Jack Campbell - Invincible

“Not before we make it through Hua,” Tulev agreed.

Geary was about to end the meeting when Desjani leaned close to him. “Ask Roberto Duellos to stay. You should talk with him.”

He covered his surprise, nodding in reply, then gestured to Duellos to stand by before nodding to the rest of his ship commanders. “That is all. We’ll be ready for a fight wherever the enigmas try to meet us.”

Images of officers disappeared in a flurry, the apparent size of the compartment dwindling with each departure so that for a moment the illusion of contracting bulkheads actually felt threatening.

Rione and Charban, who, like Desjani, had been physically present, stood up, both wearing resigned expressions. “We’ll get in touch with the spider-wolves again. Back to trying to understand strange ways of thinking,” Charban commented.

“If you want to go into politics,” Rione replied, “you have to get used to that. But it does get old at times. If you will excuse us, Admiral.”

Desjani waited until they had left, and only she, Geary, and the virtual presence of Duellos remained. “I think you boys need a play- date.”

“Excuse me?” Geary said.

“You’ve been talking to me a lot. A certain fleet commander should share his worries with someone besides a certain battle cruiser captain to ensure he gets more than one point of view. You know that Captain Duellos can be trusted with anything. And, Roberto, you’ve been talking to me about what’s eating at you since you came back from leave, and I’ve been telling you to talk to Jack a bit. For the love of your ancestors, listen to me this time.”

“Jack?” Duellos asked.

“You know who I mean. The admiral ,” Desjani added, giving comic emphasis to the rank. “Now excuse me so you can talk about me, too, if you need to.”

Duellos grinned and bowed to her as Desjani left. “What did you do to deserve her?”

“I don’t deserve her,” Geary said. “I guess you and I have our orders.”

“I have often thought that admirals should have a voice at hand ready and willing to inform them of their own fallibility,” Duellos said. “In Tanya, you actually have such a voice.”

“Which,” Geary said, “sometimes gets pretty forceful when I don’t listen to her. What is Tanya worried about?”

“You and me, I suppose.” Duellos turned to look back toward where the images of the other officers had sat. “And Jane Geary, though that one won’t talk. She still appears to be champing at the bit for glory, however.”

“I’ve noticed. Believe me.” Geary sat down and gestured Duellos to a seat. “Relax. I guess this is a personal counseling session even though neither one of us requested it.”

“That’s what friends are for.” Duellos sighed as he sat down, somehow looking older than Geary remembered from the last time he had seen him, a few days before.

“What’s the matter?” Geary asked. “We’re heading home.”

“And I should be as happy as everyone else.” Duellos shrugged, his expression reflecting uncertainty. “I went home during our brief period of celebration after the war. It felt odd.”

“Odd?”

“You haven’t been home to Glenlyon.”

“No. You know what that would be like. Kosatka was bad enough.”

Duellos nodded. “The hero out of legend coming home. I confess I went home not only expecting to have my family rejoicing but expecting to hear praise for all the fleet had done. ‘Good job, Roberto.’ That sort of thing. Nothing effusive. Just ‘good job.’” But the mood was very different, Admiral. Very different.”

“I don’t understand,” Geary said.

“It’s over.” Duellos paused, thinking. “That’s how it felt. It’s over. Not, hurrah we won! Not, welcome the heroes home! But, it’s over. There’s a big training base on Catalan. It can handle twenty thousand inductees at a time. For the last century, Fort Cinque has taught countless draftees how to march and obey orders, with varying degrees of success. I went by it, Admiral. It was closed.”

“They are shutting it down?” Geary asked, thinking that such a move made sense.

“No. What they did the day after they heard the war was over was to simply give every draftee there a ticket home. They hustled them out the gate that same day, then the instructors and the guards and the maintenance workers and everyone else followed, and before sunset the base commander left last and locked the gate behind him.” Duellos looked at Geary, his expression hard to read. “For a century, tens of thousands of men and women went through that fort. It was a part of their lives, a part of history. And the day after they knew the war was over, it was simply shut down.”

“Is that what they are doing with everything?” Geary asked.

“Pretty much. Bases being shut down everywhere, local defense forces mustered out as fast as the paperwork can go through, military-related contracts being canceled, equipment being mothballed or simply scrapped. It’s not so much a demobilization or a downsizing of the military effort as it is a dismantling of everything.” Duellos smiled bitterly. “We went to some gatherings, my wife and I. And those we met didn’t ask what I’d done. They asked if I’d seen you. But otherwise they just said, ‘What will you do now?’ Now that the war was over, and fleet officers aren’t needed.”

Geary remembered the special forces troops he had met on Umbaru Station at Varandal, themselves wondering what they would do now that special forces troops weren’t needed in anything like the numbers once required. It would have been different if the war had been much shorter, five or even ten years. Not long enough to have become a way of life for those engaged in it. But as Duellos had said, these were people whose entire lives had been about the war. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” Duellos said. “I’m a fleet officer. It’s what I grew up expecting to be. It’s all I’ve ever done. I expected to die at some distant star, battling the Syndics, or perhaps at some Alliance border star system, throwing back a Syndic offensive. If by some miracle I survived long enough to retire, I would go home and watch more men and women go off to war. It’s been that way for a century. I didn’t expect it to ever end. We had all stopped believing that it would ever end. But it did end.” He raised a hand, fingers curled as if he held a glass, in a toast and salute to Geary. “And now they don’t want fleet officers.”

“Not as many fleet officers,” Geary said, “but the need—”

“No, Admiral. They don’t want fleet officers. They are sick of war, of sending off their young men and women to disappear into the maw of war, of broken bodies coming home, of the wealth of their world being consumed by war.” Duellos shrugged again. “How can I blame them? And yet, now so many of us who always had a purpose no longer have that purpose.”

What could he say? Geary looked down for a while, trying to find words, then back at Duellos. “How does your wife feel?”

“Grateful that I came home alive. Grateful that no more of our children will be sent off to die in an endless war. Perplexed at the melancholy with which I confronted a world changed beyond recognition, a world in which what I am became obsolete in the blink of an eye.” Duellos shook his head, gloom showing. “It’s been wearing on me. Peace is good. The cost of war is so terrible. But I know nothing of peace. I’ve been molded for war. I hate war. I hate the death, I hate knowing more will die, I hate being away from those I love, but… but it is what I know. Everyone back home wishes to put it all behind them as fast as possible, to forget it happened, but when they forget the awful things, they also forget the sacrifices, the deeds done by those they sent off to fight. They don’t want to hear about that now. And I simply don’t know what I am supposed to be now that what I am has ceased to be wanted.”