“It ended when she learned her husband might still be alive,” Geary added. That wasn’t strictly true, but close enough so that he felt justified in saying it.
Commander Fensin nodded, looking haggard now. “I wouldn’t have blamed Vic, sir. Maybe before I went into that labor camp, back when I thought honor had a few simple rules to it. Now I know what it’s like, thinking you’ll never see someone again because the war has been going on forever and you can see the people dying in the labor camp who’ve been there almost all their lives and figure that will be you someday. There’s a lot of people who were in that camp who found new partners, figuring they’d never again see their old ones. Married people who started caring for someone else, or who looked for someone else to care about them. There’s going to be a lot of pain when they come home, I guess, one way or the other.” He gazed at Rione. “I did it, too.”
Rione gazed back, looking kinder than Geary had thought possible, as if meeting this man from her past had brought her back to a better time for her. “Did she come to this ship with you?”
“She’s dead. Three months ago. The radiation on that world causes problems sometimes, and the Syndics don’t waste money on expensive treatments for prisoners.” Fensin’s eyes appeared haunted now. “May the living stars forgive me, but I can’t stop realizing how much simpler that made things. I don’t know how my wife is now, whether she even knew I was alive, but now I don’t face a choice. I haven’t become a monster, Vic. But I can’t stop that thought from coming.”
“I understand,” Rione replied, reaching for Commander Fensin’s arm. “Let me help you to sick bay for your checkup with the others.” She and Fensin moved off while Geary watched them go. Desjani cleared her throat softly. “There but for the grace of our ancestors,” she murmured.
“Yeah. It’s a hell of a thing.”
“It’s nice to see that she can be human,” Desjani added. “Vic, I mean.”
He turned a slight frown on Desjani. “You know how she’ll react if you call her that.”
“I certainly do,” Desjani replied. “But don’t worry, sir. I’ll save it for the right moment.”
Geary took a few moments of his own to pray that he wouldn’t be too close when that happened. “How many of these liberated prisoners will be able to augment your crew?”
“I don’t know yet, sir. It’s like after we pulled the others off Sutrah. They’ll have to be interviewed and evaluated to see what skills they’ve got and how rusty they are. Then the personnel-management system will help the ships sort out who should go where.”
“Can you—”
“I’ll keep Commander Fensin aboard Dauntless, sir.” Desjani gave him a hard look. “Hopefully that commander will keep the politician occupied and off our backs.”
“You know, you are allowed to do nice things just to be nice even for her.”
“Really?” Desjani, her expression unrevealing, looked toward the liberated prisoners again. “I need to welcome the others to Dauntless, sir.”
“Do you mind if I welcome them to the fleet at the same time?”
“Of course not, sir.” She gave him a rueful look. “I know how little you like their reactions to seeing you.”
“Well, yeah, but it’s still my job to greet them.”
It felt odd, moving among the liberated prisoners, some of them elderly after decades in the Syndic labor camp, to know that all of them were born long after him. He’d gotten over that with the crew of Dauntless, able to forget that their lives had begun many years after his had supposedly ended. But the prisoners brought it home again, that even the oldest of them had come into a universe in which Black Jack Geary was a figure of legend.
But then an enlisted sailor with plenty of years behind her spoke to him. “I knew someone from off the Merlon, sir. When I was just a child.”
Geary felt a curious hollowness inside as he paused to listen. “Off Merlon?”
“Yes, sir. Jasmin Holaran. She was, uh…”
“Assigned to hell-lance battery one alpha.”
“Yes, sir!” The woman beamed. “She’d retired in my neighborhood. We’d go listen to her tell stories. She always told us you were everything the legends said, sir.”
“Did she?” He could recall Holaran’s face, remember having to discipline the young sailor after a rowdy time on planetary leave, see the promotion ceremony in which she’d advanced in rate, and another moment when he’d praised the hell-lance battery of which Holaran was a part for racking up a great score in fleet readiness testing. She’d been a capable sailor and occasional hell-raiser, no more and no less, the sort of so-called “average” performer who got the job done and kept ships going on a day-to-day basis.
Battery one alpha had been knocked out fairly early in the fight against the Syndics, but Geary hadn’t had a chance during the battle to learn which of that battery’s crew had lived through the loss of their weapons. Holaran had survived, then, and made it off Merlon. Served through the subsequent years of war and survived that, too, where so many others hadn’t. Retired back to her home world, to tell stories about him to curious children. And died of old age while he still drifted in survival sleep.
“Sir.” Desjani was standing next to him, her face calm but her eyes worried. “Is everything all right, sir?”
Wondering how long he’d been standing there without speaking, Geary still took another moment to answer as feelings rushed through him. “Yes. Thank you, Captain Desjani.” He focused back on the former prisoner. “And thank you for telling me about Jasmin Holaran. She was a fine sailor.”
“She told us you saved her life, sir. Her and a lot of others,” the older woman added anxiously. “Thank the living stars for Geary, she’d say. If not for his sacrifice, I would have died at Grendel and missed so much. Her husband was dead by then, of course, and her own children in the fleet.”
“Her husband?” He was certain Holaran hadn’t been married while on Merlon. Because of what he’d done, she’d lived, had a long life, a husband, and children.
“Sir?” Desjani again, her voice a little more urgent.
Apparently he’d been standing silently again as he thought about everything. “It’s all right.” He took a deep breath, feeling the lifting of a burden he hadn’t been aware of carrying. “I made a difference,” he murmured too low for anyone but Desjani to hear.
“Of course you did.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Geary assured the former prisoner. “To meet someone who knew one of my old crew.” He meant it, he realized with surprise. A moment he had dreaded had brought him release from some of the pain he carried because of the past he’d lost. “I’ll never forget them, and now you’ve reconnected me to one of them.”
The woman beamed with pleasure. “It’s the least I can do, sir.”
“It’s a very big thing,” he corrected the former prisoner. “To me. My thanks.” Geary nodded to Desjani.
“It’s all right,” he repeated to her.
“It is, isn’t it?” Desjani smiled. “Liberating POW camps seems to raise a lot of ghosts, doesn’t it?”
“Raise them and maybe bring us all some peace when we look them in the eye.” With some more words of gratitude to the older woman, he moved on to speak to others, a warmth having replaced the hollowness he’d felt for a moment.
The warmth didn’t last too long. He and Desjani were leaving the shuttle dock when an urgent call came down.
“Captain Geary?” the operations watch called, her image small on his comm pad. “There seems to be some problem with the former prisoners of war.”