John Scalzi - Tales From the Clarke

“Having one last look at the Clarke ?” Balla asked Coloma as she walked up.

“No,” Coloma said; Balla looked at her quizzically. “She’s no longer the Clarke . When they decommissioned her, they took her name. Now she’s just CUDS-RC-1181. For whatever time it takes to render her down to parts, anyway.”

“What happens to the name?” Balla asked.

“They put it back into the rotation,” Coloma said. “Some other ship will have it eventually. That is, if they don’t decide to retire it for being too ignominious.”

Balla nodded, but then motioned to the ship. “ Clarke or not, she was still your ship.”

“Yes,” Coloma said. “Yes, she was.”

The two stood there silently for a moment, watching the shuttles angle toward what used to be their ship.

“So what did you find out?” Coloma asked Balla after a moment.

“We’re still on hold,” Balla said. “All of us. You, me, the senior staff of the Clarke . Some of the crew have been reassigned to fill holes in other ship rosters, but almost no officers and none of those above the rank of lieutenant junior grade.”

Coloma nodded. The reassignment of her crew would normally come through her, but technically speaking they were no longer her crew and she no longer their captain. Balla had friends in the Department of State’s higher reaches, or more accurately, she had friends who were assistants and aides to the department’s higher reaches. It worked out the same, informationwise. “Do we have any idea why no one important’s been reassigned?”

“They’re still doing their investigation of the Danavar incident,” Balla said.

“Yes, but in our crew that only involves you and me and Marcos Basquez,” Coloma said, naming the Clarke ’s chief engineer. “And Marcos isn’t being investigated like the two of us are.”

“It’s still easier to have us around,” Balla said. “But there’s another wrinkle to it as well.”

“What’s that?” Coloma asked.

“The Clarke ’s diplomatic team hasn’t been formally reassigned, either,” Balla said. “Some of them have been added on to existing missions or negotiations in a temporary capacity, but none of them has been made permanent.”

“Who did you hear this from?” Coloma asked.

“Hart Schmidt,” Balla said. “He and Ambassador Abumwe were attached to the Bula negotiations last week.”

Coloma winced at this. The Bula negotiations had gone poorly, in part because the Colonial Defense Forces had established a clandestine base on an underdeveloped Bula colony world and had gotten caught red-handed trying to evacuate it; that was the rumor, in any event. Abumwe and Schmidt having anything to do with that would not look good for them.

“So we’re all in limbo,” Coloma said.

“It looks like,” Balla said. “At least you’re not being singled out, ma’am.”

Coloma laughed at this. “Not singled out, but being punished, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t know why we would be punished,” Balla said. “We were dropped into a diplomatic process at the last minute, discovered a trap, and kept the trap from snapping shut. All without a single death. And the negotiations with the Utche were successfully completed on top of that. They give people medals for less.”

Coloma motioned to what used to be the Clarke . “Maybe they were just very attached to the ship.”

Balla smiled. “It seems unlikely,” she said.

“Why not?” Coloma said. “I was.”

“You did the right thing, Captain,” Balla said, becoming serious. “I said so to the investigators. So did Ambassador Abumwe and Lieutenant Wilson. If they don’t see that, to hell with them.”

“Thank you, Neva,” Coloma said. “It’s good of you to say that. Remember it when they assign us to a tow barge.”

“There are worse assignments,” Balla said.

Coloma was about to respond when her PDA pinged. She swiped to her message queue and read the mail there. Then she shut down the screen, put the PDA away and returned her gaze to what used to be the Clarke .

Balla watched her captain for a moment. “You’re killing me over here,” she finally said.

“Remember when you said that there are worse assignments than a tow barge?” Coloma said, to her XO.

“Considering it’s the second to last thing I said, yes,” Balla said. “Why?”

“Because we may have just gotten one of those assignments,” Coloma said.

“The ship was the Porchester, ” Colonel Abel Rigney said. “At least for its first thirty years of service, when it was a Hampshire-class corvette in the CDF. Then it was transferred to the Department of State and renamed the Ballantine, after an old secretary of the department. That was another twenty years of service as a courier and supply ship. It was decommissioned last year.”

Coloma stood on the bridge with Rigney and Balla and looked over the quiet banks of monitors. The atmosphere on the ship was thin and cold, befitting a ship that no longer had a crew or a purpose. “Any immediate reason for the decommissioning?” she asked.

“Other than age? No,” Rigney said. “She ran fine. Runs fine, as you’ll discover when you put her through her paces. She’s just old. There are a lot of klicks on this ship, and eventually being on her began to look like a hardship assignment.”

“Hmmm,” Coloma said.

“But it’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it,” Rigney said, quickly, moving past the implied but unintentional insult he’d just offered Coloma. “If you’re new to space travel, and don’t have your own fleet of ships, then what you and I see as old and past its prime will look shiny and new. The folks from Earth who we are proposing to sell this ship to are going to look at this baby as their first step into the wider universe. It’s right about their speed.”

“So that’s my job,” Coloma said. “Take a hand-me-down and convince the rubes they’re getting something that’s top of the line.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that, Captain,” Rigney said. “We’re not trying to deceive the folks from Earth. They know we’re not offering them the latest technology. But they also know they’re not trained and ready to handle our latest ships. The only real spacefaring tech they’ve had to this point are shuttlecraft working around the space station over their planet. We’ve handled everything else up to now.”

“So we’re giving them a ship with training wheels on it,” Coloma said.

“We prefer to think of it as that we’re offering them a classic piece of technology to learn on and build from,” Rigney said. “You know the Earth folks aren’t happy with the Colonial Union right now.”

Coloma nodded; that was common knowledge. And she couldn’t blame them. If she were from Earth and discovered that the Colonial Union had been using the entire planet as a farm for soldiers and colonists, she’d be pissed at it, too.

“What you probably don’t know is that the Earth folks aren’t just talking to us,” Rigney said. “The Conclave has been very aggressively courting them, too. It would be very bad for the Colonial Union if Earth decided to join the Conclave, and not just because we’d be fresh out of colonists and CDF. This ship is one of the ways we’re hoping to get back on their good side.”

“Then why are you selling it to them, sir?” Balla asked. “Why not just give it to them?”

“We’re already gifting the Earth folks lots of other technology,” Rigney said. “We don’t want to start looking like we’re offering reparations. And anyway, the governments of Earth are suspicious of us. They’re worried that we’re offering up Trojan horses to them. If we make them pay for this ship, they’re more likely to trust us. Don’t ask me about the psychology here. I’m just telling you what they tell me. We’re still giving it to them at a sharply reduced price, and mostly in barter. I think we’re selling it mostly for field corn.”