trans_9 | Time to quickly learn some tact

"Morning sunshine," Trudy said cheerfully, stopping in front of Allenby's cell in the brig. No, that wasn't going to go over very well, but she wasn't really interested in being nice to the pilot. She'd made the whole fleet look like an undisciplined herd of hooligans. "Captain Kennedy tells me that he's put Nobel Gundam in storage for a while."

Trudy wasn't exactly sure how to go about something like this. If Allenby was still one of hers, she would simply be brigged until Trudy felt like letting her out. Having her earn her Gundam back was more of a civilian thing, but Kennedy was her CO and when he said jump, that was the thing to do.

The grin Allenby gave Trudy at that greeting was anything but cheerful. "Yeah, I see you guys have a real interestin' way of doing things on this ship," she said, propping her chin in her hands. "So is it a translation problem with Stacy when you tell me that I can keep my Gundam and the next thing I hear is that I have to kiss up to you if I ever want to see it again?"

...well that was the exact opposite of what she ought to have said, but Allenby wasn't about to buy some excuse about it being the captain's decision. She was pretty sure that Trudy hadn't exactly protested too loudly when that order came down the pipe.

Trudy was being baited, she could tell. She could always tell. So she leaned casually against the corner of the cell, smiling. "You know what's great about being a civilian, Beardsley? On this boat it means that the Captain gets to decide how to knock your head around when you screw up. I'm not saying I think it was a bad decision, but it wasn't my decision."

She had washed her hands of Allenby already, and had given up on ever fitting her into Command.

Allenby stood up, leaning against the wall of the cell with her hands behind her head. "There are lots of great things about bein' a civilian. Glad ya made the decision easy for me in the Hangar there."

Shut up, shut UP. You want Nobel Gundam back! This isn't going to get you that!

Trudy was a commander; she didn't have the same way of thinking. Obviously. Allenby just had to think of this like when she used to get in trouble... big difference in that was that she was trying to get the Gundam back, not get out of being a Fighter in the first place.

"Look. I know what I did was reckless and stupid, and next time this stupid ship sends my friends off to a planet where they get taken hostage or branded or thrown in prison, I'll ask you guys first before running off with my own team. But you wanna hear more than that, don't ya."

Trudy was quiet for a minute, examining Allenby through the bars of her cell. "You're missing a bigger picture here, kid, and it's the same problem you were having back in the hangar. You got dishonorably discharged from a military outfit - you know back on my world that would ruin your life?"

Someone with a dishonorable discharge - well, good luck to them finding financing for a car, or a house, or even an apartment. It went on your credit and your work history and it never came off.

Allenby sighed. "But we ain't on your world, and I got a whole different idea of the military than you do. I'm willing to bet you'd think the kind of military life I know is completely insane."

She'd been arrested... well... more than once, whether she was deliberately trying to piss off her handlers or by accident, but none of it had got her yanked from her Gundam.

"The way I see it, the problem is that I charged off without thinking long enough to realize that I ought've asked Leon directly if he'd done anything, and we probably would've been blasted outta the sky by the Galileeans. But I don't think Neo-Sweden would care much about the discharge. Unless you're saying that I'm going to be stuck in here until the universes are fixed--?"

Trudy laughed - "I'm not going to keep you down here for that long, what kind of bitch do you think I am? Jeez. I may think you're a snot but that's pushing it a little far."

Trudy regarded her more seriously for a moment, turning over what she had said. "That's not what you're here for, Allenby. You know what they call it when a crewmember blatantly ignores the orders of the captain during wartime? You should know better than most people that we are in a war."

Mutiny was the word for it. Trudy wanted to see if Allenby was going to come up with it on her own.

Oh. Well that was a relief; Allenby had been kind of worried for a second there. Not that she was about to show it. "Oh, is that all? Good to know." A bitch who can't take two seconds to tell me that you already sent help, that's what kind. Why don't you GET that?

...but she'd opt for the pop quiz instead of a smartass answer. Allenby was sure she'd learned the technical word at some point during her education, but she had kind of... deliberately forgotten a lot of it. Again, to piss off her handlers.

"The word I always got was insubordination or 'wasting Neo-Sweden's money.' But my world is different. We don't--we didn't have wartime anymore, not like here." Something came back. "Back in old times, I'd be gettin' hanged at a yard-arm. Is that the one?"

"Insubordination's close, but the word I was looking for was 'mutiny,'" Trudy said. She reached out and put her hand on the palm reader outside of Allenby's cell, and it opened. "Brig time's over. Let's take a walk."

She turned and started walking without waiting for Allenby to say anything. "How'd you become a pilot, if there wasn't a war? Kid your age in a robot of mass destruction - seems a little weird if there's no military use."

Mutiny, yep. Well, it was a good thing that Stacy didn't have any yard-arms.

She was almost too surprised to follow when Trudy abruptly opened the door, but only almost. That was it--? Well, an open door was an open door and Allenby was quick to go through it.

That question--well, she'd answer one part at a time. "Well... on my Earth, we use Gundams to replace war. Instead of wars and armies that kill millions, there's one Gundam per nation. Every four years we fight and the Gundam that wins, their country rules for the next four years. It's not supposed to be lethal, either." Which... didn't mean that no deaths ever happened, of course.

"As for how I became a pilot--my parents died when I was six. The military took me in and turned me into a Gundam Fighter." It had happened so long ago that Allenby was all right telling most people about it, but she wouldn't have chosen to tell Trudy under normal circumstances. Still... if Trudy wanted to know, she could know.

Edited 2011-08-05 01:46 (UTC)

Oh, Trudy wasn't letting her go yet. She still had a thing or two she wanted to talk about with the kid.

The concept of what Allenby explained was so bizarre that for a moment Trudy was tempted to laugh. Countries had actually agreed to this? Countries made up of actual human beings? Disarmament had never worked before, because who gave up the arms first?

She shook that aside, though, to focus on what Allenby said next. "How young were you when you started learning?" she asked. More importantly, how had she ended up adopted by the military as an entity? That didn't sound legal.

It wasn't her Earth, though, Trudy reminded herself.

They did, and then they put in pilots who spoke at length about communicating through fighting and seeing the light to their soul through someone else's fists. This had been working for sixty years despite all logic and laws of reality.

As someone born to it, Allenby just hadn't managed to find it questionable before.

"Well, six," Allenby said, almost surprised that Trudy asked when she'd just said. Then again, most people wouldn't think of making a kid into part of a military unit, would they? At least if they were any kind of decent.

She stopped dead in the hallway, staring at Allenby with an expression that mirrored her next words - "What the fuck. Someone put you in a Gundam when you were six? That thing's not a toy, it's a weapon! Not that I'm yelling at you," Trudy said quickly. Allenby was hotheaded enough that Trudy wanted to make sure she wasn't going to get prickly.

It was appalling that any civilized culture would make soldiers out of children. Nevermind the fact that war technically didn't exist in Allenby's world. With the hopes of an entire nation riding on the back of a child, how could you expect her to turn out normal?

Allenby was about to start yelling too. Though, not at Trudy--just on a general principle that if yelling was happening, she was going to join in. And she honestly shared the sentiment. What Neo-Sweden had done to her had been just plain wrong.

But she managed to keep her voice normal so she could clarify a bit. "Not the Gundam itself. But training for it, yeah--" Getting surgeries, experiments, all that. "I hated it. All those officers cared about was turning me into the perfect Fighter. To them, I wasn't any different than the nuts and bolts that made up the Gundam!"

She cut herself off there, realizing that she was about to start railing about her life before the Finals.

It explained a lot. It explained Allenby's words in the hangar, it explained why she'd been so quick to fly back in Trudy's face - and it explained beyond a shadow of a doubt why Allenby was wrong for a military. She would never be able to trust an officer if that was her formative experience.

"I joined the Marines when I was eighteen years old," Trudy said. She could sense that Allenby didn't want to get caught in talk about her past, and she'd been prying. This was a give-and-take game, she had to give a little. "I grew up with four brothers and we were dirt poor - every last one of them was a fuck-up despite everything mama and I could do because they had all the wrong people around them. I got the hell out of there fast as I could. First I joined just to pay for college, then before you know it Panama turned into a hot zone and I was on the other side of basic in combat." She shrugged. "I followed orders, or I died."

"...ouch." But eighteen, huh? Allenby wasn't even that age yet. Definitely it was old enough to make your own decisions and join the military on your own. And for Trudy, it sounded like it had been better than her own family...

And constantly going into life-or-death situations? Yeah. Maybe it wasn't that surprising that she'd been such a hardass over the whole thing.

...Follow orders or die. Come to think of it, it had usually worked the opposite way for Allenby.

"Out in battles like NiSaris, I get that. If I didn't do what you and Kira said right away, I could see that my friends were gonna die. But... it ain't so easy for me to see at other times. And since you've been at this so long, you wouldn't expect anything but that in any situation, huh? Even if nobody's shooting at us right then."

Trudy saw where the disconnect was coming from immediately. It was really easy to entrust your life to a commander when you were being shot at, but it took a lot more faith to believe they made the right command decisions off the battlefield, too.

"The Captain's staff, Security and Starfighter Command are the three groups that keep everyone safe on this ship. With the way things happen here, we have to make fast decisions that we don't necessarily clear with the population. And sometimes, it's better to keep those decisions under wraps so people don't get worried. We didn't tell anyone about the auxiliary team because so many people on the ship are like you. They had friends down there, and if we were sending backup that meant those people were in trouble. You know better than anyone that this crew doesn't sit quietly when their own are threatened."

It was something she loved about this ship, fiercely. There were some days they all wanted to strangle each other, but when there was an outside threat they were a force to be reckoned with.

Allenby frowned. As much as she knew that seeing Nobel Gundam again meant getting back into Trudy's good graces, she just couldn't agree with that method. If they were going to quickly decide to send back-up without consulting the whole crew, okay... that'd take too long, what with all the arguments that could break out over who would go and how they'd do it.

But keeping it clandestine even when it became clear that their secrecy had backfired horribly in the case of one Gundam-owning hothead?

"I don't know about everyone else, but if I'd known that you had already done that, I wouldn't have tried to go charging off--" She paused. "At least, I would have started listening to you a lot sooner. If you'd said 'knock it off Allenby, we have people on it,' that would have been one thing. But you didn't say one word about the back-up crew until the moment you were puttin' me under arrest! It shouldn't have been your last resort to try and reason with me."

While Allenby was talking, Trudy pulled her omnicomm out of her pocket and began scrolling through the messages, looking for Allenby's original broadcast on the network. Trudy had to uncomfortably admit that Allenby had a point, but...

"And I quote, 'Screw the Galileeans, I'm going down there.' Then when I ordered you to stop, and I quote, 'Shut up.' And when the captain ordered you to stop, still quoting, 'Forget it.'" She looked down at the pilot with a wry expression. "It's such a mystery why we didn't stop to explain ourselves, given how receptive you were to listening at all. Even to the people who tried to knock some sense into your head about facing planetary defense systems on your own, you were pretty abrupt."

Still, she didn't want to put Allenby right back on the defensive, so she explained a little. "When a superior officer gives you a direct order they expect it to be obeyed - immediately and without question. The rest of my soldiers don't have a problem with that concept, probably because the officers they're used to following make sense and give good orders. Now, it's not really our fault that the government of your country decided to take a child who should have been learning how to play soccer or something and stick her in a Gundam, then treat her like less than a person-" she's hearing you Allenby, honest - "so you can't really expect us to respond in any way other than the way we are used to operating. I gave my soldier an order, she disobeyed the order, she was placed in the brig. It's simple."

Trudy put the omnicomm back in her pocket. "Maybe you're right, and need-to-know is a moot point on this ship. It's six one, half a dozen the other out here. Either we tell people we're having a problem and have them clamoring at us to charge in guns blazing, or we keep quiet about the problem and get worried people trying to charge in guns blazing. I'll have a chat with the Captain about transparency, but we were trying to avoid an issue. And as I've just explained, neither of us are in the habit of explaining our orders."

...yeah, well...

That was why Allenby had said sooner.

She could also point out that she had been starting to listen to Hikari despite the abruptness, and that Trudy, Leon, and Kira's shutdown responses had only pushed her further out, but that'd just get things going in circles and it wasn't like the three of them were telepathic. Allenby supposed that from Trudy's point of view, signing on with Starfighter meant an automatic assumption from both her and the pilots to do what you're told, always, and that would be automatically understood. She probably wouldn't get any closer to Nobel Gundam if she tried to argue that they shouldn't assume that of all the recruits.

Especially since my Earth's the only one who used Gundams the way they should be used.

"I guess I shoulda left Starfighter Command after that first battle," she said, although it was half to herself. "But if I had--what would you have done then? Would you guys have responded different if I was already a 'civilian' and not someone you expected would obey automatically?"

Edited 2011-08-17 01:57 (UTC)

Allenby might have noticed that Trudy was slowly wandering in the general direction of the transport tubes, although she didn't seem in any big hurry to get there. "I can't say," she said honestly. "I'm not involved in civilian affairs. I imagine Kennedy would have taken a similar tactic - tried to get you to quit, then have you arrested when you didn't. I don't know how much more forthcoming he would have been."

Maybe the Captain had thought Trudy already briefed her troops. Maybe she should have. In hindsight everything was clearer, though, so Trudy didn't trust after-the-fact evaluations very much.

"The only way they would have involved me was over the X-wing - which, by the way, I am still pissed off about. Those things don't grow on trees." They reached the transport tubes. Trudy stepped into one and said, "The Hangar!" A tentacle whisked her to the desired level.

Allenby would probably follow. She wanted her Gundam back, after all.

That was probably the most she'd get without asking Leon himself--which Allenby probably wouldn't do. She'd just take the word of those she'd spoken to the next time a crisis like that arose and Command was quiet.

"I can fix the X-Wing for you." For Allenby's own hindsight, it probably wouldn't have held up for more than one trip--a Gundam's feet would be a lot for that little fighter to handle once it got into gravity. She did think it would be a good idea for Engineering to lay their hands on something that could be used as platforms, but that was something for another time.

She did note the direction they were going (those tubes were hard to miss), and tried to push down a sudden surge of optimism when Trudy called out the destination. Might be, might not--"The Hangar!" Allenby said once Trudy had gone.

Allenby landed behind her, and Trudy turned around with a raised eyebrow. "You're going to fix that X-Wing for me. You'd better hope you can do it," she said.

Trudy stuck her hands in the pockets of her plantsuit as they walked into the hangar, the lines of her shoulders relaxing as soon as she passed through the door. She was a pilot, and this place felt like home. She was sure Allenby felt the same way, and that was the reason she was going to give the kid's Gundam back.

"Look," she said, turning to Allenby. "What I saw that day was one of my pilots setting off to get herself messily killed in a fiery explosion because she thought she could take on an army. I haven't lost a pilot yet under my command, and if I ever do I don't want it to be for a stupid reason. Every single one of you is recklessly brave and ridiculously talented, and every one of you lost makes us that much weaker against the Ohm. You scared the hell out of me, Beardsley - I thought the next time I saw you would be a holo over your coffin. I don't want to have to float you out."

"Hey, I'm not in Engineerin' for no reason," Allenby said, clasping her hands behind her head. She'd let Trudy's insistence on the matter slide, since she'd just said she'd do it. Also because of the challenge--intended or not--to her repair skills. "You won't even be able to tell which one I was workin' on once I'm done."

She wished she could dismiss Trudy's next words just as breezily, but goddammit, she was right. If Allenby had managed to get off the ship, she'd be in a lot of little pieces orbiting Galilee right now.

"Well--I don't plan on dyin' anytime soon either. Especially not by being stupid. Next time this ship decides to set up the crew like that, I'll ask what you guys are doing before I make my own plans." The idea that she'd be reduced to nothing more than a picture for people to remember... it wasn't that Allenby was afraid of losing her life to bring back Earth, but it was still a chilling mental image.

"Neither Kennedy or I will ever leave a crew member stranded without backup," Trudy said firmly. "Not when there's another option."

She saw how subdued Allenby was at that little speech, so she let it go. She was reasonably sure that she and the kid had reached an understanding, at least one that didn't leave Allenby hating her guts.

"For what it's worth, I hate to lose you as a pilot," she said. "But I can't have you in the field, and I don't think you really want to be there. Fix my X-Wing, and I'll sign off on your Gundam. Deal?" She stuck her hand out so the other pilot could shake on it.

Allenby nodded. She... was pretty sure she could trust Leon and Trudy on that one, much as she doubted they would agree to (or get it) if she asked them to prove that in a fistfight.

"Yeah, you're right about that," she said. What she needed was time--time to figure out how best to fight in this war while still upholding her principles as a Gundam Fighter. Time she wasn't likely to have a lot of, honestly, but she definitely couldn't figure it out under the authority of a military commander. "I'll get that X-Wing fixed right up, no problem."

She was making a huge effort to keep a lid on the soaring elation of my Gundam my Gundam I GOT IT BACK not that they had any right to take it BUT I GOT IT BACK! A mostly successful effort, apart from her sudden, huge smile and the way she started Trudy's arm up and down.

Time to quickly learn some tact

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laaaate sorry

Re: laaaate sorry

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