► “Marines! Left face!” the gunny bellowed as the ranks swiveled. “Forward MARCH!”

Eric stayed quietly out of sight as the Marines marched off the flight deck, having finished their own ceremony of respect for those lost on Mars. He wished he’d been on deck with them, but the captain had to be in command when nuclear weapons were to be authorized, and nothing less would have been visible over the horizon of the now-dead planet.

When the ranks were far enough away that his arrival wouldn’t throw a monkey wrench into their motions, Eric stepped out onto the deck and walked across to where the colonel in charge of the Odysseus’ Marines stood looking out over the receding curve of Mars.

“Colonel,” Eric said, announcing himself. “Good ceremony?”

“Define ‘good,’ Captain,” Deirdre Conner said, her tone a little flat.

The raw wounds of the invasion hadn’t yet begun to heal for most, and Mars was and probably would remain a symbol of that pain. Eric wouldn’t have had to read her file to know that the colonel had lost someone, possibly multiple someones.

“Did my Marines acquit themselves properly?” he asked.

Deirdre smiled crookedly. “Your Marines, Captain?”

“On this ship, you are all my Marines, Colonel.”

“Your Marines performed perfectly, Captain.”

“Then it was a good ceremony, Colonel.”

He glanced over at the stocky woman in the Marine dress blue uniform. Deirdre Conner was a redhead with clear Irish roots, but somewhere along the line had picked up genes for a darker skin tone than was normally associated with Celtic blood. She’d enlisted late in the war before the Confederation Accords had been signed, crossing the border from Canada to sign up with the Corps.

That had happened frequently in those days. Canadian forces had taken a lot of hits when they’d moved to support Australian and British military in the South Pacific. Later in the war, they were willing but lacked any significant weight of metal to put men in the field.

The same dynamic happened in the south too. Mexicans, Panamanians, and various other nationalities all walked into Marine recruiting offices in such a steady stream that the phenomenon was used as evidence in support of the Confederate Charter. By the end of the war, Marines were by far the single largest service in the Confederation, and the most diverse.

“It’s been a while, Deirdre,” Eric said finally into the silence. “I was surprised to see your name on the candidate list.”

“Oh?” She glanced archly at him. “Really now?”

Eric put up his hands in mock defense. “Claws in, hellcat. I just didn’t expect that you’d put in for space duty. Last I heard, you were on the short list to take command at Parris Island. Never expected you to pass on that.”