Game Changer: Day 12

Word Count: 72,029

Summary of Events:

Tekla brought Cvita to visit Hawk, who had to soothe his rather distraught girlfriend because she didn't really understand why her father had jailed him. Several days later Tekla told Hawk that the General Secretary was trying again to send a probe — with twice the attacking force — to the Sons of Nahash and discussed the possibility of Tekla helping Hawk escape to gather some probes and launch the attack he'd suggested, or even better yet — especially in Tekla's mind — assassinating the General Secretary . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

He was actually glad that Tekla had left, because he’d had a doubt strike him that he couldn’t shake about the idea of actually assassinating the General Secretary — as much as it would be nice to eliminate him — that he hadn’t wanted to end up inadvertently sharing with her.

His doubt was whether it was a good thing to be the one who pulled the trigger to end the life of a man he owed his current rank to, a man who had always looked on him with a decent measure of favour, compared to the behaviour of all of the other higher-ranking people toward him.

Too, the General Secretary was Cvita’s father. Would Cvita really want anything to do with him after he killed her father?

She probably didn’t think the General Secretary was bad enough to deserve to be killed, after all, she was rather distraught at the fact that her father had effectively disowned her to the most squalid place in the entire colony and had decided to throw her lover into jail.

Even if she was finding her father surprisingly mean, she probably still loved him and would want him to die a slow and peaceful death, one that occurred naturally, as a result of old age, she wouldn’t want him to be attacked and shot — and especially not by Hawk.

Hawk knew Tekla’s hatred of the General Secretary well, and he understood it. He could see why she hated the General Secretary; and, in fact, he was rather upset that the General Secretary would’ve done such a thing to Tekla, because it was completely unjustified.

She had been taking the test to be commissioned early and he failed her because she refused to do something that wasn’t even a part of the test. It was completely contrary. As much as it made Hawk the only person in the history of the Emim to receive his CES at the age of fifteen, he wouldn’t necessarily have been opposed to sharing that record with someone if they were capable of doing it, as Tekla had been.

So if Hawk were to tell Tekla that he wasn’t sure he ought to kill the General Secretary he was sure that she would end up losing her mind at him and telling him that the General Secretary should’ve died years ago.

Unless Hawk could succeed in doing the other ideas of collecting up the unmanned probes and launching an attack of his own via the attack-from-below method that he had suggested and was not impressed that the General Secretary had cast aside without even attempting.

Or even the idea of seeing who else out there was discontent with the General Secretary, or even thought him an outright idiot for continuing to send probes followed by attack forces only to have the probes shot and the attack forces turn back.