Boundless

by Jack Campbell

  The ground forces commander grimaced. “We never suffered direct attack. Like a lot of other worlds, Glenlyon sent out people. Some of them came back. A lot didn’t. There’s a memorial listing every single casualty from here over the last hundred years. It’s sort of hard to handle, if you know what I mean. You’re scheduled to present a wreath there two days from now.”

  “Good.” That he didn’t mind doing. The vehicle was already slowing in front of a very large building, one he didn’t recognize, so it must have been built sometime in the last century.

  “We’re holding the buffet at the old, original veterans’ service center,” the ground forces commander said. “To sort of help you feel at home.”

  The old, original veterans’ service center. Obviously it had been here for at least several decades, but he had no memory of this structure. It felt odd, again, to be reminded that what for him were memories a few years old from Glenlyon were actually memories of a century ago.

  Inside, a vast hall was filled with tables that were piled with food, a large crowd of men and women waiting. Just from the way they stood and watched him he could have told they were all veterans.

  All waiting to talk to him.

  Feeling like he was about to be judged by his peers, Geary walked inside, Tanya beside him.

  EIGHT

  HE’D seen very old pictures of gatherings of other veterans. The difference between then and now was that the ancient pictures showed men and women lacking limbs, their bodies battered by their experiences, a visual testament to what they’d endured. These days just about any physical damage could be repaired, any limb regrown, even brain damage corrected. The physical scars were gone, all except those people chose to retain as marks of their service, but the invisible scars remained. In that way, gatherings of veterans remained the same as in ancient times.

  He could do this. Geary walked slowly among the veterans, exchanging a few words with each, feeling uncomfortable that he was being singled out compared to them. Tanya disappeared briefly, returning with a plate so he could eat while he walked and talked, surprised to realize how happy it made him to taste some of the special foods Glenlyon took pride in.

  “Admiral,” one gruff man said, saluting even though he was in a civilian suit. He had weathered skin, and had retained a scar on his neck that cosmetic surgery could’ve removed. “Colonel Duncan. Two Hundred Fifth Ground Forces Division.”

  Geary returned the salute. “How are you doing?”

  “Well enough. Could be worse.” Colonel Duncan suddenly grinned. “I worried you might take over the government like they said, but you were smart enough not to. That’s the last thing we need, right? The military has enough trouble trying to march and talk at the same time. It’d make an awful mess of trying to run the Alliance, wouldn’t it?”

  “That’s what I thought,” Geary said.

  “I knew your nephew when I was a lot younger. Michael’s boy. And his daughters. Fine people, all of them.”

  “Thank you.” How long had it been since his brother’s children had died? Best not to dwell on that.

  He felt a nudge and saw Tanya gesturing toward an elderly woman sitting against one wall, a younger woman beside her. To show that many signs of age, to need to use a mobile chair, the woman must be near the end of her life.

  Why was she by herself?

  He began walking toward her, Tanya following. Colonel Duncan followed as well, speaking to Geary. “Do you know about her? No? One of the uglier episodes of an ugly war, while I was still a boy. She was part of a ground forces unit dropped onto a Syndic planet without enough support. They were twelve hundred strong when they went in. Only fifty were evac’d alive afterwards. She’s the last of that fifty still living, the sole survivor of the few who survived. She’s not very sociable, but no one begrudges her that.”

  The younger woman saw them coming and stepped forward to meet them. “Can I talk to her?” Geary asked.

  “I think she’d like that,” the woman said.

  “Is she your mother?”

  “My great-aunt.” The woman looked back at the aged veteran in her mobile chair. “She was a sergeant. All of the officers died. She was one of the two sergeants who lived and got the others to the evacuation point before they were wiped out. I learned that from other people. She’s never talked about it.”

  “Damn,” Tanya muttered.

  Geary walked up to the old woman, extending his hand. “Sergeant? I wanted to meet you.”

  The aged veteran looked up at him, her eyes searching his face. “You’re Black Jack?” Her voice was as thin and weak as her body, but still held traces of the power it had once projected. “Why does an admiral want to meet an old grunt like me?”

  “Because I know how it feels. I’m the last survivor of the crew of Merlon. I tried to save as many as I could. It wasn’t enough. The rest died a long time ago.”

  She gazed at him for a long moment, then reached up to grasp his hand. “I should’ve saved more of them,” she whispered. “I see them every day.”

  “Yes,” Geary said. “But you saved as many as you could. Sometimes that’s all we can do. Thank you.”

  The old sergeant nodded, her eyes meeting his, exchanging a message of understanding that couldn’t be put into words. Finally she looked at Tanya, her eyes going over her uniform. “Alliance Cross,” she said. “How’d a space squid earn that?”

  “A boarding action,” Tanya said.

  “A bad one?”

  “Very bad.”

  “There aren’t any good ones,” the sergeant muttered. “Glad to know girls these days can still get the job done.” She closed her eyes, breathing slowly, worn out by the conversation.

  Geary spent some time afterwards walking through the hall and talking to other veterans, but the image of the old sergeant stuck with him. He realized that if that single meeting had been the only reason he’d come back to Glenlyon, it would’ve been all the reason he needed.

  It was getting dark when he and Tanya left, getting into the official limo. “We’ll be staying at the Geary place,” he told the ground forces commander, who like the other VIPs was still accompanying them. Jane Geary had insisted he stay there, and he hadn’t really fought against the idea.

  “That’s what we expected,” the general said.

  “I remember a lot of open fields around the house,” Geary said, staring at the buildings lining the road as the limo hummed along, the other limos with the other important people ahead of and behind it. “And a lot of trees. The first generation of Gearys on the planet, Robert and Lyn, built their place a ways out from the city. The capital still hadn’t grown enough to reach the place the last time I was here.” More than a century. Would he recognize anything? But Jane had told him the place hadn’t changed much except for a wall around the property to keep out people wanting to barge into the home of the great Black Jack.

  “It’s a stand-alone house?” Tanya asked.

  “Yeah. They’d come from a crowded Old Colony, and lot of people from those places when they had a whole new world to live on wanted a little bit of that land for their own. Robert and Lyn lived on the orbital facility for a while, they had jobs there, before settling down here on the surface. It’s sort of an old style of house, I guess.”

  But then the buildings on the right side of the road fell away, leaving a section of land fenced in by a wall high enough and sturdy enough to keep out even the most determined. Looking at it, at the effort made to make the wall look decorative from the outside, he could tell the government must have built it. The tops of trees could be seen rising over the wall.

  Their vehicle paused before the gate, a human guard coming forward to check their IDs and barely able to restrain her delight at seeing Geary.

  Once inside the gate he felt himself smiling as he saw the house. From the outside, it seemed little changed. It
didn’t seem large enough to be any family’s ancestral home, but that was what it was. Not big and grand, but low and sprawling. And it was fitting, he thought, that it wasn’t an ostentatious building that boasted of the wealth and influence of the family that lived there. Because the Gearys had never been a family of great wealth or influence, and even if they were, wouldn’t have enjoyed living in a place like that.

  “We’ll leave you here,” Council President Kennedy said. He and the other dignitaries said their farewells, got back in their limos, and the vehicles retreated out the gate, which closed to block off the sight if not the sound of the masses craning for a look at the hero who’d at last come home.

  A woman was waiting at the front door, smiling and blinking away tears. “Jane hired me to look after the place while she was gone. It’s all ready for you. The kitchen is stocked. I can get anything else you need.”

  “Thank you,” Geary said. “I’m sure we’ll be fine.” He looked at the security panel to one side of the door, wondering. Walking to stand before it, he pressed his palm against the outline of a hand.

  “Welcome back, John,” the house’s voice responded. Supposedly the voice was that of Lyn.

  “You’re still in the system,” Tanya said, bemused.

  “He was supposed to come back someday,” the housekeeper offered. “That’s what the legends said.”

  Which made a strange kind of sense. Geary walked the housekeeper to the gate, then came back to Tanya. “Ready?”

  The door opened for him, and he stepped inside, feeling as if he’d also stepped back in time a hundred years. “It’s hardly changed at all.”

  “I’m glad,” Tanya said. “This place is only one story but it’s bigger than it looks, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of. As the family grew they added rooms here and there so the house sprawled a bit. There were six bedrooms when I left last.”

  “How much land is inside this wall?”

  “It’s two and a half acres,” he said. “I guess land was pretty cheap when the planet was first settled. Though there’s a family story that the land actually was given to Robert and Lyn Geary by the government to reward their services in the early years when the planet was threatened.”

  He looked around him, realizing there was one place he had to go first. He walked through the great room and into a smaller room to one side. The family shrine. One wall was dominated by pictures, some larger, some smaller, of all the Gearys who’d died in the many years since the home was built. Beneath them on top of a low chest were the same sort of partly burned-down candles that he’d grown up seeing here.

  He focused on the central picture, a family portrait that had always been there. The first Gearys. Robert in the uniform of Glenlyon’s small navy before it had completely merged with others to form the Alliance fleet, Lyn wearing a large pin showing lines of code, their eldest daughter in Marine uniform, and two younger boys gazing eagerly outward as if poised to follow their own lives into space. “We grew up here, and then we left, and sometimes we came back,” Geary said, looking at the image. “Sometimes we didn’t.” He looked at another picture, that of his mother and father, standing with young him and his brother Michael, who’d all believed him dead at Grendel, and he wished he’d done a better job of saying goodbye to them the last time he’d been here.

  “Jane told me she hasn’t been back since Michael was declared missing in action.” Tanya gazed at all of the pictures. “She said because of the losses during the war, and after her parents died in combat, she and Michael were the last two Gearys left of the family. I understand now why she said the house felt way too big for them, and why she didn’t want to come here alone.”

  “My fault,” Geary said, feeling the pain of that. “They had to follow the example of Black Jack. Try to be heroes for the Alliance.”

  “That was not your fault. You didn’t create that Black Jack legend, and you didn’t demand that your relatives be forced to try to live up to it.” Tanya gestured toward the wall of images with one hand, grasping his hand with her other. “Do you feel anger toward you from them? Resentment? They know you did the best you could, and they tried to do the same. Do you know what I feel? How proud your ancestors are of you. Standing here, I can feel it. Oh.”

  “What?” He followed her gaze. And saw his own picture, from when he’d assumed command of Merlon. He remembered sending that to his parents. “I guess we should take that one down.” Feeling awkward, Geary looked for another picture and didn’t see it. “There’s no photo of my great-nephew Michael.”

  Tanya nodded. “Jane doesn’t think he’s dead.”

  “Did she tell you they hated me, growing up, for that legend locking them into careers in the fleet? For being constantly measured against that impossible standard. But they still did their best. Like, sure we’re Gearys, so we’ll do what we have to do, but you can’t make us happy about it.”

  “I know someone else like that,” Tanya said. “And now that Jane knows who you really are, she doesn’t hate you. Who’s this?” she added, pointing to an old, small photo of a woman that seemed to have been taken for an ID card. “That’s not a formal picture.”

  “Lieutenant Martel. She was on Robert Geary’s ship. Family lore says she died far from home with no family, so the Gearys adopted her spirit as part of our family.”

  He reached down to the chest, wondering if it would be as he remembered, pulling open what should be the correct drawer and seeing the matches inside. Sparking one to life, he used it to light one of the candles, then handed the match to Tanya. She took it and lit another candle next to his. And in that moment, standing before the images of his ancestors, and of the Gearys who’d come after him but died before he’d been found and revived, he realized how very right this was and how much he’d needed to do it. To stand here looking at them, thinking of them, thanking them, while holding Tanya’s hand and formally presenting her to them as a new member of the family. “Thank you,” he said in a low voice.

  They stood there before the pictures for he didn’t know how long, the candles burning, memories tumbling through his mind. But no clear images came, no clear messages or feelings. Finally he reached to put out his candle, and Tanya did the same. “Thank you,” he said again, this time to Tanya. “You were right. I needed to come here.”

  “I’m always right,” she said, smiling.

  “I keep forgetting.”

  “I know. I’ll keep reminding you.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “After that buffet?” she said. “No.”

  He pointed down a hallway. “I only came to visit occasionally, but they had extra room, so they left my old room for me. It’s probably been changed since then, of course.”

  “Why don’t we find out?” she said.

  The hall felt both eerily familiar and oddly strange, the same hall, pretty much the same furnishings, but some new pictures added to the old ones, along with some new plaques and other items nestled among those he’d often looked at a century before. At least one of the new plaques was about Black Jack’s Last Stand, but he refused to look directly at it and read it.

  He nerved himself before opening the door to the room, his room, not knowing just what it was that worried him.

  Inside, he stopped to stare around him.

  “Are you okay?” Tanya asked.

  “I’m not sure.” He studied the room, trying to spot details. “As far as I can tell, it’s exactly as it was when I last left here. Obviously it’s been kept clean, but I don’t think anything has been moved or replaced.”

  “They didn’t change anything over the last century? Does that feel welcoming, or creepy?”

  “A bit of both.”

  She looked about her, spotting something tossed onto the top of the desk. “Concert tickets?”

  He laughed. “They even left those sitting there? Yeah. Printed t
ickets to frustrate counterfeiting. Jump Space Riot was a really popular group on Glenlyon back then.”

  “There’s two tickets here,” Tanya observed. “Who’d you go with?”

  “Uh . . . a friend.” Why did he feel awkward about that? About a woman he’d known a century ago?

  She gave him a skeptical look.

  “Really,” he protested. “Aileen just liked me as a friend.”

  “I notice you’re not saying how you felt about her.” Tanya touched the tickets gently. “Don’t look guilty. Friends are important. I hope she found the person she was looking for.”

  “I didn’t want to look it up,” Geary said. “Her, or others I knew. It was bad enough finding out what had happened to the surviving members of my cruiser at Grendel.”

  “I understand.” Tanya looked around again, then brought out a small device, examining it. “The only bugs in this room are some commercial gimmicks. Standard home security stuff.” She touched the device a couple of times. “The ones in this room have now been deactivated, and anything I couldn’t spot is being jammed.”

  “Good.” He took another look at the device she held. “That looks familiar.”

  “It was a bequest to me from a mutual friend, along with instructions on how to use it.” Tanya turned the device in her hand as if studying it. “I don’t know where that woman got gear like this, but she must have known some very interesting people.”

  “Victoria Rione gave you that?” he asked, astounded.

  “I told you it was a bequest.” She shrugged. “Yes, I was startled. Apparently that woman thought I’d need to have it. It’s a very handy little item. I let Senior Chief Tarrani take a look at it and she was extremely impressed.” Tanya looked at him. “I assume we’re sleeping in this room.”

  “Yes,” he said, feeling his heart beating a little stronger at the thought as he looked back at her.

  She grinned at him, reaching up one hand to touch his face. “Then let’s check the bedding. If it’s the same bedding you last used a century ago, we’re going to change the sheets.”