“Yeasay. Proceed.”

“Could give her more, y’know.”

“I said proceed.”

He had firmly resolved to speak as little as possible to his officers during ordinary ship operations. He was like a drinker who could not trust himself to stick to moderate amounts. In Family meetings he gave himself a little leeway, though. There, eloquence and even outright oration served his ends. He knew he was not very good at talk, and the briefer he was the more effect it had. As Argo had approached this star system he had gotten more and more terse. There were days when most of the crew heard him say only a short “ah-mmm” as he pointedly cleared his throat at some demonstrated inadequacy.

As they made their way to the central axis Killeen set his face like stone. He was ashamed of his aversion to watching punishment. He knew that to punish a crewmember was a sign of his own failure. He should have caught the slide in behavior before it got this far. But once the event had occurred there was no turning back.

In this case, Radanan had been trying to sneak into the thrumming dangers of the engine zone as they decelerated. This alone would have been a mild though flagrantly stupid transgression. But when Cermo caught her she had bristled, bitterly angry, and had called on some friends nearby, trying to provoke a minor mutiny.

A wise Captain hands out rougher justice than this.

His Ling Aspect offered this without being summoned. “She just screamed and swore some, is all,” Killeen subvocalized. “And was stupid enough to take a poke at Cermo.”

Mutiny is a capital offense.

“Not on the Argo.”

She’ll incite others, harbor resentment—

“She was looking for food, just a minor—”

You’ll lose control if—

Killeen damped the Aspect’s self-righteous bark into silence.

Evidently Radanan had been looking for a way to scavenge something extra, though Killeen could not imagine what she thought she might find. Usually, crew were caught pilfering food, an outcome of the strict rationing Killeen had imposed for a year now.

The watch crew stood a little straighter as Killeen came into the area. Radanan was at the center of a large circle, since this was both a shipboard matter and a Family reproach. She looked down dejectedly. Her eyes seemed to have accepted already the implications of the cuffs around her wrists that held her firmly to a mooring line.

Cermo barked out the judgment. Two crewmen stood ready to hold Radanan at the elbows in case she should jerk away from the punishment. She bleakly watched as Cermo brought out the short, gleaming rod.

Killeen made himself not grit his teeth. He had to enforce his own rules or else nothing he said would be believed. And he did blame himself. The woman was not overly bright. She had originally been a member of Family Rook.

By tribal consent, all those who had chosen to set off in the Argo had realigned, so that they constituted a new Family composed of the Bishops, Rooks, and Kings. They had elected to term it Family Bishop still, and Killeen had never been sure whether this was a tribute to him, a Bishop, or a simple convenience.

At any rate, as he watched the hard rod come down upon Radanan’s buttocks, he thought it seemed unlikely that a woman small-minded enough to venture into dangerous territory in search of an oddment would benefit from so crude a tactic as flogging. But tradition was tradition. They had precious little else to guide them in this vast darkness.

A dozen cuts of the rod as Family punishment, each one counted out by a midshipman. And as ship’s punishment, twelve more. Radanan held herself rigid for the first six and then began to jerk, gasps bursting out from behind clenched teeth. Killeen thought he would have to turn away but he made himself think of something, anything, while Cermo ran the count to twenty.

Then she collapsed to the deck.

“Belay that!” Killeen said sharply, and the awful business was over. She had stumbled so that she hung by her wrists. That took matters beyond anything he would tolerate and gave him grounds to call it off four strokes short.

He struggled for something to say. “Ah-mmm. Very well, Lieutenant Cermo. On to the day’s orders, then.”

Killeen turned and left quickly, hoping that no one noticed that he was sweating.

FOUR

He made his way in a sour temper through the slick corridors connecting the life vault with the central axis spiral. His anger with himself could find no clear expression. He knew he should have become hardened to the necessity of imposing punishment. Barring that, he should have been clever enough to find a way around the situation that Cermo’s quick action had forced on him.

A whiff of sewage wrinkled his nose. He hastened past. All of third deck was sealed off. Even so, some sludge had leaked into ventilation shafts here, and crew somehow never got it all cleaned out. The problem had started a year ago with clogged toilets. Attempts at repair damaged the valves and servos. The waste had spread through the third deck until work details gagged, fainted, and refused to go in. Killeen had been forced to seal the deck, losing bunking quarters and shops.

He irritably demanded of his Ling Aspect, “You’re sure you can’t remember any more about pipes and such?”

Ling’s reply was stony:

No. I have informed you often enough that I was brought up through the combat ranks, not the engineers. If you had not let ignorant crew tinker with the problem—

“I got no engineers know ’bout that, in chip or living. You savvy so much, why can’t—”

If you’ll read the ship’s flow diagram—

“Can’t! They’re too ’plexified. It’s like tellin’ what a woman thinks by studyin’ every hair on her head.”

Even a ship like this, though far advanced beyond some I commanded, requires intelligence to run. If you’ll institute the study sessions I recommended long ago—

Make Family sit and decipher for weeks?” Killeen laughed dryly. “You saw how far I got with that.”

Your people are unlike anyone I ever commanded, I’ll grant that. You are from a society that scavenged and stole for a living—

“Won battles ’gainst the mechs, you mean. The food and ’quipment we got was war booty.”

Call it what you will. Such training is a far cry from the discipline and skill needed to fix even a broken sewer connection. Still, with time and proper training—

Killeen piped the Ling Aspect back down again; he had heard all this before. Ling knew of the Chandelier Age, when humans had great cities in space. Cap’ns had made year-long voyages between Chandeliers, braving the increasing mech raids. Ling himself had functioned then as a full interactive Personality. The Family could no longer maintain Personalities, so Ling was available only as the lesser, truncated projection—an Aspect.

Ling invariably recommended the strict discipline necessary in the Chandelier Age. Superimposed on that, though, was an older theme. The original, living Ling had come from the fabled Great Times, or possibly even beyond. The Aspect’s memory flattened time distinctions, so it was hard to tell which facet of Ling was speaking. The sensation of having at the back of his head a voice from an unimaginably grand past, when humans had lived free of mech dominance, made Killeen uneasy. He felt absurd, maintaining the persona of a confident Cap’n when he sensed the supremely greater power of lost ages.

As he climbed up the axis, saluting crew as he passed, he was uncomfortably aware of the scuffs and dings the walls had suffered. Here a yellow stain covered a hatchway. There someone had tried to cut away a chunk of hardboard and had given up halfway through, leaving a ragged sawtooth slash. Random chunks of old servos and electronics packages had been chucked aside and left, once they proved useless for whatever impulse had made crew yank them out of some locker.