Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [70]
“So there’s a chance?” Now her voice sounded hopeful, and he didn’t want to be responsible for dashing that hope.
“A chance? Of course there is,” he promised her. “There’s always a chance.” I think.
Riker?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
But the search continues?
Of course it does.
Friends, family, interviewed? All known prior whereabouts examined?
Except Starbase 311, of course.
Of course.
Otherwise, yes. The son, Will Riker, knows nothing. Neither does the woman.
Pulaski? The doctor?
That’s right. She hasn’t heard from him. She’s not happy about it. They were together only a brief while. He seems to have hurt her badly.
No surprise. It’s the kind of man he is. Cold, unfeeling.
It was hard to tell if she was angrier about the fact that he vanished without telling her, or about the fact that she was being asked about him.
She’s a good doctor? This Pulaski?
One of our best.
Then let her live.
Are you sure? He might still have some feelings for her.
Her punishment, for caring about Riker, will come when she learns of his death.
Fitting.
It’s all fitting. That’s the point. It isn’t truly justice if it doesn’t fit the crime.
That’s all I want. Justice.
That’s all any of us want. Justice. And Riker’s head in a box.
Chapter 17
“The land here is as God-forsaken as ever a man has set eyes upon. It is swampe, most of it, with almost no solid erth to walk on. With every step your boots sink deeper into the muck and fill with brackish water. The swampe stinks and is ful of bugs and even gaters which can bite a man before he sees it coming. Fore the last three days and nights I have never been dry but always wet and misirabel. Priv. Rector pulled a leech from my neck, afternoon yesterday, and then found four on his own legs, under his trous., drinking his blood. We are only days from Savanna, they say, where the Navy waits for us. But the days and nights are cold and we are hungry and ready to fight.
“Its a good thing the taste of our victories in Atlanta and since still remain in our mouths, and the cheers of the slaves who follow us from place to place, to drive us on through this because in a long and hard campaign I cant remember the boys ever beeing so unhappy and fed up. We know what we do is importent and Gen. Wm. Sherman, or Uncle Billy as the boys call him, keeps telling us so. I just keep going, try not to complane, and some of the boys have started calling me Old Iron Boots because they say nothing can stop me from taking the next step. Maybe they are right. Anyhow I guess its all a man can do is to keep marching. We havent seen a Johnny Reb to shoot for two days so we just keep pushing threw the swampe trying to keep powder dry and muskets ready.”
Will closed the old book and carefully set it down on his desk. He’d meant to just skim through it, but he found that the stories Thaddius Riker told-despite his rather primitive literary skills-were fascinating. Riker had accompanied Major General William Tecumseh Sherman on his long fight to Atlanta, and at this point in the tale, they had moved on after putting that city to the torch, headed for Savannah and the sea. Will knew enough about military history to realize that Sherman’s assault on Atlanta and then Savannah proved more than successful, that it was a turning point in the war, capturing one of the Confederacy’s most vital supply centers and cutting Southern rail links. Additionally, by leaving detachments behind to maintain his own supply lines all the way back up to Nashville, Sherman had cut off the South’s western states from the capital in Richmond. The move had been bold, brilliant, and extraordinarily effective.
Sherman, it was said, had coined the phrase “War is hell,” and Old Iron Boots Riker’s diary seemed to confirm that assessment. An earlier entry, about a friend of Thaddius’s whose arm had been amputated in a field hospital by a drunken surgeon using a dull,