A Time for War, a Time for Peace - Keith R. A. DeCandido [27]
Helga shook her head. “I’m not sure cautious is the right way to go. I mean, no, we shouldn’t come out in favor of some of the ludicrous things Zife signed off on, but we still need to be aggressive if we’re going to impress people enough to win this.” She turned to Nan. “I know you were being facetious, but to actually answer the question you asked when you came in, one of the reasons why it’s best to run now, as opposed to next year or four years from now, is that your star is pretty bright right now. The treaty with the Metrons was huge, and it’s made you a name people outside the Cestus system might actually recognize. But that recognition will only go so far. If we come across as too tentative or cautious, no one will pay any attention. Or worse, they’ll think you’re another Jaresh-Inyo.”
Nan leaned forward. “First of all, what in hell makes you think I was being facetious before? And secondly, Jaresh-Inyo was a good person.”
“Yes, but he let Starfleet fool him into declaring martial law. That killed his political career.”
“And,” Esperanza added, “paved the way for Zife to get elected. His leadership was a big reason why we won the war.”
Helga smiled sweetly. “Not the best example to use, Esperanza, given how he wound up.”
“Zife may not have been the right person to lead in a time of peace,” Esperanza said, “but that doesn’t change that he was very much the right person to lead us in war.”
“The war’s been over for almost four years now.”
Nan angrily placed her mug down on the end table next to her. The ceramic on plastiform made a very satisfying clunk. “Anybody else want to mention that the war was four years ago? ‘Cause I’m old and I don’t retain facts all that well, so it’s good to remind me every five minutes.” She leaned back in her chair. “All right, fine, tell me this: How would I handle it if half the planets in the Federation suddenly decided to secede? Or if a bunch of energy creatures decided to turn us all into giant newts? I’ve got to admit, I’m pretty damn curious to know.”
“Governor—” Esperanza started.
“If you’d asked me six years ago how I’d handle a big Gorn ship showing up in the system and blasting Pike City all to hell, I would’ve gotten a good laugh out of it and said, ‘What a stupid question. We haven’t heard hide nor scale from the Gorn in a hundred years, what makes you think they’ll attack us now?’ Truth is, any answer I give to a question like that is going to be crap, and anyone with half a brain is going to know it’s crap, and frankly I don’t want to be elected by a Federation with half a brain. Do I know how to handle a crisis? Hell, yes, I handled dozens of them. Do I know how I’ll handle the next one? Hell, no. There’s no blueprint for these kinds of things, and to pretend there is one is to just insult people’s intelligence. We can send people through space at thousands of times the speed of light, we can speak instantaneously to people halfway across the galaxy, we can cure most of the ailments and diseases out there, but we still can’t figure out how to predict the future, and until we do, questions like this are just a knuckleball in the dirt, and I’m not gonna swing at it.”
The lounge was silent for several seconds.
Fred put down his teacup. “Works for me.”
“I like it,” Ashanté said.
Helga looked confused. “What’s a knuckleball?”
Esperanza quickly said, “Baseball.”
“Oh, okay.”
Nan suppressed a chuckle as she dry-sipped from her now-empty coffee mug. They make these damn things too small. Getting up to get a fresh cup from the replicator, she added Helga’s lack of baseball knowledge to the growing list of things she didn’t especially like about her deputy campaign manager. True,