William Forstchen - Down to the Sea

Adam reluctantly nodded his head. “Yes, sir, I did.”

“Then the finest service you could perform for the Republic is to take this assignment. Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of chances later for a flight squadron.”

Adam smiled politely, his gambit an obvious failure.

Sean O’Donald, who had been standing quietly to one side, finally spoke up. “Air reconnaissance officer on the Gettysburg as well, sir,” he announced.

Pat looked over anxiously at Andrew, and in that flicker was a subtle indication that Pat would have preferred something far safer.

“They must think highly of your ability to put you with our navy’s newest armored cruiser.”

“I asked for it, sir.”

Andrew nodded, saying nothing.

He looked at the four young officers, all of them filled with such hopes and enthusiasm this day, all looking so proper and elegant in their dress uniforms. In the crowd gathered below the platform, he saw more than one young lady waiting patiently, gazes fixed on their chosen beaus. He smiled inwardly, wondering how long the comrades would actually stay together at the Mouse before secretly heading off for a final, brief rendezvous. They were all shipping out today. That was another tradition of the service, to send out the new cadets on their graduation day, and he suspected that more than one would make a promise of marriage once their first six-month tour of duty was up. He silently prayed that they’d still be alive to keep those promises.

“Go on, boys. Abraham, your mother and I will see you off later at the station.”

Again the smiling salutes and the four comrades turned, leaping off the platform to disappear into the crowd. Andrew’s thoughts turned toward his own affairs. Other burdens now awaited him. a congressman from Constantine, corrupt as the summer day was long, was looking for yet another government job for a “nephew.” And Father Casmir, now a member of the Supreme Court, wanted to argue yet again about the Ming Proposal. Behind them, Andrew could picture all the other seekers, flesh pressers, hangers-on, critics, and false praisers.

So now I look like Lincoln, he thought, absently reaching up to touch the gray chin whiskers, which Kathleen, in private, kept threatening to cut while he was asleep. As he looked over at her, a flash of pride and love swept through him, for already she had composed herself. She was turning to sidetrack a senator whom she knew was a gadfly to Andrew, charming the man with compliments about his far too young wife.

Pat pressed in closer. “Times I wish we could erase all these years, be back at our tent at the front, sharing a bottle with Emil and Hans.”

“The old days are gone, Pat. It’s a new age now.”

“Ah, I know, Andrew darlin’, I know. It’s just hard to believe how quickly it changed.”

“Your boy looks fit. He’ll do well.”

Pat lowered his head, and an audible sigh escaped him. “He never cared for me, you could see that today. I’ve tried to make amends, I have.”

Andrew was silent-for what could be said? The boy, like Abraham, has been bom the autumn after the end of the war, his mother of Roum aristocracy, a niece of old Proconsul Marius. And Pat had never married her. Andrew, Emil, all of Pat’s friends, had tried to push him on the issue, but he would laugh, then sigh and say he could never be tied down, and Livia, the darling, understood that.

And yet she gave the boy his father’s name, raised him with love, and waited for the soldier she loved to one day acknowledge the truth of their union. She had died waiting. Only then had Pat realized his mistake, but by then it was far too late. Though the boy accepted his father’s recognition now, there was no love.

Pat wistfully watched as his boy fell in with the others, disappearing into the crowd.

“Pat, we do have to talk later.”

“What?”

“I don’t want word of this getting out, but I want your opinion on recent events.”

Three events, unrelated on the surface, had occurred in the last month, and he alone was privy to all of them. Hawthorne had brought the first news, an anomaly noticed a week ago at an obscure outpost named Tamira’s Bridge, where a skirmish had erupted between the cavalry and a rogue gang of Bantag riders. One of the dead Bantag was carrying a revolver. It was not an old remnant of the Great War, but a modern weapon; in fact, better than anything the Republic could manufacture.

The second was political: yet another flare-up by the Xing Sha movement in the state of Chin, calling for separation from the Republic and renouncing the treaty with the Bantag. The annoying madness would consume yet more time and struggle to try and hold the expanding Republic together and keep it from fragmenting apart into rival states.

The third one, though, worried him the most. It had preyed on his thoughts even while giving his speech on what was supposed to be a day of happiness and pride. A courier bearing a sealed dispatch from Admiral Bullfinch, headquartered down in Constantine, the main base of the Republic’s fleet on the Great Southern Sea, had arrived only minutes before he left the White House this morning.

A merchant ship, thought lost in a storm two months ago, had limped into the harbor the night before last. Its report was chilling.

Driven farther south by the storm than anyone had previously gone and returned to tell the tale, the captain of the ship reported making landfall on an island of the dead. They had found a human city there, one that obviously had been annihilated within the previous year.

It was a city of thousands and had not fallen prey to the Malacca Pirates, which had been the main concern of the fleet in recent years. The city had been flattened, and some of the remains of the dead showed that they had been eaten. One of the sailors, a veteran of the Great War, said it looked like Roum after the siege. Buildings had been blown apart by shelling and the streets were still littered with fragments, shell casings-and the wreckage of an airship.

The city, however, was over five hundred miles south of the treaty line drawn with the Kazan embassy. The ship’s presence in those waters was a direct violation of the treaty and thus no inquiry could be made officially at the twice yearly meeting with the ambassador of Kazan, which took place at a neutral island on the boundary line. If more was to be learned, it would have to be done by other means.

Pat, looking at Andrew, could sense his uneasiness, and he drew closer. “It’s the Kazan, isn’t it? Something’s been found at last.”

The flicker of the old light in Pat’s eyes was disturbing to Andrew, for somehow it rekindled something is his own soul as well, something he would prefer remained forever buried.

“How did you know?” Andrew whispered.

“Andrew, darlin’, I can smell a war from a thousand miles off. I’ve told you for years there’d be another, and I can see it in your eyes.”

Andrew looked at him closely. He was holding something back.

“All right,” Pat chuckled, “one of my staffers saw the courier and asked around the train crew this morning. They say the docks and rail yards are already buzzing with word about it. Something’s coming, Andrew, something big, something beyond anything we’ve ever known. You can sense it the same way you can feel a storm coming long before you see it.”

Andrew nodded, looking at the happy crowd, enjoying this day of peace; the eager boyish faces of the new officers, the proud gazes of parents, many of them veterans like himself.

We were that young, Andrew realized, when we fought our war. Boys really, going off to see the elephant, never dreaming that it would bring us to this mad, terrible world, and though we were boys, we quickly became men of war.