Марта Уэллс - From a Certain Point of View

But she would be making her own interior calculation about who he was, and about whether he was trying to confide in her. Or whether this was reliable old Canonhaus laying out bait for the disloyal.

He did not know the answer himself.

He supposed that in this place, surrounded by the black corridors and white armor of Ultimatum, surrounded by all the uniforms and guns and systems of technology and personhood she had worshipped since childhood, she could really only make one choice.

Her shoulders squared. “The destruction of Alderaanian refugees does proceed directly from the Tarkin Doctrine, sir. Terror is an instrument of the state’s power. So it must flow from the state, not from the stories of confused refugees who lack the context to understand their own situation. Arbitrarily allowing some Alderaanians to live while others die would negate the lawfulness of Alderaan’s sanctioned execution. Either all are guilty, or none are.”

“Oh, precisely, Commander. Precisely.” It burst out of him: “And what would you have done in my situation? Given that you prefer direct tactical action against the rebels to…harder duty.”

“I would carry out my orders completely and enthusiastically, because I believe that the Empire is larger and smarter than me, and that I cannot possibly determine the right thing to do as well as my superiors.”

That was not what she said. That was what he had said when questioned about his ability to carry out his mission.

“I don’t know, sir,” she said.

“You don’t know ?”

She touched the back of her cap in agitation. “Sir, I don’t wish to give a poor impression. But it would be arrogance on my part to assume I would rise to the challenge as well as you did. I only hope I can learn from your example.”

He flinched.

A mouse droid whirred up with a hard copy of the watch report. She retrieved it, passed it to him, their gloves skimming with a sound like the first whine of a migraine. He fussed over his datapad. The report was full of routine traffic, administrative matters, totally unrelated to the operation around Hoth.

“Changes to the uniform standard again,” he sighed. “New regulations for the display of recognition flash and skill tabs. The new header on personnel files accidentally corrupted dental records, and it has been judged faster for all officers to receive a new checkup than to restore from the archives, so we are encouraged to get our teeth cleaned at soonest opportunity. New orders from KDY on the safe use of pilots and tugs while in harborage…power system updates to defeat ion weapon attack, we could’ve used those today…”

She said, stiffly, “What do you think I would do, sir?”

“Eh?”

“If ordered to support a mission to eliminate Alderaanian refugees.”

“I suppose you’d do what everyone does.”

“What’s that, sir?”

He coughed into his glove. “Well, you do the work. Hard work. Awful work. But no one hesitates, really.”

“No one at all?”

“No. It’s a job, and the job is to carry out orders as efficiently as possible. That’s what you worry about—that you’ll screw up, let your end down, make things harder for the others. And if it gets to you afterward”—which it had, nightly—“well, ultimately you’re not the one who pulled the trigger. Or if you are, you’re not the one who gave the order. Or if you are, well, you’re not the one who made the whole mess necessary. You get to discussing it with the other officers, very coolly, very civilly, over caf in the wardroom. And you find there’s always someone else to blame. Someone who did something cruel, whereas you were simply merciful. Very well-designed system, all in all. A testament to the rational efficiency of the New Order.”

“I see, sir,” she said, with a kind of warmth. Did she pity him? Did she respect him? Was that the warmth? Had she just come to understand that Canonhaus truly was a person with a heart?

Or was she grateful to discover that reliable Canonhaus was in fact weak, and old, and unfit for command?

Perhaps his own eyes betrayed his vicious fear. Tian recoiled, turned sharply, paced away to consult with a lieutenant commander taking a report in the crew pit.

He tried to find a calm, authoritative stance to hold. Thinking of that mission always slashed him up inside, a long knife working at his guts like the underbrush on Haruun Kal. Where he had tweezed little wasps from his CO’s pores as she died, where he would always be, in the wet darkness of that jungle—

“Sir?”

He started. She’d crept around his other side. “Yes?”

“Orders from the flag. We’re to take Executor ’s port station and screen her against asteroid impacts as we move into the field.”

“We’re going in there ?” Ultimatum would happily have transited a normal asteroid field, but the Hoth field was young and dense, the cascading result of an interplanetary collision. Gravity drew the rocks back together into dense nodes where they shattered one another—and anything else in the way. “This is a capital warship, not a pursuit craft! We have squadrons for a reason!”

“We could file a protest, sir.”

Was she taunting him? “No, no. Asteroids must not concern us. Take up station on Executor ’s port. Rig the ship for close defense.”

The old growl of power came up through the deck, engines battling compensators, swaying them both. Tian jostled against him: the hazards of standing with your hands clasped behind your back. “Sorry,” he said, and coughed. His throat itched now. He was getting a cold, wasn’t he? The weaknesses of flesh.

“Sorry, sir. My fault.”

“You get used to it quickly enough. The acceleration. It’s not like on the smaller ships, you know. The big KDY engines take a while to fight through the compensators. They’ll catch you by surprise.”

“I imagine they will, sir. May I ask, sir, how long you’ve been on navy ships?”

He had to do the math in his head. “Thirty years, I think. Since I was a midshipman with the old…the prior regime.”

“And if I may also ask, sir, where do you see yourself in another thirty years?”

Eighty years old. In a white place with polished black floors, in dry air that made him sneeze, in a uniform with a cap that hurt his head.

In the jungle.

“In command of a sector fleet, I suppose. Or a staff position.” He smiled, and coughed again. “Or writing my memoirs.”

“And the New Order, sir? The navy? Still chasing rebels?”

“Oh, the Rebellion will be long over. I suppose we’ll be…”

He trailed off. He simply could not imagine what the New Order would do once the Rebellion was crushed. Would the Tarkin Doctrine have achieved a full galactic peace? Omnipresent fear becoming omnipresent respect and obedience?

She was watching him closely. She would pore through the bridge records and select any sedition on his part to put in her file of old Canonhaus’s mistakes. He could not show any doubt.

But no matter how he twisted himself around, he could not imagine what general orders the navy might operate under except to crush insurrection and bring worlds into the Empire’s control. In twenty years, the inner emptiness of the New Order would become outer; the logic of loyalty and rebellion would be accelerated until everyone who was not aroused to the highest state of loyalty would be marked as a traitor and denounced; professionalism would become fanaticism, temporary measures would become permanent, the conditions those measures had been meant to avert would become routine; old loyalties would become grounds for suspicion and purge; the New Order would become newer and newer, constantly revised and updated, containing less and less of substance and more and more of reaction, each new day’s ideology ready to denounce the last day’s thought as regressive backsliding. Until at last the New Order was newer than all other things, the first thought, the first principle, from which all else proceeded, even truth itself. It would not be about anything, intend anything, mean anything. It would simply exist for the sake of power, absolute and unlimited, without constraint.