“Well?” he demanded when the young man hesitated.
“Sir, I…”
“Is there a weapon? What?”
The young man stuttered, unable to speak. “There is… are… no weapons. Nothing dangerous. Sir.”
Speaker Salera scrambled down out of the GEM, shoving the soldier aside as he strode toward the hopper. The men at the cargo hold moved away as he neared, futilely attempting to make themselves invisible.
Salera stood at the edge of the open hatch and stared inside, remaining there, unmoving, for several moments.
“What is it?” Adela asked of Niles. He turned to her, his eyes welling with tears, but didn’t answer.
“Adela, look,” Woorunmarra whispered, his hand on her shoulder, and nodded toward the hopper.
Salera had reached inside the hold, removing its contents, and was walking slowly toward them, his face a mask of consuming grief. The crowd, until just moments before abuzz with speculation and chatter, fell silent. There were gasps here and there from some of the soldiers as the Speaker walked into their field of view. He carried a uniformed woman in his embrace, her arms and legs dangling limply as he walked slowly back to the GEM.
But as he neared, Adela realized that it wasn’t a woman at all. She was tiny, smaller than she was, and couldn’t have been more than a teenager—eighteen, maybe nineteen years old at the most. Her blond hair hung, dirty and blood-matted, over her youthful face. The left shoulder of her uniform was blood-soaked, and her left arm swung at an odd angle as Salera stopped before them.
He tried to speak, but couldn’t find the words. He gasped painfully and looked away, his eyes scanning the soldiers whose attention was now riveted on him. His lower lip quivering, he asked, simply, “What happened?” Gone was the forceful sense of command he’d displayed only moments earlier. He walked past them and sat on the fender skirt of one of the wheeled transports that had escorted the GEM, and stroked the filthy hair away from the girl’s face. He looked up suddenly, his expression repeating his question.
His daughter, Adela realized. She felt tears of her own forming and turned to Billy, who put his arm around her, to comfort himself, she knew, as much as her.
Niles went to Salera, stopping just short of him, and looked down at the man as he held the broken body to his chest. “She was a member of one of the raiding parties involved in the hit-and-runs on the abandoned stations,” he said softly. “Her hopper was shot down last night near station 189.”
Salera knelt forward, laying the dead girl gently on the ground before him. Remaining on one knee, he rested an arm on the fender skirt and, still staring unblinkingly at her, whispered, “You’ve killed my daughter, bastard.” He didn’t rise, but looked up into Niles’ face. “You’ve killed Lanni.”
“No,” Niles replied, his voice filled with pain. “She received only minor injuries in the hit; none of her crewmates were badly hurt.” Niles sat on the fender and several soldiers brandished weapons, but Salera waved them off and stared again at the girl. They moved a few paces away, their weapons still held uncertainly at the ready, leaving the two Speakers, and Adela and Billy, alone.
“She and the others from her hopper were taken to a detention center at the encampment near Taw,” Niles continued. “Their injuries were treated and they were being taken care of according to the Laws of War.” He hesitated, his voice dropping still lower. “But this morning there was a series of tremors. The POW holding facility collapsed, as did one of our barracks. Others were severely damaged. Thirty of our people, most of them civilian support, and ten of the prisoners were killed. There was no power to the medical building, and the supplies it contained were destroyed. Medical evacuation hoppers were dispatched immediately, but eighteen more people died before they could be treated. Lanni was one of them.”
Salera, his head bowed deeply, asked, “What section of the tap system runs through Taw?”
“It was controlled from Leeper grouping, on one of the sections you ordered severed two weeks ago.” Niles shook his head. “There was nothing we could do to stop the tremors. I’m sorry, Kip.”
Salera slid to the ground at his daughter’s side and picked her up, cradling her in his arms as he rocked back and forth on his knees, causing her head to loll lifelessly from side to side. “I did it,” he croaked. “I did it.” His eyes closed tightly and he pulled his daughter closer, sobbing into the dead girl’s neck.
A throat cleared softly at her side and Adela realized that Montero had left the combat shuttle and had come up behind them. The Commander said nothing, but stood silently with the two of them.
Niles knelt at the man’s side, a hand laid softly on his shoulder.
“Let her be the last to die,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“My people fought well,” Amasee Niles said, looking around him at the blackened landscape. “So did Eastland’s.”
“It’s not wrong to be proud of fighting to serve your homeland,” Adela said, “even if the fight is wrong.”
Niles sighed heavily, shook his head at the signs of war that had swept the area surrounding the stations at Leeper.
The ceremonies had been planned for early morning, to take advantage of the cooler temperatures. The control grouping at Leeper was the northernmost of the stations, a few kilometers farther north, in fact, than the corresponding groupings linked to it on the other side of Arroyo. The breezes that blew down from the Grande Sea, laden with the tangy smell of salt water, helped a bit, but it was already hot. The orange K-type sun that was Dannen’s Star still hung low in a clear morning sky that promised an even hotter day.
The fighting at Leeper had been the first to begin and the last to stop, and had seen the greatest loss of life. It was decided to hold the ceremonies here, at the site of the worst fighting, and most of the battlefield had been left untouched. Here and there the overturned charred hulks of GEMs were scattered over the rolling hills that were more common here than at station 67. Even though the fighting had been over for months, the hulks looked as if they had only recently fallen silent. Adela supposed that the wrecks would someday be cleared, but that day would come long after the Levant had gone.
Someone had put white wooden markers, hundreds of them, in the ground to mark where soldiers died. In one spot a Westland hopper had crashed into a unit that must have included nearly a dozen GEMs with Eastland markings. The markers sprouted there like wildflowers, with no differentiation as to which marked Eastland soldiers and which signified the dead sons and daughters of Westland families. It was the markers, rather than the wreckage, that held Niles spellbound.
They sat in a group of seats that had been set up on the apron of the second station of the five-station grouping. The station had been the first one rebuilt, the work on the other four in the grouping still in its final stages. Where Adela sat now was a smaller section of maybe thirty portable chairs located at the front of the Westland viewing area. To her left Speaker Niles sat with his wife, Marabell. Although they sat stiffly, she held his hand as if afraid to let go; as if he might disappear and be lost from her if she did. She held a small leather case on her lap with her other hand. Carolane Pence, the representative from Leeper, along with a man she didn’t know, sat next to them. There were others in the seating area—Westland government officials, several men and women in military and scientific uniforms, other guests. Montero and two officers from the Levant were at her right. Behind them, seated in a separate section, was the entire Westland Congress. No, not the entire Congress, Adela reminded herself. There were empty seats scattered throughout the assemblage; seats left vacant for representatives who also served in the Congressional Guard, but did not come home from Pallatin’s short civil war. Behind the formal seating area stood row after row of uniformed men and women. They ringed the low area that comprised the station apron and spilled up the rise that surrounded the station like an amphitheater.