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Captain Absen stared at the weapon in front of him on his tiny cabin desk. It was a lovely thing and deadly, a .45 automatic based on the venerable M1911 but much more modern. Knurled wooden grips and silver highlights made it lovely; the hollow-point cartridge in the chamber made it deadly.
A knock at his door startled him. Sliding the handgun under his mattress he called, “Come in.”
“Sir, SITREP from Fleet.” The rating handed his captain the secure tablet with the situation report, then shut the door as he left. On the screen the hard facts leaped out at him. Nuclear strikes. Washington. New York. Boston. Atlanta. Norfolk. Chicago. He ran his finger down the list, over a hundred entries long.
San Diego. Coronado. Kathleen and the kids, in his house on Captain’s Row. He closed his eyes, swaying sick.
Maybe they weren’t in town. There’s no way he would know; the sub had been out and incommunicado for four months. He looked through the list again. Pueblo, Colorado, where her parents lived, wasn’t on it. Colorado Springs was the closest strike listed. And they usually took the route through Flagstaff and Albuquerque; Los Alamos was on the list but nothing else on the way. He grasped at the hope, slim as it was.
Pulling out the gun again, he checked the action. Playing with it, feeling its heft in his hand. Imagining the force of the bullet as it crashed through his brain, ending all anxiety and worry.
Even if his family survived, Captain Absen himself had failed. He might come home to find Kathleen being tortured in a Unionist prison cell, his children held hostage. That would be worse than having lost them clean in nuclear fire. Still, there was hope, and even if they were gone, he had over one hundred men depending on him.
Henrich Absen had never been one to shirk his duty. He unloaded and cleared the weapon and put it away.
