'Time you folks shipped off. I'll be along shortly.'
One by one they filed off the bridge, Jason standing by the door and shaking the hand of each until finally he was alone except for Westerlin.
'I'll leave you alone if you want, sir,' the officer said, as if he were a mortician withdrawing from the side of a grieving widower, and he silently stepped off the bridge.
Jason walked around the bridge one last time. It had been his bridge for really only a very short time. After the raid on Kilrah the ship had been laid up for a year. It would in fact have been far cheaper to simply scrap her and build a new one from scratch, but public opinion was dead set against it. During that year he'd been stuck Earthside, assigned to the fleet war college for advanced training, finishing up with a brief stint at the Academy to run their latest holo combat simulator training program. But the ship had sailed at last, only to serve in one final brief action before the armistice. Yet, it was his ship, it was in fact, since Kilrah, the only thing he really loved.
He could have stayed longer, but then farewells should never be drawn out. Leaving the bridge without a backward glance he went into his cabin and hoisted the duffel bag off his bed. The room looked sterile now, just another standard ship's room, painted the usual light green, with one closet, a bed, a desk, and a computer terminal and holo projection box. The few pictures on his desk, his brother and himself taken before Joshua had gone off to the Marines, and died on Khorsan, a faded two dimensional image of his mother and father taken on the day they were married, and a shot of Svetlana that one of her friends in the Marines had sent along after her death — they were in his duffel.
He closed the door behind him and walked down the now dimmed corridors. He passed the flight ready room and had a flash memory of his first day aboard, chewing out his new pilots, and passed on into the hangar deck. The Rapiers, Ferrets, and Sabres lined the deck and it felt strange to hear the silence. No engines humming, no shouted commands blaring over the loudspeakers, the hissing roar of the catapult or the thunderclap of engines kicking in afterburners on a hot launch. It was a silence that was as complete and deeply disturbing as if he were walking through a tomb.
He turned to face the bulkhead and the roll of honor listing all those who had died while serving aboard the ship. Coming to attention he saluted the honor roll and then noticed that the commissioning flag which should be to the right of the honor roll was missing. He felt a flicker of anger over that, wondering who had taken it down, and turning started for the airlock door which was secured to the shipyard docking station. Turning the corner, he saw a small line of men and women waiting for him: Doomsday, Sparks (his head of fighter maintenance), Kevin Tolwyn, and last of all Ian Hunter looking strange indeed dressed in civilian mufti, having been already retired from the fleet the day before. The group came to attention, saluted, and Kevin stepped forward to hand Jason a folded flag, the commissioning pennant of Tarawa.
'Thought you'd want this, sir,' Kevin said with a grin. 'Someday you might want to hang it back up again.'
'Thanks, Kevin.'
To one side he saw a group of technicians, the mothballing crew, who would finish the shut down of the ship for cold storage. Though the government had agreed to the armistice and with it an immediate cut back of fifty percent of the active fleet, at least they were not taking the ships out and simply cutting them up as the Kilrathi had first suggested; the military had managed to stop that mad idea. It had become a major fly in the ointment in the four weeks since the armistice, with the Kilrathi threatening to pull out of the peace talks but so far the civilian government had not budged, though Jamison was screaming for even deeper cutbacks. The inactive fleet was therefore, at least for the moment, secured, the ships hooked to orbital bases for power and maintenance. Rodham, however, had agreed to the ship's crews being paid off and assigned to inactive reserves as a cost cutting measure, a fact which meant that hundreds of thousands of highly trained personnel were being pulled from their ships and demobilized as quickly as ships were pulled from the front and sent to the main bases either above Earth, Sirius, or out at Carnovean Station.
He turned to face back down the corridor and bowed his head for a moment.
'Good-bye, my friends,' he whispered, remembering all those who in a way would be forever young, and forever bound to his ship. Fighting back the tears he turned without another word and went through the airlock, his friends following in silence.
'Rear Admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn, approach the court.'
Walking stiffly, Geoff came up before the court martial officers and saluted.
Admiral Banbridge, as the presiding officer, stood up, his hands shaking as he unfolded a single sheet of paper.
'Rear Admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn, it is the decision of this court that you have been found guilty of disobedience of fleet orders, in that you knowingly attacked a vessel of the Kilrathi Empire after being made fully aware of General Order number 2312A, ordering the suspension of all hostilities.
'It is the decision of this court that you hereby be stripped of your rank and suffer a dishonorable discharge with the loss of all privileges and honors due your rank.'
Banbridge lowered his head and nodded. A Marine captain came forward and took Tolwyn's ceremonial sword, which had rested on the desk of the court martial officers since the opening of the trial. He placed the tip of the sword on the ground and held it at an angle. Raising his foot he slammed his heel down on the side of the blade, snapping it in half. The crack of the sword breaking echoed through the chamber and Geoff winced at the sound. The Marine tossed the hilt of the sword on the floor by Geoff's feet and then stepped up to Geoff.
The Marine looked him straight in the eyes and Geoff could see that the man hated what he was about to do.
Grabbing hold of the insignias of rank on Geoff's shoulders the Marine tore them off with a violent jerking motion so that Geoff swayed and struggled to keep at attention. The Marine again looked him in the eyes.
'I'm sorry, sir,' he whispered and Geoff nodded a reply.
The Marine turned back to face the court and placed the torn bits of fabric and brass on the desk.
Geoff looked squarely at Banbridge and snapped off a salute, trying not to notice the tears in his old mentor's eyes. Breaking with tradition he leaned over and picked up the broken hilt and blade of his sword, turned, and marched out of the room. After he left a side door opened and a lone figure came through it, bending low and then standing up to his full height.
'Ambassador Vak'ga,' Banbridge said coldly, 'the fleet wishes to extend its apologies over this incident and as you were informed this morning, restitution will be paid to the families of those killed in the incident. Admiral Tolwyn has been dishonorably discharged from the service in punishment.'
'Does that mean that he will now commit Zu'kara?'
'Zu'kara?'
'How do you say it?' Vak'ga rumbled. 'Yes, ritual suicide in atonement for an act of shame to ones hrai, I mean family.'
'That's not our way, Banbridge replied coldly. 'And besides, the carrier he was attacking had also launched a strike after the armistice and Tolwyn could be justified in his action by acting in self-defense. Good God, Ambassador, we've logged more than a hundred such incidents during the first day, and hundreds more since. Shutting off thirty years of war is not easy.'
'So that is it?' Vak'ga snapped. 'He is simply told to go away with no further punishment? With us, for such a crime, he would not even be allowed the glory of Zu'kara, his throat would be slit and his body hung by its heels like a prey animal.'
Banbridge bristled.
'I'm sure that would be the case for you,' he finally replied, the sarcasm in his voice evident. 'As for Geoff Tolwyn, losing the fleet and his rank is the worst punishment imaginable. After all it was the only family he'd had for the last twenty years.'
He knew that the Ambassador was most likely aware that Tolwyn's wife and boys had been killed in a raid; most of the holo news reports had played on that theme as a motivation for his spectacular career and his final downfall.
'I lost my family too,' Vak'ga snarled, 'or didn't you know that?'
Banbridge nodded but said nothing.
The Ambassador turned as if to leave.
