Ten yards. Five. The admiral stopped in front of the front row, just left of the aisle, in front of two folding chairs with laminated cards on them that read RESERVED: CHARDI FAMILY.
Carter looked up at him.
He had stopped wiping his eyes. His right arm had come down into his lap, the forearm turned up, the old ink plain in the sun. Elena had gone absolutely still beside him.
For a moment the admiral didn't speak at all. He stood and looked at the man in the olive shirt, at the grey hair and the heavy shoulders and the wet, lined, sunburned face, and at the arm. At the trident with its eagle's head turned to one side. At the compass rose beneath it, no bigger than a quarter. He looked at that compass rose the way a man looks at a light he's been steering toward for a long time in the dark.
"Commander Carter?" he said.
His voice was not loud. It carried anyway. In the quiet it reached the back row.
Carter didn't answer. He couldn't.
And Reyes brought his heels together and drew himself up to his full height, and raised his right hand to the brim of his cover in a salute so slow and so precise that Lucas, watching from the stage, felt the hair stand up along his arms.
"Sir," the admiral said, and now, for the first time that morning, his voice broke. "They told me you went down with the ship."
Carter stood.
He stood carefully, like a man who has been sitting on a hard chair too long. He looked bewildered, like somebody called by a name he recognizes too well and can't believe he's hearing in the open air. He looked at Reyes's face, and at the hand at the brim of the cover, and he looked down at his own right arm as if he'd never seen it before.
Then, slowly, so slowly it seemed to take a full minute, he raised it. Up from his side. Past the ink, past the compass rose. Up to his brow, the fingers together, the palm down, the elbow at the old angle his body had never forgotten. A civilian's salute, out of uniform, out of date, out of the dark. He held it there, and his hand shook, and he did not lower it.