Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [3]
Leaving Marvick to watch in silence, the old man ascended the three stone steps that fronted the monument, then knelt before the spire, close enough to touch its eternal stone face. He released the duffel bag from across his shoulder, then gently set it down before the granite base.
He studied the flawless duranium-silver plaque that was bolted to the obelisk’s solid rectangular base. He read the inscriptions that commemorated various red-letter days in Starfleet’s annals of warfare, until his eyes stopped on March 22, 2153—a day that was graven indelibly into his memory. But most of the text that followed the date escaped him; his vision had begun to smear and blur behind a sudden onslaught of unshed tears.
“All that death has got to mean something,” he whispered. “It’s got to mean something.”
Marvick’s question haunted him as well. The old man asked himself why, in the eighty-five long years that had passed since the twenty-second of March, 2153—a quiet Thursday when a powerful Xindi test weapon had come to Earth and vaporized seven million people—he had never made the time to come to this place….
One
Tuesday, July 24, 2153,
Xindi Council Inner Sanctum
WHENEVER DEGRA CONSIDERED the end product of the Weapon Project he had spent the last several moonturns supervising, he saw the smiling face of Naara in his mind’s eye. When he pictured his wife, she was always standing with their children, Piral and Jaina, both of whom were frozen in time as youngsters, as if posing for a portrait. Though the children were grown now, Degra believed he would probably always see them that way.
Particularly when he thought of the implacable Terran enemies who would stop at nothing to destroy them and the rest of the Xindi humanoid race, as well as every member of the other four sentient Xindi species, three of which had representatives sitting with him today around the Inner Sanctum’s wide, circular Council table.
One of Shresht’s chitinous, exoskeletal appendages slammed across the black tabletop hard enough to rattle it. “The human vessel continues encroaching upon our territories, undeterred even by the Orassin distortion fields!” the Xindi insectoid shouted in his species’ prevailing language, his mandibles chittering and clicking in near-hysterical fashion. With Shresht in such an exercised emotional state, Degra found that mentally translating the percussive sounds of his mouthparts into intelligible language was an even tougher chore than usual. “And yet we continue to do nothing!”
Is that why the Council has been called back into session so soon after our last meeting? Degra thought. It had been barely four rotations since the last time they had all gathered here, and Degra knew that his science and engineering teams had little real news to report as yet. Everyone else here had to know that as well. Degra wondered how the Weapon Project was ever to reach fruition if the paranoia of the insectoids and the reptilians continually interrupted his work with still more meetings.
“There is little to fear, Shresht,” said Mallora, shaking his head in the direction of the insectoid and his aide, both of whom possessed enormous compound eyes that shone like iridescent rainbows beneath the subdued ceiling lights. “The Earth ship’s destruction within the Orassin distortion fields is all but certain, thanks to the space-time anomalies endemic to the region. Besides, the vessel’s movements still appear to be random and nondirected.”
Although Mallora, a member of Degra’s Xindi primate species, fairly exuded confidence, Degra found himself having difficulty sharing in it entirely; images of Naara and the children once again implored him, quietly arguing in favor of Shresht’s surfeit of caution.
“And we’ve hardly been doing nothing, Shresht,” Degra added. “Work continues on the Weapon, per the agreed-upon schedule. In less than six turnings of the outermoon, it will be deployed. Then Earth will be reduced to rubble, along with the threat it poses to our respective