We All Died at Breakaway Station (7 page)

Wife.
How strange that old-fashioned word sounded to him. How often in the past he had used it as a term of derision. But… but now, somehow, it was all different to him. He found himself looking at the world as if through someone else’s eyes, and he found that he rather liked it. And, he thought, perhaps that would somehow give him the courage to do what he had to do, to be the man that his superior officers seemed to believe he was.

And then he laughed at himself, for he was acting very strangely. Not at all like himself.

Maybe that was good.

Maybe he ought to sit down and write a poem about that, but he had no pad or scriber with him, and Anjenet was waiting inside and the wind wasn’t getting any warmer.

He relit the tobacco there was still left in the bowl of his pipe, mixed with the ash, and he watched the wind whip away the smoke, and then he turned to go back into Culhaven and he tried to keep the smile on his lips. Anjenet rose to meet him when he entered the great dining hall where she was sitting, studying the enormous mural that traced the history of the Culhavens from the Day of the Landing on Adrianopolis to the death of Glenn’s grandfather at Orlan during the Lords’ War. There was a strange, questioning smile on her face, and for a few moments she seemed almost afraid to speak.

“Glenn,” she asked at last, “how do you feel now?”

“I’m not sure,” he answered, gesturing for her to sit down beside him on the long bench that ran along the wall below the mural of the history of his fathers. “I don’t know, Anj. I can’t quite figure any of this out.”

“What do you mean?”

Glenn turned and looked at her for a few long moments before even trying to answer, and he studied her and remembered her, and, well, he
loved
her. What other word was there for it? he asked himself.

Anjenet McWilliams Sutin was slender, almost fragile, with the blonde hair and blue eyes and fair, almost milky skin of a racial type that had virtually ceased to exist anywhere but on Earth itself‌—‌the pure Nordic blond. Not that she was. She just looked it. Her father’s father had been black as night. But somehow, in the mixing of genes, the combination had come about that made her as she was, and Glenn found pleasure in that.

And he remembered the first time he had ever seen her. It was at an orgy held by the son of the mayor of Holmdel in celebration of his twenty-first birthday‌—‌standard years‌—‌and his commission as an ensign in the Space Forces. Glenn had gone there, for Graul had been his friend, if a few years his junior, and Glenn wanted to help Graul celebrate his Coming of Age.

Glenn had drunk k’peck and inhaled happysticks and had joined in the mad, naked fun of the swarming bodies in the great hall. He was, perhaps, half out of his mind then, even then fearful of what was coming, of the responsibilities he knew he couldn’t accept, and he had had a few more happysticks than he should have, but he hadn’t cared. What the hell?

And after a while it began to bore him. An orgasm or two, and then what’s an orgy? He’d had his fun and was ready to leave. And then he saw her, lying there with Graul, both of them spent, exhausted, half asleep perhaps. She lay there naked, white and blond in contrast to Graul’s darkness, her cuplike breasts, small but well formed, rising and falling regularly. And suddenly Glenn wanted her, wanted her more than anything else in the universe. He didn’t know why. He still didn’t know why, Maybe he never would, but that didn’t matter.

Anjenet McWilliams Sutin. The wildest girl in Nortlan, they called her. She was a daredevil, a nympho, and maybe even a DBN addict, they said about her. She was the one who broke into the Comrac’s offices on a dare and stole the Hishon painting from right under the robots’ scanners. And she was the one who took off her clothes in the visitors’ gallery of the Assembly during the discussion about the Malburton Drug Bill. And she was… You know the stories, they told him. She’s no kind of a girl for a Culhaven, for the Guardian Culhaven.

But he had to have her. He’d tame her, or maybe she’d tame herself when she found a man worth the effort.

And now he had her, and that was all that mattered.

“What do you mean?” she had asked him a few moments before, and the words seemed to hang in the air, and he ought to try to answer, if he could. “Well, I’m not sure,” he said at last. “See, Father, well, he was the Grand Admiral at the Salient and a kind of hero I guess, if you don’t listen to his critics who say that he was a senile old fool who should never have gotten engaged in a battle there in the first place.” Glenn paused for breath, and then went on. “I mean, Father never had any fears, any doubts about anything. He always knew exactly what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. I don’t, Anj. I’m not even sure I can command a patrol ship.”

“Of course you can, Glenn,” Anjenet said, putting her arm around him and drawing herself close to him, and he told himself how wrong all those people had been about her.

“I wish I
were
sure,” he said slowly, “but I can’t be. God, Anj, I’m so scared. I know, I absolutely know that I won’t even get the
Corvinus
off the field right. Can’t you just see her crashing into the Admin Building?”

“Glenn,” Anjenet said sternly.

“Okay,” he said with a sudden strength in his voice. “You’re right, Anj, and I guess I know it. I mean, I know that I’m no Mothershed, but I can’t be the worst commander in the Force either.”

“That’s right,” Anjenet said, “and you keep telling yourself that. And, Glenn, don’t worry about things until they happen. Okay?”

Glenn smiled back at her. “Okay,” he said.

“Now,” Anjenet said, rising to her feet and turning to face him, “you told me that you’d show me around Culhaven.”

“I did, didn’t I? Okay, what would you like to see first?”

“Well,” she said with a mock shyness to her eyes, her voice, “how about the master bedroom?”

“I’d love to show you that,” Glenn said, taking her hands in his and pulling her close, feeling the warmth of her body even through the clothing between them. He’d show her.

“Glenn,” she whispered in his ear, “I stopped the CP shots in time.”

“CP?” he asked.

“Contraceptives,” she said.

“Oh?” And the full implication seeped into his mind, and he thought he was glad because that would make her really his wife, and, by God, he’d be brave if it killed him!

He kept telling himself that as he took her up to the huge master bedroom and made love to her on the bed that had once belonged to the rulers of all Adrianopolis.

When Bracer reached his cabin he rolled to his desk, took a cigarette from an ornately engraved case that had been a woman’s gift, long ago, in another universe‌—‌oh, Donna, I need you now!‌—‌and slowly, carefully puffed it to glowing. He took a deep breath, lungs filling with the smoke of tobacco a hundred generations removed from the fields of Virginia, and tried hot to think, not to think of anything at all.

A scarred, battered face riding atop the narrow shoulders of a tall, thin body clad in the uniform of a starship steward appeared in the hatchway. “Is there anything I can get for you, sir?” the face asked.

“No, Johnson. Thank you. I’ll call you if I need you.”

“Very good, sir.”

The steward vanished as quickly and silently as he had come, and Bracer remained in the same position, fighting thought, until memories came into his mind that he could not hold back, though these were memories he found pleasant. These were memories of Major Donna Britt, and they would be pleasant unless he thought about how she had looked the last time he saw her…

But now, he remembered her that day in Holmdel‌—‌how long was it after they met? A week? That or a little more. And they both had a day free and they rode out of Valforth Garrison in an airbus, Commander Bracer and Major Britt, sitting silently side by side in the bus, looking at the greenness of the rolling country below them. And then, after a while, they started talking about home, about Earth, for they both had come from Earth, born within a thousand kilometers of each other.

And Donna had talked about the city of New Portsmouth where she and her sister had lived, and she told him about her sister, Michelle, and how Michelle still lived on Earth, working sometimes as a systems analyst, more often as a playgirl. She had held her priority rating, and as yet she hadn’t been called into the services, though it was possible any day, especially if one of her male friends lost his influence. And Donna showed him a slide of Michelle, and Bracer commented that they hardly looked like sisters, and Donna agreed, and said that Michelle was far prettier, but Bracer disagreed, and they both smiled. The airbus landed in Holmdel and they had a late breakfast on the Boulevard. They went to the Assembly Building and the Palace of History and walked through the city and had an early dinner in another little restaurant on the Boulevard and rented a sailboat and took it out into the bay and lay naked under the sun until it set in the sea and then made love until the wind changed and it grew cool and Bracer had to tack against it all the way back into Holmdel Harbor and they were an hour late because of it and missed their airbus back to Valforth Garrison and had to wait half the night in the terminal for the next one, holding hands, and while they sat there Bracer asked her to take out a contract with him, and she said she would, and the following week-end they did.

And it wasn’t much more than a month after that when Donna was assigned to Port Abell and Bracer given command of the
Koniev
and they saw each other only once a month until…

Goddammit, why? he suddenly cried within himself.

Then metallic knuckles clad in synthetic plastiskin rapped on the cabin’s hatch, and Bracer tore himself out of his memories and said, “Come in.”

Daniel Maxel stepped through the voice-actuated hatch as it opened, the gray sphere of his upper torso reflecting the light of the lamp on the desk.

“First Officer Maxel re…”

“Stow it, pan,” Bracer said through tight lips, not really understanding his own tenseness, perhaps not wanting to understand it. “This is a purely social occasion. I hope. Pretend I’ve taken off my braid.”

“Okay,” Maxel answered smiling.

“Sit down,” Bracer said, gesturing toward a chair with the glowing tip of his cigarette.

“Anything in particular you wanted, sir?” Maxel asked as he crossed the cabin and sat down in a large, comfortable, form-fitting chair that could adapt even to his unlikely physiology.

“I don’t know, Dan. I’m not sure. I just‌—‌well‌—‌I wanted to talk to someone.”

“Okay, shoot.”

“Look, Dan, I’ve got a couple of bottles of Napoleon brandy‌—‌some sadistic medical officer’s idea of a joke, I guess.” He cut himself off. Maxel knew that he did not have anything like a natural gastrointestinal system‌—‌but there was no point in talking about it, any more than there was any point in talking about the wounds, injuries, mutilations of the other officers and crewmen of the three starships from the Paladine. That was a carefully tabooed subject aboard the
Iwo Jima.
“Care for a glass?” Bracer asked.

“No, thanks,” Maxel answered. “I don’t think so. Thanks anyway.”

For a few moments Bracer was silent, wondering just why he had asked his first officer to come to his cabin, wondering what questions he really wanted to ask, what reassurances he wanted to hear.

“What is it, captain?” Maxel asked at last, voicing his thoughts for him. “What’s eating you?”

“I don’t know, Dan. Memories, fears, that planet down there, a million things I can’t pin down.” And pain, he thought, though he did not express it aloud, pain that he could only accept as being so, and endure and do his best to ignore when it got too bad.

“I’ve noticed it, ever since we went into orbit around Breakaway.” Maxel paused, was silent for a few long, pregnant moments. “Or has it been since we heard that Breakaway’s relief hasn’t showed up?”

Bracer did not answer the question. He inspected it for a moment, kept himself from thinking about it too deeply, and then filed it away somewhere deep inside, along with the other problems and questions he already had. Perhaps he would answer it later if it became necessary to answer it.

“You’re closer to the crew, Dan,” he said after a while. “How’s morale?”

“I think I’ll take that glass of brandy you offered,” Maxel said, forcing something like a smile onto his face. “I suspect that this is going to get rather deep before you’re finished.”

“Okay, I’ll get it.”

“No, just tell me where it is and I’ll…”

“No, I’ll get it, Dan,” Bracer said firmly. “You just answer my question.”

“Okay, I’ll try, but that’s not the kind of question you can just answer ‘good, bad or indifferent,’ not on this ship, not now.”

“I know that, Dan,” Bracer said, rolling across the cabin to a large cabinet situated against the far bulkhead, any fears he may have had about Dan Maxel’s capabilities dissolving. Maxel had full control of himself‌—‌he was sure of that‌—‌and lived very much in the unpleasant reality of here and now. There were no escapist fantasies, no mystic delusions in the man. If his face was serene, it was because he was somehow at peace within himself, and that was a great thing to find in a man. Peace. “Just answer it in whatever fashion you can.” Bracer smiled, at least his lips smiled, and that is all the face that he had left to smile with. “That’s why I offered you the brandy in the first place.”

“Well,” Maxel began as Bracer opened the cabinet, took out a bottle, “I think that I’d answer that morale is good, about as good as you’d expect under the circumstances. Oh, of course, Reddick and a few others are as bitter as hell, but you can’t really blame them.” He paused. “There’s not a man or woman on this ship, expect for the marines, who, well, doesn’t have something wrong with him. They’ve all been through hell, and you can’t expect them to come out of that with a big grin on their faces.”

Bracer returned to the center of the cabin, setting the bottle and an empty glass on the low table near the first officer’s chair.

“Sorry I don’t have a snifter for it,” Bracer said. “My funny friend didn’t provide me with any.”