Saturday, October 18, 2155
Enterprise, Oregon, Earth
THE TIDINGS OF WAR from the frontier droned on in the corner where Selma Guitierrez sat lotus-style on the floor, doing her yoga stretches in front of the living-room screen.
Nelson Kemper tried to ignore the broadcast, concentrating instead on the laughing, brown-eyed, brown-haired toddler who sat on his knee, balancing herself precariously as he leaned back on the sofa as her pudgy fingers maintained a firm grip on both of his thumbs. Although little Elena had already been walking for more than six months, she had yet to outgrow the need for “daddy rides,” much to Kemper’s delight.
On most days, such small but sublime joys served only to vindicate the decision that he and Selma had made almost two years earlier, shortly after their discovery of the unplanned pregnancy that had ultimately given them Elena, who had since become the light of their lives. They had decided then to swap their military careers for a semirural existence in a town that shared its name—Enterprise—with that of the Starfleet vessel where they had last been posted as MACO troopers.
Today was not one of those days.
After the third time Selma had replayed the recording of Gannet Brook’s report about the assault on Deneva—neither of them had been in the mood to listen to any more of Keisha Naquase’s well-meaning but ill-advised pacifism—Kemper knew that something was very different today. Although he found that playing with Elena brought him no less joy than it ever did, he also noticed that it was becoming harder than ever before to keep trying to ignore what was going Out There, in the hostile immensity of deep interstellar space.
Just as it was becoming increasingly difficult to tamp down his burning need to do something about it.
After swinging Elena playfully onto his shoulder, Kemper got his feet beneath him and walked toward his wife.
“How many more times are you going to watch that?” he said, nodding toward the image of Gannet Brooks, whose every pore seemed to radiate a mixture of both concern and encouragement.
Selma stretched once more, then rose to her feet. She pointed a small remote control unit at the screen, and Brooks’s likeness abruptly vanished.
“Sorry, Nelson,” she said, brushing several strands of her dark, lustrous hair away from her eyes. “I didn’t realize it was bothering you.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t. At least, not as much as that Naquase woman bothers me. If Starfleet could figure out how to use her denial to turn a turbine, Earth’s ships would all be able to hit warp eight, easy.”
Selma snickered as she began doing some standing stretches. “Bless her heart. Gotta love anybody whose best military advice amounts to ‘Run away, find a hole to hide in, and pull it in after yourself.’”
Kemper felt Elena fidgeting on his shoulders, so he gave her a few quick bounces to settle her down. “Well, I suppose we haven’t got to the part where we pull the hole in after us. At least not yet.”
Selma froze in mid-motion and studied him, a grave look on her olive-toned face. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying, Nelson?”
He nodded slowly. “Earth is under direct threat from these Romulans, Selma. In spite of that, we seem to be taking Naquase’s advice, even though we’re both trained warriors who know better.”
There. He’d finally laid his cards on the table, or at least most of them.
“I thought we settled this after the thing with the freighter out in the Gamma Hydra sector,” she said with a weary sigh. “We might both be trained warriors, Nelson, but we’re also both new parents.”
He paused to shrug, then continued bouncing Elena, who responded by releasing a happy cry. “The Romulans don’t seem to think much of anything’s been settled,” he said. “They’ve taken Deneva, Selma. I had cousins living there.”
Her expression darkened, her cheeks flushing with what he recognized as anger, though it was restrained as tightly as the superheated plasma in a warp nacelle.
“I lost a couple of old classmates on Tarod IX,” she said. “What’s your point?”
“I’m not trying to compare my grief to anybody else’s,” he said, raising a placating hand.
She appeared more or less satisfied by that, and seemed to stand down. “And I want to get out there and stop the Romulans just as much as you do. But we have Elena to think about.”
I am thinking about Elena, he thought as he prepared to toss his final card onto the table.
“So we both want to take the fight to those bastards,” he said. “I just can’t put it aside any longer, Selma. Not since Deneva. I have to go back out there.”
Now that the words were out at last, like so many slow-motion meteors painting the sky with lingering traceries of fire, he braced himself for her reaction. This time it was going to turn out differently. Unlike all the previous occasions when they’d had precisely the same argument—right after the attacks on Alpha Centauri, Calder II, Tarod IX, and the Kobayashi Maru—he had his talking points lined up, prepared and polished like rows of dress boots. This time he was ready to argue that the best way to safeguard Elena’s future would be to do everything possible to turn back the Romulan tide.
Then Selma put him almost entirely off balance by failing to object. Instead she merely gazed silently into his eyes for a seeming eternity.
Very quietly, she said, “All right, Nelson.”
“Come again?” he asked, unable to keep the confusion and suspicion out of his voice. This was exactly the sort of rhetorical jujitsu that always seemed to give her the crucial edge in any argument.
“I said, ‘All right.’ I can see that your mind is made up.”
He blinked in incredulity. “You’re going to let me go? Just like that? You’ll stay behind and look after Elena?”
She put a hand flat against his chest. “Not so fast, Sergeant. I want to go just as badly as you do, remember?”
“But we can’t both go,” he said, his confusion only deepening. “Like you said, we have Elena to think about. We’ve been imposing on the Marvicks way too much for child care as it is.”
Nodding, she said, “Right. And who said anything about both of us going? You just said that one of us has to go and fight, and I said ‘All right’ to that.”
It finally came to him what she was suggesting. “I outrank you, Corporal Guitierrez.”
Elena grew restless again, prompting Selma to reach up and take her down from his shoulders. “Not while we’re both retired and wearing civvies, Sergeant Kemper,” she said.
Because his hands were now freed by Elena’s sudden departure from his shoulders, Nelson Kemper shoved them both into the pockets of his khaki trousers, as was his wont when he was waxing thoughtful.
“Now we just have to find a fair way to decide which one of us stays home, and which one of us rides out to slay the dragon,” Selma said. Elena threw her arms around her mother’s neck, almost as though she understood the uncertainty that lay ahead.
Kemper absently rubbed his thumb over the slightly serrated edge of the silver disk he kept in the depths of his left pocket. He had begun carrying the ancient dollar coin as a sort of good luck talisman on the day Elena was born.
“Call heads or tails,” he said as he took out the coin.
Then he sent it spinning into the air with a practiced flick of his thumb.