Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Read Free

led.
    Because the country’s capital remained in Kansas City, the entire District of Columbia had become a National Heritage Park. Some of the country’s best museums were already located there, including the Smithsonian, the Air and Space, the Museum of Natural History, and the National Art Gallery, and it was considered inappropriate as well as too expensive to move them all to a new setting. Now the public buildings of the former federal government joined them as tourist attractions.
    The White House had become a history center with exhibits on the country’s foreign wars and invasions, from 1812 to Afghanistan. The Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the East Wing was dedicated to the Cold War and Atomic Era, while the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing celebrated the country’s response to the September 11 attacks.
    The U.S. Capitol building became an art gallery, with traveling and rotating exhibits in the hallways, amateur theatricals staged in the House and Senate chambers, and noontime concerts in the Rotunda—although the acoustics were terrible, with a nine-second reverb delay that had to be compensated with arrays of sound-damping loudspeakers.
    Brandon and every other former U.S. soldier understood that the nation would have only one monument to the Second Civil War—the Oval Pool in Oklahoma City, which serially hologrammed the names and images of the Federated Republic’s dead. But Arlington National Cemetery was still intact and functioning, and a section had been set aside for the men and women who had fought and died on the “wrong side” of the war.
    He had bought a wreath, a simple circle of cypress leaves with a cluster of two white roses for his own 2nd Battalion and three red roses for the 3rd Combined Arms Division of which they were a part. No one else would understand the symbolism—except for the two hundred and eighty-three soldiers resting here, lying among comrades from other units, other battles.
    As Brandon approached that section of the cemetery on foot, he recognized a familiar face. Frieda Hammond was wearing a black business suit and carrying a long white flower, perhaps a lily.
    “Hello, Major,” he said quietly.
    “Colonel. You remembered, too.”
    “Of course.”
    They walked down the row of graves, and he laid his wreath on the first name he recognized: SP4 Corporal John J. Sparto, who had died defending his burning tank on the northern bank of the Ohio River. That had been an awful death. Sparto deserved the wreath.
    “So many of them,” Hammond said, “for such a cocked-up war.” She laid her flower on the next grave, Chief Warrant Officer Eugenia Sparrow.
    “I’m sorry,” Brandon said. “I don’t recall exactly what happened to her.”
    “Helicopter crash,” Hammond replied. “During routine transport.”
    “Oh! Do you remember them all? Each death?” he asked.
    “Of course … it was my job,” she replied simply.
    Another thing there would never be, Brandon realized, was a Tomb of the Unknown. With DNA analysis and better recordkeeping, each soldier could now be accounted for. Rumor during the war had said that the only MIAs were soldiers who actually chose to disappear. Brandon doubted that. War offered too many ways to atomize the human body beyond recovery.
    When they reached the end of the row and had run out of names that even Hammond could recognize or remember, she turned to him, gave a sad smile, and saluted.
    “See you next year, Major?” he asked.
    “Probably not. You say good-bye and move on.”
    “That’s the way of it, I guess.”
    * * *
    When John Praxis got back to the office after his vacation—more like a honeymoon—with Antigone, he learned that his daughter had totally changed around the company’s computer system. The installation was so deep and invasive that they finally had to hire an information technology manager to keep everything together and running properly.
    Her name was Penelope Winston, but