Elizabeth Moon: Once a Hero

Not until she’d been dragged through it again did she remember that someone had paged her and told her to come initial the daily scan log of the warhead lockers. Checking the automatic scans had been part of her daily routine. She’d insisted that she had done it, and whoever it was had insisted she hadn’t, and finally she’d gone down to see. Who had called her? She didn’t remember. And what had she found when she got there?

“I’d made an error entering the scan code,” Esmay said. “At least—I guess that’s what it was.”

“What do you mean?” This interrogator had the most neutral voice Esmay had ever heard; it made her nervous for reasons she could not define.

“Well . . . the number was wrong. Sometimes that happened. But usually it wouldn’t enter; it would signal a conflict.”

“Explain, please.”

Esmay struggled on, caught between the social desire not to bore the listener, and the innocent’s need to explain fully why she wasn’t guilty. She had entered, during her rotation, thousands of scan log codes. Sometimes she made mistakes; everyone did. She did not say, what she had long thought, which was how silly it was to have officers entering codes by hand, when there were perfectly decent, inexpensive code readers which could enter them directly. When she made a mistake, the coder usually locked up, refusing entry. But occasionally, it would accept the error code, only to hang up when the next shift compared its code to hers.

“Then they’d call me, and I’d have to come myself and reset the code, and initial the change. That must be what happened.”

“I see.” A pause during which she could feel the sweat springing out on her neck. “And from what station did you make the 1830 report, then?”

She had no idea. Going from her quarters—she could see the route clearly in her mind, but she could not remember calling in. Yet if she hadn’t, someone would have logged it . . . except that was when, up on the bridge, the mutineers made their move against Captain Hearne. Sometime around then, anyway.

“I don’t know that I did,” she said. “I don’t remember that I didn’t. I got to the weapons bay, reset the codes, initialed them, and came back to my quarters, and then—” By then the mutiny had spread beyond the bridge, and the senior mutineers had sent someone down to keep the juniors out of it if they could. That hadn’t worked; there had been more traitors than that.

The investigator nodded shortly, and went on to something else. To a series of somethings else. Finally, over many sessions, they worked their way up to the time when she herself was in charge.

Could she explain her decision to return to Xavier system and try to fight a battle against odds, with no senior officers and substantial casualties?

Only briefly, and obliquely, had she allowed herself to think of her decision as heroic. Reality wouldn’t let her dwell on it. She hadn’t known what she was doing; her inexperience had caused too many deaths. Even though it came out all right in the end, in one way, it was not all right for those who had died.

If it wasn’t heroic, what was it? It looked stupid now, foolhardy. Yet . . . her crew, despite her inexperience, had blown away the enemy flagship.

“I . . . remembered Commander Serrano,” she said. “I had to come back. After sending a message, so in case—”

“Gallant, but hardly practical,” said this interrogator, whose voice had a twang she associated with central Familias planets. “You are a protÈgÈe of Commander Serrano?”

“No.” She dared not claim that; they had served on the same ship only once, and had not been friends. She explained, to someone who surely knew better than she, how wide the gap between a raw ensign of provincial background, and a major rising on the twin plumes of ability and family.

“Not a . . . er . . . particular friend?” This with a meaningful smirk.

Esmay barely kept herself from snorting. What did he think she was, some prude off a back-country planet that didn’t know one sex from the other? That could not call things by their right names? She put out of mind her aunt, who certainly would never use the terms common in the Fleet.

“No. We were not lovers. We were not friends. She was a major, command track; I was an ensign, technical track. It’s just that she was polite—”

“Others weren’t?” In the same tone.

“Not always,” Esmay said, before she could stop herself. Too late now; she might as well complete the portrait of a provincial idiot. “I’m not from a Fleet family. I’m from Altiplano—the first person from Altiplano to attend the Academy. Some people thought it was a hoot.” Too late again, she remembered that expression’s Fleet meaning. “A regrettably laughable imposition,” she added, to the raised eyebrows. “In our slang.” Which was no stranger than Fleet slang, just someone else’s. Which was the point: Heris Serrano had never laughed at it. But she wouldn’t say that to those eyebrows, which right now made her wonder which great Fleet family she had just insulted.

“Altiplano. Yes.” The eyebrows had come down, but the tone of condescension hadn’t. “That is a planet where the Ageist influence is particularly strong, isn’t it?”

“Ageists?” Esmay scrambled through what she knew of politics at home—she had not been home since she was sixteen—and came up with nothing. “I don’t think anyone in Altiplano hates old people.”

“No, no,” the man said. “ Ageists —surely you know. They oppose rejuvenation.”

Esmay stared at him, now thoroughly confused. “Oppose rejuvenation? Why?” Not her relatives, who would be only too happy if Papa Stefan lived forever; he was the only one who could keep Sanni and Berthol from each other’s throats, and those two were essential.

“How closely do you follow events on Altiplano?” the man asked.

“I don’t,” Esmay said. She had left it behind gladly; she had discarded without watching the newscube subscription her family sent her. She had finally decided, in the bleak aftermath of a nightmare in which she was not only stripped of her commission but sentenced to a term of hard labor, that she would never go back to Altiplano, no matter what. They could throw her out of Fleet, but they couldn’t make her go home. She had looked it up: no judicial action could force someone to return to their planet of origin for crimes committed somewhere else. “And I can’t believe they really oppose rejuvenation . . . at least, I can’t imagine anyone I know thinking that way.”

“Oh?”

Since he seemed interested, the first person in years who had shown any interest at all, Esmay found herself telling him about Papa Stefan, Sanni, Berthol, and the rest, at least insofar as it bore on their likely attitude towards rejuv. When she slowed down, he interrupted.

“And is your family . . . er . . . prominent on Altiplano?”

Surely that was in her file. “My father’s a regional commander in the militia,” she said. “The ranks aren’t equivalent, but there are only four regional commanders on Altiplano.” It would be the height of bad manners to say more; if he couldn’t figure out from that where she stood socially on her home planet, then he’d have to suffer in ignorance.

“And you chose to go into Fleet? Why?”

That again. She had dealt with that in her first application, and during the entrance interviews and the military psychology classes as well. She rattled off the explanation that had always seemed to go best, and it sank into the investigator’s unresponsive gaze.

“Is that all?”

“Well . . . yes.” The smart young officer did not talk about wish fulfillment, the hours she’d spent in the manor orchard staring up at the stars and promising herself she’d be there someday. Better to be matter-of-fact, practical, sensible. No one wanted wild-eyed dreamers, fanatics. Especially not from worlds that had only a couple of centuries of human colonization.