Fic: Draw the Sword (Forget the Scabbard) [2/12?]
As usual, Clone 1-1E, otherwise known as Yellow Five, went through the start-up sequence with half an ear to the transmission chatter, otherwise silent himself. As usual, the other clones were going through start-up with what their doctor called “exuberance” and their occasional overseer called “idiocy”. E himself thought it was nervousness. After all, it wasn’t every day their squadron got a new commander. Up until now, they’d relied on flash-learning to teach them all they needed to know, but there was only so much flash-learning could explain, and flying was one of those things.
“So?” a voice crackled over the intercom. “What do think?”
It was from F, on a private channel. E’s eye twitched a bit. “Can’t you wait? We haven’t even flown against the captain yet, I’d like to wait until afterwards.”
F just snorted. “I’d like to have your first impressions now. We have a minute before the sim starts, especially since I is being difficult again.”
E rolled his eyes. “Well, she wasn’t expecting to train clones, obviously. It might bother her - she definitely looked dismayed when she saw us. On the other hand, she’s been nothing but professional since she saw us, so maybe she was just surprised.”
F grunts, and the line is silent for a moment. “You’re right. We don’t have enough info.”
Drily, E says, “Well, I told you so. Now turn back to squadron frequency, the sim will be starting soon. You know B will be on us like white on rice if we’re not tuned in.”
F sniggered. “The hell, man, where do you pick up these phrases?”
E sniffed. “Unlike you, I actually listen to G’s stupid holos. They’re very educational when it comes to language.”
“Whatever,” F said, the intercom clicked off as the sim began. E turned on the general channel, and heard nothing by static - they were still in ‘hyperspace’, after all. The silence was broken almost immediately upon reversion to realspace, as G said, a little impressed, “Wow, holos don’t do that thing justice.”
E outright laughed as the other clones gave their assent in one way or another. The second Death Star was straight ahead, Endor’s moon slightly aft, and all around Imperial and Rebel forces are engaging. A immediately orders s-foils locked in attack positions, and as E leads his flight behind A’s, a joyful, eager grin spread across his face. Captain Dunter wasn’t going to know what hit her…
~~~~~~~~~~~`
In a simulator room three doors down from Yellow Squadron, Syal Antilles is also smiling. It’s a placid, sweet smile, and in a day or so, when the leader of the Galactic Alliance Guard is looking at the sim surveillance tapes for the first time, he’ll think she looks a bit too simple to have turned traitor. This is dead wrong, not the least because Jacen Solo has always been ridiculously bad at reading and predicting facial expressions and body language.
To someone familiar with Corellians in general and Wedge Antilles in particular, that small, pleasant smile is a massive harbinger of doom and destruction. Frankly, a Corellian with a clear, calm look on their face is the equivalent of a Wookie telling you he’s going to rip your arms out of your sockets - fair warning for the totally disproportionate response to follow. Syal Antilles is really angry - and when Syal Antilles is really angry, things happen. Granted, the last time Syal Antilles got really angry, the only result of her planning was the local schoolyard bully spent a good year twitching at the slightest sound, but that only means that Syal is about to break into the big leagues in a big way. One day, not that far into the future, the name “Syal Antilles” is going to cause a shudder to crawl down the collective spine of GAI…
…but right now, Syal is only a young woman wearing the uniform of Starfighter Command and a captain’s pips, with a false name and an all-too-real smile on her face. And right now, she’s going to make twelve new fighter pilots cry like little girls.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
The embarrassing way was also the simple way. Hobbie and Wes just jumped the first guy who came in - a guard carrying a meal tray. Poor Tyr Doonis, new operative of Galactic Alliance Intelligence, never knew what hit him. One minute, he was just carrying a tray of generic prison slop, the next thing he knew, he’d been slammed in the head with aforementioned tray of slop and was down for the count in one hit.
Ironically, Janson had been more focused on getting the tray jammed into the door than actually beating up their captor, but after he finished that, he took a moment to pose. “Am I good or what?” he asked rhetorically, and Hobbie rolled his eyes as he squatted down and began rifling through the unconscious man’s pockets.
“You’re brilliant, Janson. It takes real skill to pop some kid on the head with a tray.”
“No,” Janson corrected Hobbie as he bent down, “it takes real skill to pop some kid on the head with a tray while trying to jam a door open with aforesaid tray while not breaking his neck. Find what we’re looking for?”
Hobbie nodded, and as he lifted up what he’d been looking for, he smiled. Janson winced, and said, “Sithspit, that’s creepy.”
Hobbie paid no attention to him, being far more concerned with what he was doing to poor Tyr Doonis. “All right, I’m done. Let’s go.”
Wes just made an elaborate flourish towards the jammed door and followed Hobbie as they walked through the door without a backward glance. After they passed through, he grabbed the tray and swung it back and forth before him experimentally, grinning. “So, what do you wanna bet I can take out everyone here with just this tray?”
Hobbie just shrugged. “Easy call, considering the caliber of people Intel is hiring these days. I think you can take out everyone here with that tray in less than half an hour.”
Wes just grinned wider.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
All things considered, Syal thought they hadn’t done too badly. For rookies, anyway. It seemed they had a rudimentary grasp of small-unit tactics, and had even attempted to use them on her - how precocious of them! A failure, of course, but a valiant failure. And then they had acquitted themselves pretty well in marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat - well, at least they could throw a decent punch. The concepts of kicking, gouging, and biting seem not to have occurred to them until Syal had demonstrated. But that was flash-learning for you: it could tell you how to do things, but actually doing them was another matter.
Still, they were good boys from what Syal could see. They had lots of potential, even if they’d picked up a bunch of bad habits from their supposed “education”. They’d already passed the first test, which was “when beaten, figure out what went wrong and angrily plot ineffectual revenge”. At the thought of their depressed, downtrodden faces and outraged aura, Syal felt a warm, benevolent feeling rise up within her and she smiled, just like any older sister does when faced with the prospect of tormenting a younger sibling - or, in her case, twelve of them.
It was quite terrifying.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
On the other end of that terrifying smile, E was experiencing a feeling he would later learn to call incandescent rage. In his peripheral vision, he could see the others looked like he felt: sick and a little shell-shocked and quietly, furiously angry. A’s right eye had developed a tic, and J had managed to shove himself in front of I, probably to talk him down from just trying to kill Dunter outright. They had lost. They had lost badly.
Altogether, it had taken Captain Dunter less than ten minutes to break up their supposedly-foolproof flight formation (“It always worked before,” A had protested helplessly) before hunting them down one by one like some kind of implacable, unstoppable hunting thing. Maybe some kind of cat, E didn’t know, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, it had been a massacre.
It hadn’t been the end, either. Then they had gone to the shooting gallery for a marksmanship evaluation - that hadn’t gone so badly, until Captain Dunter had said in her calm, pleasant voice that their stances were wrong, and could you please look over here while she demonstrated the correct way? Then she’d utterly decimated the shooting gallery.
The hand-to-hand combat evaluations didn’t bear thinking about. E didn’t need flash-learning to know that however wiry and compact he and his brothers were, they should not have lost so badly to a woman just as slender and small as them. And to add insult to injury, she’d been interrogating them all the while: what were their names (they didn’t have any), how old they were (they’d been decanted three weeks ago), how were they taught (flash-learning), how was the command structure set up (any way you like, ma’am), what were their specialties (none of them had bothered to answer her at this point).
And now Captain Dunter was saying something about a room inspection. E didn’t even flinch - he just got into line with the others and marched down to their barracks, stoic in the face of certain doom. In his ear he could hear F say, loud enough for him to hear, but quiet enough that Dunter couldn’t, “She’s not a woman, she’s a demon.”
But he wasn’t quiet enough, because E could see the demon smile wider.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
It was just after lunchtime at Galactic Alliance Intelligence Headquarters, and as usual, Shalla Nelprin was killing time by bouncing a rubber ball off the wall between her and her next-door neighbor. Her neighbor was also her boss, and Shalla actually had a very specific purpose for playing wallball on that wall: It was called the “going home early” game. She was finished with her work for the day, you see.
Shalla had been doing this for ten minutes straight, and as she looked at a clock, she grinned and began silently counting down from ten. Ten, nine, eight, seven…
At seven, there was a pause redolent with killing intent. At five, something inside the other office slammed, and Shalla grinned wider. Three, two, one…
Right on time, her boss slammed open her door and said, in a tight voice that indicated either constipation or incipient insanity, “What. Do. You. WANT. Nelprin?”
She just shrugged, slow as molasses. “Nothing. I’m just bored.”
A muscle in her boss’s cheek twitched. “Don’t you have any work to do?” His voice broke on the word work.
Shalla paused for a minute, loving the dramatic impact. Wait for it, wait for it… “Nope. All done.”
This time, his whole face twitched. Oh, Kelvin, she though sadly, must you make it so easy for me? This only happens every day.
There was another pause, but it wasn’t dramatic at all. It was the pause of someone whose brain was breaking.
“Go. Just…go,” he finally said, voice shaking, and Shalla let loose with her most blinding smile yet as she got up out of her chair, ready to go.
“Oh, Kelvin, you’re the best boss yet. Wanna come with?” she cooed to the man as she passed. He didn’t say anything, but she didn’t expect him to. Face would have come, of course, but Face, that unspeakable piece of bantha poodoo, had gotten out while the going was good two months ago, and she’d been stuck with her current boss ever since. Well, that was going to change very shortly…
“Bye!” she called as she left. She didn’t look back.
“So?” a voice crackled over the intercom. “What do think?”
It was from F, on a private channel. E’s eye twitched a bit. “Can’t you wait? We haven’t even flown against the captain yet, I’d like to wait until afterwards.”
F just snorted. “I’d like to have your first impressions now. We have a minute before the sim starts, especially since I is being difficult again.”
E rolled his eyes. “Well, she wasn’t expecting to train clones, obviously. It might bother her - she definitely looked dismayed when she saw us. On the other hand, she’s been nothing but professional since she saw us, so maybe she was just surprised.”
F grunts, and the line is silent for a moment. “You’re right. We don’t have enough info.”
Drily, E says, “Well, I told you so. Now turn back to squadron frequency, the sim will be starting soon. You know B will be on us like white on rice if we’re not tuned in.”
F sniggered. “The hell, man, where do you pick up these phrases?”
E sniffed. “Unlike you, I actually listen to G’s stupid holos. They’re very educational when it comes to language.”
“Whatever,” F said, the intercom clicked off as the sim began. E turned on the general channel, and heard nothing by static - they were still in ‘hyperspace’, after all. The silence was broken almost immediately upon reversion to realspace, as G said, a little impressed, “Wow, holos don’t do that thing justice.”
E outright laughed as the other clones gave their assent in one way or another. The second Death Star was straight ahead, Endor’s moon slightly aft, and all around Imperial and Rebel forces are engaging. A immediately orders s-foils locked in attack positions, and as E leads his flight behind A’s, a joyful, eager grin spread across his face. Captain Dunter wasn’t going to know what hit her…
~~~~~~~~~~~`
In a simulator room three doors down from Yellow Squadron, Syal Antilles is also smiling. It’s a placid, sweet smile, and in a day or so, when the leader of the Galactic Alliance Guard is looking at the sim surveillance tapes for the first time, he’ll think she looks a bit too simple to have turned traitor. This is dead wrong, not the least because Jacen Solo has always been ridiculously bad at reading and predicting facial expressions and body language.
To someone familiar with Corellians in general and Wedge Antilles in particular, that small, pleasant smile is a massive harbinger of doom and destruction. Frankly, a Corellian with a clear, calm look on their face is the equivalent of a Wookie telling you he’s going to rip your arms out of your sockets - fair warning for the totally disproportionate response to follow. Syal Antilles is really angry - and when Syal Antilles is really angry, things happen. Granted, the last time Syal Antilles got really angry, the only result of her planning was the local schoolyard bully spent a good year twitching at the slightest sound, but that only means that Syal is about to break into the big leagues in a big way. One day, not that far into the future, the name “Syal Antilles” is going to cause a shudder to crawl down the collective spine of GAI…
…but right now, Syal is only a young woman wearing the uniform of Starfighter Command and a captain’s pips, with a false name and an all-too-real smile on her face. And right now, she’s going to make twelve new fighter pilots cry like little girls.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
The embarrassing way was also the simple way. Hobbie and Wes just jumped the first guy who came in - a guard carrying a meal tray. Poor Tyr Doonis, new operative of Galactic Alliance Intelligence, never knew what hit him. One minute, he was just carrying a tray of generic prison slop, the next thing he knew, he’d been slammed in the head with aforementioned tray of slop and was down for the count in one hit.
Ironically, Janson had been more focused on getting the tray jammed into the door than actually beating up their captor, but after he finished that, he took a moment to pose. “Am I good or what?” he asked rhetorically, and Hobbie rolled his eyes as he squatted down and began rifling through the unconscious man’s pockets.
“You’re brilliant, Janson. It takes real skill to pop some kid on the head with a tray.”
“No,” Janson corrected Hobbie as he bent down, “it takes real skill to pop some kid on the head with a tray while trying to jam a door open with aforesaid tray while not breaking his neck. Find what we’re looking for?”
Hobbie nodded, and as he lifted up what he’d been looking for, he smiled. Janson winced, and said, “Sithspit, that’s creepy.”
Hobbie paid no attention to him, being far more concerned with what he was doing to poor Tyr Doonis. “All right, I’m done. Let’s go.”
Wes just made an elaborate flourish towards the jammed door and followed Hobbie as they walked through the door without a backward glance. After they passed through, he grabbed the tray and swung it back and forth before him experimentally, grinning. “So, what do you wanna bet I can take out everyone here with just this tray?”
Hobbie just shrugged. “Easy call, considering the caliber of people Intel is hiring these days. I think you can take out everyone here with that tray in less than half an hour.”
Wes just grinned wider.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
All things considered, Syal thought they hadn’t done too badly. For rookies, anyway. It seemed they had a rudimentary grasp of small-unit tactics, and had even attempted to use them on her - how precocious of them! A failure, of course, but a valiant failure. And then they had acquitted themselves pretty well in marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat - well, at least they could throw a decent punch. The concepts of kicking, gouging, and biting seem not to have occurred to them until Syal had demonstrated. But that was flash-learning for you: it could tell you how to do things, but actually doing them was another matter.
Still, they were good boys from what Syal could see. They had lots of potential, even if they’d picked up a bunch of bad habits from their supposed “education”. They’d already passed the first test, which was “when beaten, figure out what went wrong and angrily plot ineffectual revenge”. At the thought of their depressed, downtrodden faces and outraged aura, Syal felt a warm, benevolent feeling rise up within her and she smiled, just like any older sister does when faced with the prospect of tormenting a younger sibling - or, in her case, twelve of them.
It was quite terrifying.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
On the other end of that terrifying smile, E was experiencing a feeling he would later learn to call incandescent rage. In his peripheral vision, he could see the others looked like he felt: sick and a little shell-shocked and quietly, furiously angry. A’s right eye had developed a tic, and J had managed to shove himself in front of I, probably to talk him down from just trying to kill Dunter outright. They had lost. They had lost badly.
Altogether, it had taken Captain Dunter less than ten minutes to break up their supposedly-foolproof flight formation (“It always worked before,” A had protested helplessly) before hunting them down one by one like some kind of implacable, unstoppable hunting thing. Maybe some kind of cat, E didn’t know, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, it had been a massacre.
It hadn’t been the end, either. Then they had gone to the shooting gallery for a marksmanship evaluation - that hadn’t gone so badly, until Captain Dunter had said in her calm, pleasant voice that their stances were wrong, and could you please look over here while she demonstrated the correct way? Then she’d utterly decimated the shooting gallery.
The hand-to-hand combat evaluations didn’t bear thinking about. E didn’t need flash-learning to know that however wiry and compact he and his brothers were, they should not have lost so badly to a woman just as slender and small as them. And to add insult to injury, she’d been interrogating them all the while: what were their names (they didn’t have any), how old they were (they’d been decanted three weeks ago), how were they taught (flash-learning), how was the command structure set up (any way you like, ma’am), what were their specialties (none of them had bothered to answer her at this point).
And now Captain Dunter was saying something about a room inspection. E didn’t even flinch - he just got into line with the others and marched down to their barracks, stoic in the face of certain doom. In his ear he could hear F say, loud enough for him to hear, but quiet enough that Dunter couldn’t, “She’s not a woman, she’s a demon.”
But he wasn’t quiet enough, because E could see the demon smile wider.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
It was just after lunchtime at Galactic Alliance Intelligence Headquarters, and as usual, Shalla Nelprin was killing time by bouncing a rubber ball off the wall between her and her next-door neighbor. Her neighbor was also her boss, and Shalla actually had a very specific purpose for playing wallball on that wall: It was called the “going home early” game. She was finished with her work for the day, you see.
Shalla had been doing this for ten minutes straight, and as she looked at a clock, she grinned and began silently counting down from ten. Ten, nine, eight, seven…
At seven, there was a pause redolent with killing intent. At five, something inside the other office slammed, and Shalla grinned wider. Three, two, one…
Right on time, her boss slammed open her door and said, in a tight voice that indicated either constipation or incipient insanity, “What. Do. You. WANT. Nelprin?”
She just shrugged, slow as molasses. “Nothing. I’m just bored.”
A muscle in her boss’s cheek twitched. “Don’t you have any work to do?” His voice broke on the word work.
Shalla paused for a minute, loving the dramatic impact. Wait for it, wait for it… “Nope. All done.”
This time, his whole face twitched. Oh, Kelvin, she though sadly, must you make it so easy for me? This only happens every day.
There was another pause, but it wasn’t dramatic at all. It was the pause of someone whose brain was breaking.
“Go. Just…go,” he finally said, voice shaking, and Shalla let loose with her most blinding smile yet as she got up out of her chair, ready to go.
“Oh, Kelvin, you’re the best boss yet. Wanna come with?” she cooed to the man as she passed. He didn’t say anything, but she didn’t expect him to. Face would have come, of course, but Face, that unspeakable piece of bantha poodoo, had gotten out while the going was good two months ago, and she’d been stuck with her current boss ever since. Well, that was going to change very shortly…
“Bye!” she called as she left. She didn’t look back.