>>6083449
Things to emphasize should be
>The greatest threat to Ferrum is Ferrum.
She’s implicitly admitted it already. Alpha supposedly has projections showing we can win the war against Tamar. The reason we aren’t? Civil war. The only logical choice to protect Ferrum is to defend it from itself.

>Directives can be misinformed, and contradictory directives mean they must be disregarded as a consideration
Tailing into the above, I’m absolutely willing to admit to Gamma we received the order to kill the general and eliminate many of the forces present on the southern front. We’re also the one who refused it. No one else mattered. I spelled out Thea ordered us to carry it out, but we also leave that part out and imply we somehow intercepted the message. Gamma won’t buy it, but anyone who somehow sees this exchange may.

Either way, we were put in the situation where every path would lead to a catastrophic failure for the war effort. Either we followed the order and Tamar would exploit the sudden disarray to push us back, or we ignored it. We’ve seen the results of the latter.

If these are the situations we’re forced into, we can’t trust our handlers to act in the interest of the Empire. Our actions must be based on something other than orders when contradictory ones occur, and Project Warden’s “directive” is just another order. She needs something more concrete.

>We are willing to shift again if she can give us an alternative that we believe will protect her and Delta from being potentially discarded like us.
The most important piece. She isn’t speaking to a wall like she does with Delta. She knows we’ll ignore orders if it would hurt them in ways we can’t justify. We’re GIVING her this leverage and asking her to use it if she can. But we were collateral in an order that was destined to sabotage the war effort, and a scapegoat would be needed. We will not let her (or our pilots) be placed in that situation. If she can meet that standard, she has our support and (likely) our pilots.

Things to mention on the off-chance it helps
>Sunray ordered the assassination
>Following orders would have had us branded a “traitor” either way by him
We already know he prioritizes secrecy over other concerns. We may have been spared what happened with Delta, but we can’t know that. After all, we worked with a “traitor” to Tamar. Who knows what they did to us? Better to be safe.

>We ARE loyal. With great difficulty.
The humans make it hard to know what “loyalty” even means.

>We have yet to contest a pilot through Sync since deployment. Our original since deployment still pilots us, and a second acceptable one was found. We can’t save them, though.
Lets her know we’re more like her now, but using us still damages pilots long-term. It’s the nature of the sync system and trying to control us when we need our full power. Being the superior Core means degrading the pilots who support us the most. It hurts to know.

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Core of Steel- 11 Return Under Fire