16 July, 2115:
The funerals have always been my most difficult duty.
I can’t count how many I’ve attended. I realize I’ve been burying friends, fellows, and innocents targeted by our enemies—or just unfortunately caught in our violence—for fully twice as long as the young people I’m burying today were alive.
I can’t really say if it’s gotten harder over the years as I’ve moved up the chain of command and further from the fight. It certainly hasn’t gotten easier. Different, maybe. It’s a different kind of pain I feel today, a different flavor of rage.
At first I was burying those I had served with, those I had fought with side-by-side, but we had all jumped equally into the storm. And since I was still in the fight, I took some cold comfort in the hope of avenging them, of applying some excuse for “justice”. Those funerals were all about rage.
(Not that vengeance ever healed anything—I learned that early enough, that it didn’t matter how many people I killed—but rage wants what it wants.)
As I was moved away from the fight, that’s when I started burying those I was responsible for, those I had ordered into their deaths. Those I barely knew. Maybe names, sometimes faces. But too many times it was only numbers on my screens, neat little bloodless graphics. And then anonymous boxes that hid the bodies. I even had other people do the most painful work, to inform the families and loved ones, to make those deaths sound meaningful. All I had to do was put on clean dress armor and show up, stand there. But I was burying other people’s children. And my only poultice was to send more of those children into the lethal game.
But today I realize I am in an entirely different circle of hell.
Today I must play the diplomat. I cannot rage. I cannot redirect my pain into vengeance. This was just a stupid, tragic misunderstanding, and I must forgive. There’s no one to pay for this but me, and a man who says he wants to be my friend even though he’s lost many more than I have because of my guns.
And just to twist the knife in my heart further, I realize numbly that I have no way to notify families or loved ones, even if any are still alive.
First Lieutenant Jan Carver rated a small closet of her own as Commander of First Platoon: cold gray walls, a narrow bunk, a shelf-sized desk, a standing cabinet and her foot locker. But she’d adorned the walls with her artwork: sketches and watercolors, Martian landscapes she’d done on her tour (probably sitting by one of our few precious windows). Lovingly done, with a patient but passionate hand. Keepsakes to bring home.
Otherwise, she’d kept her space neat and squared-away, so there isn’t much packing up to do. It looks like someone already started carefully placing her few possessions in her locker for storage (in hope that one day there will be someone to send them to).
I think I find why the packing job stopped. Some of her personal files are still live on her desk screen: Video mail home, dated since we woke, stored until they could be sent. It looks like she recorded one a week. The last one—stamped from three days ago—has been paused part-way through.
I sit on her neat bunk, click it back to zero and restart it.
“Mom, Dad, Jill… I’m still here, still fine. Big news this week: We got our hands on a decent map of what may be more survivors, and ships up enough to get us out looking. Colonel Ram’s given me point on our first real recon. I guess he’s counting on my luck for tripping over the hot finds. Meanwhile, we’re still working hard to find a way to call out. The Colonel has a plan of his own. I can’t give details yet, but if anyone can pull it off, I know the Colonel can. I still can’t believe I’m serving under him—I couldn’t wish for a better CO. He really is a legend. Maybe you’ll get to meet him one day soon.
“And speaking of someone I wish you could meet: Things are still great with Juan. He’s so sweet and gentle and smart and funny. And I think he’s in it for the long haul, even though we haven’t tossed around the ‘L’ word yet. I think I’d have gone crazy months ago without him. He’s really good to me. I just wish I was better at telling him how I feel.”
This is where the recording was paused.
I realize someone’s standing just outside the hatch.
“Lieutenant?”
“Sorry, sir,” Rios apologizes, stepping into the hatchway. “I should have had Lieutenant Carver’s belongings stored by now. I was just…”
“Jan,” I cut him off as he stumbles to find excuses. “You can call her Jan.”
He looks at the deck.
“I’m sorry,” I stand up and tell him.
“It wasn’t your fault, sir.” He still doesn’t make eye contact. “She knew what to expect.”
“We had a vague idea what to expect,” I correct. “This didn’t need to happen on either side.”
He doesn’t have anything to say in reply.
I key MAI to copy Carver’s messages to my personal file. Then I step out of the hatch past Rios, turning to give him a gentle
“Carry on, Lieutenant.”
We set aside a piece of ground up the ridgeline to the north, and cut into solid rock (not wanting anyone disturbed by a future slide). We seal the bodies of First Lieutenant Jan Carver and PFC Tobias Summers in neat stone vaults. Thomasen’s construction team has built a small pyramid to mark them—it’s our first cemetery, as any recovered bodies used to be shipped back to Earth before we were so thoroughly cut off. (The fact that this very crest was rendered in one of Carver’s paintings isn’t lost on me.)
As many as we can get outside in masks make the climb and stand in the gritty wind as a team of “bearers” from First Platoon—wearing Heavy Armor—gently places the body bags into the vaults and slides the cover slabs into place. Spec-3 Mathias Linns—despite the crossbow bolt he took in the right hamstring—stands with his Platoon in full armor, supported between two of his fellows.
And then I have to put together a few inadequate words to say over them before we all go back inside.
(As I head for the locks, I turn back to see a figure that MAI tags as Rios on his knees, burying something in the dirt at the foot of Carver’s vault.)
Paul stood well back away from the main formation during the brief ceremony. Then he went back inside just before we broke up and buried himself again in his work. Morales says he hasn’t stopped to eat or sleep in two days—since the tragic skirmish at the tap-site—and despite whatever his nanotech can do for him, he’s looking drawn.
I wonder if he’s ever seen death this close, raised in the bizarrely monastic world of the ETE Stations where no one gets sick or gets old, and the “Elders” just sit back and watch from a sterile distance (apparently so much distance that they don’t see age or illness) as the “Natural” humans scrape and fight in the valleys below.
Probably thinking I need a modicum of hope right now, Tru brings it to me: She’s waiting in the corridor just outside Staging, cradling one of the two newborns like a proud aunt. Persephone Hope Maxwell, three days old, joining the now two-week-old Cal Ochoa—named for our missing CO.
“Meet the Big Boss, Hope,” Tru coos. “I know. He looks scary. But he’s really a good guy. He’s just not very happy right now.” She gives me a sad smile, holding the infant close—it looks up into my eyes with wonder (and maybe a little fear)—and I offer my still-gloved finger for tiny hands to grab.
“We just got done with the doctor,” Tru announces. “Halley says she’s healthy, just like little Cal. Just a little late-term—it shows in some of the physical development. And Doc Shenkar’s hormone supplements have kick-started our puberty-avoiding teens…”
“It’s good news… Thank you.”
“I figured you could use a little life-affirming.”
Baby Hope takes hold of my finger. Her grip is strong even through the glove.
Abbas called shortly after the ceremony—against Matthew’s advice I supplied him with a field Link (though restricted to select bands). He’d just buried ten of his own people the day before, and suggested we hold off on meeting again for at le
ast a month, to allow time for grieving and tempers to subside. He also let me know that the other Nomad tribes had expressed mixed interest in our presence, and that he’d be willing to arrange meetings with their leaders on neutral ground.
“You keep surprising me, Mikey,” Matthew drawls at me as we share some of what little remains of the Bourbon I smuggled with us on the shuttle. “I didn’t think that was possible after all these years.”
“Should I be saying the same of you?” I rib him. “You’ve been sounding more like Richards.”
“Ouch,” he scowls. “Never thought I’d have to hear that name again.” He grins and shakes his head. “Old bastard’s probably been dead forty years now. He went on to become one of those retired-general news-net consultants, didn’t he?”
“They were approaching him,” I remember. “I don’t think he took it, though. Too eager to get out of the spotlight, get down to being a grandpa.”
“Seven years as our CO, then another twelve stuck between us—well, you—and the politics on the Committee?” he remembers with a sad laugh. “I’m surprised he didn’t eat his gun.”
“He would have shot us first. Well, me.”
“Yeah, he would have. But look at you: You’d make the starched old fucker proud.”
“You can have the job any time you want, Matthew,” I tell him, almost seriously.
“You know I don’t do speeches. Besides, I would have splattered those neo-rag dirt-surfers. Come to think about it, not long ago you would’ve done the same.”
“Brave New World.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Colonel Ram,” the Link interrupts us. It’s Kastl.
“Go ahead, Captain.”
“Ahhh… Someone here to see you, sir. I think…”
He flashes me an image of a blue ETE suit, standing outside the main gate. I check MAI’s internal feed: Paul is still down in the repair bays.
“I’ll be right there.”
It’s Simon. He folds up his mask so I can see his face, then resets it so he can breathe enough to speak:
“I bring no answers for you, Colonel Ram,” he says with a formal flatness. “My Elders live in a world that does not change as quickly as yours. They will watch, and they will deliberate. But you have made an impression on them, in a way that outsiders rarely do.”
“So, they won’t help us?” I conclude.
“I will help you.” Simon offers me his gloved hand.
Chapter 3: Wake the Neighbors
The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN Page 18
