trans_9 | Time to quickly learn some tact

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Time to quickly learn some tact

Allenby had waited a while before asking to speak to Trudy, despite the crew being back from Galilee. She'd been too pissed and worried before then to really think about what she ought to say, and she needed time to figure it out.

Like... how to say it without getting Trudy mad again by mistake. Though frankly, she was pretty angry herself to learn that I won't touch your Gundam actually translated to your Gundam is getting stuffed full of mothballs until I say you can have it back.

That was if the condition--getting Trudy to sign off--wasn't actually a nasty code for kiss your Gundam goodbye, troublemaker. But Allenby was going to trust her crewmates and think that Leon and Trudy were too honest for that.

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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.

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Time to quickly learn some tact

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laaaate sorry

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