Negotiating with terrorists

[Hanna-Beth Rieve 0]

Marine Captain Hanna-Beth Rieve was well ready to go into a firefight. She was expecting her squad to come back with casualties. She was expecting some of the hostage engineers would be killed in the battle. She was prepared for an assault. She did not expect to be negotiating with a Romulan terrorist. She knew that she would not convince the Romulan to surrender. tr'Tonil, as he called himself, was right. He had the upper hand. He had the trigger switch on Agincourt's engines, and, given enough time, he could break the computer command codes and fire on whatever planet he wished to at will. The all-out assault had failed. At this point, Rieve's best option was to buy the bridge crew time.

 

This put Rieve in a difficult starting position, to say the least. She tried to force Tonil's hand by taking a hard-line position. If Tonil shot an engineer, she would order her Marines to open fire. If Tonil had his way, the ship would be destroyed. So, shooting one engineer equals destroying the ship. Then, she tried to convince him that whatever his alternative mission with the ship was, it was more important than destroying Agincourt. She taunted tr'Tonil that if he simply destroyed the ship, his memorial would read: "Here lies tr'Tonil, the man who completed half his mission." She had to appeal to his senses of duty and "honor," although she didn't know to whom the duty was due, and she knew that the eventual duty was to kill them all. It was the only desperate way she could think of handling him.

 

The bridge had been given an update on the situation. She hoped she could provide them with enough of a delay for an alternative solution to their pesky Romulan problem.