Not all of the men were dead. A half dozen militiamen sat huddled along one wall of the tunnel. They had blood on their faces and bloodstained clothes and blood in their hair, and they looked stunned as they sat and moaned. I stepped over a body and saw blood running out the man’s ear.
“Maybe the medics on the Churchill can save them,” Freeman said.
The Churchill was a fighter carrier, it would certainly have beds and medicine. “Do you mean save them or fix them?” I asked.
Freeman said nothing.
Walking just outside the door, I found two more pockets of survivors. Three men sat beside each other, they were silent and still. As I approached them, one looked up into my visor, and asked, “Is it over?” He yelled the words. The heat hadn’t reached these men; when the atmosphere dropped back in place, the pressure it created obliterated their eardrums.
But it wasn’t physical pain that left them numb. They had lost everything and everyone that meant anything to them.
“Harris, come here,” Mars called over the interLink.
He stood in a little clearing. I went to join him.
Not far from Mars, a single body rested against a wall. The Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow, president of Terraneau, sat with his finger still around the trigger of the gun he had used to kill himself. His head had shattered like a melon tossed from a tall building, but I recognized his tailored suit just the same. The jolt of recognition did not include sympathy; I felt nothing but disgust for this man whose high ideals and sense of self-importance had cremated an entire population. How many millions had he killed with his visions of moral superiority simply because he did not trust any authority other than his own?
I came up beside Mars, who was dressed in his engineering armor. He stared down at Doctorow. I had no idea what he felt; but I thought his feelings toward Doctorow might not be any kinder than my own.
“General, should we take your shuttle out?” he asked after several seconds passed. They really were magicians, Lieutenant Mars and his engineers. They saved ships, built bridges, dug tunnels, and resurrected the left-for-dead.
“Give it a few more minutes,” I said, remembering the tests Freeman had run on Olympus Kri. “Let’s let the dust settle.”
Outside the tunnel, the sky would be filled with soot and steam and smoke. The final dregs of Tachyon D would still be dangerous as they traveled their circuits like angels of death.
Mars did not leave. He stood there, beside me, staring down at Doctorow’s lifeless remains. He did not speak for several seconds. I could not see his face through his helmet, but I could imagine his expression. He was new to this kind of war. The first time you see the bodies and the blood and the waste, the muscles in your face go numb and your mind goes numb and you feel as if you are no more alive than the men lying on the ground.
“What about the other planets?” Mars asked. “Is it going to be like this? Can we save them?”
I took a deep breath, held it in my lungs until I felt them searing; and even then, I still did not exhale. I thought about the Unified Authority, its leaders waiting for another chance to betray us, and the Avatari traveling from planet to planet, burning entire worlds.
“We can’t save them all,” I said, but I would try just the same. Staring down at Doctorow, I realized that the only time I appreciated the value of life was when I saw it spent and wasted.
EPILOGUE
“Takahashi-san, what are we doing out here?” asked Yokoi Shigeru, the least Japanese of the four ship’s captains.
Takahashi Hironobu, captain of the self-broadcasting battleship Sakura, took the question at face value and dismissed it as the kind of stupid talk men make after too much sake. “We’re here to track down the aliens and to protect our home planet,” he said. Even as he said it, he knew it was more slogan than answer.
Takeda Gumpei, the captain of the Yamato, accepted the patriotic answer as an excuse to toss another bowl of sake. “Kanpai!” he yelled, then he flipped the inch-round bowl with so much force that the well-aimed rice wine sailed over his tongue and down his throat.
“Kanpai.” The rest of the ship’s captains echoed his toast with limited enthusiasm. Takeda could keep drinking long after most men would pass out on the floor.
“No, Takahashi-san,” Yokoi said, “you misunderstand me. I asked what we are doing, not what we came to do. We came to kill the alien invaders. We have been here a long time. In another few months, we will have been on this mission for three years. Have we killed any aliens? Have we seen any aliens?”
As Yokoi spoke, a waitress in a pink-and-white kimono came to the table to deliver another bottle of sake. The waitress’s kimono, the tiny finger bowls from which they drank, the knee-high table, and the tatami mats on which the four captains sat were neither practical nor comfortable, but they were tradition. So much of what they did in the Japanese Fleet was based on the ancient traditions that defined the Japanese. Even in Bode’s Galaxy, eleven million light-years from Earth, they sat on the floor and drank rice wine from cups shaped like mustard bowls because their ancestors had sat on tatami mats, made wine out of rice which they drank from tiny ceramic cups.
Takahashi could tell that Yokoi was drunk. His words came out in a mishmash of Japanese and English. It was time for him to return to his ship and sober up, but telling him so would go against tradition. Japanese men did not criticize each other for getting drunk.
“It’s a big galaxy,” Takahashi said. “Who knows where the aliens are hiding.”
For Takeda, the size of the galaxy was yet another reason for a toast. He yelled, “Kanpai!” and the rest of the captains had to follow. They murmured, “Kanpai,” and Takeda tossed his drink back and swallowed it in one fluid motion. The others brought their cups to their mouths, not sure if they would drink or drown.
By that time, Yokoi, the youngest and smallest officer of the four, was so drunk he could no longer support himself. He rested his chest and head on the table. His right arm was extended beyond his head, bent at the elbow, so he could hold his sake cup above his head. The next time he drank, he would raise his mouth to the cup instead of the other way around.
The waitress came with another bottle of sake, gave the captains a polite bow, and backed away.
“Three years? Has it really been three years?” asked Miyamoto Genyo, the captain of the Onoda. The oldest and most stoic of the officers, Miyamoto allowed the others to drink and chat while he watched with a disapproving scowl.
Yokoi, not bothering to lift his head off the table, swiveled around so that he faced Miyamoto, and said, “We left in February 2515.”
“So we did,” said Miyamoto. He was not drunk. He sat with his back straight and his head held high. He had white hair around his ears and temples, and he packed a few extra pounds; but Miyamoto Genyo was a prime example of the aging generation. He lived the codes of loyalty, honor, and tradition.
“Perhaps we are wasting our time,” he conceded. Coming from an old warrior like Miyamoto, that comment was tantamount to mutiny. Men of his generation endured any inconvenience in stony silence when it involved the honor the fleet.
Did I stop at seven bowls or eight? Takahashi asked himself when the call came in the next morning. It came at 06:00, and he was still lying facedown on his futon.
“Takahashi,” he said, trying to sound more alert than he felt.