“In memory,” Vicky read the inscription off, awe in her voice, “of the civilian militias who risked everything in order to free this world from the Tahni occupation. Their sacrifice will never be forgotten so long as humans walk this world.” Beside the words was a list, inscribed in script so tiny, I could barely read it. The honored dead. “Jesus, there’s a lot of them,” Vicky breathed.
But it was the other half of the plaque that attracted my eye.
“Dedicated,” I took up the recitation, “to Corporal Randall Munroe of Marine Force Recon. Stranded on Demeter after the failed initial attempt to free this world, Corporal Munroe took charge of the civilian resistance and for a year kept them alive as they attrited the enemy and sabotaged their ability to fight. This led to the rescue of countless civilian prisoners and the final liberation of the planet.”
“Holy shit,” Vicky said, shaking her head. “That rich prick is a war hero.”
The driver had followed us to the memorial and she laughed, loud and raucous, at the comment.
“Munroe wouldn’t be offended,” she said, “but you’d better watch talk like that when you’re out and about. The people here love him and don’t put up with anyone badmouthing their hero.” She walked back to the car, casting one last addition over her shoulder. “Especially his wife.”
[ 9 ]
Lifeless eyes stared back at me, frozen in shock, as if they’d had a fleeting glimpse of the afterlife in that last second before death and it hadn’t been what they expected.
“How did he die?” I asked softly. Doc Hallonen and I were alone in the barracks room, but speaking in a normal voice felt like it would be disrespectful with the body of the engineering tech at our feet.
He’d gone out dressed in a tank top and workout shorts. I figured if I was going to commit suicide, I’d get dressed up first. But we’d only been on Demeter for a few days, and I suppose no one had the time yet to have a dress uniform fabricated. I hadn’t either. Fabricator time was hard to come by here, with so many people crammed into a city never built for this kind of population or the sort of industry the center of a new civilization required. I’d gone shopping at one of the local outlets instead, picking up premade civilian clothes for the moment until I could get some more uniforms made.
I hadn’t worn civilian clothes in years, not since we’d left the Cluster, and I felt like I was wearing a costume in the jeans and t-shirt. Hallonen looked more natural in them, mostly because I was used to seeing her in medical scrubs rather than a uniform, and to me she could never look like anything except a doctor.
“No blood,” she said with a cold, clinical detachment I could never have mastered. “No weapon around. I’d say poison. Not sure what or where he got it, but it was fast-acting. His roommate told me he wasn’t gone more than an hour, and Technician Gow here is already cold.” She looked at me, gestured with the medical kit held loosely in her hand. “I checked him when I got the word, but it was way too late even if we got him to an auto-doc. He’s been brain-dead for over forty minutes.”
“Do we have anyone coming to pick up the body?” I wondered, squatting beside the man, unwilling to take a knee because I didn’t especially want to touch anything in the room.
It was unadorned, impersonal. A few of the crew had bought holographic photo and video displays for the temporary barracks to stream pics of their families, but most didn’t particularly want to be reminded. And none of us had been able to bring much out of the Orion after she’d been brought down by the Unity. We were refugees, like most of the people in Amity
“That’s your job,” Halonen informed me. “You’ll have to square things with the local cops, military police, whatever. I’ll be around if they need my exam results.”
Gow was younger than me, maybe in his late twenties. Subjectively. All our objective ages were totally fucked up by the time in stasis, and everyone had pretty much given up on keeping track of them. But the tech was too young to have fought in the war, that much was clear.
“Did he have anyone?”
“If you mean family,” Hallonen said, arms folded as she regarded the dead man, “then no.” She tilted her head sideways in a shrug. “At least, probably not. They all lived on Hermes, and you heard what they told us about Hermes. Nothing left there except some of the farms way out in the boondocks. Few enough that the provisional government already has a census and a list of the survivors, and Gow’s family wasn’t among them.”
She moved across the body from me, kneeling down, seemingly unafraid to put her knee in whatever bodily fluids might have evacuated from Gow after his death.
“If you mean did he have any significant other among the crew, then again, no. According to Technician Second Class Melhoff, his roommate, he had a girlfriend among the Marines…Corporal Fairfield.”
“We lost her back on Waterline,” I said, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Jesus, this is the second suicide since we got here.”
“I think it’s setting in,” Halonen mused. “The reality, I mean. It’s hitting the people who had husbands or wives and children the hardest, of course, but I think maybe they haven’t really given up hope yet, not deep down inside. They still believe things are going to get back to normal.” She sniffed a quiet laugh. “Nance, of course, isn’t having any trouble at all. He figures he’s the captain of the Commonwealth’s only warp ship, so he’s doing great.”
“What about you?” I nodded to her. “You have kids.”
“A boy and a girl,” she agreed, her expression bleak. “But they’re older than you. Families of their own, and I haven’t seen any of them since I got assigned to the Orion.”
“Where did they live?”
“John was on Aphrodite, last I heard. At a geological sampling lab halfway between Kennedy City and the coast.” Hallonen chewed on her lip for a moment. “He might be okay. They don’t have a census of the survivors there yet, so there’s a chance. My daughter, Pris… she was in Capital City. An aid to the European Cultural Minister.” She shook her head. “There’s…” The surgeon’s clinical detachment slipped and she swallowed hard. “There’s no way she could have…”
I hesitated but put my hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry. I wish there was something I could do.”
“There is something you can do,” she said, her gruff mask returning as she stood. “These people have too much Goddamned time to think. Go be a commander and give them something better to do with their time. Give them a purpose.”
“It’s okay,” Vicky said, her arm wrapped around the shoulder of a young Fleet tech as I walked through the door. I assumed he was Melhoff, the roommate. “There was nothing you could have done about it. He probably made this decision long before we arrived here.”
Fleet crewmembers packed the break room at the corner of the two barracks wings in the converted warehouse, some of them sobbing, some just sitting there with half-forgotten paper coffee cups in their hands and numb shock on their faces. Some were in their utility fatigues, some the same sort of workout gear as Gow, others in locally bought civvies. No uniformity, no purpose. Lost.
“This sucks.” I turned, found Yanayev at my shoulder, her eyes red, hair sticking out as if she’d been awoken from a sound sleep. And she might have been. It was early in the evening here, but most of us hadn’t totally adjusted yet to the local day-night cycles. “I ran into Chuck Gow a few times in the mess. He was a nice kid.”
“I don’t remember him,” I admitted, speaking softly not just because I didn’t want to disturb the crew while they were grieving but because I was ashamed at the confession. I was in command. I should have known something about everyone. “I just never got to engineering back on the Orion.”
Yanayev said nothing, just moved past me and sat down between a pair of junior officers, speaking softly to them. Comforting, like Vicky was. Maybe I should have been trying to do the same, but I didn’t know what to say. It had been too long since anyone had tried to comfort me.
I sat down beside Vicky and tried to listen to what she was telling Melhoff, hoping I might be able to steal them to use with the others, but before I had the chance Lt. Springfield appeared in the door. She had managed to find a fresh set of utilities somewhere, though they didn’t have her name or rank on them yet. I suppose that technically made her out of uniform, but then again, I wasn’t entirely sure about the regs in the provisional government’s military.
“Sir, ma’am,” she said, looking at Vicky and me. “Mr. Munroe is downstairs. He wants to speak to both of you at your earliest convenience.”
I sighed, leaning my head back against the wall. I didn’t honestly want to talk to the man right now. Vicky gave Melhoff a pat on the shoulder and stood, looking back at me. I nodded and followed her and Springfield out of the room and down to the stairwell. The Fleet enlisted and NCOs occupied the third floor, Marines the second, all officers on the ground level, except for Vicky and me and Captain Nance. The three of us had been granted lodging in one of a series of townhouses at the center of the city that apparently had been devoted to housing the command structure of the new military.
Waiting at the foot of the stairs on the first floor was Randall Munroe. The man didn’t wear a uniform, didn’t use a rank, but everything about him screamed that he should have, that he was most at home with a gun in his hand. But there was none at his hip, and if he had a weapon concealed under his light, cloth jacket, it was well hidden.
“I’m very sorry to hear about your crewman,” he told us. And maybe he was, though I had a hard time reading any emotion through those gray eyes. “I... have some experience with difficult transitions.”
