Page 231: Fire-Blade!

[OwlBear33]

[OwlBear33]

looks like this was a tough fight for Fireblade

also those are some cool umiak ceramics

[Solemn]

The Umiak seem pretty skilled with decorative textiles. They also seem interested in decorating their own bodies, several look like they have tattooes. Are we going to see one wearing decorative clothing in the future?

I am curious about the decorative pottery as well, but I am hesitant to ask. For some reason it seems like the answer will be along the lines of "those were handcrafted from clay gathered from worlds along the formerly inhabited worlds along Tithric space. They contain handwritten prayers and good wishes from all surviving members of the entire Tithric species, distributed to the fleet by the Ukhtkhk-31-tktktk Rescue Project, a refugee rescue and relief foundation. Every Tuesday one orphan's gratitude card is pulled out of the jar and read in full as the ship enters a scheduled seventy-eight second weeping ceremony. Weeping is permitted to continue for a generous three second margin before disciplinary measures are taken."

[Turrosh Mak]

Aww Fireblade.

Slaughtering Umiak by the dozens has tuckered her out!

Sweet dreams, Psycho-killer. Sleep well...

Just kidding. It has no doubt been a hard fight for her. The situation must be relatively safe if she felt confident enough to remove her headpiece and rest. I don't think the other Loroi would have left her alone if she were injured in any way.

[Krulle]

I hope it's just exhaustion and not the result of injuries.
Damn.
(my hope is based on her not having been pulled over to the "infirmary" where Alex had been dropped.)

[sunphoenix]

Jardin is an explorer, a seeker of the thus far Unknown to mankind. That comes with a certain amount of appreciation for the discovery of Sentience and culture in any form discovered!
For almost ALL of human history we have viewed ourselves as ALONE in all Creation as the sole Sentience in the Universe... but to find new intelligent Star-Farring life and culture ~ only to see it destroyed ... partially by Your own hands.... that's a lot! To an explorer finding sentient life only to have a hand in its destruction ~ That IS A LOT!
Alex has seen the inside of the Umiak Warship... it was not a "shop of horrors".. this was a device designed built and crewed by an intelligent sapient culture of beings... different yes but brilliant enough to craft its own conveyance to the stars! There is something we share in common with such beings regardless of their appearance.. they are a culture of thinking reasoning beings!
I think it was Carl Segan that said it was highly unlikely any Extra-terrestrial Intelligent life we might encounter in the stars would likely look NOTHING like us humans for a myriad of reasons.
The Umiak are not monsters.. Alex has conversed with them... he sees the artifacts of their culture.. and the bodies of their slain. ITS A LOT. I don't think any 'Man of Peace' who seeks the unknown to understand would feel any less ... distressed!

AND ...

OH The ANGUISH!!! Reed, but the lovely and So lively, So sweet Spiral! {Sob!!}

[SVlad]

I don't think many of us could feel sorry for the loss of Umiaks under such conditions.

[Cloun]

At least the Umiak (if they survive) can sell souvenir blankets and drums to galactic tourists. I still think they are slightly more relatable side; all of their societal sins are things humans have experienced/tend to fall into ourselves, whereas even though the Loroi are objectively the tamer empire to side with, there is always going to be a fundamental difference in behavior just based off how telepathy works.

That being said, I wonder what the sequence of events in the engineering spaces were, because at one point Beryl did mention that Spiral's team had secured it. I'm assuming a bunch of savvy engineers survived decompression and decided to rush engineering to give any remaining crew a fighting chance?

[QuakeIV]

I don't think many of us could feel sorry for the loss of Umiaks under such conditions.

I agree tbh seemed a little over the top, guess it could be fuel for character development though. IE starts out hyper empathetic towards everything and then becomes less so over time as he learns the nature of the things in question

[grixit]

Do i see a plot twist coming-- hostility melted through shared trauma, ending in an unexpected romance?

[Arioch]

Surely a person might be expected to experience strong emotions the first time he ever killed someone up close, regardless of whether that person deserved killing.

He also just saw the mauled faces of two people he knew and liked.

[Solemn]

I don't think many of us could feel sorry for the loss of Umiaks under such conditions.

I agree tbh seemed a little over the top, guess it could be fuel for character development though. IE starts out hyper empathetic towards everything and then becomes less so over time as he learns the nature of the things in question

I'm not sure how much time has passed but he seems like he's in the reaction cycle instead of high on fighting steam. I never took any lives but I imagine you feel at least as bad as I did after a few particularly bad high school fisticuffs incidents when processing the reaction afterwards. (Other guy started and deserved it). It reads like he's just trying to parse his reaction with an analytical framing. It is normal for some people to attribute irrational emotional turbulence to rational principles.

I also don't think you're considering Alex's full position here. As readers we spent years with the Loroi, but for Alex it was only a few days, most of which were spent either undressed on the rack or in semi-solitary confinement. His time shaking hands and talking to them was then mediated by the fact that the only non-Loroi formally recognized ambassador he has access to has cautioned him that they are not his friends and are actively attempting to deceive him. Lovebombing is a pretty well known technique that's especially used on people who've undergone a period of social deprivation. The Loroi have said that his near-isolation was done to him deliberately for reasons as yet unexplained, but brushed off as for his own good.

Alex has more firsthand experience of the Umiak than the past few pages. The first time he ever saw one, it extended apparently sincere sorrow at the concept of blood boiling into vacuum and offered a deeply respectful olive branch to its mortal enemy even at a moment when it was certain it could crush them in a blow-for-blow contest. It then told several now-verified truths, which the Loroi called "lies," regarding the immediate strategic position of the Loroi in this war.

He also had Fireblade's nightmare, which he has the aforementioned cause to suspect was a social engineering attempt. In that nightmare, he saw hardtroops whose limbs were replaced with nightmarish mechanical weaponry. The hardtroop that he blew apart was not armed with anything of the sort. Its sole remaining arm was a manipulator limb, which did not close upon his skull at the rate one would expect of a combat-purpose tool. It is reasonable to speculate that the vacuum-safe, manipulator-limbed creature was assigned to maintenance when the ship was attacked and it was sucked into the vacuum of space. I expect he could sympathize with its position and understand the idea that such a person would end up in combat against a non-enemy.

Then there's the fact that the Umiak captured the shuttle at all. That seems like an indicator that the Umiak were not responsible for destroying the Bellarmine. Especially from Alex's PoV.

Alex was told that the Umiak aren't normally communicative in battle, and so might have a knee jerk response of answering comms with plasma. That's a mixed bag since Alex already saw that the Umiak in Naam were the sort to address a standoff by opening communications out of curiosity. And Alex does know that the aggressor did not respond to Bell's hails before opening fire, nor immediately afterwards, since Beryl gave him the blow-by-blow from Tempest's sensor logs. That also implies that whoever did it did not communicate the encounter to the Umiak command ship, something that any vessel working with the Umiak to secure the system would have most likely done immediately.

Alex observed their combat and saw that Umiak beams are green, but he also saw that the Umiak have a massive preference towards torpedoes. If an Umiak ship was far enough from battle to be hanging around the Bell, it would most likely have been a missile ship hoping to pick off fleeing survivors with longer ranged torpedoes, just as he saw in Leido Crossroads. That wouldn't put any obligation on the vessel to use its torpedoes for the first strike, but consider the fact that Stillstorm used a comparatively rare Loroi torpedo when it came time to scuttle the Bell, because it is the right tool for the job. Instead of four consecutive plasma beams which did not physically destroy all evidence of the Bellarmine, an Umiak ship that intended to wipe out the Bell would have used its close range weaponry, possibly stopping after the first shot bisected her, and then either captured the ship's remains or performed a more complete detonation with their superabundant torpedoes.

And capturing a derelict Loroi shuttle has implications towards the capture of a derelict Bell regardless of that initial shot. Alex has now seen just how insanely risky it was for the Umiak to capture a Loroi vessel, but he has also seen that they attempted to do so anyways. Despite the fact that Beryl informed him that just one Loroi officer such as a Teidar Pallan or a Mizol Parat would be cause enough to scuttle the vessel regardless of the find, they captured a command shuttle--the most likely kind of derelict to have command staff of those descriptions aboard. They would surely be far more likely to attempt to capture a derelict non-loroi vessel, especially one that appeared at a strategically important juncture, than a derelict Loroi vessel due to the aforementioned. So, either the Umiak have a combat doctrine that suggests that capturing prizes is worth significant risk, or the Umiak are extremely individualized. Kikitik-27 does seem like a strong argument for individuality-above-doctrine, perhaps this Umiak commander is likewise a rugged individual who makes his own rules and happens to have ruled incorrectly. But since the Loroi appear to have been so ready and capable of executing a counterboarding action, it would seem more likely to me in his position that the rule is that the Umiak capture what they can, and err on the side of capture even in the case of Loroi vessels. So far as he has seen an Umiak attacker would have captured the derelict Bell, even if they had been the ones to fire on her. They also would have killed him, for science. So him being alive is evidence that the bugs didn't sink his ship. This is something that he was considering on-panel even while on the bridge of the Tempest, before Kikitik-27's dialog completed, just from the bug's apparent lack of recognition of the ship. It has doubtless plagued him for every single sleepless night that he spent in the Tempest's brig, and is probably the reason he takes the Pocket Historian's vague suggestions as seriously as he does.

So if Alex has spent a week considering all the angles from which the Umiak are likely not his enemy, while considering the unfriendliness of the Loroi, and is now on the down cycle from his time killing said not-enemy while pressganged into wearing the uniform of his former captors, AND he has reason to believe that he's no longer actively at the center of immediate physical crisis... it seems normal that he'd let his head swim.

His position isn't a soldier killing the enemy of his nation. It's an American sailor who was impressed into the Royal Navy into fighting the French in 1812. With a gun to his back, no less.

[Moon Moth]

The drums are a nice touch. It's been so long, I forget how much support there is in the forums and Insider, but I've had headcanon for a while of Umiak fleets passing the time by engaging in ship-to ship rap battles and impromptu slam poetry competitions.

[Urist]

The drums are a nice touch. It's been so long, I forget how much support there is in the forums and Insider, but I've had headcanon for a while of Umiak fleets passing the time by engaging in ship-to ship rap battles and impromptu slam poetry competitions.

Well, going by the Umiak 'work cadence' in Page 209, I think that 'sea shanties' are something that the Shells understand.
"Weigh, hey, and up [the vessel in question] rises,
weigh, hey, and up— hey, is the air in [this compartment] getting thin or is it just me?"

[dude123nice]

I don't think many of us could feel sorry for the loss of Umiaks under such conditions.

I agree tbh seemed a little over the top, guess it could be fuel for character development though. IE starts out hyper empathetic towards everything and then becomes less so over time as he learns the nature of the things in question

I'm not sure how much time has passed but he seems like he's in the reaction cycle instead of high on fighting steam. I never took any lives but I imagine you feel at least as bad as I did after a few particularly bad high school fisticuffs incidents when processing the reaction afterwards. (Other guy started and deserved it). It reads like he's just trying to parse his reaction with an analytical framing. It is normal for some people to attribute irrational emotional turbulence to rational principles.

<snip>

Don't tell me you've fallen for the lies those bugs spout. Their just insects who forcibly transform other races into living weapons. And we have see hardtroop[[ers with guns instead of limbs alreay. The weapons in the flashback were simply efficient melee weapons. You can keep being a fan of the bugs all you want, you'll be awfully dissapointed.

[sunphoenix]

I never claimed Alex was some bleeding heart weebo, nor that he would not do his best to serve mankind in the face of violence, nor infer that he should have hesitated shooting and attacking the Umiak who posed a clear and present threat to him and his companion's lives... he did not! And he does a HELL OF A LOT MORE VIOLENT and unpleasant things to Umiak as future patreon pages show!

All I was pointing out is that Alex is/was foremost an explorer ostensibly seeking peaceful contact with other sentient civilizations... until they try to kill him. His distress at the unfortunate situation and circumstances of him being the sole survivor of his unprovoked and murdered crew have forced him to take a side ... with the unfortunate consequences of defending his life from aliens he would likely have preferred a more peaceful first contact. Indeed Alex was more leaning to side with the Loroi from previously documented statements with his superiors long before meeting either of the warring stellar empires people. Certainly, Alex would be fervently against slave status of Earth or it's environment being destroyed from catastrophic resource exploitation by a stellar empire WHOEVER they were... like most humans! He would and has opposed such forces and goals if thus far in the color pages indirectly.

Also, Alex was not press-ganged into doing anything... that is conjecture. Beryl ASKED if he would join forces with the Loroi... she Never said what they would do if he decided not to help. You assume they would have reacted like bullies and forced him or shot him dead for refusal when its just as likely they could have simply left him safely secured within the Shuttle while they did their counterboarding action ~ whatever the results.

I could point out other interactions Alex has ... or will have with the Umiak but that is spoiler material from patreon so I'll rest my point of view here.

[Moon Moth]

I wonder what that is on the floor next to Fireblade's foot? My first guess was that it looks like some sort of pry tool..

[Urist]

I wonder what that is on the floor next to Fireblade's foot? My first guess was that it looks like some sort of pry tool..

Pretty sure that's her psi amplifier.

[QuakeIV]

Surely a person might be expected to experience strong emotions the first time he ever killed someone up close, regardless of whether that person deserved killing.

He also just saw the mauled faces of two people he knew and liked.

Well sure, but
>wakes up from getting his head crushed by weird bug mech
>sees the mauled faces of two people he knew and liked
>oh my le gosh, those poor bugs

[SaintofM]

I was expecting her to be completely OP, but something knocked her out.