Day 50
Standard Year 1393
Liad
Department of Interior Command Headquarters
In which Commander of Agents moves forward on two fronts.
One of Commander of Agents’ characteristic attributes is the way he’ll casually sweep past concepts with really troubling implications. This is at least the second time his plans for Korval have taken advantage of knowledge gained from confidential medical reports. He has no apparent problem with “retraining” Val Con to betray his own family. And then there’s the box that produces “interesting reactions” in a dramliza confined inside, currently undergoing “testing”; that pretty much has to mean live test subjects, and given the Department’s track record I wouldn’t want to bet on them being informed volunteers.
It’s not quite true that Anthora’s powers have no known limits; there’s at least one known to her kin, which was hinted at in Plan B and will be explicated later in this novel. Her family seem to have kept that one to themselves, which is just as well; the Department has had the opportunity to do a horrifying amount of damage if they’d known about it.
Even though my re-read has progressed to Ghost Ship (just a bit behind in leaving my comments!) I can’t think of what you’re referring to here . . . do you comment later on, identifying this known limitation?
It doesn’t look like I did mention it at the later chapter, so what I meant was that we find out later that Val Con is able to give Anthora orders that she is literally unable to disobey. It’s said to be a dramliz-type ability, so it could be that it was made dormant along with Val Con’s other psychic abilities when he was trained as an Agent of Change… but if he retained it while he was under the Department’s power that would mean that the Department had the ability to order Val Con to order Anthora to serve the Department’s aims, and (fortunately) never knew it.
If I’m remembering correctly, Val Con could order her not to do something and make it stick, I don’t recall that he could give her positive orders, which would have meant that the Department couldn’t have made active use of her.
This does raise a question about how far the Department’s training can be relied on if the agent has to interact with their family though. If they want to destroy Korval, why not deploy Val Con to Liad with orders to do so: it seems like a much better use of him than assassinating random members of the Terran Party.
Thanks, Paul. I had forgotten that detail, or at least my recollections didn’t make the connection.
In fact, James, upon my first reading (and I suppose it’s reflected here in the comments somewhere) I assumed that perhaps Val Con had been able to warn Shan about the booby-trapped pod precisely because he *had indeed* been deployed to destroy his family, but that upon breaking free of the loop was able to recall it and issue a timely warning.