Dutiful Passage
Private Meeting Room
In which Dyoli and Mar Tyn consider what’s to do.
Two thirds of the way into the book, and I still don’t know who the people on the cover are, but I’m beginning to consider the possibility that it might be Dyoli and Mar Tyn.
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Six of Us
Daglyte Seam
In which there are arrivals and departures.
I don’t like how the narrative keeps reminding us about Anthora’s dagger.
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Surebleak Port
Portmaster’s Office
In which the Portmaster has people looking over her shoulder.
Oh, yeah. And the survey team. I’d forgotten about them, what with so much else going on.
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Tarigan
Nostrilia Outspace
In which Hazenthull has a nap.
All this nothing-happening is very wearing on the nerves. One could almost start thinking that nothing is going to happen, that the warning message is going to arrive in the nick of time and Hazenthull is going to get out unscathed.
Of course, the point where you start thinking that is the point where you really have to start worrying…
(And the other possibility is that it’s going to turn out that Hazenthull would have been fine, and it’s the warning message or the rescue mission that leads to her getting caught. But I don’t think the authors are that evil.)
In which Val Con has tea with his brother’s sister.
No more character reintroductions in this section, only consolidating and expanding on the threads from the previous two sections.
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Bechimo
In which some important things are learned.
I like Stost’s reaction to the promise of being kept safe.
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Riley’s Back Room
Fortunato’s Turf
In which Miri talks about the past, and Droi thinks about the future.
And one way in which things immediately become more interesting is that Rys’s role as leader of the freed Agents, with all its responsibilities and risks, has ceased to be merely hypothetical now that there is at least one freed Agent to lead.
It’s an interesting point about Droi perhaps not having a place on the ship of the Bedel when it returns. This chapter seems to be gesturing toward the possibility that she might by then discover that she has a place on Surebleak with Rys, which would not be quite the same as being left alone among gadje. The problem I see with this as a solution is that it revives the issue of the kompani needing to have a particular number of members at the end of chafurma, which was the necessity that drove Droi to start interacting with Rys in the first place: if both Rys and Droi leave, the kompani will be short, even if the kompani keeps their daughter, which I could see being a Balance demanded of them.
(Unless, it occurred to me as I composed the previous sentence, the newly freed Agents follow Rys’s path, and enough of them join the kompani to balance the loss. I’m suspicious of this idea, though: it seems a bit too neat, the kind of prediction that I’ve usually been wrong about before with Liaden novels.)
I was right about the nosy crews being connected; good to know my intuitions aren’t entirely off. Having some kind of underground-space-detecting technology explains how they knew where to look without necessarily knowing what was in the spaces they were looking for. The mention of an Insurance Committee suggests they might also be connected to the shakedowns Pat Rin has been dealing with. It says something about their ideas of neighbourliness (or at least of the behaviour of Bosses) that they assume they can nobble the Road Boss’s nearest neighbour without anybody noticing or caring.
It occurs to me that the kompani, who have been on Surebleak many generations “to learn what there was to know”, might well have learned things that would be relevant and useful to Kareen’s project, even if they weren’t interested in the social constructs of gadje particularly. Whether anybody in the story is likely to have this occur to them, and whether the Bedel would agree to share such knowledge, who knows?
Tradedesk
In which Theo examines a possible danger to the ship.
Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me before this point that Theo didn’t know about Clarence’s past. But it makes sense for Daav not to tell her; it’s not the kind of thing a daughter of Delgado might be expected to take calmly. She handles it all right here, but that’s after she’s got to know Clarence as a person and gained some experience of what he brings to the ship.
Theo’s statement that she’s never going back to Eylot if she has any say in it strikes me as tempting fate, but that might just be because I’ve read this book already.
In which Rys Lin pen’Chala runs smarter, not harder.
Another new character, Field Agent Rys Lin pen’Chala. It occurs to me that not every agent of the Department would have made the choice he makes here; some of the ones we’ve seen would have arrogantly assumed their own superiority to any attempt Korval might make against them, and gone straight into what Agent pen’Chala identifies as an area of particular danger. (Indeed, his plan to lay low until a few people have been caught and the hue and cry has died down implies that he’s expecting some of his colleagues to be that arrogant.)
Otts Clark we have heard of before: he was one of the Surebleak locals discussing the changes Korval had brought, back in Chapter 9 of Ghost Ship. It was pretty heavily implied from what he said then that he was with the saboteurs, but this is the first definite confirmation, and also the first indication that he was the actual person who attacked Miri, since Ghost Ship never got around to naming that person.
Bechimo
Surebleak System
In which Clarence and Bechimo do some debugging.
A small detail I like in this chapter is that the segue back to Jelaza Kazone is used as an opportunity to slip in an extra detail about what Theo did with her time there when she wasn’t having fraught conversations with her new relatives.
I wonder if explaining to the ship why the pilot is angry is a standard part of the co-pilot’s duties.