Earth Song: Etude to War by Mark Wandrey

really considering it, she began mentally formulating her letter of resignation.
    “Chosen Groves?”
    Minu looked up to see a man in his sixties standing there, a groundskeeper’s uniform nearly hung from his gaunt frame and he held a rake in one hand. “Dean Groves is fine,” she said with a smile, “or just Minu. Can I help you?”
    He scooped the floppy hat from his head and rung it between his hands in a nervous motion before remembering to don it again to cover his bald head from the deadly rays. “I'm sorry to bother you, ma'am. I've seen you here from time to time and always wanted to talk to you.”
    “You're welcome to talk to me any time you want, I'm just a staff member, like yourself.” She shifted her focus to the man and away from the letter that she had begun composing on her tablet.
    “No, no, no,” he said and shook his head. There was little hair left there, a halo like wisp of curly white, his face lined and tanned from a lifetime working outdoors. But his eyes were a brilliant blue and carried more intelligence than many men she'd met. “Begging your pardon ma'am, but you're not like me. I'm just an old man, but an old man with a family, thanks to your family.”
    “I'm afraid I don't understand,” she said, confused.
    “Thirty-five years ago I worked for the Chosen as a botanist. I wasn't Chosen, but I had skills that they didn't, so I got to go along off world from time to time to help in research for the Tog. On my last mission, we were attacked by an alien species. Most of my team was wiped out. Me and two other civilians hid in a dead city for two weeks, waiting to be found and killed. Then Chriso Alma showed up with a team of scouts and brought us home. He'd been searching for us for the whole time. He risked his life and his team for three civilians.”
    “That was my father,” she agreed, “but not me—”
    “Please, let me finish? After I got home my wife and I finally had a child, we'd been trying for many years without luck. In time that boy had two children, but they were both born with a congenital birth defect; they would be blind their whole lives. Then you sent back the codex from halfway across the galaxy, and they were cured. I cannot tell you the joy of being able to have your grandchildren look at you for the first time.”
    “I was just doing my job,” Minu said quietly, “my duty.”
    “But you did it,” the old man smiled slightly and his eyes glittered. “And I still have friends in the Chosen, so I know it was more than your duty. You went out there because you owed it to a friend.”
    Minu nodded, her eyes tearing up and she looked at the pure undiluted love the man radiated for her.
    “Without the sacrifice of the Chosen, what would we be now?” he asked.
    “Thank you,” was all she could manage, then she thought. “You actually helped me a little.”
    “Then I'm glad I bothered you. Now I have some azaleas to tend to.”
    “Wait, what's your name?”
    “A.J. Richards. I doubt you've ever heard of me.”
    The name tickled at the back of Minu's mind for a moment before it fit. “That son you had after my father rescued you, his name was Alijah Richards, wasn't it?”
    He smiled again, though not as happily this time. With a single nod of his head he pushed his garden cart towards a nearby flowerbed.
    The plants, along with all the others on the quad, were impeccably tended. As the aged botanist shambled away Minu looked back down at her tablet and the letter she'd been writing before he'd gotten her attention. In her mind’s eye was her fireplace mantel at the little cabin she lived in with Aaron. The face of Alijah Richards was one of the more prominent ones that floated in hologram there. He'd died in the opening barrage of the Rasa Vendetta more than a decade ago.
    “Nope,” she said to the cool afternoon and deleted the letter. “I won't give them the satisfaction.” A smile cut her angular face as she shook her head. Politics would have