decide have to serve hundreds of worlds for a very long time, so we have to get it right.”
Leaving the others to stare, they turned and walked slowly along the wide promenade deck, occasionally glancing out the wide bank of windows to one side. If Richart Lake had been taken by surprise by this remarkable approach to interstellar diplomacy, he also seemed quietly impressed. For his own part, Velmeran was beginning to suspect that there was more of the old Jon Lake in his grandson Richart than anyone had credited. “I am going to make a deal with you,” the Starwolf continued. “The first problem with such negotiations is that each side must figure out what the other wants, then work to some mutual agreement. That slows things down and adds too much opportunity for error. I am going to tell you what I want out of this, and you are going to tell me what you want.”
Lake made some vague gesture of agreement. “Very well.”
Velmeran glanced out the window, where a Starwolf cruiser was drifting in a shared orbit with the station, quietly standing guard. “The Starwolves want out of the business of war. We want lives of our own and the ability to find our own destinies. We want the assurance of knowing that no one will ever again treat us like machines or property. The human race is going to have to learn to police its own conscience.”
Lake nodded. “The Sector Families want out of the business of government. Too many headaches and too much grief. We want to salvage what we can of our business, but we are willing to give up our monopolies.”
“It took you fifty thousand years to decide this?” Velmeran asked.
“No, we like things just the way they’ve always been,” Lake corrected him. “There is tremendous profit in monopolies and despotism, but we see that we’ve lost the war. We can draw this out and force you to reduce us to poverty, or we can call an end to this now and salvage what we can. So we offer you this deal. We will make it easy for you and give you an immediate end to this war. We surrender nearly all political power, and we break up the Companies into reasonable sizes. In return, you allow us to survive — as free citizens — and to keep just enough of our previous holdings to keep us from going begging.”
Velmeran considered that, and nodded. “That can be arranged. You deserve some reward for being reasonable.”
Lake frowned. “Now we come to the part you might not like, considering what you have just said. Union space is big and very diverse. For thousands of years now, only two things have kept it together. One has been Starwolf threat. The other is simple greed, and the Union has been an enormously profitable venture for a long time. If you Starwolves simply disappear, the Union will fall apart and be at war with itself in a matter of years.”
Velmeran stopped to stare at him. “Are you telling me that after fighting this war for five hundred centuries, you now expect us to fight your peace?”
Velmeran stepped onto the bridge of the Valcyr, looking about in curiosity. Whatever he might have expected of a ship so immensely old, he had never thought that it would look exactly like any other carrier he had ever seen. There were exactly as many stations at the bridge, in exactly the same order. When the Starwolves found a design they liked, they apparently stayed with it. The first real difference in their design had come with the construction of the Vardon, adapted to accommodate new technology and an extra pair of main drives.
Quendari Valcyr’s camera pod rotated around to watch him as he entered, the lenses rotating to focus on him. Her movements reminded him for a moment of Valthyrra, particularly in the way she moved her boom into position just a moment before the camera pod itself completed its own turn. It was a very lifelike gesture, imitating the way that most intelligent beings would often turn their heads a moment before cutting their eyes in the direction of whatever they saw. It was an acquired gesture rather than preprogrammed, and not all of the ships shared it.
“Welcome aboard, Commander,” she said.
“Welcome home, Quendari Valcyr,” he replied. “Keflyn has told me of your resourcefulness. Do you feel ready to rejoin the fleet?”
“Yes, I believe that I should,” she agreed. “I have almost waited too long, it seems.”
“No, we need you more than ever now,” he said. “I would like to begin moving crewmembers on board right away and have you back out again in a few days. That leaves only the problem of finding you a Commander.”
“I would like to have Keflyn,” the ship said without hesitation.
“That is entirely your own choice,” Velmeran told her. “If you want, I can help you to find someone with more command experience.”
“Keflyn and I seem to understand each other very well,” Quendari explained. “We are both a little short on battle experience. But I am no warrior, no matter what role I was designed to fill, and the war is over anyway.”
Velmeran nodded. “Perhaps your time has come, and none of us will be warriors any longer. I certainly hope so.”
Velmeran turned to leave, walking quickly toward the lift. The lift doors opened just before he arrived, and Keflyn stepped out. He took a step back and bowed. “Your ship, Commander.”
“So, that is how it is done?” Keflyn asked, looking about as if she expected a little more ceremony during the naming of a ship’s Commander. “I never thought that you would agree.”
“The ships name their own Commanders,” he told her. “You should never interfere with that. I think Quendari needs a friend just now. Someone she trusts. Take care of her.”
Velmeran entered the lift and the door snapped shut. Keflyn turned and stepped out slowly onto the bridge. Quendari brought her camera pod around to face her as she walked up to stand just before the lenses of the pod. “Hello, Quendi. I have brought you something.”
She brought out a large, red, velvet ribbon, already tied with an adjustable loop. Keflyn slipped the loop around the pod and pulled it tight, checking the fit. Quendari lifted her pod slightly, as if uncertain how to reply. She was struggling with new emotions and responses that were beyond her very limited experience.
“This is life,” Keflyn said. “Any regrets?”
“I grieved thousands of years for the loss of a very short, happy time in my life,” Quendari said. “That time will always be special to me, because it was the first time in my life that I was happy. Now I am content. Thank you, my friend.”
Matters resolved themselves much more quickly and easily than Velmeran had expected, and all he had to do was wait for the pieces to all fall into place and then interpret them correctly. The final, missing piece had come with the unexpected arrival of the Valcyr and her tale of where she had spent her time. He decided that the gods of fortune must have forgiven him all the way around.
At first, he was at a loss to determine a way to salvage the Union that he thought the delegates would be willing to accept. The easiest solution, of course, was to declare that the human race could bloody well destroy itself if it had not yet learned to behave itself, and allow them to have at it. That was tempting, but Velmeran could not ignore an appeal for help. The Starwolves had invested too much in the human race to allow them to destroy themselves in war or genetic decay, at least as long as they were willing to try. But he wanted to find a solution that involved the Starwolves to the least possible extent, putting the greatest responsibility on the Union to police itself.
The answer that he eventually arrived at was to balance the forces that would now be acting upon the Union, using the threat of war to discourage fragmentation and the threat of alien intervention to discourage war. He sat down with the delegates and a large map of all of human space, both Union and Republic, and drew a line that divided the whole into two exactly even parts, each half of Union space getting an even half of Republic space. One half became the new Republic, with its capital at Vannkarn on Vinthra. The other half, after some confusion and deliberation, adopted the name Terran Confederation.
In order to strike a perfect balance, the two interstellar nations drafted exactly the same constitutions with exactly the same governmental structure. To insure peaceful cooperation and even development between the Republic and the Terran Confederation, they were joined together with the Kelvessan in the Triple Alliance, a hypothetical super nation with a congress which met at regular intervals. As an added insurance, both the Alliance and the Starwolves themselves had the legal right to intervene in the government of either nation if the terms of the treaties were violated.
That left the Kelvessan looking for someplace to call home. Velmeran had been quietly entertaining thoughts of his own ever since the unexpected appearance of the Valcyr. Terra, because of its shift into a colder, deeper
