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Jim Kirk enters the Nexus in a mild daze, still a little stunned at the news he's just received from Command. He doesn't look like he's shaved for a few weeks, but his black Starfleet Academy instructor's uniform is clean and his hair is neatly combed, so it's not like he's been letting himself go or anything.

He gets a cup of coffee on autopilot, before finding a seat to really think over what the hell just happened, a look of hopeful disbelief on his face, like he's been told something that's too good to be true.

"Have you ever had a dream job you never expected to get?" he asks after several minutes, looking up. "For those that haven't, if you knew you wouldn't be home for a couple years, what would you not leave without?"

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Shade-Seeker nods soberly. "This, I know too well. But the perfect defense against traitors... that is a lonely way, indeed, and the cost is crucially high."

Absolutely no argument from Jim. "Next best thing is safety in numbers... surround yourself with enough allies, and you've got all the more people to come to your defense. It's not perfect, but it's better than trying to go it alone."

That prompts another nod, this one firm agreement. "Far better to have friends. And in truth, Perfect Defenses are a puzzle taught to some mages when they are apprentices--not true spells, but exercises of the mind for weighing cost and consequence."

Oh, this time he can almost hear the capital letters on 'Perfect Defenses,' now that he knows it's an actual thing and not just an apt descriptor. "So it's a type of training for critical thinking? Learning to find the balance between ethics and logic, that sort of thing."

"Indeed. Or in their case, the balance between what is gained and what is lost--to defend perfectly against one form of attack is to become more vulnerable in other ways, and some Perfect Defenses directly contradict."

"That sounds really interesting," Jim says, completely honest. "Any chance you could get me some reading material? I'm teaching a Tactics course at the Academy right now, while I'm waiting for the Enterprise to finish her repairs. Something like that would be right up my alley."

"Certainly. I have not such a book with me at present, but I shall bring one on my next visit for you," he promises. "How are you liking the chance to teach?"

A friendship founded on books certainly isn't a bad kind of friendship to have, and Jim nods in agreement. They're already off to such a good start.

"It's not as bad as I thought it would be," he admits. There'd certainly been a significant amount of self-doubt, before he'd started. "I did have to devote a class to 'ask Captain Kirk tons of questions' to get that all out of the way, but everyone seems pretty engaged and eager to learn. I don't know if it's because of who I am or because of the subject matter, but if it means they're learning, I guess it doesn't matter."

Shade-Seeker might call a friendship founded on books one of the best sorts of friendship, but he has a definite pro-book bias.

"Perhaps I should try that, when I teach--a session of open questions at the outset. Every assertion must establish credence, after all. If I may ask, what manner of tactics do you teach?"

Jim is totally comfortable with answering Shade-Seeker's questions, at least about Academy training. "Mostly starship-based combat," he explains. "It's more than just the technical specs of each ship, it's also knowing and understanding the psychology of your opponent and how they're likely to react, and how to counter an opponent doing the same to you. It's mostly for cadets in the command track, but it's open to the other divisions too. And if I get time at the end of the semester, I'm hoping to do a short study on how to adapt the techniques they've learned to hand-to-hand and diplomacy."

"The School of the Tightening Circles," the scholar muses, nodding a little. "A fine lesson plan; I hope you have the opportunity to expand the study as you intend."

"School of the Tightening Circles?" Jim repeats curiously. "Is that some kind of interdisciplinary thing?"

"It is a philosophy for preparing to deal with an enemy--different tactics are called for, the nearer the enemy draws. The method which is effective at long range is less so as they approach, and so methods of attack and defense must be changed to adapt, yes?"

"Yeah, I see what you mean now," Jim says with a nod. "The closer you are, the less options you tend to have, so up-close combat needs even more prep than being at range." Tightening circles indeed.

Shade-Seeker nods. "By the same token, one who can dispatch foes at a distance may not need great skill in close quarters... until they do."

"'Better to have and not need than to need and not have,'" Jim agrees. "Starfleet generally does a good job of prepping cadets for all kinds of emergencies, but it never hurts to have extra tools in your arsenal, either."

"Ha!" Shade-Seeker laughs. "My philosophy exactly! And the tool which one has may be turned to unexpected purpose, while the tool which one has not can do very little, indeed."

"Exactly. Creative thinking might be the most powerful weapon a person can have, and it's something Starfleet's kinda lost focus on. Even if the only thing that cadets learn from my lectures is how to use what they have creatively, then I've done my job."

"I am curious--I know little of sailing, and less of these star-ships, but how may one fight creatively with one?"

Jim smiles a little, more than fine with elaborating on the idea. "The most basic thing about starship combat that a lot of species forget is that you're operating in three dimensions, not two. Unless a species evolved to fly, most people we've met tend to favor flat, horizontal planes of movement. A starship can move in any direction, and come at an enemy vessel from an unexpected angle."

"There's also a tendency to only count your actual weapons as weapons. Every starship in the Federation has what's called a warp core at the heart of its engines. It's a very powerful reactor, and without it, you're not going anywhere in a hurry. They can also be manually ejected, if there's a breach and the core's going to explode or something. So while you can only use it once, every starship has a potentially powerful explosive that can be jettisoned in the path of an enemy craft."

"There are creative defensive options, too. We have energy shields to protect the ship from damage, but they can only take so much before they fail. If you're taking torpedo fire, a lot of those kinds of missiles are heat-seeking, so venting plasma from the warp nacelles can confuse the targeting and draw the torpedoes away from the main body of the ship."

There's another aspect that immediately comes to mind, although the memories surrounding it are a little less casual than what came before. "Boarding another ship's usually done by transporter, which is a kind of mechanical teleportation, or flying over in a shuttlecraft. On my last mission, I had to board an enemy ship without use of either, to try to take it over from the inside. So I suited up, had my ship line up with their airlock a few kilometers out, and got jettisoned out the garbage chute. A living person isn't a typical target for starship sensors to pick up out in space, so they wouldn't have been able to lock on and shoot me down before I made it over."

"One might also swim in three dimensions," the amphibious academic adds. The thought does lead him to questions, though, as most new ideas do. "Where do star-ships hide, that their approach may be unexpected? Among the clouds?"

"Would it not be wise to carry a second of these cores, in case the first should fail? Then, also, it might be a weapon without being a last resort."

Some ideas, Shade-Seeker grasps easily given his backgrounds, but others inspire inquiry. Shields he understands as a mage, and when the present questions have been sorted, he might ask about kinds of shields, and whether starships attune themselves to the threat the way mages must.

Jim nods in agreement. They haven't run into too many aquatic sentients, particularly not spacefaring civilizations, but the point is well taken. The question about clouds, however, makes him a pause a moment. Maybe Tamriel's understanding of astronomy is a little more primitive than he thought? (Oh, Jim, if only you knew.) "Well, there are sort of clouds in space, called nebulas. They're not terribly common, but you could use one to hide in, and they can mess up sensors so you might not be detected. I've also heard of ships putting a planet or moon between them and their opponent, then changing their orbit to be perpendicular for a faster intercept. There are rumors that the Romulans have developed a cloaking device recently too; that'd make their ships invisible."

"The psychological part of it's a little more minor, but it can be enough to momentarily throw someone off," he adds. "There's a reason it's common courtesy to adjust your ship's orientation to match whoever you're interacting with. Humans can find it weird to talk to someone that we perceive as upside-down, or fight someone while our belly's turned towards them." Whether it works the same for other species, of course, depends on the species, but maybe that's something the Saxhleel will have in common. They are bipeds developed for life in gravity, so that does tend to indicate a preference for physical orientation, usually.

The question about the warp core is a little more complicated to answer, and Jim takes a moment to decide how he wants to answer that. "It's... possible, but not really feasible. Are you familiar with radioactivity?" Something Jim does not like to think about, these days, but now that he's had a few months to adjust, it doesn't make him twitchy just by talking about it.

In Tamriel's cosmology, the sun and stars are literally holes in a spherical sky, and their light is the glow of the magic-energy plane leaking through. It's crazy as far as space travelers are concerned. At Jim's description, Shade-Seeker nods thoughtfully. "For the most part, like open water, then, with the occasional chance to hide among fronds or duck around a rock. Invisibility would be a powerful advantage in such circumstances."

"I would think it prudent to direct your vessel's smallest aspect toward the enemy, if that is practicable; a display of trust might involve just the opposite. Hmm." Whether Saxhleel are naturally inclined toward a common orientation, Shade-Seeker is at least clever enough to consider the implications of three-dimensional space.

"Radioactivity? Ah, I believe that you have mentioned it before, in unfavorable tones," he offers.

Jim hasn't thought much about starship orientation in those terms, but it isn't inaccurate. "That's true, although I'm not sure the Constitution class was designed with that in mind. A head-on position gives a potential enemy less to shoot at, and paralleling another ship as an escort exposes the entire length of the ship."

Right, he did bring it up at some point. "Starships need a lot of energy to operate efficiently, and the more powerful types of reactions - in this case, nuclear fusion - give off radioactive energy as a byproduct. We have the technology to contain it," he manages to say without wincing too noticeably, "but it's dangerous stuff. It can't be heard, seen, smelled, or felt, and even just a short exposure can make most species very sick or kill them outright." Something he has an uncomfortable, quietly horrifying experience with now, far more intimately than he ever wanted to know. "Its lethality does gradually decay over time, though if left alone, that can take thousands of years for it to be safe. Containment breaches are really rare, and so is needing to eject the core entirely, so it's not worth the risk of doubling your chances for something going wrong."

Shade-Seeker listens, a corner of his mind contemplating how to detect this undetectable energy, and how to harness it--not as a weapon, he has plenty of those, but Jim's people are apparently able to sail among the stars. There must be other ways to utilize it, as well. "This core is poisonous even when dormant? That would complicate the idea," he admits.