“Other than age? No,” Rigney said. “She ran fine. Runs fine, as you’ll discover when you put her through her paces. She’s just old. There are a lot of klicks on this ship, and eventually being on her began to look like a hardship assignment.”

“Hmmm,” Coloma said.

“But it’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it,” Rigney said, quickly, moving past the implied but unintentional insult he’d just offered Coloma. “If you’re new to space travel, and don’t have your own fleet of ships, then what you and I see as old and past its prime will look shiny and new. The folks from Earth who we are proposing to sell this ship to are going to look at this baby as their first step into the wider universe. It’s right about their speed.”

“So that’s my job,” Coloma said. “Take a hand-me-down and convince the rubes they’re getting something that’s top of the line.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that, Captain,” Rigney said. “We’re not trying to deceive the folks from Earth. They know we’re not offering them the latest technology. But they also know they’re not trained and ready to handle our latest ships. The only real spacefaring tech they’ve had to this point are shuttlecraft working around the space station over their planet. We’ve handled everything else up to now.”

“So we’re giving them a ship with training wheels on it,” Coloma said.

“We prefer to think of it as that we’re offering them a classic piece of technology to learn on and build from,” Rigney said. “You know the Earth folks aren’t happy with the Colonial Union right now.”

Coloma nodded; that was common knowledge. And she couldn’t blame them. If she were from Earth and discovered that the Colonial Union had been using the entire planet as a farm for soldiers and colonists, she’d be pissed at it, too.

“What you probably don’t know is that the Earth folks aren’t just talking to us,” Rigney said. “The Conclave has been very aggressively courting them, too. It would be very bad for the Colonial Union if Earth decided to join the Conclave, and not just because we’d be fresh out of colonists and CDF. This ship is one of the ways we’re hoping to get back on their good side.”

“Then why are you selling it to them, sir?” Balla asked. “Why not just give it to them?”