“I've spent my life steering this ship,” Robert would say sometimes, in an angry, almost accusatory sort of way. “Don't you tell me how to count beans, sonny. Your rank at this point is an absurd formality.”
Of course he said nice things, too, like, “You're a fine young man, Conrad. I always thought so. Follow your passions, and this long, long life of yours will ease by like a pleasant dream.”
Farther down on the decade fever scale, Brenda and Peter and Bertram and Money had racked up a couple of decades each, and didn't often let you forget it. Even Xmary was puffing herself up a bit, and Conrad, who lagged her by a good eight years, supposed that he himself was not immune. When the ordinary colonists came out of storage, what would they make of Newhope's crew? And of their child-king, yeah, who in their subjective time frame had only just been elected a few weeks before?
Well, maybe the move to larger environments—orbital colonies and finally domes on the planet herself—would do them all some good. After all, no one here was an expert in colonizing a new star. In this most crucial of senses, they would all be on equal footing. Not solid, but definitely equal.
But the problems were already starting as Conrad pulled out a few teams of people who, in their studies, had specialized in astronomy and geology, or matter programming and zero-gee construction. Where possible, he introduced them to the ship no more than five at a time, and for no more than seven days at a stretch. But still it amazed him how quickly they grew bored and frustrated, claustrophobic at the confines of Newhope, and cranky—very cranky—at being told what to do. On more than one occasion bitter arguments erupted, and Conrad had to remind himself that these children, many of them, were only a few years removed from their days of revolution, and weeks at best from the Queendom's training and reeducation camps.
So he gave them every possible benefit of the doubt. Until, inevitably, the first of the Barnard freakups occurred.
What happened was that a fight sprang up between two of the newcomers. One girl was from the uprising in Calcutta, and the other from the sole revolutionary action on the surface of Mars, popularly known as the Chryse Feint. They started arguing about who knows what, and it came not only to blows, but to the Indian girl dragging the taller, thinner Martian to a maintenance airlock leading down to the unpressurized storage levels where the mass buffers and other equipment lived. There were security alerts all up and down the ship as the one girl—or woman, Conrad supposed—dragged the other down fourteen levels, past a dozen onlookers, most of whom tried to intercede in one way or another.
There wasn't much to the Indian woman, who weighed no more than Conrad had at age fifteen, nor was there any real power behind her jabs and thrusts. But she knew exactly where to hit—the inner curve of an elbow or knee, the base of the nose, the soft tissue of the ear.
When Conrad got there she was actually working the controls of the airlock, speaking voice commands and thumbing authentication circles, even rotating the locking wheel on the inner hatch itself. If she did not intend to murder the taller girl, she certainly made every effort to appear as if she did. Fortunately, it was no trivial matter to open the lock, especially with the white heat of rage slowing her down.
Conrad arrived at the same time as Ho and two of his heavies: Steve Grush and Andres Murillo.
“What's going on here?” Conrad and Ho asked at the same time.
“Help!” cried the Martian girl, whose name Conrad could not for the life of him remember. She was not technically a member of the crew, so her uniform bore no insignia, and looked like what it was: a prison coverall. The Indian girl—Geetha something—wore a shorter, broader version of the same garment, and looked no better in it.
“This shitnick Earther is trying to kill me!”
“It certainly looks that way,” Conrad agreed, though Geetha had stopped with the controls and was simply restraining the other girl.
“I was just scaring her,” she said flatly.
“Sure you were,” Ho chortled.
“Let go of her,” Conrad said, “and tell me what happened. Why are you doing this?”
“She was careless. She nearly burned my hand. She nearly burned it right off, and somebody has to show this Martian bitch some damn manners. You understand? Some damn, some goddamn manners.”
“I was nowhere near you! We weren't working together, and there is no way that telescope mirror would have burned you. The sunlight is too weak, you stupid twat! I could focus it right in your fucking retina for twenty fucking minutes, and you'd still be fine.”
Geetha let the other girl go, but promptly brandished a fist at Conrad. “You think you control me? You think you tell me what to do?”
“The chain of command thinks so, yes,” Conrad said. “And our lives depend on it. We can't have this kind of behavior going on. If you have a grievance, bring it to me. That's my job. If you feel you're in immediate danger, talk to Ho here, or just shout ‘Security!' at the nearest bulkhead. They'll break up your disputes, one way or another.”
“I fought people like you,” Geetha said through clenched teeth. “I fought to get people like you off my back. Out of my face, out of my fucking life. But here you are, like a big fat bag of pus. Chain of command my bleeding twat, fucker.”
There was a time, Conrad realized, when he and his brothers and sisters in arms had used such language, and worse. But perhaps he had matured, or the youthful fires within him had cooled, because he found it shocking now, and offensive, and flatly unnecessary. He resisted the urge to tell Geetha to watch her mouth. At this point, that would be counterproductive. What he did say was, “Compared to some of the ships we trained on, this one is fairly spacious. Maybe not as big as the habitats you grew up in, but not tiny, either. Still, there is nowhere to escape to.
“You can't even throw on a suit and go outside, because even though the radiation has finally died down, we're under maneuvering thrust half the time as we nudge, frugally, toward our target asteroid. You'd get lost, or slung to the end of your tether, or knocked in the head and burned. And there's no reason to go out anyway, if we use the fax machines wisely and judiciously, and treat each other with some minimum level of respect. I don't see a minimum level of respect here. Do you?”
“She started it,” both girls said.
And the Martian girl, finally free to do so, launched a punch at Geetha's stomach. Geetha launched a blow at the Martian girl's face and for good measure, a wild kick in Conrad's direction as well.
“Oh, I don't think so,” Ho said. And with that, he drew a gas pistol from a holster hidden in his uniform somewhere, aimed it at the two girls, and pulled the trigger twice. It went Pop! Pop!—a vaguely comical sound, except that a round, red hole appeared in the side of each girl's head, and the two of them collapsed to the deck in a tangle of limbs. There was an immediate pooling and spreading of blood.
“What did you do?” Conrad said, dumbfounded. “You shot them. You bastard.”
Ho was matter-of-fact. “Judgment call, sir. One of these girls was clearly irrational, and both were violent and presented a danger not only to themselves and each other but very clearly to you as well. I felt it would be better if they were both dead for a while. The ship has instructions to record all such incidents of violence, so we can show them the whole scene when they wake up, and maybe they'll think twice next time they feel the urge.”