The Road to Hell

Chapter 8

There was a memorial service for Admiral Hawke and the others lost during the First Contact skirmish. David, Tanner, and the rest of the able-bodied Errant Hawks stood at attention on a serene summer day on the League's memorial gravemoon: Ascension, wearing grey dress uniforms, surrounded by a seemingly endless sea of rolling green hills and white gravestones, listening as a long succession of friends and family members spoke about the people they loved and lost.

Afterwards, they had a moment of silence while a philharmonic orchestra performed "Ode to The Magnificent Unknown," a desolate descant that originally expressed the composer's deep feeling of loss after fighting in the Great Solar War that sowed the seeds of both the Hegemony and the Human Defence League, the two great powers that formed the Alliance. The Ode was played at every military memorial, as well as every Armistice Day to remind everyone of the high price of freedom.

The Ode washed over David and the rest of the attendees. For two minutes they were lifted from their bodies, cast out into the cold unforgiving reaches of space, and left to wander without purpose or guidance. It started out chaotic, discordant, forcing them to struggle against the inescapable force drawing them unto death. Out in the void, there was no comfort to be had in anything. All one could do was let any stress, emotion, or thoughts drift away and join the billions of souls already wandering the infinite nothingness. The brass rose up only to crash back down to symbolize the unending respiration of the universe. They confronted the unknown and realized that it was not to be feared, it was to be eagerly explored. When the last shrill harmony faded to silence, there was a haunting peace in the graveyard that stretched into the horizon on every side.

After the service, the crew of Hawk's Nest were given a short shore leave before their redeployment. It had been a while since David called home, and an even longer time since he'd been there. So he decided he made the long journey back to Earth to surprise his family with a visit. Tanner was going the same way, and Armin had never been to Earth, so David told them both they could come stay with him.

The trio approached the surface in a private shuttle and landed on the private airfield of the Toronto shuttleport. Waiting for them right outside of the ship, was a gleaming limousine with a white-gloved driver holding the door open for them. They climbed in and flew to the Stern Estate.

David's family built their home on one of Toronto's exclusive cloud suburbs. The neighbourhoods levitated on massive platforms supported by a combination of gravitomagnetics and high-tensile reinforced gas-filled balloons. In the event of power failure, those balloons would provide enough force to allow the platform to land gently on Lake Ontario below. It would've been hard to find a more expensive slice of real estate, but David's mother had dreamed of owning her own cloud estate since she was a child. As she'd told David when they bought the place, it was more than just a building and some land, more than a home even; it was the start of a legacy.

The limousine touched down in front of the main gate, and the men made the rest of the journey on foot. The path to the house took them through a surreal garden, Kathryn Stern's pride and joy. Her approach to decoration was rooted firmly in the tradition of rococo, so visitors to the home were dazzled by garish iridescent flowers arranged in spirals, sparkling gravity-defying fountains, and exotic trees that could only grow thanks to a sophisticated outdoor climate control system. The garden's paths wound lazily through a number of granite statues depicting various warships and famous heroes: the only decorative input from David's father.

The path led up a gentle incline to the Stern's manor house. The glass pyramid shone brilliantly in the sun, with hanging vegetation and plenty of windows and balconies. The peak glittered in the evening sun like a beacon to opulence and power. David always thought it was a little much. The people who lived on the platforms were aloof and disconnected from the rest of the city. In their old condo they were in the middle of everything, now they floated above it.