Jack Campbell - Guardian

Milam bent her head in an unsuccessful attempt to hide tears, then rose. “I should go. Thank you. This… this is something I wanted badly. Thank you.”

But Milam paused as Desjani led the way out of her stateroom, her eyes on the plaque near the hatch. “My father’s name is on that. Are… are all of these friends of yours who have died?”

“Yes,” Tanya said in a low voice. “I don’t forget any of them.”

After Milam had left in the care of Master Chief Gioninni, resplendent in his dress uniform to honor the daughter of a deceased Master Chief, Desjani sat down again. “That was hard.”

“Now I know something about the fight where you earned the Fleet Cross,” Geary said.

“I didn’t earn it. Master Chief Milam did. I don’t know why I got it, too.” She took a deep breath, closing her eyes tightly as if in pain. “Did I ever tell you about my dream after that action?” Desjani asked abruptly.

He shook his head. “No. You’ve never told me anything about it, or after it.”

“Look, I give you permission to call up the official record of the action if you want to. I’m not going to talk about it. But you deserve to know…”

“You had some dream?” Geary prompted.

She was looking steadily at the deck, avoiding his eyes. “I was… stressed. My ship destroyed, the crew almost wiped out, hand-to-hand fighting… I wasn’t in very good shape. They gave me some meds to make me sleep. I dreamed. I dreamed I saw you sleeping.”

“What?”

Her head came up, eyes catching his, daring him to disbelieve, to question what she said. “I saw you sleeping. I knew it was you. Black Jack.”

“Me? You saw me ?”

“Not exactly.” Her voice remained firm, though. “I couldn’t make out your face. It was shadowed. But I knew who it was. You were lying there in the dark. I didn’t understand that. Black Jack was supposed to be among the living stars, or in the lights in jump space, somewhere bright. But it was dark around you. And cold. I remember that.”

Dark and cold. At the time, he had been in survival sleep, frozen, drifting through space in a damaged escape pod. Geary stared at her. “Are you sure this isn’t some memory influenced by what you learned after your ship picked me up?”

“No. I never forgot one detail of that dream. I saw you in the dream, and I yelled at you.”

“Your reaction on seeing me was to yell at me? That I have no trouble believing.”

“Very funny.” Desjani ran both hands through her hair, her expression that of someone reliving old trauma. “I was telling you to wake up. To come help us. But then the Master Chief was there. Milam. He gestured to me that it wasn’t time yet. Then you and he just faded away. I couldn’t remember any other dream when I woke up from that sleep, not even a fragment, but I remembered everything about that.” She gazed at him again. “And when we found you years later, and they brought you aboard my ship, I looked at you, and I knew. I didn’t need the DNA or the other tests. I knew you were the man I had seen in that dream. Come back to save us at last.”

He felt the old discomfort arise, the sense of being totally inadequate to the myths that had grown up around the hero he was supposed to be. Her faith in that hero still burned strong, though somehow Desjani could keep the hero separate in her mind from the man he really was. She worshipped Black Jack. She loved John Geary, but she would never worship him, and thank the living stars for that. “Tanya, by now you know who I really am.”

“I knew you then, and I know you now. Do you remember the first time you saw me?”

“Yes. Very clearly.” Coming out of the stupor brought on by the very long period of survival sleep, he had seen above him a female captain who inexplicably wore an Alliance Fleet Cross. When he had fought at Grendel, no one in the fleet had earned that award for a generation. The sight of that Fleet Cross had been his first clue that his sleep had been far longer than it should have been. “You looked at me like…”

“Like I knew you. I’ve never told anyone else of that dream. I didn’t know if it had just been born of fever and stress. Or had my ancestors sent me a vision? Would I someday meet that man in my dream? Would I help him end the long and bloody war? And then you showed up, and I knew I did have a role. It would be shown me.”

No wonder Tanya had offered any support he needed, had even offered him her honor if that was what he demanded of her. “You did everything because you thought it was some job you’d been given?”

“Oh, please. I wanted to do it. No, I didn’t want to end up in love with a superior officer. I fought that. It happened anyway. But, every other thing I did because I chose to. The living stars can lead us to tasks, but only we can decide whether or not to carry them out. Of all the people in the universe, Black Jack should be able to understand that.”

“I guess he should.” Geary tried to find words that felt right, and failed. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Desjani blinked, straightened in her seat, and looked back at him as if they had just been discussing some routine matter. “My pity party is over. Now, how about you? I haven’t been so preoccupied that I hadn’t noticed you are worrying about something else.”

There wasn’t any sense in avoiding the truth when Tanya was watching him. “It’s the grand council. I’ve never gotten the impression the grand council is a smooth-running machine, but they seem a lot worse. Instead of talking over issues, they’re just zinging each other with verbal put-downs.”

“Haven’t they always been that way?”

Of course, that would be Desjani’s reaction. Her opinion of the politicians running the Alliance could probably not get a single notch lower. “Not as bad. Not during my first meeting with them. And at the second meeting, the one where I got the orders for our mission into enigma space, I had the feeling the grand council was pretty much united in agreeing on those orders even though different senators had different reasons for wanting us to go on that mission.”

She nodded, smiling without any hint of humor. “Including the hope that we’d go out and never come back.”

“Including that,” Geary said. He didn’t know how many had felt that way. He suspected even Rione didn’t know the exact number. It wasn’t the sort of sentiment anyone would advertise or leave a written record of. “I don’t know how to fix the Alliance, Tanya. The people who might know how to do it are on the grand council, but they don’t seem to be interested in actually doing it.”

“Good thing you’re not dictator of the whole mess, huh?” Desjani asked. “Speaking of which, have you noticed who hasn’t been around?”

“Who hasn’t been around? Tanya, I have no idea—”

“Sure you do.” She waved grandly. “Captain Badaya, who represents those who think Black Jack can wave his magic wand and cure everything that ails the Alliance.”

Geary started to answer her, then stopped. “You’re right. Why hasn’t he been around?” In order to forestall a coup attempt in Geary’s name, Badaya had been led to believe that Geary was secretly running the government already. But then why hadn’t Badaya been by since the fleet made it back to Varandal to ask what Black Jack was doing about the damned politicians?

“If you want my honest opinion, and I know you do,” Desjani said, leaning forward with both elbows on her desk and gazing at him, “Captain Badaya has slowly figured out that if Black Jack did take over, the Alliance house of cards would collapse even quicker. He’s been thinking, which I know is uncharacteristic of him, and he’s putting two and two together at last. He probably figures now that you’re just nudging the grand council in the right directions and otherwise trying to prop up the Alliance rather than knock the legs out from under it.”