Those In The Shadows: Favorite Minor Characters

fallsfromtrees wrote:

Chaser617 wrote:Aubrey Wanderman. I'm glad he's still around even if we don't see him very much. To be honest the entire crew of Midshipmen/women from Hexapuma, not just Helen. Thankfully save for Ragnild they are all still with us...

fallsfromtrees wrote:I'm sorry, but Ansten Fitzgerald, and many of the others on Hexapuma dies when the ship was destroyed during Oyster Bay. Aikawa was on leave and survived, and of course Paulo and Ginger were among those evacuated during hte Weyland drill, and so survived, but Hexapuma was destroyed with all hands.

n7axw wrote:Hi falls fromtrees,

Just wanted to comment here... Aubrey Wanderman was on Weyland assigned to fabrication when OB rolled in. Therefore he would have been evacuated as part of the exercise and would have survived.

Don

Don,

I had taken that as a given since he was the primary subject of this section of posts. I just wanted to point out that most of the Hexapuma people had died witht he ship during OB.

cthia wrote:Ensign Mai-Ling Jackson, with tears.

roseandheather wrote:

Hutch wrote:Captain Molly DeLaney, Lester Tourville's Chief of Staff.

She Wants those MAligment bastiches nearly as bad as Honor does. And for some reason, she just strikes as being a basically decent character.

*cough*

MOLLY DeLANEY AND ALLEN HIGGINS!!!

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

dreamrider wrote:

roseandheather wrote:*cough*

MOLLY DeLANEY AND ALLEN HIGGINS!!!

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Actually, for the sake of maintaining SOME sort of civilized relationship with rnh, I'll buy this one...gladly.

...but Shanon does NOT end up roommates with Sonja.

dreamrider

cthia wrote:

Chaser617 wrote:Aubrey Wanderman. I'm glad he's still around even if we don't see him very much. To be honest the entire crew of Midshipmen/women from Hexapuma, not just Helen. Thankfully save for Ragnild they are all still with us...

Oh my. I'm in the holiday spirit and all extra mushy and you just had to go and mention Ronnie. Oh my Ronnie. I so loved her. And I would have married her too, I would've. I just love her to pieces. I do. I simply do says I. 'sigh'


****** *

Now for my wet two cents ...


I adore the little sweet minx that handled the calvarous wormhole transit of Honor Harrington's elements to save the Home System in the Battle of Manticore.

Very loose paraphrase "Great Caesars ghost! WTH! Boys and girls, we're gonna be havin' lots o' company. Lots!"

That little lass should have gotten some sort of medal herself, for her own little courage under fire. At least extraordinary mention.

So, raise your glasses me fellow Honorites, here's to her.

klink klink klink ...

roseandheather wrote:You're thinking of Stephania Grimm, whom I also adore and who was next on my list.

"Ma'am, the Alpha Arrays are reporting—sweet Jesus!"
Lieutenant Commander Angelina Turner turned quickly, eyes flashing angrily.

"Just what the hell kind of report do you call that, Hellerstein?" she demanded harshly, even angrier because Chief Petty Officer Bryant Hellerstein was one of her best, steadiest people.

"Commander—Ma'am—this can't be right!" Hellerstein blurted, and Turner strode quickly towards his station. She'd opened her mouth in another, still sharper reprimand, but Hellerstein's shocked expression when he turned to look at her stopped it unspoken. She'd never seen the tough, competent noncom look . . . terrified before.

"What can't be right, Bryant?" she asked, much more gently than she'd intended to speak.

"Ma'am," Hellerstein said hoarsely, "according to the Alpha Arrays, three hundred-plus unidentified ships just made their alpha translations right on the limit."

break

"Oh, shit," Admiral Stephania Grimm, Royal Astrogation Control Service, said to herself very, very quietly as a soft but urgent audio alarm sounded. The napkin she'd been using to brush cake crumbs from her tunic was suddenly a crushed ball in her hand, and the people who'd just been wishing her happy birthday turned as one to look at the plot.

Figures, a corner of her brain thought. They would decide to come calling on my birthday!

She looked around at the suddenly taut faces of her co-workers. ACS was a civil service organization, despite its military ranks, and most of her subordinates and staff had never imagined in their darkest nightmares that they might ever actually see combat. But Grimm's position as the commanding officer of the Manticoran Junction's traffic control service required her to cooperate closely with its military hierarchy. Not all ACS commanders had been comfortable fits for that side of their duties, but it helped that Grimm was herself ex-Navy. In fact, she'd reached the rank of captain of the list before transferring to ACS, and she'd quickly acquired a reputation among her military colleagues for efficiency and brains. That was especially welcome in the wake of her immediate predecessor, Admiral Allen Stokes, whose sole claim to his position had been his brother-in-law's close ties to Baron High Ridge and First Lord Janacek.

But right at this moment, knowing she was well thought of was remarkably little comfort to Admiral Grimm. The huge hyper footprint just outside the system hyper-limit was bad enough, but for her, personally, the scattered footprints and spreading impeller signatures eight light-minutes out from the Junction were just as bad. There were going to be incoming drones very shortly, and there might be more superdreadnoughts hovering out there on the other side of the hyper wall, waiting to pounce, depending on what those drones told their masters.

She wasn't the only one thinking dark thoughts, she noticed, watching the huge astro plot's sidebars as the Junction forts rushed to battle stations. It would take a lot of SDs to deal with them, she told herself, but that didn't make her feel a great deal better. There were several hundred freighters, passenger liners, mail boats, and exploration vessels either already in transit through the Junction's various termini or else lined up in the transit queues awaiting their turns, and the thought of MDMs tearing around amidst all that defenseless civilian shipping made her physically sick to her stomach.

She flipped up a plastic shield and punched a large, red button on her console. A harsh, strident buzzer sounded, and every other sound on the command deck of HMSS DaGama, the Junction's central ACS platform ceased abruptly. Every eye turned towards her as the saw-edged audio alarm jerked her personnel's attention to her.

"It hasn't been declared yet, but we have damned sure got ourselves a Case Zulu, people," she announced in a flat, tense voice. "I'm declaring Condition Delta on my own authority. Clear the Junction—all traffic, wherever it is in the queue, not just the outbounds already on final. I want anything that might draw an MDM's attention way the hell away from here ASAP.

"After that, Jordan," she continued, turning to her exec, who still held half a slice of cake, "get ready for the ride of your life. Unless I miss my guess, what Admiral Yestremensky had to deal with when Earl White Haven took Eighth Fleet to Basilisk was a walk in the park compared to what's coming our way. Get a dispatch boat away to Trevor's Star with a sitrep immediately. Then go ahead and start setting up for a minimum-interval transit of everything Admiral Kuzak and Duchess Harrington have. I'm not sure what their deployments are, but we could have close to a hundred wallers coming through that terminus nose-to-arse. And if a couple of SDs misjudge their intervals and collide—or bring their wedges up too close together—we are going to have one hell of a mess."

"No joke," Captain Jordan Lamar said feelingly.

"So I want our best controllers on that lane," Grimm said. "Forget about the standard watch schedule. Pull in the best from wherever the hell they are and get them at those consoles—" she jabbed a finger at the Trevor's Star traffic controllers' section "—ten minutes ago. Then see what we've got available for tugs."

"Yes, Ma'am. I'm on it," Lamar said. He looked down, saw the cake as if for the first time, and stared at it for just a moment. Then he chuckled harshly, shoved it into his mouth, and turned to his own com to begin giving orders.

"Bradley," Grimm went on, turning to her official liaison to Admiral Thurston Havlicek, the Junction Defense Command's commanding officer, "bring Admiral Havlicek up to speed on what we've already done. I'm sure we're going to have drones incoming from these people in the next thirty or forty minutes, and I'm sure he's got his own plans for dealing with them, but ask him if there's anything we can do to help. I'm thinking we may need to be looking at ways to stack the incoming wallers to block the drones' LOS to the terminus, keep them from getting a close enough look to tell the Peeps what's coming or when. Whatever JDC needs and we can do, he's got, but I need to know what he wants now."

"Aye, aye, Ma'am!" Commander Bradley Hampton said with a grateful smile. "I'll get right on it."

"Good," Grimm said quietly, and looked back at the plot. The first Ghost Rider platforms were already twenty-five thousand kilometers out, accelerating at just over five thousand gravities. She couldn't see them, though she knew they were there. But she could see the blossoming impeller signatures of Junction Defense Command's LACs. Over thirty-five hundred were already in space, and more were appearing with metronome precision as the LAC platforms launched.

You bastards just go right ahead and come in on us, she thought venomously at the impeller signatures of the battlecruisers trying to spy on her command area. Come right ahead. We've got something for you.

exiledtoIA wrote:Dicey.
I want more of his adventures helping ADM Gold Peak maintain her weight.