“I never even thought about it like that,” Lillian said. “What happened to the lights?”
I took the opportunity to lecture them. “Technically speaking, we’re inside a private universe at the moment,” I explained. It wasn’t entirely accurate, but so few people understood the Jump Drive that it was a worthwhile analogy. “There are no stars or other sources of light here, so there’s nothing, but darkness.”
“What about the other ships?” Frank Wong asked. “Why can’t we see them?”
“They’re not in our wormhole,” I said. “We’re all in separate universes of our own.”
They still seemed subdued when I escorted them back to their stateroom, apart from Frank Wong, who caught my arm and pulled me to one side. He didn’t know how lucky he was. The Marines had taught me what to do with someone who caught hold of me with unpleasant intentions. I could have broken his arm quite easily.
“You know that Ensign you had helping us yesterday,” he asked, with a leer. “What would it take to have her sharing my bunk for a night?”
I couldn’t help it. I just stared at him. Ensign Gomez was beautiful, with delicate Hispanic features and a warm smile that seemed to light up the room, but I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. She was on her first cruise as an Ensign — she’d graduated from the class after mine, back at the Academy — and she was hard to think ill of, even though I tried. It was the job of a Lieutenant to toughen up the Ensigns. Had I ever been that young?
“You won’t even think about it,” I hissed, angrily. It was all I could do not to knock his teeth down his throat, but the Captain would have been annoyed. I didn’t want to think about his reaction to this incident. “She’s an officer on this ship and not someone you can hire, understand?”
Frank was either too stupid or too sure of himself to back down quickly. “When I was on the old Panama, the Captain sent two young Ensigns to share my bunk,” he said, his voice hardening. “You will send her to me or…”
“No,” I said, flatly. I believed him — there were Captains who would quite happily do that, even though regulations forbade it — but this wasn’t the Panama. “If you touch her without her permission, I will beat hell out of you, understand?”
He wilted, perhaps finally sensing that I was serious. “I have powerful friends,” he called after me, his voice shaking. “You’ll regret this…”
The hatch cut him off and I stormed away, shaking with rage. How dare he ask me to send him an Ensign for the night? It was quite possible that Ensign Gomez wasn’t as innocent as she looked — she’d grown up in Ciudad Barranquilla, one of the worst cities on Earth — but even so, how dare he treat me as a pimp, or a procurer? I wasn’t going to allow him to bully me like that, even if it cost me my career. I was still raging when I reported to Anna and made a full confession. I had to know where Captain Shalenko stood on such incidents.
“I shouldn’t worry about it,” Anna said, once I’d explained everything. “The Captain will put him through a bulkhead if he tries anything like that on one of his crew.”
“Thanks,” I said, more relieved than I cared to admit. “I just…”
“It won’t be the last time,” Anna warned, slowly. “That kind of people will always treat us in the Peace Force as second-class citizens. We’re the ones who were foolish enough to sign our lives away, after all.”
I nodded slowly. The Peace Force recruiting office claimed that most recruits enjoyed a high standard of living, and excellent job prospects after retirement, but they were lying, of course. The Academy had been hard enough and the starships had been primitive for the newly-minted Ensigns; I dreaded to think what life on some of the research colonies or military bases was like. Afterwards… well, it wasn’t uncommon to set veterans on the streets, begging for money. A handful had even been burned to death by the gangs.
“But if it happens again, report it at once,” she added. “I’d better have a few words with the Ensigns as well. We can’t forbid the bastards from chatting up the Ensigns, but we can promise them that if they do get… taken against their wills, they will be supported. The Captain won’t take that lightly.”
“Thank you,” I said, again. “You’ve put my mind at rest.”
“Mine isn’t,” Anna said, with a grin. “You’re on watch in thirty minutes. Go grab a cup of tea or coffee from the mess before you go on watch, or the Captain will throw you off the bridge for being distracted.”
I nodded and left her cabin.
The days wore on slowly, falling into a routine. I stood my watches — with the Captain or Anna watching me, at first — and learned more about the Devastator and her capabilities. Captain Shalenko insisted that we all be trained in operating every console on both the bridge and the Combat Information Centre — the Devastator had both, as did the Kofi Annan — just in case one of the regular officers was wounded. I hadn’t realised just how capable the Devastator actually was until I worked through the tactical simulations. We could strike and blow up an infantry unit on the surface below and never cause any collateral damage. We could dominate an entire planet from orbit. I began to understand, in a way, why the Admiral was so confident. He had weapons that no insurgents could hope to match.
And yet, I wondered in the dead of night, if that were the case, why was Terra Nova still a running sore?
“Because the weapons are only useful if they find a target,” Kitty explained, one night. We had taken to spending most of our off-duty time together, mainly playing chess or watching videos. One of the videos on the computer had been a documentary entitled The Liberation of Heinlein, which had apparently been produced before the fleet had departed to invade the target world. It seemed to be nothing, but poorly-cobbled together propaganda, without any mention of either violence or political upheaval. “How do you sort out an insurgent from a loyal citizen?”
I blinked at her, almost missing her attempt to fork my king and queen. “That’s against the Laws of War,” I protested, horrified. I’d only seen a pirate ship before…and then I remembered the ambush on Terra Nova. I hadn’t really had a chance to take in the details, but had they been wearing uniforms. “They can’t do that, can they?”
Kitty snorted. “I do wonder what he saw in you,” she said, dryly. “If a Law of War only benefits one side, why should the other one follow it?”
I nodded in reluctant understanding. “And so they hide among the people?”
“More or less,” Kitty agreed. “I bet you dinner somewhere expensive, perhaps on our next shore leave, that we’ll take the high orbitals all right, and then find ourselves trapped in a long insurgency, again. The Captain won’t permit random bombardment of the planet and even if he did, it wouldn’t solve the problem. We might never break the planet entirely.”
“No bet,” I said, without hesitation. Kitty was almost certainly right. “I don’t understand, then. Why was the Admiral so confident of victory?”
Kitty smiled. “How many Infantrymen are there in the troop transports?”
“Two hundred thousand,” I said, automatically. The troop transports were among the largest ships in the fleet, converted colonist-carriers. The UN preached that Earth’s population problem would be solved by exporting the population to the colonies, but even I knew that the logistics would never work. We might be able to export maybe two million a year, perhaps more if we really worked at it, but in that time the population would grow again. “I don’t understand…”