Note: this is a prequel to "Liberty", which can be
found in the archives.

The jubilant shouts still echoed over the cockpit
radios of the 101st Space Wing as the
lieutenant threw down her headset. The support staff
dampened their celebration briefly
as she strode past them out of Flight Control, but her
obvious ire couldn't compete with
the victory the fighters had just scored.

"Did you see that? He came out of friggin' nowhere!"
"Hey, who was the wingman from the 48th? We need to
buy him a round!"
"Dammit, Tarm, that's the last time I believe you
ain't feeling well. Where'd you pull
that from?"

The radio chatter, full of incredulous jubilation,
steered carefully around the fact that
Tarm's highly unothodox maneuver, while indisputably
effective, was also grounds for a
court martial under the heading of reckless
endangerment. Had it not been so perfectly
executed in conjunction with the unknown pilot from
the Triumphant the enemy would
have had the perfect opening to blow right through the
wing's formation. No one could
figure out how they'd done it; at the moment, no one
cared.

The hero of the hour, however, remained off the
frequencies. He was also the last one in
which gave every other pilot and half the rest of the
ship a chance to gather the party.
Their excitement crested at the sight of the
lieutenant, who was already waiting at a
pissed-off parade rest at the edge of his landing
zone; they still cheered loudly as Tarm's
canopy opened.

The decibel level dropped significantly as his boots
hit the tarmac; as much as they
wanted to slap him on the back and buy him a round or
two, no one—NO ONE—was
going to pass the lieutenant to do so. They were
primed, however, to shout their
objections to what looked to be a truly epic tirade
the lieutenant was brewing behind her
clenched teeth. So it was that they all gaped in
astonishment when the lieutenant came to
attention and snapped off a parade-ground salute to
the pilot. "Sir, you're needed
immediately on the bridge."

General Kenobi pulled off Tarm's flight helmet and
sighed. She was REALLY pissed if
she was saluting him. "Very well, Lieutenant. Let's
go."

The pilots stared open-mouthed as the officers
departed towards the lifts until someone
finally got her brain rebooted. "Let's hear it for
the General!" The cheers that erupted
filled the hangar to the roof and followed them out
the door.

Alone in the hallway, the general avoided glancing
back at the woman who strode at his
side, two steps behind him. "All right, let's hear
it," he said resignedly without breaking
stride.
"Hear what, sir?"
He snorted. "I can hear your teeth grinding,
Lieutenant. Spit it out."
"Permission to speak freely, sir?"
"Granted."
The word was barely past his lips when she spun him
and slammed him against the wall.
"That was the most bloody indefensible thing I have
ever witnessed," she said in a
reasonable voice that was ten times worse than a
screaming fit. "You endangered my
pilots and this command in a reckless, daredevil stunt
that disobeyed a direct order. Who
exactly did you expect to assume command if you hadn't
come back? And if you hadn't
succeeded, there wouldn't have been a command to come
back to. I assume that other
pilot was Skywalker?"
He blinked at her sudden non sequitur. "Yes…"
Her lips thinned once more. "I thought so. No one
but a couple of Jedi would have done
something so harebrained."
His eyes narrowed in anger. "What precisely do you
mean by that, Lieutenant?"
"By that I mean that Jedi knights operate alone or in
pairs and while they sometimes
function as leaders are constitutionally incapable of
working in a team. They disobey
orders if they don't suit them. They see themselves
as the only and ultimate answer to
every problem. They either succeed gloriously or fail
gloriously because they will
choose the solution that relies solely on their own
skills rather than using the strengths of
their allies. This tunnel vision of theirs is often
fatal to those allies, even when
successful. And at this moment, those allies are my
men. They were mine before you
arrived and they will be mine after you depart and you
will understand, General, that I
will reckon with anyone who needlessly endangers
them." Taking a deep breath, she
stepped back from him. "And now, sir, you are needed
on the bridge."
He stayed where he was for a moment and regarded her
seriously for a moment. "We
will discuss this later, lieutenant."
"Very well, sir." She saluted him again and stalked
off, fury evident in every line of her
body.

~*~*~*~*~*~
Part 2

He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. He didn’t know.

She repeated her mantra to herself incessantly.
Memory is an odd beast; sometimes if you tell yourself
the same story over and over you can begin to believe
it. Under the assumption that the future is simply
the past that hasn’t happened yet, she applied the
technique to the current situation. Whether or not it
would help, it seemed to keep her anger from boiling
over as she went about her duties.

Or someone’s duties, anyhow; she’d managed to assign
herself anything that took her into the most
out-of-the-way bowels of the ship in an attempt to
work off her bad temper before encountering, well,
anyone.

He didn’t know, he couldn’t know, he didn’t know.

She couldn’t refrain from thinking about him, so she
would concentrate instead on his lack of understanding
of normal human life. Well, parts of it he understood
quite well, she acknowledged with a small smile, but
that was one-on-one. Smirk. But social interaction?
No. And he definitely did not understand any lasting
chain of command. Not as applied to him.

He didn’t know he couldn’t know he didn’t know.

Because if he did know, if he did understand after
all, she was going to kill him. Slowly. And to hell
with him, her career, and the whole bloody war.

Pain in her hand made her look down; she found to her
surprise that she’d been wringing her spanner with a
death grip. Relaxing her fingers took concentration;
remembering what she’d been planning to do with the
spanner took even more thought. She was just about to
get back to the job at hand when the tread of boots
coming around the corridor corner sounded a split
second before his voice.

“You were saying something about Jedi?” he asked,
sounding for all the world as if he had just turned
back to her from a momentary pause, rather than having
tracked her down after several hours to a remote
corner of the ship.

Her anger flooded back, completely drowning the
question of how he’d located her. “You being a subset
of that category, yes.”

“You have a problem with the way in which I run my
command.” It wasn’t a question.

She slammed the spanner down and turned on her knees
to face him. Fortunately the access tunnel she was
working in met the upper half of the corridor he stood
looking in at her from, putting her at eye level.
“Yes, I do,” she snarled. “You knew you shouldn’t
have left the ship, that your duties as commander
required you to stay and command, not to pretend to be
another pilot. You knew and you went anyway.” She
ground to a halt, breathless with rage. As they
stared at one another, the enormity of what she’d said
and to whom she’d said it began to sink in, draining
her anger away. But she couldn’t back down, couldn’t
apologize or temporize, not only due to pride but also
for her pilots who’d been put in harm’s way.

When he finally spoke, there was something deep behind
his words, something bigger than anything she’d
experienced before. “One of the things you’re going
to have to learn is that just because what I do is not
what your military training has led you to expect does
not mean it is not correct. Hear me out,” he said,
raising a finger to silence her objections. “I
realize I am now operating in a military environment,
in which you rely on what you expect, but I cannot be
less than I am. If I had not been out there today,
your pilots would have died. I knew I could avert
that and I did. I would do it again. If that offends
your military sensibilities, so be it. I had thought
this had been made clear to you at the very
beginning.”

She was blushing; she could feel the embarrassed heat
staining her skin a spreading crimson and it made her
irritable. “Nothing could have prepared me for that
bit of grandstanding out there,” she muttered.

His disconcertingly direct, almost impersonal gaze
softened as he realized why she was so upset. He
swung himself into the tunnel and at facing her, his
back against the bulkhead. “You were afraid.”

“You’re damn right I was afraid! I thought your
damned space ballet with Skywalker and three enemy
ships was going to get us all killed!”

He shook his head and reached out, tracing her cheek
with one gentle finger. “You were afraid for me, and
afraid that you weren’t afraid enough for your
pilots.” She shook, wanting to brain him with the
spanner once for sheer, overweening ego and twice for
being right, but also wanting to prove in a very
personal way that he was really all right and in front
of her.

~*~*~*~*~*~
to be continued...