“Um, sir, I…” the young lady stammered.
Jeffrey met her eyes and waited. Submariners were very good at waiting.
She smiled, and hesitated. Then she positively beamed, and leaned a few inches too close. “Congratulations, Captain.” There was a hunger, a wanting, in her eyes. A Medal of Honor groupie? Was there such a thing?
“Thanks,” Jeffrey said, friendly enough but distant and noncommittal. He had his mask of command to maintain, his professional demeanor — and he’d never felt comfortable flirting, whatever the context.
She controlled herself and switched to more of a daughter-father mode. “Thank you, Captain. For everything you’ve done, to help protect us.”
The woman hurried away, blushing. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to talk to the guests. Maybe she’d just felt nervous, suddenly talking to a battle-hardened nuclear submarine captain in his full dress blues. Flirting was natural when people felt nervous.
Jeffrey doubted if that young lady, if most of the civilians here, really knew what the medals on his jacket even meant, which one was which. He knew very few of them had any idea what a person had to suffer through to earn these medals. Today, on the theory that less was more, Jeffrey used only his major decorations: the Navy Cross, with gold star in lieu of a second award, for his first two combat missions in the recent conflict. The Presidential Unit Citation, awarded to Challenger’s whole crew by the Department of Defense, for what they did under Jeffrey’s leadership on their latest mission, their third, the mission for which he’d just received the Medal… And his Silver Star and Purple Heart, won years ago, in the mid-nineties. He’d been a freshly minted junior officer in the Navy SEALs in those days, on a black operation in Iraq, and the SEALs’ extraction went bad. Eventually recovered, but unfit for further commando duty, Jeffrey had chosen to transfer to submarines; wanting a career in the navy ever since he was a kid, he’d done Navy ROTC at Purdue, with a major in electrical engineering — good background for his move to the Silent Service.
I was about that waitress’s age when I got wounded, Jeffrey reflected. The thought made him feel very old. He was thirty-seven, and this coming summer would turn thirty-eight, if he survived the war that long. He wondered what the navy would order him to do next. He wondered if he really would survive the war.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jeffrey caught a glimpse of Ilse Reebeck. She was a Boer freedom fighter and had served as combat oceanographer on Jeffrey’s submarine during all of USS Challenger’s war patrols. Originally a civilian consultant, Ilse was now a lieutenant in the Free South African Navy. Jeffrey saw her talking to several African dignitaries, diplomats and generals who’d been invited to the party. Jeffrey was heartened to see that an ethnic Boer could talk with a group of black Africans without them all coming to blows. This boded well for the future. Jeffrey knew there were plenty of “good” Boers. Ilse’s family had all been good, and paid the ultimate price for resisting the reactionary takeover last year: They’d been hanged with so many others, on national TV, in Johannesburg, South Africa’s capital.
Jeffrey, standing in a corner of the ballroom now — to get breathing space from the increasing press of the crowd — looked steadily at Ilse, trying to make eye contact. He could tell that she could see him. But she ignored him and continued to talk to her fellow Africans. Some of them wore traditional tribal robes, and Jeffrey thought these men looked very powerful. Finally Ilse blinked and subtly shook her head, and still didn’t look at Jeffrey. He gave up and looked away.
Ilse was like that. He and she had been intimate, off and on. Ilse was very emotionally complex. Sometimes Jeffrey felt he was being used, since it was always Ilse who decided when it was time to be close or time to be detached. Today, she’d been altogether standoffish. She wore a new medal herself, the Free South African Legion of Merit, a gaudy embroidered sunburst over her heart, on a wide red sash. Jeffrey thought the whole thing looked overdone. But he’d hoped he and Ilse could share in the sense of celebration today. That wasn’t happening, and Jeffrey felt disappointed.
Jeffrey reminded himself that Ilse had personal needs he could barely fathom. What was it like to lose your whole family and your country in one blow? What was it like to be torn from teaching at the University of Cape Town and thrown into a bloody coup and then a bloodier war? If Ilse hadn’t been attending a marine biology conference in the U.S. when the trouble started, she might well be dead now too, strung up with her relatives. On top of everything else, she’d played a key role in several recent nuclear demolitions, and must still be reeling mentally from hand-to-hand combat with kampfschwimmer at least as much as Jeffrey was. Kampfschwimmer terrified Jeffrey, and he was a former SEAL.
A senator wormed his way over, someone Jeffrey recognized from the newspapers. He chaired an important congressional subcommittee. The senator brought a staff photographer in his wake and quickly struck a dramatic pose, shaking the Medal of Honor winner’s hand in both of his own. Jeffrey tried not to blink when the flash went off. The senator disappeared in the crowd as quickly as he’d materialized.
“Son!”
Jeffrey recognized his father’s voice. He turned. His father came over from out of the crowd, accompanied by Jeffrey’s mother. Both were very well dressed, for the special occasion. Jeffrey’s dad, Michael Fuller, wore a gray pinstripe suit that fit him perfectly, even though, like many people, he’d lost a lot of weight since the start of the war. His red-, white-, and blue-striped tie’s Windsor knot was also perfect. Quite a switch from when I was a kid back in St. Louis, when my dad wore polyester clip-on ties and off-the-shelf sport jackets.
“How are you feeling now, Mom?” Jeffrey was naturally concerned. Her color was healthy, but Jeffrey knew this was mostly due to makeup.
“Good, Jeffrey. Today I’m feeling very good.” His mother grinned. When he’d first learned she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, he worried he might not even have a chance to say good-bye.
Jeffrey’s mom hugged him, and he hugged her back very hard.
“I won’t kiss you on the cheek this time,” she said puckishly. “I got enough lipstick on your face already, posing for all those cameramen.” Jeffrey’s mother had had emergency surgery less than two months before, and then a new chemotherapy protocol that specifically targeted cancer cells. The treatments were very effective, and were over so fast you hardly lost much of your hair. Her latest medical imagery scans showed her body free of all tumors.
“I managed to escape my various sycophants and camp followers,” Jeffrey’s father said. Michael Fuller chuckled; he had a biting sense of humor. He and Jeffrey’s mother had been right up front at the formal ceremony this morning, when the president of the United States presented the Medal of Honor to Jeffrey in the Rose Garden. Now, with the president off on other pressing duties, Michael Fuller was holding court himself. Since the war began he’d had a meteoric rise in the Department of Energy. Instead of being a local utility regulator, that middle-management bureaucrat Jeffrey remembered from his teen years, his dad had become a savvy political appointee in the nation’s capital, one of the dozen most senior people in the DOE.
“You look unhappy,” Michael said.
Jeffrey shrugged. “It all gets pretty wearing.” He gestured with his eyes toward the crowd, which kept churning and babbling nonstop. “How do you stand it?”
“It’s an important part of my job, the mingling,” Michael Fuller said. “You, in contrast, look rather uncomfortable.”