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By Root 1324 0

it, the shock was too much, because Mackenzie Calhoun realized that he was dead, that was all, just dead, because his murdered father was speaking to him, and he’d never really made it through the planet of ice at all. It had all been some sort of cruel joke, and at that moment, he and Elizabeth were lying on the planet’s surface becoming crusted over with sleet and snow. And at that dismal image, that final miserable end that had been inflicted upon them… the mighty, fighting heart of Mackenzie Calhoun gave out. It wasn’t for himself so much; Calhoun had no fear of death. In many respects, he couldn’t quite believe that he’d lived as long as he had. No, the despair that broke him was the thought that he had let down Shelby. That he had carried his wife in his arms, whispered to her frozen ear that he would make things better, that he would save them somehow, and he’d failed. He’d let her down.

Even as he was half sitting up, the physical and mental stress all caught up with him at once, and Calhoun fell back without ever having opened his eyes. He struck his head hard on the barren and crusty ground beneath him, but never felt it.

And so died Mackenzie Calhoun, without ever having a chance to see the sun set.

Mackenzie Calhoun, captain of the Excalibur, was so cold that it took his body long minutes to realize that he was once again in warmth.

It didn’t happen immediately, or all at once. Instead it occurred in stages. First his fingers and toes, frozen nearly to frostbite stage, began to flex. Then his lungs, which had been so chilled that Calhoun had practically forgotten what it was like to breathe without a thousand needles jabbing in his chest, began to expand to their normal size. There was pain at first when they did, but that began to subside. He gave out a series of violent coughs that racked his body, and it was only then that his brain processed the information that the rest of his body was providing him.

He was so dazed, so confounded, that he had to make the effort to reorder events in his mind so that he could recall how he’d come to this pass.

The cold… the cold was so overwhelming that, for what seemed an endless period of time, he couldn’t think of anything beyond that. There had been cold, and blistering winds that would have flayed the skin from his body if he’d been out there much longer. Cold, and bodies… two bodies…

Calhoun lay there, flat on his back, arms and legs splayed, trying to put together the pieces of his body and the pieces of his life, the ground hard and gritty beneath him, the heat of an unknown sun pounding down upon him, his extremities starting to tingle with the resurgence of blood circulating to them. And that was when he remembered Shelby.

“Eppy…” he whispered, his concern for her pushing away anything else that could possibly be going through his mind. “Eppy,” he said, revolted by how weak and whispery his voice sounded.

It was at that point that he realized he was blind.

No… no, not blind. But his eyes were closed, and absurd as it sounded, he didn’t have the strength to open them. He was trembling, his body seizing up, and he coughed once more. For a moment he wanted to surrender to despair, to dwell upon how unfair all of this was. But then he thought, Unfair? Unfair? And who ever claimed life was fair in the first place? Certainly not Calhoun. Certainly not his father, the man from whom he’d learned so much. The man who had died, broken in body but not in spirit by soldiers representing an oppressive race whom young Calhoun had eventually driven off his world. If he were here right now, Calhoun realized, he’d be telling his son to stop lying about and dwelling upon his unfair lot in life. He was still alive, after all, and that was all that was important. Now get up. The voice of his own, which so echoed that of his father, chided him yet again, and said even more sternly, Get up! Your wife needs you. On your feet, damn you, if you be a man…

Why was he thinking about his father? It had been years since he had dwelt on him… so long, in fact, that he would have thought