Hull 721, plot arc the second

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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Andras »

Simon_Jester wrote:Delightful; for the first time in my life I feel at least some impulse to read Moorcock. Some day, time permitting, hopefully. However...
Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:'Can't they at least come at us in starships?' Aldrem grumbled.

'They have.' Lennart pointed out. 'When we were attacked by "rebels", the first and third waves weren't legitimate, they were an Imperial special political action group. The second wave were genuine Alliance, and they must have been very confused. But how much of this is really your problem, hm?'
What incident does this refer to?
The 'rebel' fighter attack when the Black Prince is 'at anchor' at the space dock. Starts w Ch 9 on page 5

PS- ECR: Glad to see an update!
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Kartr_Kana »

Glad to see that 721 still lives and the intrigue just keeps getting more Byzantine. I look forward to reading more as Lennart dives deeper into the plots surrounding the Prophets of the Dark Side. Perhaps this is the political snafu that got Thrawn "exiled"?
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by jpdt19 »

Moi aussi, i was witholding delighted laughter for a good minute since i'm at work. Delighted to see this updated again remnant. You always update just whenever i need a pick me up.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Eleventh Century Remnant »

Thanks.
I think I see the end of the tunnel in sight, incidentally; the words seem to be coming a bit more easily now, there should be more fairly soon.

Simon, I reckon Moorcock suffers from retro-cliche syndrome much the same way Tolkien does; so many other people have copied him since that his work starts to look derivative, despite how much of a pioneer he actually was. 40K, for instance, owes him a hell of a lot of it's tone and iconography.
Look at the dates on some of his books; the only person writing fantasy with the same dark, irony-heavy sensibilities and trying to do it to an even vaguely literary standard before him was Fritz Leiber, and before that you have to go all the way back to Cabell.

This really is the light mirror universe version of Pyat, in the quartet he is the unreliable narrator of he is basically a despicable scumbag who deserves a large pointy building dropped on him. Work up to those.

Kartr- you could have a point there.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Simon_Jester »

Leiber is fun; the reason I've never read Moorcock isn't so much aversion as it is that he's almost entirely under my radar, one of the authors I'm only vaguely aware of and so don't actively seek out. Cabell, likewise. So you've increased Moorcock's radar cross section for me, as it were.

As for retro-cliche syndrome bothering me, I can only say "harrumph!" to that; didn't I mention to you at some point that I'm a Doc Smith fan?

And fine, consider me warned that Pyat is an utter ass. I can live with a protagonist being an utter ass; Liane the Wayfarer can't be all that much less deserving of pointy-building-dropping than Pyat, after all, and yet that was a damn good story. Come to think of it, Vance is another one of those writers I should read more of...
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Kartr_Kana »

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Kartr- you could have a point there.
I've always wondered what it was that got Thrawn "exiled" and I can totally see him taking the Black Prince and her non-standard crew of mad geniuses with him into exile. Their out of the box thinking and skill would make them a great asset and it would keep them from "causing" more problems to the Imperial Navy/Government. I also think that the crew, especially her command structure, would feel much more at ease working to keep the galaxy as a whole safe rather than enforcing Imperial edicts. Sure the Empire isn't all they were promised and they're growing increasingly wary of the "Dark Side" of the Empire, but out beyond the rim they can take solace in the fact that no mater how bad the Empire is they're protecting everyone in it from the threats that Thrawn asserts are out there.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Satori »

Singular Quartet wrote:
The Purple Feather had been a house of ill repute, and the night in question had been the night the local police had raided it. Max, offended at being disturbed, caught literally in flagrante, had deputised the prostitutes as officers of the ISB and ordered them to arrest the police.

The girls, not entirely surprisingly, had turned out to have more incapacitating and stunning weapons and much more creative restraint devices than the law. The pair of them had run for it before the situation had finished shaking itself out.

'I was flipping through the Party almanac, and I noticed her name; she must have really taken to her new career- she made Lieutenant-General last year.' Lennart said, and it was actually true.
This bit of insanity right here had me giggling for a solid five minutes once I came to it.
+1 Oh, so much.
Given the respective degrees of vulnerability to mental and physical force, annoying the powers of chaos to the point where they try openly to kill them all rather than subvert them is probably a sound survival strategy under the circumstances. -Eleventh Century Remnant
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Eleventh Century Remnant »

Third scene of what should be a four- scene chapter; thank you for your comments on the last part but Kartr, as plot- convenient as that might be to me and as good an idea in universe, I don't see that working well in practise- they're simply too divergent as personalities, have too little in common, to have a stable, productive working relationship. I think Lennart is being slightly trapped in this by his public persona, actually.

Anyway,


The other part of the plan was proceeding apace; the Alliance were on the scent. Which would have been an unequivocal positive, if they had also decided that the being who had put them onto the scent actually deserved to be kept informed.

Once and future (hopefully) Lieutenant-Commander Raesene had got the idea that they really didn't know what to do with him.

Worst of all, he was coming to the realisation that he really was a line officer, and while that involved hefty doses of politics and paperwork anyway, it was a means to an end, there was a point and an object through it and the goal was to get through it to the good part. He missed that.

It was also difficult to tell when the Alliance were playing games with him. For someone used to having Stormtroopers about the place, their internal security was ridiculously lax.


It was a physically large base, sprawling corridors connecting chambers, and inevitably there were stories about monsters lurking in the dim mass of the dirty snowball.

Once a month, it seemed, they held something they called a 'monster hunt' looking for them, but which actually seemed to be little more than an excuse for full grown adults to play hide and seek; a sanctioned thing, the chief point of which was blowing off steam.

It seemed to be quite difficult to stop the staff from wandering the corridors anyway in fits of abstraction, and that was actually how he was coming by most of his information.

The people here were, if anything, better balanced than the Imperial equivalent- if great genius really was oft to madness near allied, the average lignyot was obviously playing double agent with a foot in each camp- but that didn't necessarily mean better, not in this trade. And it wasn't by much, anyway.


He had been worried that they were setting a trap for him, letting him wander so that they could see what he tried to stick his nose into, until he had to forcibly remind himself not to be so paranoid.

That lasted until there was a notice pinned up on the base main public board, "Thought for the Day; even paranoids have enemies." With a little green smiley face appended to it.

Now that was an evil head- game indeed, and it had the entire base staff looking over their shoulders for a week during which amongst other things, three of them were accused by their workmates of being Imperial Intelligence agents, and one refused to breathe air that did not come from the upper left hand corner of the room;

there was an attempt to create an artificial synaesthesia machine, one refused to eat vertical food, another insisted on standing his trick in a mechanised portable bath, one was "exposed" as a Hutt who had gone on a radical reducing diet to infiltrate the Alliance, and another as a collective of telepathic concrats in a Togruta suit.

Strangely, he was not accused of being an Imperial spy; he was singled out as an inspector from Alliance central command sent in as a fake defector to check on their quality of work. Even with all that, they were still saner than an equivalent mass of ubiqtorate cryptanalysts.


Partly, the accusation came from him snapping and telling them openly how bad their security was, how porous and ill focused, what it could and should be oriented against and how thicker internal barriers might actually help them in their work.

Stopping them looking over each others' shoulders, stopping the ones who had been doing this for far too long projecting their habits onto the rookies, that would be a start. 'If you want to restore the Republic, why not start by restoring the republican way- start doing things in the proper old style' or words to that effect.

Out there, conspirators were busily conspiring, plotters were plotting, loonies were looning and nutters were nutting, and in this feverish whirlpool of the galactic war, nothing much was happening, with great sound and fury.

Snapping like that had been a dangerous bluff to run, putting him as it did in danger of getting sent away from here to some kind of combat assignment, surely the Rebellion didn't have so many people that it could afford to let anyone hang around doing nothing?

Although, it shouldn't really have been a surprise to find that people trying to overthrow tyranny had problems running a neat and efficient organisation, and they sometimes had hurry-up-and-wait problems of their own.


There had been repeated debriefings, and at some point his brain had glazed over and it had gone from trying to catch him out by seeing if his story had changed to obviously a bureaucratic cockup, they hadn't filed the reports properly last time and had to do it all over again.

So many times now, it was becoming tedious, and only really relieved by the food- he had horrified them with that one, actually.

'This is good. Better than Starfleet issue- might be a useful recruiting tool for the Alliance.' he had said, between mouthfuls.

'What?' one of his handlers, a seconded minder who looked as if he didn't really expect that much rational thought from anybody he had to deal with, had said.


'Think about it, you want defectors from the Empire don't you?' he had said, loading the tone with skepticism. 'Apart from anything else, it has to be a lot easier on your logistics if you can get the recruits to bring their own ship.' Mouthful.

'The major incidents might bring fresh meat in- speaking of which,' mouthful, 'but how much of that is untrained activist groundswell, and how much trained spacers and soldiers, better yet in formed units? Right.' Mouthful.

'That's essentially what the Empire thinks. More outraged raw recruits than you have equipment to give them or cadre to organise them and actually make them useful. Brutalisation during training actually works, for the people you need going for the trivia- and the stomach- might be a better bet.' Mouthful.

'Most hardened Starfleet crews simply aren't all that weepy; by all means, Remember Alderaan, but for the skills you actually need, "join the Alliance; we don't feed you recycled algae" could do more good.'


That had got him hauled in front of the interrogation committee again, the dark haired pilot, the bothan and the orange-skinned int type, along with the base commander this time, who started the ball rolling.

'Mr Raesene,' rubbing in the fact that he had no rank, had left the Empire and not yet accepted into the Alliance, 'you have half of us convinced that you really are some kind of Imperial agent trying to escape detection by pretending to be too obviously insane to be such, and the other half convinced you really are that far off kilter.

The team tell me you apparently tried to get an entire mess hall to lynch you, but the psych boys say you're not feeling enough guilt over your defection to have that profound a death wish.'


'Death or dishonour, is that the choice you're trying to offer me? Admit to being a spy or admit to being an idiot? Thank you, but no.' Raesene fired back. 'And your psycho', brief pause, 'analysts would be better starting with "physician, heal thyself".

They are as bad a collection of theory-mongers, what-I-want-to-sees, programmatics and projectionists- seriously they're almost as bad as the ISB. Hm, did they predict I'd say that?'

The base commander was a little taken aback by this, attack as defence, managed 'They said you were resistant and uncooperative.'

'So what has it come to when the Rebellion disapproves of those qualities?' Raesene fired back at him. 'I bring you the inside story of a major shift in the galactic balance, and I am not only told nothing about what is happening, nothing actually seems to be happening.'


The base commander tried to stall and deflect, parry that and resume normal questioning; 'That has been passed up the chain of command for verification, you don't need to worry about-'

Now or never, the lieutenant-commander thought. 'You're as far out of it as those fruitloops you're cracked enough to take responsibility for. This could change everything, turn the empire inside out, and it's not being pursued.'

'Higher command is pursuing it. It is no longer our problem; instead we have the problem of you.'

'You have the problem of a severely annoyed me.' Raesene fired back. 'You have around what, sixty people here? Working on what, "establishing context?" Traffic flow analysis? Very occasionally breaking a message that's of essentially historic interest by the time you get it done?

That collection of part-time clowns are hardly being worked to capacity- one of them is quite literally researching butterfly wing flaps, I think they took the old metaphor a little too seriously.

Two of them are designing five dimensional crosswords in competition with each other, it's only a matter of time before one of them tries to top the rest by going to six and three quarters. The amount of time the rest waste trying to solve them is crippling.


The number of chess games of all sorts, shift, go, all of them, the amount of inventing new games, the subgame of trawling the entire galactic datanet- spliced illicit access and look at how it's being wasted- for proof or lack of it of originality-

you know, some of them think I'm not a real defector, I'm an undercover inspector from Alliance Central Command? You are lucky that they are wrong because your head ought to be rolling for how badly you're mishandling them.

You're treating them as freaks, and letting them treat themselves as freaks; full normal discipline would be too much to ask but this is going too far the other way, you're failing to provide any kind of human context for them to work in. Some of them are so loose, they're falling apart. There's a better way, and I can prove it.'

I wish I had been this forceful dealing with the ISB to begin with, when they asked me to spy for them; then I would still be a frigate captain and I wouldn't be in this mess, he thought.


'What, specifically, do you want?' the base commander said, and Raesene wasn't sure whether he wanted this or not- was likely to kick himself either way.

'In theory you have three watches, although the system's got so overgrown with exceptions it's barely recognisable any more. Give me one of them.' Crap, he was thinking, either answer, yes or no, is going to hurt. 'I'll get results that won't have to be paid for in sanity.'

'Before anything else, I want a fuller explanation of what you meant- what lay behind what you said in the mess hall.' the base commander challenged him.


That was easier to field. He took a deep breath before beginning. 'Look, Imperial propaganda may be designed by cynics for the consumption of fools, but Alliance propaganda seems to be designed by student activists, for student activists. Ones with rose-coloured hindsight, at that.

Can you remember far enough back to think how the actual old Republic would have treated a groundswell movement like the Alliance? You have people, kids, who have no living memory of it trying to tell those of us who grew up in it what the Republic was like, and their version isn't what I remember.

Even if you recruit all the youth activists in the galaxy, they're still going to be far outnumbered by the fools- and probably by the cynics. Even with all the rioting teenagers you can shake a red notice at, what are they going to do to the forces of order, beat repulsortank squadrons to death with placards and interpretative dance?'


'But that's- it's simply how it has to be, doesn't the galaxy have to be awakened to the moral outrages of the Empire?' the pilot said, and managed to sound as if he believed it. Raesene had thought he had more sense than that.

'Only a true cynic could agree with that, because what rousing the youth chiefly does is give away unlimited opportunity to create new outrages. If your recruiting method really aims at convincing stupid kids to charge occupation troops with their bare hands, then I have to wonder who has the right to talk of morality.

Any popular revolt, hm, protest isn't invariably lethal- but sponsoring it makes it a damn sight more likely it will be. A crowd might just be a crowd, they might be hydroblasted and sonocannoned but that's not usually terminal.

A crowd with Rebel banners is a terrorist group, and it's live ammo time and a commendation for the officer concerned graded by body count. What you need is to persuade the Starfleet and the Army not to shoot the people, and you're losing that fight because you choose not to have the faintest idea of what they actually do and don't care about.'


'No, no, you're twisting everything- the people are the key, they have to rise up, they're what it's all about-'

'The last time the people rose up, we called it the Trade Federation.' Raesene said, snarkishly.

'The trade federation was most definitely not a movement of the people; it was solely a thing of the elite.' the orange-skinned int officer pointed out.

'And their employees- and anyway, how many ex- Senators do you have in the leadership of the Alliance?' Raesene pointed out.

Gambling time again. 'Look, you're right in that, I do have a long history of not joining the rebellion. I was loyal to the Empire. I don't see how I can remain loyal to what I now know the Empire is starting to turn into. You happen to be the default alternative, no more, no less.'

'Your faith in us is touching.' The orange- skin said.

'Likewise.'


'Remembering that we might want to shoot you at the end of all of this, not just for intelligence reasons- so what do you think needs to be done?' The base commander asked. 'Let's hear your version.'

'How long ago was the Republic, and how long is a naval career?' Raesene asked the obvious, rhetorical question. 'The people most Alliance recruiters dismiss as fascist goons, babykillers, brutal thugs, all that, are when you look closely the last remains of the old republic.

It's only recently we started to lose the cadre of warrants and senior chiefs who went through basic training and indoctrination in the clone wars; only very recently we started getting recruits who hadn't been trained by somebody who went through the clone wars.

Unfortunately for you, a lot of the Starfleet's old heads have seen planets burning before. And besides, most spacers' gut reaction to an explosion that big is "Whee" anyway.

Yes, I know what you're going to say next, Chancellor Palpatine, a plot from the beginning, seizure of power, the Binks Act, all that y'zz- but that only reinforces the point that the republic you're fighting for is largely a creature of your own imagination.


Worse, the truth is that they are a fairly rough crowd; and I'd only have said this in the mess if I really did want to be lynched, the most common lower deck comment on my ship the month after the news of Alderaan became public? "Good riddance."

Warriors despise cowards at least as much as pacifists loathe militarists, and the people of Alderaan, apart from a few relatively honourable terrorist exceptions, were smug, sanctimonious, preachy, tax- dodging pacifists.

There is a morality there, a sense of pride and duty that can be played on, used as leverage, but so far the Alliance conspicuously aren't doing anything of the sort- the majority of the fleet is completely unrepentant on the subject of Alderaan, and expecting them to be is just pissing into the wind.

Particularly as the Alliance did actually get revenge for that- and when it comes to Slick Willie Tarkin, most of the lower deck's reaction was "good riddance" there too.'


This was not, he thought, going down well. Why were they even bothering to hear him out, were they simply recording this to have a good laugh at when things got boring around here?

'Could the Old Republic fleet, as it then was, have prevented the fall of the Republic? Have deterred sufficient of the old order's enemies, foreign and domestic, to hold it all together? Think about that for a moment...

the answer is No, of course, not with the budget, not with the remit that they had, were allowed. Maybe some of the further-out propagandist nutballs have a point, maybe the republic didn't fall as much as it was pushed, but why was it weak enough to go?

Who insisted on a demilitarised, barely policed state, at the mercy of the Trade Federation? Piled law on law, as if enforcement occurred by magic? The current leadership of the Alliance has to bear a lot of the blame for there needing to be an Alliance in the first place. I don't see them owning up to it, do you?' If they don't shoot me now, he thought, they never would.


'No, the natural fault lines are completely different from the ones the Alliance is aiming at, probably largely out of embarrassment, and I may have been exaggerating for comedic effect about the food but that is actually one of them, the daily routine is getting worse.

Nobody in their senses likes being shot at, but that is actually the easiest way to keep an Imperial unit loyal- find some rebels to shoot at it. Usually bumps the official reliability estimate up at least two categories. Some Sector Groups might have started to create fake rebel cells for the purpose, it was always a rumour.

That evil goit Lennart who dropped me in this, for example, his crew have spent so long shooting at the Alliance they're basically recruitment- proof. What breaks loyalty, what would make your recruiters' jobs much easier if you only choose to take advantage of it, is the routine daily grind. The New Order.

Lowest-bidder food and general human logistics with quality control on the take, petty discipline executed according to the party rulebook, the endless droning political lectures that you have to pretend to look interested for, the relentless conformity, the day in day out drudgery of doing pointless jobs badly;

scarcely mitigated boredom, the not being allowed to do anything to relieve the boredom, the endless backstabbing that is almost welcome as the only relief, the tiny, petty, microscopic regulations- not much of which was actually better under the Republic, really, but you had better start pretending it was.


That is the fault line you need to hit, the gap between duty and honour, protect and defend, and what the fleet usually does on a quotidian basis. Don't bother with the big picture, the Alliance's version of it is so full of holes it's meaningless.

We're talking about people with a worm's eye view here, crap flows down-well and these are the people at the bottom of gravity's holes, a band of jaded, pissed-off cynics who no longer believe in their leaders.

You can subvert the Imperial fleet; you just have to stop believing in your own propaganda first. And you have to investigate this. The idea that Palpatine's own inner cabinet are now trying to kill him- you really think that isn't important to the Alliance? Let me follow it up.'

Being told 'yes' was possibly the nastiest thing they could do to him. So they did.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by jpdt19 »

Magnificent

Raesene is increasingly growing on me. My only fear is that he's going to unintentionally make the Rebellion infinitively more sucessful

Oh well, Lennart would find that amusing!
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Simon_Jester »

Well, the Rebels did win the war, more or less, didn't they? ;)

Though now that I think about it yes, a big part of the reason the post-Endor collapse played out the way it did had to do with this. So much of the Imperial fleet splintered into warlordism in large part because the Rebels failed to rally the Imperial military to their side, even at the end- they had to build far too much of their own heavy metal, train far too many of their own cadres, from scratch. And if the Imperial remnant states hadn't wound up blowing up most of the old equipment fighting each other for want of decent leadership (in multiple senses of the word), they would never have gotten the time to do it.

And indeed, the New Republic wound up with a lot of the same problems- and this is very much hindsight, from reading the Thrawn trilogy and comparing it with prequels that came out years later- as the old one. Not necessarily because the same people were in charge, but because of the same problems with politics; relatively tiny interest groups (then the Trade Federation, 'now' the Bothans) trying to manipulate galactic affairs at the expense of galactic interests.

And then, on top of that, well. The fact of the matter is that the bulk of the galaxy didn't go up in arms and collapse the Empire over Alderaan, that those who did were a minority who like as not seized on it as an excuse to do something about other grievances (many of them legitimate and long-standing, no doubt)... and that there probably were people sociopathic enough to argue something along the lines of "several billion people a year die in traffic accidents anyway, so what's all the fuss about?"

The relative handful of genuine idealists who cared enough to die for someone else's planet debris field: the charge that they believe their own propaganda may be getting it backwards; their propaganda is what they believe, righteous condemnation of the corrupt old order included free of charge. Because say what you will about them, they genuinely are more righteous than the government... they just can't quite get their heads around the idea that that isn't enough.

And yes, thinking about it, all the material on the subject of the Alliance and their take on how the war ended- it does tend to read like a student activist's (or, if I may temporarily remove the fourth wall, a screenwriter's) idea about how politics actually works.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by darthdavid »

Heh, it looks like he's about a step away from subverting himself into the alliance...
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Master_Baerne »

One of the stronger scenes so far, I thought. Any situation in which the prisoner winds up telling the jailer how to do his job, something has gotten interestingly skewed.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Kartr_Kana »

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:... thank you for your comments on the last part but Kartr, as plot- convenient as that might be to me and as good an idea in universe, I don't see that working well in practise- they're simply too divergent as personalities, have too little in common, to have a stable, productive working relationship. I think Lennart is being slightly trapped in this by his public persona, actually.
You're Lennarts creator so obviously you know him better than I, but the sense I get from him is that he's still fighting for the Empire because he's a good soldier and he feels that the order of the New Order is preferable to the chaos of the Rebellion. He knows the New Order is full of brutal ambitious psychopaths who only care about amassing more power, but what if he was given a clear enemy that threatened everything he's fought for, but didn't have the morally ambiguous trappings of the Rebellion/Empire conflict? I do agree his methods are probably wholly incompatible with Thrawn's. After all Thrawn is the "master" of detailed planning and for thought while Lennart is much more the adapt and overcome type. I guess what I'm saying is that I can see Lennart agreeing to take the job, but I doubt Thrawn himself would want such a loose cannon. So Lennart would have to be forced on Thrawn by a higher power and their relationship would be uneasy at best. Hmm I think I may have just argued myself over to your point of view. :D
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by RecklessPrudence »

On the other hand, Thrawn could be that rarity, someone who may not be able to wrap their head around how you think, but can recognise the value of both your method and your results - he may approach Lennart precisely because their approaches are so different. After all, diversity in methods can brings results when everyone marching in lockstep wouldn't. Especially against something like an existential threat.

On the first hand again, Thrawn could very well be the 'my way or the spaceway' type, or could believe that only an intricately coordinated effort has a chance, and not want someone whose methods so differ from his own and could throw his plans into disarray - it could go either way, because even though Thrawn is canonically a fan of intricate, artistic plans, he's also the kind who appreciates results (guy at the tractor beam when Luke gets away, anyone?). And whatever else you could say about him, Lennart gets results.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Vianca »

Master_Baerne wrote:One of the stronger scenes so far, I thought. Any situation in which the prisoner winds up telling the jailer how to do his job, something has gotten interestingly skewed.
But funny, I remember a story with that in it.
The guy was so often in prison, he started doing stuff to get into prison since there he didn't have that much trouble getting food, water and a roof above his head....
Bad luck he stole something and crossed the boarder without knowing of this. :lol:
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Vianca »

RecklessPrudence wrote:On the other hand, Thrawn could be that rarity, someone who may not be able to wrap their head around how you think, but can recognise the value of both your method and your results - he may approach Lennart precisely because their approaches are so different. After all, diversity in methods can brings results when everyone marching in lockstep wouldn't. Especially against something like an existential threat.

On the first hand again, Thrawn could very well be the 'my way or the spaceway' type, or could believe that only an intricately coordinated effort has a chance, and not want someone whose methods so differ from his own and could throw his plans into disarray - it could go either way, because even though Thrawn is canonically a fan of intricate, artistic plans, he's also the kind who appreciates results (guy at the tractor beam when Luke gets away, anyone?). And whatever else you could say about him, Lennart gets results.
Heh, it could even be that Trawn becomes that good in predicting people with art-work thanks to Lennart and his ship.
I know the pic that would represent Lennarts thoughts, remember that room with stair-cases everywere, even even upside down on the celling?

How did Trawn get a cloning pod?
He did clone himself.
As for a working relation between Trawn and Lennart, Trawn would send Lennart to the places they would expect Trawn himself to hit, leaving Trawn to go after those puting all those "we're here signs" planters.
Basicaly, Trawn could use Lennart to shack things up for him and thus letting him light up those he wants to get.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Vehrec »

I'm pretty sure that Thrawn already has his art-talent and he got the clone tank just before he died. I do agree that they would work at cross purposes-probably spend more time sparing that working to take together.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Eleventh Century Remnant »

Quick post, speak to the comments in a bit, but I managed to get this done just before I have to go out- not as finished as I would have wanted but enough to go with.



Rafaella- Lennart? Jovanov? Both? Neither? Was not in a positive mood, and was dimly trying to remember the last time when things hadn't been going terribly wrong.

She had tens of thousands of years rattling around in her head; why did they weigh so much less than the seconds and the moments? And yet here she was, slumped with her back literally and metaphorically against the wall, trying to think and failing.

I hate the idea of submitting to fate, she thought, but there doesn't seem to be a reasonable option. Bolting would not only land my father right in it, worse it would probably get him sent to hunt me down. That could be an interesting conversation, she thought- and then a flash of it came to her; the visions were getting worse, happening during the waking day now.


She was dressed in a blue jumpsuit with a bandage round her head, in a very military-looking room full of other people in simple colours, and the ground was shaking under them and dust coming off the walls.

'It's amazing how few people know that trick.' a voice was coming over the base PA that she recognised as her father. 'Even fewer know the countermove... you're wide open, now, ripe for being exploded one at a time, in batches or all together. Send her out.'

'Out to certain death at your hands? Never!' the base commander, a man she vaguely recognised, said.

'How many of your people have I had to carve my way through to get to her- has she effectively caused to be killed by running to hide behind them? Several thousand by my count, and I really ought to know.' The deceptively calm and quiet voice was saying- no, not deceptive, he really was that matter of fact about it. mass death was a normal part of the working day.


'Release Rafaella,' he added, 'into my custody.'

'Isn't there supposed to be an "or" at the end of that?' Her hopefully-not-future self fired back.

'Chip, meet Old Block.' he laughed. More soberly adding 'No false promises, no. At most I might be so busy yelling at you they get a little more time to come up with a sensible evac plan. Getting that midi count done was a mistake.'

'The Force is with us, and we will never-' the base commander began.

'Let her speak for herself. Well?'

'Father, I'm sorry,' she heard her alternate- version self seal her own death warrant, 'but being as I am and knowing what I know now, I could never submit to the Empire.'

'I was afraid you were going to say that.' he said, and to someone else on his own bridge, 'Ob? Fire plan Doughnut, variant... cardamom, I think. Execute.' And that was the end of that particular nightmare version. So much for running to the Rebels.


There had been another vision, and she was starting to detest them, this one had been a simple auditory hallucination; a female voice she did not know, must have been her mother's.

'You father sees too much, too many paths; the dangerous idea that truth can depend, when you get right down to it, on your point of view is a commonplace to him. He has held too many points of view and seen too many mutant truths.

He no longer believes or can believe in any one, or any dozen- and with no one great truth, no strong light to follow, I can see him becoming less than himself, drifting, drifting into darkness...he needs you. You have to be his light.'


As befitted a very important prisoner, she was being shipped to Corellia on a special transfer flight, and she had to admit that, physically, things could have been a lot worse.

She had quite a comfortable suite, wasn't restrained- although left in no doubt that if she made trouble she would be- but it was the mental atmosphere that surrounded her, they were treating her as though she was a monster who might try to kill and eat them at the slightest provocation.

The fear and hate pouring off them was more than merely palpable, it was poisonous. None of them would talk beyond the absolute bare minimum, most of them tried to shun her and at the same time keep a paranoid eye on her, which took some doing.

She actually felt more oppressed by that than she thought she would if they simply chained her up. Then the notion occurred to her that the alien admiral must have known this, and this was part of his plan.


He wanted her to arrive feeling miserable and lonely, because- thinking it through wasn't the hard part, it was where in the sequence of regressions to stop. He knew she had the force, that she could pose a realistic threat to the crew; also that she knew relatively little about flying a ship.

He wanted or was permitting- had chosen minds that would need little encouragement- to treat her as an uncaged abomination, in order to achieve some effect on her, to get her to react in a way that he wanted or could use; probably as another step on the way to a final target, her father.

She wasn't the needy type, and hoped the force wasn't turning her into one. Assuming she didn't have to lash out to defend herself, treatment like this was more likely to get her to retreat within herself, and he knew it.

The blue alien rear-admiral also knew her father, and that was a thought- her mother's ghost, if it really was, had to be wrong. If the file Alrika Lennart had shown her had any veracity to it at all, Jorian had found his truth and his way in his profession.

That Altara would not understand this was unfortunately all too likely in life. For two people that had presumably, deep down, loved each other, they had spent ninety-five percent of the relationship furiously refusing to admit it and generally screaming at each other.


Then again, which galactic dictator-wannabe had at one point informed his staff that he had a little red imaginary friend that gave him much better advice than they ever had? And then proceed to descend into disaster by ignoring it...

Zeptim Leore, dates variously assigned 11,030-10,190 brS, nicknamed the Builder at Arms, the Lawyer, the Better Half- from his frequent boast that "the better half of the galaxy is with me" despite the fact that it manifestly was not.

Ignoring her own visions could be said to fall into the same category as genie neglect, except that she was not a deranged would- be galactic conqueror. And besides, Leore had probably simply been being sarcastic and it had been mistranslated.

The blue rear-admiral on the other hand probably was such a being- apart from the deranged part. She would be a lot less scared of him if he was just a maniac. No, her mother was wrong about this- or at least the echoes in her own head that she mistook for her mother's voice.


There was a hint that it wasn't entirely about her when they emerged in the Corellia system, and she invited herself to the bridge. As the navy trooper guard scurried out of the way after she glared at him, she couldn't help wondering how it served them to encourage her to be a monster.

Why was it good for the state, or the part of it the alien admiral represented, for her to be that, for her father to have to cope with that? Or was she intended to react against it, go the other way- and incriminate him?

She was also not a fan of active windows. The main viewscreen of the ship looked back, followed the direction the watcher's eyeballs were pointing in and displayed the sensor- magnified image of the most interesting thing in that direction. As long as it's definition of interesting and yours were the same, and it didn't obscure anything like the rock you were about to hit.

What most of the bridge crew were looking at was her biological father's ship. She joined them, or tried to- they edged away from her. She had seen Star Destroyers innumerable times on the holo, rarely in the flesh, and never one that promised to play such a part in her life.


Elegant was not the word- the only curves visible on the entire ship were the engine bells and reactor dome, and weren't they all supposed to be stark, gleaming anti-flash white? That would presumably be the last thing to be done.

Art the moment, most of the original coating had faded and yellowed; that was the base, but there were streaks and patches of bright white replacement, one side of the ship angry red hull replacement, patches of chrome and black, and irregular score marks of bolt impact and repair.

Most of the starboard edge was open to space, the framework of structure stage one, tensor-bearing heavy atom rich main ribbing being supplemented by the stage two helical woven crystal-filament girders, the cartilage to support the bone.

Some of the podules intended to fill the compartments and chambers being formed were drifting in the vacuum alongside, waiting to be plugged in, larger components and slabs of decking and armour too.


It was obvious that whoever bore responsibility for that ship- any and all of them- was making it so ostentatiously obvious that they did not give a flying kriff about appearances, that they actually did in a backwards way.

She played a daft little game; try to look over the corvette crew's shoulders and see what they were looking at. They flinched, they cowered, they shuffled away, they looked pleadingly at each other- come and save me from this madwoman- but eventually she managed to look over the helmsman's shoulder; he daren't move.

He was looking, as most of them were, below the registry number and name, at a line of shaped blobs- ship silhouettes- each with a name and an rS date next to it.

Fighters, yes, but relatively few capital ships had such tallies; many captains, usually those with nothing to boast of, thought such boasting gauche. So had Jorian Lennart, once, until he had tried to add up the number of merchants and minor warships they had taken or destroyed and lost count.


Well, the Empire knew she had the Force, or at least a part of it did, so what was there to be lost by looking with more than merely eyes? She thought she knew what she was doing, but as she plunged too steeply into the psychic atmosphere of her father's home and domain she realised she really didn't.

How much of an impression she was radiating to them she didn't know, nor how much damage it might be doing, but it was an appallingly tactless way to start a relationship.

She muted and retreated as fast as possible, but some of it all spilled back into her head and left her reeling, she sat with a bump on the deck as the sensation of the minds she had touched flooded into her.

Most of them were thinking, so much sense and number laden surface detail, but underneath- distinct and diverse, yet deeply alike, synchronised- harmonised- by shared experience and responsibility, individuals some of them stubbornly idiosyncratic, who had been free to choose and yet made a common choice.

Flutteringly, her mind grasped on the concept of social statistics as a crutch; the community had it's fair share of jokers, characters and oddballs, if not rather more, the occasional prima donna, but of serious misfits and maladjustments there were few. A sociologist would have called it an insular strong parallel; someone more navy minded would simply have said a happy ship.

They may in a lot of ways define themselves in opposition to each other, in their departmental tribes and rate specialisations, but they were all and consciously part of a greater tribe- of which her father was the chieftain.


I can't do this, she thought. I can't fit in to that matrix.

I could try to force- literally, Force- my way in but that would make me their enemy and- that could not end well. Mr Blue had to have known this, figured it out that far ahead, had to know I could only be a disruption to my father's life and a danger to his person and career, why does he want that?

'I shouldn't have come.' she said, and the corvette's captain- actually a Lieutenant- made the mistake of glancing at her; she caught his eye and went into full monster mode. 'I should have broken confinement and forced you to take me far, far from here...too late now.'

And if I can realistically consider such options- I didn't, of course, but could I? Actually bring myself to do that to somebody? The Light Side is simply not acceptable to the Empire any more; I wonder how close it is possible to skirt the dark side, to act the part, before it actually draws you in? I hope that's what he's been doing...


There was a group of small craft coming up from the planet, out of the dockyard, all heading towards the corvette. Too late to run for it, they had known she was coming of course.

The file and transfer order had reached Jorian Lennart while he was in the middle of trying to resolve a stores discrepancy; as part of the reconstruction, the work teams had had to empty out some of the holes and corners down in Main Machinery-2 that hadn't been audited in years.

In one of them, they had found the bits of what had evidently been one of Mirannon's schemes that had not quite come to fruition; a nest of meshed Hybridium mobius loops connected to three quarters of the core of a stochastic subspace drive.

Lennart was trying to backtrack and find out where it had all come from, and how to dispose of it safely and legally, and had just about decided that they might be better off assembling the bastard thing- whatever it had originally been intended to be- when the datawork on his daughter arrived.

Eldritch gizmos- and that was actually the text on the tracking note applied to it, "eldritch gizmo; do not touch"- were bad enough, but the file inspired him to reach for the ship's one and only copy of Subspace for Kamikazes.


How could this work? From the records and pieces of them he already had, she was an adult in her own right and had already started off down her own path. Which was probably not still open to her.

Remanded into his custody, too- that would get things off on the wrong foot if anything would. They would just have to work past and around that, if that was possible.

Rafaella...not a name he would have chosen, reminiscent of old money and core world values as it was, but it was exactly the sort of backwards compromise he could see them ending up agreeing on.

Oh, Altara, he thought, why did you have to go? Why couldn't you have told me, why did we have to pretend we were strangers to one another? Well, if she couldn't tell me something like that, perhaps we were. Two swirling cyclones of strangerness, and the warm eyes only managed to meet that once.

Worse, no romantic notions of making it right in the next generation, either. She managed to grow up, and get into hideous trouble, without me. Released into my custody- ah, dreck.

I'm going to have to arrange something like a future worth having for her, and while pretending she's a prisoner, and a fish out of water on a Starfleet ship, and probably more powerful in the Force than I am at that. Does that mean keeping her safe from the dark side- or not?

This seemed like such a wonderful thing before I started worrying about the problems.


The reception committee that had been arranged for Rafaella included, as a matter of inevitability, Aleph-3; there was no way she was going to be left out of this. She had been maundering on the subject of names, too- getting positively numerological trying to turn her service numbers, any of them, into something pronounceable.

6NL-554-392c didn't exactly slip off the tongue. Snileed- well, just no. Primavera? Deliciously inappropriate, but too clunky and didn't abbreviate elegantly either. And "trinity" was right out.

When I talk to myself, she thought, I tend to do so without names, in first and second person; while a generic, common name that a quadrillion faces could hide behind, like "Elle" or some kin variant of the simple feminine, might be easy it wouldn't be enough.

She had briefly considered dropping the whole business in Jorian Lennart's lap on the grounds that she just called herself "me" anyway and it mattered more to him really, so would he care to suggest...

It would have been fun for the couple of seconds of total panic it would have caused him while he tried to figure out how seriously she meant it, but it would be no basis for a relationship and they both knew it.


Any name from his past- and there were a few ex- girlfriends she wanted a word with him about- or for that matter from hers would just drag in too many inappropriate memories, so all of her previous cover identities were out. She wanted to be something new anyway, something that included and integrated them all.

The other direction her mind had been going in was towards the rare and exotic, the archaic and alien. Unfortunately, this was the same territory a lot of vidshow producers headed for, and she had a shower of characters and worse, actresses, to avoid.

She had liked the sound of Devorah, but it was out for that reason. Morrigan would have been perfect, but it was overused and corny. Caitlin, likewise. Brigid was almost forgotten and suited her complexion, but the first four letters, too many bad jokes.

There were a handful of very deep archaisms that crossed her mind; Portia, she actually liked the character who had perpetuated the name, but there were too many blue jokes possible by it. Granuaile, also, it would be an honour to take up the name- but for the mangling her comrades would make of it. Likewise Daireann, Gormlaith, Fionnulah.

As a female Grand Army clone, a female version of a male name might have been thematically appropriate, but she had surprised herself with how much she disliked the idea- how much she did not want to be just a bloke with a prosthetic "a" tacked on the end. No Johannas or Davinas or Marcias for her.

With one possible exception; she liked the boy's name Severian, but still had the unpleasant feeling there was no common usage female version that didn't raise thoughts of frilly lace and petunias. Perhaps, she thought, if I just spell it with a y...


Now here- and whoever- I am, she thought, with the rest of a company- strong boarding party going to collect the Captain's long lost daughter from custody. If I am going to be more of a partner to him- and I've spent so long under his orders it still makes me dizzy to think how- I am going to have to start taking more of a share of his troubles, and this is definitely one.

He's not thinking clearly about this, at least not far enough, and neither is she in all probability. She is absolutely natural and perfect conspiracy fodder, that's almost certainly why Rear- Admiral Thrawn bent the rules to have her dumped on us.

Intelligent, very well informed, known to be strong in the Force, criminal background- if she had been made up for the purpose she couldn't be this perfect. Further, a family bond is the only way, I would think, of sending someone as a penetration agent into the assorted ranks of devotees of the dark side and actually getting them out again.

Of course, it would be beneath the Admiral to actually explain any of this, he would rather set it up and let it happen, but she is supposed to fall and he is supposed to redeem her, undermining the conspiracy in the process. Hm, or possibly the other way around.

The damage all of this will do to Jorian as a result will weaken him, make him more dependent on the Rear-Admiral's patronage, and a a result the fringer alien gets a crack ship to order around, a pet dark jedi beholden to him, and very probably promotion, honour and glory.

Oh, I would very much like to be wrong about this, she thought, but the setup is just too good, the rewards from his point of view just too tempting. Now all I have to do is subvert the master schemer of the special operations bureau's plan. I wonder what the common female version of "muggins" is?
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Kartr_Kana »

ECR every post I read pushes me more and more to believing that this is what got Thrawn exiled. I know you said you weren't going to do that, to neat and convenient, but I think the Force is at work here pushing you to your destiny of explaining that lost bit of Thrawns history. :D

Another good installment, I especially liked Aleph-3's internal monologue trying to figure out what her name should be. Though I'm surprised she hasn't considered nameizing Aleph-3, Alephina or something. Just joking :D
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Vianca »

Good piece Remnant, really like the Hull 721 parts.
Have you ever played (or wikied) Empire at War?

I'm mostly thinking of the Zann Consortium or rather some of their ships, Trawn did confront Zann. :twisted:

Any change on "Black Prince" getting a couple of TIE Phantom's or the Dark Trooper project?
The fun Mirrannon could have with them..... :mrgreen:
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Kartr_Kana »

I've played Empire at War and the expansion and while they were fun I refuse to believe that the events pictured in those games actually happened :P

As for the Dark Troopers it would both be canonically incorrect and in my opinion against the grain of what this story is/has become. In other words adding the Dark Troopers (and the TIE Phantom's) would be to much nerd wankerage for what has become a great Star Wars story.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Vianca »

Kartr_Kana wrote:I've played Empire at War and the expansion and while they were fun I refuse to believe that the events pictured in those games actually happened :P

As for the Dark Troopers it would both be canonically incorrect and in my opinion against the grain of what this story is/has become. In other words adding the Dark Troopers (and the TIE Phantom's) would be to much nerd wankerage for what has become a great Star Wars story.
Well, I was more thinking about them getting a sample of them while their Imperial opponent is fielding a whole taskforce of them (or so).
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Vehrec »

Four Consortium ships-Keldabe class destroyers-appeared in part one of the story. They faced off against Cosmonaut Ijon Tichy a ship much much larger than they, and armored against their big guns. Unfortunately, they were not armored to take hits from their own weapons.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Eleventh Century Remnant »

Those four things and a pair of Recusants were actually Black Sun, the crime syndicate Zann broke away from, which I think does go back far enough in canon- to the Marvel Comic era- to have some roots and actually be quite interesting in terms of what money and power under the Empire make possible; on the other hand, no matter how much a single purpose heavy weapon platform they might be, they were overmatched. Mandator class dreadnoughts are a bit out of their league.
And that is a plot thread I'm going to have to pick up; Lennart did manage to burn a very large Black Sun operation that they are going to be extremely annoyed about.

The "eldritch gizmo" is a failed idea from the Department of Military Research that Mirannon took a look at; it was basically supposed to be an escort cloak, a cloaking device that can conceal more than one ship. It doesn't work, because although it does damp electromagnetic signatures massively- albeit double blind- it does so partly though use of a bubble of warped space that to the right sensors, which are a lot more common than CGTs (any comint rig could do it) it might as well do so by holding up a hundred thousand kilometre wide neon sign saying "Hey! We're Invisible!" He got far enough through kitbashing it together to spot the problem and gave up on it.


Basically, and especially when it comes to things like the prequels, I go for the scanner darkly approach. It makes it so much easier to believe in the coherence of the universe to take the approach that what we see of the GFFA is seen through a scanner darkly, as imperfect, biased, rushed and arguable a version of events as, hell, as our own news media serve up to us. That what is presented to the fans may well be the "hollywood version" of a real event, and you know how close to the truth that is liable to be.

In other words, something like the basic events of Forces of Corruption might actually have happened- a criminal syndicate going paramilitary, trying to raise and profit from armed force, led by a revenge crazed loon who aimed really, really high- but the details? Exceptionally unlikely.

Incidentally, this is another thing that goes back quite a long way in canon- the Empire didn't, couldn't, have sprung into being fully formed overnight. There have been a couple of major failed campaigns, Hapans and Hutts, that suggest the iron fist of the Empire has a couple of fingers still under construction, and there might be quite large areas of space where the Empire's writ runs weakly if at all.

TIE Phantoms are a bit too consciously tacticool, but there is a supposed ancestor, the TIE Sentinel, which has most of the same weapon layout- three laser two ion; a large traditional- style cockpit more comfortable for long haul flights, and actually seems to be more or less a customs service TIE variant, a patrol fighter, that would be available.

More soon, I hope.
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Re: Hull 721, plot arc the second

Post by Simon_Jester »

Vianca wrote:Good piece Remnant, really like the Hull 721 parts.
Have you ever played (or wikied) Empire at War?

I'm mostly thinking of the Zann Consortium or rather some of their ships, Trawn did confront Zann. :twisted:
Seeing Black Prince up against an Aggressor would be amusing- something about that design concept strikes me as profoundly off.

Giant spinal energy weapons are all well and good, and I'm playing very enjoyable games with them over in the STGOD subforum, but you have to design the rest of the ship around the guns to a higher degree than the Aggressor-class seems to have done. Heavily armored and suitable for a siege platform, that's the obvious way to take advantage of the main gun and of having a narrow target profile when the enemy's in your alpha arc, yes.

But that particular school of design is premised on set-piece battles. As implemented in the Aggressors, it leaves more than a little to be desired in the kind of high-mobility, high-evasion combat Lennart prefers.
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