Kind thanks on this one to my pals SpockLikesCats and SpockSide. Meant to post on Memorial Day but life got in the way.


12. Poppy

On Orion, honour is defended with a blade. Across the planet wars are waged; tiny, tight knots of people skirmish for pathetic little reasons and Gaila is glad to be away. Family feuds last for generations, until the original spark that lit the straw of animosity is forgotten. But still they quarrel, but still they argue, but still they are exhausted.

Orions loathe a quiet existence. If drama is not there, it must be manufactured. What is life without adrenaline? Gaila's answer would be peaceful, and that answer pushed her into Starfleet. No more the comm-calls to her mother who sharpened her blade and tongue while picking at every remark in order to find an opportunity to use both. No doubt, Gaila loves a blade, but for the craft, the metalwork, the edge and the elegance. Nobody crafts things any more, but on Orion they do, and they are well-forged.

A planet of warriors, of course, is impossible. Someone has to collect body parts and ferry the injured.

Someone has to dig the graves.

Always there's been that someone, in Gaila's case an uncle so traumatised he never spoke of it again. A person on the periphery of written history, but in reality at its centre, armed only with a basic med kit, and a shovel. A boy of nineteen turned to a man in the space of one day. Turned to a man who loved his fellow man so much he made it his life's work to understand them; always question, always love, always care.

But he's dust now. With arms folded in superiority her mother relayed his death, for to be a thinker was to be a wastrel and a coward. No matter he was her own brother, he shamed the family.


There's a flitter in the shop; Gaila just fixed it. On the pretext of a test drive she takes it to Treasure Island, a fitting place to remember a man who was born, and died, at the salt-lick of the sea. She's read Earth's history, their warring, and knows this human ritual is correct.

At the ocean's swell she takes a bloom from a shining, hard stasis tube and throws it into the offshore wind. For a moment the flower rides blowsy and bright on a white, foaming crest.

Gaila stands at attention, head forward, until the poppy's papery petals are dragged down.


.

Here dead we lie because we did not choose,
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

Life, to be sure is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.

Alfred Edward Housman