2034: A Novel of the Next World War(87)

“No one here trusts us, not even our own people. We’ll never be Americans,” the girl said bitterly. She sat slumped next to her mother, the two of them side by side in the stern of the dinghy. Her mother held the tiller; she didn’t look at her daughter, but at the horizon, trying to keep them on course.

“You don’t understand,” her mother eventually said. “We are from nowhere and have nothing. We have come here to be from somewhere and to have something. That is what makes us American.”

The two sat silently for a time.

A spray of water came over the bow as they crossed the wake of a much larger ship, the uncaring wave almost swamping their small dinghy.

When they arrived off the coast of the Naval War College, they drew in the sail, lifted the tiller, and dropped their small anchor. Their dinghy bobbed in the gentle swells. The two of them, mother and daughter, didn’t speak. They watched the shore, the familiar pathways, the office where he had once worked, the life they’d once had and, perhaps, would someday have again.



* * *





    17:25 June 12, 2037 (GMT-6)

New Mexico

The ranch house was built in the center of her one-hundred-acre plot. The renovation had taken three years and most of her savings, but Sarah Hunt was starting to feel as though it was home. The house itself wasn’t much, a single floor with exposed timbers and rafters. She still didn’t have anything to hang on the walls and wondered if she ever would. Most of her photos she kept in storage. On a few occasions since retiring, after one sleepless, sweat-soaked night or another, she would go out to the shed in the back of the house and consider burning the single box that contained the photographs.

But it hadn’t come to that, at least not yet.

After Shanghai, the dreams got worse. Or not necessarily worse, but more frequent. Night after night she would be standing on the dock with the seemingly infinite parade of ships offloading their cargo of ghosts, while she searched for her father. She never found him, not once. Yet she remained unconvinced that her searching in the dreams was futile. For a long time, she hoped that when she finished her new home, the dreams might stop. And if they never stopped, she at least hoped to find something or someone recognizable in them. That hadn’t yet proven the case.

She had gone on and off medication to no effect.

She had spoken to therapists who only seemed to want to bury her beneath the weight of her own words, so she’d stopped talking to them. Each day, she walked the perimeter of her property, though it made her bad leg ache. Eight miles from her nearest neighbor, her plot of high desert brought her a modicum of peace. Despite the dreams, out here she could at least sleep. After the strike on Shanghai, she’d gone nearly a week with no sleep at all, her nerves so frayed that Hendrickson had to fly out to the Enterprise and relieve her of command himself, in the midst of the ceasefire negotiations being brokered by New Delhi. He had been gentle with her then, and he had remained gentle with her in the three years since. Predictably, he’d stayed in the Navy, pinning on a third star in his ascent to its highest ranks. A reward—and a deserved one—for the role he’d played in brokering the peace.

On his visits, which had become less frequent, he always assured her that there was nothing she could’ve done to prevent Shanghai. She hadn’t been the one to issue the launch order. Once the nine Hornets had departed the Enterprise there was nothing she could have done. If anything, the one Hornet getting to its target might have proven crucial to ending the war. During the ceasefire negotiations that followed, it had been essential for hawks like Wisecarver to make the face-saving claim that they had avenged the attacks against Galveston and San Diego. Without that claim, Hendrickson felt certain no ceasefire agreement would have been signed.

“This wasn’t your fault,” he would say.

“Then whose fault was it?” she would ask.

“Not yours,” and they would leave it at that. For the first year and into the second, Hendrickson would offer to help her in the ways he thought she needed help. “Why don’t you come stay with us for a bit?” or, “I’m worried about you out here on your own.” He thought it might be good for her to get back on the water again. Healing was the word he’d used. Hunt had reminded him that it was no accident she’d bought property in New Mexico, a landlocked state.

In the third year, on one of his now-rare visits, the two had decided to take a stroll around her property before dinner. During a lull in their conversation, she finally asked, “Will you help me with something?”

“Anything,” he answered.

“I’m thinking about adopting.”

“Adopting what?” he replied, as if he were hoping she might say a cat or a dog.

They continued to walk in silence, until, eventually, Hendrickson muttered, “Whosoever destroys one life has destroyed the world entire, and whosoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world. . . .”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“Isn’t that why you want to adopt?”

“I never thought I’d hear you quote scripture.”

Hendrickson shrugged. “I heard Trent Wisecarver say it once. Though I don’t think he believed it. Do you?”

They had come to a portion of her fence that needed mending. Instead of answering, Hunt bent down and cradled one of the heavy joists in her arms. She lifted with all her strength, exhaling sharply as she jammed its end into an upright. It would hold, at least temporarily, until she could make a permanent fix. She did this again with the joist’s other end. Then she wiped her dirty hands on the front of her jeans. “I’ve already started the adoption process,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m not asking for your opinion. I’m only asking for your help. They require letters of reference. You’re a war hero; one from you might mean something.”