Commander Carmel lifted her glass. “Well said, sir.”
Sir
’d him even though
Don
Cordillera was a civilian.
“Oh. Well. This
is
unfortunate,” said Aghani, grave.
The delicate Mr. Barron, whose head motions brought to mind a chicken, gave a nervous glance up at the sprinklers in the overhead. His eyes flinched downward. Chin pulled in. Gazed upon his plate with loathing. Asked in great trepidation, “Are we dining in a chemical lab?”
“Oh. Those.” Farragut nodded up at the sprinklers. “Standard equipment. All decks.”
“I’ve never seen that on a Naval vessel,” said Barron, all but calling his host a liar.
“They’re standard on
my
boat. We’re a Hive hunter. Those sprinklers spray neutralizing solution for that brown caustic goo gorgons melt down into when you kill ’em. Oh, hell.” Turned to the Marine orderly, “Tell the galley we might should skip the French onion soup.”
“Captain,” Madame Navarro cut in on another tack. “Forgive me if I’m wrong or if I give offense for suggesting such a thing, but I’ve been given the impression that you, how should I say, that you
like
fighting?” And she shrank away from her question as if she had offended herself.
John Farragut bit back the first answer that sprang to mind—probably a cheerful, “Are you nuts?” He said instead, soberly, “Not a good quality in a battleship commander, you don’t think?”
“No!” she cried. The emphatic snap of her head set her earrings to swinging madly. “A man with that much destructive power at his command should have the utmost loathing for violence. The
utmost.
”
“Then we differ.”
“Oh,
dear,
” Madame mumbled with the utmost dread and disapproval. The utmost.
“It’s the American way,” the American representative of the LEN commented with heavy irony, an apology for his barbarous kind.
“War does have a purpose,” Augustus proposed, his first offering.
“You mean other than expanding the Roman Empire?” Steele asked Augustus.
Someone had thought to space the entire length of the table between the Marine commander and the Roman intelligence officer when making up this seating chart. It didn’t stop the cold salvos from soaring end to end.
“Keeps you employed,” Augustus returned.
“Colonel Augustus, I beg you to explain.” Ambassador Aghani sat forward, clearly troubled. “I find war senseless. Anathema. The final resort of brute impulse. You see some purpose in it?”
“War trained humankind to survive out here,” said Augustus. “For centuries
we
were the only formidable enemy
we
had. There was, for a long time, an assumption among us that any race who could reach the stars would need to overcome internal conflict first. Fallacy, of course. Humankind reached the stars very nicely, still fighting one another. Aggression persists even as intelligence progresses.”
“It’s a throwback,” Madame Navarro broke in. “Baby teeth to be spat out. A diaper to be washed, folded up, and put away forever.”
Augustus ignored her. “Those millennia of internecine warfare prepared us for truly virulent foes. On first contact with the Hive, the LEN would have walked out to meet them, smiled, shown them your periodic table, and been eaten for your trouble. Aren’t you comforted that there persisted those of us belligerents with guns enough to blow each other to kingdom come, guns which, turned in a single direction, might yet stave off this mindless, soulless terror?”
Madame recoiled. “You
don’t
mean to imply that Earth’s history of horror and bloodshed could be a survival mechanism, the purpose of which was to prepare us to survive a hostile ET contact?”
“I don’t mean to imply any such thing,” Augustus answered. “I’m pretty sure I came flat out and said just that.”
“Oh!” Madame Navarro appealed in the wrong direction, “Captain Farragut! You cannot agree with this hawkish pretext for violence.”
“Well . . .” Farragut demurred.
“No!”
Madame Navarro insisted. “War is absurd!”
“Well, yes, it has its bad moments,” Farragut confessed. “But so does the peace.”
The League of Earth Nations considered Palatine’s conflict with the United States a civil war. Even though the League disapproved of a governmental system that allowed euthanasia, cloning, slavery, and colonization of inhabited worlds, those transgressions had never stopped any nation of the League—other than the U.S.—from recognizing Palatine’s government or from carrying on trade with its expanding empire.
From the moment Palatine declared independence, the Romans and the Americans had been locked in a territorial race. When not at open war, the two nations waged a defensive aggression across a quarter of the galaxy. Their zones of influence expanded like rival pancakes, each trying to bubble through or around the other, while spreading ever wider and wider, planet-stabbing all the way—planting their flags in any solid ground, in every dirtball, from Rim to Hub—the object to hoist the colors, hike the leg, piss on every tree and declare “Mine!” and off they go.
While the rest of the civilized world watched in disgust.
“I don’t know about y’all, but our worst enemies have been good for us,” Farragut told his LEN guests. “After the Romans captured the
Monitor
, right quick we devised all kinds of low-tech and phase-shifting countermeasures to defend
Merrimack
against the Romans. And it’s those same measures that saved our asses in our first contact with the Hive. The Roman ship
Sulla
got eaten. We didn’t, and I have Rome to thank that I had a sword on me the first time a gorgon oozed through my force field, shut down my targeting system, and chewed through my hull. So God bless the Roman emperor.”
The captain had only one taker to that toast.
“You’re not drinking, Commander Carmel?” Aghani noted that
Merrimack
’s XO made no motion toward her wineglass to toast Caesar.
“There is a reason I should?” said Calli. Calli was dressed in formal military whites, but she had done something artistic with all that long shining chestnut hair, and she looked positively imperial at the table, and made the breathy young woman with the plunging neckline next to John Farragut look vulgar.
Captain Farragut intervened, “Mr. Carmel attended the Imperial Military Institute on Palatine. Doesn’t make her a Roman. It’s a good school.”
“It is an excellent school,” Aghani allowed. “The best by some rankings.”
“It was tough,” said Calli.
“The educational system on Palatine is the finest among all the nations and colonies of Earth, bar none,” said Aghani.
“We are not a colony,” said Augustus.
“Palatine began as a colony,” Aghani revised. “I was complimenting your educational system.”
“You were stating fact, Mr. Aghani. Compliments are unnecessary.”
“Colonel Augustus, where did you attend?” Madame Navarro asked solicitously.
“I don’t recall that I did,” said Augustus.
“No school? What? Were you programmed?”
Madame Navarro meant it as a jest, but Augustus answered without humor, “I don’t recall that either.” Offered nothing more.
Another LEN representative, who had had quite enough of his companions’ pandering to Rome, and quite too much to drink, set a fist and forearm on the table and launched into a scold at Augustus, “You don’t seem to realize the catastrophic brain drain planet Earth suffered under the Roman exodus to Palatine. Our world harbored and nurtured you for centuries. You used our societies—controlled many of them. You
used
our best institutions to perpetuate your language—religion, medicine, law, higher education—and not for the good of the masses. Oh no. All for the elite and for yourselves. Then the whole spiderweb of you packed up your scholars and your scientists and your judges and just
left
.”
“Good riddance,” said Lieutenant Colonel Steele. “Take ’em. Better they go to Palatine where I can see ’em, than having a secret society sponging off Earth.”
“Whoa, Mr. Steele,”
Don
Cordillera said with a slight smile. Attempted to drag the talk off in a lighter direction, “I could understand the resentment if you were a doctor, lawyer, or priest, but that’s rather harsh coming from someone who never had to suffer through a Latin class for his profession.”
“You’ll never catch me talking Latin,” Steele vowed.
And there it was. The brick that was bound to drop. Augustus lifted his glass in a toast to the other end of the table. “
Semper fi
, flattop.” And watched the Marine turn the color of cheap rosé.
“I don’t feel the U.S. is in any way inferior to Palatine,” said Calli Carmel. “I think I’m in a position to know.”
“Thanks for the backup, Mr. Carmel,” said Steele.
Madame Navarro’s glass came down hard. “
Mister
Carmel.
Mister
Carmel. I
do
not understand this conceit of denying the sexuality of your female officers. As if femininity were not command material! You Americans must unsex your female officers in order to respect them?”
“I am not unsexed,” Calli answered for herself without excitement. “The distinction is irrelevant to the position.”
“There are no ladies in the Navy,” said John Farragut with a wink.
Except on Christmas Eve, he thought, when the women pull those dresses from the bottom of their storage lockers, with those little bitty shoes, and transform themselves into amazing, soft, sweet-smelling, civilian-looking creatures, and it hurt. Last year John Farragut saw Hamster in that strappy little dress and those strappy little shoes, and he’d walked straight into a bulkhead. Hard. Carried away a mouse that lasted for days.
Madame Navarro scolded Calli, “Your sex may be irrelevant to your position, but denying its existence makes
you
irrelevant. Are we no more evolved than we were at the dawn of civilization when Hatshepsut made herself an honorary man, because one must be a man to be Pharaoh? Submerging yourself to a male identity?
Really
, Miss Carmel.”
“I am not an honorary man,” Calli said. “ ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ only includes me if I am a man individually as well as collectively. I am a man. Happen to be a female one, but a man in fact, not honorary, not submerged.”
“Oh, stuff and apology. The distinction cannot be so glibly brushed off. You are a woman. He is a man. The division is there. It’s biology. The U.S. Navy Space Fleet ought to grow up and acknowledge and accept the femininity of its female officers.”
“Separate but equal?” Calli suggested faintly.
The ensuing silence lay like a slab.
Until Calli answered herself, “Not in this man’s Navy.”
In the thick cessation of conversation, the soft music, the thump and hum of the ship, and all the background noises pushed forward.
Through the partition that separated the captain’s mess from the xenos’ mess, shouts, mounting in volume, indicated that the scientific gathering was no more amiable than this one. It sounded like they were throwing things.
Something flew past the open hatchway and rolled down the corridor.
“What was that?” said Farragut.
The Marine guard at the hatchway turned stiffly, shoulders dead square within his uniform of navy blue, eyes barely visible under his smartly centered white cap. Answered, “Muffin, sir. Blueberry.”
“They got muffins?” Farragut lamented, wistful. Sounded like a funner party over there. More sincere at any rate. Still, “I can’t endorse muffin throwing.”
Sounds of the melee grew louder. Shouted name-calling. A clash of a metal platter hitting the deck and spinning to rest.
Jose Maria Cordillera rose, bid everyone else stay seated. He set his snowy napkin on his chair, and smoothed the creases from his square-shouldered charcoal jacket and wide trousers of coarse black Tussah silk. When he turned from the table, you saw his only jewelry, the simple clasp of hand-wrought silver which held back his long black hair.
He exited the mess at a calm, cat-footed walk, his soft-soled shoes making no sound.
The shattering of glass beyond the partition made Farragut worry belatedly if he ought to have given Jose Maria a Marine escort.
And silence descended behind the partition.
Moments passed with no sound but a few muted voices.
Jose Maria reappeared in the hatchway, quietly composed.
“What did you
say
to them?” Aghani marveled at the doctor’s peacemaking prowess.
“I asked if they had any muffins.” Jose Maria produced a plate, lifted the linen to reveal a stack of them, still warm.
“
Muffins?
With bariki and munsrit?” Faustino Barron balked at the culinary gaff, and gazed on
Don
Cordillera as if the esteemed doctor had grown tusks.
“Works for me.” Augustus accepted a warm muffin from the basket, held it up in admiration. “Ah. Like LEN weapons. Like new. Only thrown down once.”
“That was uncalled for,” said Guillame Kapila. “The League of Earth Nations has always accommodated Palatine.”
Augustus gave a cold smile. “Which is why when the real menace showed itself, we allied with our most
offensive
enemy.”
“Why, yes, they are all that,” Kapila allowed, the U.S. was offensive.
John Farragut signaled foul. “Now how’d I get a two-front campaign going here? I expect that from
him.
”
Him
being Augustus. “But Dr. Kapila, what did I do to piss y’all off? You haven’t liked me from your first ‘Permission to come aboard.’ ”
“Sir, I am certain you are well qualified at your profession,” said Kapila, making no attempt to hide his distaste for that profession. “But you stumbled into a Class Nine extraterrestrial intelligence with your battleship, blundered down to the planet’s surface, and started
talking
. That is not protocol. It is . . . stupidity.”
“Worked at Hispaniola,” Farragut offered.
Kapila’s eyes flared white. “Invoking the image of the earliest act of American imperialism is meant to make us feel better about this botched first contact?”
