Private Mate in Six II: Counterplay

[Verity Stuyveris]

COUNTERPLAY: Active play undertaken in response to an opponent's imitative, creating threats of one's own rather than simply absorbing the pressure.

After: Candidate Moves | Before: King in Check​

"We can't complain that you've been ignored by the press," Lucian greeted Verity before she'd even shrugged out of her coat. It had been two days since word leaked that Senator Stuyveris' office was contemplating a motion to censure Aurelian Veruna over what she called his misdeeds.

"What'd they say?" Verity asked as she hung up her coat by the door. She glanced into the outer office, then shut the door when she was satisfied there was no one within earshot.

"They're not too polite," Lucian said. "The Naboo establishment press, especially."

"They say I'm a -- " Verity began, falling short before she reached a suitably insulting term.

Lucian gave her a deadpan look as he followed her to the desk. "Well -- yes," he said, slapping down the more sensationalist headlines on the table once Verity had settled herself. "They've pulled you to pieces, in five different dailies. The Star: STUYVERIS TO FORCE CONFRONTATION. The Evening Trumpet: RALLY TO THE KING. And my favorite: The Theed Bulletin: STUFF IT, STUYVERIS," said Lucian, gesturing to what accompanied the headline: a photo of Verity so unflattering that it had to have been doctored, beside a stylized hand giving her a highly offensive hand gesture.

"My favorite too," Verity said thoughtfully. "Have any serious publications weighed in?"

"The Beacon calls on you to put your money where your mouth is," Lucian said, offering her the paper. "It's an unsigned editorial. Let's see here... 'Stuyveris may be strident, aggressive, and argumentative, but she seems to be the only prominent senator willing to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable about Aurelian Veruna. If this is just noise for gamesmanship, then shame on her. Time to put up or shut up, Verity.'"

Verity's eyebrows lifted at this. "I should so hate to disappoint the editorial board at the Beacon." She stood and went to the caff on the sideboard and poured two cups, one for each of them. She fixed them the way they liked and brought them back to the desk. "Any feedback from Senate colleagues so far?"

"They're playing it close to the chest so far," Lucian said. "Although the delegation from Plooriod III have unanimously signed on to a strongly worded letter alleging that any attempt to censure the King would be conduct unbecoming a Senator and that you can look forward to being referred to Senate Ethics if you do not immediately and publicly denounce what is, they say, clearly a malicious rumor you started to discredit Veruna." He looked up from the message memo. "Shall I dignify that with a response?"

"You could tell them how admiring I am of Plooriod III's intestinal fortitude, but -- it's a little early in the day for that much sarcasm." Verity took a sip of her coffee. "See if you can get me a few minutes with Sarn and Lex and Ayumi," she said after a moment. "To be clear, this will happen. If Sarn hates it and Lex hates it and Ayumi hates it, it will happen. If the Chancellor calls me a damned fool, it will happen, for all the reasons we've talked about. But I am interested in their views. Put up or shut up, right?"

"You hate shutting up," Lucian observed, and was rewarded with a sly smile.

Another gulp of coffee and Verity glanced at her wristwatch, then rose. "Morning motions in ten. What do I need to know? Let's go around the world."
​

 

[Davran Rendari]

COUNTERPLAY: Active play undertaken in response to an opponent's imitative, creating threats of one's own rather than simply absorbing the pressure.​

Davran Rendari had read the Bulletin's cover twice before deciding that he'd like to whack whoever had approved the front page with a rolled-up copy of the tabloid.

He left it spread across the low table in front of him, the enormous STUFF IT, STUYVERIS screaming from the front page beneath the masthead. Someone in the art department had found a particularly severe photograph of the Senator for Druckenwell and placed it beside an illustration that left little room for interpretation. The entire thing had all the subtlety of a pub brawl.

Davran assumed it would sell exceptionally well.

Across the room, several members of the Naboo Preservation League's political committee had been considerably more entertained by it. They had arrived at the League's Theed offices over the course of the morning, each carrying a copy of one paper or another, most of them pleased that the response to the leaked censure story had been immediate and hostile, at least from the heritage Naboo press.

The Star accused Stuyveris of manufacturing a constitutional crisis to justify her own outsized ambition. The Trumpet had called on Naboo's political establishment and infrastructure to close ranks around King Veruna. Half a dozen regional papers had managed to work the term 'Druckenwell interference' or 'Republic overreach' into their morning editions' headlines.

He approached the group with his own copy of the Bulletin, folding it over so the Senator's face disappeared beneath the fold. "I know everyone enjoyed this," he said pleasantly as he approached them, holding up the paper. A few of them smiled around the table. One of the older men opposite him admitted he had really enjoyed it. "Me too," Davran said, tossing the paper down on the table before he picked up his half-crumpled pack of cigarettes. He shook one out onto his hand, then flipped it and tapped the filter edge against the table too pack it. "For about ten seconds. Then I remembered you're not allowed to be a senator if you can't read."

A woman near the end of the table leaned back in her seat. "You think she'll dig in her heels."

"I think," Davran began, then placed the cigarette between his lips and lit it. He drew on it before continuing. "I think if the objective is to persuade Stuyveris she's overreaching, this isn't the way to do it." He took another drag, exhaled again. "This isn't a challenge. It doesn't make her think about the danger of what she's about to do. This just insults her. Makes it easy for her to dig in her heels." Smoke rose in languid tendrils from the cigarette as Davran pointed with the two fingers that held it. "This? This gives her something to prove."

"What do you want us to do?" one of the men asked.

"For now? Nothing stupid." The man's blank stare made Davran raise his free hand and scrub it through his hair. "All right, I'll be more specific. We will oppose the motion on its merits -- not because Stuyveris is an overly-ambitious, jumped-up industrialist from a world whose relevance is its ability to sacrifice itself for industry."

Spoken like a true Naboo patriot.

He went on: "We will argue the real points. Not that Stuyveris and His Majesty have loathed each other from the word go. Not about her at all. This is about us -- Naboo! Our mandate. The limits of Senate authority. The precedent they're trying to create. It's about whether censuring the elected sovereign of the capital world is really going to improve relations between Naboo and the High Republic. Will it? Will it, heck as like."

"You don't think we should pressure her?"

"The right kind of pressure, of course. This just makes it about respectability politics. It's stupid. And I think it helps her." Davran had seen politicians frightened out of positions before. Most were easier to move than they liked to pretend. Donors, debts, lovers, children, ambitions, private humiliations, constituencies that could be provoked into restlessness or outrage.

Verity Stuyveris was no exception.

He pushed away from the table and walked around the tall windows overlooking the avenue below. The League occupied respectable rooms in a respectable part of Theed. Its floors were polished, its walls appropriately bedecked by old photographs of civic campaigns, and a reception desk staffed by people who knew half the city's noble families by sight and by name. There was nothing clandestine about this place. That was one of its strengths.

In the avenue below and the city beyond, Theed went about its business as though the week's political noise was no different from last week's. Davran couldn't bring himself to agree. "She's going to file it," he said, then took a drag from his cigarette. He turned back toward the table. "Anyone disagree? No? Then let's stop pretending the question is whether we can scare her off from pushing it. The question is what would make her decide the cost is too much."

The others muttered among themselves as he came back to the table, now opposite from where he had first stood. He leaned over, pulled a dirty ashtray, and flicked ash from his cigarette into it. "Find out who she's meeting with, who's supporting her, who's on the fence. We think this is her vendetta alone, but I want confirmation. And I want everything we can get on her political vulnerabilities before the session. Send a team to Druckenwell. Get everything we can find."

Davran returned to his seat and drew the Bulletin back toward him. He unfolded it and Stuyveris reappeared, staring from beneath that ridiculous headline with an expression the editors had clearly chosen because it made her look haughty. He had the uncomfortable sense that, if she saw it, she would probably laugh. Perhaps order it framed in her office.

That was going to be a problem.
​

TAG: Verity Stuyveris

 

[Verity Stuyveris]

The ride into the Senate building was proceeding as normal. Verity had her datapad balanced on a knee, sitting in the rear of the speeder, with the radio tuned to a news station. It was covering demonstrations in the capital and at the Senate plaza in particular around the rumored censure motion that Senator Stuyveris was planning to bring against Aurelian Veruna . Further rumors had begun to fly about Stuyveris seeking to strip him of his crown (false, though Verity thought it was a marvelous idea) and that she had begun private inquiries into the feasibility of moving the capital from Naboo (true, though Verity now questioned how private the inquiries truly were).

Verity's quiet deliberation of the text of the censure motion on her datapad was disturbed when a loud crunch broke the morning quiet. A split second later her lap was being showered with tiny cubes of tempered glass and something heavy hit the floor next to her handbag.

Immediately the Senator's security escort shouted, "Go, go! Sirens on, make a path." The speeder lurched forward as the driver floored it and the speeder's sirens wailed. "Senator, are you injured?"

"No," Verity said distractedly. "What in the blue heavens?" She leaned down and picked up what had been hurled through her speeder window before her security escort could stop her. It was heavy but uneven, and when she untied the twine that secured some paper around it she was unsurprised to find a heavy river rock, utterly nondescript. Then she saw the paper. On the inside a heavy-handed scrawl had written a little love note presumably specifically for her.

A SEAT, NOT A THRONE. It was followed by a lopsided V with a stylized spiked crown over it.

Subtle as ever, Verity mused her eyes lingering on the crowned V.

The rest of the ride was fast and blurred and if the speeder had had wheels it would have come into the secure Senate garage on two of them. Varencourt was there waiting, looking equal parts furious and concerned. "Now we'll all get stick," Verity told the two men in the front seat her tone serious but clearly joking. Neither of them seemed to find much humor in it.

Perhaps it simply wasn't funny.

"I'm fine," she told Varencourt as soon as he pulled the door open. "It didn't hit me. It landed over there."

"You shouldn't have touched it," Lucian answered. "They'll want to see if they can get fingerprints."

"You're right of course," Verity said. "Still it was hard to resist taking a peek since someone wanted me to see it so badly." She held it up to him. "V for Veruna, do you think?"

"Or Verity," Lucian murmured.

She smirked. "Or Varencourt. I suppose security will be wanting this but can you take a quick photo? I'd like to compare it to the rest of the, ah, pleasant correspondence we've been receiving."
​

TAG: Davran Rendari