The Senior Chief snorted. “Do you think that that makes any difference?”
His voice softened. “You don’t know how lucky you are to be onboard this ship,” he explained. “There are far worse ships, commanded by UN zealots, who can get away with anything. This ship is the best ship in the fleet and don’t you forget it. The Captain won’t hold you responsible for your little fuck-up. You were only following orders.”
I felt my temper flare. “Why was he so angry with me, then?”
“Because the Captain might have known what was going on and chose to turn a blind eye,” the Senior Chief explained. “The System Command sent him the intercept request first and he turned it down on a point of order. They then sent it to you and made you carry out the interception. You didn’t know it, but they were placing you in a really bad position. Luckily…the refugees didn’t open fire.”
He smiled thinly. “Tell me something,” he added. “Do you think that two hundred, or two thousand, or even two hundred thousand people would make any difference to Earth?”
“No,” I said, remembering irregular power supplies and the tainted, odd-tasting water, that we’d been forced to drink. Entire districts had been blacked out for weeks on end. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“No, you didn’t,” the Senior Chief said. He hesitated. “The Captain knew it as well, hence his willingness to let them go. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I think you need to know. You were damned whatever happened, but you’re going to get a commendation and probably a promotion to Lieutenant when we return to Earth. You’re a hero! You stopped the colonies from hoarding some of their knowledge capital instead of sharing it out equally.”
“I don’t feel like a hero,” I said, numbly. “I feel like a bastard.”
“So you should,” the Senior Chief said. “Did you ever think to wonder why the Captain was given you Ensigns specifically?”
“Us?” I asked. “I just thought we’d been assigned to the ship as normal.”
“Normally, one to three Academy graduates would join a pair of Ensigns who had already served on the ship and had seniority,” the Senior Chief said. “The Captain was given seven totally green Ensigns because his enemies wanted to embarrass him and perhaps cost him his command. You see, the Captain obtained his post through political connections and then let the side down a bit by actually being good at his job. There are ships where the Captain is a frightened man, scared of his own crew, and ships that are run by tyrants. On this ship…raw Ensigns become men.”
He looked down at his hands for a moment. “There’s a power struggle going on back home,” he said. “One side wants to try to come to terms with the colonies and reform the system from within. The other side wants to fight it out till the bitter end. The Captain was supposed to be a member of the latter faction, but effectively changed his allegiance. They can’t get rid of him without looking like idiots, but they’ll be watching and waiting for a chance to stick a knife in his back. There are times when I wonder if he’s going to go rogue, but he’s got too much of a sense of duty to accept that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, helplessly. “I didn’t know.”
“No, you didn’t,” the Senior Chief said. There was no condemnation in his voice. “You couldn’t know what they were doing, or why. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I’ll refuse the promotion,” I said, suddenly. “I’ll stay here and…”
“No, you won’t,” the Senior Chief said. “You’ll accept the promotion and the probable transfer. This ship has a full complement of Lieutenants, so you’ll end up being transferred, and you’ll go there and remember what I told you. It’ll serve you well in later life.”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s the point?”
“Earth is on the end of a very long supply line,” the Senior Chief said. “It cannot feed itself for very long. When the system finally falls apart, we’ll still be here. The galaxy needs us.”
“As what?” I demanded. I was too angry to care any longer. “Kidnappers and thieves?”
The Senior Chief smiled. “Maybe more than that,” he said. “There are worlds out there that are far less peaceful than Terra Nova, and worlds that would cheerfully attack their neighbours if they were given half a chance. There are groups on Earth that would commit genocide if we allowed them to try. The Peace Force can’t keep a peace that doesn’t exist, but we can try and stop it from getting out of hand. If not…”
His eyes met mine for a long moment. “It’s quite possible to wipe out the entire population on a planet, you know,” he said, slowly. “We might be all that stands between the human race and destruction.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, without thinking. He shrugged and let it past, even though I suspected he saw it as something of an insult. “What about…”
I broke off, and then took the plunge. “What is really going on back on Terra Nova?”
The Senior Chief shrugged. “Back when the Jump Drive was first invented, no one knew how many worlds there were out there waiting to be claimed, so when Terra Nova was discovered, everyone wanted in. There were hundreds of nations or factions who wanted to set up their own colony world. The UN ended up arbitrating between the factions and used it as a chance to push forward their own position. To cut a long story short, they moved out tens of thousands in the first year, with berths shared out on an equal basis.
“The sociologists believed that a new culture would form in the melting pot,” he continued. “They might have been right if there had been pressure to make people melt together, but they also forbade the use of such pressure. It wasn’t such a problem in the first few years, but when the hard work of making the planet liveable was completed, everyone looked at each other and realised how different they were. It didn’t help that hundreds of other planets had been discovered and claimed by different nations, which meant that Terra Nova was suddenly a backwater. There were even people starting to leave. To add to the chaos, the UN decided that prisoners should be exiled to Terra Nova and dumped among the general population. They included thousands of rebels and radicals…
“To cut a long story short, civil unrest began quickly and mutated into civil war,” he concluded. “The UN decided to put a stop to this and moved in a few companies of infantry. On a ship, that’s enough manpower to subdue a battleship’s crew easily. On a planet, it’s tiny. The peacekeepers rapidly found themselves under attack by the rebels, or insurgents, or whatever you want to call them and ended up trying to defend themselves instead of keeping the peace. Reinforcements were poured in, but the UN desperately needed a political victory, so there was no attempt to crush the enemy decisively. It didn’t help that the diplomats kept getting their wires crossed so that different factions in the UN would back different factions on the planet.”
He sighed. “And it all went downhill from there,” he said. “Do you think that the forces you saw on the planet can put the genie of ethnic conflict back in the bottle?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t seen much of the infantry down on the surface, but there had been an undeniable…sloppiness to their arrangements. “Probably not, no,” the Senior Chief agreed. “The UN breaks things and when it does, it’s our task to keep the peace, somehow.”
He grinned at me. “You’re one day older, kid,” he said. “Welcome to the real world.”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d been taught all my life that ethnic groups could get along fine, but I’d seen plenty to suggest otherwise, even though there had been no way to express it. Back home, whites and blacks, Chinese and Native American and others had all gone around in their own groups. The religious sects had kept themselves separate from us non-believers, or fought us whenever they saw a chance. The schools had told us that racism had been eradicated, but it had been alive and well on the city streets.