“There’s a problem with the Dragonseye,” Captain Violet announced.
We were having another apprentice meeting, giving me a chance to talk to my peers again. I figured that this meeting probably wasn’t very important, because only one captain was present. (I assumed that they’d all come to the previous meeting to meet me, the new apprentice.) So I didn’t pay too much attention to his ominous words as I slid into the seat between Dimun and Huspi.
Nobody else looked overly impressed either. “What kind of a problem?” Mana asked. She was focused completely on the captain, like she’d forgotten that the rest of us were even there.
“There’s something unpredictable about the material composition of the asteroid belt. Most of the readings are expected, but the mass of some of the asteroids is… off. About half a per cent of the asteroids, mostly interior ones, read as externally iron, but the wrong mass.”
I asked the obvious question. “Is there already a colony there?”
It mustn’t have been as obvious as I’d thought, because the three youngest apprentices looked surprised. Mana sneered at me. “Another civilisation? That we just didn’t know about, for some reason? How could that be the case?”
I didn’t think that sucking up to this girl was going to win me friendship points with her, which was good, because I didn’t want to. “How would we know?” I asked. “We don’t know where every other fleet fragment is or what they’re doing. Do you have a better explanation? Because when I hear ‘iron ball without enough mass’, my first thought is ‘that’s a hull and there’s an atmosphere in there’.”
“We would’ve picked up radio signals! We would’ve noticed the materials in their external hull equipment! Who even builds hulls out of iron?”
One of the colony bids for the Dragonseye involves growing living hulls out of plant matter. Some colonies live in ice! Why would we assume that there would be exterior equipment made of materials that we recognise as foreign? They might not use radio. Captain Violet said that these were interior asteroids – if they’re close enough tot he sun to make radio contact messy…”
“That’s a very good guess,” Captain Violet said, “but in fact the asteroid belt doesn’t go nearly that far in, and the density issue is in the other direction. The asteroids have far more mass than we expected.”
“So it’s an iron shell around some kind of far denser material,” Sema said. “And since you’re being coy about what it is, we don’t know what it is? Meaning that this isn’t the sort of thing that this star is expected to produce?”
“Exactly.” Captain Violet glanced at me. “It does appear to be a natural phenomenon, though. No sign that it’s been constructed, and the asteroids in question will be quite some distance from the colony. We’ll be colonising from the outside, and if necessary we can even choose part of the belt where the interior unusual asteroids are very rare, since their distribution is quite uneven.”
“So the asteroids themselves aren’t likely to be any kind of a problem,” Aevor said. “The problem…”
“Is that we didn’t expect them and don’t understand how they got there,” Dimun continued. “Meaning that something about this star is unusual. There’s something happening here that our models don’t account for.”
“So there might be some unpredictable causal factor that will affect the colony,” Huspi finished. “Maybe when we’re building it, maybe killing it off years after we leave.”
“Exactly,” Captain Violet said.
“So this is another thing that we have to do before we can leave the Dragonseye,” Mana said. “I’m sure the entire fleet’s worth of astrophysicists and geologists and all that can figure it out. A lot of them will probably be excited to finally have some new natural puzzles to tackle.”
I nodded. “Framing it like that would probably help keep people excited and enthusiastic instead of discouraged and afraid,” I said. “Presenting it as an opportunity instead of a danger.”
“How will this affect the colony bids?” Dimun asked.
Captain Violet shrugged. “It’s far too late in the selection process for major changes; the fleet in general has already analysed the bids and started to narrow down the candidates with a serious chance. We, like most ships, won’t actually cast our vote for many years yet, but we’ll start reviewing the top candidates fairly soon and the general plans of each proposal are generally very concrete by then. Changing too much at the last minute seriously hurts a bid’s chances. There’ll likely be small changes to most of them, though; all the bidders will be scrambling to add some kind of star and rock analysis angle to their plans. Small additions are very common as we get close enough to a star to actually measure the conditions and resource distribution with proper accuracy.”
“But the core designs of each proposal are fairly set?”
“Yes, it’s too late for anybody who wants a serious chance at winning the bid to be messing about with big changes now. It looks unreliable and makes ships reluctant to vote for them.”
“How do the ships vote?” I asked. “Do the captains decide?”
“On some ships, yes,” Captain Violet said. “The Courageous handles things by a citizen vote – have any of you lived through a citizen vote before?”
Sema lifted a hand. “When I was about six, I remember all the grown ups were talking about voting for something. Something about rockets?”
“Ah, yes, the proposed changes to deceleration. The rest of you were probably too young to remember. The way it happens is that every adult citizen of the Courageous will tell the treegrave which colony bid they want. Or they can say they have no opinion, if they like. The treegrave will tally up all the votes, do some statistics on them based on various demographics to keep things fair, and then tell us what the most popular choice was. Then the captains will agree on voting for that choice.”
“What if the captains don’t agree on that?” I asked. “What if someone disagrees?”
“Then they’d get outvoted by the other three captains, and very likely fired,” Captain Violet said. “It’s extremely rare for a captain on the Courageous not to either retire voluntarily or die in office, but if they’re particularly terrible at their job, it can happen. Captains get a fair bit of leeway on their decisions and we disagree a lot, but it is our duty to represent the interests of the people, and in matters like the Mission, that means respecting the decisions of the people.”
“What if the interests of the people don’t match the decision of the people?” I asked. “What if they make a really awful choice?”
“Then they’ve been given extremely bad information or very muddled conditions for decision making,” Captain Violet said. “People are intelligent. They’re not in the habit of making terrible decisions as a group unless something else has failed catastrophically enough to make it seem like a good decision. If that happens, it’s a sign that we – not just the captains, but the entire management structure – have already massively failed in some very key areas, and are receiving notice of that failure in the form of the vote.
“The people very often make suboptimal and sometimes baffling decisions, and that’s completely fine. But if they are making catastrophic decisions on important things, then that they’re not making a catastrophic decision – it’s a manifestation of a catastrophic decision that we made ten years ago.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility to put on the people in management,” Mana said drily. There was something about the way that she emphasised ‘responsibility’, like it was a dirty word. Accusatory, almost. Like it was a euphemism for something else.
Captain Violet shrugged. “Everybody does their job as well as they can,” ke said. “There are a great many careers open to you at the end of your apprenticeship. It doesn’t have to be management, if you find the… responsibility…to be burdensome. Believe me, you don’t want to see what it looks like living in a small space for generation after generation when the people in charge don’t take their jobs seriously.”
Mana narrowed her eyes, but before she could say anything, Aevor jumped in.
“Um,” he said, “you said that you’ll start looking at the bid candidates soon?”
“In another six months or so,” Captain Violet said, “unless there’s a delay from people adding their scientific analysis angles to all their bids. We only review the most promising ones, the ones where the Courageous’ vote is likely to matter. We do tend to sway a lot of other ships’ votes but there’s usually a big difference in interest between the decent candidates and all the slop, big enough that the less popular bids aren’t worth considering even with our influence. It’s normally between six and twelve candidates. You’ll all get a chance to see them and give us your input.”
“Except me,” Sema said with a grin.
Captain Violet returned the grin. “You’ll see them,” ke promised. “Just in my office instead of this meeting room.”
“We’re going to miss you in here,” Dimun said to Sema. “You always make so much more sense than the rest of these guys.”
“Don’t worry,” Sema said, deadpan. “Someday you, too, will be free of these guys.”
“Do you think maybe they don’t respect us?” Aevor whispered loudly and openly down the table to Mana. “Even though we’re fantastic?”
“You have years yet to earn respect, little boy,” Dimun said with a grin.
“You’re less than two years older than me!”
“And yet so much wiser than you. Pretty embarrassing for you, really.”
“Well,” Captain Violet said, standing up, “I don’t think I’m needed here any more.”
Sema stood to follow kem out, but was quickly pulled back into his seat by the other apprentices to a litany of comments like “You can’t escape that easily!” and “You’re still ours for three more months!”
And then they let kem stand up again, because obviously we weren’t going to just hang out in the meeting room.
The apprentices all filed out together. I hesitated, not really sure I I was supposed to come along, until Aevor put an arm around my shoulders and steered me through the door behind the others. Unsurprisingly, we made our way to the best cafeteria on the entire ship.
It was still very average.
We grabbed snacks an crammed in around one of the bigger tables. I found myself wedged between Aevor (harmonica player, I should learn about the harmonica) and Huspi (hummer, was it rude to bring that up?) with a small pot of nutrient cream that I’d grabbed more because it was the closest thing to me at the counter than because I actually liked nutrient cream.
“I can’t wait to be rid of the lot of you,” Sema said in the tone of someone who didn’t really mean it.
“What kind of work are you going into?” I asked him, because people liked it when you showed interest in them, and also because I didn’t want him to know I’d already asked the treegrave and get creeped out.
“Resource administration,” Sema said. “More rpactical and less politics than a lot of Administration jobs.”
“Well that’s a lie,” Mana said. “You’ll be in the job when we reach orbit. It’ll be one of the most political jobs on the ship.”
“Weren’t you looking into travel administration?” Sema asked her. “That’s going to be political. The amount of travel in and out of the belt…”
“Yeah, but I like political.”
“What about you, Taya?” Aevor asked me. “Do you like politics?”
“I haven’t seen enough of them to know,” I said truthfully.
“Didn’t you go to a whole bunch of ships we have important deals with?” Mana said. “And then trick the apprentice-free captain into taking a last minute apprentice? If anyone’s into politics…”
I blinked at her. Just what did these people think my life was like? No wonder she thought I was some kind of threat for the captaincy.
“I’m sure we have important deals with a lot of ships,” I said, “and I wasn’t visiting those ones for anything political. It was just for part of my jaunt. I got to go because my sister let me tag along; I just wanted to see other ships without having to wait until I was older.” I paused for a bite of cream. “And Captain Blue came to me. I had no idea who he was.” Honesty would help me more than ego here, if I wanted to not look like a threat. I let myself smile a little bit, half-amused, half-embarrassed. “I didn’t actually know he was a captain until after I started the apprenticeship,” I admitted, not looking up from my cream. “He told me it was for some kind of general administration job, he never used the word ‘captain’. It took me weeks to figure it out.”
There was some chuckling. Yeah, I was gonna get teased for that. Definitely. Probably in a friendly way, at least.
“You didn’t know?” Huspi asked, trying not to laugh.
“You must’ve felt like the luckiest kid on the ship when you found it out,” Dimun said.
Okay, that was enough honesty. Time for lying. I shrugged. “I was pretty annoyed,” I said. “It wasn’t what I’d thought I’d signed up for. Most of this captain stuff is gonna be useless to me. But I’m here, and it’s not like I’m going to get a better apprenticeship, so I guess I’ll make the best of it.”
“Not interested in being captain?” Aevor asked.
“Not even a little. I’m thinking, something to do with records, or personal assistance… something with note taking and organisation. I’m good ar writing and remembering things and putting information in the right order.” (I didn’t know if that last one was true, but it couldn’t be hard to learn.) “And working with Captain Blue is letting me see a lot of different departments where I can do that, so I’m not making any big decisions about where I want to go until I’ve gotten to know them all.”
Mana relaed. She didn’t say anything, but she definitely relaxed. Fantastic.
“That’s a wise choice,” Sema said. “Deciding what you want too early and focusing on it too hard can make you miss other opportunities. You have plenty of time; I’m sure you’ll find the perfect job.”
I nodded. I was sure I would.
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