The next long story, then, pushes at the boundaries of this limitation. It sets up a situation which could break apart the Federation... and, since I'm not allowed to break the Federation, it means I have to find some way for my guys to fix things, however desperate the situation looks. (Actually, fixing it was not my biggest problem, when it came to this storyline. Shuffling the whole of the rest of Starfleet out of the way, so my guys were the only ones on the spot to save the day, now that was a problem.)
The main characters in this story are Tylha, Ronnie and T'Laihhae; it's the first time T'Laihhae appears as a first-person point-of-view character, and so this is the first look we get at her actual thought processes. Previously, she's been enigmatic and well-informed - very well-informed. This story offers some explanation of how she got that way - and also resolves her long-standing personal plotline with her former boss.
A few more of my characters get bit parts in this one. By now, I'd added a Caitian and a Ferasan to my stable of toons, mostly for the fun of watching them bounce around. As the crisis develops in the Federation, my KDF characters are around to comment on it and take advantage of it. And there are brief appearances by my Starfleet science officers, T'Pia and M'eioi. (There's a mention of a "young black-furred Caitian" in one scene where Tylha and Ronnie are in Club 47: this is M'eioi, although she doesn't get an actual name-check until further into the story.)
This one was written before the end of the Federation-Klingon war, but not before I'd heard that the Earth Spacedock map was going to get a complete overhaul. So I had no qualms about, well, the things Tylha does to Earth Spacedock at one point. I mean, if it was going to get broken anyway....
Oh, and a one-off Literary Challenge story fits into the timeline here, about when Ronnie is off running patrol missions by herself. It's one of my favourite Ronnie stories, that one.
No comments:
Post a Comment