Hull 721, plot arc the second

[Kartr_Kana]

Nah better to live dangerous and go out in flames and glory.

[Raesene]

Nah better to live dangerous and go out in flames and glory.

Good point, until glory takes the form of a heavy turbolaserbolt about to impact on your unshielded bridge window

Edit: noticed a typo and corrected it

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Right, story segment to follow, but first-

Darth Raptor, my basic starting point there was to wonder how somebody, live, clone, whatever, can actually be incorruptible, unpersuadeable, unseduceable and so willing to serve a cause? Maybe it's because I'm a lazy git myself, but I do see their determination, dedication and self- discipline as positive qualities.

Although I really should work more on the flaws of their virtues, the abrasiveness and arguably callousness that ought to come with that.


Kartr, I just ran through what I consider to be 'good advice' in my own head and realised I don't follow half of it myself. In terms of plotting, I'm a gamer, I avoid published adventures wherever possible, and I've had frighteningly many years of practise at coming up with variously demented plans and plots.

Practise really is the key. You can get better at knowing what to write by reading, but you get better at writing by writing, generally. Try different styles, try different voices. I have juvenilia that will never see the light of day because they're just too awful, but that's normal, it's part of the apprenticeship.

Coming up with them is the fun part, though. To be honest, the best plot generators in the world are real- life politics and economics. Work out who is aware of a situation, what they might think they stand to gain from it, how they're going to go about it, who the other players are, throw them into the pot and stir.

After the brainstorming session, you have to make it all happen, put finger to keyboard. That's the hard part. Start diverse, experiment, and when you find a mode and a voice you like, keep doing it.

Actually, there is another bunch of people in- universe I'm probably unjustifiably hard on; the Alliance. It doesn't change in this segment.
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'Who was it who said that nothing concentrates the mind like knowing you're going to be disintegrated in the morning?' The female prisoner in cell fifteen mused.

'Whoever it was, I hope they kriffin' were. This waiting is unnatural and inhumane punishment.' The nervous man in Cell Five said. He would have been pacing up and down if he wasn't fettered to the wall. 'If my lawyer gave a damn I'd complain.'

'Listen to the judicial reformer.' Cell eight said, sarcastically. 'If they're going to disintegrate me, I don't mind them taking their time.'

'Oh no, no, you don't want that. Have you ever listened to someone being disintegrated, millimetre by millimetre? Felt the smell of it? I think the dead guy almost got the best of the deal.' Cell Four added his opinion.


'Well, at least now we know what you're in for.' Cell Twelve added, sarcastically. There was a long pause, and somebody told remand prisoner twelve to shut up.

'It was in the holding tanks. I think they decided that the guy in the cube next to me knew too much, let him up on the stand and he might start talking- so they just murdered him in his cell, one molecule at a time.' Four went on.

'He didn't want to just get it over; he screamed for mercy, then he screamed that he would tell them whatever they wanted to know, then that they could do anything but please not that, then he just kind of screamed.'


'I don't believe it.' Cell Two, a very young voice, said, trying loudly to convince himself. 'Not even our police-'

There was a general, sadistic laugh at that, and 'How often have you been arrested, kid?' Cell Ten asked.

'This is the first go round.' Two said, trying for bravado and not entirely making it.

'How the kriff did you manage that?' Cell Eight said, with mock admiration. 'Hell of a first offence to get you straight to MaxSecPol.'

'I don't know, really.' the kid said more normally. 'We were leafleting, putting up posters- we hardly really did anything, we didn't hurt anybody.'

'Oh, stang, they got you on a twelve- eighty.' Ten said.


'I don't remember, is that the charge number? It could have been something like that.'

'Relax and enjoy the rest of your life, kid, it's only going to be a couple of days. Didn't you read the leaflets? Twelve-eighty is aiding the Alliance.' Ten said. 'Death without the option.'

'Hey, that's crazy. He's just a little baby criminal.' Prisoner Five said.

'Shit, you really were a judicial reformer.' Ten said to him, and it was not a compliment- “judicial reformer” was slang for someone who couldn't do the time, who whined and whimpered through their sentence.

'Yeah, I believe that all jails should be open access.' Five reestablished himself.


'Do you know how they weight that? They charge you as an accessory to the crimes of all the guys you tried to spring. ' Ten said.

'And you say there's something wrong with saying that the system stinks?' Five said.

'Is that why the police let us talk, so that we can incriminate ourselves and be incriminated in each other's crimes?' Prisoner number fifteen suggested, accurately.

'Yeah. Hey, kid, keep talking, a quick trip to the booth's probably better than seven hundred years in the shit.' Ten said.

'Seven...hundred...years. Seven hundred years? Frigging zarquon, what did you do?' Five asked him.


'I suppose it isn't going to matter now. I was a 'conflict resolution technician', in plain language a thug. Scare the shit out of this guy, break that one's face, feed the other one into a blender. Nothing special, except I was doing it for the Reconciliation and Justice Party.' Ten gave their name without a shade of embarrassment.

They were centre-rightist, new order friendly authoritarians; that they had street thugs was no great surprise. 'Opponents, journalists, that sort of shit. So one day I get sent by the precinct captain to break this guy actually in the party, some kind of faction fight.

Except they changed their minds, or his mates won, after I'd already dislocated him- so guess who gets the shitty end of the stick? They threw me to the wolves, or the lawyers, who are nastier and have bigger teeth. Previous offences taken into consideration.'


'Man, that's harsh. All that just for finishing a job ahead of time?' Twelve tried to reestablish himself.

'Seven hundred years- is anybody here looking at a number without two zeros in front of it? Apart from you, kid, you're just going to die. If you're not freaked out by the fact your life is over-' Nine said.

'Anyone ever promise you the world was going to be full of justice?' The prisoner in cell eight said, sarcastically.

'You can take it like a man or give the bastards the satisfaction of breaking you, your choice.' Ten added.


Twelve tried to score points with the rest. 'Hey, fifteen, you going to take it like a man?'

'I'm certainly not going to take it like a whiny poser addicted to his own voice.' she snapped back. There were a few cheers and jeers at that, but she went on 'I don't intend to take it at all. I'm sure we can make a way out of here.'

The cell block was underground and organised like a four- leaf clover, central lift and observation console looking out on four corridors, each with five individual cells.

In the corridor between each set of cells was a remote blaster turret, there was a physical grill and an energy screen at the door of each cell, the walls were metre thick ferrocrete, and most of them were electromanacled to the walls anyway.


Eight, Five and Ten laughed at her. 'In a body bag? Nobody breaks out from here- there's an entire pigpen overhead. What are you in for anyway? You don't sound like you belong here.'

'Computer archaeology.' she said, and there were some peculiar small metallic noises from her cell.

Prisoner Four caught on fast; 'Two, ya kriffin' weasel, it's slime like you that crap in everyone else's stew- prockin' Alliance stirring everything up. Security Alert this and humpin' Stability, Conformity, you kriffin' rebels give them an excuse. Maybe the lice who caught me only had jobs because of you.

Yeah, you give cops jobs, scumball. You better hope they kill ya fast, cause if they don't I'm gonna kill ya slow.' He was shouting, ranting, and the rest got the idea fast. Make noise, distraction.


Prisoner Eight, a registered member of the Traditionalist party- who had supported the moderate progressive bloc in the senate when there had been a senate- accused Ten of being a class traitor and a fascist stooge; Nine joined in, calling Five a crybaby and a lamebrain for getting caught.

There really should have been two guards. One couldn't watch everything there was to watch. He started to check through camera images, uncage and activate electromanacles, arm the turrets- he missed the prelude, but not the sizzling electric explosion from Fifteen's cell.

He grabbed the control stick for the turret, hosed down the cell, but the screen fuzzed over- turn to look at the turret, something that looked like a broken piece of the door had been thrown through the monitoring module.


That wasn't supposed to be possible. Four layers. Shock- chains, physical grate, energy barrier, gun- how the kriff? Not only had the prisoner got through, she had used one to beat the other- she must have shorted one of the manacles and used it as an explosive to blow the door grate, used a piece of that to spike the turret.

Screw trials. The bitch was dangerous. The guard uncaged the kill switch, flipped the toggle that should have caused her remaining manacles to short their power cells and explode.

It worked, and would have achieved the intent if the prisoner had still been wearing them. A quarter of a second later, a pair of ankle cuffs, tied together by the cables that had been pried out of the wall and thrown like a bolas, landed on his desk.


Once the flare had died down and the noise had stopped echoing, Remand Prisoner Twelve looked across at the lean, dark- blonde woman now crouching by the wreckage of the security turret. 'Hey, babe, everything nasty I said about you, I take it back. You're great, you're wonderful, will you have my babies?'

She was still twitching from the shocks she had got picking her manacles, and dazed and shocky from multiple concussions, but she wasn't that badly stunned. 'You're an even bigger optimist than I am.'


'Fifteen, way to go. Have you got a plan from here?' Ten suggested.

'Blast waves don't help my thinking, give me a moment to recall what it was.' she shouted back, voice sounding strange in her own ears. 'Ah, it was short out the fail-deadlies before they kill you all.' She remembered, and stumbled towards the control console.

The three remaining turrets were on sweep, covering their own cell areas; they could fire backwards, but the control computer would first have to reset from it's own shock- the rupturing batteries gave out a powerful magnetic pulse, one of the reasons for doing it this way. The computer was stunned, for the moment.


So was she. She had known the guard would be dead, would have to be dead for it to work, but she didn't expect him to be so partially cooked and splattered around. She tried to screen it out, failed, knelt down by the console with her eyes closed and wished she could close her nose, guddling for the control cables she needed.

She retched anyway, hardly anything to lose- prisoner care wasn't exactly a priority around here. Didn't stop her isolating and disabling the manacle controls. Nobody screamed or exploded, so she must have got it right.


There was something else that should have been here but wasn't. Release mechanisms. Evidently the prisoners could only be controlled from this station, taking them away had to be done by officers from the main prison level with security keys that weren't kept down here.

No, it was worse than that- the manacles and cell door and field could only be released with a dual key system, this terminal and an access port at the device. They could be activated unilaterally, and normally failed active.

Having to puzzle through that helped clear her head; she stole the guard's sidearm- again by feel, trying to ignore the warm slimy pieces she was rooting through- and put five bolts into the ceiling, where the lift pad was.

'It needs keys from prison control to get you out- is anyone good with locks? Five, weren't you in for organising a jailbreak?'


'We collapsed the walls with thermal charges under the building.' Remand prisoner five- she could see the plate by his cell door now, his name was Akun Levdi- said.

'I had a droid that did all of that for me.' Remand prisoner Ten- Varion Akomin- said. 'Shoulda' bothered to learn from the little clunker while there was a chance.'

'I broke into a few buildings, cracked a few security fences, yeah.' Eight said.

'Did you get caught? Four- their cells were too far back from the central console for her to read the nameplates- said, sarcastically.

'What do you think, dumbass?' Eight shouted back at him.


'No choice, I've shot out the lift but we have to get organised before they find some other way to send a riot squad. Where, oh.' She shot the console again, blasting loose a shower of casing fragments and broken pieces that could come in handy, and headed to his cell.

Eight was a shaven- headed, growthdrug- muscled man, medium height and what looked like a semi- permanent ferocious scowl; he looked so much like a stereotypical gangland villain, it was a wonder the cops hadn't picked him up on suspicion. Maybe they had.

He didn't look like a security tech. He did look more than capable of going for his own advantage and damn the rest. A double- cross? Maybe. None of them were here because they were nice people, after all. She decided to do it the hard way. 'Stand back, I'm going to blow the door.'

She used one of the console fragments to pry open the door control panel, used the shard to puncture and scrape off the insulation and wrapped a piece of wire round the tip to bridge between the power and one of the strands of the parallel control cable. Flattened against the wall, fingertip length, she pushed the wire into contact.

The belt and braces security defeated itself; the barrier field flared up, shoved the grid out of it's frame- would probably have cooked anyone right in front of it- and then earthed through what was left of the grid and burnt out.

Eight had been stunned by the blast and hit by some of the shrapnel from the grid door; that was good. She glanced at the charge panel; burglary, so maybe he might not have been lying- at least, not entirely. She pried open the casing of the shock manacles around his wrists, shorted them- shocking him, but releasing them.


She left him a couple of pieces of broken wire and casing for use as tools, said 'Right, start with your own feet then go on to Twelve.' Cells One, Three, Six, Seven, Eleven, Thirteen, Fourteen and Sixteen to Twenty were empty.

She was tempted to start breaking in to them to steal the manacles for their power cells that could be tapped, if not used as grenades, hell she was tempted to start dismembering the security turrets to steal their guns and the forcefield doors to rework as personal shielding, but the techwork would take hours, stang, maybe days they surely didn't have.

Wait a moment. She ducked back into Eight's cell, he was making a poor job of getting himself free but at least he was trying. 'Give me those.' She said, reaching past him for the open manacles hanging from the wall; split the cable casing and parted the cable a strand at a time, shouted 'Duck and cover', and threw one of the manacles each at Nine and Ten's cell doors.


Two electric flares, two blown in forcefields and two mangled grids. 'Great G'guvuntt, girl, you surely do love your explosions.' Ten said, as she came into view. 'Are you sure you weren't an arsonist?'

He was in his mid thirties, short dark hair, solid but not blatantly- he looked more like an independent building contractor, not so much like someone who broke people for a living. Maybe that was just the day job.

'I probably will be soon.' She admitted. 'Although it's their own fault for leaving so many volatiles around. I was telling the truth about that- although I have had to break out of prison before.

We were researching an abandoned Mandalorian dungeon ship when some damned fool on the salvage team decided to restore power. The first thing the intelligence engine did when it came back on line was, guess what? He didn't. Activate all the internal security measures. Now that was a learning experience. Hold still.'


She went to work on his fetters, adding as she did 'I'm surprised you don't know anything about this.'

'I'm an electrician, not a 'troncist.' He said, confirming that she had guessed right about the independent tradesman part. 'I can do power cables, but not the fiddly stuff. I'm surprised you bothered to hang around.' he added. 'We are all criminals.'

'I thought about that.' she admitted. 'Then I thought about how it's going to be much easier to get out of here with help. Besides which, suppose you do stop me escaping? Even if they take a century off your sentence-'


There was a third explosion, not an electronic one, close but muffled. A short, abrupt crack, more like proper demo. Dust drifted down from the ferrocrete ceiling.

'Wasn't me that time.' She said. 'Probably the riot squad trying to break in.'

'They'd come through the lift shaft, or from above- that felt like underneath.' he said.

'They could be trying to be clever.' She said, with a wild moment of optimism, quickly squashed by common sense. Who else would be trying to break into a cell block?

'The cleverest cops are the guys on the street level investigation teams, they have to use their brains day in day out so they're the bastards you have to outguess, but the riot squad? Five, you got any really good friends you want to tell us about?' Akomin shouted over.

'No, but you better hope that whoever's out there is really good, because the actual breaching charge-'


There was another explosion, and this one they got the full benefit of. She curled up and turned away, saw reflected off the wall a white flash come out of the floor where the console was, then she was kicked back against the cell back wall by the concussion.

Just as well she was too dazed to draw the gun, because only a couple of seconds after the detonation, through the cloud of dust, a man- at least a somebody, in armour, with a jetpack. Up through the hole they had blasted in the floor, blaster assault rifle ready, scanning the cell block.


'Stang! We have doors down, medic.' the armoured figure shouted, then turned to the nearest open cell- which was Cell Ten. Behind an overturned, narrow cot, there was a man with a loose, stunned look- no wonder- and a dark- blonde woman bleeding out of her ears and twitching. Dreck.

'Don't kriffing move.' He said to the man- who had been released from his wrist cuffs but was still tied by the ankles- emphasised by a large blaster rifle aimed at his eyeballs.

Akomin wasn't intimidated, as such, but an honest tactical assessment would say it was a good idea to pretend to be. Unless the tin soldier got a lot closer, the chances of jumping him and taking his gun were negligible.


He got closer; maybe...he was bending down to check the girl. Gun, and there was a lens on top of it, a fire round corners device that would show the user exactly where it was pointing, was still aimed at him. 'Are you Rafaella Jovanov?' he shouted at her.

'Not if you keep exploding me.' she said, dazedly.

There were more of them coming up from the hole blasted in the floor, they had some kind of line strung now; all in blast vests and helmets, dark and drab, cool and professional.

One of them scanned the rest of the cells, shouting 'Everybody down, nobody move' as they did- a woman; she got to cell fifteen, read the name and charge sheet adhered up by the door, called back 'It's her.'


'Who are you people?' Akomin asked.

'Alliance. What happened here?' the armoured one snapped back.

Crap. This was not a good time for a case of the snarks. 'We- she was doing most of the work- were already trying to escape. You were relying on the cell doors still being up?' he tried not to yell. The blank armoured mask didn't inspire confidence.

There were a couple of people screaming- Eight was one of them, 'Stang, my foot, my foot, kriff.'

'Bring her.' the armoured one said. The third one to emerge tried to support her, she collapsed- the concussion had pushed her back, she had landed awkwardly, broken her leg. The pain at least cut through some of the fog in her head.


'Hey, hey, what about us?' Akomin said to the retreating rebel commando, then realised it was futile; the local Alliance were notoriously old- school, hard line, certainly wouldn't go out of their way to help someone just because they were an enemy of the system. Vigilante justice was much more likely.

Five took up the yelling. 'This isn't kriffing fair, man; you're rebels, you're the most criminal of all of us, you have to help us out here, you can't leave us to forever in jail.'

Remand prisoner two was screaming as well. 'I'm a rebel, I'm with you, I was distributing propaganda, get me out.' Thin, high, whiny voice that evidently got on the leader's nerves.


'No time. Move out.'

'What? Is this a rescue or a kidnap?' Rafaella managed. 'That isn't, isn't justice.'

'These people are criminal scum that any sensible legal system would have put to death anyway. That they committed their crimes under an evil regime is no excuse.' Their leader said, coldly.

'For circulating rebel propaganda?' Remand prisoner Nine yelled, and had a stun bolt fired into him.

'The reformer was right; you're the worst of the lot...' Rafaella said, just before she also passed out. One of the strike team slung her in a fireman's lift, backed down the angled tunnel that had been blasted up from the subway.


The rebels had siezed a train, derailed the rear carriages, rigged a shaped thermal charge powerful enough to melt most of the way through, put a foamcrete block between them and it and set it off.

That had melted most of the foamcrete, letting them back through to the base of the melt-tunnel, and sent a wash of hot vapour back down the subway tunnel to discourage pursuit. Hadn't done the first responders any good, either.

Then the strike team had blown their way in, while the support team disengaged the carriages that still moved. They would make some distance in them, then escape into the warren of basements and buried facilities and service tunnels the city had acquired over the millennia. Leaving boobytraps in both directions, of course.


'Boss?' The woman rebel asked the cell leader. 'Maybe you should compromise your principles just this once. Whatever we want her to do for us, looking this hard- edged is probably a bad start to getting her to like it.'

'Like? What the kriff does like have to do with it?' He snapped back.' We don't want her for what she can do anyway, we want her for who she is. Besides, if they were going by procedure, one of the people in with her would have been a police plant. We took enough risk not shooting them all.'


There weren't that many places for sound to go; some of it carried upwards. Most of the inmates of the cell block- it remained to be seen whether they would be able to make it as former inmates- heard that.

'Callous bastards.' Five said. 'Hey, do you think if we rescue her from them, we might get a pardon out of it?'

'Let's see if we can make it out of here first- we might just be in luck.' Akomin realised. 'She had the wit to drop her gun.'

[Kartr_Kana]

Jailbreak!! Hmm isn't that Lennarts daughter? Is this the one he planned orare the Rebels just mucking up the picture?

Thanks for the tips ECR I suppose I'll just have to keep writing and maybe someday I'll have something worth posting.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Right, now that it's not three in the morning, let me see if I can be a bit more helpful about that.

Yes, remand prisoner fifteen is Rafaella Lennart, who has been, well, more or less abducted by- the Alliance, as I see it, has three, later five major strands.

First- although that is highly debatable- the Corellian wing, which more or less includes most of the people from the outer rim. It basically encompasses everyone who has an abstract, moral or social reason to hate the Empire, and it's restrictions and it's joylessness. The people who see unity as dehumanisation and dealienisation, stability as tyranny, conformity as suppression of individuality and freedom.

Quite a lot of them were probably temperamentally suitable to be rebels against the Old Republic as well, to be honest, but they're probably the most genuine brand of shoestring- improvising, moral- crusade freedom fighter you're going to get. The heroic face of the Rebellion, the people who are likely to call it the Rebellion rather than the Alliance, and who are also probably on some level enjoying themselves. They seem to possess a sense of humour, may on occasion possess a sense of justice, but generally very seldom a sense of proportion.


Secondly, and I have real problems with these people, the Chandrilian wing which is represented by most of the Senatorial and core- worlder rebels, the people like Mon Mothma, who were so well off compared to the average citizen and so far up the ladder of real power that their opposition to the Empire starts to look less like principled resistance and more like sour grapes.

Admittedly, they bring a lot of the money, but they also want to go back to the bad old days, of galactic crime sydicates, widespread corporate slavery and completely ineffectual central government, in order that their own nests be better feathered. They are the 'Restore the Republic' part of the Alliance, and I do not believe they have much of a sense of humour at all, or proportion, although they claim to have a sense of justice.


The third primary wing of the Rebel Alliance is the Alderaanian, not actually composed primarily of Alderaanians for obvious demographic reasons, but of those who think like they do- with some personal grudge against the Empire, having suffered some personal injury. The crew of the Ion Cannon at Hoth- which may have been a suicide job- were Alderaanians, Crynyd of Executor bridge window fame was an Alderaanian, and there is mention in the EU, mainly West End- rebel spec ops sourcebook if I remember rightly- of outright suicide bombing, although that was written in the late eighties/early nineties before the subject became so massively politically charged.

I do believe that this third wing is the dark face of the Alliance, and is perfectly capable of descending to outright acts of terrorism to oppose the Empire, fighting atrocity with atrocity; they may have a strain of black, gallows humour, they may claim to a sense of justice or at least retribution, but really, no- and forget proportion entirely.


Lennart's Corellian, almost all the people he knows in the Alliance are Corellian, but the hit team who "rescued" Rafaella don't really sound very Corellian, do they?

(The minor strands- the Mon Cal influence, although their name remains long after most of them move on to more or less Chandrilian or Alderaanian positions, the viewpoint that doesn't want to restore the Republic as it was, but do something better and get it right this time. Fix things so that peace might actually last, the "never again" position. So far so good.

Last, and how I wish they were, something else that evolved during the war, the Bothan position. What was Fey'lya's constituency, anyway? How did he come to wield power so ridiculously far above his trustworthiness and honesty? What if he represented- took good care to represent- the upper working and middle class, the people who were squeezed by the Empire's doctrine of fear and by the measures they took to deal with the rebellion, although not so badly they joined the Alderaanian wing? If he captured that groundswell, that would explain his subsequent status. (Fey'lya will never appear, because I would be unable to resist the temptation to have someone push his face through the back of his head.))


On writing, what I mean is that there are no real short cuts to self improvement, in fact I'm not sure that road ever ends- but there are ways to make the going smoother.

Why is there no 'writing hints and tips' thread here? There's one on SB.com that actually makes some sense, we should be able to do at least as well as that.

Don't say never, for a start. Beta, if you can get someone to read it, even re- reading it and editing it yourself can achieve something. Post it anyway, if it seems good enough.

Think of the things you like to read, and try to work out how it was done. Don't be afraid of being influenced- avoid plagiarism like, well, the plague, apart from anything else it doesn't help, but you're unlikely to be able to find clear, fresh ground anyway.

We've all effectively been influenced already anyway, by sheer cultural immersion; there's nothing wrong with running with the pack to begin with, once you find your own voice and pace you can strike out on your own.

Although I will say that the difference between the conventions and archetypes of a genre and the tropes of a genre is the difference between free range and battery farming.

Work from notes. Writing something down lets me think about it more clearly, analyse it and spot the holes. If you have to leave something to come back a later day with fresh eyes, do it.

One useful exercise (This is one of those bits of advice I never take myself, so YMMV) is to write the same incident from more than one perspective, figuring out how a different person would see it differently. Comb the headlines for incidents to practise on- obviously this should never see the light of day, but it's a learning tool.

Do things you don't think you're going to be good at; you may be pleasantly wrong, and even if not, if you can figure out why that's still a step forwards.

I hope that's slightly more help.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Sorry about the delay- writer's block that only a case of acute dysentery could shake. Now I know exactly what writing with feverish intensity means. (I will leave the other obvious joke to somebody else.)

I've also been editing and tidying the main arc for (possible) inclusion in C&C- which is a good moment to make a confession. There was one bit of advice I missed out on earlier; don't get too attached to your characters. They are throughput. Work on them, but ultimately they have to leave, and better to send out something in a finished, rounded state than keep tinkering away.

I mention this because I couldn't do it. When it came to the Battle of Ord Corban, I wimped out. Some rain had to fall, that was obvious, the situation and the odds demanded it, people, ships and careers were going to be maimed, but I couldn't bring myself to manually select which of the involved board members' avatars were going to get it.

I did what any long- time gamer would, and let the dice decide. Everyone involved got two dice rolled for them, d20, one for effectiveness, one for survival, no specific benchmarks but high being good, and then plotted the details of the action around the results. Some of them should in retrospect be evident, but in the interests of disclosure, here are the numbers rolled.

Vehrec; Effectiveness; 15 Survival; 4
LadyTevar; Effectveness; 19 Survival; 6
Raesene; Effectiveness; 16 Survival; 10
Phantasee; Effectiveness; 20 Survival; 16
Eris; Effectiveness; 14 Survival; 18

So, now you know...

Anyway, this chapter is inded slightly feverish, and consists mainly of beginnings.

Hull 721 arc 2 ch 14


The Corellian Navy's command qualification course only got worse, as indeed it was supposed to. The requirements and procedures had been born of an unholy combination of pride and freewheeling independence on one side and outright dictatorial influence demanding that these lunatics live up to their contract on the other.

There was little respect shown to the candidates- some of whom had already had acting commands and small ships- largely out of policy. The course was supposed to simulate the pressure and stress of a universe out to get them. Bring out and highlight any latent character flaws that could make someone unfit for command.

Considering that only officers whom their superiors thought were up to enduring the strain of it were sent on the course, the dropout rate was frighteningly high.

To be strictly accurate, the course was designed to be tough enough to reduce the number of command candidates to something approximating the number of available commands. You could be theoretically good enough, but if you weren't the best- out.


Which made a stray navigation officer from the Imperial Starfleet something of an odd man out in every direction, and it didn't help that Ielamathrum Brenn was starting to think of himself as pretty odd already.

The technical aspects were the parts that gave him a chance to catch breath. He had a small boat rating anyway, and had picked up enough bits and pieces on training and exercise to be at least capable of directing the specific functions of a larger ship. When it came to his own professional specialty, he could leave the academy staff standing.

Naturally, and out of pique too he suspected, they took a special interest in arranging situations for him where navigation and ship handling seemed to be the answer to be the problem, but really weren't.

Like the minefield that was spaced juuust far enough apart to stunt through...and consisted of low speed armoured, networked homing mines. Like the rescue that had to be done on a crippled ship drifting towards a neutron star, that turned out to be full of pirates.


Both those situations were easy enough to defeat. One of them, in fact, by playing to his strengths. The minefield, fly close enough to to get them chasing him, draw them out into a pursuit cone, jam their comms, and lay a small minefield of his own in their path.

The pirates, they had clearly not been doing background checks to any great depth or they had misunderstood, because Black Prince had had to do exactly that once, or close to it.

Anyway, he had dealt with the situation, nearly given the petty officer helmsman a heart attack in the process- they had had to admit that it would have worked if it had had to be done for real. The caustic response that of course it would, that's how it was done last time, was not tactful, but it was called for.


The technical side was the easy part; what got most people wasn't ship handling- he was by a wide margin the best on the course but objectively most of them were very good- it was crew handling.

He had allowed himself to forget just how low the standards of the fleet could go, and that Black Prince's rich crop of lunatics were basically good men trusted with and allowed the privilege of being somewhat idiosyncratic.

He hadn't had to deal with genuine scum for some time, although it was possible that depending on the outcome of his trial Aldrem may be entered in that category retroactively; was not enjoying re- learning how.


Not that the enlisted staff of the command college contained that many genuine bad apples, but it did contain some very experienced chiefs who had seen it all and knew how to act the part.

What was due to happen was that each of the command candidates who had made it this far would be locked in a small ship simulator as the only officer in charge of a crew composed, supposedly, of the rejects of the fleet on the verge of mutiny.

After that, things got complicated. The object of the exercise was to prevent or contain said refusal of duty, which was scheduled to occur at some unpredictable time in the course of the week in the sim tank.


In one respect it was inherently unrealistic. In this day and age, a crew going on strike, which was what a lot of historical mutinies amounted to, simply would not happen- and would be a career ender if it did for the officers concerned.

The other definition of mutiny- first degree rejection of duty, dereliction and desertion compounded to what was clearly a death penalty offense- was the most common now, and meant that if their working conditions did become unbearable, there was no accommodation, no middle ground- it was all or nothing, shoot the officers and steal the ship.

Or in this case, simulate (he hoped) shooting the officers and stealing the ship. If nothing else, it was a real and severe test of man management ability. That of course was the point.


What a passing grade consisted of, nobody was entirely sure- although it was doubtful after this much close scrutiny that they would get the same mutiny each. What happened to them would be individually tailored to strike at their weak points and see if they broke.

All the participants- except him- had been trying to game the system, of course, hide and mislead the instructors with regard to their real problems by setting up false patterns that would result in situations being presented to them that they could easily stroll through.

That was generally expected and in fact encouraged, because gaming the system like that was part of an officer's real duties too- darwinian competition between forward units and logistic services wasn't supposed to happen, but it always did. Whether the candidates were better at it than the instructors was doubtful.


Not that it stopped anyone trying, which Brenn had realised (too late) was a test in itself, of self- confidence more than anything else. His gut had rebelled against the whole stupid, backbiting internecine business.

It was impossible to work for Captain Lennart without understanding the basics of military fraud and deception, but this was elevating it from the status of an ugly thing that had to be done into a meaningful end in itself. He had been self- destructive enough to say so openly, in the belief that it couldn't make his situation worse.

Probably true, too. The course had been invaluable in that respect, and he suspected that was why the Captain had sent him on it. He had said more than once- quoting from some old dimension- impoverished vid, and most recently in connection with Rear- Admiral Thrawn- that a wise man has to know his limitations.


Had that been the point of the exercise, from Lennart's point of view? Get his left hand man to face his own limitations, with the stated hope of preparing him for a command of his own- and the dark side inspired real purpose of crushing him with them, driving him down to inadequacy, dependence?

Unworthy thoughts, perhaps- but under this stress- riven schedule and the pressure of his own circumstances it was easy to think ill of the people who had got him into this, and most of the people around him.

Most of the teaching that was done on the course seemed to happen by osmosis; hints and examples, encouraging and later demanding the maximum degree of self- education and learning ability. Pressure, and little help to cope with it.

Brenn thought they took the self- reliance thing too far, that that was too little of all on the same side and none at all of the brotherhood of arms, but even at it's worst the Imperial Starfleet had some sense of mutual support- actually, no, at it's worst it had Vader. More commonly, then.


There was one bright spot, and he was already becoming stressed and paranoid enough to find it a suspiciously bright spot, and her name was Nat, Senior Lieutenant (log.&ops) Natalya Themerhahn to be exact.

This was her big chance to move up into the real navy; she had been running the supply department of a deep space fighter station, had wrangled chances for herself to fly the patrol boats and armed shuttles they used for transport runs.

There had been incidents, she had been shot at a little, scared but excited, and realised it was career make or break time. Carry on, write the whole mess off as a fluke, and subside back into the concrete fleet for what might be a long and distinguished but would certainly be an uneventful career- or take a chance.

She had gone for the long shot, applied to command course, and they gave preference to officers who had seen combat; to her surprise they let her in, and now it was sink or swim.


There was only one class at a time, the command course only had to replace casualties, transfers to noncombat branches and retirees plus a little extra for emergencies- they took in about three hundred a year, and aimed to qualify around a hundred to a hundred and fifty depending on the times.

They had started with thirty, one stray Imperial, three relatives of the rich and famous, eight in various semi- and non- combatant assignments trying to get into or back into active ship service, five fighter jocks aiming to transition to something with bigger guns, four junior lieutenants and warrant officers who needed the command certification to move out of gunboats, and seven straightforward step-on-the-ladder execs who needed it for their move up.

Seven of the thirty had already gone, unable to take it. Brenn had found grim amusement in looking at the rest and wondering, how would I break him? Trying to replicate the thought process of the instructors. He was also trying to cultivate the brutal, aggressive streak he was sure one of his own flaws was that he had too little of.


At first they hadn't known how to pigeonhole him, treating him as a “typical Imperial” hadn't worked, to his surprise as much as theirs. His gut instincts of leadership had mutated- the old hard- line, mission first, failure is punishable by death school, the cold, draconian formality of the Starfleet, it took effort to simulate that now. Certainly wasn't second nature.

Perhaps that was another one of the captain's lessons. At any rate it was, and would continue to be after this, a problem. The other problem was that he was starting to recognise he was as gregarious as a porcuswine with a bad nervous twitch.

Thinking of the other officers on the course, he hadn't connected socially with any of them except Nat. Knew most of their names, could have written personnel reports on them, but barely spoke, didn't socialise. A man apart.


For someone who refused to crack the whip, being constitutionally incapable of cracking a smile was a serious problem. Using their reactions to him as a mirror, trying to see himself in their opinion, in many respects what he saw was a wise fool.

Technically skilled, yes, but naïve in many ways; possessing the social grasp and imagination to know others and know himself, but too willing to let others by, finding it obscure, awkward and difficult to reach out to someone in need...or to enforce his will on an errant junior. Knowing but, and possibly because, finding it hard to act.

What makes my emotions flow, he had been forced to ask himself, what do I care enough about to impose my will? How do I cope with this mutiny? They can technical- fault me any time they choose, they don't have to be fair about it, probably the most I can do is make it as obviously unjust as possible.


Well, there's always the old, time- honoured method of passing the impossible test; sabotage. How? Bribery- I'd have to know who was going to be assigned for that, he thought. Slicery? Unlikely unless their security is a damned sight more porous than it has any right to be. Sheer bare- faced cheek, face it on my own terms and force them to play my game rather than theirs? Potential.

There was hardly any social time, just enough for them to spark rivalries and enmities, not enough really to get to know anyone. For normal people anyway. For Brenn, quick to grasp and slow to act, it was as good as anything, he would find his feet faster and wouldn't get any less far than he normally did.

He spent as much time with Nat as he could, which was a surprise to them both; they weren't exactly a natural pairing. Although he was more than a decade older than she was, he couldn't shake the feeling that she was much more socially calculating- she would be the political one of the two of them.

Perhaps that was the attraction; someone outside the normal rules of the game. Someone she wasn't competing directly against. Someone extremely different from herself.


The sim pods were all together in one long hall, a disused hangar; the guts of a ship, sans skin and major systems, peculiarly raw and forlorn looking things. Match the number on the datacard to the number of the sim; of the twenty-five pods, Brenn was more than half expecting number thirteen. He got eighteen instead. He looked up and down the line, saw that Nat had drawn number ten.

Walked over to her. She was looking pale; apparently he wasn't, because the first thing she said was 'Doesn't this ruffle you- how do you mange to look so calm?'

He couldn't keep the pretense up. 'Lots of practise at faking it.' he said, trying to sound nonchalant. 'Seriously, think backwards. How would the sort of person they want to forge out of this pass this test? Better yet, how would the sort of leader you want to be do it? I can think of two options off the top of my head for starters.'


She giggled, nervously. 'You do know that...the management weren't exactly racing to split us up? They wanted me to, um...'

He didn't need chapter and verse. 'Play along, then dump me just before this so that I would be in an advanced state of depression and misery going into the tanks, and ripe to fail?' His stomach was full of lumps, head of cotton- dazed and ill. He was vulnerable to this. Should have been expecting it.

'Pretty much- although thinking about what you said about brother and sister officers and comradeship, I think they might be looking for someone with the guts to tell them to shove it.' she reached up and kissed him. 'I have a reservation at Cellwan's...in eight days' time.'

He had to take a couple of nervous seconds to breathe, then beamed at her. 'I'll be there. To celebrate. And so will you.'


He walked- practically bounced- back to the pod, turning the possibilities over in his head. He didn't have more options than he had before, but now he had much more confidence in his options. He felt like doing something utterly ridiculous.

As he moved to take charge of his collection of glasshouse scrapings and conscripted wharf scum, and lead them to something vaguely resembling glory in the service of he wasn't entirely certain which side the scenario terms said they were on, he wondered what precautions the sim supervisors had taken against the officer candidate stunning the crew and hijacking the ship himself.



At least this time the nightmares didn't take her by surprise. In pain, and on pain medication, they were expectable. It didn't mean they were welcome. For what little they gave to her, the price was far too high.

This was another variation on an age- old favourite, the beast within beginning to emerge, and after that it had been inevitable. After committing murder, after being concussed and having her leg broken- it was impossible that it would not happen.

Always, folded in to the sense of falling away from herself and the identity she had built, there were hints, glimpses, of what might happen next. Usually grim, probably just an artifact of the process- it was towards the end of it all that the prophetics turned up, in the dying fall. As it was fading, so the clues were naturally a little doom- tinged. She hoped.


It was dark, and twisting, with unseen light- sensation of things half seen, blurs, catching the eye and forcing it to strain after them, snaring only afterimage, words and worlds and truth scything by cutting the shroud of gloom briefly before vanishing.

What were they, really? She had used to believe they were just random noise in the brain- she was too well educated, had come across too many of history's many madmen, not to believe just how fantastically strange and stupid humans and near- humans could be.

Reacting to the nightmare, whatever fragments of cortex were most supplied with blood casting round for a way out, making connections, looking down avenues of the future, that she interpreted as making predictions she would have dismissed as raving nonsense if she had been in full command of her reason?


Until recently, yes. These stray and frequently inconsequential glimpses of the future sometimes frighteningly precise, accurate to the last detail- she accepted that intellectually, refused it emotionally. That she could see the future in crystal clarity, briefly, and usually a scene of such inherent unimportance- it was proof of an alert mind, but past that it meant nothing.

Or so she had tried to fool herself. She had also tried to convince herself that she was a thoroughly practical, even hardened young woman, who had learned to cope with what life had to throw at her and needed no such fantasy life. Belief in magic is for people unable to deal with reality.

It was a fine theoretical position, but the last two months had made a complete nonsense of it. It had always been at least partially a pose, archaeology was no walk of life for a serious person anyway- for one thing it was exceptionally unlikely that a qualified archaeologist would find themselves actually with a physical or digital spade in their hands.

For another thing, it could be extremely dangerous, knowing more than you were supposed to about bits of the past that were better left undisturbed.


She was running; whoever her biological parents had been, they had granted her sound genetics, and she had taken care of them- she was good at running, found peace and fulfillment in it. Taking after her grandmother in that, although she couldn't know it.

Except in this peculiar half- nightmare, there was no from and no to, place was state, mood was landscape, a long, undulating but ultimately circular path through fright and worry and despair, determination and doubt, and round the merciless circuit again.

The real pain of a shattered leg intruded on the dream, presenting itself as pain barrier, one that could not be run through, could not be fought past, the deeper she plunged into it the surer she became that it would burn her up. Athlete's fears, physical, visceral, beneath reason.

The fugue- state, the predictions were whiplashing wildly, backwards and forwards in time; sometimes she was running backwards, sometimes the landscape was sliding forward faster than she could chase it, the distinction seemed terribly important, although she could not hold on to the reason why.


Blood memories; the force was heritable, the continuity and ebb and flow of life mattered a great deal to it, were there glimpses of the future- seeing what could be, what was coldly inevitable, or what was doomed to never be?

At times she was sure she was seeing what might have been- postcognition, alternate pasts, ways things otherwise could have been; there was a blinding light, and only slowly she made out the rest of the picture through the flare- the light was her, a less than year old self, and she was the bright star at the centre of a trinary.

Wrapped around her and connected to each other through her were two spiders' webs of light, one clear and bright and sharp, although quivering- who am I misinterpreting here, Rafe thought, she's afraid. For all her power and light, she's running, and running scared. Mother?

The other web was darker, fainter, but also more extensive and more multicoloured, more light than not but not of the light; he was more scared than she was but refusing to let it affect his judgement, he was calculating and sensing and thinking, trying to see a way out- and also berating himself for having got into this mess. Her father?


She had hoped to make contact with them, had told Plarch that she would deal with what she came across as it came, there were ugly times and there must have been reasons- but she had been fooling herself, and probably him too.

He was a peculiar one; he had a particular quirk of mind that had been what had attracted her to him- he was almost emotionally illiterate in the flesh, honest and decent but desperately imperceptive; let him write it down and he could analyse it to a fare-thee-well.

It was as if he could only bring himself to look closely if he could pretend they were imaginary- that there were no feelings to be hurt- but spell it out, reduce it to evidence, and he could hack through deceptions and conspiracies as if they were no better disguised and acted out than a kindergarten play.

It was a good talent for an archaeologist, and one that meant she had never spelled out the relationship with her biological parents to him- he would have realised that on many levels she had come to hate them for abandoning her. He may have guessed but she doubted it.


If this- and this is a hallucination, she reminded herself- had been like the truth, her mother and father, if they had chosen to keep her, would have been running for their lives from a dark shadow behind them within months of her birth. She could already sense, waveringly, that that was not going to end well.

She tried to wrench herself away from that, and found another and worse. Something like what would have happened if they had turned themselves in, embraced the dark to protect her from it. Watching her luminous and holy mother fall under the spell of the dark side, give herself over to her nightmares.

Her father, broader based and more peculiar, did not fit neatly into the judgements of the night. He rebelled, mostly covertly, disagreeing and hindering and sabotaging, trying to hold her back from destroying herself, until it reached an impasse where one of them had to kill the other...she could not watch that play out, either, could not break away.


In desperation she threw herself at the pain barrier, hoping that was the dream- way to wake herself up; as she hung and burned and bored her way through to release, she caught voices, closer, less dreamlike. Possibly real, just the other side of wakefulness.

She held herself back from full consciousness, sine- waving through the layers of dream, and listened to '-fools. Blind, terroristic morons. Do you have no concept of- does your lexicon not include the word 'counterproductive'? It was a woman's voice, assertive and acerbic- it held real power over the local rebel contingent, or at least thought it did.


'Some prisoners do not deserve to be rescued.' her interlocutor said- Rafaella guessed it sounded like the power armoured man from the actual jailbreak.

'An eighteen year old student sympathiser?' A man's voice, on the woman's side, but unwontedly weak- a strong man nursing an injury, at an estimate, that seemed to fit the pattern it was attached to.

'A martyr for the cause.' Hitman number one, as she dubbed him, said. There was insufficent doubt in his voice, and his head was hard and sharp and spiky.


'At the cost of- Force protect us all, there is nothing quite so stupid,' the authoritative woman said, unconsciously mimicking her brother on many an occasion, 'as a man who has read half the manual. How many people do you think are likely to rally to the cause as a result of your bombings?'

'We are striking fear into the hearts of the oppressor-'

'What about the oppressed? The impression you make, casually blasting crowds of bystanders- you realise you're close to gaining popular support for the Empire?' she stopped him, and hissed that.

'This is our branch, our planet, our cell, our methods. You cannot break the grip of tyranny with soft soap and whiffle, with grandstanding posery.' The hitman said, and there was no trace of doubt. He was convinced of what he was saying- and Rafe felt the woman's reaction to that.

She was holding back from what would probably have been an unwise comment, but inwardly seething, resolving to destroy this murderous idiot by all possible social and official means- have him cast out into the wilderness like the embarrassment to their cause he was.

Well, that was something of a relief. Although who was she, and why was she here?

Rafe tried to struggle upwards to consciousness, failed and fell back towards the nightmare again, that was enough, it was the failure, not the attempt which mattered- she snapped awake screaming.


Looking around, small windowless room, hard plain ferrocrete walls, empty holes drilled in one wall, armoured cables running down the other- as an archaeologist she had seen a lot of broken buildings, had a good grounding in architecture. And excavation and demolitions, at a pinch.

Two empty light sockets in the ceiling, broken locker on the far wall, armoured shutter to her right- this was probably a closed and locked down switching room, somewhere deep under the city's rapid-transit system. The single active light socket showed a set of medical machines, primitive, primitive stuff, most of them wired to the cable at one end, her on the other.

Cold, tiny, poorly lit- the single remaining fluoroglobe was giving out only a shade more light than the medical monitor- it was still a cut above her first student flat.


She rushed to take that in, moving her mind on as quickly as possible out of the shadow; sieze on something else, obsess on it even, count the fibres in the bio- resin casing of her cast, speculate on the unwritten pages of the corporate history of the Transit Authority, anything but allow herself to relive and remember.

The nightmare would present itself in it's own way, oozing over her conscious mind, in it's own time anyway. They rushed in and found her moaning and shuddering, feverish and trying to remain in control.

The woman she had heard was very poorly dressed for tunnel work, Rafe noticed; business formal, nothing aristocratically impractical, but too neatly cut and easily ruined for this. This must be urgent. She was also- there was a resemblance, there was a definite resemblance. Forceful and decisive in general, but ill at ease with the specifics.


'Rafaella? Rafaella...Jovanov?'

'Until a sufficient weight of evidence accumulates to the contrary...' she said; it was a bad archaeologist's joke. To bluff or not to bluff? 'Who are you, and what interest am I to a terrorist cell? Going to try to brainwash me into joining you- do you normally do your recruitment out of the prisons these days? You're not going to get much of a ransom out of me, that's for sure.'

'I'm your aunt. Your biological father's brother.' she said, going for shock tactics. It was a shock, but after a plethora of them in quick succession, less of one than her aunt imagined.

'So my flesh- parents had to give me up because they were big in the underworld, then?' she returned fire for fire. Actually, it was obvious that her parents were big in the Force, and the relatively pure and uncontaminated nature of her mother, and the time frame- might not be all that far from the truth.


'Where do you get that from?' her man said- he was wearing civilian bridge officer's uniform, the sort of thing one of the great merchant lines made their people wear. Walking slightly off centre, too.

'Hiring mercenary thugs to break me out of jail. It was a good touch having them pretend to be members of the Alliance, divert attention from their being in it for the money and the fun of murder- this is part of some Huttese power game, isn't it? I've only got one leg left to break...'

'You're wearing your injury very lightly.' mr aunt'shusband said. He wasn't.

'I've torn myself apart or been torn apart in my nightmares so often, reality isn't all that much worse- why, were you not about to rely on pain as a method of compulsion?'


'When you got into trouble for the second time,' Alrika said, overriding Rafaella's interruption of 'Fifth,' 'You sent your fiancee to see if your flesh and blood could help you. He...was arrested, and the information in his possession found it's way through sympathisers in CorSec to me. We are here to help you.'

Most people wouldn't have noticed there was an edge of self- serving cynicism in there at all, but Rafaella did, not just a leading edge but an entire cranked delta wing's worth of complexity. 'You say that with more undertones than a Mon Cal orchestra. I didn't expect things to be simple, but-'

'Blood will out. That's exactly the sort of crack your father would make. Things are not simple, they are fiendishly complicated, and I'm not entirely certain what we're saving you from.' Alrika admitted, going for empathic.

'I'm not entirely certain that you are saving me. Even if you would present genetic proof, I still want to know more about the hows and whys. A father being unaware I can understand, but surely my mother must have noticed, I mean...'


Rafe was looking closely at this woman who claimed to be her aunt, and perhaps it was the force, perhaps just sharp eyes and quick mind, perhaps she had done this before in her nightmares, but she saw a blank. 'You didn't know my mother at all, did you?'

'Jorian hardly spoke to us about her.' Alrika admitted, thinking of a plausible line to spin, anything sufficiently close to the truth yet functional to get this strange and yet somehow entirely appropriate product of the family line on board.

'Even if I take you at your smell and grant that you're kin, there's still a world of warped possibility in there- and my father never mentioned my mother to you at all, did he? In fact, you were hardly talking, period.' she more than half guessed, and saw by her aunt's reaction that she was right.


Alrika made a diversionary attempt. 'You're under regeneration therapy, full of bone- knitting drugs, and you can manage forensic cross examination. If you want to do the right thing and fight for justice and freedom, you could be a real asset to the Rebellion.'

It wasn't enough. 'Which is more than my father is- you're virtually estranged, your man jumps and snarls every time he gets mentioned, he's not with the alliance, is he?'

Timing, pace, it fitted. If her dreams and nightmares were true the web of light that lay around the image, her mother could only have been a light side force user, might as well use the criminal word, one of the Jedi. Although not exactly in good standing, after conceiving, at any rate...


The only people she even could have met profoundly enough to break through the mandated detachment were the people she worked directly with, or directly against. Her father had to have been a member of the armed forces of the Republic, or less likely the Confederation. Which, twenty- three years later, meant- she wanted someone else to say it out loud.

Alrika was having difficulty deciding what to say. Somehow 'Hush, dear, we're with you now' wasn't going to cut it. Lying might not be so brilliant an idea either. The truth might just have to do. 'Your father is a Star Destroyer commander in the Imperial fleet.'



'Captain, we have to talk.' Aleph-3 began, before the door was even fully open.

She found the office desk pushed into the middle of the room, her man and her commanding officer sprawling back on a couch on one side of it, the Corellian Engineering senior man- Caldor, that was it- on the other side, in an executive swivel chair, both of them looking at the little floating grid in the air between them.

There were dots on the junctions of the lines, some of them, and the dots were behaving peculiarly, some of them growing, some shrinking, some changing colour- it had been a popular game in the fleet in the dying days of the old republic, a four dimensional variant of an old game called simply Shift, or something like it.

Played on a nineteen by nineteen by nineteen grid with mutating pieces, it was exactly the sort of ridiculously complicated time waster that would have been devised by a navy whose chief occupation was long patrol runs in the middle of nowhere. She wasn't at all surprised to hear him say without looking up 'Hang on, be with you in a couple of days.'


Not surprised, but bitterly disappointed. She had psyched herself up for this, wallowed in misery and dared to hope, coldly reviewed the facts and passionately shredded them, played it out so very often in her head- and now this?

She was tempted to put a blaster bolt through the holographic board. Would have, except she was in someone else's office, and given the game she suspected there were actually rules for that anyway. Can I just grab him and make him listen? She asked herself.

She took a couple of steps towards him, and Calder looked at his old flatmate, said 'Jorian, I think she means it.'

'I expect she does...' Lennart said, sitting back. 'You, on the other hand, are just trying to stall for time because you don't know what I've got planned.' Which was actually what he was doing. He had been expecting, and dreading, something like this.

'I'm sure it'll be as much of a surprise to me as it is to you...'


'Not that I'd turn down a little evil plotting time, but isn't being doorstepped by a beautiful lunatic more important?' Caldor added in Old Corellian. 'Especially considering that she's armed, and this is my office.'

'How quickly you grasp the essentials.' Lennart said, deadpan, and also in Old Corellian. 'She also picks up languages quickly and reads expressions very well indeed, so don't assume she isn't going to work it out.'

'If you admire her talents, why are you avoiding her?' Caldor threw the barb.

He had it caught, turned and lobbed right back when Lennart said 'That's a story you listen to at your own risk, considering it involves my late unlamented political officer. Mind if we borrow your office for a little while?'

[Simon_Jester]

Good to see you back. I see Rafaella thinks the same way her father does, although since their thinking style seems to closely approximate your affect-free writing style, that may be an illusion.

I did what any long- time gamer would, and let the dice decide. Everyone involved got two dice rolled for them, d20, one for effectiveness, one for survival, no specific benchmarks but high being good, and then plotted the details of the action around the results. Some of them should in retrospect be evident, but in the interests of disclosure, here are the numbers rolled.

Vehrec; Effectiveness; 15 Survival; 4
LadyTevar; Effectveness; 19 Survival; 6
Raesene; Effectiveness; 16 Survival; 10
Phantasee; Effectiveness; 20 Survival; 16
Eris; Effectiveness; 14 Survival; 18

Were there not low effectiveness rolls?

[jpdt19]

Yet again, i'm thrilled by your story progression, and annoyed by the fact that the chapter ended so quickly.

I want to turn to the next page, but there's no page to be found.

I must say, i'm extremely interested in seeing the interaction (it will come eventually i presume) between Jorian and his daughter. Also, yay another archaeologist in sci-fi, and from the looks of it, a fairly sharp one

I always have a soft touch for a smart capable tough girl, especially if she's an archaeologist

Excelletn!

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Sometimes, random numbers do defy probability, and those are the figures I have in my manuscript notes; a string of high results for effectiveness, a rather more normal distribution for emerging in one piece.

(Forgot to add; Vianca, effectiveness 19 survival 15.)

At that point, I wasn't even sure if it was going to end there, or if there was going to be an escape and a chase, a deep- space running fight; I remember thinking that it was unlikely nothing would get away, but the fortunes of the day said it would be a stand- up Imperial victory- although one some of the participants were going to pay for.

There was no way I was going to surrender everything to chance, of course, I would have felt just as bad about that as I would about choosing someone to drop the hammer on- I let the random element help me shape the action, not take it over.

Going strictly by inherent probability it would have been down to Alliance tactics who got zapped, and the tactics probably would have been, kill the force multipliers first, the electronics and command ships, kill the flagship, then the glass cannons- reduce the enemy threat by the greatest amount for the least amount of loss and expenditure; then do as much bulk killing as possible, then run before whoever survived and escapes brings back reinforcements.


Current crisis aside, in the life she was leading up to this Rafaella is more rounded and stable than her father was at the same age; she's in much better control of her own eccentricities, for a start- but she does share quite a lot of them.

I've always felt that one of my worst flaws was an instability in the narration and writing style; it tends to take on the tone of whoever's in the spotlight. Since so much of this has turned out to be about them, that probably means the flaw has not gone away- but yes, there ought to be a resemblance and a similar slant of mind, although not quite as far off the wall. What I want to do is write her for a bit and see how much of her mother there is in her.

The reason I broke it off there was because, first of all because by the schedule I aspire to keep, the chapter was already horrendously overdue, but (because and also,) Jorian Lennart and Aleph-3 are about to attempt to have The Conversation. The one they've been avoiding, dancing round and half-nearly-almost-rehearsing-bits of as long as they've known each other. The one that starts "I love you, you idiot" and gets worse from there.

After two segments like Brenn's bit and Rafaella's nightmares and her father's sister, it would be a shade fraught to go straight into that. It's next on the list, although I may have to accompany it with some catastrophic explosions to ease the tension.

[Andras]

Great update!

Wrapped around her and connected to each other through her were two spiders' webs of light, one clear and bright and sharp, although quivering- who am I misinterpreting here, Rafe thought, she's afraid. For all her power and light, she's running, and running scared. Mother?

The other web was darker, fainter, but also more extensive and more multicoloured, more light than not but not of the light; he was more scared than she was but refusing to let it affect his judgement, he was calculating and sensing and thinking, trying to see a way out- and also berating himself for having got into this mess. Her father?


Are you implying that her mother (the Jedi) is still alive, unknown to Jorian, or is she connected to her mothers force ghost in some manner?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Rafaella's dream/nightmare state is giving her force visions, but they're visions of the past, and alternate pasts at that- how things could have been. Remember, she was removed from her mother's womb at eighteen weeks and placed in stasis, to await full gestation when the circumstances would allow it?

At this point, Lennart was a fleet nav coordinator with the outer rim forces, Altara Yallam, Rafaella's mother, was with the reserve fleets over Coruscant; they had been moved apart. As the war seemed to be approaching a decisive crisis, Altara authorised her daughter be brought to term in an artifical womb, but her ship was one of the early casualties of the Battle of Coruscant. Altara's dead. Rafaella was put up for adoption because her mother never lived to collect her and her father never knew about her until now.

I mentioned, in connection with Lennart's lightsabre abilities or lack of them, that he had only done something like that before once? That was when- when he found out Altara was dead, when his task force arrived along with the Open Circle and the rest of the reinforcements. There was a boarding action, in which he went berserk and started hacking his way through battle droids, crazed with rage and grief. "I have no clear memory of it- the after action report says it happened, so it must be true."

If Altara had lived, she would have gone on the run with her daughter and Jorian would have gone with them, they would have been subject to the Jedi Purge and Rafaella would probably have been raised, entirely parentless, to be an Emperor's Hand- or possibly disposed of outright. Alternate pasts, and dark ones at that.

[Simon_Jester]

Going strictly by inherent probability it would have been down to Alliance tactics who got zapped, and the tactics probably would have been, kill the force multipliers first, the electronics and command ships, kill the flagship, then the glass cannons- reduce the enemy threat by the greatest amount for the least amount of loss and expenditure; then do as much bulk killing as possible, then run before whoever survived and escapes brings back reinforcements.

Hmm. How long do you think it took the Rebels to figure out who the flagship was? Would they have already known before the battle? On the one hand, they might. On the other, they might honestly wonder whether that frightening Imperial with the axial battery was really in charge. After all, the thing was obviously being handled by some rapidly promoted maniac who had somehow managed to preserve a youthful sense of invulnerability into his thirties. Probably someone who had mistaken his star destroyer for a corvette...

I've always felt that one of my worst flaws was an instability in the narration and writing style; it tends to take on the tone of whoever's in the spotlight. Since so much of this has turned out to be about them, that probably means the flaw has not gone away- but yes, there ought to be a resemblance and a similar slant of mind, although not quite as far off the wall. What I want to do is write her for a bit and see how much of her mother there is in her.

What I was trying to get at is that from what I've read of you when you aren't writing Jorian Lennart's thoughts, I get the sense that your unaffected writing style* is fairly close to the style you write Lennart's thoughts in.

Which lends itself to two interpretations:
1) You've written so much from inside Lennart's head that he's started to infect your style even when you aren't writing from inside his head, or:
2) Lennart happens to think like you would naturally write, which would make a fair amount of sense. He's a high speed intuitionist who's been doing tactical analyses for the past thirty years. The way your writing sounds probably is the way such a person's internal train of thought would run: lots of logical leaps, bordering on free association in the extreme limiting case, and with formal structure taking a second place to the rapid transfer of ideas. The style projects a sort of flickering, mercurial sense of intellect, at least to me. And there are few characters I've ever read more flickering, mercurial, and intellectual than Lennart.**

*as in, when you aren't writing anyone's thoughts, when you aren't even writing in third person limited
**And one of them is Dr. Nygma...

[Vehrec]

Welp, now I know why I got cooked. I suppose that part of that effectiveness was just changing the way the Rebels reacted to the huge swarm of fighters moving around. I imagine that a 2 or 3 would have been terminal, and a 1 would have been instant vaporization. On the other hand, our collective effectiveness was high, and stunningly so. All in all, a High cost, High return operation.

I found the force visions shockingly clear and direct for hokey religions and superstition. And they drive home an awful terrible fact- that as bad as growing up not knowing your parents might be, sometimes the alternative would be worse. So much worse. As for the rest of her section, she's every bit as perceptive as she ought to be, even able to see the answer when she doesn't like it.

Breen sounds like... well, one of us. He's got his work cut out for him, going to need at least 500 miliListers of discipline to prevent this mutiny from happening.

As for the five branches of the Rebellion, I think you raise some good points. I'd say that if anyone has a sense of perspective it's Fey'lya's wing of the group, which makes it a shame that his is the group that is constantly painted as the one with the bad guy at the helm in the EU. Grassroots funds, spy rings, propagandists, not warriors as a rule, but maybe some of the more effective members. The Mon Cals' are also sympathetic in their desire for real reform, although we know how that turns out. In all seriousness, the greatest victory of the A.R.R. was nothing against the empire but preventing all out war between the wings. Even so, major parts of the Corellian Wing broke off after Yavin, and the Alderaan wing must have changed drastically at the same time. Less caring about what would replace the empire, more devoted to its destruction.

[Kartr_Kana]

I feel left out, no survival rolls for me in that fight? Oh well guess I'm not a Captain so I wouldn't have a major effect on the story anyway.

As for this chapter it was great however the shift to Lennarts daughter was a little hard to figure out at first. Don't know if you've ever thought of breaking up the sections with a short ***** for example so that we could see it easier?

Once again I look forward to the next installment with much anticipation! Especially what the dear XO is going to do to keep that mutiny from happening. At least he knows its coming, as they say "forewarned is forearmed."

[Simon_Jester]

Breen sounds like... well, one of us. He's got his work cut out for him, going to need at least 500 miliListers of discipline to prevent this mutiny from happening.

How much discipline is in one Lister? I've heard of the character Lister, naturally. But if one Lister's worth of discipline were the level of discipline possessed by Lister, then 500 mLister is an inconceivably small amount. Not nearly enough to avert a mutiny. Although if Brenn does something clever and weird, it might be little enough discipline to avoid the mutiny, I guess.

[Vehrec]

The Lister is the SI unit of discipline, as defined by the amount of effort needed to make David Lister do his duties, clean his quarters and generally not be such a shame to the space corps. A single Lister of discipline is therefore often more than is needed for the entire crew of a Star Destroyer.

[Simon_Jester]

The Lister is the SI unit of discipline, as defined by the amount of effort needed to make David Lister do his duties, clean his quarters and generally not be such a shame to the space corps. A single Lister of discipline is therefore often more than is needed for the entire crew of a Star Destroyer.

Oh. Wow. I dunno, though. The crew of the simulated ship is specifically under orders to act like the Crew From Hell, and I'm sure some of them have watched the Galaxy Far Far Away equivalent of Red Dwarf.

This... this might actually take multiple Listers, maybe even decaListers.

[Crazedwraith]

Well, I've just fully caught up after starting to read Hull 271 when it was brought up in the C&C Suggestions thread. I've been reading far too much and have probably have forgetton most of what has happened thus far. Still, initially I disliked it for being far too well 'mary suish' is the way I put in the head. Its a ship full of zany crewmen; that's extensively modified to be super-special awesome with its amazing combat record and unorthodox but oh-so-effective captain! Did I mention its got twice as many fighters as normal? And not the normal kind either, oh no, but all the awesome special designs like Defenders and Avengers! And then of course we find out that the Captain and the Chief officer are also super special force sensitives! Plus the superhot and also force sensitive storm trooper girl has the hots for him!

Personally I would have loved it if in the end it had turned out Lennart wasn't force sensitive at all but as a corellian was just that skilled and lucky to be effective anyway, like the Star Destroyer Captain equivalent of Wedge Antilles. (of course Wedge does captain Star Destroyers even SSDs eventually)

Like I said that was the initial opinion. Still as the storyline continued these elements seemed to be de-emphasised or i just became so used to them they seemed more acceptable. (long out of universe post regarding the draw backs of Mirranon's extensive modding also help) But still I think the secondary characters brought in the second half to the first arc were what really started me liking it. The character of Falldiss for example was very interesting, (more on her and her career transition from water ship to star destroyers would have been awesome)

I still don't like Lennart's ideas about the force though.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Well, I'm slightly disappointed you don't like it, but more than that, stringing it all out like that one deviation after another makes me think about just how far downhill the snowball has rolled.

To a certain extent eccentricity built on itself, and attempts to rationalise and situate it resulted in springboards for further eccentricity- much like the actual structure of the ship. I'll own up to that.

The force thing is complicated; let's see if I can explain this in such a way that it's actually believable, because there's definitely a paradox embedded in there that leaves me wondering why I let it turn out that way. I dislike, myself, how force- centric a lot of Star Wars fiction is.

At times it seems as if every major event in galactic history was the work of either Jedi or Sith, and hey, what about us? What about the overwhelming majority of normal people who don't seem to get much of a say?

I will say this; you're right. Jorian Lennart ought not to be force sensitive. It doesn't do a damned thing for him, he doesn't depend on it in any way whatsoever, and he doesn't want it. Concievably that entire plot segment could have split the other way; there was plot structure in place for it- the reason that decision ultimately went the way it did is because I wanted someone in position to rebel against the Force.

There are two keystone lines I would point you towards; in ch28 if I remember my own work, lightsabre sparring, when he deliberately reaches out for the Force and finds that it is a strange new thing- foreign to his thought processes, that as far as he can tell he hasn't been using it all along; and ch 37's "Lads? Get him."

[Crazedwraith]

Sorry, that last post does come off as very negative. When I review things I do tend to bitch alot even about minor things, giving the impression I dislike thing I really do like on the whole. I meant to imply all those there are aspect I didn't like at the beginning; on the whole by the end I do very much like it. The fleet combat scenes are top notch. The characters are great. The Black Prince's Art Gallery is a work of genius. The long tangents about fighter combat, different ships and so forth, although not entirely necessary are very interesting. And while I do have complains on the whole I think its a work of stunning depth and complexity that's very well plotted.

Still one question Mirannon and Lennart are both highly force sensitive yes? And they are both old enough to have been born in the Old Republic not the Empire. So why exactly did the Jedi Order not pick them up and take them to temple when they were very young?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

No worries, I probably do get carried away a little by the flow.

How they both got away with it; Lennart's peculiar circumstances are in there, but the short version is that he was a genetic fluke, but also the firstborn, and his parents had second thoughts and refused to give him over to the Corellian sub-order of the Jedi, refused even to inform them about him.

The existence of which in itself is so fantastically unlikely- Corellia must be producing a million times the statistically expectable number of jedi for it's share of the galactic population for their own idiosyncratic branch of the jedi to exist.

His mother must share similar views or at least eventuially come down on that side of it, because she didn't even inform him. Medical testing- now there is a question, but he grandfathered in from the Republic fleet, through a long string of institutions that should have screened him out but each assumed the last had. That and he had less than no desire to confirm his own suspicions.

Mirannon's more of a mystery; the closest I ever get to discussing his family is basically a 'don't ask' around ch 30, talking to the Muun engineer, Subradal. There's a story to tell there, but the short version of it is he's what in 40K terms would be called void- born. Spent his life on a succession of liners and freighters, travelling family, virtually grew up in the engine plant, without any real authority or oversight except tramp space lines, moving from place to place- basically, he slipped through the cracks.

Neither of them are exactly stellar; their "sensitivity indexes" are in the low five thousand and high three thousand range respectively, and if there are a set of rules for rating one force user against another that aren't non-canon game mechanics, point me to them; but they are not comparable to the great names, these are not galaxy shaking strengths like Yoda, Palpatine, Jenobi, the Skywalkers (all of them) in the fifteen-to-twenty thousand and beyond range. I'm assuming the significance of the count is exponential.

Aleph-3 (who was advised to choose a proper name for herself by slicing the pages out of a dictionary of names, throwing them up in the air, and shooting one; that could be unlucky, so she decided she would prefer to print them all out, have them launched, hose down the cloud of bits of paper with an E-web, collect the survivors, and repeat until she came up with the one that was lucky enough not to be shot)- she may 'have the hots' for him, but she's also trying to turn him into a monster. It would be easy if it was that simple.

Incidentally, simon_jester; I can't really prove this without landing multi-thousand-word tranches of other original fiction on you, but as far as I can satisfy my own judgement, I do inadvertently achieve a sort of 'method writing', concentrating through the perspective of whoever's in the spotlight, and it probably has got worse lately.

The worst side effect of this is that I tend to imagine the scene visually from their point of view, deliver the lines, and then forget to put the descriptive bit that I just visualised down on paper. Got to work on that.

[declan]

I will say this; you're right. Jorian Lennart ought not to be force sensitive. It doesn't do a damned thing for him, he doesn't depend on it in any way whatsoever, and he doesn't want it. Concievably that entire plot segment could have split the other way; there was plot structure in place for it- the reason that decision ultimately went the way it did is because I wanted someone in position to rebel against the Force.

Yeah but we see Lennart now at the pinacle of his professional career, when the force is really just the hone on the blade, something like the force as he is rising would count more , making friends , anticipating enemies, gently doing that mind trick that makes people forget droids, and not even realized that he has done so.

As well, how many times might he have prodded some enemy from a distance into doing what he wants him to do, again without actually realizing that he does it. Im not going to say that he would be useless without the force, but Id say that it gave him the edge when he needed it.

Declan

[Simon_Jester]

The force thing is complicated; let's see if I can explain this in such a way that it's actually believable, because there's definitely a paradox embedded in there that leaves me wondering why I let it turn out that way. I dislike, myself, how force- centric a lot of Star Wars fiction is.

At times it seems as if every major event in galactic history was the work of either Jedi or Sith, and hey, what about us? What about the overwhelming majority of normal people who don't seem to get much of a say?

Part of the problem is that the Force grants its users the ability to foresee events and be in the right place at the right time, even when they don't know exactly what that place and time are. So you'd honestly expect to see Jedi and Sith converging on key moments in history, the turning points where the actions of one individual can effect great changes.

Take the non-Force user who is best in the galaxy at predicting events and taking advantage of them: Thrawn. He's so good it's implausible, but in a galaxy-sized population with multiple species the outliers are bound to lie a lot further out than anyone on Earth does, so what the heck.

But when it comes to predicting the future, in a real sense he's a tyro compared to someone like Palpatine, because he needs actual facts to base his judgement on, even if not very many of them. He can't get empirically useful results by following the voices in his head. So while he will often know how to handle his immediate situation, he doesn't have the ability to know far in advance what the decisive points of a given action will be. For instance, he would never think to pick up a random eight-year-old slave on Tatooine, expecting him to become a powerful ally of the Republic in a war that won't start for ten more years.

Of course, because no Force user (with a few possible exceptions) has Thrawn's sheer brains, the advantage of clairvoyance and prescience doesn't take them as far beyond his level as it otherwise might.But it should be no surprise to see Jedi and Sith involved at the decisive points in history, because that's exactly what their Force abilities are herding them to.

Now, what is disappointing in Star Wars fiction is the relative lack of non-adepts as characters, but that's a subtly different problem.
__________

No worries, I probably do get carried away a little by the flow.

How they both got away with it; Lennart's peculiar circumstances are in there, but the short version is that he was a genetic fluke, but also the firstborn, and his parents had second thoughts and refused to give him over to the Corellian sub-order of the Jedi, refused even to inform them about him.

The existence of which in itself is so fantastically unlikely- Corellia must be producing a million times the statistically expectable number of jedi for it's share of the galactic population for their own idiosyncratic branch of the jedi to exist.

A high level of genetic Force sensitivity in the general population would actually explain a lot. Like why they can get away with "never tell me the odds" behavior so often. I don't mean active Force manipulation here, though; I'm talking about what you figure are midichlorian counts in the mid-hundreds range.

If, due to some fluke of engineering or chance, a relatively large fraction of the Corellian population carries genes for at least mild force sensitivity, there could end up being a LOT of Corellian Jedi in cases where those genes happen to recombine. Sort of like Tay-Sachs and the Ashkenazim, only beneficial instead of harmful.

His mother must share similar views or at least eventuially come down on that side of it, because she didn't even inform him. Medical testing- now there is a question, but he grandfathered in from the Republic fleet, through a long string of institutions that should have screened him out but each assumed the last had. That and he had less than no desire to confirm his own suspicions.

Also, the Jedi don't normally take anyone but small children, because they're trying for something comparable to the Jesuit standards of education- shape the child before they have a chance to see the broader world, and you get a much more controllable, predictable adult. And one who is, theoretically, less likely to start cackling and throwing Force Lightning around. In theory. Of course, the difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice...

Anyway, even if Lennart was confirmed to have high midichlorian counts, no one was looking for those high counts during the Republic era, because the Jedi didn't normally recruit adults. If it didn't get caught in his childhood it would never be considered at all. After that, of course, questions become slightly different.

My best guess is that Palpatine wasn't actively trawling the fleet for people with high midichlorian counts, either. He may have been able to see the practical drawbacks of recruiting adults with command and military warfare experience and training them as Dark Jedi, for instance.

As an example, consider Nova Stihl in Death Star; the man was a stormtrooper sargeant who had used untrained Force ability and extensive training to become a master of unarmed combat, and no one noticed or recruited him into Palpatine's Dark Side religious orders. And he had just about the same midichlorian count as Lennart...

Neither of them are exactly stellar; their "sensitivity indexes" are in the low five thousand and high three thousand range respectively, and if there are a set of rules for rating one force user against another that aren't non-canon game mechanics, point me to them; but they are not comparable to the great names, these are not galaxy shaking strengths like Yoda, Palpatine, Jenobi, the Skywalkers (all of them) in the fifteen-to-twenty thousand and beyond range. I'm assuming the significance of the count is exponential.

Hmm. The practical significance of the count may be exponential, with the effect of a Force user on the galaxy scaling with e^am, where m is the midichlorian count and a is some constant. That doesn't mean the actual ability is exponential; it need not be true that, say, one super-master with a midichlorian count of 10000 can telekinetically lift more than five marginal Jedi with counts of 2000 each. It might be linear, or weakly exponential, or a power law.
__________

Incidentally, simon_jester; I can't really prove this without landing multi-thousand-word tranches of other original fiction on you, but as far as I can satisfy my own judgement, I do inadvertently achieve a sort of 'method writing', concentrating through the perspective of whoever's in the spotlight, and it probably has got worse lately.

The worst side effect of this is that I tend to imagine the scene visually from their point of view, deliver the lines, and then forget to put the descriptive bit that I just visualised down on paper. Got to work on that.

I believe all that, although I wouldn't mind being linked to that other original fiction. If nothing else you're welcome to PM me with links. But I do think that, if nothing else, the specific character Jorian Lennart's thinking style mirrors your unaffected writing style. And rightly so; his thoughts probably should sound like that, given what he does and how he does it.
__________

As well, how many times might he have prodded some enemy from a distance into doing what he wants him to do, again without actually realizing that he does it. Im not going to say that he would be useless without the force, but Id say that it gave him the edge when he needed it.

I'd say that even without the Force, he'd make a more effective commanding officer than almost any Jedi, with the possible exception of one who actively develops Force-based battle coordination techniques (like Joruus C'Baoth, or Bastila Shan from Knights of the Old Republic).

The best such officers in real life can pull off what can only be described as miracles, situations where no sane person would expect a victory against such a correlation of forces. What I think the Force does for Lennart is slightly improve the odds of pulling off a miracle. But I imagine he could do quite well without it, better than almost anyone else could do, and better on his home territory than even people who did have Force abilities.

[fractalsponge1]

I want to say that I really loved Hull 721, and I find your two new arcs really intriguing, but I do have some suggestions and criticisms.

First, I will second the opinion that the narrator's voice is growing too Lennart-like, and I think that's a bad thing. It's quite understandable given you've probed mostly deeply into that character, but I find Lennart's thought process so staccato and convoluted that I get a little lost at times. When that bleeds into the narrative text, or starts to color other characters, I end up having to re-read some sections to get all the information out. Also I think the characters were more differentiated in their dialogue in the original arc, partly due to this creeping Lennartization (strained wordsmithing, I know).

Lennart also seems to benefit a bit too much from the writer's omniscience; he's never flabbergasted, never totally confused or overwhelmed by sheer volume of data and possibilities, never obviously forced into taking a completely blind leap. Obviously a captain would seek to project confidence and absolute mastery of the situation to his crew, but to the reader, it's a bit difficult to swallow sometimes. Some incredibly powerful Force-wielding Sith lord managing to keep that many balls in the air seems plausible, but for a relatively "mundane" character it's starting to stretch the bounds of my credulity, at least.

Odd to say, but I think the story can be improved by having Black Prince, or her constituent crew members, screw up, or get caught out. Some fight that doesn't involve 5-to-1 odds to cause real strain and damage. Some frenzy and desperation. As gloriously fun as it is looking at performances like Ord Corban, or seeing the bureaucratic maneuvers that somehow manage to keep the rest of the fleet from treating the ship and crew like the borderline nutcases they are, it's also geometrically more difficult to string such improbables along. One might have imagined surviving the Palmus Viridis incident having drained enough of the karma as it is.

There's good, there's lucky, but get carried away and there's character shielding.

Some of how what is going on can possibly be going on is explained in your out-of-universe posts, but I think it could be better integrated into the text itself. The technical/tactical digressions that are already there about relative strengths, weaknesses, and mitigating factors are both fascinating and helpful in this regard, and I think the whole thing could be strengthened by more of it.

Please don't think that the above crits make the vast bulk of what you've been sharing here not brilliant, because Hull 721 is some of the best SW fiction I've read.

[Andras]

Odd to say, but I think the story can be improved by having Black Prince, or her constituent crew members, screw up, or get caught out. Some fight that doesn't involve 5-to-1 odds to cause real strain and damage. Some frenzy and desperation. As gloriously fun as it is looking at performances like Ord Corban, or seeing the bureaucratic maneuvers that somehow manage to keep the rest of the fleet from treating the ship and crew like the borderline nutcases they are, it's also geometrically more difficult to string such improbables along. One might have imagined surviving the Palmus Viridis incident having drained enough of the karma as it is

Hmm, now that you mention it, it might be in Lennart's best interest to engineer such a situation every now and then, simply to keep from being requisitioned by the Death Squadron and other strategic forces he has no interest in joining. Just as they deliberately mark down the best performing crew members. He has to make sure they have sufficient backup, to keep it from becoming a fatal screw up.