Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [1]
The main events in this book take place during
the summer of 2153, between the Enterprise’s
discovery of a Xindi who was working in a
mining complex (“The Xindi”) and before
the ship is stopped cold by a spatial anomaly
and is boarded by pirates (“Anomaly”).
…from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which
they gave the last full measure of devotion…
—From President Abraham Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863
Prologue
Sunday, August 12, 2238,
San Francisco
THE OLD MAN DREW strength from the scent of freshly mowed grass, which smelled like home. In spite of that, the duffel bag he carried across his shoulders seemed to be growing heavier with each step forward. Under a glowering, cantaloupe-colored sky that seemed barely able to hold back its tears, he slowly ascended the hill until he stood in the monument’s soft, mercurial shadow.
“I wish you’d let me carry that,” said the much younger, sandy-haired man who was walking alongside him.
“I’m old, Larry,” drawled the silver-maned man with the duffel as he smiled and squinted into the scattered, fog-obscured morning light. “But I’m not an invalid. At least not yet.”
“I just worry sometimes that you’re going to sprain something.”
The old man looked the brilliant young engineer up and down and chuckled tolerantly, shaking his head. Laurence Marvick couldn’t have weighed much more than sixty-five kilograms soaking wet, so he wasn’t exactly credible when he held forth on the subject of hauling freight.
“If I’d gotten into the habit of letting other people do everything for me,” the old man said at last, “then I never would have made it past my hundredth birthday.” The old man didn’t like to consider that the date in question had come and gone twenty—no, make that twenty-one—years ago.
Turning away from Marvick, the old man stared mutely at the monolith before him, which had been erected nearly eighty years earlier to commemorate the thousands of casualties Starfleet had suffered, despite its sincere efforts to extend humanity’s olive branch across the galaxy, stretching back to a time before that very first Federation Day back in ’61.
All the way back to the Xindi attack, the old man thought. The intervening decades might have washed away much of the bitterness he’d felt back then, but the pain the Xindi had inflicted on him remained in fairly close to mint condition. Since then he’d observed on a number of occasions that war was a ravenous, unappeasable beast. More friends and loved ones than he cared to count had been snatched up in its jaws. Somebody usually prevailed in a war, but nobody really won.
He wondered how many more of his family, friends, and enemies had succumbed to the far slower, but no less insatiable, ravages of time—especially during the past few years. Sooner or later, time would come for him as well, even if war and conflict hadn’t.
“It’s hard to believe it’s been seventy-six years since they signed the Federation Charter,” the old man said at length.
“Seventy-seven years,” Marvick said quietly, sounding almost embarrassed to be correcting the man who had taught him so much over the years. The ink was barely dry on Laurence Marvick’s doctorate, so the old man was willing to overlook the kid’s tendency toward pedantry. He might be a bit overprecise, he thought, but at least he’s proved he can stop himself from saying too much when it counts. The lad had already proved his ability to keep a secret on any number of occasions.
“Seventy-seven years,” the old man repeated. “Right.”
The old man allowed his gaze to drift past the monument. Perhaps a hundred meters away, a stand of tall sycamores shifted in the summer breeze like fidgety children. A young family—a red-haired man dressed in a red Starfleet uniform, accompanied by two energetic-looking little boys and a woman attired in a lightweight summer dress—approached from nearby, just out of earshot on the hillside adjacent to the monument. Thankful that the place wasn’t more crowded, the old man craned his neck upward to