Tag Archives: Erkes Dormitory

Saltation – Chapter 4

1 Reply

Academy Flight GT S14
Anlingdin Piloting Academy

In which Theo’s day is not great.

A mysterious aircraft pursued and shot down by four others. The urgency with which the Academy called on its own aircraft to get out of the sky suggests that they had some idea what was going on, and some reason to suppose that the four pursuing craft might not limit their attentions to the particular craft they were pursuing.

Theo manages a difficult landing in a sequence I feel probably deserves to be talked about, not just acknowledged, but I don’t have the whatever to appreciate it in detail.

Asu takes a while to notice what’s going on outside her own concerns, but at least when she does notice she seems suitably concerned and has some idea how to respond appropriately. (And the fact that she knows Theo’s tea preferences without needing to ask suggests that she does sometimes pay more attention to other people.) This is not to say that Chelly doesn’t want to help, but he seems like he might be under the kind of stress that hinders, rather than helps, efforts to think about what to do; I can relate.

Saltation – Chapter 3

2 Replies

Erkes Dormitory
Suite 302
Anlingdin Piloting Academy

In which Theo gets to know her roommates better.

Asu is the scion of a family that owns a fleet of trading ships — famously and prosperously, to judge by her sense of entitlement, her expectation that Theo would recognise her name (and the fact that Chelly does), and her discourse last chapter on the risks of people always trying to find out what one’s family is doing. (I infer that her homeworld’s media have an attitude towards the lives of the famous more like, say, Feinick than like, say, Liad, though without Feinick’s transactional approach.)

Chelly, despite his poor showing earlier, remains impressively reasonable in the face of a mix of deliberate and inadvertant provocation from Asu and Theo. I wonder if his not-exactly-apologetic comment about Wilsmyth being not at his best when he’s not working is also a description of himself.

Saltation – Chapter 2

Leave a Reply

New Student Orientation
Ozler Auditorium
Anlingdin Piloting Academy

In which Theo meets her roommates.

Although Theo noticed last chapter that things here are more freewheeling and less closely monitored than was the case on either of the planets she’s previously left footprints on, the wider ramifications haven’t all sunk in. She remarks to herself that the way Asu acts you’d think her home planet didn’t have a Safety Office — but she clearly means it as a joke, and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that it’s very likely true.

Asu says her age is “Eighteen Standards, and a half”, and Theo repeats the “and a half” before conceding that Asu is older than her. I’m not sure whether that means that it’s the half year that makes the difference in their ages or just Theo quietly pinging the unusual degree of precision. It would make sense in general that two people starting school together would be within a year of each other in age, but I’m not sure if that applies to a piloting academy; presumably pilots arrive at whatever age they’re ready. Still, I’d like to think it’s that, if only because that would mean we have an idea of Theo’s age in Standard Years and not just in the still-undefined Delgadan years.

I don’t think I like the detail from the orientation speech about the planetary government requiring them to graduate a minimum number of pilots per year. There are so many ways a requirement like that could go wrong.

After spending so much time on Delgado, I find myself wondering whether Ozler and Erkes were men or women. Which is the unmarked case on Eylot?