Peter Flynn
pulled out the bottle of Antares Whiskey and a couple of shot glasses from his
private stash and headed out of his cabin. He joined Lt. Kimball in the common
area of the ship. She already had a bottle of Ember Spirits on the table
cracked open. The spicy spirits already started to perfume the room. No doubt
the bottle had already warmed itself up.
She filled
the two glasses. Together, they raised them.
“To the
Corinth colony. Never forgotten, always mourned,” Flynn said.
“Five
thousand souls passed on to the Celestials too soon,” she agreed.
They
clinked glasses and drank their shots. The spirits went down Flynn’s throat,
immediately warming him, but not due to the alcohol alone. The unique liquor
was exothermic on contact with oxygen, warming to the temperature of a cup of
coffee almost too hot to drink.
Eltie went
first. “I remember I was stationed on the Miranda when we entered the
system. We emerged from jump only to see the coronal ejection half way to the
station already. But we were already too late. The flare had already swallowed
up the station.”
They poured
and drank again.
Flynn
cleared his throat and coughed. Normally Eltie would give him a hard time about
how sailors couldn’t hold their liquor compared to marines, but not today.
“I was a
month on the Indus as her second officer. When we went to patrol Archon Bay. It
We dropped out of jump into the system to see the detonation on the star and
the formation of the plume. Our sublights outdistanced it, but Archon Bay had eighteen
thousand people on the planet. The math was perfect. The planet’s revolution
and rotation would expose the domes to the ejected plasma. We tried to
coordinate evacuation, but ten thousand people didn’t have a way off the planet,
and the domes shattered.”
They drank.
They told
the other stories, these related to us by others who had been there. The
simultaneous attacks of Decimation Day by the Imperium had cost the Alliance
over one million casualties. All civilian.
Though the
war was over, the memories remained, as they needed to. Flynn and Eltie drank
until they finished the warm spirits and went to work on his whiskey until they
had finished all of the targets during that horrible campaign.