Tag Archives: Jela’s Own Troop

Plan B – Chapter 27

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Erob’s Boundary
Quarry War Zone

In which the Yxtrang come off second-best in an argument.

I’m glad Dustin survived; I would have felt bad if he’d gotten killed because Shan maneuvred him into taking him back to the lifeboat.

I’m struck by the detail that the Yxtrang have one kind of rifle for ordinary troopers and a different kind for officers. I mean, I know we recently learned that the Commander of the Gyrfalks owns a particularly nice pistol, but that’s presumably because she made an individual decision that she wanted it, and probably saved up some of her own money to get it, not because of a standard rule. I wonder what the difference is between the Troopers Regular Field Long Arm and the Officers Personal Duty Long Arm: Is the officer version functionally the same, just with extra frills? Or do the officers get a weapon that works better than the regular trooper version? Or worse?

Priscilla’s flash of memory is interesting, because I don’t think it’s hers. The involvement of the red counter suggests that it’s an older memory, from Moonhawk or Lute, though none of the stories we’ve yet been told about them has anything to match it.

Plan B – Chapter 20

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Erob’s Hold
Practice Grounds

In which Val Con and Nelirikk speak of Jela.

The news that the entire 14th Conquest Corps is acting out of turn suggests the possibility that the Yxtrang we’ve encountered so far, who value prestige over effective action, are atypical, and most Yxtrang are more sensible. On the other hand, there’s still the decision High Command made about Nelirikk, and if Yxtrang High Command doesn’t behave typically of Yxtrang, who does? Perhaps these Yxtrang are atypical not in the sense that they behave unlike Yxtrang, but only in taking typical Yxtrang qualities to an unusual extreme.

The bit about what “the Troop did not know — or did not tell” is interesting, in light of the prequels. The Troop does know how Jela died, or at least did at the time, since Cantra told them; indeed, Jela’s Troop was named in his honour only after he died. Perhaps the story was lost to memory because it contained too many things that the Yxtrang would not wish to remember: Cantra herself, for one.

Plan B – Chapter 15

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Erob’s Hold
Freeze-Dry Prison

In which the Lytaxin Combined Forces gain a new recruit.

Val Con reporting Nelirikk as an example of a “potentially sapient race” is one of my favourite moments in a chapter with many excellent moments.

Incidentally, Val Con’s account of their first meeting confirms that he held the rank of captain before being promoted to commander, though that still seems to me backward from the way I’m used to seeing ranks work. Come to think of it, the same thing is visible this chapter with the mercs — Commander Carmody outranks Captain Robertson — but I don’t think I ever paid that much attention before because I figured a merc unit might use whatever ranks it likes, and it makes sense for Suzuki and Jase to be the Commanders when they’re the ones in command of the unit. For that matter, it’s been mentioned in the past that the individual in command of the Scouts is the Scout Commander, which is presumably different from being a scout with the rank of Commander. At this point, I’m about ready to just throw up my hands and go on to a less confusing subject.

The name of Nelirikk’s “toy”, the Shibjela, calls back (or forward, if one is reading in publication order) to a weapon called a “shib” that Jela carries in Crystal Soldier. The two weapons don’t actually seem very similar beyond being worn, contrary to their names, concealed in the belt; Jela’s shib is described as more like a whip, with a flexible ceramic cutting edge that can slice through bone. Perhaps it was the product of old technology since lost, or perhaps what was lost was a detailed description of what it actually was, and either way the Shibjela is somebody’s best attempt to recontruct it with the knowledge and technology available.

I did wonder briefly if the medic named Chen, who comes to attend to Nelirikk at the end of this chapter, was the same person as “Doc Tien”, who saw to him when he was first brought in, give or take someone’s attempt to pronounce a name from an unfamiliar culture. But Chen is male and Tien was female, so that’s unlikely.

I wonder what it says about the Yxtrang worldview that they have one God of Quartermasters but multiple Gods of Irony.

Crystal Dragon – Chapter 33

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Spiral Dance
Solcintra

In which the leave-takings begin.

Jela’s Troop are shipping out with the rest of Captain Wellik’s soldier boys – and have received an official troop designation, so henceforth they are an actual Troop and not just a bunch of people united by shared experiences and a nickname.

Cantra sends Spiral Dance off on autopilot, with a seedling from the tree as passenger or crew. I’d got the idea somewhere that this was a distraction mission, in case the Enemy were looking for Dancer, but that’s not the impression I’m getting this reading. The way Cantra talks, it’s so they both have a chance of survival: Dancer has a better chance of survival on the move than sitting on the ground on a planet that’s about to be attacked, and the seedling’s there to give Jela’s legacy another chance if Quick Passage perishes, and Cantra and the tree along with it. You pay your debts, as best you can.

Crystal Dragon – Chapter 27

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Solcintra

In which Cantra takes Tor An on an excursion, Rool Tiazan takes Liad dea’Syl on an excursion, and Arin takes himself on an excursion.

Two things in this chapter caused me to look up from the book and say “Oh!” in that tone of great enlightenment that means my backbrain has just done something clever, like figure out whodunnit before the detective. Neither of them are super-important; I think they struck me because I didn’t notice either of them the first time around (or if I did then, unlike most of the other revelations in this chapter, they didn’t stay with me).

Thing 1: During Master dea’Syl’s conversation with Rool Tiazan, he says the math predicts or prescribes that the new universe they’re planning to escape to will be constantly expanding – unlike the steady state of the universe they’re in now. This is, of course, one of the hints that this duology is not set in our universe, but the thing I realised this time is that it’s also the base explanation for the differences between how interstellar travel works in the duology compared to later. Long-distance navigation through space is bound to be different when space itself behaves differently.

Thing 2: According to the timing mentioned when Cantra is inspecting Salkithin, the ship she inherited from Jela, Salkithin is none other than the ship Commander Ro Gayda mentioned when she recruited Jela way back near the start of Crystal Soldier, the one he was to be made Captain of for its voyage to a then-unnamed place of storage, as the excuse for being detached and placed under Ro Gayda’s command.

And the maintenance crew of Salkithin, getting back to things I did notice the first time around, are – apart from being the crew that Jela commanded on that voyage – the founders of Jela’s Own Troop, of whom we will be hearing more much later. (And they’re not just X Strain; there’s a couple of Ms, a Y, and “Ilneri, who was, as far as Cantra could make it, a natural human”. I don’t know how much that’s going to affect the bodies of Jela’s Own Troop – as I’ve had occasion to comment before, we’ve never been told anything about how the Yxtrang go about making little Yxtrang – but it certainly explains a deal about the shape of the Troop’s minds.)

To finish the chapter off, the event we’ve been waiting for all this time heaves into view on the horizon, as what passes for the leadership of Solcintra at the moment turns to Wellik after their actual leaders do a runner. (It’s possibly my favourite of the Solcintra-as-it-really-was details that, for all the status jockeying and High House politics the Liadens get up to, there’s not a single Clan on Liad that was High House before the Great Migration, because the High Houses all had the resources and the lack of scruple to take off on their own.)

(I wonder what happened to them all.)

(Maybe they got eaten by a giant mutant star goat.)