trans_9 | A little too close a call [OPEN]

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A little too close a call [OPEN]

Trudy walked down the corridors with her general wide stride, her dogtags jingling and her rifle bouncing against her back. She'd slung it on the other side from her healing rib - which was also why she wasn't moving really fast. Of course, she was on her way to visit the ship that had kept her alive. She had to see what all those near-misses had done. At least scratched the paint, maybe more. She thought a shot had skimmed her astromech, and then there had been the blast that had crippled the Dart.

The hanger, unsuprisingly, was fairly busy. She figured she'd run into at least a couple of the squadron's mechanics, and probably even more of the squadron. It would be good to see the guys - and she especially wanted to talk to the General.

As she crossed over to her X-wing, she passed her Samson and paused. It was still in the same state it had been before she started training with Rogue Squadron. It took up a big chunk of her time, and getting caught up in the media library on her ship's specs took up the rest of it. "Sorry bebe," she said under her breath. "Guess I've left you after all."

She walked over to the X-wing, trailing her hand along its underside. It definitely showed that it had been in a firefight. There were a couple of blaster marks hellishly close to her engines, that made her start grinning like a fool. "Guess it could have been a whole hell of a lot worse," she said, tapping the cross around her neck. "Good on you, big man."

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Trudy was silent for a minute, staring at the Samson over her shoulder like it had the answers. She'd told this story to a few people, but it didn't make it any easier to tell.

"We found a planet - a moon, really, in tidal-lock orbit around a planet. There were natives, the Na'vi. They lived right on top of the mineral that we wanted, and after a few years of trying to get them to move quietly, Quaritch decided it wasn't worth it."

She tapped her fingers on the butt of her rifle. "He gave orders to fire on Hometree - their village. Keep in mind we had missiles and they had bow-and-arrow. I refused." She had to remind herself that the refusal was the important part. She had refused to fire on the Na'vi in the end - even if she had been complicit in most of what happened up until that point.

Kira's face was hard to read, but his expression clearly wasn't happy. Greed, war, slaughter... did human nature ever change? "Mm," he gave a wordless acknowledgment of her story.

"So you fired on him?"

"That came later," Trudy said. "After we got the natives together and decided to make a stand." She stared at the Samson for a moment, taking in the scorch marks and the bullet holes almost the same way she had when she had first set foot in Stacy's hangar, what felt like a lifetime ago. "I'm pretty sure that if it weren't for Stacy I'd be dead. But then again, if it weren't for Stacy a lot of us would be dead."

A nod. "I've heard that... the way Stacy works, she can bring you here even if you did die. But there's no way to know - maybe you might have survived."

Kira paused, turning to look at his own mobile suit, and his thoughts flashed back to its predecessor. "Turning your weapons on your former comrades... that's a hard decision to make."

She looked up at the mobile suit with him. She knew what it looked like when someone had their own baggage, their own shit they didn't want to talk about. And it was always funny about things like that, how the minute you got started you just had to keep going.

"You'd think that," she said quietly. "But in the end? It was probably the easiest damn decision I ever made."

There were probably some Coordinators who considered what he'd once done the same thing - being a traitor to his own kind. "...it probably depends on your reasons, then. And their reasons for what they were doing in the first place."

"Far as I could tell all they cared about was some mineral shit in the dirt. Jake, Grace, they cared about the people, the Na'vi, their way of life." She shrugged. "Comes down to what you think is right, you know? And how you've been trained."

She was quiet for a moment. "I'll say I came really close. Finger on the button. Almost followed orders." And then she hadn't. A soldier who didn't follow orders was next to useless - but a commander who gave the wrong orders was a criminal.

"It's easy to just follow orders. Even if you don't believe in what you're doing ... people can always rationalize it somehow."

"But sometimes you can't follow them anymore."

Trudy nodded. She knew that all too well - there had been a long time of her rationalizing what she was doing as 'just following orders.'

"Luckily the General seems like a good man who wouldn't pull that kind of bullshit, so I doubt we'll have to worry about that."

"That's true, he doesn't." Kira closed his eyes for a moment. "He knows what he's doing, but it's not easy to trust someone you've just met like that."

Trudy shrugged. "Trust hasn't got much to do with it," she said. "I mean - okay, it does. But he's my CO, I trust him by default until he gives me a good reason not to."

These were the kinds of principles that it felt very, very strange to have to explain to people inside what she considered to be her unit. All the more reason why they needed basic, and needed it badly.

"Even after having a commander betray what you felt were your ideals?" Kira moved to sit on one of the nearby maintenance ladders. "It'd be understandable if you were wary, after that."

"That would be why I'm watching out for that good reason not to," Trudy said. "But he doesn't strike me as a bad guy. Quaritch was an asshole from day one."

Then again, sometimes it was the nice ones you had to watch out for.

"That's true, he doesn't. I think we can trust him... but I'd rather trust a person than trust a position."

Learning that pretty much the entire upper echelons of your military were staffed with genocidal maniacs would do that.

"Sure, but you don't get that choice when you're military," Trudy said. She hitched her rifle up a little further. "You hesitate because you're not sure if you like someone, or not sure if you can trust someone, or not sure you agree with someone - it's a damn good way to get you and everyone around you killed."

She shook her head. "Basic is sounding like a better idea all the time," she muttered.

"As long as the trust is given, does it matter why? I'd rather trust the General because of his experience and his ability to lead - not because we call him General."

"'Course you'd rather do that," Trudy said. Of course everyone would rather have a good enough relationship with their CO that they didn't doubt their intentions. "But in the middle of action when someone gives an order... you don't think, you just do. Most of the time," she amended.

"But that doesn't mean that we should just stop thinking, either. If we have an order, we still need to decide how to best carry it out, right?"

"In a split second?" Trudy asked. "I don't know about you but I don't want someone up there on my wing who's gonna think a whole lot about what we're doing."

"But you don't want someone who rushes in on instinct, either. There has to be a good balance."

Trudy shook her head with a little half-shrug. "Some of the best pilots I ever flew with did it by the seat of their pants. I'd rather have someone with good instincts and better reflexes than someone who hangs back any day."

"I'm not saying you should hang back," Kira shook his head in return. "If someone tells you to break, you should break off and not think about it. But if you never think about the battle, then you'll be in trouble if someone isn't calling the shots for you."

"And you'll be more likely to follow an order you shouldn't."

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A little too close a call [OPEN]

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