Yes, he could feel sorry for him even if he was the enemy, and that realization Jukaga found to be almost troubling.

"All engines stop."

"All engines stop, sir. Hard dock to station secured"

Docking a ship the size of an escort carrier was always a bit of a tricky job, and with the maneuver finished Jason sat back in his chair and took a sip of coffee.

He looked around at his bridge crew who stood silent. The speeches had already been made earlier when the rest of the crew, except for the few hands necessary for this final run out from Earth orbit, had transferred off.

There was simply nothing more to be said.

"Secure reactor to cold shut down," he said softly.

He paused for a moment.

"I guess that's it."

The crew was unable to reply.

"Dock yard officer coming aboard," a petty officer announced and Jason nodded.

A minute later he heard the footsteps in the corridor and tried to force a smile. A lone officer came on to the bridge, faced Jason, and saluted.

"Lieutenant Commander Westerlin, commander fleet yard five, requesting permission to come aboard, sir."

He tried to be formal in reply but his voice still caught slightly.

"Permission granted," and returned the salute.

The officer pulled out a small piece of paper and unfolded it.

"By order of C-in-C ConFleet, to Captain Jason Bondarevsky, CVE Tarawa," the officer began, and Jason could see he had been through the ritual so many times that he barely needed to read the orders.

"As of the this date, CVE 8 Confederation Fleet Ship Tarawa is hereby officially stricken from active list and placed in inactive reserve. Unless otherwise noted in attached form below, all officers and crew are hereby discharged from active fleet service upon completion of all proper discharge procedures and placed on inactive reserves. Signed C-in-C ConFleet."

The officer folded the paper and hesitated for a moment.

"Sir, its a bit out of form but I also received a note from the Commander of Third Fleet, Admiral Banbridge, which he asked me to read."

Jason nodded, and the officer unfolded the piece of paper.

"Never in the annals of the fleet has so much been accomplished by a ship such as yours. I am proud to have served with all of you. The name Tarawa will not be forgotten, God bless you all."

The officer handed the paper to Jason, who smiled.

"Sir, for what's it's worth I hate this job," the officer said quietly. "A lot of the other ships I don t really care about, but your ship, sir," and he hesitated. "Sir, I'm sorry I have to take over this old girl. She's a proud ship."

"So am I," Jason sighed "Just take good care of her."

"We'll do our best."

He turned and looked back at his crew.

"Time you folks shipped off. I'll be along shortly."

One by one they filed off the bridge, Jason standing by the door and shaking the hand of each until finally he was alone except for Westerlin.

"I'll leave you alone if you want, sir," the officer said, as if he were a mortician withdrawing from the side of a grieving widower, and he silently stepped off the bridge.

Jason walked around the bridge one last time. It had been his bridge for really only a very short time. After the raid on Kilrah the ship had been laid up for a year. It would in fact have been far cheaper to simply scrap her and build a new one from scratch, but public opinion was dead set against it. During that year he'd been stuck Earthside, assigned to the fleet war college for advanced training, finishing up with a brief stint at the Academy to run their latest holo combat simulator training program. But the ship had sailed at last, only to serve in one final brief action before the armistice. Yet, it was his ship, it was in fact, since Kilrah, the only thing he really loved.

He could have stayed longer, but then farewells should never be drawn out. Leaving the bridge without a backward glance he went into his cabin and hoisted the duffel bag off his bed. The room looked sterile now, just another standard ship's room, painted the usual light green, with one closet, a bed, a desk, and a computer terminal and holo projection box. The few pictures on his desk, his brother and himself taken before Joshua had gone off to the Marines, and died on Khorsan, a faded two dimensional image of his mother and father taken on the day they were married, and a shot of Svetlana that one of her friends in the Marines had sent along after her death — they were in his duffel.

He closed the door behind him and walked down the now dimmed corridors. He passed the flight ready room and had a flash memory of his first day aboard, chewing out his new pilots, and passed on into the hangar deck. The Rapiers, Ferrets, and Sabres lined the deck and it felt strange to hear the silence. No engines humming, no shouted commands blaring over the loudspeakers, the hissing roar of the catapult or the thunderclap of engines kicking in afterburners on a hot launch. It was a silence that was as complete and deeply disturbing as if he were walking through a tomb.

He turned to face the bulkhead and the roll of honor listing all those who had died while serving aboard the ship. Coming to attention he saluted the honor roll and then noticed that the commissioning flag which should be to the right of the honor roll was missing. He felt a flicker of anger over that, wondering who had taken it down, and turning started for the airlock door which was secured to the shipyard docking station. Turning the corner, he saw a small line of men and women waiting for him: Doomsday, Sparks (his head of fighter maintenance), Kevin Tolwyn, and last of all Ian Hunter looking strange indeed dressed in civilian mufti, having been already retired from the fleet the day before. The group came to attention, saluted, and Kevin stepped forward to hand Jason a folded flag, the commissioning pennant of Tarawa.

"Thought you'd want this, sir," Kevin said with a grin. "Someday you might want to hang it back up again."

"Thanks, Kevin."

To one side he saw a group of technicians, the mothballing crew, who would finish the shut down of the ship for cold storage. Though the government had agreed to the armistice and with it an immediate cut back of fifty percent of the active fleet, at least they were not taking the ships out and simply cutting them up as the Kilrathi had first suggested; the military had managed to stop that mad idea. It had become a major fly in the ointment in the four weeks since the armistice, with the Kilrathi threatening to pull out of the peace talks but so far the civilian government had not budged, though Jamison was screaming for even deeper cutbacks. The inactive fleet was therefore, at least for the moment, secured, the ships hooked to orbital bases for power and maintenance. Rodham, however, had agreed to the ship's crews being paid off and assigned to inactive reserves as a cost cutting measure, a fact which meant that hundreds of thousands of highly trained personnel were being pulled from their ships and demobilized as quickly as ships were pulled from the front and sent to the main bases either above Earth, Sirius, or out at Carnovean Station.

He turned to face back down the corridor and bowed his head for a moment.

"Good-bye, my friends," he whispered, remembering all those who in a way would be forever young, and forever bound to his ship. Fighting back the tears he turned without another word and went through the airlock, his friends following in silence.

"Rear Admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn, approach the court."

Walking stiffly, Geoff came up before the court martial officers and saluted.

Admiral Banbridge, as the presiding officer, stood up, his hands shaking as he unfolded a single sheet of paper.