Things Fall Apart: Part 25

Aboard Borass Station

Sometimes, the universe seemed to have a sense of timing. Singer did not believe the universe was so involved in the minute affairs of those who inhabited it, but sometimes, timing worked out in a way that made her wonder if something, somewhere, was orchestrating matters.

The memorial service for the dead of Gliese-581—and, by implication, all those others who might have perished in the Incident, was held about a megasecond after the tour of Zephyr. That week had been a whirlwind, as Singer and her people began to train actively on the new systems they would be using, while engineering and logistics crews pitched in with the dockyard to complete the ship. Physically, it looked like the ship would be ready to leave, more or less as planned.

There were still holes in the crew roster, however, of which the most glaring was the lack of at least one medical doctor. There were surviving medical personnel scattered around the system's rock-stations and the shipyard itself, but not a lot of them. Haraldsdottir was trying hard not to strip the system of people they would still need, not least of which because the leaders of those stations—with whom she would have to deal with for the foreseeable future—were reluctant to part with their expertise. She could order it, but she did not want to do so.

Singer, for all that she desperately did not want to leave dock without a Chief Medical Officer, could not blame Haraldsdottir even a little bit.

If pressed, Singer would also have had to admit that she felt a little guilty about wanting a CMO, when Chief Kasel had done so very good a job at keeping the crew alive when the ship they were flying was full of holes and everyone was concussed. Except that Kasel, himself, was as anxious as she was, maybe more, about the glaring absence on the new ship's books.

Singer, of course, had an added duty that made for a frantic megasecond: Haraldsdottir had not forgotten that she'd placed Singer on the hook to help her devise a fitting memorial ceremony for the system's dead. They had spent a great deal of time together, working out the details. In the end, they had agreed that it had to be something short and heartfelt. It had to be honest while giving what comfort was possible in the face of catastrophe. No one had time or attention span for something longer, and no one—at least, no one they knew personally—was in the mood for platitudes.

Singer was not, in the end, required to be the face of the ceremony. The commodore had not thrown her weight around much, but she was aware that she was functionally the head of this system's...administration, just now. "Government" felt wrong. She was in charge. Governing would have to wait.

Point was, it fell to Haraldsdottir, not her current favored protege, to face the holosensors.

And so, at last, that moment came. In the assembly hall on Borass Station, Singer stood on the dais behind her superior, flanked by her officers and Haraldsdottir's, while her crew, along with the crew of Borass, stood at attention below. In a space between the front row and the dais, lay six caskets—the bodies recovered from the only pod found intact. The one which Singer had ordered brought in and the bodies put in storage against this exact occasion.

"Every person who has ever lost another person they cared about," said Haraldsdottir, in a cadence far more measured than she was feeling, "comes to ask the same question: why? Why now? Why there? Why that way? Often, why me? Why should I lose someone I needed?

"As beings who reason, we always seek out reasons. We want the universe to make sense, and we are at a loss when it fails us in that regard.

"We cannot, today, say for certain how many people we have lost. We cannot, today, say even how many people we have lost in this system alone. It surely numbers in the hundreds of thousands. If we began reading the list of those we believe dead, it would take megaseconds.

"It isn't fair. They deserve to be named. They deserve to be known. All of them. But for those of us who remain, too much work lies before us.

"Before us lie six whose names we do know. They lie here on behalf of all those we cannot honor. It's a heavy burden to ask of them, a prominence surely none of them would have sought.

"If there is, as many here believe, a power, or powers, to receive such souls as these into their keeping, we ask, however belatedly, that these six: Crewman Hieronymus Ganz; Crewman Elaine Tarkovsky; Petty Officer Ivar Sigurdsson; Petty Officer Li Fen; Chief Petty Officer Bréanainn O Conaill; Ensign Roberta Danton; these six and and the countless others, be so taken, and comforted, and granted peace."

Haraldsdottir bowed her head, and there was silence, nearly two hundred seconds of it. Enough time for anyone with a penchant for prayer to say what needed to be said.

When she resumed, there were unshed tears in her eyes, an echo of that moment in her office, with Singer, where she had broken down.

"I spoke of the work that lies before us. A large part of that work is about to be undertaken by Zephyr, and her newly assigned crew. Part of that work will be to try to answer that question, 'Why?!' And also, if at all possible, 'Who?'. It is possible, in an infinite universe, that such a catastrophe as we have endured could be an accident. We do not believe it to be one. Someone, somewhere, did this. We intend to find them—"

And then a bell tone sounded, followed by a young voice—Singer guessed an ensign or lieutenant who had drawn the short straw to remain on Tower duty. "Commodore, I deeply regret the interruption, but we've had a flare at the system's edge. A ship has just emerged from time compression. They identify as Aquila."

Things Fall Apart will be on hiatus for two weeks while I go on an Actual Vacation^tm. Consider this a mid-season cliffhanger! Watch reruns while you wait!