'Well,' said Aveya briskly once the man had finished speaking, 'you may be right about me, but you won't be winning your diplomat's stars any time soon either, Citizen Vanguard.' Blissfully ignorant of what had been going through his head, and with that mask giving nothing at all away, she had to draw her own conclusions. One of which was that he had likely been expecting something else – someone else, really – and she would doubtless prove a disappointment. But that didn't mean that she couldn't learn anything from the exchange.
She regarded him carefully, head tilted a little. 'What would the lesson have been if you had managed to disarm me? Not that you wanted to kill me. We've already established that isn't happening. Not that you're bigger and stronger and physically capable of it, because that much is obvious.' That had been one of the very first lessons in the militia on Nammu, with the point being made that a gun was a great leveller. Provided you knew what you were doing.
'Which leaves what – that I should have kept my distance because you aren't trustworthy?' She shrugged. Aveya had spent two of her formative years in very cramped quarters with other trainee kids aboard a starship. She'd figured out quickly that the ones who liked to talk about what they could do to you weren't the ones you needed to worry about. 'If we're going to share anything we have to trust each other at least enough for that.'
'And as for my militia? Of course the government knows about it. They know exactly what I want them to know. Why would they dismantle a citizen's defense force – how did you put it? Boy scouts? My goal is to give average people the knowledge to take care of themselves in a crisis. That's true whether the crisis is natural, or caused by other people. Government or not. If I did things your way, and they discovered a secret militia someway down the line, of course they'd try to shut it down. That'd be needless, wasteful conflict, even if they didn't succeed.'
She finished this little speech with one hand on her hip, confident. The Nammu government found its citizen's militia useful. The companies and the inner worlds didn't care what a little colony like Nammu did. Aveya might be mistrustful of authority – sensibly, given her experiences – but her solution wasn't to attack it but to act independently of it, treat it as irrelevant without being deliberately antagonistic.