“Oh, look at that,” I laughed suddenly. “She’s left me the horsewhip!”
Sally giggled, despite herself. Lieutenant Hatchet had decorated her cabin with a horsewhip she’d picked up from somewhere and she’d occasionally threatened to use it on us for a particularly disastrous failure, back when we’d been new and untrained Ensigns. No one had called her bluff and, as far as I knew, no one had ever been whipped. The Political Officer Sally had encountered sounded like an excellent choice for the first target.
“I think its her way of warning you not to fuck up her position,” Sally said. “Or perhaps its her way of telling you that she’ll be back. Take care of it, all right?”
I nodded. “I wouldn’t dare not take care of it,” I said. “She’d kill me.”
Sally finally left me to my cabin and I started to unpack my bags. I’d been impressed by the size of the cabin, but even so, my small number of possessions just seemed to rattle around in the compartment. Lieutenant Hatchet must have had hundreds of possessions, or — perhaps — she hadn’t been inclined to fill all her drawers. I wished, just for a moment, that she were still onboard. I knew so little about what I had to do. I didn’t even know how to console Sally. Lieutenant Hatchet would have known what to say, of course, but I didn’t. I just felt so helpless.
I spent the first night rattling around in the bunk, wishing that Kitty had transferred with me, even though that would have made her First Lieutenant. The bunk was tiny, compared to the beds in the hotels on Luna City, but I’d been used to sharing with someone else. Now it just felt tiny, and alone. I could still message Kitty — her starship hadn’t jumped out of the system yet — but it wasn’t the same. I entertained the absurd thought of leaving my new ship and going to find her, but… how could I do that? I needed the Jacques Delors for my plans.
The next morning was too long in coming. I breakfasted at the mess — as everyone, but the Captain was supposed to do — and ground my way through foodstuffs that had been reconstituted from waste, instead of having been sent up from Earth or one of the asteroid farms. The cook did the best he could, but it seemed that supplies got worse and worse every year. I didn’t understand what was going wrong with the farming back down on Earth, but it was clearly disastrous if they were starving starship crews. I would almost have preferred to starve. The food tasted like someone had fed it to a cow, which had vomited it up afterwards. There were probably laws against feeding dumb animals such crap.
“The Supply Department is having problems, or so I’m told,” the cook said, when I asked. “They’re warning us that supplies of anything, but Algae-grown foodstuffs might be limited over the next few years. It’s only temporary, or so we are assured.”
“I see,” I said, wondering if I should take it up with the Captain. He might know more about what was going on. “I’ll see what I can scrounge up for you.”
“There’s been a major accident in one of the main food producing areas on Earth,” the Captain said, when I asked him an hour later. We were alone on the bridge. Hardly anyone bothered to keep a proper watch in Earth orbit, even Captain Harriman. There was no point. Earth’s defences would provide plenty of warning if the system came under attack and the level of firepower surrounding the planet was utterly intimidating. I doubted that anyone would dare to launch an attack. “The UN Food Commission has had to reduce quotas for the year.”
I shuddered. I knew little about food producing systems — the farms and the vats where meat substitutes were grown — but if the UN had lost a major source of food, the entire population would have to tighten their belts, and probably starve anyway. The UN needed to feed us to keep us alive and working for them. What would they do with the population down on Earth? They might not bother to try to feed them at all?
They’d probably try to extort food from the colonies as well, but it would only be a drop in the ocean. Even if they assigned every jump-capable ship in existence to the task, they could only bring in a few million tons of food at most, barely a drop in the ocean compared to the requirement. It might also be disastrous. Some of the food we’d sourced from Heinlein had been contaminated in several different interesting ways. Food poisoning was not a pleasant way to go.
“Still,” the Captain said, “we can survive on what we get. Now…”
We went through an entire watch period, calling up simulations and responding to them. I don’t know if I impressed the Captain or not, but he wouldn’t have hesitated to chew me out if there had been a real problem. Eventually, he called up a set of tactical simulations and told me to keep practicing until told otherwise. I had manned tactical stations before, but this was different. The person commanding the ship had to keep everything in mind. I might not have had to fire the weapons personally, but I had to juggle our course, speed, interdiction field capabilities and weapons. There were some tactical simulations that simply didn’t have a solution. The more you progressed through the simulation, the worse the computer-generated opponents became…and, eventually, the ship was lost.
“You’re not meant to win,” the Captain said, when I complained. “The simulation is meant to force you to think quickly and survive as long as you can. There are people who turn it into a gambling game, but it’s really meant to push you right to the brink.”
He smiled, thinly. “And, of course, it’s cheaper than testing an entire starship to destruction,” he added. “How else could we find out what you’re made of?”
“There was no such test at the Academy,” I said, puzzled. “Why weren’t they included there?”
“Because the Academy is run by people who believe that failure stunts a child’s development,” the Captain explained, angrily. For a moment, I wondered if the Captain was a member of the Brotherhood. It was quite possible, apart from his family connections. “Instead of being taught how to deal with failure, in an environment where the worst thing that could happen was punishment duty, you were coddled and generally spared from experiences that would have taught you things you needed to know. Discipline was lax, almost non-existent, and accidents were common. Those accidents happened because you were not allowed to fail.”
His eyes darkened. “If you ask anyone what went wrong down on Earth, why we have to kidnap workers from Albion and a dozen other worlds, you’ll get a thousand answers,” he said. “I believe it happened because no one was allowed to fail. No child could be taught how to cope with failure, so they were never challenged or disciplined. It didn’t matter how well, or how badly, you did; you were always feted and rewarded for your accomplishments. You were never pushed to succeed, so you never really did — and you never understood that you were a failure.”
I nodded slowly. I would have liked to disagree with him, but he was right. I had been unprepared for the Academy and I’d been unprepared for life on a starship. It could have been worse — I’d seen children failing Remedial Sewing and Advanced Creative Writing — but even so, I’d been one of the lucky ones. There were people my age who’d never been taught to read, but spent most of their time mouthing slogans and trying to find a job that would pay them enough to buy enough drink to blot out the pain of their lives.
Two hours later, I met the Infantry Company as they boarded the starship. I hadn’t been impressed with the infantrymen I’d seen on Heinlein, but this company looked much neater, carrying their bags in a disciplined manner. They weren’t allowed to carry their weapons onboard ship — safety regulations again — but even so, they looked tough enough to take the ship off us with their bare hands. I wondered, briefly, how the Marines would get along with them. I just hoped there wouldn’t be blood on the bulkheads.