" Colonel, it is your word against his," Desaria gestured towards the seething Prince. " I remember hearing that story, thinking such desertion unbelieveable. There are no recorded survivors from that engagement. Your Colonel must have thought very highly of you because you are dead according to Imperial records."

The eyes of the present Guardsmen all swiveled in their sockets to their standing commander. His was now an uneasy decision. As a flag officer, he would be happy to allow the matter to pass, letting the young fighter officer fly for the SS and not ever again rear his head. However, he was also a Guardsmen and honour demanded that he be challanged. If a unit was destroyed, a Guardsan, a true Guardsman, would have braved the fires of Hell to charge back into the inferno and avenge those lost. Commander Lomax had not done that.

" Admiral, let me avenge my cousin."

Vice-Admiral Makarov was not an aristocrat but he was a Guardsman to the core. He held up a hand and looked hard at the Prince. He said nothing that the unspoken language of his face did not command in the sternest gaze. Prince Jurror sat down quickly and deferred to the senior officer present, Desaria.

" Commander Lomax, you have dishonoured the Guard. You survived where others fell trying to rescue those who could not rescue themselves. There is no higher calling. You did the logical thing which was retreat, but it was not what a Guardsman would have done. You leave me no choice."

Baron Desaria pushed his chair back and took several deliberate steps around, behind the backs of the seated personnel. He moved next to the Commander and took up his gloves in his left hand. The Grand Admiral looked at the floor and then with a swift movement he brought up his arm across the face of the disgraced officer; the sound of leather slapping flesh filled the chamber. Desaria threw his gloves onto the table and turned to walk away.

" Commander, you are no Guardsman. You are to be stricken from the roster of the fallen and are hereby charged with conduct unbecoming a soldier of the Imperial Guard. There is no criminal punishment, but you are now a man without honour. You will never get it back."

The Grand Admiral walked back to his seat and sat down. There was a hushed silence in the room - angry looks from Jurror and Meyer, confusion from a few others and astonishment from the rest. He was not happy, but had averted a duel and bloodshed. Not the right action for a Guardsman, but it was the right action for a Grand Admiral. A tough act to balance.

Desaria looked at Vos. " So, what have you ordered us for the entre?"

As the glove struck Lomax's face, he steeled himself and took the blow without flinching. His eyes narrowed at Desaria's words, and they seemed to burn as he turned his back. The Commander's muscles tensed as Desaria walked back to his seat; his face grew red with anger as he saw the looks he received from the other Guardsmen. Finally, he could take it no longer. As Desaria finished his question, Lomax slammed his hands on the table and stood, nearly knocking his chair over in the process. "Grand Admiral, I..."

He didn't get to finish. Selere stood even as Desaria whirled around and said, "Commander Lomax! That is enough! You will stand down now!" Lomax turned his glare on Selere and did not sit. Selere's gaze grew cold and steely. "Commander Lomax, you will sit down and continue eating your meal or I will make sure you do not sit for a week. Do I make myself clear?"

Selere had known what would come. If Lomax had finished his sentance, he would have challenged Desaria to a duel to regain his honor. Desaria, being a man of honor himself, would have accepted. The outcome would not have been in doubt; Lomax would have died or been incapacitated, and it would have deprived Selere of a good leader. The SS didn't care about honor anyway, only respect.

But now that respect was being challenged. Not the respect of Lomax's men for their commander, but that of Lomax for Selere. The Commander continued to stand, glaring at his commanding officer. Selere set his jaw. "Commander Lomax, I will give you one more chance. Sit down!"

Lomax slowly sank back into his seat, his face still red with anger, nearly covering the mark from the glove. He said slowly, "Colonel, since my honor is stripped from me, I do not feel worthy to eat with such honorable men. Permission to leave the table?"

Selere nodded, and Lomax, with a nod to Wes and a glare at Jurror, stood and walked quickly from the room, leaving his place empty. Wes, dumbfounded by the whole exchange, sat there speachless as Selere once again sat and continued to eat as if nothing had happened.

A long moment passed without much said. The tension that had been so quickly defused seemed unwilling to die, having returned with a vengeance. The table arrangement aided the stalement somewhat, at least removing the element of one side against another. The men just sat there as if students just reprimanded by a schoomaster. No one from Grand Admiral to Colonel saw fit to speak thus forcing salvation to come from an unlikely place - the kitchen.


The SS servers in their plain dinner jackets moved with precision and skill, removing the empty appetizer plates and refilling wine glasses without so much as bumping a guest. White wines were topped off and emptied until a chime sounded the coming of the entre - red wine was now served.


" Ah, I know that smell."


The Grand Admiral's olfactory senses proved accurate, his glance at an approaching steward revealing a quadri-winged herring native only to a marshy region near D'vonal, a large city only a hundred kilometers from the Desaria family's estate. This particular foul was considered endangered and only a thousand permits were issued by the government every year to hunt them making the price of a feast upon them rare indeed - and very expensive.


The stewards brought the bird forth on a silver platter which took the place of a floral centerpiece. Bay leaves and wreathy vegatables lined the tray which served a purpose other than ornamentation: the leafy perimeter held back a potatoe-laded basting sauce that smelled of spice.


" Impressive, General, very impressive. I did not think you had a taste for freauchamt." The Guardsmen sliced up the beast and diviied up the spoils with their SS comrades. Each bite was savory indeed and very moist - such delicacies were often ruined by overcooking making the precious meat dry and hard.


" So General, a question," intoned the fortifcation expert, Admiral Makarov. Despite his naval rank and education, he was a student of land warfare and seized on the opportunity to pick the collective SS brain. " Your offices have been churning out a lot of repulsor-tank designs. Is this a sign the SS does not approve of Walkers?"

"Colonel Selere recommended it, Admiral," Vos replied, helping himself to a modest serving. "I must say, he does have excellent taste. This Frochamp is quite good." Vos, not realizing his linguistic error, was puzzled that Desaria cringed when he said this.

At Makerov's question, Vos looked up at him. "Well, Admiral, I wouldn't say that we disapprove of walkers exactly. We still use them in some of our armored battalions. But a walker is much too easily destroyed for our liking. The members of the Waffen-SS are difficult to replace; most are veterans of several combats, all are very good at what they do. If walkers are destroyed as easily as we saw them fall on Hoth or Endor, then we lose these specialized men. The loss of equipment, while regrettable, is something we can handle. The loss of those men is not. So we switched to repulsor tanks; they can handle the same tasks as a walker, over more varied terrain, and with the same, if not better, ability."

The Grand Admiral cringed slightly at the Colonel-General's pronunciation, emphaszing the first syllable in a manner so gutteral as only describeable as provincial. Colonel Selere, a noble himself, heard his commander's misfortunate and almost choked on his wine in lieu of a horribly twisted smile.


Down the table, Vice Admiral Makarov, with his angled muzik beard looked like a figure from some mythic story - more like a primitive winter warrior than an Admiral. True enough, were his expertise in defenses and fortifications, both land and orbital, not renowned galaxy wide, the lapse in grooming standards would have been terminated long ago. His question asked and answered, the Vice Admiral slipped a piece of the meat's upper lair into his mouth which veritably disappeared behind his whiskers.


Count von Strachwitz, for his part, listened intently then placed his wine glass onto the table and brought the other hand down palpably. " Rubbish!" he intoned," you just can't handle that kind of power in your hands!"


A round of laughter from all personnae burst out, ending round two of the tension. When it had subsided, he mustered all the seriousness he could. " Many years ago when I was a Major, I commanded a small reconnaissance battalion attached to the 79th Heavy Armor Division. We had a storming General - long on drive, short on intelligence. We were ordered into the first drop ships for the Siege of Xeres XII. My battalion was outfitted with a few AT-STs and a platoon of AT-PT scouts. We dropped in and marched off the transports into a hail of fire. When we supressed the enfilding salvos from some nearby emplacements we turned to see our repulsor-lift support smoldering in the sun. When I tried to exit my AT-ST, I almost fell down! Turns out the gravity on Xeres was out of sync and the hovers hand't been programmed properly. When I got to my feet, my driver yelled 'want to drive one of them back?' I said 'Tanks, but no tanks!'"

Laughs were exchanged around the table, coming from both SS and Guardsmen. The pun was not lost on anyone. Colonel Krutz, commander of the 1st SS-Panzer Regiment, leaned forward and, with a smile still gracing his face, said, "Well, Count, I have to say you make a good point. On certain planets the gravity is such that repulsors do have a bit of a problem. That is why retain some walker units. That is also why we scout the planet in question carefully before beginning an assault. As you said, your General was long on drive and short on intelligence."

Commander Fleetfire, having been left out of the conversation so far, put in his two cents. "And really, I'd much rather risk a gravitic anomaly than lock myself in a box that can be destroyed by Ewoks swinging on vines!"

Der Walkergraf as the Count's name went in the Grand Admiral - and Colonel Selere's - native tongue, raised a wine glass with one hand and touched his hand to his chest with the other. " A good shot Commander. Touche!"

Baron Desaria overheard the exchange between Commander Fleetfire and von Strachwitz and smiled himself. He devoured a piece of meat and washed it down with some wine. He locked eyes with his SS counterpart and spoke just loud enough for all to hear.

" My dear General Vos, you men are fond of low blows. If this trend continues we'll have to start issuing your commendations while seated!"

"As long as they're issued, Admiral, as long as they're issued," Wes replied, joining the laughter. This is good, Wes thought. Our men are actually getting along. If this continues, the Guard might actually accept us as equals. Wes cut another piece of meat, attempting to copy the elegance of the Guard in doing so (and failing miserably), then washed it down with a sip of wine.

General Demelhuber, commander of the 1st Waffen-SS Division, joined the conversation. "I have a question for you, Grand Admiral Desaria. How do you manage to combine such rigid discipline and chain of command with individual initiative? I've never seen the two work together properly, yet you seem to have achieved a working model. I would very much like to implement something like it into my division."

" Imperial soldiers as a whole and the Guard in particular are seen by many governments in the same light. In propoganda we are represented by mindless automatons marching in lock step over a cliff if ordered to do so with no initiative beyond pointing at the enemy and marching as close as we can before dying."


Laughter continued with a few side conversations, particularly among Commander Fleetfire and Colonel Meyer whose fame was not against other pilots, though he was able, but in a ground support role against enemy armor and emplacements. The other SS officers, some with wine in hand, listened intently.


" The reality is that discipline has its place. We can march all day and well into the evening but what that type of rigidity teaches us is to rely universally on the men to your left and right, and operationally on your flanking units. The uncompromising part misrepresented by our detractors is not in the manner of the execution of the duties assigned us but the execution itself."


General Demelhuber seemed to be a proud man and did not ask for clarification, but the look on his face belied a smidgeon of confusion. Thus the Grand Admiral elaborated.


" Initiative is stressed rather than stifled, but in that initiative clear guidelines are laid down that prevent ambition from becoming anarchy. For example, in say the Confederation Army they have a magnificent mini-laser system that does a good job of knocking our anti-armor rockets out of the air before they hit. The weapons are droid handled because of the high rate of fire; thus, it's impossible for them to depress those guns and use them against infantry targets - targets I might ad for which they would be well suited. The reason why: their soldiers are taught from the moment of enlistment that a stylus is a stylus and for use only as a stylus. That is where we differ. We teach what a stylus can do but we also teach how to use one if that's all you have to work with and you don't neccessarily need to write anything.


" It's a fine line, General, very fine. And it has not always worked. There are times when an officer seizes initiative and fails, miserably in some cases. The key is not to chide him for failing but praise him for trying. The punishment comes when he fails to learn from his mistakes. Does that make sense, General?"