What to Do with Jardin (Fan Fic)

[sunphoenix]

Same here.. I was playing the sole human character~ [TdSmR] Athen Rourke... and I made one post and the DM never returned to the game... honked me off to no end!

And that's what sucks about Play by Post. I wholeheartedly endorse using Roll20.

Yeah.. I recently opened an account with Roll 20... for a Paizo game I'm playing PbP.

[Hālian]

I dunno, I like the permanent record that a forum provides.

sunphoenix: next time an Outsiderverse RP rolls around, you should bring Maiannon or another half-loroi.

[sunphoenix]

Yeah, but I think.. the next RP should try to use the GURPS system.. it seems to be the one that Arioch uses as a benchmark for the Outsiderverse.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I dunno, I like the permanent record that a forum provides.

sunphoenix: next time an Outsiderverse RP rolls around, you should bring Maiannon or another half-loroi.

Roll20 does have a permanent record, assuming you use text and the GM isn't an idiot and hits the clear chat log button.

[Hālian]

Yeah, but I think.. the next RP should try to use the GURPS system.. it seems to be the one that Arioch uses as a benchmark for the Outsiderverse.

Agreed; only problem I can see is that a lot of his stuff is based on 3e, not 4e.

[Krulle]

Wow.
Finally got to the end of this masterpiece.

Thank You!
Very much!

I wish I was as imaginative and had the time to write....

Again, thank you!

[ShadowDragon8685]

Wow.
Finally got to the end of this masterpiece.

Thank You!
Very much!

I wish I was as imaginative and had the time to write....

Again, thank you!

Heh. I'm not actually done - although I suppose Jardin having drove Fragile Storm to drink with his sanity-defying luck would be a decent point. But I spoke with saint of m, he told me I could keep writing, so I have been doing.

[Hālian]

I dunno, I like the permanent record that a forum provides.

Roll20 does have a permanent record, assuming you use text and the GM isn't an idiot and hits the clear chat log button.

The former is a mighty large assumption. Better to have someone who can transcribe the voice chat.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I dunno, I like the permanent record that a forum provides.

Roll20 does have a permanent record, assuming you use text and the GM isn't an idiot and hits the clear chat log button.

The former is a mighty large assumption. Better to have someone who can transcribe the voice chat.

It's an easy assumption if the GM turns off the voice chat functions and uses text.
Though I suppose if you had an aspiring court stenographer in your group...

[Hālian]

Why am I suddenly struck with the urge to run an RP where the loroi and my safir make first contact…

[ShadowDragon8685]

Why am I suddenly struck with the urge to run an RP where the loroi and my safir make first contact…

Because the Loroi are a compellingly awesome race? What are the Safir?




..... Man, I wonder what they'd think of my Kiffix from Stellaris...
I can only imagine those first-contact negotiations would go spectacularly, right up until a vulpine hermaphrodite propositioned one of the Loroi to sneak into a cabin for a quick shag. War might ensue.

The perils of taking "Fanatic Xenophile" literally...


Ah, well, they'd probably make up anyway when the Kiff decided "officially fuck those bugs, and not in the fun way," and sent fleets of Psi Jumpdrive-equipped lance-and-torpedo ships to shrek the shells' day.
One does not turn away allies when one is locked in an existential crisis, after all. Especially when their FTL method puts yours to shame, allowing them to trivially run raids inside your enemy's industrial heartland.

[Hālian]

The safir are a race of matriarchal, four-armed, blue-skinned, psionic elvenoids native to my worldbuilding project Safiria. I'm homebrewing them for Legend, 3.5e D&D, 4e D&D, 5e D&D, and I probably ought to port them to GURPS and BESM as well. (And before you ask, I first created them before I read Outsider. )

Unlike the loroi, all safir are capable to some degree of psychokinesis, and their method of FTL is a bit more versatile than the loroi's.

[ShadowDragon8685]

The safir are a race of matriarchal, four-armed, blue-skinned, psionic elvenoids native to my worldbuilding project Safiria. I'm homebrewing them for Legend, 3.5e D&D, 4e D&D, 5e D&D, and I probably ought to port them to GURPS and BESM as well. (And before you ask, I first created them before I read Outsider. )

Unlike the loroi, all safir are capable to some degree of psychokinesis, and their method of FTL is a bit more versatile than the loroi's.

I think the Loroi response to that would be to throw up their hands and shout "Oh come on!"
Jardin would fall down laughing, and Fireblade would telekinetically slap the stupid out of him.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I've been writing a lot, hoooo boy.

I've got about twice this much written, but the rest isn't ready to be thrown up yet, and I'm going to bed, so...
And yes, I did calculate the date, and the position of the moon at 2:00 PM EST.




Sunday, January 20th, 2165; 1,651 days after first contact between the Terran Colonial Authority and the Loroi Union

His new coat felt unusually heavy; for a moment he considered asking Fragile Spear if there was something wrong with Retribution's deck gravity, but Alexander Jardin knew that nothing was wrong with the ship; it was all in his head.
He knew what the feeling was; uncertainty and dread. It was over; his mission, anyway. He had completed Bellarmine's mission, and surely, it seemed, now was the time for the real diplomats to take over; real diplomats like Tempo, and the huge gaggle of others like her who had come in aboard Retribution, and the endless parade of trained diplomats humanity had its disposal.

He idly wondered if they'd draft him as a 'subject matter expert' on the topic of the Loroi. It had, after all, been almost five years since he'd first met the Loroi. Thinking about how the war had gone, it was nothing short of amazing that the first Loroi he'd met were still alive; Beryl, Tempo, Fireblade, Talon... Hell, the last he'd heard, even Stillstorm and Tempest were still around leading the 51st, crushing shells left and right.

He reached the aft of Retribution's bridge, and nodded to the quartet waiting for him; Fireblade, Tempo, Beryl, and Kelly. Talon was, he understood, appropriating the use of one of Retribution's shuttles, as the TCA pilot who had flown them up to rendezvous with the flagship of Commodore Fragile Storm had refused to let her fly his ship - again, anyway.

Jardin thought he was making a big fuss over nothing. She'd obviously meant to bring the shuttle in careening and scuffing the deck of Retribution's hangar bay. On the other hand, Talon had officially gotten a nickname out of it; Fishtail. After Alexander had explained the human practice of callsigns for pilots, and the origin of the term in wheeled ground vehicles, she had found it very amusing.

The four rose and followed him, Kelly looking around in wide-eyed wonder. He didn't blame her; Retribution wasn't as large as Tempest, but she was still over a half a kilometer long with a crew of four-hundred fifty; longer and larger than the biggest human warship yet manufactured.

There was no beautiful mosaic on the wall leaving the bridge as there was on the first Loroi vessel he had been aboard; Retribution was not named for a mythological figure, nor was she strictly named for the concept of retribution itself. Instead of a mosiac, there was a holoprojector dividing the hall in two, and it was displaying a slowly rotating image of a Loroi; a stunningly beautiful one, Alex thought, with all the qualities of a supermodel: with a far heavier chest and hip curvature than any of the Loroi he traveled with, a face that (human) men would die for, and a stunning, glorious mane of hair, richly orange at her head, becoming paler to an incandescent mostly-white by the time it reached her thighs. She was depicted nude, which left out any tell-tale identification by her armor, though the hologram had rotated; when they'd come in, she had been wearing the uniform of a Torrai Tazites, an Admiral of Sector Commander rank.
He could read Loroi script now, but there was no name-plaque. Behind him, he heard a low whistle of appreciation. "Damn, she looked good in uniform, she looks like a goddess now," he heard Kelly say in English, and shook his head, laughing quietly despite himself. "Is this like, the Loroi equivalent of the nose art we paint on fighters?"

"No, I don't think so," Jardin said, turning to Beryl. Beryl shook her head.
"Sadly, no." The slim analyst answered. Fireblade looked back, her eyes just a bit hard.
"The hologram depicts the warrior whom this vessel was named, albeit obliquely, for. That is an image of Admiral Sunfall."
Kelly blinked, and looked back; the hologram had shifted again, showing the same Loroi, but this time notably younger - in the uniform of a Soroin Passat, with her hair shorn completely to an orange buzzcut around her head. Even with no hair and a middie's outfit, she looked damn good, in Jardin's opinion. "Admiral Sunfall - she died almost twenty years ago," Jardin recalled, glancing to Beryl; the slim analyst nodded at his correct answer. "So, I'm guessing, the ship was named by someone who wanted personal retribution for her?"

"Most likely," Tempo said. "We could ask someone for the full details, a vessel this size must have a chronicler aboard."
"... An admiral? Huh." Kelly looked back at the hologram, and shook her head. "She... Well, she doesn't exactly look like it," the Yeoman murmured, and Tempo's lips twisted up in a grin.
"Admiral Sunfall was as legendarily vain and beautiful as she was legendarily skilled... Sadly, there is only so much that even legendary skill can do when the enemy can bring overwhelming numbers to bear from all sides."

Kelly let out a quiet hiss of sympathy, and shook her head. "That sounds... Unfortunate," she murmured, and Jardin closed his eyes as the group reached a lift to take down to the deck where the hangars were. Tempo set the lift in motion, and Beryl let out a quiet exhalation.
"It was," she murmured. "It was a disaster. The largest offensive we had been able to mount was cut off and... Annihilated. She was one of our greatest heroes."

She was also a butcher who damn-near exterminated an entire species, Jardin thought, but he wasn't going to voice the opinion aloud. Sunfall was a hero to the Loroi, and not without some justification; she was, indeed, a brilliant admiral, and though he thought nearly glassing populated worlds was a drastic overreaction, he admitted he was hard-pressed to think of an alternative. Plus, it was true that the entirety of the blame couldn't be laid at her feet; Emperor Greywind had approved the destruction.

The same Emperor Greywind who found him amusing. Man, I wonder what that says about me, he thought, bitterly. He felt soft fingers on his hand; wrapping around his; a snapping in his mind, like the discharge of static electricity after shuffling around in socks and a sweater on a thick carpet and suddenly touching metal. With his eyes closed, a silhouette sprang into his mind; not the blazing starfire intensity of Fireblade, but the cool blue silhouette of Beryl.

It was, even after five years, still the closest he could come to making any attempt at understanding sanzai; still, it was an awful lot more psychic expertise than he had had five years earlier. Instantly he recognized Beryl's 'feel,' even before he glanced up to check her hairstyle. He didn't know how he could 'see' with his eyes closed, but he could still see the outline.

She didn't speak; she didn't need to. He couldn't tell what the soft analyst was trying to say, but he knew, nontheless, that she was concerned for him. That much, he both knew because it was a feeling she often expressed, and because she was willing to touch him often enough for him to get an understanding of her mental 'moods.'

"Yes, I'm okay, Beryl," he said. "Just... Thinking."
"About?"
"About opinions that three-fifths of the people in this lift will not share," he said, opening his eyes, smiling wryly. "About the past... The future... You know, the sort of thing I haven't really had much time to devote much thought to in the last five years."

"Ah... You are considering Admiral Sunfall's deeds," Beryl asked, quietly. Yeoman Kelly had her eyebrow raised, as Beryl let go. "What is that human phrase you have cited so often? Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it?"
Alex nodded. "Still," Beryl said, "To dwell too much on the past can be almost as detrimental as forgetting it, yes? What good can come of dwelling on the horrors of history?"

"Horrors?" Kelly's eyebrow raised. "And unshared opinions... What does she mean?"
A moment of discomfort ensued in the lift; Fireblade's expression looked to Jardin, acidly, and Jardin sighed. "Let's just say we have... Differences of opinion about Admiral Sunfall," he said. "Does the name George Armstrong Custer ring a bell?"
It did, and he could see it in Kelly's eyes. She squared her shoulders, putting her hands on the lift's railing, drawing herself up. Jardin held his hands up, appeasingly. "Easy, Kelly. I'm not going to make excuses for everything Sunfall did -"
"Justified actions taken against those who throw in with an enemy bent on your extermination need not be excused," Fireblade shot back, and Jardin sighed.
"Ex-Extermination?" Kelly blinked, and Jardin sighed.

"Look, Amelia, it's a grade-A Charlie Foxtrot out there, and the shells are leading the orchestra," Alex said, letting out a heavy sigh. "The Orgus told us this kind of thing, you know that. But..."
He sighed. "Look, I don't agree with everything the Loroi have done. If you ask my frank opinion about Sunfall, she was a fucking butcher... And a hero," he said, looking between the two redheads in the lift. "Hell, I don't think any of our heroes haven't done things that they would have rather history had forgotten about - and how many of them had to have done things that never made it into the history books?"

Kelly swallowed. Fireblade's hackles were up; Tempo had the awkward look she always had when trying to make something she knew sounded unreasonable and awful - largely because it was - palatable, and Beryl had a mournful look on her face. Kelly crossed her arms, and looked into his eyes. "I think this sounds like the kind of story I don't want to hear, but should," she said.

Jadin snorted. "What, are you Fleet Intel or something?" He shrugged, and sighed. "Fireblade, you tell it."
That surprised the Unsheathed warrior, and Fireblade's eyebrow arched. "Me? You know our opinions on this matter are ever as crossed blades," she said, and Jardin nodded.
"Yes, and that's exactly why I think you should get the opportunity to put forth your view of things first."

Fireblade snorted, and smirked. "The Tithric campaign," she said. "The Tithric were an unaligned race who were unwilling to prevent the shells - the Hierarchy, whom you call the Umiak - from raiding our territory through theirs. They were profiting by doing so, providing the enemy with passage and refueling. This situation was intolerable, and led directly to Emperor Greywind's institution of the anti-neutrality doctrine. Sunfall led a fleet into their territory, to destroy the Hierarchy raiders who were lurking therein, and the fuel depots which were supplying them. The Tithric showed their true colors by openly siding with the Hierarchy, and Sunfall treated them as enemies are due."

"By which you mean what, exactly?" Kelly's eyes snapped to Fireblade's, demanding an answer directly from her, and Fireblade didn't flinch.
Staring directly into Kelly's eyes, she answered. "By which I mean she asked for and received the Emperor's consent to sterilize the Tithric worlds, to deny them any war-industrial use to the Hierarchy."

Kelly swallowed, and turned her eyes back to Jardin, who swallowed himself, and sighed. "August 6th, 1945, Kelly."
The slender redhead shook her head, opening her mouth to speak, but then closed it again, her brow furrowing. Beryl looked at Jardin. "What is the significance of that date," she asked.

"The bombing of the city of Hiroshima on Earth," Alex said. "We were locked in an industrial war with an enemy which was tenacious, and committed to total war. We - by which I mean the nation-state that Kelly and I were both born in, the United States of America - dropped atomic bombs - a nuclear fission explosive - on another nation, Japan, in order to force them to surrender, rather than attempt a ground invasion that would have cost millions of lives between both sides. To this day, there's still rather intense debate about whether or not it was justified, whether or not it was the right thing to do."
"It was," Fireblade said. "A foe must be defeated, and made so they will never be able to wage war on you again."

"But we didn't exterminate them," Kelly said. "We dropped two bombs, and Japan surrendered. We then spent the next decades rebuilding their homeland, which we had spent years burning to the ground, and they've been our friends ever since," she pointed out.
Fireblade didn't say anything immediately, and Tempo sighed. "Such... Reconciliation may indeed be possible between members of the same race - even, perhaps, members of many races," she said. "But not all. The Hierarchy... Cannot be forgiven their crimes against us."

Kelly looked to Jardin, who sighed. "When this clusterfuck started, the shells invaded the Loroi's Seren Colonies. After she was done slaughtering the Tithric - and don't try to say it wasn't a slaughter," Jardin said, looking to Fireblade, "dropping antimatter on civilians from orbit can't be described as anything but," he said, sharply, to stave off the objection he knew was coming, earning an angry look and silence from his friend, "Sunfall launched a massive push into the territory the shells had captured. Millions of Loroi civilians and their assorted defenders had been taken captive, and the Hierarchy had been attempting to make use of them. After continued guerilla campaigns, the Hierarchy just... decided to get rid of them."

"Get rid of them," Kelly said, quietly, and Alex saw a shiver run through her. "You mean... You're talking Auschwitz and Dachau, aren't you?" The three Loroi in the lift looked at him confusedly, and he closed his eyes, nodding.
"Yes, Kelly. That's exactly what I'm saying. There were fifty million civilians on Seren when the shells took it. Six hundred thousand were still alive when Sunfall liberated it. Every other planet in the Steppes were the same." He opened his eyes. "So, like I said... It's a proper Charlie Foxtrot out there. Everybody's done things that they should regret. The difference is that the Loroi - some of them," he said, nodding in deference to Fireblade's outspoken opinion on the Tithric campaign, "regret that it was done, or had to be done. The shells don't give a damn."

"How... Can you be so sure," she asked, and Jardin shrugged.
"Well, look around this lift... Is it just me, or is the lift going slow," he asked, and Beryl shook her head.
"It's not just you," she noted, taking a tablet computer from her hip pouch and starting to tap on it. "I'll see if there's a maintenance issue going on," she said, and Jardin nodded.
"Thanks. But like I said, take a look around the lift. Three different Loroi here. Three different opinions; Fireblade has made her feelings on the matter abundantly clear, I think." Fireblade nodded, crossing her arms. "Tempo will very diplomatically tell you she regrets the necessity of the action, and regrets that a more diplomatic solution was unable to be found. Beryl straight-up regrets it, the way you or I feel about the horrors and holocausts of our own history, like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagisaki, or the Trail of Tears and the other awful things our ancestors did to the Native Americans."

"... So, what's the difference?"
Jardin shrugged. "The shells are..." He thought for a moment. "Fanatically collectivist utilitarians. They're not a race of individuals working towards a common goal; they're a common goal being enacted by sapient cogs in the machine. They know no remorse; they have no hesitation about committing an atrocity. The only virtue the Umiak hold is efficiency, so the only atrocity, to them, is in not doing your part. They treat everyone and everything as disposable, even themselves. Especially themselves," he said, emphasizing it urgently. "So when the Loroi resisted, waged guerilla warfare as we'd recognize it... They were cogs that were actively attempting to damage the machine. Industrial extermination was their response, same as you or I would pull broken parts out of a machine and throw them away to get new ones."

Kelly swallowed, and looked down at the deck plates in the lift, shaking her head. "But how do you justify glassing entire worlds, wiping out an entire species?"
"I don't," Alex said, shaking his head. "I don't, and I won't try. Fireblade will say the Tithric brought it upon themselves by aiding the Umiak under the pretense of neutrality and then declaring openly when the Loroi went into their space to get rid of enemy combatants who shouldn't have been using supposedly-neutral space to stage assaults. Well, their government certainly did declare themselves the enemies of the Loroi Union, that much is certain. Tempo will squirm and try to figure out a way to make 'yes, we just drove a sapient race to the brink of extinction, but we were at war with them' sound reasonable, because that's her job and she has far more than the required amount of brains and sympathy to realize how fucking horrible that looks in the eyes of everyone in earshot whose skin is not blue. Beryl just gets a deer-in-headlights look because she hates trying to justify things that horrify her, and Talon will say that it's not her job to think about stuff like that and derail you with stories of times behind the stick."
"And what about you, Captain Jardin," Kelly asked, looking him dead in the eye. Alex took a deep breath, and let it out.

"Alexander is conflicted," Tempo said, with a light smirk. "I have posed to him the question: what would he have done in Sunfall's position."
"And I'm unable to say," Alex said, with a heavy sigh. "I can't say what I'd have done. Sometimes I wonder, what would Admiral Callan do, or what would Harry S. Truman have done. The fact is, I don't know. I can say that I wouldn't have glassed most of their worlds... But something did have to be done. They were actively aiding the shells, and any less-vigorous effort to knock them out of the war entirely would have been untenable, because the Hierarchy would have been back sooner rather than later to reindustrailize their worlds if Sunfall had just bombed their industries into dust and buggered off. What would you do?"

Kelly swallowed, and looked around, at the three Loroi. Fireblade had a smugly superior smirk, Beryl just looked sad, and Tempo looked quizzical. "Occupation?"
"Possible," Tempo conceded, glancing to Fireblade; Jardin knew that the experienced soldier was feeding Tempo her best analysis of the possibilities and outcomes of a ground campaign occupation of the Tithric worlds. "Not simple or easy, but possible; Tithric ground forces were competent but unspectacular. Your people could have successfully occupied them if you could have landed; we could have done so quite a bit easier. But holding a planet when the enemy holds orbit is untenable at best, and the fleet was needed elsewhere, while the Hierarchy had easier access to Tithric space than we did. We would not have been able to maintain the defensive naval campaign required to maintain orbital supremacy, and the Umiak armies would land. Even if they were willing to commit ground soldiers to liberate their Tithric allies, then though if our soldiers would have prevailed time and again, the Umiak would keep coming. One of two outcomes would ensue: either the shells would drown our occupying armies in wave after wave of carapace until we were all dead through attrition, or the shells would decide it was not cost-effective to continue the ground campaign, and sterilize - in your terms, glass - the planets themselves."

"Bomb... Their own friends," the Yeoman asked, incredulous, and Beryl turned to her, speaking up before Jardin, Tempo or Fireblade could.
"They do not have friends, Amelia Kelly. The Umiak do not forge relationships, bonds of fellowship, of sisterhood, the way you and I do," she said, her white hair bobbing as she animatedly spoke. Had she been human - or, indeed, had she been addressing a human whom she was thoroughly comfortable with such as himself, he was certain she would have placed her hands on Kelly to emphasize her point. "They do not know pity or compassion, only efficiency and expediency. If they grant you mercy, it is only because they believe you will be more valuable as a slave than a corpse - when that calculation reverses, they have no compunctions about turning you into one. They do not have alliances except of convenience, they know no loyalty except to the Hierarchy, and their singular goal, their existential purpose, is to serve the Hierarchy with maximum efficiency." Beryl shook her head, her eyes saddened. "So yes, if the cost of liberating their nominal allies became higher than the cost of simply abandoning them to their fate, they would not hesitate. If they could profit by exterminating them - such as by destroying armies of Loroi at the same time - then they would not hesitate to do so."

Jardin snorted, and shook his head. "Maxim 20, Kelly; have you read that book?" he asked, and to his surprise, she quoted from the ancient book of fictional malevolant canon he was thinking of without hesitation.
"If you're not willing to shell your own position, you're not willing to win," she said, looking down and swallowing. "So these... Umiak, these shells... They really are the Bug War, huh? The just want to devour, they can't be reasoned with, or negotiated with? What do they want? Why would anyone start a war like this - assuming they started it?"

Alex sighed, nodding at Tempo, who also nodded. "It is not known to us whether Loroi or Umiak vessels fired the first shots," Tempo said, quietly, "nor can we know if, assuming our ships did fire the first shots, whether they were suitably provoked into doing so, or were at fault. Either way, it is immaterial," she said, and Kelly snorted.
"Immaterial? You don't think 'who fired first' is relevant?"

"I do - assuming the incident has not been manufactured," Tempo explained. "One way or another, the opening salvo was the herald of a full-scale invasion; fleets the Umiak had prepared in advance, lying in wait, flooded into our systems like a tsunami. If our ships did fire first, then it was a transparent attempt to secure what Alex has explained to us as casus belli - that is your term, yes?"
Beryl, with her impeccable memory, was nodding quietly, as did Kelly. "Casus Belli - it's Latin. Roughly, it means 'justification for war.'"

Tempo nodded. "Indeed. If our forces were provoked, or frightened into firing first, it was a manufactured incident to provide casus belli. I do not believe, however, that the Hierarchy feels it requires a justification to go to war. They never formally declared a state of hostilities; they have not declared any goals, they have made no demands save the immediate and unconditional submission of the Loroi Union to the rule of the Hierarchy. This is, needless to say, unacceptable to us, for reasons you adequately enumerated as your reasons for preferring us over the shells, when we were helping Captain Jardin ready himself for the public ceremonies earlier."

"There is a maintenance issue with the lift," Beryl said, quietly, looking up from her pad. "Mechanics have already been dispatched. We should be at the deck containing the hangar shortly, however... We should probably put a conversation this... Intense away until we will again be in private."

Fireblade inclined her head in assent, and Tempo nodded. "Fireblade and I are agreed. I am not opposed to receiving and answering criticism, but most Loroi react poorly to it."
Kelly held her hands up, nodding. "Consider the matter dropped, Parat."
Tempo nodded, her eyebrow raising. "Was it your intention to be formal, Ensign?" The Yeoman blinked, and shook her head, and Alex stepped in.
"Parat is Tempo's rank; Mizol is her caste. We forgot to give Kelly the short-and-sweet on Loroi forms of address, didn't we?"

"I'll fill her in," Beryl volunteered, turning to walk in step with Yeoman Kelly, as Fireblade took the lead, with Tempo and Alex flanking her. Behind him, Beryl was, he knew, focusing on anything but a litany of atrocities committed in the heat of the fires of war. He thought it really was a cruel thing, to raise an entire caste of Loroi with holographic memory and then send them off to war. Tempo was walking with her arms across her belly, hugging herself; he didn't have any meaningful sensitivity to sanzai without skin contact, but he knew her well enough to know she'd taken the step of walling her thoughts off; the conversation weighed on her.

Yeah, well; I don't have an answer, either, Jardin thought. He knew that Sunfall's "solution" to the Tithric problem was every bit as murderous and genocidal as the Umiak's "solution" to that of the Loroi insurgents, yet it was hard to condemn it the same way. Fireblade, he knew, was in no conflict about the matter; hardened and embittered by the crucible of total war, of seeing a number of her friends and comrades she couldn't even begin to enumerate dead or horrifically maimed, she neither expected any quarter, and offered none - at least, not to the Umiak or their allies. In her mind, when the Tithric declared openly for the Hierarchy, they were valid targets, and she wasn't prepared to make any distinction between civilian and military targets. It was truly frightening, when he dwelled upon it. Then something crossed his mind; she would have been twelve; what was her opinion at the time, not her opinion as expressed through a lens of almost two decades intervening of solid warfare.

He resolved to ask her later; it was trite, he knew, but he sensed, as he always had, good within her, even if she held herself to be an utterly pitiless warrior. He mulled the problem over in his head, picturing Sunfall - now he had a very good idea of what she looked like, since Fireblade had put her name to the holosculpture - on the bridge of her unique warship Eye of Heaven, staring down at the Tithric homeworlds below. Had she regretted it? Had she argued for, or against it? Was she as pitiless in ordering the extermination of a sapient race for choosing the wrong side as Fireblade would be, or would she have had her doubts? For that matter, would Fireblade be conflicted about it, or would she be as callous and cold about the matter as she expressed herself as being?

He supposed if he was telepathic, he'd know; then again, he'd known his four Loroi comrades long enough to know that they were each complicated, deep individuals. Fireblade's gait was heavy, she was fulminating. He supposed she took his disagreement with her on the issue personally; moreso because they were good friends, because they had fought shoulder-to-shoulder against a common foe, because they had each saved the other's life on considerably more than one occasion.

The problem with Loroi, in general, is that they're extremely polarized. They don't well handle ambiguity, shades of gray, or incomplete dedication. They take everything as a life-or-death, to-the-hilt matter. It must frustrate the hell out of her that I consider her not just a bodyguard, not just an ally, but my friend; one of my best friends, yet I will openly question and take a stance against her opinions on very serious matters. She must hate it, because it's so alien to everything she knows. I have her back, but I openly argue against things I consider horrible, even if she's certain that they're necessary and doesn't care about the horrific nature of them. I disagree with her to the point of being utterly unwilling to accept any compromise between our opinions, yet I still consider her a friend.

Indeed, simply getting Fireblade to accept that 'agree to disagree' did not mean the dissolution of their friendship had been a challenge. She was quiet again, and he regretted the conversation; getting Fireblade to speak aloud more than barking orders at him in the urgency of battle had been a very difficult task, and he worried that she would withdraw into herself again; and that was a shame, as her spoken voice was really very beautiful. He accelerated his step, drawing up alongside her, turning to look into her eyes; she met his gaze, beneath the diadem on her forehead, her eyes peering into his cooly. Even when she was angry with him, with emerald eyes as hard as the namesake gemstone, he found it hard to summon any anger in turn.

"We good," he asked quietly; in English, lest any nearby crew happened to be lurking behind a maintenance panel.
"We have agreed to acknowledge our opinions on the matter as irreconcilable, yet not to in any way terminate our relationship," she said, her voice calm. that was a good sign; Fireblade was many things, but capable - or rather, willing - to falsify her tone of voice was not one of them.
"Yes, but that's not the same as us being good," he admitted, gesturing between herself and him. "Are we good?"
"I remain ever at your side until death or duty parts us," Fireblade said, waiting a beat. "And I would not have things otherwise."

Alex looked forward, and nodded. That was, he supposed, almost the best he could get out of her. If she'd been Ellen, he'd have thrown his arm around her shoulders, leaned in, to assure her that he was still fond of her. Fireblade would have tolerated such an exuberant display, now, after five years, but she would not appreciate it if he so openly touched her amongst Loroi who were not part of their circle, though, and as they walked, a gaggle of suited crew turned the corner. His eyes instantly picked them out as mechanical staff, even if the tools and hovering maintenance drone following them didn't give it away.

Their eyes flicked up and down, appraising him as he appraised them. With a sad realization, he recognized that all of them were probably no more than thirteen years old at the most. That, he just could not get over; even though he knew that Loroi considered them adult, in his eyes they were kids drafted far too young and sent into the meat-grinder... Then again, Loroi considered them much the same way.
They knew him by reputation, if not sight; he'd been on Fragile Storm's command vessel, explaining himself, more than once in the past. He nodded to the mechanic in the lead, and after a moment, she nodded back.

The group passed, and he continued. On a human vessel, they should have paused and saluted when he passed. Of course, he knew well that the Loroi had a mental salute that they considered just as important; the mechanics probably had given him such a mental salute - indeed, he was certain they had, or Fireblade would have given them a ration of shit for it - but he still hadn't heard it.

A slight grin twisted his lip; he knew that when he got back aboard Swiftwind, every crewmember aboard would snap smartly to and come to attention, snapping off a smart salute. When Tempo had explained that Loroi ship customs allowed commanders from very disparate backgrounds to impose certain customs of formality from their native traditions on the vessel, he'd wasted no time in getting that straightened out. Fireblade had even praised him for it; a commander had to maintain discipline and morale, and for that, the crew had to openly show their subordination to her - or him, in his case. And without sanzai, since he couldn't recieve the formal telepathic salute, they'd made do with the visual one.

He'd even caught them appropriately standing to attention and saluting his circle, and even each other. He imagined that meant he'd done a good job commanding their respect; and the next commander of Swiftwind would find herself highly confused by the alien martial tradition he'd very intentionally affected the crew of the corvette with.

He paused, suddenly, in his gait; Tempo and Kelly nearly ran into him, but a telekinetic tug at his body from Fireblade kept him moving, and he regained his footing. The four of them looked at him, concerned. "Alex? Is something amiss," Tempo asked.
"No, Tempo. I just realized I'm going to miss it."
"Retribution? It's a nice vessel, I suppose; I miss Tempest, even if Commander Stillstorm was sick of the sight of me."
Alex snorted, and shook his head. "I could get used to Retribution, but I meant I'm gonna miss Swiftwind."

"It is an underpowered, over-engined little courier," Beryl said, quizzically.
"Maybe - but she's also, somehow, been my first command, Alex said, as they passed to a corridor lined with windows - and on the other side of the windows, a hangar bay containing a shuttle. "I'm fond of the little ship, and the crew."
"As well you should be," Fireblade weighed in. "They were a pack of inexperienced, unready girls barely worthy of the title warrior when we took command. We have forged them into a crew; them, and the other survivors on the other vessels."

Jardin nodded. "Right. I'll have to recommend them for advancement; and I'm sure some of them deserve decorations for performance, too," he said, trailing off.
"Tempo and I have already compiled a list, Alex," Beryl said, and he looked back at her. She smiled. "You told me three years and twenty-seven days ago that 'an adequate officer carries out his commander's orders; a good one anticipates them.' We anticipated the need, and compiled a list of the officers aboard our surviving vessels, and those who, regretfully, did not make it this far with us, who deserve to be recognized."

Alex swallowed, and nodded. Was there a posthumous medal for attempting to follow your commander in an insane plan to make hyperdrives do something they weren't supposed to do, and returning to realspace inside a star; or not at all? He closed his eyes; he couldn't think about that, or it would eat him up.

Presently, they reached the shuttle; Fragile Storm's personal transport, the hold was configured for passenger service, meaning chairs around tables, supplies of food and drink, a slightly more comfortable - executive washroom in the aft, and bunks on the walls. Alex ignored them; they were in low Earth orbit his ship - when had it become his ship? - was only on the moon. He instinctively went forward, to the cockpit. Talon was sitting in the pilot's seat; the copilot's seat was empty, and he slid into it, pulling on the headset and flicking his fingers over the controls. Talon nodded at him.

"Not dead yet, Alexander?" Jardin grinned at her.
"Not yet, Talon. Any news worth hearing," he asked, as he heard the others filter into the control cabin behind him. It was tight, but there were enough seats; in the reflection from the cockpit window, he saw Kelly looking around appreciatively.
"I heard from Spiral," she said. "Thanks to engineering crew and material sent over from the other cruiser, Swift Justice, Coldfjord's no longer half-exposed to vacuum."
Alex nodded. "That's good. They were probably getting tired of wearing vacsuits at all hours of the day and night." His voice lowered. "Any update on our wounded?"

Talon nodded, as she ran the shuttle through the preflight check; he was sure she'd run it a hundred times, but wanted to run it again. "I asked around while you were talking with the Commodore. The medics on the cruisers say your navy doctors did about the best they could have expected a species with your level of medical technology working on an unfamiliar species to do - most of the injuries were well on their way to recovery by the time they got back..." She lowered her voice, sighing. "The more serious traumatic injuries are going to be cared for; the time between getting the into our sickbay, I was told, complicates restoring lost limbs." Jardin swallowed, as Talon continued, "some of them may not get full function back, but most of them will; it's just going to take time." Time, of course, for injured Loroi to spend recuperating, was a steep price to pay. "The worst off are the radiation cases from Firelance. When her reactor lost shielding, well... You know they stayed at their stations to get it under control before they went for their suits."

Alex nodded, sadly; he was well aware of this, and he swallowed the miserable lump growing in his throat. "How are they?" The last time he had seen any of the radiation-sickened crew, they were in the TCA Naval Hospital at the Earth-Moon L1 point; all of them had lost their hair, many of them were sickly, and a few of them were comatose.
The ten of them had undoubtedly saved the ship, and the rest of their crew, but at a steep cost. Talon let out a sigh. "They're deeply unwell. Again, this is a case of if they'd been able to get into a proper Loroi medical bay... There's no improvement, essentially. They may live, but the doctors are not hopeful that more than two of them will ever recover enough to serve again."

"Cyanwing and Redwing," he asked, and Talon nodded. Jadin sighed, reaching up under the visor of his headset, rubbing his eyes. He knew all of their names - the injured, especially the radiation injuries from Cloudskimmer. He'd read the situation report and reviewed the internal security holos often enough he could see all the dance steps in that particular charlie foxtrot in his sleep. The wings - so named for being twins, and because Redwing had opted to permanently recolor her hair so that others could more easily distinguish her and her sister - ironic now that neither of them had hair - had been working in the maintenance crawlway that was called a Jeffries tube on human ships when the reactor's shielding had been breached. They'd been shielded from the absolute worst of the radiation, and had used the tube to drop down into the locker with the radsuits, which they put on before going to work.

Some of the Loroi on his vessels had called them cowards for doing so, but he'd put the kibosh to that. The two of them were two engineers more than were expected to be in the reactor room; their getting into suits first had allowed them to relieve two of the engineers in the reactor room to don suits, which in turn allowed those two to don suits, and so forth and so on. The worst-off cases were the ones who had been relieved last. Jardin let out a sigh; everyone who'd been in that room had been so cooked, radiologically speaking, that if they were human they would have been dead within a week of the incident. Loroi were rather more resistant to radiation poisoning, but they were anything but immune.

He'd known better than to hope for a miracle, but still - he'd hoped for a miracle. After all, what he'd seen of Loroi medical science was amazing; they'd managed to revive him from a suit decompression that he didn't think human medicine could have brought more than one man in five back from, let alone restore him to full. He'd and Fireblade had been in full-body casts after a far-too-energetic lithobraking, and had been up and laughing about it in under a few days. An angry young Delrias had disarmed him, quite literally at the shoulders, for having beaten him at a board game, and the Loroi had put his arms back on within the hour; he'd had full function again under a week.
And that was what they could do when working on an alien. Not that the TCA Naval Hospital had thrown in the towel; the doctors and medics there had been working like demons, around-the-clock, to tend to the injured Loroi, busting ass to synthesize more of the running-far-too-low pharmaceuticals from the meager medical aid stations aboard the corvettes. At least the Loroi had been impressed with the dedication of his race's doctors, if not particularly with their results.

Alex could curse the Umiak for that. The shielding on Cloudskimmer's reactor had been damaged during the brief skirmish with the farthest-out of their gunboats, the meager picket between the corvette flotilla and the jump into "unknown" space, which the shells evidently hadn't believed they would be desperate enough to take. The shielding had seemed fine after the first damage-control efforts, and compared to how bad-off some of the other vessels they'd laid to rest on asteroids or in parking orbits had been, Cloudskimmer had seemed to be in fine shape; and she was, as long as nobody went into that reactor room.

It ate at him; he'd performed stunts no-one should perform and survive, yet, most of the Loroi entrusted to his care had survived - but not nearly all. He took a deep breath, looking up again, his fingers flying over the controls. He could fly a shuttle like this - hell, he could fly Swiftwind - but he certainly couldn't fly it as well as Talon could. "Take us out," he instructed, and the blue-haired pilot beside him nodded. She spoke into her headset briefly, and in moments the view of space beyond the bay became a view of space all around them, as she set course for the Moon. He turned in his seat.

Man, that's gotta be the weirdest sight of all in this; I'm sitting in the cockpit of a Loroi shuttle, staring at my homeworld. He looked up at the shuttle's display, which gave him their callsign - Highland XII - and nodded. "What's our status, Talon," he asked, quietly; formally.
"Departure from Retribution is proceeding normally under reaction control thrusters, we are two hundred meters distance and rising, orbit is equatorial, east-to-west and eccentric," Talon informed him quietly; preparing to formally hand control of the craft to him. "Space traffic control has been informed of our launch."

Alex took the controls in hand, and nodded. "Understood." he could see everything on the control panels, but it was, he felt, important to follow the formal procedures, even if his lack of telepathy did make things slow from Talon's point of view. "I have the craft."
"You have the craft, aye," she responded, clipped and formal. It briefly occurred to him that what he was doing was probably paving the way for future joint military operations or even combined services between Loroi and humans - but that wasn't really his concern at the moment. Alex adjusted his comms frequency to that of trans-lunar STC and informed them of his destination and that he required an expedited transfer window.
The voice that came back was young and female. "Affirmative, Highland-Twelve... Woah. Are these drive specs accurate; you want to go to the moon in a shuttle at a 20g burn?"
Alex grinned at himself; the VIP transport shuttle he was piloting could burn harder than anything humanity had short of a visual-range air-to-air missile. "Accurate, STC. You want me to buzz the tower to prove it?" Talon grinned beside him, and the STC operator laughed.
"That won't be necessary, hotshot, but I am giving you a grand-tour trans-lunar injection. Try not to moisten any panties with that raw display of horsepower out there; TLO STC out." Raw numbers started to appear on his screen as Kelly's breath terminated for a moment in a hard snerk. In the window, he could see her clasping her hand to her mouth, trying not to giggle, as the three Loroi in the back looked at her confusedly.

He grinned, but decided not to comment, as he glanced down at his screens; thankfully, one of the very first things he'd done when they reached the first TCA scout picket had been to assign all of the computer scientists with his corvette flotilla to working out electronics interaction schema. There were a few hiccups as the powerful Loroi computer in the shuttle - pinnace, really - worked out what they wanted him to do, and then he got it, and grinned. Even though the moon was approximately 'above' him at present, the STC had sent him on a grand loop through low-Earth orbit, with a hard burn at perigee to exploit the oberth effect and a half-the-way-forward, half-the-way-back burn to the moon.

It wasn't the boring-but-practical straight-to-the-moon maneuver the Highland-class pinnace was fully capable of, but it was much more to his liking than not. Behind him, he heard Beryl ask Kelly if the STC operator had been intentionally humorous, and if so, what Kelly found so funny. In turn, the Yeoman groaned, placing her hand over her head, blushing intensely. Alex started to snicker, even as he punched the burns he wanted to make into the computer and set the autopilot to take them, then turned around.
"Talon, you have the stick," he said, as he turned; she confirmed, taking the stick. "Yes, she was being intentionally funny," he explained to Beryl. "This goes back to how I told you that humans have a one-to-one gender ratio. When your species has a one-to-one ratio, securing mates becomes a matter of competition, and traditionally in most human cultures, it's the men who compete for the women. This competition has taken a great many forms over millennia of human civilization, but one particular recurring theme has been competition through prowess in various exhibitions; speed being one of those outlets of prowess, whether it's who can run the fastest, or who can race their horse or vehicle fastest. We still use 'horsepower' as a crude measure of force to gauge the capabilities of ground vehicles."
Seeing him launch into the explaination for Beryl's benefit made Kelly groan again, rubbing her eyes, as Beryl absorbed everything he had to say raptly. "Ah. I think I understand - but why would the comparative power of your mechanical transport matter? Surely that's not a personal attribute?"

"In a way, it is," Yeoman Kelly said. "Being able to afford to own a very fast and powerful transport is a mark of status in and of itself; but it's not just the owning that was implied, but also the skill to use it to its full capability," she explained, embarrassed and grinning. "A bad driver in the very best car around still won't outrace a very good driver in an only okay car... But it's not nearly so formal as I make it sound."
Beryl nodded, listening raptly, drinking information like a sponge; Tempo was listening amusedly, but so was Fireblade, with an amused grin and roll of her eyes.
"And what are panties, and why would this cause them to be moistened," she asked, causing Kelly to groan and hang her head in her hands. Beryl looked worried. "I'm sorry, have I offended you?"

"No, you've embarrassed her, though," Alex explained. After five years he'd long since lost all but the most minor traces of shame about answering Beryl's endless stream of biological and cultural queries. "Panties are human female undergarments," he explained, "And in the context of a sexual competition for female attention -"
"Oh! A reference to any potential female audience to a male competition for access to them becoming sexually aroused; I understand," Beryl said, intuiting, and looked over to Kelly, who looked very much like she was trying to hide within her seat. He laughed.

"Imagine this for five years," he said to her, and the Yeoman looked up at him; her face was red, and she was grinning, having a look very much like she was close to expiring of embarrassment.
"How did you survive," she asked, and Alex grinned in turn.
"Desensitization. That, and it's basically impossible to be upset at Beryl, even when she's asking the most embarrassing questions. She's just that nice." Beryl beamed at the compliment, as Kelly turned around, shaking her head. Talon laughed.
"I can't speak to the utility of men being the ones to compete for women, but I didn't take him all that seriously until I found out he could fly," she admitted, leaving Jardin blushing something. Fireblade smirked.
"Agreed. I considered him something of a pest, until Jardin proved willing and able to throw himself into battle at my side; even though protecting him was my responsibility, not the other way around." She fixed an icy gaze on him, and Jardin shrugged, smiling apologetically.
"Yeah, well, you wouldn't have stayed as sharp as you are if I hadn't been there at your side, making your job difficult by putting myself in danger shooting the shells trying to shoot you in the back, now, would you? Adversity being required for excellence and all," he said; Fireblade rolled her eyes, and Jardin felt a sudden force on the back of his head, not unlike a slap; it swept the headset off his head, and he winced, plucking it out of the air, and laughing. "Yeah, I kind of deserved that," he admitted, as Fireblade smirked at him, and he put his helmet back on.

Kelly blinked; she had seen it. "What... What was that," she asked. "It looked like you got slapped."
"I was," Jardin said, reaching up and rubbing the back of his head. "Fireblade is what the Loroi call an Unsheathed. She's an incredibly powerful telekinetic; no bullshit, I've seen her destroy the shell equivalent of a main battle tank with her mind."

"... Woah. Do all Loroi have that kind of power," she asked, and Jardin shook his head.
"No; some do. The very powerful telekinetics are Unsheathed. Some others may have telekinetic power, but not very much. Tempo," he said, "is a telekinetic, but she can't produce more than, at most, a kilogram of force. But she can apply it with great precision; she can push controls from across a room, or rearrange your desk while you're talking with her and you won't notice it. So watch the contents of your desk, because she finds that trick very amusing," he said, shooting a look at Tempo, who smiled mischievously back at him. "Fireblade, on the other hand, can exert a lot of power; literal tons of it, but her control is much more limited. When I met her, about the most subtle she could exercise her power was 'gently' throwing me across a lift. Nowadays she's gotten to the point where she can slap you without touching you; or, say, throw a rock - or, say, a grenade - with good precision a great distance, but she still can't really do anything subtle like Tempo can. If she tried to rearrange your desk, it would... Well, rearranging your things from the surface of your desk to the floor is still rearranging, right?"

The group laughed, and Kelly shook her head. "Wow. That's... Pretty incredible," she said, and Jardin nodded. "Yeah, it is. Sometimes I'm kind of jealous," he admitted. "Give someone Tempo's control and Fireblade's power and a lightsaber, and they're basically a Jedi Knight," he said, causing Kelly to grin, but most of the Loroi to look at him in confusion. "A cultural touchstone," he explained, "more fiction, you wouldn't approve," he said, as Fireblade rolled her eyes.
"Wouldn't approve... Why not," Kelly asked, and Jardin shrugged.

"Loroi, as a general rule, do not like lies. They don't find it natural to conceal their feelings, and some of them are so hardassed about it that even little white lies, spin, or other social niceties infuriate them to the verge of violence," he said, smirking, thinking of Stillstorm. "As a consequence, they have very little patience for fiction; even if they understand it is not meant to represent a falsehood as truth but simply to tell a tale, most of them do not take well to it. Like Fireblade, for example," he said, and Fireblade snorted.

"I do not see why you would waste your time telling false tales of heroism, Alexander. Your people have more than enough real heroes to celebrate."
Alex grinned, and shook his head. "I used the phrase 'Herculean' once, which necessitated an explanation of Hercules. She was actually getting interested, until I explained that the myth of Hercules was just that; a myth, and there were no hydras on Earth to hunt, nor were there ever at any point."
"It would have been a worthy trophy," Fireblade said, with a smirk, and Alex shrugged.
"So then she started to ask if my people were so bereft of actual heroes we had to invent them, so I started telling her about people like Teddy Roosevelt, Alvin York, Admiral Nelson, George Washington, Ghengis Khan - I know, most of us would consider him more of a villain, but Fireblade views Heroism in the classically Greek sense. Most of them don't really 'get' fiction, and when explained, think it's stupid bordering on being offensively so."

"I like listening to your stories," Beryl pointed out, and Alex grinned at her.
"Sure, but you like them because figuring out what kind of tales a person or a species likes lets you figure out more about their psychology," he said in turn, and Beyrl smiled back at him. "That doesn't mean you like them."
Beryl shrugged, and Tempo chuckled at him, turning to address Kelly.
"It is difficult not to get absorbed into an interesting tale; we are no more unlikely to become enthralled by a gripping story than you are. To learn after-the-fact that the tale was false from the start is upsetting. To know beforehand causes it to lose its appeal for most of us, as most Loroi are unable or unwilling to make a distinction between that which is not true, yet is not presented as being true but is presented anyway for the purpose of entertainment, and a falsehood made with the intention of misleading another for the purpose of gaining advantage over them. Beryl and I can appreciate the fictional tales of those races which do produce fiction as being valuable insight into those races' culture and psychology; and there does, indeed, seem to be some utility to your ability to communicate very complicated concepts very rapidly by referencing works of fiction the both of you are already familiar with. Still, most Loroi would find these kinds of things unacceptable," she admitted. "Which is why it is the job of diplomats, like myself, and analysts like Beryl, to have more open minds than those of warriors such as Fireblade, or Talon."

"Leave me out of this conversation; I'm just here to fly the shuttle," Talon said, from the front, and Alex grinned.
"Talon's probably the most open-minded of the Loroi trained to be warriors that I know," he explained, "but I think she's embarrassed by it. The very first time we actually spoke, she pulled a fast one on me, going all deadly serious 'are you intending to be humorous,' and then when I responded, she cracked a joke at my expense."

"A small joke," Talon said, and Alex turned half-way to the front in his seat, grinning. "I still found it kind of funny," he admitted, glancing out the window. Earth was much closer now; they were above the American heartland, and there was little cloudcover out to the west coast. He paused, turning all the way forward, looking up, and swallowed, hard, growing quiet as he stared at California.
"Alex?" He swore that sometimes, it was like Beryl could sanzai-read him.
"I - I just..." Alex pushed up, out of his seat, switching off the console controls in front of him so he could lean forward on it, under the cockpit windows, and point. "it's just hit me; I grew up here. My parents and my kid sister - god, she's fifteen now... We've led girls younger than her into battle." Alex shook his head, as the others climbed up to lean around the pilot and copilot seats, looking where he was pointing.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Stupid 60,000 character post limit...

=========

Talon brought up a holo-pane above the console with a zoom-view from the shuttle's sensors, and flicked the projection over to him; he pulled it into place, zooming in on northern California; finding the San Fansisco-Sacramento Metropolitan Area was easy, and then it was trivial to just follow the line of Interstate 5 up to Redding.

Even Loroi technology couldn't break certain fundamental laws of optics, at least not without deploying an array of sensor drones to create a huge synthetic aperture, but they could fiddle with the results some in post-processing. The result was a very nice, if oblique, view of the city of Redding, and it only got bigger as the shuttle's orbit brought it closer and closer to the planet, and horizontally closer to California. "Redding, right," Kelly asked, and Alex nodded, as his eyes flicked over the image, trying to quickly put together memories of traveling the city streets into narrowing down the approximate location of his parents' home.
"Yeah," he said, as he found the rough location of his home, and pointed. "I grew up about there," he said, with a chuckle that subsided almost as soon as it started.
"Cape Cod, Massachusetts," the redhead behind him answered; her reflection in the window showing that she was contorting herself to avoid leaning on Beryl's shoulder, as she surely would have done if it had been him in Beryl's place. "Been awhile since you've been home, huh?"
Alex snorted. "I've been hundreds of light-years away... Comparatively, I'm closer now to being home than I am to New York City, where we attended a parade a few hours ago."
"Want me to submit a request for some personal time," Kelly asked. "I mean, it's been five years, you probably should check up on your folks and your kid sister."

"Surely your parents are capable of caring for themselves without your aid, Alexander," Fireblade asked, looking at him quizzically, and Alex chuckled, shaking his head.
"It's different, Fireblade. Think 'highly-developed rules of kinship.' My parents weren't just the people who made me; they raised me. You know how Fragile Storm - and, I guess Fragile Spear - are considered weird because they were raised and trained in one of those old Clan-type holdouts? Most human families are like that, so they're not just people who created me, they're as close to me as a Loroi is to her diral."

"Ah - I understand," Fireblade said, holding her hand up. "Then if at all possible, you should see them."
"... Yeah. If at all possible. When am I gonna find the time - I've got sooo many reports to write, and then the brass are going to want to pick my brain for anything and everything I've seen out there... If I'm lucky, maybe I'll get to see them by the time I'm thirty." He smirked, and Kelly chuckled.

"I can probably make it happen - put in a word to Admiral Callan. I'm sure he'll dig up a three-day pass for you."
Alex snorted softly, and settled back in his stick. "Back in your seats, ladies, straps on, we're coming up on perigee," he cautioned; the four behind him sat in and strapped in, as did he. It wasn't really necessary, of course; the Highland-class shuttle's gravitational dampeners were as good as those on a warship, but just in case something happened, protocol on the pinnaces called for straps whilst under thrust.

"I have the stick," he said, and Talon nodded, confirming it as he took the controls in hand, bringing his console to life and watching the autopilot rotate the shuttle to its next maneuver.
Say, Talon," he said, as he watched the time to thrust count down, "How are we getting this shuttle back to Retribution?"

"Commodore Fragile Storm's personal pilots are in the bunks in the back, catching a few hour's sleep," Talon responded. "Thrust in about ten solon."
The solon, as a unit of time, always tripped him up; it was almost but not quite one second, and he instinctually wanted to count-down following the call of ten, but his countdown was always fast as a result of it. The shuttle's tenor changed as the main engines fired, pushing them through the maneuver; accelerating them with a gravity assist on a translunar trajectory. Once they were facing the moon, they'd burn somewhat under halfway, then flip around and burn the rest of the way. "So, think their cameras got a good view," she asked, and Jardin grinned.

"I hope so. These Highlands are really great shuttles," Alex said, to a chuckle from Talon. "So, Kelly, what makes you think Admiral Callan would write me a three-day pass?"
"Check your tablet," she said, and he pulled it from his pocket; a new one he'd been given to replace the one he'd broken when he redirected a dragon turtle away from a bunch of Barsam kids and off a cliff. Sure, he had a Loroi tablet he could use, but they just weren't that interoperable. Yet. He had put the new computer on mute to attend the parade, but it was registering a number of new messages; one was a three-day pass from Admiral Callan, authorizing Jardin to take up to 72 hours' personal time whenever and wherever schedule permitted, in one-day chunks as he saw fit to write for himself. There was a note from Callan giving him a strong advisement to make the take of those three days and see his family.

"You were sure because you already knew," Jardin intuited, and Kelly grinned. "I am your adjutant, sir. It's my job to know."
Alex snorted. "I guess that means we're going to have to find you a bunk, huh?" He looked to Beryl. "Can we find some accommodations for the Ensign? Hopefully by now they will have taken the excess crew aboard the cruisers," he said, shaking his head.
"Excess crew," Kelly asked, as Beryl began checking her tablet, and Alex nodded.
"Yeah; we had to ditch a lot of corvettes along the way, draining their fuel and supplies and bringing their crew along in the ones we were bringing with us. To put that in perspective, I've been hot-bunking with Fireblade, Beryl and Tempo have been sharing a cabin with the gunnery officers, Talon's been sleeping in my ready-room, and we've had girls sleeping in hammocks we improvised out of cargo netting in the cargo hold."
"Packed to the rafters like the days of wooden ships and iron men, huh?" Kelly snickered. "I can take it. I had a pile of sisters growing up, and then my parents sent me to boarding school in a huge dorm full o' girls. Why didn't you diffuse them out to the dorms at Luna-9 drydocks, though?"

"Loroi social taboos. It took me two years and just about strangling a shell with my bare hands when he jumped on her back to get Fireblade to decide that I was more 'warrior' than I was 'male' and share meals with me. Most Loroi nowadays that spend any time with me can get it, but that's a personal exception for accepting me, not a general exception for male humans."
"They... You won't eat with men," she asked, and looked around the shuttle. Fireblade turned and started manning the console she was at, while Beryl ducked the question by digging into her tablet. Tempo looked uncomfortable, and Jardin glanced back.
"Talon, you have the stick," he said, turning his seat around as Talon confirmed her assuming authority for the craft. Alex put his hand on Tempo's shoulder, and she looked up at him. "I'll save you the awkwardness of this one, 'kay?" She nodded, and he turned to Kelly.

"Loroi have some childrearing - for warrior-caste girls, anyway - that, well... Anyway, they're kept segregated from the males. Remember, Loroi are ninety-percent female. The warrior-girls in particular almost never see men, and they're basically - most of them, anyawy - thrown out into the wild to fend for themselves for a few years." Kelly's eyes widened in alarm, and Jardin held his hand up. "Don't... Just don't. That's not a debate we want to get into right now, it'll take us all day and we'll need to requisition a bottle of asprin each. Point is, they're raised very communally - for an all-girls, all-warriors value of community. They never eat alone if they exist in any social group larger than one - by which I mean for a Loroi to eat alone, she has to be marooned by herself. But they're also conditioned that they - the warriors - have to be extremely self-sufficient, which means not being any kind of a burden on existing civilian infrastructure. Also, they're each about three times as protective of male Loroi as a Victorian Englishman would be of a human woman. Put that together, and even after they've had the rough edges of their sink-or-swim wilderness education filed off by a few years of formal military training, they have basically never interacted with a male," he explained, deciding to leave out the whole 'access to a male upon becoming a warrior' thing for later, "and they have extremely strong taboos against both eating alone, and eating in the company of civilians, which is trebled in the case of the men, whom they have been conditioned to protect, but also kind of think of as, well, a bit foreign."

Kelly seemed to digest this for a moment, and looked to Tempo, who was looking forward at Jardin. "Huh," Kelly said. "You people are complicated," she said, which got a sudden laugh and a smirk from the diplomat.
"As are yours," Tempo said, turning back and smiling at Kelly, who grinned back.
"I hope that was meant as a compliment, because I meant it, too. Hum... A society without men. I could dig it," Kelly said, smirking back at Jardin, who laughed.
"You're the kind of girl who made your brothers' lives hell, weren't you," he asked, and she grinned.

"I thought so. Anyway, like I said; Loroi warriors are, as a whole, unwilling entirely to eat in the presence of men. I had to basically force them to recognize me as a warrior first and man second before that changed, and again; that's a personal exception for me, not male humans in general. They're uncomfortable around civilians, and very uncomfortable around civilian men. They can keep it together for formal interactions, especially if they're older, or have had diplomatic training, but most of the girls on the corvettes we brought here are girls. They accepted me as their commander, but they'd still be skittish and awkward around human men. Believe me, I asked; I pulled the commanders of my ships together into a conference call and asked them if they thought it would be possible to disperse the extra crew into the dorms at Luna-9. They all asked me if I'd be able to make sure that the only humans they saw would be female warriors. I wasn't able to promise that. Only Spiral thought she could get her girls to behave properly around female civcons and male soldiers, and she didn't think she could get them to handle male civcons. So we decided it would be better to keep the crew in the ships and just take advantage of the base to make the ships as comfortable as we could."

"You've mentioned Spiral twice," Kelly said. "Is she like, a standout," she asked, and Jardin grinned, prodding Talon's chair.
"She's from the same diral as Talon," he explained. "There were seven of us in what I guess is kind of our 'circle.' Fireblade and Reed are security, Talon and Spiral are our pilots; Tempo and Beryl are the brains of the outfit, and I'm the screwball cut-up who wound up in the position of formally representing humanity to an alien race. One of the other corvettes got damaged when we were running from the shells and leading them away from the rest of 73, and their replacement commander... She got injured, badly, as did her pilot. We were burning hard to get the hell out of Dodge, and Coldfjord lacked a helmswoman and a commander. So in the middle of a 33g burn, I told Spiral I was putting her in command, and told her and Fireblade to suit up. We didn't have any time to dock, and the Coldfjord didn't even have a helmswoman who actually could pull off a docking even under good circumstances, let alone full acceleration."

"... Woah. Sounds like a Charlie Foxtrot," Kelly said, and Jardin nodded.
"Yep. So I told them to open the outer doors of their airlock, put their aft to the bugs and put the hammer down. Spiral and Fireblade suited up in our airlock, and Talon lined us up - two ships under full acceleration, practically kissing to get our dampening fields overlapping, and Spiral takes a flying leap, propelled by Fireblade's telekinesis, across about three meters of literal open space."
Kelly stared at him, and Jardin laughed at her. "My hand to god, it's true," he said. "We have the airlock camera footage to prove it. If I have any say in the matter, they're all getting medals for that stunt," he said, and Talon chuckled. "But anyway, she takes a telekinetically-propelled leap, sticks a three-point landing like an anime heroine, and hauls ass to the bridge to get Coldfjord moving. Did I mention that the bridge was open to vacuum? And so was like, half the ship at the time. Anyway, Coldfjord goes from no-chance-whatsoever to being piloted and commanded at the same time by the second-best pilot I know," he said with a chuckle, and Talon rotated her seat a quarter-turn, elbowing his chair.

"You liar," she said, with a smirk. "We both know I beat her in the last flying competition we flew, and no pilot in the galaxy is gonna admit they're not the best," she said, and Jardin laughed, and shook his head.
"Okay, the third best pilot I know," he said with a grin. "Anyway, like I was saying, Talon and Spiral - they're not biologically sisters," he said. "But they might as well be. They're both pilots, both intensely competitive, and they've been together for the majority of their lives."

"Yeah," Talon said, with a sigh, turning back to fully face forward. "We're the last survivors of our diral. That is what our tattoos symbolize," she elaborated, "our diral. All of us got matching tattoos... And now, only two Loroi in the galaxy bear them." The pilot took a deep breath, and let it out in a slow sigh. Kelly bit her lip.
"Combat pilots don't do well in this war, huh," Kelly asked, and Talon shook her head.
"No. The shells are cowards," Talon said, angrily. "They drown us in missiles and torpedoes, and won't come out to face us fighter-to-fighter. Fighters are becoming increasingly rare, and are wholly relegated to supplementary fleet point-defense roles," she said, her voice angry.

"The previous big one the Loroi were in, their fighters were the decisive edge in the space and air fight," Alex said, "Not because the Delrias didn't have fighters, but because the Loroi combat pilots are that fucking good. Almost as good as us," he said with a grin, earning his chair a smack by Talon and a laugh from the pilot at the same time. "But when the enemy are numerous, and missile massacres are their preferred engagement tactic, fighter utility is limited, and after the start of the war, they started ramping up their own point-defenses... Yeah. Of course, Talon compensates by flying a corvette like she'd fly a starfighter. During that run, a bunch of shell gunships got on our tails, and she advised we do something crazy and take the bastards into the atmo of a big motherin' Saturnine gas giant. Well, Loroi corvettes are something approximating aerodynamic, and Umiak gunships have all the aerodynamic virtues of a masonry brick.

Kelly laughed, hard, and turned forward, facing the back of the pilot's seat. "Bullshit," she said, and Talon looked back, grinning.
"Not in the slightest. I told the gunners to just lock the cannons forward and route the cannon controls to my station and override the heat limiters, and to project a combat vitals HUD at my station."
"She did, she really, really did," Jardin said, grinning and shaking his head; Kelly was looking atTalon with something approximating awe and glee. "It sounded absolutely crazy... But the Umiak gunship pilots were screwed. The ion storms in that gas giant meant they couldn't get any missile locks worth a goddamn, and when they tried to just hold in orbit, we kept popping up at them from the cloud cover like a game of whack-a-mole, if the moles were packing heat. They tried to engage us at close range with their cannons... Their mistake."

Talon laughed. "Yeah, tell me about it. That would only have been more fun at the stick of a Tornado," she said with a smirk. "But that might have been too easy."
Kelly laughed again, and grinned. "God-damn, girl, you really are a flying ace, huh? Man, grandma would love you."

"You mentioned your grandmother was a fighter pilot," Talon said. "But you're not. Why is that?"
Kelly shrugged. "Traditionally, the women in my family go into piloting roles. I went to officer school - I wanted to fly big ships," she said with a grin, "But... Well, it's not that I'm a bad pilot, it's just that my test scores were higher for intelligence and analyst roles -"
"Ah-hah! I knew you were fleet intel," Jardin said, grinning and pointing at Kelly, who snickered.
"No, I actually applied to be a tactical analyst," Kelly said. "But for the most part, instead of giving me info to analyze and theorize with, I just wound up shoved aside and being the gofer for the older analysts with more wrinkles on their faces, until I basically wound up playing the part of Admiral Callan's adjutant's adjutant. So when Callan said he was going to assign an adjutant to you, sir, I literally jumped at the chance to volunteer."

Alex snickered, and Beryl looked up at Kelly. "Why? You sound as if the role of adjutant ill-suits you."
Kelly shrugged. "It did, but I figured, hey, I'd get to meet the man who made First Contact - not to mention meet a bunch of real life, in-the-flesh nonhuman sapient beings, so I could be happy being an adjutant under those circumstances," she said, grinning and gesturing around the cabin. "And I figured, hey, this is going to give me a lot of expertise that can't be ignored; Jardin jumped from Ensign straight to Captain for making first contact, being his adjutant for a while should be enough to jump me to Lieutenant Commander."

"You seek advancement for its own sake, then," Tempo asked with a raised eyebrow, and Kelly shook her head.
"No, I seek advancement because I'm good at the things that I do, and I want to prove that I am good at more than being an admiral's secretary's secretary. At the very least, as of right now I'm probably the human who has the second-most experience interacting with Loroi, which means that even if Jardin gets recalled tonight, I'll at the very least be pulled into an intelligence unit charged with understanding the Loroi; which means I'll be doing something more than managing the personal affairs of an officer who spends so much time managing the affairs of a higher officer that he doesn't have any time to manage his own."

"Worthy," Fireblade commented, turning around. "A warrior who does not seek to prove her worth is no warrior at all. Little is more frustrating to a warrior's spirit than being assigned to a detail which will be mundane. I despaired when I was first assigned to manage Alexander's security."
Alex smirked. "Yeah, well, that turned around real quick, didn't it," he asked, and Fireblade smirked back.
"Indeed. Safeguarding you has been a task which has been anything but mundane, even leaving aside your penchant for imperiling yourself attempting to safeguard your own bodyguards. I would have it no other way, Alexander Jardin."

Alex chuckled at that. "Yeah. That, and we got to psuedo-link our minds through that robot control system that maniac Historian construct built for us. That was pretty cool."
Fireblade grinned at the memory, as Kelly blinked and boggled at him, and Fireblade said "Oh, it was. That was when I learned that within your heart was indeed the soul of a warrior. I genuinely regret that the devices which permitted such contact were too bulky to be remade as implants, and that Historian construct found the idea of reimplementing them as such too mundane to bother itself with."

Alex nodded at her. "Me too. Touching your mind like that was... Wow," he said, chuckling and shaking his head, and Kelly gazed flatly at him. "Okay," he said, "The Historians are another race allied with the Loroi - chiefly because the Umiak got the stupid idea to invade their space. The Historians are super-advanced compared to, well, basically everybody, but they're isolationists with no taste for prosecuting a war on their own. They'd rather provide advanced tech to the Loroi to do the fighting for them. They're also really, really shy, so instead of going out on their own, they send personality constructs - which I swear are digitally-uploaded Historians - out instead. I wound up talking for a while with one of these personality constructs, aaand I had a data chip in my hip pocket that had the complete run of every Gundam series produced between 1979 and 2129 on me - the hundred-and-fifty-years-of-Gundam anniversary collection. But I'd already broken my tablet, so I couldn't watch it, so I asked the Historian if it could read the chip and format the contents for use with Loroi data tablets. He agreed... See, at the time, we were in a Barsam shipyard - they're another allied race. The Historian crunched data for a while, and then decided it was going to build a couple of giant combat robots for me and Talon. It commandeered the shipyard's robotic systems, started feeding technical requirements to the systems, and the next thing we know, there's a mad AI scientist building a couple of giant robots for me and Talon - oh, and a Umiak raiding fleet has slipped through and is coming to destroy the shipyards. What else were we gonna do?"

Kelly blinked at him. "That's unbelievable," she said, and Jardin laughed.
"I know, right!? But there we were, caught between a rock and a hard place, and the nearest Loroi fleet was nothing but a picket of courier corvettes, they couldn't stand up to a Umiak fast-attack raiding squadron. So... We got into those giant robots, and tore them fucking apart."
He grinned, ferally, and Fireblade reached over; he held his hand up, and she clasped it, giving back a grin in turn. Jardin closed his eyes, and suddenly his vision was filled with the blazing-hot starshine of Fireblade's mental presence. It was comforting, now. "So, yeah. It sounds outrageous, and it totally is, but I will swear on a stack of bibles it's the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We ripped up half their fleet before they turned to fuck off, and they sacrificed a heavy cruiser ramming us into the atmosphere to buy the rest of them time to withdraw. Damn thing plowed us straight into the ground, just a liiiitle bit harder than the 'mechs dampeners could compensate for. We passed out as we were falling through the atmosphere, and woke up in body casts. Worth it."

"... Wow. So why is this war still a war," Kelly asked, incredulously, and Jardin shrugged.
"The Historian refuses to build any more. I think it got carried away and deployed a whole lot of tech it wasn't supposed to provide the Loroi in building those robots, those things were definitely more advanced than anything I've seen - at all. And if you're asking, why don't the Historians just squish the bugs themselves..." He shrugged, and Fireblade's aura flashed, her head turning in the direction of Kelly.
"The Historians are cowards with no taste for battle. They fled their own worlds in the face of Umiak aggression, allowing the shells access to our Seren colonies in the first place. They are more than capable of prevailing against the shells in conflict, but are so averse to it they'd rather let us do it. We are allied with them united in the commonality of the Hierarchy attacking us and being unwilling entirely to submit to the Hierarchy's rule, but they do not trust us, nor do we trust them."

"While Fireblade should leave speaking of such things to a diplomat," Tempo said, slightly archly, "she is essentially correct. I would stress considerably more nuance in Historian-Loroi relations; they have no warrior traditions the way we do, and have comfortably wielded the threat of their advanced technology for so long that they have not had to actually deploy it for as long as we have known of them that it is likely their skills at making war have atrophied to nothingness... But in essence, Fireblade is correct. They are not pacifists the way the Barsam are, but they have no skill or mettle for conflict. Indeed, even with all their technology, they have yet to fully retake their territory; not for lack of ability, but for lack of mustering the will to do so."

"Huh. Maybe we should try to get some Historians of our own," Kelly said with a grin, and Beryl sounded pleased with the idea.
"That is an excellent notion. The Historians, if committed fully to sharing their technology, could easily advance your race's science by leaps and bounds. They do not trust us sufficiently; they have shared technologically-dumbed-down examples of their technology, but have been unwilling to teach our scientists."
"Huh... So, why would them sharing with us be a good thing, from a Loroi point of view," Kelly asked, and Jardin opened his eyes. He was sad to see the mental blaze of Fireblade's aura fade, but she was smiling at him. Okay, we're good, he thought, and he looked to Beryl, who was grinning. "I mean," Kelly said, "If you distrust other races with advanced tech, and they advanced us to where you guys are or past you, even... Wouldn't that be a bad thing?"

"No," Beryl said, with a chipper smile. "I'm sure my opinion is a rare one, but I have come to believe that our races are kin - spiritually, not biologically," she explained. "I do not believe you would turn on us, even if the Historians asked you to, and you owed them a debt of gratitude. I believe in such a situation, as a race, you would behave as Jardin does when two of his friends are in conflict, and mediate. Besides which, if the Historians brought you to a technological par with us rapidly, our fleets would make the Hierarchy feel our combined wrath to a highly satisfactory degree."
Kelly blinked, looking at Beryl, and then to Jardin, who chuckled. "Yeaaaah. Beryl is sweet and bubbly, I know, but you've got to remember she is still a Loroi warrior..." His grin faded, and he took on a more serious tone, squeezing Fireblade's hand for support; she squeezed back.
"Everyone in this shuttle except you has lost friends and comrades to the shells," he said, then he shook his head. "No, shit, your sister. We all have skin in this game," he corrected himself. "And Beryl has a photographic memory. Believe me, we've been on the ground in the middle of some very fucked-up shit, and she's a highly empathic, friendly person. Every single Loroi she sees get hurt, or... Or killed, they stay with her, and will for centuries. This may not turn out to be a guilt-free extermination war - for most of us," he said, looking to Fireblade, "but if it doesn't, it will be damn near to it. Even Beryl has no sympathy for the Umiak, and she's the closest thing to a friend-to-all-living-things type I've seen among the Loroi warriors... And most of the civilians, for that matter."

Beryl took a deep breath at that, her eyes casting down, and Jardin sighed. "Shit... Sorry, Beryl. I didn't mean to remind you..."
"I must live with it," Beryl said, with a heavy sigh. "I cannot forget; I must not forget." She looked up at Jardin, into his eyes. "You are right, really; conflict is not my natural inclination. I would have been ejected from the warrior caste, but for my memory and an active war being waged. I was so valuable as a Listel I was compelled to serve. I do not regret it." She closed her eyes. "You're right. I can remember them all - every ship I've seen take damage, every friendly icon on our tactical boards that... Vanished. Do you remember the ship which... Foundered, in the first engagement we were in together?"

Jardin swallowed, hard, closing his eyes. "Winter Tide," he said; Fireblade's aura popped back into his line of sight, until he parted his hands from hers, swallowing firmly. "Yes, she was too badly damaged to pull away. The shells ran over her like a freight train," he said, shuddering; picturing the ship's captain in the holo-pane, thrown forward against her console by the impact of a plasma focus on her vessel's starboard nacelle. He remembered the vessel aflame, her captain speaking into the holo, attempting to restore power... Just before her starboard reactor went critical. Shuddering, he recalled the scene; Winter Tide exploding in a while burst of antimatter annihilation, the holo-pane locked on the static-filled last-second of their transmission, monochromatic, the barest hint of a womanly figure visible in the conflagration erupting through the aft wall of the command center.

And he knew that as good as his memory was, Beryl's was better; it was, definitionally, flawless. "Her captain had pink hair with two long bangs in front of her ears," he said, quietly, and Beryl nodded. "Her name was Nova."
Jardin looked into Beryl's eyes. "Was she a friend," he asked, and Beryl closed her eyes, nodding.
"Yes. Before she was promoted to Soroin Torret and placed in command of Winter Tide,, she was one of Tempest's Seinen. For a time earlier in our careers, we bunked together. We were not as close as, for instance, Talon and Spiral, but we were good friends."

Beryl hung her head, sucking in a deep breath, and Alex bit his lip. Oh jeeze, I fucked up, he thought, afraid he was near to seeing Beryl cry. He glanced at Tempo and Fireblade; both of them looked unhappy, and Tempo was looking sympathetically at Beryl, while Fireblade was looking down at the floor. He knew it was hard for her to see Beryl become emotional at loss; Fireblade compensated by getting angry, but Beryl just wasn't wired that way. The slim, white-haired Loroi sucked in a deep, bracing breath, and looked up, swallowing, looking ahead, at Jardin. "That is why I must remember. Any time I might be tempted to think that the cost of this war is too high, I remember those that the Hierarchy has killed. I remember what they have done, and I remember that not one of them is capable of remorse, or pity, or sympathy." She grit her teeth. "I must remember Nova, and all the others I've seen hurt, or killed, and remember that to the shell who did it, they meant nothing. They weren't an honorable enemy, they were... Just a number, in a computer, or an inconvenient biological unit that needed to be removed. You are right; I would be entirely unable to serve in a war against, say, the Barsam, or Historians, or especially humans," she said. "They might make me a diplomat, or they might eject me to civilian life altogether. But against the shells? I can never forget the sight of Nova's body being engulfed in flame, and knowing that the shell which did it... Never felt anything except the satisfaction of an accountant marking a tally in a ledger. We are not worthy foes locked in a struggle to them, we are just... An inconvenient race too powerful to establish dominion over, and therefore a threat to their limitless ambitions of unending hegemony, and therefore we must be exterminated."

Kelly was left speechless, and Jardin sighed, heavily. Every instinct in him was burning to draw Beryl into a tight hug; and he knew that she would accept it and find comfort in it, too. A hush fell across the cabin, and Alex bit his lip, feeling like a heel, looking to Kelly, who looked similarly helpless. Then he saw her mouth move, deciphered the words 'fuck it' in them, and realized, a moment too late, that of course she was human, and felt the same instincts regarding seeing Beryl on the verge of tears that he did.
How fucking weird is it that I needed to remind myself that a woman was another human, he thought, in the split second after Kelly disengaged her straps, slid smoothly out of her seat, and reached for Beryl. Fireblade tensed up, as he lifted his hand to try and warn Kelly off; Tempo blinked in alarm, and Beryl didn't see it coming.
Contact. Kelly pulled Tempo's torso forward, hugging her. The short-haired Loroi sucked in a deep breath of surprise. A pin's fall would have been heard in the shuttle cockpit, and Talon turned in her seat, half-way and looking over her shoulder, alarmed.

Jardin had given into that instinct a few times before. The first time, Fireblade had telekinetically ripped him away from Beryl, and rather roughly interrogated him as regarded exactly what he was doing. "You looked like you needed a hug," Kelly murmured. Fireblade gazed at her back, but Beryl settled the matter. She closed her eyes, laid her head upon Ensign Kelly's shoulder, and raised her arms, wrapping them gently around the barrel of the yeoman's torso.
Hoooooooly fuck dodged a bullet there, Jardin thought, settling back down as he saw the outrage fade in Fireblade's face, though she still stared disapproval at Kelly until Jardin caught her eyes.

"Thank you, Amelia Kelly," Beryl murmured. "I understand the gesture's import to your race; therefore I am not offended," Beryl said, in a subdued voice, taking a slow, shuddering breath. Jardin let out a sigh of relief. "But please, even if you see other Loroi in similar emotional state, you must refrain; at the very least, ask permission first. To touch a Loroi abruptly like that is going to be alarming and shocking to us; most will take it as a threat, or an attempt to probe our minds when we are vulnerable, and view it instinctively as hostility. Jardin may take such liberties with us, for we know him well and trust him as a true companion."

Ensign Kelly blinked, leaning her head back to look at Beryl, whose eyes were closed, her head firmly planted against Kelly's shoulder. "I... I'm sorry," she said, quietly. "I know it was taboo, but... You just seemed so hurt and in need of comfort -"
"And I was, and I do find this comforting," Beryl clarified. "You humans are so very warm... Loroi find sudden touch to be unnerving because of sanzai - the closer we are, physically, to one another, the stronger the... The greater the bandwidth, is how Jardin understood it upon explanation. Imagine someone else being suddenly privy to everything; every emotion, every stray thought, running through your head. If you were Loroi, or indeed, one of most other races, being this close to me, you'd... You'd be perceiving the sources of my grief at this moment; you would be reliving the last moment of my friend Nova's life, as I am. You would be privy to my innermost thoughts and emotions... You can see how it would be upsetting to be so probed, especially, I imagine, during a moment of such grief?"

Kelly swallowed, and nodded. "Y-Yeah. I can see how that would be... Yeah... But it's not like that with humans, because we're... Blanks to you?"
"Not quite," Tempo said, leaning back; relaxing, now, putting her right leg up on her left knee. "But very nearly so. Through sanzai, we can sense other races at a distance; every other race, in fact... Except humans. There are variables; Golim, for instance, are bright beacons to sanzai, we can sense them at a greater distance than we can sense each other, unless the Loroi in question is announcing her presence; they are also very... Sensitive to sanzai, even in ways we are not."
"By which she means that, for example, if she were to crave a cup of coffee and there were a Golim around, by the time she was realizing consciously that she wanted coffee, there would already be a pot brewed and he'd be bringing it to her."

Kelly snorted. "That sounds handy," she says, and Tempo looked down, shaking her head.
"Honestly, it is an embarrassment. Useful, to be cynical; Golim find contact with us to be... Almost religious in character. It is somewhat awkward," she admitted. "Large swathes of their homeworld are absolutely forbidden to Loroi travel, that there might be maintained populations of them who are free of will. On the other hand, there are the Mannadi, a race we do not often speak of. We came into conflict with them because they continually preyed upon our allies, the Neridi and Pipolsid, even though they recognized us as a race of similar power and ambition as their own and wisely chose to refrain from antagonizing us. They are extremely resistant to sanzai; I am a powerful telepath, in your words, though not nearly as powerful as our most accomplished, I will admit. I would sense a Mannadi if he were at the aft end of this shuttle, as would Fireblade. Beryl would sense one in the cabin behind us, and Talon would not sense him until he were standing behind her."
"Sure I would, because I have the interior cameras at my station," Talon said. "And I'd space him before he got close," she said, and Tempo laughed.

"Okay... And us," Kelly asked, and Tempo smiled, reaching up.
"The closer we get to most things, the stronger we sense them. Physical contact is stronger still, and skin contact is strongest." She held her hand an inch from Kelly's face. "I cannot sense you even now, and I am almost touching you. Beryl's skin is not touching yours, and she can sense your presence, though nothing more."
"Are we that... Muted, to your senses," Kelly asked, and Jardin frowned, realizing; he had no idea what they perceived of him.
"Come to think of that, you've never told me, either," he said, and Tempo shrugged.

"It is a difficult question to answer, my friend. How does one explain the awe-inspiring majesty of a gas giant to one who was born blind? In this case, the analogy is not even perfect; even a blind Loroi can see through the eyes of another. I suppose I should ask; what do you perceive when we make contact with you?"

Jardin bit his lip for a moment. "I see you. When we touch, I can feel a kind of... It's like an electrostatic snap in my mind, which I know makes no sense, but it's that sensation. You know that, I trust?" Tempo nodded, and Jardin continued. "Right. There's that snap, and then I am keenly aware of your presence... Kind of a surety, in fact. When I close my eyes, though, I can see you - your outline, anyway... You're all different colors."
Tempo's eyebrows raised, and he elaborated, "Fireblade is like a slice of Fireblade-shaped star-fire," he emphasized, nodding to the red-headed Unsheathed, who raised her lips in a grin of approval. "Beryl is a cool blue. You're a kind of warm fuschia; Talon is aggressive orange. I saw Spiral once, when I was knocked the hell out on that space station and she was dragging my ass; she's kind of a, a pale, lemony yellow. I've never touched Reed's skin as far as I can remember, or if I have, I haven't closed my eyes whilst doing it. I can also sort-of get an understanding of your moods, through trial and error; the patterns and colors I see when you're touching me kind of... Change. Pulsate... When Fireblade tried to probe my mind, it was like she was a blazing inferno, like looking into the heart of a blast furnace... Then it exploded, and I passed out."

Jardin snorted, and looked up at Fireblade. "What was that like for you," he asked, and Fireblade paused mid-breath, as if considering.
"It felt rather like running at full speed and slamming headfirst into a solid wall," she said. "I could sense you, certainly, I could feel your mind, but everything it held was locked away as if in an impenetrable vault. When I attempted to breach that vault, your mind... Lashed back at mine, as if I were attempting to probe a powerful telepath and she did not take kindly to it. You screamed, in rage I think, or perhaps agony, I could not tell. You passed from consciousness, and I was left dazed, reeling, with a mind-numbing pain in my head. Stillstorm ordered us to try again half an hour later, with you still insensate, but the result was the same. We could learn nothing from the attempt - except that to attempt to forcibly probe your mind was painful and fruitless."

Jardin nodded, and bit his lip, thinking about what Fireblade said. "Yeah, that... Was not a pleasant experience," he said, and Fireblade smirked.
"Interrogation seldom is. Usually, it is only deeply unpleasant for one of the parties involved, however." She nodded at Alexander, who nodded back, then he looked over, frowning.
"You know, I never thought to ask - Tempo, you're a better telepath than Fireblade is. Why weren't you the one trying to probe my mind?"

Tempo smiled at him. "Simple: I refused. As the diplomatic officer, I had authority over matters of non-violent contact with other races, not Stillstorm. I would have treated you as the shipwrecked survivor you were. Stillstorm, however, believed that you, your vessel, and the bodies of your crewmates had been manufactured by the Umiak, as you know... It is not her purpose to be diplomatic or reasonable, of course, it is her job to bring destruction to our enemies. We... Could not agree upon your exact status. We quarreled. She settled the matter by having me escorted to my office and confined there, while she recruited the next-best telepaths aboard the ship to attempt to interrogate you in my stead."

Alex snorted. He'd been treated quite rudely by her, and Kelly, still embracing Beryl, was looking at him; as was Tempo.
He smirked, and sighed. "Good old Stillstorm. I kind of miss her."

The Loroi in the cabin all laughed, and Alex shook his head. "I really kind of do, though. Sure, she's a hateful, spiteful xenophobic paranoid who probably still doesn't trust me all the way, but..."
"I think know what you mean," Tempo said, with a nod. "As of the last that the crew of Retribution had heard, Task Group 51 was still intact, and Tempest with Stormwind commanding her was still the flagship."
"Good," Jardin said, and Tempo nodded.

"Indeed. Now, to answer your question, and thence, Amelia's, we can sense your minds through sanzai, if we touch you. I do not know that the visual metaphors you use are appropriate; perhaps, as you have no sanzai senses yourself, it is how your mind interprets an alien sensory experience. It is -"
Alex cut her off, raising her hand and shaking her head. "I am not speaking in metaphor," he said. "When you touch me, that is very literally what happens to me. I perceive your outlines through my sense of sight."
Tempo furrowed her brow, and raised an eyebrow at him, then turned to Kelly. "I wonder... Would you be amenable to an experiment," she asked, holding her hand up. Kelly stared at Tempo's hand, bit her lip, and nodded.
"Okay. What do I do?"
"Take my hand, and close your eyes," Tempo added, and Kelly sucked in a breath, nodding. She parted from Beryl, rolling her shoulders, bracing herself, and reached out, taking Tempo's hand.

Kelly sucked in a quick breath, her eyes going wide. "Wow; you're not joking. I feel like I've been scuffling around my grandmother's living room in a Christmas sweater for an hour and just headbutted a lamp post," she said with a laugh. "Okay, here goes.."
Kelly sucked in another breath; deep, slow, and closed her eyes; then her jaw dropped. "Holy shit," she murmured. "Like, no - he's not exaggerating," she said, looking to the sides, then up and down. "I can see you, in outline." She moved left and right, carefully. "And it's... It's not like I'm seeing you in my 'mind's eye' dominating my 'view' or some shit like that; no, I see the literal outline of your body, in my field of view, when I point my eyes at you. When I look away, it's just like I'm looking away from you. I can see you, perceive you, in three dimensions... Just, only you, because, well, my eyes are closed."

"Fascinating," Tempo said, quietly. "To try to elaborate... I can sense your presence, now that we are touching. I would not ascribe visual qualities to it, although..." Tempo closed her eyes, and shook her head. "I do not perceive you visually in the way that you perceive me," she said, and opened her eyes. "But yes, I sense your presence, your location. Even if I look away from you, I know exactly where you are, in the way that I would another Loroi; I also can... Sense the presence of your mind. I cannot make much sense of it, and it seems futile to attempt to discuss the particulars without a common frame of reference. I can sense considerably more than your mere presence, but nothing which is of concrete utility if I wished to, say, probe your mind for information you were unwilling to provide, or to understand an experience you have had and were failing to convey verbally. I might liken what I can sense to flavors, perhaps, or to the subconscious understanding of the general state of one's vessel gained through experience, but without the instant context of what I perceive when I touch the mind of another of any other race. I could learn, I believe, to determine through trial-and-error, what different broad emotional states and moods feel like; to know the difference between anger and boredom and rage and mirth, for instance - but only through experience. And it would be unique to you, Amelia; I have, I believe, some perception of what Alexander's states are like, but I cannot liken your states to his in any meaningful sense."

Kelly digested that information, biting her lip and nodding. She let go of Tempo's hand, stepping back and settling into her seat, shaking her head. "Wow. That's..." She shook her head.
"A hell of a trip, right," Jardin asked, smiling, and Kelly nodded back at him.
"Right... But you and Fireblade did this - like, the full thing, right? With the help of those giant robots?" She looked between Jardin and Fireblade, and Jardin scratched his head.
"Um... It was..."

"It was not like a sanzai communication," Fireblade clarified. "It was... Different; Jardin described it as transcendental, and it was, but it was also alien to me, as it was to him. When we communicate with sanzai, we communicate with one another. It is unlike speech, but not wholly;it is faster, communicating both words, and context, along with images and sounds and sensations."
"Wait, sensations," Kelly asked, and Fireblade nodded. The Yeoman laughed. "Wow. Sex must be incredible for you girls, huh?"
An awkward silence passed for a moment, and Tempo chuckled. "It is... An unusual experience for us, and in truth, somewhat awkward. Let us not discuss something so intimate quite so soon in our acquaintance, yes?"
Kelly blinked, and nodded. "Yeah... Sorry, I... If I'm making you uncomfortable, please, shut me down and correct me right away."

"We shall," Fireblade said, with an amused smirk. "But no, connecting to Jardin through those machines was... Not like sanzai. Sanzai is a form of communication; it is possible to lie through sanzai, if one is a very skilled and very depraved person. When we connected... It was more as if momentarily, our minds merged, then parted again, but remained joined through the machines. I could feel him thinking; we acted, we struck, as one, with perfect coordination. That is not possible, not even with sanzai; even with sanzai, the person on the other end requires time to process anything you tell them. With that, it was more akin to..."
"Akin to our minds running in parallel," Alex said, and Fireblade nodded at him. "It's not like I felt like I was her, but I felt her, perceived her; every beat of her heart, every strain in her muscles, the feedback when her mech was damaged. When we thought, thoughts formed fully in both of our minds; I would think 'he's on my six,' and she would understand that I had a shell on my six; she took aim at him, and I knew to dive out of the way of her shot. It wasn't like we became one person or anything, but..."

"We became, temporarily, fewer than two, but greater than one," Fireblade said. "We struck as one, we acted as one, we thought as two and understood as one thinking for two. It was truly a transcendental experience, one I wish I could revisit," she said, and Jardin nodded.
"Yeah, me too. Sometimes I feel so clumsy, trying to explain myself, or to... To convey to you something I feel about - to say nothing of trying to understand you, where you're coming from..." He looked down for a moment, at the deck of the shuttle. "Maybe that's why we can get along, even when our opinions on certain matters reach a state of irreconcilable loggerheads," he said, and Fireblade nodded.

"It must be," she agreed. "That experience also taught me keenly the difference between you and a male of my own species. It taught me never to underestimate you, never to question your resolve, or commitment. I understood then that, though you perceive us as alien, as we perceive you, at the same time you perceive us as kin. I felt your anger, your outrage, at each Loroi lost in that battle, just as keenly as I feel that of my fellows. I understood then that above all else, you are a warrior, a comrade-in-arms and a true companion. Whatever our differences, biological or philosophical, I understand that such bonds of fellowship are not something you take lightly, and not something you will forsake out of fear, in the name of convenience, or even self-preservation."

Kelly snorted, and grinned. "Damn, Fireblade. That reminds me of an inspiring speech I saw a while back."
Fireblade turned her head, raising her eyebrow. "Oh?"
Kelly nodded, and started to quote. "'Sons of Gondor - of Rohan! My brothers!'" Jardin rolled his eyes. Lord of the Rings. Oh boy, he thought, as Kelly continued, and he began to quote it with her; "'I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me! A day may come when the courage of Men fails; when we forsake our friends, and break all bonds of fellowship; but it is not this day. An hour of wolves, and shattered shields, when the age of Men comes crashing down; but it is not this day!'" Jardin couldn't help getting into it, pumping his fist with his elbow tucked and arm held in front of his chest. "'This day we fight! By all that you hold dear, on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!'"

Fireblade nodded in approval, as Jardin dreaded the moment that was surely soon to come; Beryl looked excited. "That is inspiring," she said, with a grin. "Which nations are Gondor and Rohan? I haven't seen them on any of the maps of Earth; were they subsumed into a larger nation since?"
Jardin took a deep breath, and sighed. "Fireblade's gonna hate this part - that was Aragorn's speech at the Black Gate, from Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. A work of fiction," he said.
Fireblade rolled her eyes, making a sound of disgust, and Kelly snickered. "So I don't suppose I should quote Theoden's 'Ride for Ruin' speech at the Battle of Pellenor Fields, then?"

"Please don't," Fireblade said. "There is only so much I can tolerate having my interest roused, and then told that the story is fabricated in one day. It is, indeed, an inspirational speech, but its impact is wasted to learn that it was falsified."
"Sorry," Kelly said, and Jardin shrugged.
"I wouldn't say it's without utility," he said. Fireblade raised her eyebrow archly, looking at him. "Loroi can use hypothetical similies to express concepts without being excoriated for lying. Even though a good story may be fiction, doesn't mean it's without value - as entertainment, of course, but also to pass on lessons, morals and parables, like... The Boy who Cried Wolf," he said, and Fireblade rolled her eyes.

"I have no interest in hearing another tale of fiction," she said, and Jardin shook his head.
"It's brief, and I think if I recount it, you might understand the point," he offered, and Fireblade sighed.
"If it is brief, I will entertain it, if only to rebut it," she said.
Jardin shrugged. "Fair, okay, so -"

"Hold on," Beryl said. "What is a wolf? It has come up twice now."
"Oh! Here," Kelly said, pulling out her tablet, lifting it to her mouth. "Search: Timber Wolf with man for comparison." She looked at the results, and tapped on one, then turned it around. On the screen was an image of a big North American Timber Wolf - the huge canine, gray-furred coat in the snow, next to a tall-looking woman wearing a jacket and carrying a hunting rifle. "Wolves are canines, pack-hunting predators that can be very dangerous to a lone person. They're mostly extinct these days, outside of certain wildlife preserves and of course, zoos, but their descendants, the domesticated dog, is one of the most common animals on the planet."
Jardin nodded at her, as she showed the image around. "Talon, would you like to see?"
"Sure," the pilot said, and Jardin took her tablet, holding it in front of her. She snorted. "Big. Looks dangerous."

"To you, perhaps," Fireblade said with a smirk, and Jardin snickered.
"Yeah, well... Not all of us can crush a tank with her mind," he said, handing the tablet back to Kelly. "Anyway, the Boy who Cried Wolf; note that this is set in an age before technology more advanced than loose powder firearms, if that; there are no early warning sensors, no drones or electronics of any sort, no radio or remote communication techniques more advanced than running and yelling. There was a boy whose father, uncle, whatever, was a shepherd - a person who herds livestock, and -"
Fireblade rolled her eyes. "Now we must listen to tales of agriculture, as if fiction were not enough?"
"Fireblade, you said you'd entertain the story," Tempo reminded her, and Fireblade nodded.

"So I did. I shall not interrupt again," Fireblade said, and Jardin nodded.
"I could make it a hunter, if that would be more palatable," he offered, and Fireblade raised her eyebrow.
"How... Could you 'make it' a hunter?"
"That's the nature of fiction, especially short parables like this one; they can be adjusted to suit the times, or the audience, without deeply impacting the meaning." Fireblade seemed to mull that over for a second.
"Very well - I am unconvinced you are capable of that, so let us see if you can do it," she said, smirking, challenging him, and Jardin thought for a few moments, recomposing the story.

[Krulle]

Wow, I will need more time to read this than I have right now.
Thank you for having filled my evening with something to do besides household chores (which I love to postpone, if I can).

You are playing into my procrastinator heart!

edited to add: lovely reference to my other beloved SciFi comic.

[sunphoenix]

As always ...these stories entertain IMMENSELY!

I wonder what Ensign Kelly's reaction will be when she learns of Alex Jardin's.. er numerous grey-skinned, half-Loroi children?

That could be the subject of another series of your Stories - "Jardin's Children"...

But NOW... I am inspired to write a portion of the tale myself...

So I need a few questions answered...
1) What is Jardin's Loroi Rank and his Terran Rank?
2) Are you planning to have their shuttle land on the moon's surface or dock at an orbital facility?

I intend to write a tale involving an encounter with a certain Loroi when they arrive at the Moon who is Also a first contact Loroi 'Ambassador' {snicker}... the TSA - Cydonia, with her rescued crew of the foundered Loroi Cruiser - Argent Fire has finally arrived at Earth ...after three long years!

I guess you really don't have to hold on writing more until I finish... but it would be cute if anything I wrote was alluded to in your subsquent stories... {chuckle}.

..I'll get writing tonight!!

[ShadowDragon8685]

As always ...these stories entertain IMMENSELY!

I wonder what Ensign Kelly's reaction will be when she learns of Alex Jardin's.. er numerous greypurple-skinned, half-Loroi children?

That could be the subject of another series of your Stories - "Jardin's Children"...

That was a very amusing anecdote from the point of view of a fly on the wall in Fragile Storm's office hearing her get a report on it, but I imagine that Jardin himself feels very uncomfortable about it. He probably doesn't like to speak about it at all to or around the Loroi, or indeed anybody, but to put this in perspective, Jardin is keenly aware of how the situation would look if the genders involved were reversed - and suddenly it stops being funny.

He's not really furious about it or anything, and he doesn't want to raise a fuss, but he's very uncomfortable with the whole situation. I expect he, Beryl and Tempo had a very awkward conversation wherein he had to explain to them the concepts of informed consent and rape. It would be a very uncomfortable conversation indeed, partly because I suspect the concept of rape is indeed utterly alien to the Loroi; the idea of a male forcing himself on one of the warriors is all-but-absurd, and they probably wouldn't take it seriously (like we sadly treat female-on-male rape IRL unseriously,) in the context of civilian Loroi, and the idea of a male objecting to sex would be like the concept of an fruit objecting to being eaten. This is one of those subjects where the ability to touch him and mind-meld, Vulcan style, would really help.

Also, on the subject of the procreating itself, I'm saying that there was something in that stuff he drank that overcame all the obvious biological barriers.

But NOW... I am inspired to write a portion of the tale myself...

So I need a few questions answered...
1) What is Jardin's Loroi Rank and his Terran Rank?
2) Are you planning to have their shuttle land on the moon's surface or dock at an orbital facility?

1: He doesn't actually have a rank in the Loroi structure, as he's not part of their military, but for diplomatic purposes he's been pegged at being equivalent to a Torrai Torret, primarily to make it easy for Fireblade and others to chastise and discipline any Loroi crew who disrespect him, and so hardasses like Stillstorm can't trivially ignore him, but also because he was the nominal commander of Bellarmine's mission. The other Scout Corps advance crews whom the Loroi rounded up and contacted to send home didn't interact with Jardin beyond bringing home word that he was alive, probably a year or two before the story. When he returned leading that corvette fleet, his TCA rank was still Ensign, but Admiral Callan decided to retroactively promote him to full Captain as of 14 July 2160, the date when Bellarmine was destroyed, to align his rank with the importance of the work he's been carrying out and the relative weight the Loroi have attached to him.
-Also, fun fact, I discovered that if an MIA is presumed and declared KIA and death benefits are paid out, then the MIA crawls back outtawoods, the family has to pay it back!
2: They're landing the shuttle at the Luna-9 Small Craft Drydock facility's shuttlebay (one of them). A cruiser, human or Loroi, would be too large for those drydocks, and would need to be at an orbital facility. I'm also busy writing the next bit - the sight of a Loroi shuttle already in the bay is intended to be ominous, or at least spell out trouble. If you wanted to have some action set concurrently, it would be more convienant for me if you could hold off any meetings until after Alex settles down to do paperwork, or alternatively, you could have Loroi shipwreck survivors being taken to Fragile Storm?

I intend to write a tale involving an encounter with a certain Loroi when they arrive at the Moon who is Also a first contact Loroi 'Ambassador' {snicker}... the TSA - Cydonia, with her rescued crew of the foundered Loroi Cruiser - Argent Fire has finally arrived at Earth ...after three long years!

I guess you really don't have to hold on writing more until I finish... but it would be cute if anything I wrote was alluded to in your subsquent stories... {chuckle}.

..I'll get writing tonight!!

Heh, I don't object, and I can try to allude to it. I'd imagine that if the TCA managed to bring in a shipful of Loroi survivors and their wreck, they were probably not detained in Earth orbit, and probably not anywhere in the Sol system, or if they were, it would be in a black-site somewhere waaaaaaay out in the sticks, like, in orbit of Uranus if not farther out in the Oort belt, dogging around Charon or something?

[sunphoenix]

Ah..so you are going to have some action at the Orbital port..ok. I can hold off.

The situation with the Cydonia is this.. the Argent Fire was in a battle with a Umiak patrol ship.. I'll have to go back to the actual detail of the PbP to get the actual ship sizes involved.. but the loroi crew narrowly escaped on their shuttle..NOT a Highland by the way. The Argent Fire went up in an antimater explosion. Their Slipper "Lillit" - shuttle was picked up by the Terran ship Cydonia... and then things got interesting!!!

Ah found it the Argent Fire was a~ Blaze "Totor", Class - Frigate (FF) being pursued by two Umiak Hegemony - Light Destroyer, Class - Frigates.

The Argent Fire had been dispatched by Stillstorm to seek Jardin's Earth before he reached the Loroi Capital to try to find out the veracity of his tale... onboard she sent one of the Teidar that had assisted Fireblade in interrogating him... Teidar Sezon Sonnidezi~ "Stormrage" {the blonde teidar int eh room at the time}. Of the two Teidar onboard the Argent Fire Stormrage was the only survivor and all of the Torrai Command staff were killed and only their captain~ Soroin Mallas Beinrezei~ "Copper Spear" survived~ for a long time severely injured and mostly comatose because Stromrage disobeyed orders to rescue her from the smashed bridge before fleeing the Argent Fire. The Loroi have only Listel, Mizol, doranzer, and Sorin castes..no pilots at all and one Teidar trying to protect them all. The chief diplomat~ Mizol Parat Beganenzit~ "Twilight Saber" and "Stormrage have been in a love/hate relationship trying to maintain order over the other Loroi vying often times on who has better authority in the situtation.. but indeed 'technically' the Argent Fire's mission was a diplomatic one...so mostly the Mizol was in charge...but with the Umiak hunting them it got intense.

Anyhow the survivors bereft of their ship and indeed at the Terran's mercy are rescued.. and complicating the matters the Mizol declares the nature of their mission as a diplomatic Envoy to Earth mentioning the rescue of 'Captain' Alexander Jardin of the Bellermarine, which changes the nature of their rescue indeed. So the human Captain~ Jeremiah Blake is put in the unexpected role of host to the diplomatic party of ambassadors. Unfortunatly... the Cydonia is not big enough for much separation of the 32 Loroi, ulp.. that is 33.. as one of the Loroi gave birth to a male Loroi child in transit, form the General crew of Cydonia.. the Loroi have to learn to become very tollerant of the Human's customs in a fully manned ship of males and female humans.

The adventures they survive getting back to earth are many and harrowing.. but they returned perhaps a month or so after Jardin's arrival with the Cydonia modified with Umiak tech from a salvage opperation that the combined crew of the Loroi Doranzer and Cydonia Engineers managed to repari and modify some of the Cydonia systems with Umiak tech to limp the embattled ship eventually home...

One could say the Loroi have 'adapted' to the human culture after a fashion after being soo long in their company.. and when word was finally received by Torrai command of their susrvival and arrival on earht and the ...nature of some of the changes in their envoy party.. they were somewhat considered... 'contaminated' with Earth culture and so.. they wanted them to wait on Earth until Jardin's flotilla of also equally 'contaminated' Loroi trainees begin their return to Loroi space to keep them all in the same group so that the Diadem Council can ascertain if any reeducation is needed before any are returned to the Loroi rank and file..so to speak.

I don't want to give anything away.. but 'Stormrage' has a reason to visit Earth involving family... and the scene I intend to write is her meeting Captain Jardin and his Circle again after so many years to 'appologize' for his unseemly treatment when they first met so many years ago now; because she has 'gotten it'.. about humans and understands them possibly as well as any of those in Jardin's circle and her "relationship" with humans all started with Jardin.

Like I said I don't want to give anything away but my intent is not to contradict anything in your tales.. but to expand them to include the Cydonia's misadventures as well! As Stormrage is not the perfect Teidar that Fireblade is.. she is unique... and I think her story would be interesting to tell!

[Hālian]

Now I wonder what Malidasaria has been up to since we saw her last…