We don't, however, appear to have any law against having a Betazoid deep-read prisoners to find where tangible evidence is hidden. Which is why it's so important that the Amarki caught two Shodars alive here, if we can get the Scrutineers in a room with them before they can commit suicide the impact payout will be massive.
That runs into interesting questions about just how deep a Betazoid can read into the mind of a resisting subject.
We know a Vulcan could get the information with a mind meld- but nonconsensual mind melds raise a lot of problems in Vulcan ethics, with good reason.
Also, we first put telepaths on the Orion beat
two years ago. If I were associated with the Syndicate, I'd have made damn sure to create "In case this person is captured, purge file XYZ" protocols. Given that they're a lot more cautious about their cell structure organization than most criminal organizations in real life, this seems very likely.
From the same setting that has me wishing for Kinnison... Never assume the bastards are stupid, or won't adapt to your secret weapon after you use it on them repeatedly.
Isn't telepathy a more effective version of the polygraph? Are polygraphs against the law in Federation space?
I would have thought that telepathy would be hailed as a great tool for getting to the actual truth, rather than randomly incriminate somebody. The point of telepathy in this case is to find out who actually committed each crime, instead offending everybody away in an accusation of slavery and conspiracy to commit crimes, which you should be able to easily make it stick with everybody that got arrested.
The catch is that in the process of finding out who actually committed each crime, you are taking every person
accused and deeply, intrusively reading their every thought and learning their every secret.
If the idea of someone doing that to you doesn't bother you, then I'm jealous of you on some level, because you would have to have led a life that is both quite dull and very happy to be fully comfortable letting an unknown stranger riffle through your thoughts.
Then maybe they should've done something about their slaver problem before.
The chief of staff of the current Orion Union head of state is a woman who, well...
Iron Wolf said:
It was times like this, with Ordey's small but strong hands running through the silky material of the neckbow and then tightening it around her throat that Oyana felt a twinge of unease. By all accounts, those hands had once turned taps to run a bath for Ordey's owner. Then, those same hands opened up a kitchen drawer and withdrew a paring knife, before returning to the bathroom. Then, while Ordey's owner relaxed in the tub, those hands had run that knife from the owner's wrist to their elbow on both arms, purple-red blood draining away into a bath filled with scented oils and salts. The final, gruesome detail was that the distinctive purple streak Ordey put in her hair was in memory of her tipping her long hair into those bloody waters, before she cleaned her hands and walked into the street to join the revolution.
So yes, I think they
did something about their slaver problem before. If you think it's bad now, you should see what it looked like a couple of generations ago.
What about it? I'm against the thought police as well, but these guys were caught in flagrante delicto. The reason for protections against self-incrimination is to avoid torture from being used to prove a rime has been committed; if you are under torture, you'll admit to anything to make the pain stop. If witness evidence (or security cameras, or DNA, or fingerprints) is acceptable, why not a telepath? Witnesses are often unreliable because they are often under stress, or saw it from far away, in poor lighting, etc. A trained telepath under oath (or three!) should be able to give a more reliable account of what happened, from the point of view of all involved.
For one, there are very serious concerns about the honesty of the telepaths. There's a good reason hearsay evidence is normally prohibited, because under extreme circumstances, the temptation on the part of a witness to lie about what they learned from another person, or at least to shade the truth, is overwhelming.
Why not try them in both systems?
As long as it's for different crimes, it works fine.
Because what if the Amarki sentence them to death, but the Orion courts don't, or vice versa? You can have a person serve prison sentences consecutively, but you can't kill a person in one country and leave them alive in another.
The first class of Amarki graded in '06 it is currently 2312 and most of them are Lieutenants.
Ka'Sharren took command of Enterprise at 32, which likely gives her ten years in service before hitting the EC.
So an Amarki that rockets up through the the ranks like her we will see soon, about '16 or so But there is no indication of that.
Most Officers seem to hit Captain in their late 30s early 40s. Which would put us seeing them around 2320 or so. But most of our EC captains have an extra couple of years of seasoning at that rank. So say 2323?
... I just realised that I forgot about Commander Leaniss... So whenever Oneiros feels like it I guess?
I am
pretty sure that I remember there being references to Amarki officers with experience in their own navy transferring to Starfleet at higher ranks. Sort of a 'transfer credit' thing. So he'd have ample precedent to bring in other Amarki captains, not just Leaniss, if he saw fit.
But yeah. Right now, the typical Starfleet captain is someone who was in training (or a recent Academy graduate) when the Khitomer Accords were signed. At that time, we hadn't met the Amarki.
[Makes continuing notes for the 'spiritual successor' game idea that is taking over his brain...]
That's only true for the people who weren't on the raid and who didn't order it.
Which is probably
the great majority of everyone they captured. That's the entire point of having tried to hit the slave auction at which the (frozen Amarki-sicle) slaves were being sold.
There's no sovereignty issues in not granting extraterritoriality to slavers actively at war with the government.
Optics MIGHT be a tactical consideration, but there's no actual sovereignty issue, just a potential PR ploy by Syndicate pawns.
No, there really,
really is a sovereignty issue, assuming the auction was being held in Orion space and that most of the people captured were not personally involved in the original slave raid. And those assumptions are at least
strongly supported by the text.
Hmm, this 15 year development may sound bad, but the Excelsior also had a torturous design process, especially due to the transwarp thing. USS Excelsior was just starting trial runs in 2285, so it probably finished construction around that time, and using TBG rules, the design and prototype took up to a decade. Then because of the failure of the experimental transwarp drive, she was refitted and stayed in spacedock until at earliest 2287 and at latest 2290. So the Excelsior also could have had nearly a 15 year delay from design to full (re)commissioning.
Still, I hope this Riala design+prototype length does not bode for future Amarkian ship designing, since their doctrine is geared for ship design.
The "design process" described may also include some of the fundamental research that had to be done (i.e. "2280s Explorer Engineering" or some such. If the Amarki had to develop a tech
specifically to build such a huge ship, THEN research the actual ship design projection, THEN spend six years building a super-prototype... Fifteen years sounds entirely reasonable to me.
Huh, so Amarkia is a stratocracy? Or something similar to one?
The Amarki seem to model all forms of authority and rank through a feudal 'knightly' lens. It is unsurprising if their head of state is of necessity the High Commander of the Order of [the whole Amarki Navy]. Because if they weren't, then by definition, they would not have the authority to command the navy.
The navy takes orders from the highest-ranking person within the navy's own feudal system. The shipyard facilities, likewise.
There is no civilian control of the military. There aren't even separate categories of 'civilian' and 'military.' There are just "people with feudal rank" and "people without feudal rank." If you want to put a 'civilian' in charge of the military, you just give them the top rank in the military. If you want to put them in charge of a country, you crown them Prince(ss) of that country. At high levels, one individual can hold numerous titles as a routine, necessary part of doing their job.
This is a feature of real life feudalism, and even in the decline of real world feudalism, it helps to explain things like
why Queen Elizabeth II has like a hundred titles.
