Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [105]
As if there’s anything I can say that will make things right, he thought, knowing that nothing had really been right since the day of the Xindi attack on Earth.
In the forward section of the armory, next to the launch tubes, stood a single raised bier bounded by a ramp—a catafalque that held a torpedo casing draped with three banners: one was emblazoned with Starfleet’s navy blue chevrons, while the other two bore the official seal of Earth’s global federal government and the United Earth Space Probe Agency, the same white-on-sky-blue globe-and-laurel-leaf symbol that the United Nations had adopted some two centuries earlier.
Beside the torpedo stood a four-person MACO honor guard, immaculately turned out in dress uniforms, gloves, and ceremonial sidearms. The honor guard, among whom Archer recognized Corporal Peruzzi and Private Money, collectively held a ceremonial wooden staff that carried a flag bearing the red-and-blue shark logo of the Military Assault Command Operations organization. The troopers held the staff at a reverent forty-five degrees, taking care not to allow the attached banner to come within five centimeters of the deck. Like the flags that partially covered the torpedo tube, this flag also displayed the United Earth symbol.
Two deaths, but only one casket, Archer thought, feeling desolate. Although just one body would be interred today—the lost MACO had been vaporized during the assault on the Xindi fuel depot, leaving no remains—the crew, Starfleet and MACO alike, had congregated here to honor a pair of fallen comrades. Both of the dead had been loyal members of two unique and sometimes contentious services, each one the product of a distinct military tradition.
But whatever might have differed in their respective training, or in their view of the world, both had died in pursuit of a common noble cause: protecting their homeworld, and thereby affirming their shared humanity.
Only an EVA in freefall—conducted without the benefit of a helmet—could have made Archer feel even half as uncomfortable as he did right now. Doing what he could to put aside his own grief and pain, he stepped up to the makeshift podium that Malcolm had set up for the occasion, and cleared his throat. He squared his shoulders, gazed out across the crowded, grief-suffused room, and stepped off the edge of the verbal abyss.
“Nearly three centuries ago,” Archer began, “on a battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on which the guns of war had only very recently fallen silent, a national leader named Abraham Lincoln addressed the survivors of a great conflict. His words not only helped to salve the grief that follows all military bloodshed, but also focused a young nation on the bright future that still lay ahead of it.
“As Lincoln noted on that grave occasion: ‘It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain…’ ”
Archer remembered very little of what he said after that, but did note that the assembled group—“squids” and “sharks” alike—seemed to have absorbed his words with respectful solemnity.
After he had finished speaking, a Starfleet honor guard—Donna O’Neill, Malcolm Reed, and Travis Mayweather, all spit and polish in their dress blues—approached the torpedo tube and stood at attention beside it. They watched with somber faces as one member of the MACO honor guard—Corporal McKenzie—reverently removed his service’s banner from the staff. While McKenzie held the staff as though it were a sacred relic, the other three MACOs proceeded to fold the flag with crisp, rehearsed precision. Corporal Chang stepped forward