a geekish argument that resulted in most of Saturday afternoon being wasted in an attempt to stat up a Nemesis-variant Warlord Titan using GURPS Vehicles
I'd love to see this. That kind of work deserves to be enshrined.
Loved the after action report, and you did get my tendency to favor fighters(and missiles) over guns. As well as my propensity to sprawl/put my feet on things. Although I must admit feeling only distant relation to a character not as lazy as I am.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
Wow-wow-wooow... extremely good fanfic. Took me about 3 weeks to read, too much work and yadda yadda. Atleast I win first price for being slow
My initial reaction was opposite. As soon as I read about a female stormtrooper I thought this was the work of someone who knows almost nothing of the Star Wars universe. But boy, I was prooved wrong Actually I really like all the details from games, WEG and so on, that you have put together in this very realistic universe. But I think what really lifts this fanfic is how you portray all the individuals in different sections of the ship, and how they they interact and have distinct personalities, morals and goals. And I love that no one are stereotypes (even Adannan can admit he was an idiot), and no one is "perfect". I could keep rambling about how good this is, but 'nuff said for now
Just one thing: Stormtroopers are elite and you portray them so - thank you very much
I guess it's too late to get in the story? My real name is Alex Overgaard, my nick could maybe pass for a ship name, but in my favorite Star Wars rpg my ship is named Relentless. I've also had another ship, Dark Millenium, a twist off Millenium Falcon. But there doesn't seen to be any open spots left on the imperial side, and I don't wanna be a reb
AradoX wrote:I guess it's too late to get in the story? My real name is Alex Overgaard, my nick could maybe pass for a ship name, but in my favorite Star Wars rpg my ship is named Relentless. I've also had another ship, Dark Millenium, a twist off Millenium Falcon. But there doesn't seen to be any open spots left on the imperial side, and I don't wanna be a reb
You could aim for having a supply ship that is bringing new parts for that fleet tender.
Bet it gets a bit true it's spareparts meant for repair work.
I'm guessing that it would generate some kind of back-scatter/ion storm/rad spike/Mag Pulse. Whatever it is, it's not hard to guess the purpose-to blind and confuse the OpFor's sensors.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
I came back late last night from a two-day show that had somehow turned into four days worth of chaos including a funeral and a fortieth birthday party; I'm still in 'blyuurgh' mode and I may have contracted scrapie [I really, really hope this turns out to have been a joke], so any update will be round about next weekend.
I may not be making much sense, but to start with, Vehrec's spot on; it was to disrupt the radiation belt and make electromagnetic noise, not really battle-altering in itself but a useful suplement to Black Prince's own barrage jammers. I can try and come up with a number for that, by the update, but I think it's not going to be the initial flare as much as the after effects that matter.
Caliphant is going to have to take a larger share of ship operations; Group Captain Konstantin Vehrec is a fighter jock, and there is a time and a place to have the pilot couch in your TIE Avenger replaced by a Lay-Z-Boy, and a time to be bold, creative and daring- hopefully in a way that sets the reputation high enough that you can afford to relax a bit. Didn't quite work.
I am an old WEGgie, but you have to bear in mind that they had the license for a decade, more or less, before there was an internet- powered, technically literate fandom around to set them straight; and their other games, well, they were not exactly interested in realism. I mean, one of the selling points of Paranoia was "some really dubious abuses of the laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy."
Take the fluff, take the concepts, take some of the ideas they came up with, and throw the numbers away. They produced a fine roleplaying experience, but it was not the whole story, and should not have been adopted as the foundations for such. I don't blame them for the sloppy bits of the EU any more than parents should be held responsible for the crimes of their children.
The titan, I'm going to have another go at and see if it gets any better. Powerplant and weight of armour are the biggest headaches; even with a fusion plant delivering 1 kw per 90 grams, outrageously good, it was still awkward to fit more than a 50gw setup- I ended up with nearly 6,000 tons, ground pressure of 115psi, top speed on ground capable of taking it, if there is such a thing, of 119.6 mph. More in OSF, maybe.
Alex, hello and welcome, and I'll see what I can manage- although you may not survive the experience.
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:I came back late last night from a two-day show that had somehow turned into four days worth of chaos including a funeral and a fortieth birthday party; I'm still in 'blyuurgh' mode and I may have contracted scrapie [I really, really hope this turns out to have been a joke], so any update will be round about next weekend.
I may not be making much sense
By the sounds of it, you shouldn't be anyhow; sorry to hear you're feeling poorly. Get better, m'kay?
I am an old WEGgie, but you have to bear in mind that they had the license for a decade, more or less, before there was an internet- powered, technically literate fandom around to set them straight; and their other games, well, they were not exactly interested in realism. I mean, one of the selling points of Paranoia was "some really dubious abuses of the laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy."
For starters, Paranoia was the greatest RP system ever devised. The rules were so brokenly farcical that you had to ignore them half the time anyhow, which I'm was the point, and made for a great setup for hysterical RP.
As far as WEG goes, I have to admit I'm in agreement with you. I played a story or two out with a few friends of mine, and some of the settings we nicked (and mangled admittedly) were pretty neat. And if nothing else, there's a lot of stuff out there, and largely unhindered by silly things like character development. (Not that the novels were either, but the supplements were at least distilled geekiness.)
Alex, hello and welcome, and I'll see what I can manage- although you may not survive the experience.
Aww, but that's half the fun. I actually considered volunteering for a moment just for that (and to see another female Imperial wandering around). I decided against it, since I don't want to cause a character bloat problem. But still, seeing a personified avatar suffer is one of the high points of fantasies for me. (Still not sure if this qualifies me as a sadist, or a masochist, but so it goes.)
I'm looking forward to the next part.
"Hey, gang, we're all part of the spleen!"
-PZ Meyers
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:I am an old WEGgie, but you have to bear in mind that they had the license for a decade, more or less, before there was an internet- powered, technically literate fandom around to set them straight; and their other games, well, they were not exactly interested in realism. I mean, one of the selling points of Paranoia was "some really dubious abuses of the laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy."
Take the fluff, take the concepts, take some of the ideas they came up with, and throw the numbers away. They produced a fine roleplaying experience, but it was not the whole story, and should not have been adopted as the foundations for such.
Exactly, apart from the numbers, WEG made many good things. So when WotC released their d20 Star Wars I was a happy man. On the day it was released I borrowed my parents car and drove with a friend to the shop, bought it, went home, read it, and hated it... This experience was too much for me. So the same day I started making my own Star Wars rpg-system, using TSR's Alternity (now discontinued after TSR was acquisitioned by WotC ). After these years my "Rogue Rules" are now about 100 A4 pages.
Alex, hello and welcome, and I'll see what I can manage- although you may not survive the experience.
Apparently I'm not dead; whatever kind of bug it was that hit about half a dozen of us, it wasn't that bad- comparing notes, it seemed to hit me hardest and burn out fastest; I had a thoroughly rotten couple of days but I'm more or less OK now. The rest of the group seem to have caught a slower- burning version of the same bug.
Eris, you're in this one, I decided to write you in anyway, in a form in which you can suffer all you like. Hope you don't mind.
This segment is basically a relatively slow burner, intra- Imperial manoeuvring is beginning- Brenn has it right about the cruiser, something political and/or improbable has indeed happened.
Ch 28
Black Prince’s Fighter Direction Centre was usually busy, even when there was nothing much going on. There were always situations to be monitored, exercises to be run, ground services to be coordinated.
Initially a cavernous, empty space, it had long since been modified- a web of internal bracing, then deck plates laid over them, converting the open pit and tiers of wall galleries into three separate decks.
The main tactical tank was still in place on the original lower deck, with the controllers’ subchambers for the four squadrons of the fighter wing around it, but the next deck up was operational planning, surface action support, and the control pens for the bomb wing, and the top deck maintenance and status, and control for the transports and multirole wing.
In the operational planning bay, Air Commodore Olleyri and his control team were doing their own post-exercise analysis.
‘Countermoves. What do you do about an enemy fighter force that’s turtled in a planet of your own system? How do you deal with the sort of threat we presented there? Ideas?’ Olleyri asked- most of the senior controllers and the squadron and wing leaders were gathered with him around the central display table.
‘Ignore it.’ Beta One said. ‘As such. They stay in there, they’re neutralised. They come out to fight, we pursue and intercept as normal. How close were you,’ he asked Iota One, ‘to running out of air?’
‘It’s not the air that’s the problem, it’s the fuel and ordnance. To get any real advantage from that situation, we have to move fast, which is the main reason the TIE lifesystem is crap.’ Iota One said.
‘The fuel is the limiting factor, the life system was designed down to that. Upgrading is trivial, but to get any really greater combat endurance, we need more fuel, which is vicious circle time again. Hit and run especially.’
‘You’re just jealous because you haven’t got a hyperdrive.’ Beta One said.
‘It is more fuel efficient for those Alliance clunkers to short- jump than thrust a lot of the time- which means high relative velocity when we overrun them and strafe them to bits. Swings and roundabouts.’
‘Waiting out TIEs might work, but think operational. We often won’t have the luxury of time, due to political pressure. Rahandravell?’ The boss turned to the newest, and temporary, addition to his team of controllers.
Franjia’s hoverchair was bobbing up and down beside the main display table; she was out of her hospital bed, but they wouldn’t let her get back into the cockpit yet.
Worse, instead of letting her join and lead Epsilon in the battle, from a sim tank, Olleyri had ordered her to join him in the direction centre. He had made a joke of it, mocking her sim habit, but it was also an order.
‘The hidden lair is less important than hidden eyes. It’s recon assets the hidden force needs more than anything else- so whoever has jamming ascendancy has the edge. The attacking force can’t time their lunges, can’t reliably find weak points to strike.’ She said.
‘Blanket barrage jamming, in a friendly system, has several disadvantages. Traffic control, for one- and if civilian freighters are wandering around blind, deaf and dumb, that makes them easy targets.’ Olleyri countered.
‘So you- ahh. That ought to work. Spysats and probe droids around the planet, create a line of control, oh.’
‘Turns into a meeting engagement on the fringes of the atmosphere, advantage defender. So you do it as a two-parter, fast flyby shootings by one team, take out the eyes, when the opposition move out to defend them the second team in closer orbit ambushes them- with luck piecemeal, if not?’ He let her come up with the next piece of the puzzle.
‘Fly an evasive holding action and take what you can while the second formation rejoins the fight. We-‘
There was a buzz from the com terminal, Olleyri turned to it. ‘CAG. What’s the situation, bridge?’
‘Incoming transport dangerously overdue.’ It was Brenn, playing the part of the Captain’s shadow as ever. ‘We were supposed to rendesvous with a Modular Cruiser which was tasked to take the rebel prisoners off our hands before they could do anything, for instance attempt to escape.’
‘Now it’s passed from late to missing presumed lost, and you want us to sweep for it. Why would the rebs hit a prisoner transport on the way to the pickup, not the way back?’ Olleyri wondered.
‘No good reason, so it’s almost certainly a bad one.’ Brenn said, meaning that at best something improbable had happened, at worst something political. Olleyri nodded slightly to show he understood; Brenn continued
‘Long range scan has nothing, don’t even start looking at less than seventy-five light years out. You’ll have backup so load for anti- fighter, we’ll have course menus ready to download in twenty minutes.’
‘Sir, can I-‘ Franjia began.
‘No.’ Olleyri said. ‘They say another four days before you’re fit. Assuming they’re being overcautious as usual, count on another two days before I let you try to get killed again.’
‘Aye, aye, Sir.’ She said, disappointed- although it wasn’t that unreasonable. ‘This is going to be a squadron operation?’
‘No, we’ll be deploying every hyperdrive capable fighter we can muster, backed up by the corvettes. Pass the alert then fifteen minute break, everyone, get calories and stim up, this is going to be a long search or a short encounter battle.’
Lennart had taken his chief engineer’s advice; the reports would take a little time to write up anyway, he could afford a hundred minutes for fencing practise, and if the command team were going to have to take an increasing share of running the ship, they may as well start now. Brenn had been left in charge of organising the recon sweep for the missing modular cruiser, for a start.
Once- back when he was a junior officer- he had carried a datapad with him everywhere, constantly scribbling down notes, trivia, facts and events, trying to get his head around what was happening.
Now, although he did his best to hoover up any information that crossed his path, he tried to keep it all in his head. Partly to keep his brain fit, partly so that he could be busy while managing to look cool, calm and collected.
He supposed that the force had been helping him with that too, and cursed it for it- then realised what he was doing. That was one of their recruitment techniques, wasn’t it?
The force flows through all things, influences and affects everything you do. You aren’t the person you thought you were anyway- so give in and become one with the force.
Balls to that, Lennart thought. The main question is, to what extent were the Jedi honest practitioners, and to what extent a self- perpetuating cult? To what extent was it necessary to follow their code to safely and effectively wield the Force, and to what extent was it a matter of what amounted to brainwashing?
This turbolift needs more ‘turbo’, he thought, grumpily. They give far too much time to think. He wondered how many defaulters, hauled into the Captain’s presence for transgressions too severe for a divisional officer to deal with, had been saved by a lift- by the time it gave them to come up with some explanation or answer?
Or how many had been condemned by being given too much time, enough to overdo it and trip up on their own lies.
Which does connect right back to the question. Their relationship to the force had been a kind of institutionalised schizophrenia, as he saw it; on one hand so terrified of falling to the dark side that they ruled much of what the force was capable of to be off limits, on the other hand virtually abolishing their own personalities to enslave themselves to it.
Or fear, he realised. If Gethrim was right, and looking at the short list he had put together he seemed to be, the Force was a thing of feelings and emotions, needs and drives above all else; exactly what the jedi forbade themselves. So the traditional way was out- even before taking order 66 into account.
Or possibly sublimated their feelings by only allowing themselves to experience them through the force. If the modern- well, immediate prewar- Jedi Order was a decayed remnant of it’s former self, corrupted into near uselessness by a small green fool who couldn’t distinguish the means from the end, then what had it originally been?
Had it always been without a mandate to help people? For some professions- the strongest example he could think of was from the medical side- simply doing their jobs well would ensure that good things happened to people, and any emotional involvement would represent a loss of ability to do the job.
So relentless perfectionism was the only permissible, and in the last analysis only necessary, form of compassion.
How could you have the Force, be literally one in a trillion at the most generous estimate, and not try to be either a hero or a villain? There must have been a mandate. Couldn’t not have been.
So the ‘no attachments’ rule made a kind of sense after all, except that somehow the original purpose had got lost along the way, the rule itself had become the objective.
The jedi order had reduced itself to accepting only the young and the impressionable, and dedicated itself to the waste and disuse of it’s power.
What were the traditional branches of the order- consular, guardian, sentinel? If there ever had been such a thing as a Jedi Knight- Errant, they were more than a thousand years extinct.
The lift doors hissed open on the office bay of Main Machinery-2. As per standing orders, no-one who was actually busy bothered to stand up and salute. They acknowledged him, of course, but not the full leap to feet, click heels and dislocate elbow ritual.
For a moment, he started to reach for his sabre. How dare they? How did these insignificant worms, these nobodies who only breathed by his will, fail to grovel in his presence? He should-
He should smack himself upside the head, before he lost the plot entirely. He just stood there, reeling slightly from the bolt-from-the-blue flash of anger that had nearly possessed him.
‘Skipper, you OK?’ the watch officer asked.
‘No, no, I don’t think I am.’ He said, dragging himself back to some kind of normality. He took a deep breath and started again.
‘There are some strange things happening in my head, and I also have a rather urgent need to practise hitting people. Given both those facts, do you have such a thing as a sparring droid, expendable or at least rebuildable?’
Never mind the grapevine, he thought, I’ve just dropped a bloody melon. That’ll get around fast.
‘Not in one piece, I don’t think, Sir. Ten minutes?’
Ah, Lennart thought. The dark side has enough brains to find a natural point of weakness. On some near surface, automatic- formal level, I do expect to be honoured and obeyed.
‘If you could find a live opponent, someone good enough that I’m unlikely to be able to hurt him even if I do lose the plot?’ he asked.
‘Sir.’ The watch officer contained his surprise fairly well, sent one of the leading spacemen off to look.
As the captain of an Imperator-class destroyer, I must rank high on any scale of authoritarianism, he thought. And yet I’ve used the contradictions in the regulations- which are not nearly as large or as many as I usually make them out to be- to throw half of them away and rewrite the other half to suit.
My ship looks like a wreck, my crew are half crazy already; and somehow they still jump when I tell them to. So, this illusion of freedom thing, who’s fooling who?
Between training, background, being on the receiving end of propaganda, they know how ruthless the Empire can be, probably better than I do. So what makes more sense- that I have managed to create some kind of microcosm, or that a man from a planet notorious for spawning chancers, rulebreakers, oddballs and maniacs is kidding himself?
Are their collective forty-six thousand minds more intelligent than my one? For some things, maybe. For speedy and decisive action in a crisis, no, which is why a ship has to have a captain and he has to be an autocrat.
For social judgement, yes, many vague takes may be better than one sharp. Even disregarding the natural effect of perspective, as between giver and receiver of orders and punishment, obviously I am more of a bastard than I like to admit.
So treat this as a problem. What are the potential outcomes, and what are the tools to hand? Is unstinting self- knowledge the key? Kriff, I hope not, considering I’ve just put off getting a midichlorian count for twenty years.
Self- deception might be more to the point, considering how much of the Force seemed to be based on it. No, he decided. I am going to treat this as if it was a behaviour- altering disease, move slowly, think very carefully, examine every action to see whether it is a product of the affliction.
Which is actually the strongest argument anyone’s come up with for embracing the force yet- the time involved in fighting it.
‘Sir? This way.’ The watch officer said; Lennart followed him.
As Captain, the only part of the ship off limits to him was the imperial suite, everywhere else he could go as he pleased; having to be invited to join the wardroom was convention and tradition, not law.
That didn’t mean he had. Main Machinery- 1 he was reasonably familiar with, but that was the clean bright and shiny end; central control complexes, offices, planning and refresher training.
Main Machinery-2 was a warren of workshops and laboratories and storerooms, folded away like the intestines of the ship. Lennart suspected they moved the bulkheads around from time to time anyway, just to stay in practise.
The training hall was almost empty; between routine maintenance, the axial defence turrets, and the major repair job in progress on the Comarre Meridian, most of Black Prince’s engineers had no time and energy spare to keep up their practise.
Disused machine tools and pieces of tools along one long bulkhead, including the casing of a second- hand molecular furnace that Mirannon swore was no longer radioactive, storage bins along the other.
There were four men there, obviously waiting for him; two leading hands, a petty officer and a reactor charge chief, Vilberksohn.
‘Morning, Charge chief.’ Lennart said, addressing the senior rank as per protocol.
‘Morning, Captain.’ Vilberksohn said, trying not to sound bleary. ‘You have a sudden need to hit people, Sir?’ At five in the kriffing AM, he didn’t quite say.
‘That too, Charge chief.’ He brought out the lightsabre, thought about it. Shoved it back in his pocket. ‘The closest you have would probably be a welding torch. I want to try that.’
Five torches were retrieved from one of the storage bins, Lennart was handed one of them. ‘Ever used one of these before, Sir?’
‘No, not in anger anyway.’
They looked at each other, thinking it’s true, the old man’s finally flipped; Lennart caught them doing it, they snapped back to eyes- front. He couldn’t really blame them.
‘Shall we start with the basics?’ the Charge Chief said, not quite entirely concealing his scepticism.
‘May as well, but the accelerated version, you hear? We have just under ten days, now, before this might matter.’
They thought about that and leaped to a correct conclusion. ‘Then, Sir, the only move you really need to know is how to trap his blade, and then shoot him with the blaster you should have in your other hand.’ Vilberksohn said.
‘That might be just a little too basic.’ Lennart said. Never mind the fact that he might be expecting it.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Captain, the biomechanics of this are fascinating, and there’s more than a human lifespan’s worth of information on sword and pseudo-sword fighting, it’s a great hobby, but there are easier ways of killing somebody.’
‘I know you’re trying to help, Vilberksohn, but the politics of the situation mean this is the way it has to be. No shortcuts.’
‘Aye, aye, Sir.’ Vilberksohn said, words correct, tone deeply sceptical. He activated the blades, said ‘Exercise setting.’
‘These are non-standard, then?’ Lennart asked.
‘Sir, as a tool, you’re looking for precise control response, focused on the task, not time critical, for a weapon you’re looking at a totally different set of requirements, you cannot afford to need to control the thing precisely in a fight. The blob at the back, flip it open.’
The ‘blob’ was a round, oversized pommel; Lennart unfolded it, found a keypad, two thumb sticks, four sliders, two discs.
‘Now seal it up again, Sir, because you don’t need to worry about any of that. As a weapon, we add biometrics and presets so you can reliably voice control the thing.’
On exercise, the blades looked smaller and brighter than they had at first; Lennart waved his through the air to get the feel of it.
‘Sir, exactly how much of this have you done?’
‘Five or six training sessions with Commander Mirannon, I have a hazy, drunken memory of a dawn duel with a minor offshoot of the House of Tagge, and a boarding action during Second Coruscant.
Most of that is a blur, too. I seem to remember jumping on a Destroyer Droid’s back and smashing it’s head in with a vibro-axe…the after action report said it happened, so it must be true.’
There were other reasons why Lennart’s memories of that day were fuzzy, but they were none of his business.
‘So you have spilt oil in anger, then.’ The Charge chief said.
‘DC-15Se in the other hand, too, at least to begin with. You were saying about the basics?’
The charge chief went through the standard cuts, first set direct strikes at the centre of mass, then sweeping cuts, then thrusts, blade simply a continuous arc, a blur.
‘I was being sarcastic, Sir.’ He said- not bothering to stop. ‘Like a true lightsabre, the blade is effectively weightless; all the mass is in the hilt. No momentum, it moves as fast as the hand and eye behind it can move.
The reason the lightsabre is- was- the signature Jedi weapon is that, in anyone else’s hands, the fight’s over in half a second. They’re all offence.
When they meet, it’s down to the strength of the wielder- but you need strength to parry, not to attack. If you can get your opponent to make a major movement in response to a small movement, over-react and leave himself open, you can gut him with a twitch of the wrist.
Sweeping parries and the like are big, wide, slower movements- attack is faster. The only real defence is to get them before they get you.’
Lenart moved his welding torch through the standard moves, getting a few of them wrong, sloppy, working up to speed. He concentrated on exactly how it felt, trying to feel if the Force was at all involved.
‘Lightly, Sir, lightly, the blade does all the work, keep it fluid. Feel up to trying a little free fight?’
‘Depends on how likely I am to be able to walk away from it.’ Lennart said, looking at the blade. ‘Tell me more about this exercise setting.’
‘Basically, Sir, there’s barely enough plasma to pressurise the containment field, and that’s set for fuzzy edge. It’ll scorch, sting and deliver momentum, but it won’t cut and cauterise.’
‘So, rather like being beaten with a red-hot blunt stick.’ Lennart said.
‘Unscientifically put but essentially true, Sir. We find that people take learning more seriously when there’s something at stake.’ The charge chief said, quoting his captain.
‘I am thinking of finally having the ship repainted.’ Lennart said, apparently off hand.
‘Sir.’ Vilberksohn said, formally, snapping his cutting torch to the guard position.
They began; at first circling, warily, Lennart trying to keep his blade between his body and the charge chief’s, thinking defensively in as far as he had any time to think at all.
Pure stimulus and reflex; at most snatched tenths of seconds to form words, to consciously observe- first touch was a blade dropping on to his shoulder, he smashed it aside and thought kriff, wrong, as it flickered back, tipped up and dropped again as he was wildly out of position- Lennart crouched back, out of most of it, but it stung.
He shook his head as if to clear it, said ‘I see what you mean, Charge Chief. How much are you holding back?’
‘Sir, if I just went straight for you, I’d win maybe ninety percent of the time- that’s an estimate. You wouldn’t learn anything. Try again.’
Lennart did; striking for the tip of the charge chief’s blade, it dipped out of the way- so Lennart jerked back out of the way of the return stroke that somehow hovered in front of his eyes, looped around twisting out of the way of a hasty counterstroke, touched him under the lowest left rib.
Lennart reeled back, almost taking his own nose off with the torch, but it wasn’t all impact, most of it was sudden reaction.
He stepped back and brought the blade up to guard position then lashed out in a rolling disarm, Vilberksohn managed to avoid losing his blade, continued the twist to bring it back to guard, Lennart smashed it the other way, got inside and was about to crash the edge of his blade against the Charge Chief’s throat when he realised what he was doing.
So that was how it’s supposed to work, he thought briefly- before Vilberksohn, acting on pure reflex, brought his blade in and up and hit Captain Lennart across the spine. He crumpled, ended up crouching on the ground supporting himself with one arm.
‘Ahhh. I am clearly not looking hard enough at you people- if you can manage to pound each other like this and still turn up fit for duty next day, you obviously don’t have enough to do.’ He said, refusing to be angry.
That flash of speed, where he had seemed to be looking out from slightly behind his own eyeballs, as if he had been plucked out of the universe and put down at a slightly skewed angle- the force. The dark side, to be more specific. It would have done real damage if he hadn’t pulled it short just in time.
‘Sir, if it isn’t bleeding out and hasn’t fallen off, it doesn’t count. Ready?’
No, would be the honest answer. He wanted to go and sit and think about what that felt like, and what it meant. The force didn’t have a mind of it’s own, wasn’t really the product of mind, just of life- but it could exploit his.
It would hit him at what he thought were his own weak points, and it was thirty years too late to start trying to trick it.
Time to see if he could hold it back.
‘Yes.’ Lennart pulled himself back to his feet, raised the cutting torch to try again. This time, another drop on to the shoulder, at first he tried to sweep it aside, then thought that if he pushed the charge chief’s blade away he would simply duck round and in.
He stepped back and tried to push the chief’s blade up in the air with an extended down-and-up sweeping parry. It worked solely because Vilberksohn couldn’t understand what he was trying to do and pulled back.
Lennart tried the same move himself to see how the charge chief handled it; the countermove was sidestep and riposte, twisting in and catching his captain’s left arm.
‘This is getting monotonous.’ Lennart said, shaking himself out and getting ready to try again.
‘Captain, you’re trying too hard. Maybe you’re just not yet ready for a live target.’
‘So convince me.’ Lennart said, returning to guard position, and deliberately trying to reach out for the passive, herbivore side of the force, to form that quasi-religious connection to all things the stories spoke of.
To his considerable surprise, it worked; to his very great relief, it was a genuinely unfamiliar sensation, somewhere between lucid dreaming and fever-induced out of body detachment. He was still marvelling at it when the charge chief’s blade hit him in the gut.
‘Never try that. Never try to wait your opponent into doing something stupid, Sir.’ Vilberksohn said, as Lennart pulled himself together.
‘It’s been a long time since I’ve lost, really lost, at anything. I suppose it’s probably good for my spiritual growth or something, but I could live without it. Let’s try that again.’
‘Captain, Sir, under certain circumstances I think most Imperial spacemen would relish the chance to beat the shit out of their commanding officer, but…maybe you should go back to basics and start with some simple exercises.’
‘How long have you been doing this?’ Lennart asked him.
‘Ten years, Sir. Since before we were famous.’
‘I have ten days before this is going to matter. It’s the deep end or nothing. Let’s-‘
‘Captain?’ it was the duty watch officer, at the entrance to the hall. ‘Urgent from the bridge. They think they’ve found her but the circumstances don’t make sense, they want your presence.’
‘Saved.’ Lennart admitted, clicking off the blade.
In the lift on the way back up to the bridge he asked himself, so what have I learned?
Apart from that getting hit is bad. That whatever natural talent with a lightsabre I have it is going to take a lot of effort, and probably pain, to bring out. That some of my engineers do not have nearly enough to do to keep them out of trouble.
No point punishing him. It was mostly my fault, anyway.
Mainly that if feelings are anything to go by, and in this they are, then he had not been making much use of the Force to date. That surge of disembodied hyperclarity, that was new. Genuinely unfamiliar- apart from the odd student recreational drug experience, which he had never been much for anyway.
And that makes me much happier to realise that my record is basically clean, that I have got this far without needing to call on the force in any but the most preconscious, inexplicit way, than it does to know that I can when I need to, he thought.
The lift doors opened, he walked- limping slightly- through the entry chamber and on to the bridge.
‘Good morning, Captain. You’d think that with thirty-seven thousand people, we’d be able to work shifts.’
Brenn said, yawning slightly. ‘Elements of Gamma and Epsilon are in contact; target’s apparently dropped out of hyperspace to recompute a course, coasting under hotel load.’
‘Everyone else has the privileges of working shifts; department heads are permanently on call. What made you decide that she’s a target rather than a contact?’
‘Positioning.’ Brenn said, called up the sector map. ‘From there, to here, via way-over-yonder? No mechanical malfunction that would leave them in as good a shape as the fighters are reporting could cause that.
A navigational screwup should leave them falling over themselves to call for help or at least make excuses rather than going ‘umm, who me?’ It’s possible that the captain is either an idiot or a lunatic, but- no, I don’t like it.’
‘Com/scan, patch me in. Aerospace group, multirole wing, Gamma One.’ The link beeped when it was established, then ‘Jandras? Black Prince Actual. Have you made any attempt to contact the modular cruiser?’
Aron, riding his still unfamiliar Hunter, was a light second away on the cruiser’s port beam, beyond accurate gun but well within sensor range, lead flight with him, the three of Epsilon lead less Franjia ten thousand kilometres astern and to port.
‘IFF squirt, Captain. Verifies as Imperial- at low confidence. No voice or data, either way.’
‘How does it smell to you?’ Lennart asked.
‘Sour, Captain. Do you want us to go in for a close inspection?’ Aron asked. According to the Hunter’s files, modular cruisers carried a solidly anti-ship armament, bizarrely ineffectual point defence but a decent spread of medium turbolasers, intended to keep off the likes of heavy corvettes and light frigates. Relatively easy for a fighter to approach.
‘Negative, Gamma One, what I may need you for is wild weasel. Plan to make attack runs on her guns and EW emitters. Com,’ he said to his com/scan team, who cut Aron out of the part he didn’t need to know, ‘get me the customs corvettes.’
‘Aye, Sir- wait one, connecting now.’
A holoimage appeared on the main terminal; head and shoulders of a woman in severe-cut customs service uniform. ‘SFA(I) Rontaine, Captain. What is it you need from us?’
Dark, very close-cropped hair, sharp-nosed, hard face- relatively young, but dressed and acted older, Lennart thought. Probably a nightmare to work for.
‘Senior Field Agent (Interdiction)? Which of your clutch of corvettes has the best inspection sensor fit?’ Lennart asked her.
‘All six have the same sensor suite, all of them regularly achieve ‘excellent’ or better efficiency ratings.’ She said, aggressive-defensive. Surprisingly so; how dare you criticise, was the subtext.
‘And all of them could be taken over and run by Starfleet crews, if you keep trying to mess me about. Whatever grudge you have, live with it. Answer the question.’ Lennart said, sharply.
‘There’s no need to be like that.’ Rontaine said, surprised.
‘Really? If I give you a task, are you going to do it, or am I going to have to micromanage you every step of the way?’
There was a long pause. ‘Captain, we seem to have got off to a bad start. What is the mission?’
‘Essentially a customs job. Our stray modular cruiser has finally arrived- sufficiently late to make me suspicious. It’s carrying an interrogation module, with standard prison security shields and baffles. I want to see what’s inside them.’
It was interesting, watching Rontaine’s face change; from a poor imitation of proper subordination, to shock, to determination not to be found wanting- over a thick bottom layer of ‘oh kriff’- to thinking about the mission in hand.
‘Acknowledged.’ She said, not wanting to provoke further a superior who had already taken one bite out of her hide. ‘Proceeding to contact, CN27AJ-‘
‘Do you really think that’s all there is to it?’ Lennart interrupted her. ‘I threw you a trick question and you fumbled it. The ship you want to send on this job is the one with the best track record of not being shot.
Instead, you let some old grudge or snit dominate your thinking to the point where you are now about to rush off to go rancor baiting without proper coordination or preparation. Talk me through how you’re going to do this.’
‘Sir, I reacted poorly, and now I want to make up for that by going and getting the job done.’ From his expression she realised she wasn’t getting off the hook. ‘Approach from 50deg off the bow on a crossing course close to, match velocities for inspection.’
‘With?’ Lennart added.
‘Shields up, weapons manned and jammers on standby. All of this is standard procedure in the customs service as much as it is in the navy.’ She said. ‘Approaching a suspicious contact.’ She was trying not to sound more than mildly irritated.
‘There are fighter elements ready to cover you. The rest of the search units will be converging on the contact to form a cordon. Report your findings as you make them. Navigation downloading now, Black Prince Actual out.’
He dropped the link, turned to his bridge crew, found com/scan had already located and displayed Rontaine’s personnel file. He started reading through it; the single most important fact leapt out at him. Eris Rontaine was a graduate of the sector’s naval academy- eighty-fifth in a class of twenty-five hundred.
On graduation, she had not taken- no, he noticed, not been offered a commission in the Starfleet. For someone that high up the class rankings, to be given nothing- without even accumulated demerits as an excuse- was almost unheard of.
Possibly it was no more than misogyny, possibly a personal grudge, either way it would have been an embittering experience.
Denied that, she had found another path, and hacked her way up the ladder, on proficiency and professionalism; her six ship division had an outstanding record- for this sector, anyway- but if she enjoyed her job, she hid it well.
She would have looked up her commanding officer, and found from the less heavily classified portions of his own service record that he had been an instructor for four years himself. That would bias her against him to begin with, as part of the system that had drawn her in, led her on and spat her out unwanted.
Everything looks so neat when it’s just metal and energy and mathematics, Lennart thought. Maybe that’s part of why the Confederation were able to keep fighting so long- mechanical crews cutting down on the problems of command, no egos to soothe, no personal crises to draw down efficiency.
Huge numbers of armed droids helped as well, of course. And especially at this precise point, by far the largest of those problems is my own, so I’m in no position to get bitchy, he added to himself.
The customs corvettes were attached to the sweeper line, their high thrust and heavy antifighter weaponry should prove useful to cover and support long- range TIE patrols, but they were very lightly built for confronting warships.
They had power and load capacity to spare, but it was unlikely there would be time and personnel available to make any meaningful refit.
He would have to see what could be done for, or if necessary to, Rontaine. She would be difficult to work with, especially for an ex-free trader and freewheeler like Konstantin Vehrec. Probably wasn’t her own best friend in that regard.
Still, she almost certainly knew things that could be useful for him to find out. Later, assuming she survived.
‘Alert Tarazed Meridian, she’s first stage intervention along with the rest of recon line B if this goes badly wrong.’ Lennart ordered.
There was a beep from his terminal. Private message; Aleph-3. He decided to deal with it now. ‘Your timing’s abysmal, we have a situation here. What is it?’
‘I have just found out that you have been experimenting at fencing practise- and more besides, if the account I got was accurate.’ She sounded annoyed with him.
‘Yes, I was. I’m glad you weren’t there; it was rather embarrassing. I found out, if that’s the term, that actual ability is the coefficient of natural talent and effort invested.’
‘Which is why you need an expert there to guide you and push you on.’ She said.
‘I had one; that was the problem.’ Lennart said, not entirely joking.
‘And the force? You called upon it, reached out for it, didn’t you?’ she said, failing to hide her eagerness.
‘Yes, both sides. I called on the ends of the spectrum, reached out to touch them and feel them, heft them and see how they sat in my head- and I don’t quite see what all the fuss is about.
Under the influence of the light side I found it difficult to distinguish reality from illusion; the dark side simply made it difficult to distinguish friend from foe.’
‘Thus clearly proving the superiority of the Dark Side, especially when dealing with politicians.’ Aleph-3 bounced back at him.
‘The last thing you want, at this precise point, is for me to become power-crazed and attempt to assert my alpha-male personal superiority over my friends, allies and colleagues.’ Lennart said, rubbing the bruise on his shoulder.
It was fascinating, to listen to the slightly panicked silence on the com as she tried to think of what she could get away with saying. She should be experiencing some cognitive dissonance about now, he thought.
A dozen possibilities danced through her head, ranging from ‘Remember I’m first in line when you’re stocking your harem’ to the copout ‘if that be the will of the force’. She resorted to ‘So who else do you think can fill the role? Do you want to be a beta? You have to use the gift you’ve been given.’
‘My gift for finding trouble, or letting trouble find me, has got nothing to do with the Force, and if you’ll excuse me,’ Lennart said, ‘I can hear it calling my name.’
‘Then, Sir, the only move you really need to know is how to trap his blade, and then shoot him with the blaster you should have in your other hand.’ Vilberksohn said.
Is it a bad thing that in the one SW rpg game I've played in, my character did more or less that? In general she completely failed as a Jedi in general, but she was a bitch in a fight.
Poor Rontaine. Called out on her screwup, and then publicly had her nose rubbed in it. This no doubt does her ulcers no good at all. This story's not going to treat her very well at all, isn't it?
And I don't mind at all. I'm somewhat amused that soulless bitch is the first thing that comes to mind when people think of me, but so long as she's there, I'm curious how she'll develop.
More to the point, I liked this chapter. The character development and squishy talky bits are more to my taste in the best of circumstances, and I'm amused by how utterly blasé Lennart is about the Force.
"Hey, gang, we're all part of the spleen!"
-PZ Meyers
I agree, it's a nice chapter. I like the variety of the chapters in your story and appreciate how you take great care to flesh-out (I think you can say this in english?) your characters - so they are individual humans, not just stereo-type hero and npc's.
Hope to see a new chapter soon
Obdurate’s captain’s day cabin was a lot smaller than that of a fleet destroyer; it really was a cubbyhole, sandwiched between the base mounts for the ship’s sensor domes just aft of the main bridge.
It contained a bed, a fresher, and a video wall, and at the moment it contained Karl-Anton Raesene and the pair of ISB agents who had been making his life miserable for the last week.
‘I don’t understand why you’re being so difficult about this.’ The senior man said to him. ‘You know what we need from you.’
‘It was an exercise.’ Raesene said, with the sinking feeling that he was speaking an entirely different language whose words were coincidentally the same.
‘A drill. It is still duty, is it not? It is still worthy of security oversight, isn’t it?’ the younger agent said. He had been laying on the menace fairly thickly, fingering the butt of his gun and glaring at people wherever he went.
The crew are afraid of him, Raesene thought. Afraid of the system that he represents, afraid of what he can arrange to have done to them. So afraid that some of them would actively help him do it. They won’t stand up to them; I’m on my own.
Lennart’s crew would cheerfully help him murder them, in a similar situation; but who, on board, could I count on to help me do that?
‘Is it not, Lieutenant- Commander Raesene?’ the senior agent asked.
‘It is a special case, that doesn’t fully apply.’ Raesene said, hoping that at some point they would actually start listening.
‘How can that be? A violation of doctrine can be nothing other than a violation of doctrine.’
‘The navy allows things to happen on exercise which are written up and learned from, but it’s not like it is in the ISB or the Army.’ Raesene tried to explain.
‘I don’t understand.’ The senior agent said. ‘What do you mean?’ The junior agent started to say something, the senior agent shushed him. ‘Explain, in your own time.’
With the uneasy sense that he was signing his own death warrant, Raesene tried. ‘The Starfleet’s always had more processing power available to it than the army or the security services. So have Intelligence. That makes it-‘ he didn’t want to risk saying “us”- ‘relatively tolerant of change and experiment.’
‘How does that translate to being allowed to misbehave on manoeuvres?’ the senior agent asked.
‘We weren’t on manoeuvres, we were in simulation. Half the point of exercises like that is to push the limits of doctrine- all right, underscore why it’s usually a better idea.’
‘Computer space isn’t real? Good luck selling that one to a court.’ The junior agent snorted.
‘The Starfleet allows simulation exercises to be used as a forum for making mistakes. It’s easier and cheaper to get wild ideas out of the system by letting them burn themselves out in virtual space than to risk billion-ton, trillion-credit ships on exercise, or stars forbid actual combat.’ Raesene said.
It was an exaggeration, but not by much. With twenty-five thousand years of space combat experience to draw on, it was impossible to remember everything, and equally difficult to teach. A lot of advanced tactical training consisted of throwing the candidates into a sim tank and seeing what happened.
‘So violations of doctrine on exercise just…don’t count?’ the younger agent said, baffled. ‘That’s contrary to Correct Thought.’
‘Not according to the Starfleet, it isn’t, and that comes from a far higher level than you or me.’ Raesene said. ‘Captain Lennart could do everything but take a hard copy of the Fleet Instructions, tear it up and set fire to the pieces then piss on the ash, and get away with it- on simulation.’
‘Then how do we go about providing him with a copy and a full bladder? I find it difficult to believe that nothing he does can be used against him.’ The senior agent said.
‘Hold on a moment, here.’ Raesene objected. ‘I agreed to help you uncover evidence against a renegade; manufacturing it was not in the game plan.’
The senior agent glared at the junior agent, who opened his mouth and shut it again; it didn’t matter. What had nearly been said still hung like poison gas in the air.
‘Are you beginning to doubt your mission? You’ve heard the man; you know what manner of maniac you’re dealing with.
He is unstable, he is unreliable, regardless of whatever his real achievements are there is no guarantee we will not find him ranged against us tomorrow.’ The senior agent said, trying to be charming; interesting line in pronouns you have there, Raesene thought.
It wasn’t about truth any more, or even about flagrant bad examples being set by senior officers who ought to know better; it was about finding some reason, any sufficient excuse, to bring him down.
‘I realise that.’ Raesene said, knowing he was making a lousy job of acting it. It had been a straightforward choice between moving onward and upward and going nowhere.
He had been bribed, plain and simple. Why did they have to complicate it with ideology, simple corruption wasn’t enough for them?
If it had been a case of “you or me”, he would have dropped a senior officer in it in a heartbeat; that was as much navy life as the uniforms and the food. The rebels were the opposition, and your own colleagues were the enemy.
That much was business as usual, part of the job. The best clawed their way to the top, and while the connection between political in-fighting and naval war-fighting was weak, it was there; the determined and the devious succeeded in either case.
‘The Starfleet, even the sector fleet, would never stand for the security services prosecuting one of their own on a breach of tactical doctrine.
Even if it was a legitimate charge, you couldn’t bring it without making him so many friends, or at least allies of convenience, in the process that you wouldn’t have a hope of making it stick.’ And it would also ruin whoever they tried to use as a lever in the process, something of more than a little concern to him.
‘Shame.’ The senior agent said, almost wistfully. ‘I would have liked to meet him, and break him, on his own home ground. If that is not possible then we need another line of attack. Are disciplinary problems too internal to the Starfleet also, or would they provide a useful avenue of approach?’
‘I have been hearing squadron scuttlebutt, about things on board that ship. Black Prince’s domestic economy is…very strange.’ Raesene understated.
Most crews that leniently treated would have reacted to it as the softening of control that makes revolution possible and be in a state of anarchy if not mutiny within the month.
‘Perhaps someone among his own officers would be prepared to give us what we need?’ the junior agent said to the senior.
‘Oh, I don’t think that would be necessary, would it?’ the senior agent said to Raesene. The message was simple; deliver.
‘With his reputation, if he was an easy target someone would have indicted him already.
The best kind of real evidence I’m in a position to get for you,’ Raesene stressed, ‘is how he exercises his command- whether he encourages disrespect of the Empire, or other un-Imperial behaviour. The fallout from this exercise should help, and I have a report to write up as part of that.’
‘So how did it go?’ Mirannon asked.
‘I gave the skipper the bloody nose that you wanted me to, boss.’ Vilberksohn shook his head. ‘He does have real potential, and he could get to be very proficient at this, with practise.’
‘Which he doesn’t have. I’ve known him for, what, fifteen years now, ever since we were both on the staff of Tingel Approaches Command. If I didn’t give a damn about him, I’d let him go and get killed.’
‘So what we’re doing is trying to convince him that he doesn’t have a kitten’s chance in a reactor core following the script, he can’t afford to do this the way our VIP expects, and he needs to think of another solution?’ Vilberksohn asked.
‘Pretty much. Steer him in that direction, get him to realise that he can’t do this all on his own.’ Mirannon said.
‘It just doesn’t feel right, boss. I mean, yes, we’re trying to do a good thing for him in the long run, but you’re just not supposed to pound the snot out of command level officers. On any other ship I would have been crucified for that.’
‘On Black Prince, being good at something, even something you’re not supposed to, isn’t a death sentence. Remember the graffiti outbreak?’ Mirannon said, with an evil grin.
‘How could I forget, Sir? Lieutenant Ranner’s heart attack isn’t the sort of thing that passes easily out of mind.’
The Graffiti War of ’29 had been a bout of harmless fun, for the most part; it had begun as simple misbehaviour, but Lennart had decided to play with the situation.
Some of them, he had decided, had artistic merit. Following a dead regulation grandfathered in from the Republic Starfleet about raising the cultural level of the crew- which he suspected had been copy-and-pasted from the penal code of the time anyway- he had decided to have a selection of pieces framed.
In practise, this meant removing the surface that had been painted on and carting it off to the ‘gallery’ improvised out of the storage bays up in the bow, then replacing the surface.
It took about five seconds for the various branches of the crew to realise that there was no point fouling their own nest; that if you happened to, for instance, daub your symbolic-abstract masterwork over someone else’s barrack room hatch and bulkhead, they had all the fun of cutting it loose and replacing it.
So sneakiness became the order of the day; midnight painting raids, mysterious malfunctions to the ship’s lighting system, spurious alerts, stealth artistry- and all the fun of carving pieces out of walls to cart them off in the morning. Not easy when it happened to be the skin of a pressure vessel, or a major armoured bulkhead.
It was a lot longer before they realised that it was, to all intents and purposes, a team and morale building exercise combined with practical training in damage control.
The only people who were safe were the legion; after one of their AT-ATs got painted dayglo pink with scarlet go faster stripes, they identified the perpetrators and exacted revenge.
A fifty- strong crew room, an entire maintenance section, found their barracks had been redecorated as a rainforest. Everything had been painted, dyed, coated, or inked multiple shades of green-including all fifty of the occupants. While they slept, no warning, no-one noticed.
It had finally come to an end when someone, chief suspect being Mirannon himself, had taken an airbrush to the containment vessel of the main reactor.
Whoever it was had painted a fairly good impression of the first nanosecond of a catastrophic breach- the watch officer, Lieutenant Ranner, had taken one look at it and keeled over.
Not because of any special realism, but mainly because of the potential difficulties of dismounting and framing a slice out of the reactor containment shell.
The medics had got to him in time, but that had been the end of it. Most of the pieces of the gallery had been holo’d and the bits recycled, and the graffiti war had been declared over.
‘Well, there were no permanent casualties.’ Mirannon said. ‘The skipper turned a nasty disciplinary incident into a bit of fun and a learning experience; not many others would. Suppose he gets killed as a result of this; that would leave us with Mirhak-Ghulej in charge, officially, wouldn’t it?’
‘Oh kriff. Sir.’
‘Traditionally it’s not supposed to be engineering’s job to care about what happens topside, but screw that. If we have to protect him from himself, that’s the job at hand. If he’s appointed you fencing instructor, then you’re a part of that.’
‘Thank you, Sir. I think.’
The customs corvette emerged from hyperspace a hundred thousand kilometres off the position of the modular cruiser; the rest of Gamma and Epsilon emerged and formated on their leaders- far astern.
‘Gamma, Epsilon, with me; follow that corvette.’ Aron ordered, urgently. They accelerated after the customs ship, conforming on him; Aron pushed the throttle to it’s limit, then relaxed it slightly.
How would that look; two squadrons of fast fighter- bombers sharking in, from a position the cruiser’s guns didn’t cover, behind an antifighter escort?
It would look like a direct attack- which might not be so bad a thing to fake. Might flush them out.
‘CN27AJ19 “The Silent Bugler”, this is 721-Ep, Gamma One,’ Aron nearly forgot which squadron he belonged to, ‘decelerate and await escort.’
He was probably senior to whoever was in charge over there; a light corvette, that was at best a senior lieutenant’s command, more likely a lieutenant’s. Equivalent, of course.
‘Gamma One, you are out of position. Accelerate to join us.’ A snappish woman’s voice answered him.
‘Bugler,’ Aron snarled, ‘this is a Starfighter Corps squadron leader telling you to kriffing well conform.’ Damned customs.
‘Gamma One, this is Flight Control.’ Franjia’s voice. The standard theory was that the voxsystems made everyone sound alike in order to reinforce the group, interchangeable ethic;
Black Prince’s director crews regarded that as a factor that potentially compromised security, and preferred to use identifiable, verifiable voices, that an expert system could recognise even if the pilot’s ears couldn’t.
‘Be advised,’ she continued, sounding slightly smug, ‘that “The Silent Bugler” is the flotilla leader, under the command of a Senior Field Agent whose rank equivalent is O-4, and who has seniority.’
That’s all I need, Aron thought.
‘Gamma One, take up station on our bow, snap it up.’ Rontaine said, calculating time and distance in her head- aiming for a k-k approach, thousand kilometres per second relative velocity at a thousand kilometres cpa.
‘CN27AJ19,’ Franjia instructed her, ‘you are out of position, decelerate and await escort.’
‘Thank you, Control.’ Aron said. ‘Query; are we trying to make this look like a strike? An antifighter light escort to clear away the defending fighters for a bomber approach run?’
‘Negative, Gamma One, assume escort stations around “The Silent Bugler.”’
Lennart looked at the map display again. ‘Working hypotheses? One of three things, I think.’
‘The captain of the modular cruiser’s a fool, they blundered into the rebels on the way here and they went for it, or?’ Brenn asked.
‘Think what lunatics we would look if we assumed that ship was in rebel hands, boarded and captured her, and it turned out she was simply being late and stupid all along.’ Lennart said. ‘Reinforce sector group’s case against us pretty effectively, wouldn’t it?’
‘How do you propose to find out which is which, Sir? Boarding would do it, but-’
‘Ideally, either without fuss, or tailored to make them look like the incompetents of the piece. Bearing that in mind, our probe now should have an interesting effect, provided Rontaine understands her footwork well enough to dodge when they do start shooting.
Perhaps we should have a heavier unit standing by to, hm, render assistance.’
‘Obdurate?’ Brenn suggested.
‘And what are you going to say, when the court of inquiry asks you why that ship?’ Lennart asked him, skipping straight over the intervening step- that Brenn had obviously picked up on his Captain’s doubts about her.
‘Good record, should be able to cope with a changing situation, large enough and enough engine and tractor power to render assistance.’ Brenn said, after a moment’s thought.
Lennart nodded. ‘Dispatch her, give her a vector consistent drop point at one light second, and alert Tarazed Meridian and Recon line B as first response if it does drop in the pot.
There’s no indication of a heavy covering party so they should be sufficient, by the time any larger threat manifests we could be there ourselves.’
‘Aye, aye, Sir.’
The TaggeCo. Modular Cruiser class didn’t really have a proper Imperial designation; ‘Dromedaries’, they were frequently referred to as, for their load carrying capability and their general orneriness.
Most of that was a situational problem; as a powerful family with an independent resource base, even the Imperial state couldn’t afford to be overly cavalier with them, and they rode that for all it was worth.
Most of the technology on board was copyrighted to the House of Tagge, requiring proprietary tools and licensed technicians to work with. Usually the only different thing about it was that it had been designed to only work properly with proprietary tools and licensed technicians.
Most of the changes were awkward ranging to trivial; septagonal nuts and bolts, non-standard pipe diameters, five pronged plugs, female-to-female connectors with interface boards, nonsense like that- but it was easier to temporarily retrain than completely refit. For the system, not the spacers concerned.
They also had no proper names, being part of the logistics train of the sector they usually got alphanumeric designators and nicknames at best. QDX312F9 “Free Gravity For All” had bigger problems than grumbling techs and half a name. Two regiments of Rebel infantry onboard, for a start.
They were not particularly happy either. The operation had already gone spectacularly wrong; their going ahead with what remained of the plan was a stroke of extreme audacity, or idiocy, depending.
The troop commander and the first lieutenant of the light carrier that had captured her were watching the Imperial approach develop.
‘Well?’ the rebel Colonel, a short, wide man with long dark hair and long frizzy beard, asked. ‘Are they a threat?’
‘Recon fighters. They themselves can do nothing to a ship this size; it’s their friends we need to worry about. Looks like we need to start lying earlier than expected.’
‘Damn that mercenary nerf-herder, anyway. I knew we should never have trusted him- hero or not, he isn’t even a full signed and sworn member of the Alliance; he probably did a pirate’s job of recon.’ The colonel said.
‘I don’t think Solo’s to blame. From her records, this ship’s course track looks as if someone played nullball with the sector map; she blundered through where our information said she was going to pass on the way back.’
The colonel’s spine went cold. ‘What information?’
‘We were acting on a tip-off from our agents within Sector group. Didn’t you know?’
‘Acting on information received, that led us into this clusterkriff- that doesn’t disturb you?’ The colonel said.
‘If we can bluff our way past them, the mission goes on. No worse than it was going to be anyway.’ He nodded to the comtech- using a ‘borrowed’ Imperial uniform for verisimilitude- to start the plan.
‘Customs Craft, this is Dromedary QDX 312F9, you are on a collision course, what is your intention.’
‘Dromedary,’ Rontaine said, watching it’s gun turrets on the image, ‘you are well off course. Is your ship fully functional? We will pass close aboard and inspect you for damage sustained.’
No response; on board Free Gravity For All, an ISB officer was being hustled on to the bridge.
‘There’s a customs cutter out there. Convince them that everything is fine.’ The colonel said bluntly.
‘What, help you against the Empire? Betray them to the Alliance? Never.’ The ISB officer blustered, but his skin was very pale.
‘There are a lot of things you’ll never do again, after we feed you slowly into one of your own disintegration booths. Cooperate and we release you and your survivors on a backwater outworld, decide not to and we take you and them apart, a molecule at a time. Simple choice.’
‘Kriffing rebel scum. How do we- how can I trust you?’
‘Because we are Rebel scum, not Imperial scum. If I was still Imperial I’d make all the false promises in the world then fry you up anyway.’ The colonel told him. ‘You’re wasting time. Two seconds. Choose.’
No answer. ‘Take him away. Power setting 3, slow broil, for ten minutes-‘
‘No! No, wait, I’ll do it. Just promise it’s an outworld with a breathable atmosphere?’ the ISB man said.
‘Connect him up. To the com circuit, not the kriffing disintegrator.’ The colonel shouted at the guards who had misinterpreted and were about to drag their prisoner away.
‘Corvette, this is Space Major Overgaard, acting commander.’
‘Good name for a Space Major.’ Aron said, irrelevantly. ‘What does that translate to, anyway?’
‘The Starfleet refusing to allow them to use the same rank table, I think.’ Franjia told him. ‘O-4. Unlikely but not unfeasible for a large auxiliary.’ Not the listed commander, either.
‘What, another one?’ Himself, Rontaine and now this man. ‘Why does it have to be based on integers anyway? It’d make more sense to use fractions. Why couldn’t I be an O-4.268, for instance?’
‘If you don’t shut up and keep proper com discipline, I kriffing well will decimalise you, you mathematical illiterate.’ Olleyri interrupted.
‘Yes, Sir. Sorry Sir.’
‘We suffered an, ah, technical malfunction. Power coupling ruptured, fragments of the casing- it was being inspected at the time. Astro-Warden Fertun was among the injured.’ Overgaard lied.
He didn’t have to act too much about that part; the rebels had run Fertun through a drumhead court- martial and thrown him into one of the disintegration booths. He was awaiting executon now. It had not been a hollow threat, and Overgaard did not have to simulate sounding shocked and horrified.
Obdurate materialised out of hyperspace, square on the starboard beam of the Free Gravity For All; Raesene queried the situation, received a copy of the conversation so far.
Both the agents were on the bridge as he replayed it; smiled when Aron’s part came round, and noted his number.
‘Do you know Fertun?’ Raesene asked them.
‘I had the privilege of vetting him once- we uncovered and defeated a Rebel attempt to compromise him. A very zealous officer.’ Which was security service speak for a hanging judge.
‘Can we take that ship, or at least withstand her?’ the rebel colonel whispered to the first lieutenant, meaning Obdurate.
‘Unlikely; she’s two sizes larger than a dromedary’s guns are designed to keep off. Bluff is still our best weapon.’
‘Acknowledged, Dromedary. Do you have a position fix?’ Rontaine asked.
‘Yes, we had an, uhm, minor nav computer malfunction.’ Long pause. ‘A glitch in the self- mapping software, apparently the module turned out to be the wrong shape or some such explanation. It’s all perfectly in order, we have it recalibrated, we’re fine now.’
‘Wait one, Dromedary, external inspection under way now.’ Rontaine announced; Gamma and Epsilon had finally caught up and reached escort positions, flanks above and below the customs corvette. They were all looking closely at the target- Aron mainly at the gun mounts.
‘Gamma One to Epsilon Squadron; do you-‘ he began, and then realised it was a leading question; he changed it to ‘report on the precise thermal status of the Free Gravity For All’s weapon systems.’
‘Gamma One,’ Yatrock- now Epsilon’s senior flight leader- reported, ‘I have residual heat in the after MTLs. They have definitely been charged recently, high confidence two have been fired.’
‘Dromedary,’ Rontaine challenged, ‘do you-‘
‘Wait, Customs.’ Raesene had a message tightbeamed to the corvette. ‘Don’t make it a challenge. Let them talk themselves into more trouble.’ He said, trying not to think too hard about his own unwelcome guests.
‘Free Gravity For All, we have signs of recent weapon activity. Are your systems fully safed?’ Rontaine asked, not acknowledging yet another supercilious Starfleet officer.
‘The power coupling that blew,’ Overgaard replied, ‘it was, ah, part of the bridge/computing mesh, it, ah, may have been the source of the surge that caused our malfunction.
We found ourselves in an unfamiliar location, after an internal explosion- the after defence section went on alert, thought we were being ambushed. Even fired a couple of shots.’
‘Was the responsible officer commended for his promptness?’ Rontaine asked.
‘Um…’ Overgaard stalled. ‘Ah, yes, Force Security Special Agent Colomban was noted for his quick thinking, but he also was given the bill for the fuel he burnt off with meaningless fire. He, ah, declared himself bankrupt and committed suicide with a fuel cell over the 1MC. We’re all still a little traumatised by it.’ Overgaard invented.
‘Presumably Third Technician Lister is busy trying to bypass the navicomp now?’ Raesene asked.
‘What the kriff is that, some sort of recognition code?’ the rebel colonel asked Overgaard, who shrugged. ‘No change.’ The colonel reminded him. ‘You’re still lying for your life.’
‘Of course he is. What, you think the Imperial Security Bureau has no respect for the classics?’ Overgaard replied over the com. Which, of course, it usually didn’t.
‘This is getting less probable by the moment.’ Raesene said. ‘Are they trying to aim for “so crazy it could only be true?”’
‘Who would this ‘they’ be?’ the senior agent asked.
‘You really want an explanation? Let’s see what security implication you can make out of this; Lennart suspects that ship is in Rebel hands, but has no proof.
It may be simple, or at this stage extraordinary, stupidity, it may be some kind of loyalty test on the part of the sector group- or the security services.’ And he may suspect that, too, Raesene realised.
‘If that is what he suspects, then he should move in on them at once. Better to inconvenience an ally than let an enemy go for want of sufficient thoroughness.’ The younger of the two ISB agents said.
‘That would involve destroying the ship’s engines and weapons- specifically, the fighters hit the MTL turrets and we pound the engine block to prevent their escape.
Hundreds of millions of credits’ damage at least, and many questions asked if it isn’t a rebel trick. If it was an official security service request, we could do it now- provided you’re prepared to sign off on it.’ Raesene said.
‘Just when I think that you are incapable of rendering us any useful assistance, you come up with something sufficiently sneaky to make me think there is perhaps hope for you after all.’ The senior agent said.
‘In my estimation the ship is in rebel hands, and at least one of her crew is sufficiently alive for the rebels to use him as a mouthpiece. The utterly unbelievable story he is telling may be deliberately intended to raise our suspicions.’
‘But you don’t want to advise Captain Lennart of that.’ Raesene guessed, accurately.
‘We allow this situation to play itself out as though we were not here, of course. We will- observe.’
Very cold- blooded, Raesene thought, but had the sense not to say. He had already pushed it far enough.
Customs ships’ penetrating scanners were defeatable by special shielding, but that certainly did not invalidate them. What they achieved was mainly to make complicated and expensive measures like smuggling compartments necessary, if the criminal wanted to last long enough at it to make a decent living.
It was estimated that upwards of ten million would- be smugglers a year were indirectly killed by the grey economy because their ships had been incompetently maintained- they had special adaptations that would have cost them their freedom if they had gone to a reputable yard.
Probably as many again were directly killed, for reasons of going too far into debt trying to afford the modifications.
Chances were, “The Silent Bugler”’s sensor system had eliminated more lawbreakers than her gun fit. A young and spottily trained bunch, the rebel prize crew had few if any members who really understood how the scanners worked and how to stop them- or why they needed to.
‘Command, this is Rontaine- no visible damage, no major ionisation scarring. Hotel load, Life Form Indicator interprets as…her engine and bow sections are undermanned. Skeleton crews.
Module section is overmanned. forty-four hundred lifeforms- and indications of recent onboard weapons fire and disintegrator activity.’
Thank you very kriffing much, Aron thought. There was at least a shred of a reason why Rontaine hadn’t been offered a Starfleet commission; a tendency to work to the mission- regardless of what it cost her crew or her colleagues.
That thing’s engines had better be on top line, because we are going to have to run for it. Now.
There was a brief crackle of com carrier wave, then nothing.
On the bridge, Overgaard twisted out of the rebel soldiers’ grasp and lunged for the microphone. ‘Rebels on board, it’s a trap, we were ambushed-‘ he shouted into it.
No effect. The rebel comtech had been a holovid producer before going to the wrong side of the law, and knew all about things like one second delay loops on supposedly live broadcast. He cut Overgaard off, and the two rebel troopers escorting him laid into him with their rifle butts.
‘Take him away.’ The colonel ordered. ‘And, speaking of away, I don’t think they bought a word of that. Let’s get out of here.’
‘Get moving, we’ll cover you.’ Aron com’d to Rontaine, who felt perfectly comfortable now with putting the corvette into a diving corkscrew away from the belly of the modular cruiser.
The fighters swept up behind it, starbursting out of the way of the ion plume as the ship started to run up to hyperspace initiation.
They fish-hook turned behind it to pursue- the inquisition module was one of the heaviest and most power-hungry and slowed the modular cruiser down the most, with it she only pulled about eighteen hundred ‘g’, slow for a warship.
Aron’s fighters had a big speed advantage they could use to manoeuvre round it; first thing they did, he detached Gamma C flight to escort the corvette, and ordered the rest out to optimum firing range.
Nineteen fighters, five targets- the single mount MTL’s that covered the modular cruiser’s stern. They were already spitting fire in the direction of the Obdurate; no real worry there, without spectacular stupidity on his part- leaving the bow bay doors open and shields down would do it- a Demolisher class frigate was more than capable of soaking up sporadic MTL fire.
She had incriminated herself handily with that, though. Open season.
“The Silent Bugler” ‘s guns were long-barrel ultralight turbolasers; quick tracking, fast firing, but their weight of shot was calculated for fighters and freighters, not armoured warships or fleet-auxilliary imitations thereof.
Rontaine had done her part, didn’t need to but decided to fly a slightly curving course away, to give the after pair of turrets a chance to open up on the dromedary- in the process scaring the crap out of Aron.
He was already planning approaches that avoided crossing Obdurate’s line of fire; she carried the equivalent of half of one of Black Prince’s turrets- the bolt would barely notice him if he got in the way of one of those shot.
Raesene was holding fire with the LTL, though, recognising that the only thing they were likely to achieve were friendly casualties.
Rontaine’s hail of fire tracked on to the target, standard antifighter procedure, and Aron’s fighters scattered.
‘Kriffing customs. Which side are they on? Let’s see how they like it.’ Gamma- Six, Aron thought.
‘If you’re still alive to complain, it wasn’t that bad. Anybody hit?’
Epsilon Ten had taken a hit, just shielding. Nothing serious. ‘Right, designating now; even numbered Gammas,’ he laid the pointer on one turret and relayed it to the rest, Epsilon A,’ point on, repeat for each subformation, ‘B, C flights, and odd Gammas with me.’
Six or eight missiles homing on each turret, then. Not killing firepower, but enough to damage and disorient, maybe dismount the tube or destroy the local fire control systems.
Epsilon dog-legged their missiles in, steering them to avoid the limited PD; only Aron and his senior flight commander did from Gamma. Nineteen of thirty hit.
Only one of the target turrets actually blew; but it did so in a spectacular flare of rupturing energy bank that kicked the Dromedary down and sideways.
‘Kriff, that threw our navigation out. Take five minutes to recalibrate.’ The naval lieutenant said, trying to remain calm.
‘Which we don’t have, with that frigate pounding us.’ The colonel roared at him.
‘We’d be hopelessly lost-‘
‘Lost where-are-we is better than lost dead. Do it.’
‘She’s jumping. Running up to hyperspace entry.’ Aron announced.
‘Active pinging, give me flood.’ Raesene ordered; Obdurate- and the fighters- began to hammer Free Gravity For All with active sensor pulses, aiming to image her exactly enough to get a course prediction worth giving chase on.
She flared, almost blindingly bright in the target scopes, and for a moment Aron thought they had hit the reactor, but it was just scan. Then she stretched out and leapt across the light barrier.
‘Com, signal Falldess and recon- B to pursue, and get me Doctor Nygma.’ Lennart ordered.
The image was different this time; it was an idyllic pastoral landscape; Lennart suspected that in time, the dark clouds would close over it, the storm and the thunder would cause the buildings and the hills to melt and splinter, and it would end in earthquake, volcano and space demons dancing in the fire- blackened streets.
‘Ah, the voice of the lord of darkness squonks again. Good afternoon, Captain.’
‘I think you know what this is going to be about, Doctor.’
‘A notion made a motion, in the direction of my feet; but it had a change of heart, made for a different part, and ended in my head, instead.’
‘Have you been administered therapy for your wordplay addiction?’ Lennart asked, not seriously.
‘What sort of therapy would you consider appropriate?’ Nygma asked, and on his image the clouds were now raining acid.
‘Being locked in a library with every ‘teach yourself’ language book ever coded, and not let out until you could pun in every language known to lifekind.’ Lennart suggested.
‘Ah, aversion treatment. Diversion and reversion treatment as well, depending on whether we have unnatural light. They tried that, plied that, and refried that. I can hoot in Hutt and woot in Wook, drabble in Dug and construe in Cerean, inculpate in Ithorian, an inherently improbable idiom-‘
‘And babble in Basic, and commit sadistic yet scintillating sabotage on the syntax of Standard. We know.’ Lennart said. ‘There was actually a reason for contacting you.’
‘How depressingly mundane. You don’t think you’re going to get away that easily, do you?’ Nygma cackled slightly.
‘No,’ Lennart admitted, ‘and there are some terrifying simplicities I may need your help to mock, later, but that’s a hurdle I’ll undermine when I come to it. I want to talk to you about the dromedary “Free Gravity For All.” ‘
‘Ah, now there is a name to shovel confusion with.’ Nygma said. ‘Shall I make wild, random guesses as to what caught your ear?’
‘I probably should give you information.’ Lennart said.
‘Aww. That takes all the fun out of figuring out what’s going on.’ Nygma said.
‘It’s already happened. How and why are the interesting questions now.’
‘Let me interpret…”oh my grud, it’s full of Rebels”- does that sum up the situation?’
‘That’s more than just Finagle’s law, isn’t it?’ Lennart stated. ‘You expected some such- more than that, you knew to expect it. Why?’
‘We had to clear the dromedary’s path. Like sweeping out the cracks in crazy paving. Which is a very pointless thing, I mean if you waste all the goodness on paving, what are you going to do to lubricate the rest of your life?’
‘She was sent on a wild goose chase?’ Lennart asked.
‘So your plan is to bring down rogue waterfowl by throwing pre-fragmented shrapnel pavements at them? Intriguing but undependable. Which is what you want if you happen to be a goose.’ Nygma said.
‘I may attempt it in another incarnation. In the mean time, demetaphorise.’
‘If time is being that mean to you, you may wish to consider-‘ Nygma noticed Lennart containing an outburst of temper. ‘Yes, “Free Gravity For All” was sent on a long, complicated, roundabout route.
She was supposed to arrive late and from an unexpected direction, with older IFF codes. If they wanted to simulate confusion they really should have asked an expert.’
‘Wouldn’t a real expert in confusion be so confused, no-one would ever realise they were an expert?’ Lennart searched for a stab of wit, and found it.
It was harder; he was annoyed not as much with Nygma, but with himself. He could feel the force crowding into his head, getting in the way of clear thought.
‘What’s code, except simulating confusion? What’s language, except piling confusion on confusion until they cancel out and let us grasp the universe?’ Nygma declaimed.
‘Look, Doctor Nygma, as much as I might want to take the time, we have a running operation. Could you translate to Ordinaryese?’
‘Why didn’t you say that earlier? The auxilliary’s initial orders were for a straight pickup. They were altered by someone, let’s call them Alice, who arranged an approach that would give you every reason to be suspicious of them and hopefully overreact. Someone else- are you following this?’
‘Someone whom you are going to call Bob meddled next?’ Lennart asked.
‘Yes, you remember that, then? A second major change ordered the auxiliary to pass by a specific point on the way back to the nearest prison planet, Suorand V; I thought, maybe the starfield is unusually pretty or something, but I checked and it wasn’t.
So someone lowly placed in Escort Command, person C- Carol- altered the orders again. The point was very specific- only this time “Free Gravity For All”, wonderfully tautologous don’t you think and yet subtly ironic, passed through there on the way to the rendezvous.’
‘Which RV turned out to be with a rebel strike force. So let me get this straight- we have elements within Sector group offering us maximum possible opportunity to make fools if not criminals of ourselves by over-reacting and slagging a friendly unit;
a second group, of Rebel spies within Sector, who altered that to arrange for the recapture of their people; and a third group- or individual- who played with both their heads. Carol.’ Lennart said, meaning Nygma.
‘The beauty of it all is, in the chaos of order, counter- order and disorder, it’s going to be impossible for anyone not an expert in confusion to work out exactly who did what when, to whom and why, never mind wherefore, whither and whatnot.’
‘The rebels boarded her and captured her, and were in the middle of sanitising her. Still hiding the traces of the operation when squadron elements went after her and found them infrared- handed. Only one problem.’ Lennart said.
‘This feeds back into that time thing, doesn’t it? No wonder you object if your reference frame only lets you manage one problem at once. What would that be?’ Nygma asked.
‘Once we do catch her, we’re going to need another transport to hold all the existing prisoners and the crew of the dromedary. In fact, I think we’re going to need two, just in case one gets lost.’
Sorry I missed the last one, I hope to make up for it this time.
IFF is always a tricky bussiness, especially when someone is suspected to compromized. So I find what happened here to be quite appropriate. bit of cautious probing establishes suspicion, and sensors uncover the scope of the deception. By the way, Third Technician David Lister sends his regards from three million years in the future for the shout out.
I like how the captain's crew watches his back, even if what they think is best for him isn't what he thinks is best. Mirannon seems to think the force is something they should be trying to decontaminate themselves from.
And the ISB is really too eager here. Don't they know the value of being patient, or do they really think that tactical conformity is a good thing? They obviously don't understand that a predictable tactician is one who gets himself and his men dead in short order.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
The situation with the ISB; recruiting from the politicised and fanatic as they do, their average IQ probably is a few points below that of the Imperial citizenry- but their leadership is sharp enough.
They desperately want the same sort of authority over the Imperial armed forces as the NKVD- later KGB- had over the Soviet army up until mid-42, but they're nowhere near that kind of ideological control of operations and ability to judge serving officers.
They are much closer to it with the Army than they are with the Starfleet- in the Army men can be arrested and shot for tactical innovation, never mind tactical failure.
As long as the war goes on, as there is an external or quasi- external threat, the Imperial Starfleet at least will be able to fend them off; sufficiently necessary to the Imperial state as a whole that they are able to resist security service influence.
In the meantime, the ISB gets involved in Navy internal affairs wherever it can, even allowing itself to be used as a pawn, with the eventual aim of having enough leverage and enough men beholden to it- read; blackmail material- to ascend to the role of arbiter, and take a long step towards the political control of the armed services.
What's getting at Raesene is that he is realising just how far away from business-as-usual this is, and that this time it is the security services that are using him.
What's worrying the ISB men is that they are dimly starting to see just what the larger operation is. They are on the side of the local force in this because Lennart is the obvious political target, but they are becoming aware that thereare more sides to this than they thought. Not that they ould discuss this with Raesene at all.
Incidentally, who would the potential enemy have been if the Battle of Endor had gone off according to the Imperial plan? The Starfleet would have had to go looking in the Unknown Regions and extragalactic nebulae for someone to fight- Thrawn was already out there securing the beach-head, but it would have gone from covert to overt project. Goodbye, Vong. For so many reasons it's a shame it didn't happen that way.
As far as the Book goes- Fleet Instructions and Fleet Orders- twenty-five thousand years of precedent to draw on, across an entire galaxy? Vastly too much to take in. It would be very easy to drown in information, be paralysed by being unable to decide which of the many, many possible solutions was right.
It's also highly unlikely that whatever's been done hasn't been done before. The illusion that naval tactics are simple comes from the fact that, faced with this mountain of experience, it is usually easier to work from first principles and rederive as you go along.
Black Prince's crew; the further back you go in naval history, the more explicit the notion becomes that the captain and crew exist in a state of professional symbiosis. The captain's decision-making power and determination are necesary to keep the crew alive, the crew's skill and enthusiasm are necessary to make the ship effective.
To be blunt, the stricter the rules get, the less the crew's consent and commitment matter. Also, as constrained by the rules as they are, junior officers develop less decisiveness and determination. When he took over, Lennart made a conscious decision to go very, very old- school in his running of the ship.
When there isn't any consent and commitment to begin with, the highly formal, highly organised usual discipline of the Starfleet is the way to go- and on a different ship, with a different crew, that was what Lennart would have had to do. He gambled on them, and between skill and luck built a crack ship out of it.
Actually, thinking about it, there could be an SI unit of discipline, described as the amount of regulation and monitoring necessary to contain a command problem of a given magnitude. I propose that it be called the Lister.
He is an extreme case, and the internal economy of most ships should be ranked in milli- or micro-Listers.
In a strange case of, well, art imitating art, this chapter was supposed to include a segment about Voracious, and the line "I'm worried about Caliphant. I don't think we're doing him any favours by asking him to take on a job this big" did come up.
The segment had to be removed. For length.
Real life has got unpleasantly wierd. The best way to start a new job is almost certainly not to get off the phone after accepting it, open the mail, including a standard government issue Dreaded Brown Envelope, and find inside a summons to jury duty. After training, I will be in gainful employment for precisely one week before beng hauled off to sit in...juryment? Not best pleased.
What this is going to do to my writing schedule, I don't know, but at least the other two segments that were supposed to make up '29 were mostly written, they just need a lot of polishing. They should appear before long, but this bit's ready now.
Ch 29
Tarazed Meridian was a fast ship, with a heavy fuel load; likely be able to run down and overmatch anything the Alliance could reasonably have, in this sector of space. At least, Falldess had thought so until recently. The damage to her sistership Comarre Meridian argued against that.
As the line punched through hyperspace to the last known position, where they were to pick up the trail, she worried about that. Compared to the wide open void out there, what had seemed so much now seemed frighteningly little.
Only two ships- her own and the Demolisher class Guillemot- with HTL mounts, and they would have to deploy independently. Or possibly remain as central reserve? Impossible, she decided.
This was going to be a multiple- trip, jump, whatever they called it, sweep. For them to move to the assistance of any of the smaller craft, it would be impossible to plan that in advance. They would have to make it up as the need arose anyway, so there was no sense fretting about it now.
Blackwood could deploy independently as well, she was fast and well armed enough to look after herself. There was something sinister about the shape of that ship, overlapping and angular compared to the normal bulbous strike cruiser.
Kuruma, the other Strike she had, was of the standard pattern. Then there were two Servator and three Carrack heavy corvettes, last generation and this generation’s main screen/reaction unit; and two Bayonet, four Marauder lighter corvettes.
Match them up. The Bayonets with the Servators, the Marauders with Kuruma and the three Carracks. That would give her nine little splinters, independent search groups that a well handled MC-80 could catch and crush in detail.
Who was she kidding. A rebel cruiser- to all intents and purposes line destroyer equivalent- could do that even if they were together, organised and waiting.
So avoid them. A lot easier than it sounded; the size of space and the randomness of unplanned flight left a huge search area. It was unlikely the rebels would do any better looking for their missing prize than the Imperial forces would.
Emergence, and for a brief moment she felt absolute horror as two of the ships, the carrack- class Splenetic and the Marauder VY-466ZZ, emerged frighteningly close to each other.
They managed not to sideswipe, and she controlled her expression- problem encountered and solved, exactly as it was supposed to be; but the thought of what to do to make sure it didn’t happen, and what to do about it if it did, sat heavy with her.
Responsibility, not a problem, but the technics of the job, knowing what the right thing to tell them to do was, that was the hard part. Just nerves, woman, she told herself. Calm down or you’ll spook the bridge crew.
‘Demolisher Obdurate, this is Tarazed Meridian. Do you have a predicted course?’ she asked, forgetting for a moment that the com team had to be ordered to connect them.
They routed her through, and Raesene’s com chief answered.
‘We have-wait one.’ Short pause. ‘Downloading now.’
Falldess looked at the image in her ship’s main navigation tank. If that was the direction it had gone in, then-
‘Tarazed Meridian,’ the com speaker said- woman’s voice- ‘This is Black Prince Fighter Direction. Aggregate sensor data from FRS squadron Epsilon indicates this as a likely post-transition course, downloading now.’
Hm, Falldess thought. The details were- detailed. Who to believe was the question. Raesene, who seemed capable enough, or this unknown voice, brisk, confident- not uncommon among fakers.
She watched the plan unfold, a nine- pointed spiral sprint- and-drift, but it was centred on a different direction.
Would Lennart really play silly buggers like this? She asked herself, wondering if it was some kind of test. Who would she follow, who did she trust?
No, that made no sense. They had been detached from the sector fleet to be assigned to this, and why would he have asked for people he didn’t trust?
There were reasons, she thought, but best not to think of them now.
‘Lieutenant- Commander Raesene, we seem to have a difference of opinion. My units will follow the plan received from the flag, you will follow your own predictions. Execute.’
Obdurate acknowledged, and began to move; a couple of seconds’ delay, though- what was happening over there? Slow to begin and quick to execute- was there someone looking over his shoulder? That could do it. Strange.
Com-Scan broke down the plan and transmitted it to the ships of her line; they leapt into hyperspace one by one.
‘Lost where-are-we is better than lost dead, you said.’ The rebel lieutenant grumbled at the colonel.
‘I’m just an old ground- pounder, why didn’t you kriffing tell me?’ the colonel replied.
Free Gravity For All had tumbled, initiating with a poorly balanced, oversensitive hyper field. The compensators had held the ship together, but it had left a huge, obvious signature behind them, and they had no idea where they were.
‘It would have taken too long to explain. Now, we have to work out where we are so we can move again before they come after us, and then another couple of detours before heading for safe harbour and coming up with another plan.’
‘How long is that going to take?’ the colonel asked.
‘Honestly? Don’t know. It’s not a job you can sweat over, the effort you put in really doesn’t make much difference, it either clicks or it doesn’t.’ The lieutenant said, hoping that was true and he hadn’t missed a trick somewhere along the way.
Their own sensor capability was not on top line, which meant they couldn’t really see trouble coming far enough ahead to run from.
Rebel and Imperial forces both hunting for them, what usually happened was that both sides watched each other; rebel speed runs being registered by the empire, and vice versa. Interceptions would be plotted, and usually fail.
It was a long, slow dance that only occasionally spiralled down into genuine combat. The recon pair consisting of HIMS Splenetic- Servator class- and the Marauder VY-466ZZ ”I’m So Bad Baby I Don’t Care” thought they had something, a sensor touch on a moving ship; probably too small to be the target, but also probably not Imperial.
Falldess’ decision; pursue. They ran on to the end of their predicted course which gave them a start for the next leg, reoriented and moved back along their line to investigate.
She had given the most likely vector to the ship with the most sensitive detectors, the recon Strike cruiser- Verberor, Lennart called them showing off his grasp of Standard- the Blackwood;
lots of contacts, lots of civilian and merchant traffic, but a collection of small distortions riding wide apart that could only be a rebel recon squadron.
Tarazed Meridian made her own re-entry to scan, and calibrate for the next leg; just before emergence, there was a small bump.
‘What was that? That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?’ she asked.
‘No, Captain, but it’s probably-‘ her navigator started to say, then noticed her glaring at him.
‘If it isn’t supposed to happen, then it’s not nothing, it’s a potential problem, isn’t it? Find out what it was and stop it happening again.’
‘Yes, Captain- but it was probably external. Overrunning a small object with high relativistic mass could-‘ for the second time, he was interrupted by her glare.
Just because she hadn’t grown up with technology didn’t make her a fool. High relativistic mass- that meant fast, didn’t it? Frighteningly, damagingly fast.
Like the impactors that had rained down on her world thirty generations ago, and for which no-one had ever been found or brought to account. Small objects.
‘Find it.’ She snapped out the order. ‘If there are more, find them too. Where they came from and where they’re going.’ This was… unexpected. An age old mystery that carried with it a blood cry for vengeance? Melodramatic in the extreme.
After all, the perpetrators would be thirty generations dead too, and only their descendants left to take vengeance on.
Which was fair enough.
Assuming it wasn’t some random rock. Assuming the mission could look after itself. Assuming the Imperial Starfleet wouldn’t ream her out, possibly literally, for what amounted to desertion.
There really was no choice to make, she knew at once. All the rationalisations happened afterwards. The thought of what she would be able to say if she went home without investigating it convinced her. The idea that it might be a genuine threat to Imperial security only occurred much later.
Tarazed Meridian turned and began flooding the space back along her own vector with active sensor pulses. Caution- and emission control- be damned.
The Rebel recon fighters dropped out, reoriented and began to move towards her; evidence that they had some larger ship with full nav capabilities with them.
Something for the bigger guns to do, then. Falldess stood looking out, knowing that she couldn’t expect to see anything her eyes could make sense of at the speeds and wavebands involved; looking anyway.
Aron’s fighters vectored after the rebel recon unit; the rest of the line shuffled to fill the gap; Blackwood moved to chase down her contact. Falldess got the first good scan at her ancient, ancestral enemy that her people had ever had.
There were two ships and a cloud of smaller craft; fighter types, quite why they worked she had never understood, but they identified readily enough. Shovel nosed cylinders, with long pod-tipped cruciform set wings.
The rRasfenoni. A minor species of no great account, until now. Little things with too many limbs, long term- probably native- inhabitants of the sector, handful of worlds, but more likely to rip you off on your fuel bill than ram and board with blaster and space axe.
Small time grey- economy merchants. Outposts and franchises and colonies on a lot of worlds.
Their ships were moving fast, up around eighty percent of lightspeed, and the smaller of the two dome-on-dome, blobby ships looked as if it was laying mines.
‘Can we catch them?’ Falldess asked her navigator, willing the answer to be yes.
‘They have too much of a lead.’ He shook his head. ‘Mechanically yes, tactically no.’
‘Then shoot them, shoot them.’ She said, trying and failing not to shout. The gunnery officer started to look sceptical. ‘What happened to these guns you were boasting of? Interplanetary range, you said. Well?’
‘Captain,’ Com-scan interrupted, ‘we have solid reads on three squadrons of fighters and two ships of heavy corvette or light frigate class. Also four hundred and seventeen smaller, missile- sized objects.’
‘Captain, the engagement time would be too short. PD might be able to hit them, but anything heavier couldn’t lock on.’ The gunnery officer stated, hoping she wasn’t going to come up with the first order answer.
If it would take too long to match velocity, almost two hours, then-
‘Microjump ahead of them and shoot them as they go by. Then do it again until they’re dead. Converge bursts, flak bursts- every trick you can think of.’ Or you will get a new job as a warhead, her tone said.
‘Yes, Captain.’ There was nothing else to say, really. Imperial discipline did sometimes have it’s advantages.
Nav groaned; the two ships hadn’t reacted, outwardly- it was actually harder to calculate the jump to hyperspace from high velocity, with relativistic mass to factor in, than from low.
Their jump would take longer than usual to set up; that gave a window of opportunity, the same window he intended to throw the safety regs out of.
Normally, the computer did the work; he input the parameters and margins. This time, instead of waiting for a full derivation and the officially acceptable margin of safety, he instructed the computer to take the best compromise it could find in a minute’s factoring, and overrode the safety interlock entirely.
Her gun crews were all bored and frustrated, and keen to finally do what they were supposed to and shoot something. This might not have been what they had in mind, but it would do.
The rest of the line boggled at their flag taking herself out of the pattern, and going off on some lunatic chase to nowhere. Black Prince was informed, in full, in three seconds.
Lennart knew anyway; fighter direction were monitoring the situation.
It might be true, or it might not. Gut instinct, yes. Those fighters had been seen in company with Rebel craft before- he wondered if the rebels had any knowledge about their local ally’s genocidally aggressive past. They claimed the moral high ground, after all; it would be politically interesting to tell them about it.
His actual response was to instruct the commander of HIMS Blackwood to take over coordination of the search, and to remind Falldess not to jump directly in front of the cloud of fighters and impactors.
That and the forlorn hope, at those speeds, of actually finding evidence or a live prisoner from whom evidence could be extracted.
Tarazed Meridian got the message shortly before going into jump, early. ‘Ah, kriff. Didn’t allow for that.’
She emerged a light minute ahead of the small formation, well within it’s manoeuvre cone. Even at point eight of lightspeed, they had enough thrust to move into a head on collision. Which they did.
Falldess felt distinctly like a parrot thinking about it, repeating ideas she was uncomfortably aware she didn’t fully understand. She did grasp that the damage they could do to the world the impactors had been aimed at, they could do to her ship.
‘Helm, bring weapons to bear. Nav, plot another jump, out of their line of attack this time, if you would be so kind.’ Lennart’s sarcasm was rubbing off on her. ‘Guns, you have your orders, what are you waiting for?’
Fight this pass out, hit them hard enough to forestall their escape- and maybe enough to punch a hole in their screen and get at the ships- and try not to get an extinction level event in the face.
Meridian class did not carry their cousins’ strategic bombardment missiles; too small a salvo to be worthwhile in ship to ship. They did mount eight quad fighter-weight point defence lasers, four twin light ions and twenty light turbolasers, and she used them.
Extreme range to begin with, but what was to lose? They sprayed fire across the swarm, the MTLs and HTLs went for the two ships at the heart of it.
The small dots, the bombardment missiles, were surprisingly elusive. They had jammers, and they were using them collectively, shielding each other. Tarazed Meridian’s gun crews were well enough drilled, but they had little real experience; nervous excitement and tension impaired their efficiency.
They were shooting at a blur, not a collection of dots- probable loci overlapping into a shifting pink-red kaleidoscope. Doctrine stated odd numbered guns went on to barrage fire, even numbers to active local control to isolate individual targets.
Half of them got it wrong to start with. No point correcting- Falldess yelled at her gunnery officer to keep shooting.
The penetrators were purely kinetic; when they were hit, they died unspectacularly, a tiny drop in intensity and shift in the pattern of the jamming. The cloud of plasma usually kept coming.
The fighters and the two ships veered away, maximum deflection angle, and sprayed return fire at the Imperial frigate; the fighters’ large autoblaster setups perfect for high relative speed, high deflection shooting. The ships were armed with heavier weapons- same principle, though. Turboblasters?
High rate of fire, colour spreading from brilliant yellow to standard rebel red, they were trying to weaken the Imperial ship’s shields to make it easier for the impactors. The capital guns landed hits faster than the Meridian’s heavy lasers were scoring.
Their weaponry was primitive bordering on peculiar, but their shielding was standard, maybe heavier than average. Meridian’s main guns divided their fire evenly between the two, the larger command unit and the smaller missile carrier;
the command ship was five hundred and forty metres broad and basically a shallow dome, with smaller domes piled on top of it, flew rounded side forward, three hundred metres in length. The missile ship was a smaller version of the same.
The missile ship took four MTL hits when it was still half a light minute away. The shields flared, but held. It turned side on, minimising target profile, and rolled and hooped through the salvos coming it’s way. The command frigate trusted to it’s heavier shielding and replied with two heavy turboblasters hosing down Tarazed Meridian.
The blasters every few seconds strayed and scattered, twitching off target, expecting defensive moves that never came- the Imperial heavy frigate was locked into calculating an escape course before the shower of relativistic missiles reached her.
In theory, they were less effective than the bigger, more powerful Imperial ship’s heavy turbolasers- they threw 1.4 teraton bolts at a rough estimate of five bolts per second.
Pointless for heavy antiship work, useful corvette killers but most people used smaller, lighter, more efficient LTL for that. In practise, for this kind of full acceleration, high speed fight, they got a lot more energy on target.
Falldess knew there was no point in screaming at her gun crews, but pacing up and down the bridge was no relief either; the flares from outside as her ship was kicked by the stream of shot ate away at her nerves, as well as the shielding.
Finally, finally, forty-five seconds elapsed and twenty-six light seconds apart, one of the HTL impacted on the command frigate. It took it well, at first, but burnt off so much of the shielding that she had to go evasive as well.
Fire advantage shifted decisively to the Imperial side, but they only had thirty more seconds to exercise it in before the wave of planet-killers reached them.
‘Concentrate on the command unit. Nav?’
‘Fifteen seconds more to calculate, five to turn to bear.’ The navigator said, every available bodily appendage crossed.
‘I don’t think assuming animal form is going to do us much good.’ Falldess said, snappishly.
‘It seems to work for the AT-AT…oh, that was pretty.’ Two HTL shot in quick succession slammed into the rRasfenoni command frigate, blasting through the shields and turning one of her towers of domes into molten fragments.
‘All weapons on that ship now. If we hit her hard enough we can take her on the next pass.’ Falldess ordered.
‘Not possible, no time.’ Nav said.
Falldess wanted to fight down to the muzzle, actually she wanted to physically get hold of them and rip them apart; another disadvantage of modern warships, boarding was an order of magnitude more difficult.
She knew, though, that they had to keep up this hit and run routine, one jump ahead of the impactor cloud- they had taken down less than forty of them; some planet somewhere was going to suffer.
Only a technological illiterate or a Corellian would even have attempted this. The age old cliché of daring to go further because they didn’t know what couldn’t be done, that had driven health and safety operatives to the limits of sanity for almost as long.
‘Then by the plan, jump.’ She reluctantly ordered.
Tarazed Meridian’s turrets pivoted to stay on target as the ship banked away, and the range closed to something like reasonable firing distance. Starboard side could still bear; they kept pumping out shot.
They connected with two HTL and five MTL blasts just before transition. The green nova faded, revealed less than half a ship, molten and spewing life pods from what was left.
Just before the leading pair of impactors, covered by collective jamming, reached and smashed into Tarazed Meridian low on her starboard side.
And the cult of webber did intone: 'Fifty thousand missiles at .9C'
You write the best visualization of hunting deep space I have seen in a long time. I thank you sir.
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
Vehrec wrote:And the cult of webber did intone: 'Fifty thousand missiles at .9C'
Never, when I made that offhand comment years ago on SB, did I figure it'd turn into some sort of weird mantra.
This story is fantastic. They're Star Wars characters I sympathize with and are genuinely interested in. Keep up the great work.
"I'm sorry, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that your inability to use the brain evolution granted you is any of my fucking concern."
"You. Stupid. Shit." Victor desperately wished he knew enough Japanese to curse properly. "Davions take alot of killing." -Grave Covenant Founder of the Cult of Weber
Agenda? You honestly think I'm not just making this up as I go along?
Partly, well, the shift of work patterns has made some difference, not so much to the amount of time as to the attention paid to it all- it is in fact a fairly crappy job, but in a good company wth good prospects of moving up the ladder- but mainly that chapter 29 has turned into an absolute bastard to get written.
When complete it should consist of a battle in three parts, the first of which you have already, and three conversations. All of which I'm working on simultaneously, and at least two of which I have been picking away at for the last week- thinking they were almost ready, rereading them and realising that they weren't.
Now I'm faced with an insufficiency of mallets; who was it who said an artist should have someone standing behind him with a mallet, ready to stop him when he had finished? Shaw? Wilde? Someone like that. (Just to dispel the high-falutin' ness of that, e-cookie to anyone who can spot the dubious literary reference when it finally does show up- it's either Bob Shaw's Who Goes Here? Harry Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero, or Dangermouse.)
I think I am pretty much finally ready to go with the most important of the three stretches of dialogue, either later tonight (UK time), or tomorrow night. Either that or ready to admit it's not getting any better for further polishing.
In the meantime, the first half of the second part of the combat sequence. It's not eventful and it's not good, but at least it's ready.
It was a loose, sprawling fight. Simultaneity was the real problem. So many things, happening at once. The rebel and Imperial recon fighter elements, blurring together, trying to outguess each other and come to combat in tardyonic space.
Combat in hyperspace was impossible, for one very good reason; energy density. A turbolaser bolt, or any missile that could be carried in numbers worth using, simply carried too much power over area to move anything like quickly.
In most cases, a ship that fired a volley of turbolaser fire at a target on it’s bow would shoot itself, as it, protected by the hyperdrive field, moved faster than the massively energetic turbolaser bolt would once it left the field.
In theory, minelaying could be done. In practise, forget it. Any random factor would be multiplied by the ratio of tachyonic to bradyonic speed, too.
The mines, whatever they were, would scatter so widely that even if the enemy actively cooperated in trying to be hit, they probably couldn’t manage it.
Launching mines across the light barrier, that was potentially promising. That might work. Perversely, it was a problem precisely because it wasn’t new technology- nothing like the pulse mass spreader had been implemented in at least a thousand years.
The DMR were trying to rediscover how it had originally been done now; they had the physics, but no experience with the technology.
When it was done, it would add more interesting wrinkles to the fundamental problem of pursuit. The Squadron included no interdictor types, because Lennart had very little respect for most of the grav well generator carrying designs in service. The Immobiliser and it’s predecessor the CC-2200 were both widely considered to be undergunned.
Which was, if anything, an overestimate. Both types carried little more than point defence. In fact, strip off the domes and call them a Lancer replacement and it would probably be a better use of either hull.
The Spoliator-I, one of the new so-called “light fleet” destroyer types along with the Arrogant, carried a single interdictor dome in a dorsal hump on a fast-destroyer chassis.
That could work, they at least had reasonable speed and firepower, but they were as rare as fluorescent purple Bantha. 851 might be able to get hold of one, but Vineland Sector Group couldn’t.
The ultimate solution, as far as Lennart and Mirannon were concerned, was to strip the bow tractor beams and some of the useless deep-storage space, and mount an interdictor dome under the bow of an otherwise conventional Imperator-class.
That was a project for another time. At the moment, Gamma and Epsilon were chasing a gaggle of Rebel fighters, and HIMS Blackwood something that could either be a rebel warship or their target. Tarazed Meridian was still responding to transponder interrogation, but no more detail than that.
The bulk of her must still physically be there, but in what state of damage, and the crew in how deep a state of shock? Tactically, this could be made to work. She could provide the fixed point, the necessary catalyst for a meeting engagement.
Lennart ordered Black Prince’s hyperdrives online, and Tarazed Meridian to broadcast a beacon signal with her statement of condition, hamming it up a little.
If she really was badly hurt, that was one thing and they would move to cover, but if not, exaggerate. The chances of the Rebels not believing it was a trap were low, but the probability of them moving to investigate was high.
That was one thing Imperial long range fighters were better at; the rebel astromechs gave improved self repair capability, as if that mattered often enough to be worth spending that much mass and volume on it, but they were lousy navigators.
The Starwing had a bounded-area computer; within a given section of space, mapped by the carrying ship- usually a sector- they could hyperspace freely.
They could also transfer that to the accompanying Hunters, and did. Aron’s two squadron task force arrived well before any Rebel probe.
What they found was a perfect example of the greater spotted Meridian class; four of the clouds of plasma from destroyed impactors had made contact and splashed, scorch marks giving the ship a mottled appearance.
She was tumbling slowly, most of her was still there. One of the hits had been from a relatively light bus- missile, a ‘mophead’ designed to mop up smaller population centres; thirty impactors, single-digit megaton mostly.
That had left bright scar marks, one unlucky impact where a viewport had been hit square on and breached, but nothing serious.
The other one had been a seismic, designed to do geological damage- a single multi-ton, teraton-yield impactor. That could have been potentially lethal, but luck was not always and solely on the side of the rebels.
The heavy head had breached the outer skin of the frigate and punched through one of the small craft bays before striking the only material component on the ship capable of taking the impact, the main reactor bulb.
A solid hit would have ruptured the containment vessel and destroyed the frigate, but this had been a glancing blow, at a shallow angle. It had wrenched the bulb out of alignment, leaving the ship mostly intact but running on emergency power.
The couplings could be reset, but it was a long job, usually needing a fleet tender. It could be done in the field, but not in combat time.
‘Control, Gamma One, we need support here. Tarazed Meridian’s in pretty bad shape.’ Aron reported.
‘Gamma One, Control, papa bear is on his way.’ Franjia reassured him.
In a way, she wanted to cock this up, make some mistake that would guarantee her being sent back to the squadron- but she couldn’t. Not while it was her unit, not while it was him out there. ‘Take up defence stations around the Meridian.’
The other problem the Imperial frigate was suffering from was shock damage. The tensors had held the frame of the ship in one piece, but the moving parts- especially the crew- hadn’t come off so well.
Of just over thirty-two hundred sailors and troops on board, nine hundred had been in compartments that had been breached or where the compensators had failed to completely damp out the shock.
The bridge module was relatively intact, there had only been one fatality. A Pit Lieutenant, who had been in mid air at the time and whom the compensators had not reacted fast enough to catch, not in his entirety.
Falldess was the least affected. She had seen, smelt and tasted the effects of black powder cannon fire on wooden hulls and the men inside them before, men ripped apart and splashed across bulkheads.
This was, in it’s own way, more impressive- certainly a more expensively achieved way of getting killed. It mattered, it was impossible to ignore, but you picked up the pieces and kept moving. For her, that was chiefly recalling the rest of the bridge crew to their duty.
It was the risk you agreed to take, the bargain you made and the damage you were trying to inflict on the other side. She was unpleasantly surprised by how badly her own bridge team reacted to it.
Her navigator was sitting at his chart board, pecking away at it, dazed one fingered typing. She was about to round on him when she looked round and realised he was one of the few actually trying to function, however badly.
Her gunnery officer was on his knees retching into a pool of blood, most of which was the pit lieutenant’s, some of which was his own drawn by fragments of the pit lieutenant’s skeleton. She leant down, grabbed him around the stomach and squeezed.
‘That’s it, get it out then get back to work. You,’ she pointed at the four Stormtroopers guarding the bridge, ‘restore order. Anti-nausea pills, a good kick up the arse, and if that doesn’t work stun them, throw them out and summon their replacements.’
‘Good grief.’ She continued, looking around the crew. ‘You soft- bellied shower. I might not know what I’m doing but at least I don’t stop trying because I’m standing in somebody’s guts.’
One of the com-scan team lost it at that point, curled up into a ball and puked. A stormtrooper moved to deal with him.
‘At least try and pretend that you’re officers of a fighting service, rather than uniformed bully boys who can dish it out but can’t take it. Com-Scan, is there anything else out there? Helm, how does she answer?’
‘Bridge? Engineering.’ The main overhead speaker interrupted her. ‘Lost main power uptake, lost no. 2 distribution complex, lost no. 4 flight bay, lost no. 4 life support subcomplex.
Surges damped, atmosphere restored. Repair priorities?’ The voice was businesslike, straightforward- at last someone who seems to know what they’re doing, Falldess thought.
‘Tarazed Meridian, this is Gamma One.’ Aron announced. ‘We have incoming Rebel fighters, probably strike loaded.’ He was looking at the computer predictions of emergence- sensor data mostly from the Starwings. Two to three squadrons, two to three small craft with them.
He argued it with himself for a moment. The fighter pilot in him said, there are barely enough to go round. Don’t let those little bitty /ln in on the action.
The responsible side, the squadron leader, wanted to take all the help he could get and bury them in TIE fighters before they had a chance to do much in the way of shooting back.
The argument didn’t last long. He was a squadron leader because he was a pilot. ‘We’ll take them.’
‘Systems, shield status?’ Falldess asked.
‘Still bleeding off heat, loaded and compromised in lower port aft.’
‘Good.’ Falldess said, with deliberate optimism. ‘Launch what fighters can still swim.’
‘Yes, Captain- what? Good?’
‘We have an obvious weak point, that it would obviously benefit them to strike, so they’ll come in predictably.’ She said, knowing the flaws in that but vaulting over them for the sake of crew confidence. ‘Engineering, what can you give me for the guns?’
‘We can give you power for ten teratons per second from the backup reactor. Lights and mediums are good, trickle-charge the heavies.’
‘Nav, what does that mean in speed?’ she asked.
‘We- checking out the steering thrusters now. That power would give us a hundred and sixty ‘g’, main drive.’
‘So,’ she tried to remember, ‘we would lose a race with an escape pod. A problem, but a containable one, as long as we can turn to bear.’
Strangely enough, two of my most re-read authors, Philip K. Dick and Bob Burden, are/were renowned for doing exactly that; just hanging out, peoplewatching, occasionally jotting down snatches of things they overheard. Dialogue snatched from life and riffed into shape. You have to hang out in some pretty peculiar places to pick up anything that's much use for Star Wars fanfic, admittedly.
(You know what I mean; things have been in motion, and even if I had a cunning plan as far as scheduling and releasing goes, I couldn't hold to it right now.)
In terms of influences, this is probably a good moment to admit that I do lurk over on HPCA from time to time. Thanks for that vote of confidence, Andras- although as I live well within "oh shit" distance of Britain's largest counterforce target, went to school with someone who has been arrested frequently protesting against it, and shared a flat at uni with someone who literally ended up on the other side of the fence, I'm not even sure where I am on the political spectrum any more.
Anyway, there's a continuity glitch in this bit. I'll come back to the battle scene once I've written the rest of it. This chapter is on course to be a 25- page monster, and the rest of the combat should happen- probably get pasted in- immediately before this. I'm not sure I have this one down even yet.
NB for editing purposes; this segment was later rewritten, this is the version that is bypassed as being not up to scratch.
‘Captain? Vidcall, from the Imperial Suite.’
‘The one on board this ship, I trust, not the one on Coruscant?’ Lennart replied.
‘It’s Kor Alric and please, Sir, don’t even joke about things like that.’ The comtech said.
Lennart started to say ‘If you’re so scared you won’t even poke fun at them from time to time, then the bastards really have ground you down’- but stopped himself just before committing high treason.
What kind of thing was that to say about the saviour of the galaxy and his own ultimate boss? Something to say very quietly or ideally not at all, he decided.
‘Captain Lennart. I trust you are not too busy to attend on me?’ Adannan said, sarcastically.
‘We’re in the mop up phase of the operation. Between that and the paperwork I should have half an hour or so free.’ He said.
‘It is not wise of you to take the Force so lightly.’ Adannan snarled.
‘Really? In a knock-down drag out fight between a cosmic energy web connecting all life and the dead hand of bureaucratic procedure, I know who my money’s on.’ Lennart quipped.
‘Can the dead hand do-‘ Adannan began, about to force choke Lennart, then realised; draining the life out of someone, taking their air away…yes, the dead hand of bureaucracy could do that.
‘Brenn, you have the conn, Kor Alric, I’ll be right up.’ Lennart hung up; Brenn wanted to say something, ideally wanted to stop him, but there really wasn’t any choice.
‘If I’m not back in an hour-‘
‘Send a search party?’ Brenn interrupted.
‘No, send a Bomber with antiship torps to blow the suite’s viewport out. If I have to deal with him for an hour, by that point I think I’d prefer to take a chance with hard vacuum.’ Lennart said.
The Imperial suite was guarded; four stormtroopers, two with carbines and two with flamethrowers. Interesting load. Lennart simply strolled past them into the main chamber of the suite.
Adannan was not quite ready to receive him- he was still in his underwear. Second tier acolytes of the sith had moderately embarrassing tastes, it seemed; powder- blue shorts, silk, tied in a little bow.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Lennart said. ‘If I’d known it was going to be that kind of meeting, I’d have brought the talcum powder.’
Adannan was a fit man; the bronzed geometric perfection of physical culture exercises, the body as a cleaned, scrubbed unlived- in temple, it seemed at first. The recent shot mark was obvious under a bacta patch, and the burnt ends of his hair had been trimmed. On closer inspection, there were fainter scar lines and blotches, possibly cosmetic, equally probably old wounds that he had either been chosen, or not been allowed to, have fully healed.
That was a worrying thought. At any rate, and as Lennart would have expected, he had no shame.
‘Do you always try to turn everything into a jest?’ Adannan said- snatching up his lightsabre, before Lennart could get ideas.
‘Call me clinically insane, but I’ve always suspected that somewhere, somehow, the universe is laughing at us. If you can’t beat it, join it.’
Adannan boggled slightly. ‘Why do you- no, silly question.’
He had been about to ask “why do you want me to think you are willing to embrace the force?” The answer “so you won’t hurt me” was just too obvious. Less accurate then he thought it was, though.
‘What if you could? What if you could beat the universe, warp it to your will, make the laws of reality cower before you?’ Adannan asked, instead.
‘I can’t think of an answer to that that isn’t consistent with a straitjacket.’ Lennart said. ‘Especially coming from a man in his undershorts.’
‘Does that disturb you, Captain? Are you afraid of the visceral?’ Adannan leered- acting, looking for a weak spot.
‘Smenge, no. Passion’s passion and part of life, happens to us all with a little luck. All that matters is how professionally they deal with it, not what it happens to be oriented towards.’
‘Have you no prejudices? No complaints, no grudges, no defining dislike? Nothing you want to lash out against?’ Adannan probed.
‘I’ve done that.’ Lennart said, calmly. ‘When I was a student. We were wild and young and free, and experimented in all directions, political, sexual, chemical, and venting our feelings and our energy on everything we came across. On one demo I hit Senator Amidala in the face with a flour bomb. I don’t think anybody noticed.’
‘Who?’ Adannan asked.
‘Old, dead politics, only important to the conspiracy theorists.’ Lennart said. There was a slight, unpleasant tingling feeling that he was wrong.
‘Now is what matters.’ Adannan said, in a down-to-business tone. ‘You have the Force. You know that you have the force, I can feel it clustering closer about you, and still you doubt it?’
‘How old were you at the time of Geonosis?’ Lennart asked him.
‘I was eight.’ Adannan admitted. ‘It was the light side that over- reached and failed. That isn’t the issue.’
‘Twelve at Second Coruscant, then.’ Lennart said. ‘During the war years, I never saw the vaunted powers of the Jedi stretch to anything a normal professional flag officer couldn’t achieve through their own knowledge, skill and instinct.
What I did see, time and again, were jedi taking on the role of heroic leadership; charging forward like raw junior lieutenants, using their force powers instead of their brains- if they had any.
‘Command’ was a hollow joke; as well ask Jabba’s pet rancor to run his business for a day. The power of the Force did not make up for what it took away- it made them stupid.’
‘What do you expect, from followers of the blind side of the force? Is this not simply old ground, that you are going over again to buy time and postpone the inevitable?’ Adannan challenged.
‘Unfinished business. And despite what you or the force say, it is not inevitable.’ Lennart said.
‘You’re at the very portal of your new life, you know nothing. Yet.’ Adannan said.
‘No more than could be learned from five Jedi Generals, two of which we had to mop up, wring out and bury in baggies and one we could only find with a molecular sieve. Why is the dark side smarter?’
‘Because it is more fundamental.’ Adannan said, after a moment’s thought. ‘What would you expect the natural state of the Force to be? Mystic nonsense? Of course not. The force should be part of things, another thread, a strand of the great web of life in the Galaxy. Perhaps a bright and even dominant part, but involved. Visceral, tactile, burningly intense- not the pale wilting thing of ether and moonbeams the Jedi peddled.’ Adannan ranted. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking along those lines already.’
‘I have, but that just leads to more questions. If that is the truth, then where has the dark side been these last thousand years? Where was that burning thread?’ Lennart asked.
‘Obviously, you have something in mind.’ Adannan said.
‘Where is invisible, inobvious power to be found?’ Lennart phrased it as a rhetorical question. How to put this in a way that Adannan would be proud to admit to- where did the common sense to avoid self- incrimination trip over that pride? ‘Where do you hide a giant shark?’
‘In a pool of slightly smaller sharks.’ Adannan stated.
‘Among bankers and financiers who hold authority without accountability,’ just like the Trade Federation, Lennart thought. How would Adannan react to that? Lennart thought it was very likely to be my cult, right or wrong. ‘Fixers and deal makers, grey and black economy men- frankly, if the underworld didn’t contain a few then the Dark Side was missing a trick.’
‘It did, and does; but the power of the Force is too rare and valuable to be wasted on small time thuggery and extortion. Your own hunters’ job is in part to find such people, and bring them within the fold of the new order.’
‘I knew there was something rotten about the smell of COMPNOR.’ Lennart said.
‘One thing I have become convinced of’, he went on, ‘is that buried under all the feedback loops is a fairly simple relationship; commitment is power. Which is fair enough, until you look at the balance sheet. Even totally immersive dedication gets you very nearly nothing, to begin with. You have to sweat blood at it, give yourself over a shred at a time, until there is nothing left.
My personal bet is that there’s very little visible sign of the dark side in galactic affairs,’ until recently, he thought quietly, ‘because few of them have managed to master the dire and dread secrets of appearing perfectly normal.’
‘How do you know this? Do you sense it in the force?’ Adannan snorted, contemptuous.
‘As a matter of fact, yes. Shall we take a test?’ Lennart said, refusing to back down.
‘What kind of a test?’ Adannan asked. Obviously not strength, speed, skill- none of the qualities of a warrior- hero.
‘A comprehension test.’ Lennart said. ‘You tell me what the kriff the sector group are playing at, I tell you what I think they’re doing, and we’ll see whose explanation best fits the facts.’
Adannan thought about it. ‘Who is to arbitrate this? Who is to be the judge of understanding?’
‘Who do you trust to hear all this and not speak of it?’ Lennart asked.
Adannan opened his mouth to make the standard response, then sighed. ‘When are you going to stop leaving these little traps for me?’
‘Ah, efficiency.’ Lennart replied. ‘I’m not sure I ever want to reach a state of mind where I see a question about trusting my subordinate officers and men as a trap- but I meant it at face value, as well.’
Laurentia chose that moment to walk in from the side chamber carrying Adannan’s tunic and trousers; both of them turned to look at her. Lennart pulled out his com.
‘Legion, special operations company, team Blue-17. Send Aleph-3 up to the Imperial Suite.’
She took only a minute to arrive, obviously had come at the run. Adannan finally managed to place that suit of armour she was wearing- only a tiny number had ever been issued, long ago. It was the upgraded Royal Guard version of the original Clonetrooper suit. Lennart had obviously had it stolen from an armoury somewhere.
‘A matched pair. Good.’ Adannan said.
Aleph-3 looked back and forward between them, face calm but obviously slightly bewildered; by Adannan’s state of disrobe, as much as anything else.
‘Lord Adannan. Captain.’ She acknowledged them. ‘A matched pair of what?’
Subtly, Adannan tried to probe both their feelings. Her for him, an- interesting mix. Passion, banked and contained, both more and less than purely physical; desperation and frustration, but also logic.
That could be very interesting to manipulate. Him for her- she was in for a real disappointment. A certain wary fondness, more rivalry and respect than lust; although there was a little of that there, too. Predominantly, protection, responsibility.
If he had to categorise, Adannan would say father fighting back a guilty passion for his daughter. Oh, that could be entertaining to play with. Very much so.
‘Viewpoints.’ Lennart said. ‘Kor Alric and I are about to disagree on a lot of things, and we need someone moderately neutral in the middle. Between you, you should do.’
Aleph-3 and Laurentia looked at each other. ‘Nonsense.’ They both said, in stereo.
‘See? Perfect harmony.’ Lennart said, knowing that neither of them would believe it.
‘My civil rank trumps your military. You first.’ Adannan instructed.
‘Who are the Moff’s friends and backers?’ Lennart asked.
‘Do you always begin an explanation with a question?’ Adnannan asked- and as Lennart opened his mouth, added ‘If this ends with or includes in any way the phrase “Of course, don’t you?”, there will be lightsabres.’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, frequently I do. It establishes the extent of the pupil’s knowledge and hopefully lets me skive off by skipping bits out. Bad old lecturing habit.’ Lennart said, continuing ‘On the matter in hand, I do not believe Xeale got to his position by merit, still less by random chance.
I miss the Senate; it made things so easy for amateur government- watchers. It was vaguely possible to tell who owed who, who owned who-else, which way things were going. Now, any attempt to identify power blocs and lines of allegiance comes down to watching he social circuit, market trading and wild-ass guesswork.
My best guess,’ Lennart said, ‘ is that Xeale is loosely affiliated to a group who call themselves Liberal Normalisation, formerly the LNP- have you ever heard of them before?’
Adannan groaned, but decided not to bother with an argument this time. ‘No. Should I have?’
‘Probably. They were a small party, pretty much single- issue on the subject of reconstruction, and heavily laden with ex- separatists; dubiously so, in fact. They used to have a reputation for being ostentatiously super-loyal on the surface and venom itself in private, with strong links to organised crime and the murkier fringes of law enforcement.
I think Xeale is primarily here to exploit this sector on their behalf. Best chance against him may be the fact that he is Falleen.’
‘Do you think that because he is an alien, he is inferior?’ Adannan probed.
‘No, I think he’s vulnerable because he will have used charm, and pheromones, to carry him further and faster than raw ability would dictate. He’s not as skilled, or as secure in place, as he thinks he is.’ Lennart said.
‘And why is this relevant to the operation?’
‘You’re pretty good at answering a question with a question yourself, you know that?’ Lennart bounced back. ‘It is past time we discussed what the actual objective is. From my point of view,’ Lennart said, ‘Ord Corban is a shadowport on the grand scale. Classified and closed down, it is protected from the official forces of the empire by that clearance- but wide open to those outside the law. Including the sector moff. And,’ Adannan could feel Lennart’s nerves jangling, and the dark side hovering over him, ‘if he works out what you intend he’ll have an official excuse to bring the entire sector fleet against us.’
Adannan went pale- all the way down; the colour drained out of his chest and arms, as well. Kill him now, most of his logic said. Laurentia looked baffled, she hand known there was a scheme but not what it was. Aleph-3 had done a little communication hacking of her own, and could hear on the flight communications channel ‘I think this is the pay- off now. Stand by.’
‘You were right.’ Adannan said. ‘I was a medical student. Do you know how the incident that led me to this started?’
‘I can guess. With a well- meaning ship’s sawbones prodding around inside an injured clone trooper’s head.’ Lennart said, tensely watching Adannan. This was not the time or place that he would choose for a confrontation, but the potential result was worth the risk. ‘Purely by accident, the existence of embedded command codes like Order 66 became obvious, and things went to shit from there.’
Long pause. Eventually Adannan said ‘And?’
‘And what? Men versus clones, womb born versus cylinder- my bet is that they wiped each other out. The truth was draped in a cover story or five, the base ultra- classified and deliberately forgotten, until someone who couldn’t care less about legality and classification came across an abandoned fleet depot, and started drooling badly enough to short out the security computers.’
‘Or the details were betrayed to them by these politicians of yours.’
‘Is that the same way you found out about it?’ Lennart asked.
‘Do you realise how much danger you have placed yourself in, by asking that question?’ Adannan asked him.
‘Or how little? Your personal interest and your personal actions look like the sign of a man with an agenda. You are, after all, a sith- and how much of that is the living word of the Emperor, and how much your own voice?’ Lennart said, gambling and knowing it.
‘I presume you’re not deranged enough to make a mere wild accusation.’ Adannan said, making no attempt to deny it. ‘Your line of reasoning goes; I antagonised the Moff to provide a credible cover story, to sheath an attempt to sieze the place for myself? For my own greater glory and power?’
‘That, and partly so I could watch your inner turmoil as you tried to deny it.’ Lennart said. ‘Oh well. It’s too obvious, I wouldn’t believe you even if you could bring yourself to contradict your own power- lust.’
‘Are you threatening me?’ Adannan asked, standing up.
‘Would you prefer it if I did? No, I’m putting the same question to you as I put to the Force at large; what’s in it for me?’
Adannan thought it over for a second; how badly did he need Lennart’s cooperation? Fairly so. Enough to string him along for the time being, anyway.
‘With those code over-rides, with the mental engineering behind them,’ Adannan admitted, ‘I would be unstoppable. No-one would be beyond my reach. I could carve out a place for myself- and my apprentice.’
‘You’ve already been dabbling in the field.’ Lennart admitted that he knew.
‘Would you expect someone who didn’t have the contacts to know what was at stake and how much it was worth to be pushing this? Enough to glimpse the limits of it. Enough to be interested in it, and to comprehend what we find there and take it for my own.’
‘As a general case, we’re simply talking about improved propaganda here, yes? Advanced, media based mass coercion. How different would that really be from current best practise? Considering how resistant COMPNOR are to putting in the effort needed to achieve even that, what difference would a better theory make?
That and with the authority you already have, and the Force to boot, who would you need to use that against?’ Lennart asked.
‘I find it hard to believe that the answer is all that unthinkable, especially for you.’ Adannan said. ‘Those who currently fancy themselves my superiors, in the Imperial state and the ranks of the Sith.’
Having you bugged through the main sensor system turned out to be valuable after all, Lennart thought. ‘So much for the carrot. I think I understand the stick. Now understand my position; you’re a novice when it comes to open warfare. Whatever we’re going to do, you leave the charge of the doing of it to me, right?’
‘Do you really think you’re in a position to bargain?’ Adannan bluffed.
‘Despite the many rude things I’ve said about the force, I don’t believe that you’re short sighted enough not to. I’ll do the fighting; I am also,’ and this, this was the pay-off, Adannan sensed it coming, his hand went to his lightsabre and so did Lennart’s, ‘the only man who can protect you from Imperial central authority.’
Aleph-3 looked away from them, round at the viewport; several stars occluded- by a compact, finny shape that looked remarkably like their single surviving Advanced-X7/proto-Defender. Bringing a starfighter to a sabre fight? That was evil. She glanced at Lennart with mixed pride- and doubt. Presumably, he actually had thought of some way of not getting blown up in the process?
‘You think you have achieved something…’Adannan sensed.
‘What, you expect me to monologue? Is that supposed to be another sign of falling to the Dark Side?’ Lennart said.
‘Your bugs would be ineffective. This room is far too well shielded for that. My word overrides yours.’ The Sith acolyte stated; Lennart hadn’t stopped smiling. ‘You- pride comes before the fall, does it not? What have you done?’ Adannan realised, and demanded.
‘With the electronic warfare suite on a star destroyer, what do you think? My price, before we go any further; I’ll study under you in the arts of the Force, I’ll give you your shot at fame, but we bombard Ord Corban. Go hunting for your secret keys to power, but at the end of the day, the support it’s giving to the Rebellion and the security threat it presents to the Empire are just too severe.’
‘You will not get between me and my prize.’ Adannan said. How long is it going to take him to realise, Lennart wondered. ‘You will also not create a situation with me in the bowels of a planet scheduled for bombardment, and you up in orbit with all the guns.’ Two seconds, then.
‘Isn’t it traditional for apprentices to try and murder their masters?’ Lennart said.
‘And for masters to cull unworthy apprentices.’ Adannan stated.
‘For the moment, you have an interest in keeping me alive, to do the actual physical work of beating the Alliance off Ord Corban and holding the Sector Group off, and I have an interest in keeping you alive, to pick up from you exactly how to use the powers of the force. Won’t always be the case, will it?’
‘This is not,’ Adannan stressed, ‘supposed to be the subject of a deal.’
‘How do you expect to be able to make any use of what you find,’ Lennart asked in the tone of an innocent question, ‘if you’ve got no taste for the political?’
‘That’s the whole kriffing point. I won’t need to, I will be able to-‘ Adannan stopped himself in mid flow, again. ‘How can you do this to me? Is this some mind influencing power of yours that you have developed through independent research?’
‘No, but it’s interesting that you think that’s possible.’ Lennart said. ‘Polarising effect, is all; normal enough, between two people on opposite sides of an argument. Which you knew, before you opened your mouth. Piett and Aleph-3 could tell you that I can be an infuriating bastard when I put my mind to it, but I’m not usually that good.’
‘You believe in raw brainpower over the force, so backing me into arguing the other way- and not using the full power of my own brain to do so. Nicely laid. Of course the situation calls for a degree of subtlety.’ Adannan said.
‘Making sense of court politics these days pretty much demands a degree in subtlety. ‘ Lennart agreed. ‘You can probably think more clearly- occupy a broader spectrum of possibilities- when I’m not here. Do we have a preliminary arrangement?’
‘You are a puce hole.’ Adannan said.
‘Excuse me?’ Lennart boggled slightly.
‘You have anti-meditative powers. You draw in and destroy common sense and sanity.’
‘Oh. I get the reference now. And, no. I’m an Imperial starship captain, after all. That and if you think I’m good at it, you don’t want to meet some of the people I have to deal with.’ Lennart said, without seriousness, deliberately.
‘There are so many, many reasons I ought to simply strike you down.’ Adannan said, marvelling slightly at the fact that he hadn’t. ‘Why do I not do that?’ He made no aggressive move, though.
‘Self preservation?’ Lennart suggested, looking out of the viewport. A hovering starfighter was dimly visible.
‘Tell me,’ Adannan said, ‘Why can I not simply melt the pilot’s mind? And how did you expect not to get incinerated in the process?’
‘Let’s find out.’ Lennart said, enthusiastically, pulling out a comlink. In fact, he had only the vaguest idea of what the crew intended. He hadn’t expected to be taken this literally.
‘You’re bluffing.’ Adannan said, a little too confidently to be true.
‘Think about it. If you get killed now, it was a training accident- pretty close to dying by your own hand- but you’re still a red smear on the wall. Gets me off the hook nicely.’ He activated the comlink. ‘Drone-‘
‘That won’t be necessary.’ Adannan said. ‘I see that you are simply a risk that I will have to take.’
‘I have to catch up on the squadron’s paperwork now.’ Lennart said. ‘I’ll leave you to counterplot.’
‘Go.’ Adannan said. Lennart did, and Aleph-3 followed him.
As soon as they were out of the access corridor to the suite, Lennart stopped, and spent half a minute shivering, letting the tension of their encounter wash over him. ‘That’s how you’re supposed to do it.’ He said, quietly. Looked at her. ‘I had no idea whether I was bluffing or not. That was just a throwaway quip, they took it seriously.’
That warranted a whole flood of clichés ranging from “you did what!?” to banging his head off the bulkhead, grabbing him and shaking some sense into him. Maybe later.
‘You had no plan. You went in there with nothing resembling a plan. You didn’t even have an objective, did you? You’re impossible.’ She said, caution to the wind.
‘That was the plan.’ Lennart said, not entirely truthfully. He had a rough goal in mind; walk out again.
‘Then again, from a certain point of view, that was…peculiarly uneventful.’ Aleph-3 said, wondering. ‘I expected him to try to use me against you.’
‘Are you so sure he didn’t?’ Lennart said. ‘He started prodding me about prejudices, and I could tell he wanted to go further, ask me why there were so few women and aliens on board, but I think he could sense me thinking a move ahead, making up answers, so he changed tack. Or I did.’
‘To what?’ she asked.
‘The force. Stupidity. Correlations between the two.’
‘I would say that from the purely professional viewpoint, he mishandled that. He failed to project himself as a personality type you could respect, failed to break out of the boxes you stuffed him into.’ She said.
‘Is that a pregnant pause I see before me, it’s point levelled at my breast?’ Lennart misquoted, after a couple of seconds. ‘I know if I back him into a corner far enough, he’ll do something drastic. It’s all in the curves, in how fast one thing happens against another.’
‘Are you actually trying to break my conditioning by attacking me in the limbic system? Breast? Curves? One thing happening against another?’ She said, in her I’m-on-the-edge-here voice.
You left out “pregnant”, he nearly said, but decided to listen to his instincts for self preservation. Actually, there might be something in that. Oh kriff. Probably literally.
‘Way too many allusions in there to be completely accidental. Probably subconscious.’ Lennart admitted. ‘Men are traditionally supposed to have one track minds, so one thing at a time; you’re beautiful. That I have no problem recognising. You’re also a liability.’
Unfortunately, she was also smart enough to understand exactly why she was a liability.
‘I see what you mean now. All he has to do is to give a little nudge from time to time, to the chaos inherent in the situation. And-‘ she started to say something, started to say half a dozen things by the look of it, and stopped. Most of the problem, the personal problem, was hers, and there was no way she could ask for his help without adding to it. The words wouldn’t, couldn’t be enough.
He noticed her halt, decide to retreat back inside her mental shell. ‘You were optimistic enough when discussing the force. Look- remember when you were taking me to task, about having to work harder if I wanted to stay the ship’s Alpha male?
I actually think you got that wrong. It’s a lot better than the alternative, but it’s not accurate; my anthropological job description, if I can put it like that, is much closer to “Patriarch”.’ Lennart said, analytically. ‘An Alpha’s the first among equals, establishing dominance through animal qualities; randiest of the randy, boldest of the bold, thuggiest of the thuggish. It’s a position that has it’s advantages, but it doesn’t correlate to the captain of a ship.’
‘So how does a patriarch deal with a renegade alpha male?’ She asked.
‘How does a patriarch deal with a newly emergent, would-be alpha female that doesn’t really understand the powers and limitations of her own position, could be a better question to have an answer to.’ Lennart pointed out. ‘There is at least one terrible temptation to face- and while I know in the core these days it’s fashionable to just give in, consider this.’
‘You don’t need to say, I can see it clearly.’ She said, slowly. ‘Learning to mould others to your will with the Force, I am in an almost inevitable position as first target.’
‘It was already difficult enough, without a temptation that amounts to a duty in it’s own right, but as an alpha-male, I could happily say, space fiend take the hindmost. What I mean by patriarch is that I’m responsible for you. I chose- carved my way into- this position, it is by my will that I have assumed that responsibility, and I owe it to myself to discharge that responsibility honourably. Why do you think all my wild thranta seeds have been sown outside the hull?’
‘Thranta aren’t a plant.’ Aleph-3 said.
‘I know.’
‘They’re also extinct.’ She added.
‘I know. This is your attempt to dodge the question by doing a me impression, isn’t it?’ Lennart asked.
‘Oh,’ she said, lowering her voice and doing an excellent impression of his accent, ‘I think I could do better than that.’
‘Then talk me through my hang-ups.’ Lennart put her on the spot.
‘Ah. Perhaps not.’ She threw the ball right back at him.
‘As “patriarch”, as the head of the military family that constitutes the crew of the ship, my human role is to bring them up. To teach them and show example, to protect them from danger when that is what the situation warrants, and when the Starfleet, the state and the circumstances call for it to lead them into harm’s way.
‘I may have set a damned strange example, but that doesn’t mean I don’t take it seriously. Naturally, I’m not even handed; the best and the worst get disproportionate amounts of worry and attention.
‘If I were to take a lover from among the crew, I would be…ferociously biased on her behalf. Dangerously unprofessional. So I look outside the ship and usually outside the fleet entirely, for partners of the day or of the week who mean little to me and matter even less.’ Lennart said, wondering why he even expected her to understand, wondering if he was simply making an excuse. Wondering if he was being a complete idiot.
‘You sound lonely.’ She said.
‘With forty-six thousand younger brothers and sisters?’ Lennart said.
‘I can see exactly where you wouldn’t feel right with a- younger sister.’ She said, bright with disappointment and the perverse hope that if she understood, that might be enough to change his mind.
‘Speaking of things that don’t feel right.’ Lennart said, jerking his head in the direction of the Imperial suite- and changing the subject. ‘What did you make of that?’
‘You now have him on record with what amounts to a confession of treason, but he has you acknowledging it and apparently agreeing. He should have called your bluff.’ Aleph-3 said.
‘It’s mechanically possible that we all wouldn’t have died.’ Lennart said, with retroactive optimism. ‘Stepdown antipersonnel strafing mode, AG and pressure curtain keyed to my rank cylinder, drop the tensors on half the window so the other half shatters like a transparisteel shrapnel bomb- we might have survived.’
‘Politically speaking, what difference should that have made?’ Aleph-3 said.
‘He should have been at least as willing as I was to take any risk on offer. I think I got away with it because he could tell I hadn’t precalculated that, it was a complete shot in the dark- metaphorically as well as literally. If you had been dealing, for the grand prize of your life, with a man who had talents you needed but was also cheerfully psychotic, what would you do?’
‘You mean I wasn’t?’ she snapped back.
‘All right, you got me on that one. What do you think he should have done?’ Lennart rephrased.
‘Trusted in the Force.’ She said without hesitation. ‘Dared you to do it.’
‘He was a doctor, once.’ Lennart said. ‘I don’t think he still holds to anything of the sort, but he remembers what it felt like to have ethics and standards, a code to live by and a body of knowledge that went with it, and whatever he may strive for I don’t think he’s entirely over that yet.’
‘Not entirely relevant.’
‘I think it is. My take is that he is less confident in his own abilities than he likes to think, and his source of inner certainty is not particularly well aligned with the being he’s trying to turn himself in to. When doctors go bad they tend to be pretty drastic about it, as a rule of thumb, and we have some idea how personally cruel he can be, but I don’t think he’s the magnitude of monster he wants to be or is trying to become.
Quantitatively, not qualitatively. Now he probably thinks he’s lulled me into a false sense of security by letting me win a trick, and he’s planning something ugly- you’re more comfortable when we talk business, aren’t you?’ Lennart changed subject again.
She blinked. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’
‘Right. Meet me by the forward shuttle bay in an hour, civilian clothes, discreetly armed.’ He said.
‘If this is you being unprofessional, I think I like it.’
Commander of the MFS Darwinian Selection Method (sexual)
Actually I really like all the details from games, WEG and so on, that you have put together in this very realistic universe. But I think what really lifts this fanfic is how you portray all the individuals in different sections of the ship, and how they they interact and have distinct personalities, morals and goals. And I love that no one are stereotypes (even Adannan can admit he was an idiot), and no one is "perfect". I could keep rambling about how good this is, but 'nuff said for now 
