Tag Archives: Lufkit Prime Station

Agent of Change – Chapter 8

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In which Miri thinks on her feet.

Miri and Val Con are both older than the eighteen to twenty-five years estimated in the police bulletin: Miri is twenty-seven, and Val Con is thirty. It’s already been noted that Val Con looks significantly younger than he is; apparently Miri does too. It’s likely a Liaden thing, considering that it’s Terrans doing the estimating, and in any case the height probably has something to do with it.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I like about this series is that many of the minor characters, though they may appear once and then never be seen again, have distinct personalities and a sense of personal history. This chapter contains a few more examples.

Agent of Change – Chapter 2

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In which Miri Robertson meets Val Con yos’Phelium, and he invites her to join him for dinner.

If this is Val Con yos’Phelium, much has changed for him since we last heard of him, two or three months ago for us and six or seven years for him. Back then, he was a Liaden Scout, and a First-In Scout at that — not an occupation much given to assassinating Terran supremacists. Nor is he himself a person one would have expected to take up that line of work, despite what happened to his parents (if anything, the way he and his family reacted then supports the idea that it’s uncharacteristic for him now).

And then there’s Miri, who we haven’t heard from in about twice as long. Back then, she was a girl just embarking on a career as a mercenary soldier. How that led, a decade and a bit later, to packs of gunmen laying for her in alleys… we shall have to wait and see.

(An aside: Miri’s use of arbitrary numbers tends toward multiples of seven, while Val Con’s tends toward multiples of twelve, a Liaden attribute I’ve noticed in other novels but hadn’t realised was established so early.)

Is it just me, or does the picture of Miri on the cover of the Meisha Merlin edition look an awful lot like Jamie Lee Curtis? This is not, mind you, a complaint, because either way it succeeds in looking a great deal like Miri, an achievement by no means to be taken for granted when it comes to characters on the covers of Liaden Universe novels.