“Were not involved, sir.”
There was stark silence for a moment. “You’re rather righteous, aren’t you?”
She leaned forward, arms on the table, and gave Mazian stare for stare. “I don’t
permit my troops to sleepover on-station, and I keep strict account of their
whereabouts. I knew where they were. And there are no Norway personnel involved
in the market. While I’m being called to account, I’d also like to make a point:
I disapproved of the general liberties when they were first proposed and I’d
like to see the policy reviewed. Disciplined troops are overworked on the one
hand and overlibertied on the other—stand them till they’re falling down tired
and liberty them till they’re falling down drunk—that’s the present policy,
which I have not permitted among my own personnel. Watches are relieved at
reasonable hours and liberties are confined to that narrow stretch of dock under
direct observation of my own officers for the very brief time they’re allowed at
all. And Norway personnel were not involved in this situation.”
Mazian glared. She watched the steady flare of his nostrils. “We go back a long
way, Mallory. You’ve always been a bloody-handed tyrant. That’s the name you’ve
gotten. You know that.”
“That’s quite possible.”
“Shot some of your own troops at Eridu. Ordered one unit to open fire on
another.”
“Norway has its standards.”
Mazian sucked in a breath. “So do other ships, captain. Your policies may work
on Norway, but our separate commands make different demands. Working
independently is something we excel at; we’ve done it too long. Now I have the
responsibility of welding the Fleet back together and making it work. I have the
kind of independent bloody-mindedness that hung Tibet and North Pole out there
instead of moving in as sense should have told them. Two ships dead, Mallory.
Now you’ve handed me a situation where one ship holds itself distinct from
others and then pulls an independent raid on an admittedly illicit activity
involving every other crew in the Fleet. There’s some talk that there was a
second page to that List, do you know that? That it was destroyed. This is a
morale problem. Do you appreciate that?”
“I perceive the problem; I regret it; I deny that there was a destroyed page and
I resent the implication that my troops were motivated by jealousy in reporting
this situation. It casts them in a light I refuse to accept.”
“Norway troops will follow the same schedule hereafter as the rest of the
Fleet.”
She sat back. “I find a policy which gives us mutiny, and now I’m ordered to
imitate it?”
“The destructive thing at work in this company, Mallory, is not the small amount
of black marketing that’s bound to go on, that realistically goes on every time
we have troops off-ship, but the assumption of one officer and one ship that it
can do as it pleases and act in rivalry to other ships. Divisiveness. We can’t
afford it, Mallory, and I refuse to tolerate it, under any name. There’s one
commander over this Fleet… or are you setting yourself up as the opposition
party?”
“I accept the order,” she muttered. Mazian’s pride, Mazian’s ever-so-sensitive
pride. They had come to the line that was not to be crossed, when his eyes took
on that look. She felt sick at her stomach, boiling with the urge to break
something. She settled quietly back into her chair.
“The morale problem does exist,” Mazian went on, easier, himself settling back
with one of those loose, theatrical gestures he used to dismiss what he had
determined not to argue. “It’s unfair to lay it to Norway alone. Forgive me. I
realize you’re a good deal right… but we’re all laboring under a difficult
situation. Union is out there. We know it. Pell knows it. Certainly the troops
know it, and they don’t know all that we know, and it eats at their nerves. They
take their pleasures as they can. They see a less then optimum situation on the
station: shortages, a rampant black market—civilian hostility, most of all.
They’re not in touch with operations we’re taking to remedy the situation. And
even if they were, there’s still the Union fleet, sitting out there waiting its