A Talent For War by Jack McDevitt

Author:Jack McDevitt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-12-21T10:35:15.888000+00:00

XIV.

The destruction of Point Edward (after it had been evacuated) was an act of puzzling barbarity. Nothing could have more readily demonstrated the gap between human reason and alien spasm. In the wake of that destruction, men were sufficiently horrified that, for a moment, they drew together and came very close to recognizing their own common humanity and the peril it faced. Unfortunately, the moment passed quickly.

—Arena Cash, War in the Void

THE CURIOUS THING about Matt Olander's grave is that it was waiting for the refugees when they returned to Ilyanda after the war. They found it in a weed-choked field that had once been a lawn, not twenty meters from the main terminal at the William E. Richardson Spaceport. It was marked by a single oblate white slab which had been cut out of the front of the building with a laser. The slab was engraved, presumably with the same tool:

Matt Olander

died Avrigil 3, 677

No Stranger to Valor

The characters were crudely cut, the name and the last word written large. They tended a trifle toward the ornate, in the style of two centuries ago. The date, in Ilyanda's calendar, corresponded with the Evacuation.

The site lies within a grove. There are low hedges and flowering trees and seashell walkways. Overhead, a Dellacondan pennant, with its harridan sigil encased within the silver ring of the Confederacy, snaps fiercely in a cold stiff wind off the ocean. At the foot of the flagpole, the Point Edward Historical Society has erected a stone marker: a bronze plate, dated 716, carries Olander's name, and a remark attributed to him, reportedly spoken to a comrade during the final moments of the evacuation: It is not proper that Point Edward should face the mutes without a defender.

The base of the monument is engraved with a resolution of the Joint Chambers, that Matthew

Olander never be forgotten by the City he would not desert.

The site is the sort of place people go to on holidays, to sit on benches and watch seabirds and floaters. On the midwinter day we were there (I'd brought Chase along), a troop of kids were flying brightly colored gliders, and a large tourist group had debarked from an airbus and were milling about. Ilyanda's white sun Kaspadei was breaking through a gray sky; and most of the older visitors were hurrying about, glancing at the inscriptions, and climbing back into the airbus, where it was warm.

It's a lonely place, despite its proximity to the Richardson terminal. Maybe the sense of isolation is spiritual rather than geographical. Standing beneath the canopy of shrub trees within an enclosure dedicated solely to one individual's courage. I kept thinking about the slippery quality of truth. How would Olander's comrades—the ones who had sneered at his memory and suggested to Leisha Tanner that he was a traitor—How would they have responded to all this? No Stranger to Valor.

Where was the truth? What had happened on Point Edward?

"Who put it here?" asked Chase. She looked solemn, thoughtful, almost oppressed. The wind pulled at her hair, and she brushed it back, out of her eyes.

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