Ebner was appointed General Counsel with a rank of Lt. Commander on Unity. With her track record in sustainability and environmental policymaking, she was seen as an experienced legal advisor who could first settle any potential disputes on the ship, then later adjudicate in the colony itself, perhaps becoming Chiron's first judge. Because the initial voyage only required a skeleton crew, Ebner settled only a handful of unofficial "cases", having plenty of downtime to get acquainted with the rest of the command staff, who found her to be an affable, if overly loquacious, character. Chief Botanist Deidre Skye enjoyed their hydroponics bay chats on techno-green horticulture techniques, but found Ebner's tendency to buck established practices to be irritating, after a while. The General Counsel herself considered the Unity xenobiologist to have an exemplary green thumb, but Skye's obsession with nature caused her to overlook its effects on humans. In her estimation, Skye would be happier if the entire biosphere was composed of virgin primordial forests with a few primitives skipping through in the nude. Ebner preferred a world of well-managed natural preserves coexisting side-by-side with hamlets and state-of-the-art green cities.
While Chief Librarian Élodie conveyed an air of superiority and invulnerability from being baited, Ebner attempted to rouse her ire whenever possible. Throwaway remarks about the Mediterraneans' tendency to cut and run when climate disaster struck- uttered towards the end of long staff meetings when all present were eager to leave and losing interest at the discussion at hand. Dismissals of the value of Rembrandts and Agricola in the face of species-wide extinction- tossed out in the midst of engrossing lunchtime chats at the ship's canteen. Direct challenges to the culturally imperialistic, self-serious notion of a single booklist for all humanity- made during public debates that Captain Garland, at the suggestion of Chief of Surgery Pravin Lal, had hosted over the Unity datalinks as a means of entertainment. Yet her Gallic counterpart had only lost her composure once or twice, unwilling or incapable of allowing her faith in her Canon be disturbed by Ebner's petty practical concerns. As a neat side-effect, she was able to advertise her political philosophy across the crew, leading to talk of starting a Unity INTEGRIN among the ensigns.
After these interactions, Ebner retreated to the Life Support systems of Unity, where she utilized her engineering background to the fullest. Having completed a crash course before the voyage, she learned in person how to maintain and repair the intricate machinery that recycled the ship's air and water, generated heat, and disposed waste. Prior to entering cryosleep, Ebner received the equivalent of a junior grade officer's training in Life Support operations.
As a member of the staff, Ebner woke up in Planetfall to a situation that was beyond mediation. While she worked closely with Psych Chaplain Miriam Godwinson and Morale Counselor Kavitha to reach a settlement to the ongoing crisis, the Spartans refused any deal that made them give up their supplies and obey mission authority. They had thrown out the fine print of the U.N. Charter. So Ebner tried different tracks. Appealing to them as a fellow countercultural activist, she sympathized with their rejections of mission authority. She wove intricate arguments based on that skepticism, drawing from her own views of the failings of the current order, citing the establishment's mistakes that she believed to have damned the world. And then Ebner drew her web- if they were to secede and show that any alternative to the neo-colonial order was nothing but lawless barbarism, would not be letting Garland and Yang and Bolivar, all of the petty tyrants, win the game?
Of course, Santiago and her lieutenants laughed her off. But during the long crisis that was Planetfall, Ebner was able to use both emotion and reason to convince some of the Spartans to lay down their arms. Rather submitting to Unity authority, they agreed only to subject to the General Counsel's authority, as she had promised them clemency that the captain could not grant them. She made even more progress with the Free Thought Anarchists. She had argued futilely to her skeptical shipmates that those anti-conformists were nothing like the Spartan militants, that they were not engaged in mutiny but simply elaborate performance art- a prank that had gone out of control. But while the Colonel was a known quantity to Captain Garland and the others, Dame Snow Hart was too cryptic and beyond their comprehension, so the same amount of force was ordered against the Society as it was against the Spartan Coalition. To the Anarchists, Ebner could only try to offer as many pardons as she could to their coteries before the freed Yang sicced his security guards against them, backed by Bolivar's peacekeepers.
At the end of the crisis, Ebner left for the landing pods with her followers, her Spartan converts, the Anarchists in her ward, other misfits she had gathered, and a heavy heart. She was among the few who had voted to continue the mission, despite her own ideological misgivings. The spirit of INTEGRIN, in her view, was always to spark revolutionary change within a system. But what good is revolution in a desert? Unlike Skye, she had no wish to start from scratch.
Note: The vote during Planetfall is a reference to the part in the "Journey to Centauri" novella by Michael Ely where the faction leaders vote to each become acting captain of a cryocell and land separately, dissolving the mission. Only Lal and Miriam voted against it, and Deidre was the dramatic deciding vote for it. I probably should have mentioned how each of the C:BE figures voted, but suffice to say that all of the ones who ended up with Lal voted against it alongside him, while others (such as Élodie or Kavitha) voted for the plan and then took up their own landing pod. Han Jae-Moon, like Santiago, just wrested control of his own pod with his own armed followers and was not present at this vote.
