Kneale nodded appreciatively. “You’re quite right, Randall—do you go by Randall?”
“Huh? Ah, Ran, sir. Actually. Though—”Colville smiled in a not-quite-calculating manner. “—I’ve answered to shithead a time or two. Anything you please. But Ran for choice.”
“Staff Side officers traditionally don’t stand on ceremony when we’re alone,” Kneale said, smiling also. “I’m Hiram—unless you screw up royally. Just don’t make the mistake of calling Captain Kanawa ‘Sam’—or anything else but ‘Sir!'”
Kneale paused again, eyeing the younger man. Without really intending to do so, he’d thrown Colville badly off-balance. The threat of exposure, unstated and unmeant, still hung over the man, but going to a first name basis was a positive sign. You drove laboratory animals mad more quickly with random punishments and rewards than you could with a regimen of brutal punishment alone.
“Neither side is going to do anything as crude as an open seizure of the Empress of Earth,” Kneale resumed. “Every planet but Earth is still a frontier, though some pretend they’re not. The outworlds, particularly Grantholm, sneer at Federated Earth because she has so much power and doesn’t use it the way they would—but they respect the power. They know that Earth could swat them, any one or all together, as easily as a whale could swamp a dinghy. Whatever else they do, they won’t force the whale to take action against them; and commandeering Terran shipping would do just that.”
Colville cleared his throat and said, “If the Empress were just to vanish, though, the Legislative Council would dither. The Federation bureaucracy wouldn’t be able to act without authorization. And maybe if the ship was handed back after Grantholm won the war—with an indemnity for Trident Starlines and any passengers who were in the wrong place when the shooting started—they might get away with it. Grantholm might.”
The left corner of Kneale’s mouth lifted. “That would be risky too, don’t you think?”
Colville shrugged. “War’s a risk.”
“And you think Grantholm will win this war?”
“I think everybody on Grantholm thinks they’ll win it,” Colville stated flatly. “Personally, I think if it comes to open war, they’ll both lose, but they’ll wreck fifty planets and kill millions of people to prove it. But that’s not my business. The Empress of Earth is my business.”
Kneale stared at the younger man for long moments, deciding whether or not to say more. At last he went on, “Trident Starlines has a very rigid set of rules. For instance, the safety of passengers is paramount I’m sure that Captain Kanawa would unhesitatingly surrender his ship, this ship, if he felt that by doing otherwise he was risking the lives of his passengers.”
Colville nodded, wary again, certain that the conversation was about to veer from normal channels.
“But some officers, even in an organization as controlled as Trident,” the commander went on, “have bent the rules when they had to. And they’re willing to do it again. For Trident, for civilization.”
“Sir?” Colville said softly.
“I knew a fellow from Sulimaniya,” Kneale said. His eyes were focused in the direction of the holographic mural behind Colville, the Empress undocking from Grantholm. The blue glare of the starliner’s magnetic motors reflected between the low overcast and the soft, fresh snow covering the hills around the spaceport. “He killed a man—his business partner.”
Kneale smiled. His expression was terrible to see. “Actually, he’d killed quite a lot of people a few years before, but they told him that made him a hero because he’d been guarding the Parliament House during the Enlightenment Riots. But this was different. He had to run.
“He got off planet—that was easy. What planet he ran to doesn’t matter; it could have been almost anywhere. And he got a job as ground staff for Trident Starlines. That wasn’t terribly hard either, because he was only a janitor, hitting the spots that it wasn’t cost-effective to program the cleaning robots to get. And that put him around the data base at night, when nobody else was in the terminal building.”
Ran Colville was looking at Kneale with the expression of a man feeing a snake he knows is poisonous, but which may or may not be hostile to him. Colville said nothing.