Andras wrote: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.
fractalsponge1 wrote: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.
In his own way, and on a much smaller scale, Lennart is functionally comparable to Thrawn- he is to captains as Thrawn is to admirals. He's one of the most unusual ship captains in a galaxy-sized population, so his ability to keep track of what's going on and improvise responses in a hurry may not be as surprising as it would be otherwise.
Frankly, given the sheer size of population the Star Wars galaxy has, and the number of capital ships floating around, that should be normal. There are something on the order of 1E15 to 1E17 intelligent beings in the galaxy, and on the order of 1E5 to 1E6 spacecraft larger than, say, 100 or 200 meters. Anyone who gets promoted to command one of those ships on merit in that sort of environment ought to be in the 99th percentile of the 99th percentile of the... repeat for three or four more recursions. That means that by any reasonable standard of competence they ought to be a damn freak of nature, the sort that only appear on any given planet once in a lifetime, if that.
Which is why I ended up picturing, for example, Captain Falldess as being her world's equivalent of Nelson or Francis Drake, who just happens to get recruited into the Starfleet. And by the standards of capital ship captains, she's not even all that remarkable in the parts she's good at, let alone the technical bits.
Then you write a story about one of the best of the lot, one of the most capable ship captains in the galaxy... how many standard deviations out from the capabilities of the average human being is he going to be?
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.
Agreed. I would definitely like to see Black Prince honestly screw up, have one of those clever gambles go wrong and get a hole punched in the ship somewhere semicritical. Not least because I'd like to see Lennart trying to recover from a real disaster, as opposed to the classic "danger/opportunity" mix you see in most crises.
I like the story very much too; that's why I'd like to see something more than a steady stream of triumphal marches. Every good saga needs a few major errors to fill it out.
Simon_Jester wrote:Frankly, given the sheer size of population the Star Wars galaxy has, and the number of capital ships floating around, that should be normal. There are something on the order of 1E15 to 1E17 intelligent beings in the galaxy, and on the order of 1E5 to 1E6 spacecraft larger than, say, 100 or 200 meters. Anyone who gets promoted to command one of those ships on merit in that sort of environment ought to be in the 99th percentile of the 99th percentile of the... repeat for three or four more recursions. That means that by any reasonable standard of competence they ought to be a damn freak of nature, the sort that only appear on any given planet once in a lifetime, if that.
Which is why I ended up picturing, for example, Captain Falldess as being her world's equivalent of Nelson or Francis Drake, who just happens to get recruited into the Starfleet. And by the standards of capital ship captains, she's not even all that remarkable in the parts she's good at, let alone the technical bits.
Then you write a story about one of the best of the lot, one of the most capable ship captains in the galaxy... how many standard deviations out from the capabilities of the average human being is he going to be?
Well, the premise of a lot of the Hull 721 arc is that skilled manpower is the limiting factor in the Starfleet. Forgotten about Dynamic so soon?
Obviously there is a large enough pool of intelligent people able to crew these ships, but it's not entirely clear there's mass conscription involved, so it's not like the state gets to filter everyone and cream off the best. Of course they might have the authority, but it doesn't mean it's done on a large scale. Then there's the Army, and Customs and whatever other standing militaries like those of Corellia, Kuat, or Tepasi that can siphon off available military talent. And also, just because intelligent people exist, or are even fed into the Starfleet in large numbers, doesn't mean there's the time or combat experience to go around to turn them all into Nelsons or Drakes. And it's not exactly going to be a strict meritocracy, once nepotism, tradition, and politics get mixed in. Ozzel, anyone?
Anyway, even Nelson got bit in the ass a few times over the course of his career. Which brings me back to my original point - screwups happen, bad luck happens, being just plain wrong happens, even to the best. I think good storytelling suffers when a character, however exceptional doesn't rightly experience all that at the kind of frequency that probability dictates. I think Thrawn suffers from it (though, curiously, less so in his guise here), and Sidious suffers from it too (though that's more believable due to the massive Force talent involved).
Another great chapter! But what did happen to my alter-ego, since she rolled so badly? I can't find the right chapter
Nitram, slightly high on cough syrup: Do you know you're beautiful?
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
LadyTevar wrote:Another great chapter! But what did happen to my alter-ego, since she rolled so badly? I can't find the right chapter
As I recall, she more or less went berserk* and got her ship hammered, doing heavy damage to the enemy at the cost of taking heavy damage to herself. It's the sort of thing that gets you a medal after the fact, but the medal doesn't protect you from the nightmares very well.
EDIT: So you could argue that in her case, low survival probability was low psychological survival.
*Not "foaming at the mouth" berserk, but the equivalent of berserkergang as applied to capital starships. Fist was heavily damaged by fire from the heavy destroyer Admonisher,
Last edited by Simon_Jester on 2009-11-21 12:39am, edited 1 time in total.
You personally, I’ve recommended you be detached to a territorial- district- command while you wait for your ship to be rebuilt.’
That was interesting. District was the next level beneath subsector, and in this smaller sector that amounted to twelve major, six hundred and fifty minor worlds and the space between them, and authority over their local patrol forces, planetary defences, sector fleet elements that entered her territory.
It involved few major combat elements, but a wide and varied spectrum of authority and responsibility. Next to having her ship in working order now, it was as good as she could reasonably hope for. It was also usually a Commodore’s command.
‘Are you recommending me for promotion to flag rank?’ she said, not quite believing.
‘More and less than that.’ Lennart said. ‘Before the law, I cannot promote you or anyone greater to a rank than I myself hold. I’m not entirely certain why I’m still a Captain of the Line, for that matter. Also, all things are subject to confirmation- or disapproval- by higher command. The most I can do is put you into a position where you can expect to screen for promotion.
I'm gonna laugh my ass off if you become Lennart's boss, Tev.
Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.
Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Darth Nostril.
-'If you really want to fuck with these idiots tell them that there is a vaccine for chemtrails.'
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.
Like ripping off part of the ship?
He didn't do this to the command tower because of all the paper work it would cause.
Yet it has happend one time, it seems Lennart knows quite a lot about the paper stass it generates.
I'm sure he can project from his experiences with other situations. After all, the command tower contains the ship's offices, and therefore all the paperwork; if it's destroyed, the odds are that a large fraction of the total paperwork for a 37000-man crew operating a mile-long battleship capable of pulverizing planetary crusts will have to be replaced.
Because the Galactic Empire couldn't figure out how to handle a distributed file system and off-site backups? Admittedly for a definition of 'off' and 'site' that allows for being on the far side of a kilometer-plus warship's hull...
Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.
Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Darth Nostril.
-'If you really want to fuck with these idiots tell them that there is a vaccine for chemtrails.'
White Haven wrote:Because the Galactic Empire couldn't figure out how to handle a distributed file system and off-site backups? Admittedly for a definition of 'off' and 'site' that allows for being on the far side of a kilometer-plus warship's hull...
Physically, it's that simple.
Paperwork is not determined by physics constraints, except perhaps for the application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to information theory. It is determined by bureaucracy, and is therefore subject to a Murphy-dominated regime. There's no way they'd let you get away with blowing up your ship's central record database without putting you through hell. If nothing else, they'll want to satisfy themselves that you aren't using the destruction of the bridge tower to hide evidence of anything they'd care about.
The point is that if you have data redundancy, you trigger paperwork from getting your conning tower shot away, but you don't have to rebuild the entire contents of your database by hand because you haven't lost it.
Chronological Incontinence: Time warps around the poster. The thread topic winks out of existence and reappears in 1d10 posts.
Out of Context Theatre, this week starring Darth Nostril.
-'If you really want to fuck with these idiots tell them that there is a vaccine for chemtrails.'
Not that that's stopped him having happy daydreams about it, mind you...and I did mention "spending the rest of your life paperchasing through the navy (sic) bureaucracy trying to reconstruct it all."
That seems to have gone critical somehow, let me catch up here. On the subject of failure; arguably, it would be good for the soul- but also, I've never thought of him as being spotless and immune from cockup, certanly not early on in his career. At this stage, it's the old aphorism about the superior pilot- who uses their superior judgement to avoid situations that would stress his superior skill.
Yes, there was the Palmus Viridis incident- but I don't bring up the number of times he's looked at the odds, added up the number of snowbals in hell and decided, not today. You really don't have to do that very often to get a reputation for it.
Also, when it comes to being caught out, there is a second line of defence- he wants his bridge team to be able to challenge him, offer their own ideas and interpretations. He does not want to get so far ahead of them, via the dark side, that they aren't willing to do that- which is one of the reasons Brenn is on this nightmare of a command course.
Is there a canonical date for the disastrous failed attack on the Hapan consortium? Thinking about that and about failure, Black Prince was involved in that- not in the actual attack, but in the aftermath, defending against real or possible counterattack, damage and loss assessment recon runs, retrieving and escorting cripples to safety- and, Fractal, that could be the window for the sort of stress you want to see Lennart under and that you've almost managed to convince me would be a good thing. That particular incident would have to be told in flashback, though.
Other major incidents about the time of Hoth, well, there was Xizor's death and the chaos and conniptions that caused, plenty of opportunities there, there were at least two rebel (one big R, one opportunist) Admirals canonically, that's blue on blue...and of course, in the fratricidal confusion after Endor, all bets are off.
Then again, when it comes to making mistakes, look at his social and family life. He is a bundle of contradictions, and in some respects draws strength from that- in others, he clearly has problems. His sense of family is virtually disconnected from the biological fact, has warped round from being a being thing to being a doing thing- family are the people who stand by you, and vice versa.
Rafaella is the only significant exception to that so far- and that's mostly because of Altara. Aleph-3, he actually has a much larger problem with her attraction to him than he lets on, because in some respects he thinks of her as being in the place of a daughter, too.
Then we have the non- combat side, the political and legal, and he has made at least two potentially career ending moves there apart from the main one. Alrika and Fal are there, in a position to be talking to Rafaella, because they weren't stopped- at the very least, he let them go, at the worst he's complicit in an extremely dodgy personal deal with two officers of the Rebel Alliance. That and he is at gut level not willing to sacrifice Pel Aldrem to the cause of "justice." Mistakes? Hell, yes.
The only purpose in my still being here is the stories and the people who come to read them. About all else, I no longer care.
The problem with many of those examples is that in a fictional setting, mistakes made as a result of honor-before-reason (conspiring at two removes to bust your only daughter out of jail, sticking your neck out dangerously far to protect one of your best crewmen) don't come across as mistakes. They come across as the hero being, well, heroic, and if anything bad happens to him as a result it's because the villains are villainous, not because he screwed up.
And I'm not saying that's a logical assessment; I'm saying that's the way it tends to seem to the reader, unless the author goes far out of their way to establish the protagonist's heroic stupidity as exactly that.
One of the most promising aspects of the Lennart-Thrawn interaction here is that Thrawn comes to the story already built up as a master manipulator and strategist. That means that, even with Lennart established as no slouch, Thrawn can credibly outmaneuver Lennart on virtually any field Lennart tries to oppose him on. It looks like you're taking advantage of this, with Lennart effectively trying to fight a holding action against Thrawn in bureaucracy-space... and still losing ground.
This allows you to set up a sort of "Empire Strikes Back" scenario, if you will pardon the sloppy analogy: Our Heroes are good, damn good, and still losing. So you get to see them ducking and weaving and scrambling to salvage something from the wreck, instead of blowing through impossible odds like they did it every day before lunch.
This is the first half of the chapter- it turned into a two scene effort, the second scene will be along as soon as it's finished. Maybe tomorrow.
Hull 721 arc 2 ch 15
'Just one damned crisis after another, isn't it?' Rafaella said, largely to herself. Which she almost never did, proof that the medication, or the situation, was getting to her. Or the flashes of waking dream.
On the whole, she supposed she had an excuse. She also had a datapad.
In a familiar tactic, used by the best and smartest dictatorships for ten thousand years, they had pretended to leave her to her own choices and her own decisions, all the time knowing there was only one real path.
Within the datapad was, supposedly, everything the Alliance knew about her father. They had left her to read it, expecting that she would emerge thinking 'we have to save him for the Light' or some such.
Actually, considering the rebels she had met so far, she was by no means certain that she wanted to. She was fairly sure that what the file on the pad contained was heavily slanted, and hoped her head was sufficiently on straight to spot the inaccuracies.
She could have said 'I don't want your version of events, take me to him and I'll see for myself'- but there was no good reason to assume that they would. Apart from being very dangerous for them, they didn't want to make her feel like a prisoner. Correction, they didn't want to hammer home the fact she was a prisoner.
They wanted to use me against him, she thought, especially my aunt and her man. I'm a pawn, a weapon in their hands against this...she couldn't not read it. Even if it was a pack of lies, it promised to be an interesting pack of lies.
There was a surprising amount on his early life- although most of it was raw and unedited, must have been taken down by a secretary droid and organised into bullet point format from his sister's reminiscences.
There was obviously bad blood between them, because it wasn't an attractive picture. Arrogant, egotistical, ungrateful, disruptive, determined to walk his own path- not quite to cartoonish extent, but he really couldn't be as bad as this, she thought.
She believed, fundamentally, in the shoe fetishist theory of economics. There were always oddballs, always misfits- and the proportion of them that society was willing to tolerate was a subject in it's own right, the proportion that it generated another story entirely- but the defining mark of a healthy system was just that.
By and large, people gravitated towards the sort of work that suited them, and the job tended to attract the people whose temperament fitted it. A system that produced the sort of people that drifted towards the sort of things that needed doing was a functioning system. When it didn't, she thought, archaeologists and historians got left with lots to do.
Like me, she thought. Born in mystery, so naturally I aim to spend my life in a job all about unravelling mysteries. Although, considering present company, there are probably far more people emotionally suited to terrorism than ever find work in the field, and just as well that one tends not to rise to it's natural level.
She had a fairly clear preconception of what the commander of a major Imperial warship would be like. Would have to be like, given the demands of the job. Authoritarian, for a start. Brutally self confident. Not a 'good listener' in the emotional sense of the term, but definitely capable of attention to detail.
Results driven, and trained in a school which despised excuses. About as good an organisation man as could reasonably be, given that. Not likely to worry about someone else's feelings, even worry overmuch about their existence.
So how in the name of sanity had the man described in this file found his way into the Starfleet? He wasn't merely a misfit, he was an outright saboteur; not just an oddball, more like a vortex of confusion.
After the distinctly jaundiced cast his sister put over his youth, there were some details of his time at the University of Coruscant, where what she had been thinking earlier about terrorists came right back to haunt her, because that was the charge he had been sentenced to death in absentia on.
The unrest of those times had been legendary, the student- radical response to the runup to the Clone Wars had been the aspired- to model for a generation of protesters. The mass actions had been one thing, the actions of a small group of militants another.
Their pranks- they had, physically manipulating the junction boxes, arranged a lighting power cut so that the blackened towers spelt out 'J'accuse' across the face of Coruscant; they had committed electronic fraud and used the money to pay street people to reenact scenes from the local chief of police's favourite porn holo;
they had spiked the water supply of Centre North One tower- the local branch of the Bank of the Core- with hallucinogens; they had reprogrammed spaceport tender bots to arrange the incoming ships in the shape of two fingers raised at the senate building;
if that had not been enough, there had been four pranks that would have passed into the history of the republic, if it had not been about to come to an end.
One had been a simple switch. Droid- slicing to reroute three containerloads of ingredients for the senate catering facilities to a homeless shelter had had a certain brash elegance about it.
Substituting the senate guard's armour polish with an electrosetting resin that effectively froze them in a body cast when they turned their force pikes on had met with a total lack of comedic appreciation; especially as it had inadvertently revealed just how many of the average senator's staff were in actual fact their own private gunmen.
Substituting a stuffed garbage squid for a Senator had been an insult worth killing over, even if it had been Garm bel Iblis it had happened to; the perpetrators had thereafter been presumed to be Corellian, but no evidence was ever found.
Bombing the opening ceremony of a session of the senate, with homing mortars fired from a garbage truck, would seem to veer into outright terrorism; apart from that they were flour bombs. Albeit flour soaked in indelible, fluorescent, yellow ink. Estimates of the value of the couturierie ruined reached the low billions.
The security services had suffered a total sense of humour failure, and the perpetrators had been tried in their absence and sentenced to death- which meant that if identified, they could be shot without further ceremony.
Unsurprisingly, none of what was believed to be an extremely small group had ever turned themselves in. Suspicion had fallen at one point on Senator Greyshade, also strangely on a man whose very name was forbidden these days- Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The idea behind that was that it had been some sort of internal matter, some kind of security probe gone catastrophically wrong, she didn't believe it. She had come across enough about the jedi to recognise that it was extremely unlikely that any of them would ever openly display that kind of warped sense of humour.
On the other hand, the evidence now before her, a direct quote from her father- “anything that ruins Mon Mothma's day is all right with me. She always was one of our favourite targets; what a shame the memory- metal whoopee cushion plan never came off...” seemed to place him squarely in the frame.
He had actually said it to one of the Heroes of Yavin, yet- what the kriff had they been doing in the same place at the same time? Another mystery.
The fact appeared to be that her biological father, a Captain of the Line in the Imperial Starfleet, when he was a couple of years less than her own age had been one of the most wanted men in the galaxy.
Well, there's at least one thing that doesn't run in the family, she thought optimistically, choosing to overlook her circumstances for now and remember what a stable, sober, disciplined student she had been. Possibly even a little too much so.
She had been a model pupil, always in uniform, always homework done, always on time to the second, always behaved, and most of her teachers had found it eerie. It wasn't that she was quiet, not a bit of it. She was a doer, a go- getter, always at or near the top of the class, good on the sports field.
There was clearly something driving her, nobody gets achievements like that by accident, but she was equally obviously keeping it tightly under control. They had actually told her to misbehave; run wild now, they had said, get whatever's riding you out of your system, because the longer you bottle it up, the more catastrophic it's going to finally be.
A mad moment now might result in detention, suspension at worst; the same mad moment in a decade's time might cost a career, her year head had advised. She hadn't. Considering the current situation, though, on the run from the law and having been kidnapped by rebels, she had to admit it had been a valid point.
It hadn't been possible, that was the problem; this was it, the void above and behind her- the empty connection , a sort of phantom mind, and the strange semi- random noise that came from the half- made connection, the missing blood tie.
My adopted parents loved me, in their own way and as much as they could, she acknowledged, and that will always be there, but I always knew that I belonged somewhere else.
Although what a ridiculously strange place it looks like being. I have demons? He must have had an entire polytheistic pantheon hagriding him, to go from that to the Republic Fleet- joining the organisation that had a death warrant out on him, without even changing his name yet.
What did drive him, first to kick over the traces so spectacularly in one of the most widely holovised pranks of all time, and then to swing round to the diametric opposite?
She tried to imagine him as a student, at the same age as herself; would I have known him? Talked to him, in the handful of classes we would have had in common considering he was doing PPE? Would we have belonged to any of the same clubs and societies, shared any of the same haunts and habits?
Not overwhelmingly likely, she had to admit; she had been the hard- grafting child of hardworking, middle class parents, but she had had her problems- that she attributed to, ironically, a lack of study discipline.
It had taken a little time to adapt, to learn how to funnel what she wanted to do down into what they- the usual, omnipresent they- wanted and expected of her, and considering how me and Plarch got ourselves into trouble in the first place arguably I still wasn't on top of that, she added wryly to herself.
Her father, on the other hand, had been the eldest son of a family of overachievers, meritocrats who had been determined that he should inherit anyway, however hard they had to push him to make him the best.
They had done a surprisingly good job of conditioning him; recognised that him simply falling into line, generation succeeding generation, was not a viable option, and aimed higher than that.
They had managed to give him enough pride and self- confidence to make it unthinkable for him to rebel by simply being lazy and letting himself fail, that most common failure mode would have been too easy.
Instead, and perhaps inevitably, he had been driven to assert himself by excelling- going as far or further than they expected, but at a tangent, down his own, strange path.
In fact, skimming forward through his naval career, it seemed as if the child was father to the man after all.
One thing she suspected, wanted to meet him to confirm- and for so many other reasons- but she suspected he was an anarchist precisely because, at gut level, he was an elitist.
He could have gone into politics, become the target of his own flour bombs- they would probably have moved up to hypnotic pulsers and memeplanting or something like it by then- but he had chosen to do something entirely different.
Partly because there really wasn't much more they could do before the odds caught up to them, partly because she suspected he wanted to push himself. Prove how good he really was.
She couldn't imagine turning against her specialty in the way he had repudiated his; what had happened to him, to turn him from a prospective member of the governing class into a terrorist-comedian? A case of acute, sudden- onset cynicism?
One of the many things she wanted to ask. Her adoptive parents had been a doctor and a police officer; not exactly professions which tended to look on the sunny side. Being an orphan had just added to that. She had always had some gut sense of the rottenness of life.
Her father, though, had been the son of privilege, and could easily have led a sheltered life. Then again, she doubted that it was possible to pick up the skills to pull off the stunts they had leading that sheltered life- perhaps he had always been more at odds with them than his family liked to admit.
If he mistrusted authority, was deeply dubious of the methods it used to maintain itself, was suspicious verging on contemptuous of the people set in authority over him, had lost faith in the political process- that might explain his sudden change to the military.
It might also explain his continued fealty to the Empire; after all, it really couldn't get much worse, and allowed unlimited free play for the cynic.
After abandoning politics and the soft sciences, he had thrown himself at the most mathematically dense specialisation that he could, and apparently been very good at it.
In fact, there was a note in his files to the effect that he was responsible for one of the urban legends of the fleet- he had, in fact, made a jump on the basis of stylus, paper and slide rule calculations. For a bet. There was some intelligence officer's scribble in the margins- investigate; possible force powers?
Apparently nothing had actually been done, partly because the hard copy actually existed. The piece of paper covered in scrawled equations, scorings out and rough approximations had been handed over to the fleet museum on Renillis when the Acclamator he had served on was decommissioned.
There was an ancient old movie quite that he had made his own- something about a wise man having to be aware of his own limits. His record through that period was the picture of a man mapping those limits out, and beginning to work on himself to eliminate them. Evidently they weren't very limiting, she thought wryly.
Then she came across the part she had been more than half dreading, but had to find. Her mother's name appeared in the document. Jedi Padawan Altara Yallam, assigned with Jedi Knight Ethog Senemit to the flag of the 8059th Assault Support Group.
She had half expected that, but what was this, disciplinary action brought against him? According to the patchwork that made this up, reminiscences of men of the group who had later joined the rebellion, of the retrieved files of wrecked ships from that period and intact defectors, they had hated each other.
It was not a quiet, grumpy hate; they had got off on the wrong foot and ran with it from there. It had affected the operations of the ship; every time they had been forced to deal with each other it had turned into a blazing row, once on the bridge in the middle of a council of war.
It always started out civil enough, both of them straining to be reasonable, and descended step by step and accusation by accusation into a shouting match, he attacking the concept of jedi command, she- well, charges of mutiny had been considered, but not pressed.
The file made a lot of that, his hostility to the Force; speculated about his part in order 66- a chill came over her, he hadn't, had he...that made no sense in the light of, well, of what she had thought until recently was the random noise of a half- awake brain.
Although they had outwardly loathed each other, the child of the pair of them noticed, they had kept coming back to each other to do it all over again. There was definitely some depth of attachment there; a bittersweet, love- hate relationship, with only the hate ever allowed to show in public?
Certainly, reading this and the open, searing contempt he had had for the very living example of indifferent privilege, unearned power and subservience to corruption, and the return shots of indiscipline, dilletantism and anarchism she had taken at him, no-one would suspect them of being likely to make a baby together. More likely a corpse.
Considering my mother never told my father about me, Rafaella thought, they couldn't have been too sure themselves.
Were my visions just no more than that, wishful thinking, noise in the brain? Or did she see into the future herself? Skimming ahead to try and grasp something of the flavour of the man, looking at his record, he was a man in a state of change.
As an anarchist by temperament, being put in charge of something should have been the worst thing that could have happened to him- but it wasn't. He would hold himself to his own standards, and he had risen to that challenge.
Being in charge of something, being answerable for other people, had revolutionised him. All of his pride and anger and ego had turned outwards, and their daughter suspected her mother had known that it would.
She had seen what he could become, if he was pushed, and he had probably tried to break the real person out of the restrictive shell of the jedi code, and they had clawed and hammered at each other with drive by offendings every time they had come face to face, each trying to break through the other's defences.
Apparently he had won, although he had probably never known it. No, he couldn't have. The kind of man he had became, the kind of man she had been trying to turn him into, wouldn't have abandoned his own child like that.
So...what had happened to her? Ah. There was a footnote, cross reference- she was listed as an official casualty of the war, the date was very familiar, even to an archaeologist who regarded the last thousand years as falling into 'current affairs'; that had been the Battle of Coruscant.
The victims of Order 66 had never turned up on any such official list, so that was that- there was much made in her father's file of the day. Ramming, boarding and clearing a CIS droid warship, leading the boarding party in person. He had officially won a medal of valour for that- but had refused to attend the ceremony.
Not the first and not the last time. Then at least there were special reasons, but it had been the start of a pattern.
What kind of Imperial was he? How did he justify that to himself? Descent into total cynicism- all power corrupts, any power will therefore be corrupt, looking after myself and my own is all that matters? Sense of loss, nowhere else to go?
Had responsibility made him readier to compromise, turned him from someone capable of pranking the Lords of the Galaxy into someone willing to dance with the darkness in order to protect his people? Or was he struggling to adapt himself and keep the place he had carved among the cogs of the machine?
The Alliance weren't too sure themselves. Some of their reports on him describe him as a natural rebel and were sure he must be straining at the leash, others considered him a licensed barbarian who would cheerfully wreck and destroy for anyone willing to pay him.
Neither of them made sense to her. Looking at the wide, wild curves that made the trajectory of him, the meanings he had ranged across, they were both far too simple to be true. The Alliance didn't understand him, but knew it ought to.
Considering the number of rebel and renegade warships he had accounted for, small wonder they had a file on him. And key evidence which could destroy him, although that had only emerged very recently.
I'm bait, she realised. They mean to trap him, and this is the lethal payload of the trap. They could kill him unless...what? Defection? Or do they simply want him destroyed?
The door opened- no shiny technology down here, it was on hinges- and her aunt Alrika came into the room, accompanied by gunman number one and two guards.
'Monitor camera, and you saw me put the datapad down. I notice you didn't want to wait until I'd finished thinking.' Rafaella said.
'I assumed you had at least that much of your father in you.' Alrika recovered quickly, and said.
What would the man she had just been reading about do? For one thing, he would have a lot more backup in this situation. Feint and counterattack, probe for information. 'I don't know him, in fact I think I know less now than I did at the start. He is your enemy though, isn't he?'
'What reasons do you have to be on the side of the Empire?' Alrika saw the next move, and countercharged.
'Do these people you work with, are they even vaguely aware of how they would have been treated at the height of the republic? Do they know anything at all about the politics of insurgency?' parry and riposte.
'Remind me why you were in jail?' Alrika snarked.
'So these people are the 'any port in a storm,' then? Tell me one thing, one thing first at least- what sort of standing, what sort of footing is Captain of the Line Lennart on with his superiors?' Rafaella asked, thinking that that might be the key to it.
She missed the first part of Alrika's explanation- the start of another vision headache. Incoherent, plunging, turbulent, glowing bubbles of memory and faces. Nothing good. Alrika noticed, Rafaella waved at her, 'carry on.'
'He actually tried to persuade me to rescue you, for him. Attempting to blackmail us with politics, but essentially for private and personal reasons.'
'So,' Rafaella pondered, 'he was in enough trouble that he couldn't do it himself...do you think he would have followed through on that threat, exposed you as a rebel, if you hadn't?'
Alrika took a long time thinking about that, before saying, 'He must have been very desperate to fall back on his biological family. In any case I couldn't trust him not to expose us. He is...evil, now, poisoned by service to the Empire.'
'How sure are you,' Rafaella said, remembering reading and analysing the evidence of plots and assassinations, special operations and kidnappings- the exciting end of the business of digging up the past, 'that he didn't have you traced?
Even if he meant to let you go after you turned him down, there's no good reason the people he's in trouble with would have been so generous.' she pointed out.
'You can't possibly know that, you're an archaeologist.' Alrika said, knowing that they had changed transponder codes, scanned for self- emissions, deviated from their official route, searched the ship for homing devices, taken every known, every credible precaution;
but knowing, too, her brother's reputation and his gang of lunatics, and suspecting that whoever the empire had sent to trap him would be even more devious and unpredictable.
Rafaella dissented from that. The department always took care to get them hooked, with a taste of the past's high politics and economic double- dealing, before sending them off to do something like excavate the lower levels of a scrapyard world looking for evidence of changes in the demographics of spaceflight.
'No, I do know how these things work. Given enough time and enough sifting through the debris, everything comes out.' Rafaella said. 'I've picked over the bones of more dead and broken conspiracies-'
The chief gunman put his hand to his ear, heard something on com he didn't like; unslung his blaster and shoved the door open. 'Move. Move now.'
'Once you fit motors to this thing-' Rafaella gestured in the direction of her hospital bed, but nobody was paying attention.
'What is happening?' Alrika asked him. Rafaella guessed, already. The local terrorist/rebels who had made themselves so obnoxious; two moderately important Corellian rebels, the daughter of a demi- renegade imperial officer, and the Alliance's file on him- what a glorious time for a raid.
'Word from the surface team. We are under attack, the Empire has arrived in force and dispatched a wave of assault transports to blockade all entrances to and begin combing the underground system. They appear to be led by a blue- faced near human admiral.'
The only purpose in my still being here is the stories and the people who come to read them. About all else, I no longer care.
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:She believed, fundamentally, in the shoe fetishist theory of economics. There were always oddballs, always misfits- and the proportion of them that society was willing to tolerate was a subject in it's own right, the proportion that it generated another story entirely- but the defining mark of a healthy system was just that.
Shoe fetishist theory?
There was an ancient old movie quite that he had made his own- something about a wise man having to be aware of his own limits.
The shoe fetishist theory of economics was spawned by Scott Adams, the creator/perpetrator of "Dilbert"; basically, people with particular kinks in their heads gravitate to jobs and hobbies that feed those kinks, and employers should seek out thse people because they will be willing to work for less money.
And therefore, by logical extension in a twenty- five thousand year old society, media types and propagandists should try, and try to be paid for, turning the youth of the day into the sort of prospective employee that employers want to see.
The specific example he uses is shoe fetishists in a shoe shop. Although I have to suspect he is ignoring or glossing over the issue of customer service there.
I don't really want to think too hard about the subject of employee programming and exploitation in the real world at the moment, though. Midwinter's gloomy enough.
"A wise man's gotta know his limitations" is definitely a movie quote, from Inspector Harry Callahan no less. I presume that hard boiled cop dramas, or something like them, exist in some corner of the GFFA.
The only purpose in my still being here is the stories and the people who come to read them. About all else, I no longer care.
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:'Word from the surface team. We are under attack, the Empire has arrived in force and dispatched a wave of assault transports to blockade all entrances to and begin combing the underground system. They appear to be led by a blue- faced near human admiral.'
Tipical, very tipical.
And in a very perverse way is showing you don't need no stinking tracers or stupid force feelers, just ask Trawn were to go.
Here is the second segment of the chapter. It feels raw, rough, jagged, as if I haven't exactly made it say what I want it to, and it's something I really wanted to get perfect but it keeps dancing away. This is about the best shot at it likely to happen. Follows on from the last half- scene of 14.
'Come in, then, let's see how badly we can get this wrong.' Lennart said, turning to look out of the window. This would probably manage to end less disastrously if he began with something inconsequentially absurd.
'Nothing sadder than a skyline full of ghosts.' Lennart said, with his back to her, looking down at the planet. 'Look closely enough and you can still see the dents in the earth where Corellia's old industrial cities used to be, before we turned the place into a garden and tore them all down...
we're a vacuum dwelling people, now, and it is only a garden, no real ecological anchor at all, just wasteland- we don't really live on our own home planet any more.
I'm not sure we do grow up besotted with the romance of spaceflight, as much as it is that we cut the ground out from under our own feet and left ourselves with nowhere else to go.'
So, Aleph-3 thought to herself, he was going to- what? Baffle me and deflect me with words? Oh, if it was only that simple. Maybe the words exist, I've followed his paper trail, she thought, not the technicalities, the non- professional nonfictions and the stories he accesses. Trying to get a grasp of the furniture of his mind.
One of his favourite novelists thought that, wrote that; that people really do have something like true names, a deep, learned in childhood thing, for most people there are a few words that could destroy the foundation stone of their lives. There were also words that could heal and restore, although they came much later if at all.
Considering the way he was looking and apparently feeling at the moment, she had to wonder if his didn't include “you have the force.” What would mine be? She wondered.
Might as well start in the way that pointed towards what she wanted out of this. 'The last thing I could accuse you of, Captain, is being obsessed with romance...' said slinkily, trying to get him to disagree with her which she could then move on to a more personal footing. Or bedding, to be exact.
Many reasons, power and the subversion of power, the madness and the smell of him, but most of all their bodies needed to talk to each other, flesh to flesh and blood to blood. If this was only going to be with spoken and half- spoken words, they could keep dancing around each other for a million years.
They could argue up and down, high politics to low thuggery, the fate of the universe to the price of nerf, but if there was a simplicity somewhere that could be the rule to sort out the tangled mess, this was it.
'Hm? How romantic a proposition is “kriffing mutate, you dubious bastard”? Love is not love, when it seeks to alter which it finds, but that fixed mark unchanging... something or other along those lines, anyway.' Lennart misquoted.
'Do you really want me to sacrifice mind and conscience, become an anti-moral parody of strength, an abomination and worst of all a victim of the system, another link in the chain of bastardry like Alric Adannan?'
A less mercurial man would have broken down into random shouting at some point during that; a more malicious one would have swung for her. She was rocked back by that, but...he was finding it difficult to face her, but she could see his face reflected in the viewport; not really angry- a guess closer to the truth would be bitterly disappointed.
There were snappy comebacks that suggested themselves to her, and questions- worst of all a victim? There was a kink in his head that would be worth playing with- but that would only engage on the intellectual kinetic level, the same mad verbal dance they always did, endless, elusive, evasive non- seduction.
That and she had begun as they never quite managed to go on, she had instinctively set out on the dance, and he had broken the pattern this time, with something genuine and raw.
This was not a moment to be subtle. Still less would deceit help. 'You know what I owe loyalty to, what I'm obliged to uphold, to believe; at the time, at that time, I was sure I was doing the right thing by you.' she said, trying not to sound as if she regretted it.
She moved over to stand by him, he saw her in the reflection in the window.
'Looking at it in the abstract, pretending for the sake of argument that it wasn't me involved, you probably did the right thing. I don't want to pretend that it wasn't me involved, and I don't think you want me to either...' he said.
'I'd settle for a precis.' she said, using his own trick of striking off at a tangent against him, or trying to.
'Verbal pseudo, now? By trying to defeat me with my own weapons you let me dictate the structure of the engagement.' Not an entirely fortunate choice of words, they both realised.
Besides which, she asked herself, what was the answer to that? Did Chief Mirannon know what he was making me promise? I want him to be strong in the dark side; to matter...by extracting that from me, under duress, promising to stand by him- and at the time, I meant it.
She could ask him if it had to be a struggle- but the appropriate dark side answer would be yes, it did. 'Go on. Define “Victory” as by this clash of words, as between us. I dare you.'
'Not sure I can...' Lennart admitted. 'It's not as if I'm being completely honest with myself, or with you, either. I know what I do not want, and that is to turn into something, and I do mean thing, like Kor Alric. You still report to the Inquisitorius, don't you?' Lennart asked, wondering what she would say and if he could believe it.
One thing was certain, if their hormones got the better of them and something long term managed to happen, it was never going to be a quiet, cosy relationship. They would always be dancing around each other, probing and teasing, always a little off balance.
'I'm not sure if I do any more.' she said, honestly- but not really expecting him to believe and recognise it. 'Kor Alric took over the management of that section, probably as a deliberate measure in the conspiracy; I would be reporting to a cloud of dust.'
'I've done that a few times,' Lennart said, tangentially, 'but the fleet bureaucracy usually catches up in the end; even when they don't spot it, the pile of memo forms beside the gravestone catches someone's eye sooner or later...two things occur to me.'
'One of them being the professional thought that this might be a good way to probe deeper into the conspiracy, find out who picks up the pieces, a long step towards proving your innocence?' Aleph-3 suggested.
'Although I'm not sure why I'm trying, the last thing anyone needs when they're joining the dark side is innocence, and you know it. The other thought being that if they don't follow up, if there could be bureaucratic confusion, this could be your chance to slip the yoke off your shoulders, be free of them.' Captain of the Line Lennart suggested.
She thought about that, and realised that she shouldn't have wasted time thinking about it. The proper, official response would be to decline vigorously; maybe shoot him. Too late.
Although, most of her gut instincts were pointing in that direction. Don't give up on the job. Never leave it undone, never leave a task unfulfilled. That was the old loyalties, the ones that were tearing her apart.
It was hard, because it was painful, to think of oneself as a thing standing still. She found it vastly more comfortable to be a process, and she started to think now that it wasn't so much a matter of moving forward as of never having to look back. Never having to simply be.
The whole point of her existence, the rest of the clones' existence, was to do. They weren't really supposed to stand still. She was an idiosyncrasy among them because of what she had been intended to do, she was supposed to be able to pretend.
Do I even really know what I want from him? 'The reason I found myself doing that, the why of it all would still exist- I, I don't think it would be an escape, just a day release. I don't think I have your maneuverability.'
'We manoeuvre evasively around a base course, you know.' A technicality used as a metaphor; the twisting, flickering dance of a ship under fire, but it was usually accomplished around a base vector, most of the time the chosen trajectory, the core loyalty, was maintained, was at the heart of the pattern.
She knew just enough of the naval- technical side of it to understand the metaphor, but she already deeply grasped what it meant. 'Part of me, but only part of me, can do that.'
The core loyalties, the conditioned reflexes, discipline and dedication, like a waterfall pounding through her head she had described it as, actually to him, how long? Less than a calendar month. It felt far longer than that.
She had initially meant his ability to pick and choose between loyalties; any damned fool could be treacherous, that was part of being human and the clones were, after all, clones of human beings- but to defy authority on his own initiative to hold to a higher principle, she had to admire that. Even if it was trying to kill him.
'Always been the problem, hasn't it? What you're, I'm, willing to stand for, able to tolerate, what you are not against is part of who you are, almost as much as what you stand for, and I don't understand if I ever did where you draw that line.' he said, with half a dozen false starts and rethinkings along the way.
'I had it drawn for me.' she admitted.
'Who drew that line, and whose interest did they draw it in, yours or theirs?' Lennart challenged. 'You've already broken the mould in that respect, you were never supposed to be what you've become. You can reject “their” expectations, you already have.'
She had to laugh at that, but it was in the edge of hysteria. 'You mean I leave my government provided barracks from time to time, and disguise myself on the orders of the government, with government provided secret funds, to do the bidding of the government? I just happen to come from a strange mould, Captain.'
'Who am I to encourage rebellion? And in any case, do you really think the live- born among us are that much freer? What do you think it means to be human, anyway? We all trail chains, meshes of heredity and acculturation, obligation and temper and duty and words given and taken, some just carry it more heavily than others.
Do you understand more clearly, now that you have met the beast face to face, what it is that you are bound to? Do you feel, now that you have seen one of your other selves in the flesh, what it is that you stand for? Is that really all that you thought you were?' He said, angrily and accusatively.
Compared to the eloquence and wordplay he had used on Kor Alric, the glib buoyancy he had moved from idea to idea with, this was raw, open, unshielded.
She had always known that for him, simple duty was not the explanation, and to extend his own metaphor his web of motive was crossconnected and interwoven to the point that he could tack against it, lever one part against another.
She started to understand that the simplicity the dark side would force upon him would rob him of so much of that, she might as well offer to cut his legs off. He enjoyed complexity, loved it, danced with it.
Which is one of the reasons he's both drawn to and repelled by me, she grasped at least three years too late. I'm the only dance partner he's likely to get, I can be complex, she thought, but I keep turning down the invitation, preferring to crawl back into the neatly framed simplicity of the barracks.
Some actress you are, she shouted at herself, not even understanding the role you're supposed to be playing. Not wanting to live it any more, at least. She could push further into that idea- he danced and she waded through snow; for her, it was pushing- or she could change the subject. He was tolerant of changes of subject. It was probably a safe move.
'Your father took a look at my genetics. I- well, so much for donor tracing. I'm a mongrel.' she said. Aldrith Lennart had felt it safer to send her a holonet message than meet in person, and she could hardly blame him.
'So there are no-one's footsteps to follow in,' Lennart said, cutting to the important part- what it meant to her, the emotional impact, 'no-one to acknowledge you as kin, no vertical connections, only a thin and migrating sisterhood- I'm sorry.'
She shrugged, not meaning it, just social- she didn't want that now. 'According to your father, I'm the product of a genetic soup that came from at least four different donors, and when they were patching it all together they stuck in some parts- mostly the cosmetics- that are whole cloth, no living derivation.'
'It was one of the fleet commanders of the Light and Darkness war being introduced to some fat- backsided noble who came out with that line- “you're only a reflection of the drip off your grandfather's dick- what have you ever done but bask in the glory of your ancestors? Me, I am an ancestor.” Indelicate but accurate.'
'I'm not an ancestor.' Aleph-3 pointed out. 'You need descendants for that, and-'
'You're not sure you trust your own biology any more.' Lennart said. Guessing, accurately, what she had been about to say, but realising just too late that she needed to bring herself to say that out loud. 'Neither do I.' he added, hoping that would make it better, suspecting he was making it worse.
'There are so many things I'm supposed, mandated, to say to you about the force, that-' Galactic Spirit, she thought, maybe that's it. That is the driver. He's had the Force, subconsciously, all his life, and been reacting against it for at least that long.
Fighting against the smooth flowing instincts, driven out into a blizzard of cold equations and actual thought, radically unForcelike; if he can balance the force against that, do it actively- I might be wrong, she thought, but if, I need time, thinking time, a tangent.
'Why are you so certain you're going to fall into the same traps that he did? Kor Alric was at least sharp enough to organise a conspiracy that is taking one of the greatest minds in the Fleet to penetrate.' she essayed a move.
He fell for it, or at least chose to follow that move in the dance. 'Kor Alric was an agent of something that starts at an even higher level, and face to face, sharpness wasn't his dominant trait- you were there for most of it; we both behaved like peacocks. Flaring our tails at each other on every occasion.'
Lennart could tell that she was thinking, so he threw another surprise at her. 'When I look at what little is left of his notes, he might actually have had a point. He probably could have convinced me to join him, if he hadn't, well, hadn't been such a devoted adherent of the dark side.'
Her brain went 'boing' at that; what he had said was a shaved hair away from a confession of treason, to the last person in the universe that he could trust that kind of confidence to. Is he really so certain by this point that I won't betray him, she thought, flattered and insulted both- then realised that of course he wasn't, that was why he had said it...
'Are you saying that he would have been able to seduce-' she realised how inappropriate that was, substituted 'convince you to join him on the dark side, if only he hadn't been a follower of the dark side? He defeated himself by being true to himself?'
'If that was true, then all a man would have to do to be a roaring success is to be completely false to himself-' Lennart said, then stopped as he realised, and she recognised, just how much truth there was in that.
'Base course and evasion, then?' she suggested, echoing his earlier metaphor, which made some kind of sense now, and that was either a good or a bad sign she still wasn't sure which.
'I hope he wasn't being true to himself because if he was, considering what he did to your clone- sister, if that's the sort of psychotic the dark side likes to home in on- do you really think I'm any less vulnerable than he was?' Lennart said.
She managed a poorly guarded response, giving too much away- 'You never asked me to lie at your feet and be your pet the way he did to Laurentia, there were times when I wanted you to but you were always too decent for that.'
'Implicitly accepting that the dark side isn't.' he pointed out. 'Passion without compassion, strength without control, power without responsibility, victory without wisdom to exploit it, freedom after burning away so much of the conceptual space that the only question left is who to hurt- do you want me to degenerate into something of his type and kind?'
She opened her mouth, closed it again, three potentially disastrous replies flashed across her consciousness, she abandoned them all in favour of 'You know, I'm not sure you even could.'
'I'm an inherently more likely candidate for turning into a murderous monster than he was- he was an emergency room doctor once, I'm in the violence trade to begin with. You have- or you're pretending to have- more faith in me than I do.' Lennart said.
'You don't seem to believe that you could have convinced me. You asked me how a good soldier, could tolerate the backstabbing, fratricide, treachery of the dark side? Don't you think you were right?' she asked him.
'I know, to the limits of those two words, that I was; but I can't forget either that you were trained and indoctrinated to be ready to sacrifice yourself for the objective.' Lennart pointed out.
She laughed at that; it was the only feasible response. 'You're trying to tell me that I wear too many masks, that I'm too good an actress?'
'What are you protecting yourself from, that you need so many?' he asked her, implicitly admitting quite a lot himself, and what he had really asked, she noticed, was ”can I trust you?”
'I'm not protecting myself,' she said, intending to go on, realising she couldn't and he would work the rest of it out anyway. She was defenceless against authority; theoretically, anyway. The masks were hunting tools, to let her sneak up on her prey.
'And you still wonder why I've never abused that?' he asked, shaking his head.
'I used to.' she said. 'Now I'm simply thankful. Although-' she paused. 'you won that round of the dance. When I first came on board you gave me almost no encouragement, there I was trying to be sexy in your general direction and you treated me like a professional soldier, with just the occasional hint to make me keep trying.'
'Wishful thinking on your part.' he smiled. 'That was exactly how I was playing it- playing the part, if you like,' said with an undertone of annoyance, meaning that he would be damned if it was just a part, 'of a commander with some kind of standards.
I wouldn't abuse my authority to screw a member of the crew, because it would be an abuse, it always degenerates to that anyway. The tragedies we can manufacture for ourselves- why were you trying to be sexy in my general direction, anyway? Control the relationship?' he asked.
'Something like that.' she admitted. 'I tried to set up a reaction like that anyway, I was designed to draw attention, the best I could usually hope for was to cast myself as forbidden fruit.'
'Sometimes you were serving under somebody with standards, and it worked, and sometimes it all went wrong.' Lennart guessed. And she was still willing to take risks.
'I've tried to blank out most of the details.' she said. 'I came closer to ending up like my sister Laurentia than I like to recall. You, though- there was a long time where I hated you, for not rising to the bait. I sent the first talent- scouting report on you in then.'
She took a deep breath, she had to get this right, she couldn't afford at all for it to look like she was acting- just let it go, not even pretend that she wanted to be believed. '...and now I think I was wrong.'
Good grief, she thought, maybe that's what a disturbance in the Force is supposed to feel like; the shock of listening to herself talk and realising that she actually did mean it. He doesn't belong with the dark side. Doesn't belong with the light either, but if I...
It got worse from there. His mask slipped, all the way- something in him said he could trust her, and the flood gates opened and he said more than enough to damn himself.
'There was another reason.' he said, slightly glazed as if trying to remember something he had been rehearsing for a long time. 'It's not as simple as flesh and blood. My woman would be, by default, Mrs Captain.
She'd have to be up to the job of unofficial personnel manager to twenty-five thousand people, it looks as if we'll have that many when the transfers and fixes are all in- and to their families, and that...
Can you raise one of them up, without striking another down, can you judge the ambitions and crosscurrents finely enough to do that?
Can you give them wisdom when they come to you for it, without paralysing their ability to look for their own solutions, teach an arrogant young shit of a junior officer how to listen to his men without losing sight of the fat that ultimately, it really is up to him?
Can you defend the mistakes and the cruelties of the system, when the men you're talking to know better, and they know that you know better?
What do you do when the rationalisations aren't enough any more, when the pretence wears too thin to keep you away from the facts that we are fighting to enslave and terrorise other people, and all the promises that made it worth the price are being broken?
How do you hold them to their duty when the only thing that makes ultimate sense is that you and me and the rest of the galaxy have been set against each other and played for fools?' He honestly wounded as if he was looking for an answer.
She knew, now, what the words were. So much more that needed to be said, and the though of where to go and what to do from here was terrifying, but she knew how to make it work, how to make there be an “us.”
The actress and trickster cautioned the rest of her, careful, girl, this is going to be your mark on the permanent record, the role that defines you. Traitor? How is it even possible to be a traitor to the dark side? Crusader in a lost strange cause, that just might do.
'Jorian? That is exactly what I was originally meant to do. I'll stand by you...you need me.' shereached over, pulled him into her, kissed him.
She was right. Flesh to flesh and blood to blood.
The only purpose in my still being here is the stories and the people who come to read them. About all else, I no longer care.
One had been a simple switch. Droid- slicing to reroute three containerloads of ingredients for the senate catering facilities to a homeless shelter had had a certain brash elegance about it.
Substituting the senate guard's armour polish with an electrosetting resin that effectively froze them in a body cast when they turned their force pikes on had met with a total lack of comedic appreciation; especially as it had inadvertently revealed just how many of the average senator's staff were in actual fact their own private gunmen.
Substituting a stuffed garbage squid for a Senator had been an insult worth killing over, even if it had been Garm bel Iblis it had happened to; the perpetrators had thereafter been presumed to be Corellian, but no evidence was ever found.
Bombing the opening ceremony of a session of the senate, with homing mortars fired from a garbage truck, would seem to veer into outright terrorism; apart from that they were flour bombs. Albeit flour soaked in indelible, fluorescent, yellow ink. Estimates of the value of the couturierie ruined reached the low billions.
I love the pranks.
Nitram, slightly high on cough syrup: Do you know you're beautiful?
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
I can usually follow that sort of conversation easily enough when it's about most things, but trying to follow this one, and the associated thoughts... ow. Proof that my emotional intelligence isn't up to the standards of the rest of it. Ooh, my poor aching frontal lobes.
Still, great scene; anything that went over my head did honestly go over, and therefore isn't a bad thing.
I think if the individual thoughts weren't placed in separate paragraphs, that would be easier to follow who's thinking/saying what to whom. Also, once again: Double Quotation Marks (") are for speaking. Single quotation marks (') are for contractions and sometimes for a person's thought-bubbles. You're still doing it backwards and it *really* confused the hell out of me.
Nitram, slightly high on cough syrup: Do you know you're beautiful?
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Many authors make a custom of italicizing thoughts to further distinguish them from both speech and narration. That wouldn't work in the most recent scene, because you'd end up with two thirds of the text italicized.
Wassail, Merry Yule, Hail Eris, Adeste Fideles and all that...
To clear up some of the confusion, I'm not saying anything you don't already know but British English usage is the other way around. Single marks for speech, double marks- or simply quotation marks as we call them on this side of the pond- for speech. Apart from that, it's just easier to write in manuscript and to type up, so much so that I have to wonder why the American version evolved that way.
Apart from the density of interior monologue, text styles also don't cut and paste in, and in this scene in particular there's less difference between internal and external than usual. It'd have to be done in post- production (post post production?)- and that reminds me there are a couple of howlers of typos in there I'll have to catch and kill.
And, yes, intense. Both of them firing double- meanings and curveballs at each other, both of them going further than they had intended and as far as they had hoped- I'm still not entirely sure myself who exploited who there, if indeed either of them did.
Usually I handwrite the manuscript and then type it up, and most of the time the final version bears a pretty close resemblance to the first version, but not this time. Which is just as well, because if I'd written it entirely from his point of view, that probably wouldn't have happened. Too defensive.
Incidentally, her name; the in- universe suggestion has been made that she should print out a dictionary of baby's names, throw the pages into the air and shoot, and whichever one the hole goes through, settle for that. Her response was that she'd rather not pick the one that gets shot, thank you very much; do that, but with an E-Web, hose the cloud of pages down, eliminate the names on the bits of printout that got hit, and repeat until she's left with the luckiest.
Of course there is going to be an element of selection in this- 'Ugh, the E's, I don't want to be a Eudora, give me more power-' so any ideas? What sounds like it would suit her?
Oh, and a bit from the first section- there is a simple, straightforward and elegant way Rear- Admiral Thrawn could have tracked them, but as it's almost certainly not going to come out in the story- he is going to do a spot of legend- building around it- I might as well tell you. Lev- Matrow took all the usual, sensible precautions, the technical precautions at least. From a man with a record of being so careful and conscientious, that was predictable.
So the rear- admiral exploited the human factor. Find an individual spacer in Lev- Matrow's crew who had hostages to fortune, and apply the carrot and the stick- turn states' evidence, and you can come in from the cold, you're not an outcast anymore; on the other hand, your family... He gave the poor sod a holonet code to call when they landed, and to say where. That was it, simple and functional.
The only purpose in my still being here is the stories and the people who come to read them. About all else, I no longer care.
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