My aide entered the office as I studied the holographic starscape filling the back wall. "I will be retiring soon, Miss Chun," I said.
When I was aide to Chief of Administration Singh thirty-seven years ago, she always called me "Mr. Smith." I have held many positions in the Unity bureaucracy since that time, but my first supervisor marked me more than I realized until I became Chief myself.
"You have several years left, sir," Chun said. She glanced at the starscape. It was a raw blaze of color against blackness, all the stars within the volume the Unity called human space; whether or not the stars had planets, whether or not those planets had life, whether or not there was a permanent human presence in the system.
"I was thinking of Stalleybrass, Miss Chun," I said with a smile. Her implant would have told her if I had careted one of the stars on the display, but even a biocomputer as sophisticated as a Category 4 civil servant cannot read minds.
"Not the choice I would have expected, sir," she said, perfectly deadpan though she knew there must be a joke of sorts somewhere in my statement.
Miss Chun was not afraid of me, but she knew that if I ordered the guards outside to kill her, they would obey me without hesitation. Implants do not rob us Category 4's of personality, but the .8 probability was that Miss Chun would commit suicide if I ordered her to do so. Any decision I made would be, must be, for the benefit of mankind.
"The learning curve ensures there will be a dip in the performance of this office when Ivanovitch replaces me as Chief," I said. "Better that the change not occur in two years, after age and stress have made noticeable degradation in my abilities. The Kalendru leave us very little margin."
Instead of repeating her comment about Stalleybrass, Miss Chun looked again at the starscape.
Stalleybrass is a fleet base. It has a permanent cadre of fifty thousand and a transient population of up to three times that number. Those civilians on the planet are as directly concerned with the war effort as the military personnel who outnumber them.
There are plants and shellfish in the seas of Stalleybrass, but the continents are wastes of sand with no indigenous life except lichen. Existence on Stalleybrass is viewed as a penance by all the humans stationed there.
I have been thinking a great deal about penance since I made my decision to retire.
"Not for myself directly," I said. "The Maxus 377 expeditionary force has returned to Stalleybrass."
Chun nodded grimly. "An expensive bit of bad luck for us," she said, "but not nearly as expensive as it would have been if the Kalendru fleet had arrived immediately after our landing instead of immediately before. There would have been tens of thousands of casualties among troops on the ground while Admiral Gage fought off the enemy—if he in fact was able to do that. If the Kalendru had pushed Gage out of the system, the entire landing force would have been lost."
"A .2 probability," I agreed. "Instead we lost only twenty-six personnel."
"Deaths as a result of enemy action," Miss Chun said in the interests of precision. "There were a hundred and five accidental fatalities during the voyage and return, though of course the serious costs were logistical."
"The serious costs to the Unity were logistical," I said, precise in turn. "And our duty is to the Unity. But Miss Chun—have you considered the problem of reintegrating former combat personnel into civilian society?"
Miss Chun stiffened almost imperceptibly. She was wondering if my mental condition hadn't deteriorated abruptly after all. "I'm aware that the problem exists, sir," she said. "It appears to me as inevitable as the danger posed by lightning storms. Neither threatens society as a whole because of the relative rarity of the event."
"They aren't criminals in the normal sense," I said. "The likelihood of a former combat soldier violating laws for the sake of gain is significantly lower than that of a non-veteran doing the same thing. The risk is that they may react with extreme violence to social constraints on their behavior."
Miss Chun walked to her console in the corner. Even with an implant the amount of information one can absorb is limited. Until now Miss Chun had scanned only a summarized report on the Maxus 377 expeditionary force. She called up the full data, from inception to the present.
I had viewed the same file a few minutes before she entered the office.