104: Mana

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It was way too late to pretend I hadn’t seen Mana, so of course, I had to walk over.

“Hi,” I said. “Do you live around here?”

“No,” she said. “I’m just spying on you.”

I wasn’t sure what to do with that. She didn’t say it with any animosity, but she also didn’t say it as a joke. Just a casual statement of fact.

“Well that’s probably a waste of time,” I said, sitting next to her. “I’m not doing anything interesting.”

“Preparing for a temporary assistant job, huh?”

“Yep. Diplomat’s liaison.”

“So you are going into personal assistance as a career?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said cautiously. Mana wasn’t usually this open with me. Despite my best attempts, I’d never quite gotten her to stop being generally suspicious and critical with me – well, she was critical of everyone, so that was fine, but the suspicion wasn’t helpful.

What had changed? The only thing I could think of was running into her and Huspi in the cafeteria when Huspi wasn’t at kes best. Did Mana think we’d bonded at that moment? That we were closer now?

If so, I wasn’t about to turn her down. I sipped my drink and positioned myself so that I could watch her reactions carefully without looking like I was being weird about it.

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you headed for the exciting world of personal assistance?”

She laughed a little. “Probably not.”

“Captaincy?”

A short pause. Sudden tension. Resentment? Not aimed at me, if it was – I knew what Mana’s resentment looked like when it was aimed at me.

“Probably not,” she said, still sounding casual. Fake casual, this time – a good fake, though. Very practiced.

A sore spot, but a very old one. Something that I wasn’t involved in.

I’m not stupid. I can do math. The red apprentices were aiming to put one of their own in Yamin’s spot when he retired, which should be happening around now, but because of me, would likely happen very shortly after I completed my apprenticeship. It was their best shot at one of them being captain, since the whole ‘keep at least one captain who wasn’t apprenticed, but having more than one is too much work and giving away too many good jobs’ status quo meant that Captain Red would likely be replaced with another non-apprentice. It was fairly easy to assume that they’d gotten together and picked one of their own to back, and the general situation being what it was, their choice would almost definitely get the job.

Mana was the youngest red apprentice. She’d likely finish her apprenticeship a few years before me. She wouldn’t have enough experience to even be considered, and the blue captaincy going to one of the other reds would essentially lock her out of ever getting a captaincy, unless there was some horrible tragedy that killed the other captain. That was all fairly logical and obvious; what I was learning right now was confirmation that Mana wasn’t happy about it. Like me, she actually did want to be a captain. Like me, she knew that the chances were unbelievably slim, due not to her own capabilities, but quotas and internal politics and terrible timing.

“I think you’d make a great captain,” I said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Did Captain Blue really bring you on to be a personal assistant?”

“He never told me he wanted me to be anything in particular,” I shrugged.

“Hmm.”

Suspicion, like usual. But it wasn’t really directed at me, was it? Most people seemed to think that Yamin had chosen to apprentice me at the last minute in order to fend off expectations about him retiring for a bit longer, but so far as I could see, he wasn’t really doing anything with the time they all thought he was buying. I still thought he was a bit weird for becoming fixated on me as an apprentice in the first place, but personally, I thought that the opposite was true – he’d wanted me back when he found me so that he could apprentice me and retire at a reasonable age. He probably wanted to be retired already. Either way, his reasons weren’t important – what mattered was that Mana thought that something nefarious was going on, and she wouldn’t stop being suspicious of Yamin, and of me as his tool, until she figured out what it was and how it affected the red apprentices’ plans.

I’d tried playing naive and harmless and uninvolved, and that clearly hadn’t worked. She was set on the idea that I wanted something, or that Yamin wanted something through me, and if I hadn’t been able to convince her otherwise so far, then I probably wasn’t ever going to be able to.

So, the best way forward was probably to agree with her.

“He did take on a personal assistant very shortly after me, though,” I admitted. “And had me shadow kem a lot. And made kes work seem more interesting than everyone else’s, possibly on purpose.”

She just gave a little nod of acknowledgement, thinking hard. Don’t see the hand yet? Fine. I’ll ‘accidentally’ lower a few more cards.

“Maybe he was worried that I’d be upset about not having a chance at becoming captain,” I said, “with the timing and everything.” I took a sip of my drink. “So he wanted to show me the next best thing. A captain’s personal assistant is a very important position.”

Ah, there we go. Her eyes met mine, then looked away under a mask of carefully schooled nonchalance. Would it be too much to circle back to ‘you’d make a great captain’? Yeah, it would. I’d given her plenty to work with.

“You’ll be good at it,” she said. “You can pick up important stuff that other people might miss. You did notice all the political problems with Hexacorallia going off on their own if we don’t back them in the first place.”

There was a slight edge to her voice. Resentment? Respect? I couldn’t tell.

And not knowing was a problem, because I had a response, but without knowing her position, I had no way of predicting how she’d react. Admitting something that made me look bad might build on this rapport that she seemed to think we had going, or it might make her angry. But if I played it safe and admitted the truth later, that would be a lot riskier.

Eh, the truth had been helping me out a lot today. Maybe I should try some more of it.

“Oh, none of that had anything to do with why I backed the Hexacorallia bid,” I said. “I just said all that because I was mad at you for accusing me of backing the people I already knew just because I knew them, and that was the first thing I thought of. I don’t think ‘what do we do if these guys just start making their own colony without fleet support?’ is a new question; it probably comes up at every colony. Didn’t you see how uninterested the captains were until I mentioned Hexacorallia’s attitude towards treegraves?”

“Why did you back their bid, then?”

“For the exact reasons you said,” I shrugged. “I knew people on those ships, an knew how excited they were about it.”

To my relief, Mana laughed. “That’s so irresponsible!”

“Why? It’s not like our decisions were going to affect anything, unless we accidentally raised something they didn’t know. Which I did, so it’s lucky I went to those ships. The captains had presumably already had their discussions before bringing anything to us; my stupid reasons couldn’t affect anything. I mean, the decisions… ah…”

“The decision will be made by the public as a whole, via their own free choice,” Mana said in a very careful, neutral, measured tone.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Interesting that Hexacorallia’s diplomats are coming over so much earlier than everyone else’s,” she said with a faint smile.

“Probably a coincidence,” I said, matching her smile. “Like how so many people have capuchin friends now.”

“Coincidences can be so useful,” she said.

“They sure can!”

“But anyway, it’s the principle of the thing! We might not make any actual changes in our little meetings, but surely you don’t want to get into the habit of making decisions like that. Someday, we will be making important decisions on our own. What if you pick a bad one, just because your friends – ”

“There were no bad ones,” I said. “All of them were equally good choices for a colony.”

Mana rolled her eyes. “And you know that from the genius analysis you did just glancing through the proposals?”

“Of course not. I knew it before we even looked at the proposals. I know they’re all equally good, because they gave us the proposals. Any dangerous, unreliable or expensive colony wouldn’t have had enough backing from other ships to ever make it into that pile. If there were a couple of really standout options that were way better than the rest, then they’d have so much more support that they’d be the only ones we got. The fact that those were the proposals that we got means that they were all the best proposals. By the time the late ships like the Courageous, and the ships that base their votes on the Courageous’ vote, get the proposals, all the important decisions have already been made. All those choices are as good as each other for the colony, and our main choice is picking which one is the best for us.

“And I don’t know how most of those proposals would affect us. I don’t know anything about the ships involved, or why they want their particular colony, or how we could leverage our vote with them. But I went to four different ships that really, really want the Hexacorallia bid, and I found out why they want it, and what they contribute, and got a pretty good idea of what they can do for us. So yeah, even if my decision did matter, then that’s what I’d pick, and for the same reasons.” I grinned. “Well, actually I’d do a lot more research before saying anything, and see if we’d be better off backing someone else. But I didn’t have the chance to do that in that meeting, so in a similar scenario I’d just have to trust that if somebody else knew that another bid was more beneficial than that one, they’d change my mind. In the meantime, I prefer to back the people I know.”

“You know, everyone says I’m the cynical one among the current apprentices.”

“Well, clearly they just don’t know me well enough yet. By the way, who are the red apprentices backing for captain?”

“Betta.”

“Hmm. I don’t know them.”

“Not surprising. Do you know any potential candidates for replacing your captain?”

“I only know one red apprentice, Mana.”

She met my eyes, and I held her gaze for an uncomfortable amount of time. I didn’t look away until she did.

Mana cleared her throat. “I have things to do,” she said, getting up.

“Me too,” I said. “I’ll probably be pretty busy for the next month.”

“Yeah, good luck with the diplomats.”

“Thanks,” I called after her as she walked away rather more quickly than was necessary.

Well. Time to get back to work.

I had more snacks to try.

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