Captain Maze and General Zey (and Skirata)
A number of years ago I read an article where a woman’s husband asked why she was divorcing him, and her response was “because you don’t do the dishes.” She could probably say a lot about why she was leaving him, but that simple line encapsulated the fissure at the heart of their relationship in very few words.
There’s a line in Imperial Commando that does a similar amount of legwork for the relationship between Captain Maze and General Zey. It’s when Skirata is upset with Maze for having brought Zey to Mandalore, and Maze says he’s helping Zey “because he used to make the caf in the office.”
What Skirata says next, “give you [Maze] a pot of caf…and it’s okay to send men to their deaths,” is also a great window into his own mindset because it shows how differently he’s interpreting the relationship between Zey and Maze contrary to the reality experienced by the two men themselves.
When Zey makes Maze coffee, Skirata sees that interaction as putting a coin in a machine with the expectation that something you want will pop out of that machine. It’s about gaining influence over another person, and using that influence to further your own interests. Because Maze is already bound by virtue of his rank and position to cooperate with Zey, Zey doesn’t actually need to do anything to guarantee that cooperation. Zey has authority, and Maze is loyal to the authority of his position.
So when Zey makes coffee for his staff, Skirata is thinking that Zey is after another kind of authority and something else. It’s what was in the back of his mind when Skirata wants to hear that Maze “didn’t [save Zey] out of loyalty.” Skirata thinks that Zey is after the same kind of loyalty–that has nothing to do with the chain of command and is solely about the character of the other person–that Skirata himself has secured from Omega, Jusik, and others in his circle of influence. Because Skirata has their loyalty (first given as their training sergeant then earned on a personal level), he uses it to influence their actions, and he hates the idea of a Jedi exercising the kind of power and influence that he himself exercises, especially over clones (even ones Skirata himself doesn’t actually care about.) (I think this might also interfere with Skirata’s self image, which is somehow threatened by Zey actually respecting Maze, caring about him as a person, and having influence over him. Not sure.)
This quote also provides insight into how Skirata views the Maze and Zey relationship and is more context for why he says what he says in response to Maze mentioning the caf:
Skirata opens with a cold “oh so you’re incapable of doing your damn job?”, not thinking for a moment that Zey may have failed to execute Order 66 because he was just like Niner, Atin, and Darman and disobeyed out of a strong personal bond or belief. It literally doesn’t even occur to him. He just assumes Maze is a dog that won’t hunt. He then figures that Zey only survived because he managed to manipulate Maze in the moment with nice words, and that Maze fell for it. Again, it does not occur to Skirata that Maze and Zey have any kind of relationship outside purely professional or selfishly utilitarian, and that’s the background Skirata is coming into this conversation with.
Mazes sees Zey’s habit of making coffee for the office completely differently, and he says as much, telling Skirata that it was a mundane detail yet told him all he needed to know about Zey’s character. Zey respects his subordinates not because he ‘has’ to, but because they’re people. He doesn’t see a reflected power differential in the act of making coffee, and he doesn’t expect his people to be servants for him. I think that’s notable in the context of Maze being Zey’s aid, so Maze is already very involved with Zey’s schedule and daily affairs to the point where it could be easy for Zey to wade across professional boundaries and tell Maze to do things beyond his job description that cross more into ‘personal servant’ territory, but we are never told that is something Zey does. He never abuses his position like that. (For all I know Zey could totally be within his rights to tell Maze to get him caf and it wouldn’t be a big deal– I’m not saying that’s tantamount to crossing a line. I’m saying that it’s kind of nice that Zey doesn’t ask that, and it’s great that Zey doesn’t ask him to do anything that would cross the line either.)
Zey doesn’t make coffee because it’s a low-key ploy for influence; he’s legitimately just being nice with no expectation that there will be some benefit to himself later down the road. I don’t think Zey even thinks about the fact that he makes coffee for his staff at all.
Moving away from the caf conversation, in True Colors, we see that Zey offers to help Maze if he ever wants to pursue an “alternative career.” There are no qualifications to that statement. Zey doesn’t say ‘after the war is over’ or ‘after we capture Grievous,’ it’s an unqualified offer to help Maze–one of only 100 Alpha ARCs–desert the army whenever he wants to. This is not something Zey would do if his relationship with Maze was squarely built on the question “how can I use him to benefit myself?” Buried in that offer I think is the recognition of agency and individuality of a person who was born to have neither. Maze has always been a person to Zey, and Maze knows it.
The offer is also a sign of how ‘flexible’ Zey can be, but for a different reason than usual. Throughout the book he cuts Skirata a lot of slack to do what he wants how he wants. (He says it directly when he wants Skirata to be honest with him, also admitting that he doesn’t have a clue what Skirata’s ARCs are up to half the time, illustrating just how much slack Skirata really does have.) Zey is open to giving people leeway to do things that’ll make it easier for them to get their jobs done within reason, but with his offer to Maze he’s also being flexible (a huge understatement lol) for compassionate moral reasons. Ultimately he’d be breaking the rules because of something he believes is wrong, which is later what Maze does when he refuses to execute Order 66 because he believes Zey should have been given a fair trial. It violates his sense of justice.
Maze not following Order 66 is kind of a big deal. Coruscant–the seat of the Republic–has just been attacked, then there is (to outside appearances) a coup followed by emergency orders (from literally the highest authority Maze has) to eliminate all members of the organization that launched the coup. Maze doesn’t just let Zey go, he actively helps him escape and then travels with him to ensure his safety, even bringing him to Mandalore. Whatever Skirata thinks about this doesn’t even factor in, Maze is taking the responsibility for his own life and Zey’s life into his hands. And Maze did have a choice here– he could have let Zey go, then played dumb and continued as part of the Imperial military. He could also have let Zey go then run off himself, but he doesn’t do any of that, and Zey realizes the gravity of what Maze is doing and how he’s willingly putting himself at risk. That’s what’s coming across in Zey’s line here below.
Zey also makes a point to identify Maze as an equal, and while I don’t think Zey ever thought Maze wasn’t, what he’s referring to here I think is more about neither of them having authority or control over the other. Maze is not less important than Zey, and Zey is not in a position to treat Maze like he is (nor would he.) The moment Maze shot a meter to the side of where Zey was standing during Order 66, they both knew that they were on a kill list and had lost their positions and ranks. The circumstances are awful, but it makes them equals in a way that they weren’t before. (After Order 66, I think Maze is also the one whose skills they’re going to need to rely on quite a lot in order to survive. Not that Zey isn’t capable, but what Maze can do will play a big part in their survival and there’s no ignoring his abilities and importance here. Basically they’ll both be useful but in different ways and will have to rely on each other.)
“I’ve got to consider his welfare” reads to me as an obligation from Zey in light of what Maze has done. It’s not that Zey didn’t care about Maze before–he clearly did otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered to offer to help him desert, and we’ve never seen Zey be callous about his men’s lives–but now it’s a moral imperative.
I also want to talk about this part here:
While I think Zey not sensing Maze’s emotions is largely a reflection of Maze’s training for combat and very demanding/intense situations, a smaller part could be because Maze has in some ways already decided what he’s going to do before he consciously knows what he’s going to do. Maze isn’t angry, worried, or conflicted because there’s nothing to decide, so Zey senses nothing.
Maze didn’t know it at the time, but all his reading on law and political philosophy (and how the military fits into that) was bringing him to a specific moment. When Maze receives Order 66, he knows his orders are to kill, but he spends time talking to Ordo and then tries to arrest Zey instead of just shooting him immediately. (Ordo even wonders to himself why Maze hasn’t just killed the guy yet.) In developing his own ideas about what is just, Maze had already ensured that he was never going to follow Order 66. I think this is somewhat foreshadowed when Ordo asks Maze if he has a sense of injustice earlier in the book, and Maze quietly answers that he does and walks off. The point of that scene is two-fold, first to tell Ordo something about how other clones are very much people just like he is, and second to lay a bit of groundwork for Maze’s actions during Order 66.
At the same time I’m not sure how much Maze actually believed that he could arrest Zey? I think Maze saying that at all was him having a final moment of wanting to believe in the system he’s part of, of believing that that system is just, but he already knows it isn’t. (Zey asking Maze to kill him is the death knell of that last idealistic moment.) I also think he didn’t actually want to kill Zey– from working together so closely over the course of the war they started to become friends, and Zey was the one who’d make the caf in the office.
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