Date: 07 Jun 2012 17:27 Title: Chapter 43
Yes! Yes! Yes! Finally Icheb's secret is revealed (more or less), no wonder Maren is such a nervous wreck giving Icheb's condition. I also get the feeling that later on this story (or the next) some of the VOY characters (Janeway, Seven and the Doctor) will come into prominence. Great story!
[Report This]Date: 06 Nov 2010 16:09 Title: Chapter 43
Seems like Captain Oyugo's got a very young crew and now pays the price for it. Secrets, lies, emotional and unprofessional decisions, drinking parties, oh my, she needs to make them grow up faster or the ship is going to be doomed ;)
Maren strikes me as emotionally unstable - she is shaken, crying, doesn't control her impulses and genius engineer or not genius engineer - I don't think she should be the head of the department. She may know everything about the slipstream and the ship, but she is unstable and she's too weak to make important decisions. I am told by other characters how brilliant she is, but I see little proof of it - she whines most of the time. I don't think I like this character (I mean the character=the person, not your writing :)).
I like Quigley. Impulsive and also not yet ready to be a chief of anything (but with huge ambitions, not doubt :D) but no one forces him to be one. However something tells me that with all dangers that await them he will have to grow fast to be an effective and good security officer. And I think he is going to. Go, John! :)
Oddly, I like the admiral. I wondered if he had some Cardassian style training (to shield his mind from Betazoid/telepathic probing plus his clearly powerful memorising technique), or if he is part Ferengi (small enough not to be obvious, big enough not to be read), and with some tiny piece of information I have now I think he had had some special intelligence training.
I like the captain too. She's got difficult job to do and has a bunch of people looking over her shoulder. It would make everyone nervous, but she handles them well.
Author's Response:
Yep. This is a young crew. It's a seven year mission, so they skew toward the young and (legally) unattached. There are only 40something children on board (on a ship of about 1500), so that shows how few "families" there really are.
As for Maren, I can totally see why you don't like her, and I kind of like that you don't -- not everyone likes real people, so if I've written a character that most people like a lot, but you don't ... I guess that makes her seem more realistic. The fact is, she IS emotionally unstable right now. She's carrying a lot of emotional trauma that she hasn't really dealt with ... just sort of shoved it all down inside, and the whole situation with Icheb brought it all to the surface again in a really ugly, public way. So there are a lot of people on the Tesseract (including, possibly, her captain) who feel the exact same way about her that you do. She's got a lot of work to do to repair her reputation after this ... not to mention to actually deal with her issues.
I love your assessment of Quigley, and yeah, you'll see him thrust into some situations that force him to grow later on.
I will let you speculate to your heart's content on the Admiral. ;-) I confirm nothing.
Glad you like Adele ... some people do, some people don't. She's trying the best she can in a really dynamic, weird situation, and it's only going to get worse for her.
Date: 20 Apr 2010 20:16 Title: Chapter 43
Damn Maren-she's in really, really, hot water now. And Adele, really taking a hardliner there...I know Hank, in her position, would have been on the other end of the spectrum for this one; He'd take a really hard line with the board (because he hates oversight) and be totally on Maren's side. Command personalities...ah, the beauty of it all. Great chapter.
Date: 18 Jan 2010 20:12 Title: Chapter 43
Woah. What a chapter. The face off between Maren and Adele was due a few chapters now, how and ever, I hadn't been expecting the John and Maren face off. Oh my gawd! That was rather intense. Poor John feels like the biggest fool, the biggest loser and completely betrayed by his friends for not trusting in him. Not to mention knowing this he can better understand what happened to Icheb and Maren's relationship which can only put further hampers with his secret desire for Maren. She now seems even more unattainable.
Then after that we have Adele stride in to take lumps off Maren. Oh dear. In fairness, Adele was extremely nice and lenient towards Maren in light of what she could have done. I guess the memories of her own loss and soul mate tempers the case against Maren as she knows to lose someone is a pain worse than death but at the same time to know that they risked his life too by their lies. Not to mention putting the crew in danger because of her actions. So much dialogue going on and it all zipped by such that I soaked it all up. Just top stuff. I want to say heaps more but it is just gushing and rambling. But terrific stuff should suffice.
Author's Response:
MF, thanks for the review! Feel free to gush and ramble anytime you like, too! I certainly don't mind.
You summed up John's feelings pretty well, I think. He's really angry. I didn't include the scene where Maren laid it all out for Julian and Adele, but John was close enough to overhear almost everything. Talk about a WTF moment. We'll see how it shakes out between the three of them ... right now they're all scared and feeling truly alone for the first time since they all met at the Academy.
Adele was a lot more lenient than she could have been. And yes, a lot of that is due to her own memories and feelings. She's no stranger to the emotions she's sensing in her chief engineer, and she already knows how Icheb feels about Maren. She's also mindful of the fact that Maren has her entire career in front of her, and anything she does to her now will follow her for a lifetime. And in some ways, her hands are a bit tied, too ... any disciplinary action she takes could open a whole can of worms if the Board thinks it's not tough enough. She may essentially be facing the choice between doing nothing (at least not publicly) to Maren and hoping for the best ... or making an example of her.
As always, thanks for reading and commenting, I really appreciate it!
Date: 18 Jan 2010 19:44 Title: Chapter 43
This conversation between Adele and Maren has been coming for awhile now. Adele is taking a very risky tack with the young engineer, especially since her suspicious about Maren’s motivations vis-à-vis the Borg were confirmed by the lieutenant herself.
Part of me hopes Maren can somehow manage to come out of this with her department head status intact, but the leader in me also thinks her taking a back seat to Telek or someone else for a few years of seasoning might do her some good.
And the thought of Maren facing the combined experience and insight of the advisory board is downright chilling. The two captains’ decades of experience, Beckley’s razor-keen mind and interview/interrogation skills, the abilities of a fully telepathic Betazoid counselor, and the reasoning acumen of a top-notch lawyer… yeah, it’s going to be like throwing a kitten into a den of wolves.
Really wonderful character development material here as you drive the emotional core of the story forward.
Author's Response:
Thanks so much, Gibraltar!
Yes, Adele's concerns about Maren had been building, and to have Maren confirm them was probably both a disappointment and a relief -- after all, Adele, though she can't read minds, is something of a human polygraph and she would have known if Maren was trying to lie to her. So, finally, Maren is just spilling everything. Deep down, she's an honest person. She never wanted to lie, never would have lied had she not been so head-over-heels in love with someone who was begging her to do it. We'll see if Adele's risktaking pays off with her. Adele's got pretty good instincts, but she's got so much flying at her face right now it's anyone's guess how she's really doing underneath the calm exterior. In a day, she's met the Borg face to face for the first time in years, lost her Number One to mystery aliens, nearly lost her ship and chief engineer to the Borg, got some drones left for her to deal with, and found out Number One and the chief engineer are not only much closer than she realized, but have been lying to Starfleet. It sucks to be Adele today. So, either her risktaking will work and Maren will succeed with the drones and please the Adv. Board, or it will fail and I'll be adding her to your "Captain's Prerogative" thread. Stay tuned.
We'll also see what happens with Maren's job ... she may be more technically proficient than everyone else when it comes to engineering, but she's certainly proved Adele's point as far as her youth and accompanying lack of perspective.
As far as the Adv. Board ... kitten in a den of wolves? Something like that, though if she has to talk to them, she may surprise you. She soldiered through an awful lot of abuse at the Academy when she was dating Icheb, and testified in front of fairly hostile disciplinary panels a few times when that mess was being straightened out, and she was a lot younger then ('a lot' being relative at her age, obviously). If the universe would give her an hour to really think things through, she might be able to pull herself together. But the universe has not been on her side lately. (Or is that the author? *evil smirk*)
Thanks again for reading, and the great review.