Christopher Nuttall: Patriotic Treason

“Fifty seconds,” the Captain confirmed. He had to be aware of the sweat trickling down my back. “You have the conn, Ensign.”

“Yes, sir,” I gulped. I wanted to flee the bridge and hide. “Pilot, bring up the Jump Drive and engage in…three…two…one…now!”

The screens went black as the drive triggered and we vanished inside the artificial wormhole. “Secure from departure stations,” I ordered, automatically. “Estimated time of arrival at first waypoint; seven days.”

“Acceptable,” the Captain said, calmly. I flushed again. “You were given the conn, Ensign. Not issuing the orders would have been unacceptable. I relieve you.”

“I stand relieved,” I said, formally. The Captain nodded to the First Lieutenant. “Lieutenant Hatchet will take you to meet with the Political Officer now.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Hatchet said. “Follow me.”

“You did reasonably well,” she said, as soon as we were outside the bridge and walking down the corridor. We paused to allow a pair of crewmen to walk past carrying a large box of spares between them. “You could have been sent to the Captain’s Mast for forgetting to depressurise the tube, or forgetting to clear enough space between us and the station before opening the wormhole, but on the whole… good work.”

She smiled at me. It completely transformed her face. “Thank you, Lieutenant,” I stammered. I hadn’t realised how much I’d forgotten after the brief course at the Academy. “May I ask a question?”

“Of course,” she said. “I may decline to answer.”

“Why did the Captain talk to Engineering instead of me?” I asked. “I don’t mind, but…”

She laughed. “The Engineer would not have started the power-up sequence for anyone less than the lawful Captain,” she explained. “You’ll see more of it when we start you on the drills later this afternoon, but for the moment, only the Captain has the clearance to issue certain orders. You’ll hear more about those later.”

We stopped outside a large hatch. “This is the Political Officer’s quarters,” she said. I felt my insides clench before she issued her warning. “Behave yourselves.”

The hatch slid open, revealing a cabin that was much larger and more luxurious than our shared cabin, or perhaps even the Captain’s cabin. I looked inside and my first thought was wondering just what the Political Officer did with all the space. It was decorated in a fashion that surprised and disgusted me, with a handful of nude images on the bulkheads and a drinks cabinet placed in a prominent position. The Political Officer himself was seated behind a desk that looked rather out of place on the starship, but as we entered he came to his feet and smiled at us. I found myself distrusting the man on sight.

“Enter, enter,” he said, waving us to a comfortable sofa that had seen better days. It looked large enough to hold more than seven Ensigns without difficultly. “No need to stand to attention here, my dears; we’re all friends here. Take a seat, please. Would you like something to drink?”

I shook my head. None of us, even Roger, had the self-confidence to ask for a drink. The Political Officer looked far too well-fed, and polished, to be trusted. He was overweight and surprisingly unkempt, wearing civilian clothes on a very military starship. The string of medals he wore on his jacket clashed oddly with the civilian outfit. I didn’t know what half of the medals were, but I doubted that he had any right to wear them.

“Welcome onboard the UNS Jacques Delors ,” he said. His voice was light and effeminate. “I would have greeted you at the hatch, but the Captain insisted on me seeing you after we’d entered the wormhole and shipped out for Terra Nova. I hope that you weren’t too disappointed to miss me there? The Political Officer is quite an important figure on the starship, my dears, even if I am not in the chain of command. You can talk to me about anything, anything at all.”

He took a chair himself and leaned back in it absently. I wasn’t sure what to make of the performance — and yes, I was sure that it was a performance — but I saw no reason to change my first impression. He seemed to be trying to be friendly, yet disconcerting, and I had the feeling that telling him anything would be a really bad idea. The Political Officers at the Academy had been boring people with stuffed shirts, testing us endlessly on our political opinions, but this one was different.

“No?” He asked. “Well, we’ll get down to business. I am Jason Montgomerie, Political Officer to this ship. My task is to ensure that you understand the political implications of the work the Peace Force does and assist you to remove any doubts or hesitations you might have. You have to understand the rational behind your work to give your lives meaning, you see, and you have to understand that it is all worthwhile.

“The UN was founded originally to bring peace and tranquillity to the Earth, which was suffering under the endless curse of war spread by rogue nations and societies,” he continued. I’d heard this all before, but I knew better than to be lulled into complacency. “It took years to move from being little more than a talking shop to develop the framework of international law — later interplanetary law — that governs the human race today. The Rules of War, the Code of Behaviour and the various protocols governing interplanetary trade all grew out of those early works. The UN was resisted mightily by nationalists who wanted to reserve the right to butcher thousands with crude weapons and threaten the very future of the human race, but slowly it grew into a mighty edifice.

“And yet, enemies of the UN continued to threaten its existence, to make profits for themselves at the expense of the remainder of the human race,” he said, his voice rising. He believed what he was saying. “The asteroid miners insisted on selling their ore at prices the market would bear, not what the poor could afford to pay, despite the attempts by progressive forces to intervene. The development of the Jump Drive only made those problems worse. The Enemies of Progress took resources that should belong to the entire human race and used them to found new colonies, teaching their children that the UN was evil and its dream of a united humanity nothing, but an attempt to suppress them. Would you believe that many of them banned Free Speech regarding the UN?”

I felt myself shivering slightly and hoped that he couldn’t sense it. I’d seen the UN’s idea of Free Speech before, back when I’d been at school. A young teenage boy — a wiseass, true, but very smart with it — had questioned the UN’s policy on race and racism. His speech had been moving and quite effective, but the day afterwards…he hadn’t shown up at school. If the teachers had known what had happened to him, they never told their pupils… and we all drew the lesson. Free Speech was dangerous to the health. I’d been told that restrictions existed to prevent the spread of racial hatred and bad ideas, but… he’d just been a boy!

“Our task,” Jason Montgomerie continued, lumping himself in with us, “is to prevent the Enemies of Progress from preventing the unification of the human race. We can and will do anything that is required to prevent them from deserting the human race in its hour of greatest need. You will learn, as we go on, that they have sacrificed their rights because of their insistence on placing themselves in front of the rest of humanity…”

He went on for hours. By the time he had finished, we were all headachy and confused. Lieutenant Hatchet, surprisingly, allowed us to go back to our cabin and sleep, instead of taking us to start drilling. We all needed our rest.

The day afterwards, we began drilling in earnest.