The Lost Stars: Tarnished Knight

That was the problem with space. On rare occasions, things happened way too fast, with only moments to make crucial decisions and only tiny fractions of a second to engage the enemy, but by far the majority of the time everything happened slowly. Even with the tremendous velocities that modern spacecraft could achieve, it took a long time to cover billions of kilometers, and light itself seemed slow when it took hours to cross the distance between you and another group of ships, or between you and a planet. The flotilla she had sent to the second planet to chase off the snake-controlled warships had left nearly twelve hours ago, but was still nearly three hours from getting there even when traveling at thirty thousand kilometers a second. And whenever the snake-controlled warships reacted to the approach of that flotilla, it would take her about an hour and a half simply to see it.

Simultaneously bored and tense, finding it hard to focus on the decisions that had to be made at some point but not immediately, Iceni thought about Marphissa’s proposal to name the battleship. If she named that battleship, then there would have to be names for the other warships as well, the cruisers and the HuKs. Was there supposed to be some kind of system to that?

If there was, the Alliance would use such a system. And naming conventions were the sort of thing Alliance prisoners would have spoken freely about since they didn’t involve anything the Syndicate Worlds could have used in the war. Iceni did a search of interrogation results, finding a series of reports on that very topic.

The first answered a question she had actually wondered about for some time but never gotten around to looking up an answer for. Why didn’t the Alliance politicians stroke their egos by naming Alliance battleships and battle cruisers after themselves? The answer involved those same egos, because it turned out they could never agree on who got the honor, instead engaging in endless squabbles. Which raises the question of why the Syndicate Worlds never named our battleships and battle cruisers after the highest-ranking CEOs. I can’t believe the Alliance politicians have bigger egos than the top CEOs that I’ve encountered. Maybe our CEOs, like their politicians, couldn’t agree on whom among them to honor.

Why not name the battleship after her? The Iceni. There was something breathtaking about the idea of a battleship Iceni. But something in her felt a little odd at the idea, too, as if she were an incredibly ancient ruler with an incredibly huge ego constructing a massive monument to herself. Like one of those . . . what were they called . . . pyramids back on Old Earth.

Still . . . All right, say I name it after me. If all goes well, at some point we will find a way to get another battleship or a battle cruiser. I’d have to name it after Drakon. Assuming that something hasn’t happened to Drakon before that. But then what about a third? Who gets that name? I’ve seen how vicious internal fights can get over far smaller issues of ego and precedence and recognition. Do I really want that kind of headache? Do I want my largest warships to be pretentious monuments to living politicians? And what if I named one Drakon, and he and I had a falling-out? Rename it. Maybe rename it again. And again. And the name means nothing to anyone because everyone knows it’s just a flavor-of-the-month sort of thing.

Could the Syndicate bureaucracy’s refusal to give warships names have actually been a smart thing to do given the way CEOs are? I suppose even the Syndicate bureaucracy gets things right every once in a while.