Chandra brought the group back to earth. “Helfort, good to meet you. If you are passing the Damishqui, please step aboard for a drink. It would be an honor, and I’m sure a certain junior lieutenant of your acquaintance would be more than happy to see you as well.”
In an instant, Michael’s face was bright pink with embarrassment. How the hell had the captain in command of a heavy cruiser found the time to know about him and Anna?
Chandra smiled indulgently. “Now, I have some people I wish to say goodbye to, so forgive me.”
“Sir.”
Michael and Chen followed the two captains as they made their way past the depressingly long line of 387’s gun carriages to those of the Al-Jahiz, Damishqui, and finally 166.
As Chen walked on, giving a brief pat to Michael’s shoulder to steady him, Michael slowly moved past gun carriage after gun carriage, all draped in the gold and purple flag of the Federated Worlds. Mounted in the center of each gun carriage was a simple mahogany plinth cradling a small gold funeral urn in front of which was a cushion, its deep crimson fabric decorated with a pathetic spread of medals, with a small brass plaque being the only clue to each urn’s identity.
Not much to show for a life, Michael thought bitterly as he wondered if the win was worth the pain. None of it felt real to Michael as he struggled without success to connect brass plates to the faces of the people who once had been his fellow 387s.
Michael stood alongside the last of the carriages, the one carrying the pitiful remains of Spacer Vignes, killed only weeks after his twentieth birthday and the youngest of 387’s crew. His neuronics chimed softly.
“Yes?”
“Junior Lieutenant Helfort, this is the AI. My apologies for interrupting, but we move off in five minutes. Would you mind taking your position.”
“On my way.”
Michael’s left leg had begun to ache, a vicious stabbing pain, only minutes after the cortege had left the Fleet barracks. True to form, he had forgotten to renew his supply of drugbots.
The strain of the march through Foundation streets packed solid with an unbroken mass of silent Worlders, their faces bitter with grief and anger, began to tell. The slow, measured pace pulled mercilessly at muscles and tendons that despite the best efforts of FedWorld medical technology were not fully recovered from the slashing damage inflicted by the Hammer slug. The human body still kept some secrets, and how to quickly repair the damage inflicted by high-velocity projectiles was one of them. As for all of human history and despite the enormous advances in geneering and trauma medicine, getting well mostly took time and lots of it.
By the time Michael had covered the seemingly endless kilometers that separated the Fleet barracks from Braidwood National Cemetery, the final resting place for the ashes of all spacers killed on active service, his leg was molten agony. So bad was the pain that the huge crowd of silent Worlders that had flanked the route from the very start had become a blur.
As the cortege turned into Remembrance Avenue for the final approach to the massive gilt gates of the national cemetery, the deep hush broken only by the chinking of gun-carriage harnesses and the uneven beat of horses’ hooves on the ceramcrete road, Michael cursed himself for not taking the basic precaution of getting some painkiller drugbots inside him just in case. You are a fucking idiot, Helfort, he railed at himself, conscious that his left leg was beginning to drag and embarrassed that there was nothing he could do about it apart from gripping his sword so tightly that the pain in his hand and wrist would distract him, praying all the time that he made it and that the holovid commentators didn’t think he was playing to the crowd.
At last, the cortege passed the gates. Guided by the AI, without which he would not have the slightest idea of where to go or what to do, Michael led 387’s crew and the sad column of gun carriages up a gently sloping hill away from the main access road and the rest of the cortege. The narrow road was surrounded by achingly beautiful trees and shrubs, their leaves and flowers bright with color in the late morning sun.
And then there it was, the sight bringing a lump to Michael’s throat and tears to his eyes: the final resting place for the 387s he was there to bury that day. When the engineers had finished making the ship safe for its return dirtside, it would be the last resting place for DLS-387 also. The torn and blasted ship would be set into a sandstone-walled recess cut back into the hillside above the small hollow that would cradle the ashes of its fallen crew, almost as though it were looking down in sorrow at the people it had failed to protect.
The marine honor guard and firing party stood to attention as Michael led the surviving 387s past the waiting burial plots, turning them off the road to halt opposite the temporary stand with the families and friends of the dead. Tears fell unashamedly down their faces as the gun carriages came to a halt one by one, to be relieved of their pathetically small burdens by the marine burial parties.
For a moment, Michael had to smile to himself as a picture of Athenascu, objecting strenuously that the marines she so loved to hate were handling the last of her mortal remains, flashed across his mind’s eye.
Michael watched the sad sight of golden urns one after another being put in position alongside each of the burial plots. As the last one was set in place, he looked across the little hollow to where his family was standing, his parents rigidly at attention in the front row of the stand. Between them stood Sam, her face a frozen mask as she struggled to absorb the full meaning of this, the final act in a tragedy that had been unthinkable just a few short months earlier. Her plain gray-black dress stood in drab contrast to the dress blacks, loud with medals, unit citations, combat command stripes, and rank badges, that flanked her. Behind his family, Michael picked out Vice Admiral Jaruzelska and, with a shock, the president herself, her mass of chalk-white hair standing out starkly like a beacon in a sea of Space Fleet black, marine green, and the dark grays and blacks of the crew’s families. Also there were Moderator Burkhardt, Minister Pecora, and most of the cabinet. But Anna, the one person he most wanted to see, the one he most wanted to have with him, was not there. Her place was with the Damishqui spacers who had fallen. Michael ached to be with her.