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Alliance of Equals – Chapter 20

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Admiral Bunter
Jemiatha’s Jumble Stop

In which Admiral Bunter returns.

I like the byplay about Padi using glancing-at-the-notepad as a way of providing appropriate pauses in the conversation, and the way it offers an explanation for her father’s ubiquitous glass of wine. (The glass of wine has a potential strategic advantage over glancing-at-the-notepad, in that the latter might make it look like one doesn’t really know what one is doing.)

It’s also another example of how two plot lines parallel each other within a chapter, because over in the other plot line we have Tolly thinking about how Admiral Bunter needs to learn about providing appropriate pauses in his conversation.

Thematic parallels aside, I still have no idea how, or if, the three plot strands are going to meet up. What has the progress of Dutiful Passage to do with Admiral Bunter, or either to do with the Uncle and Daav and Aelliana? Maybe Padi will accidentally stumble upon the ancient AI that the Uncle and Tocohl are each so interested in finding?

Alliance of Equals – Chapter 9

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Vivulonj Prosperu

In which patience is a virtue.

Interesting. The scene with Daav is Interlude 9 from Dragon in Exile, only from Daav’s point of view instead of the Uncle’s. Which means this present is after Dragon in Exile‘s main plot line (i.e. the part that had Tolly and Haz in) but contemporaneous with the interlude/subplot. Well, it’s not as if it would be the first Liaden book where the various plot lines travelled at different speeds. The other interesting thing about it is that the empty chamber Daav finds himself in, and gets up to explore, is not real — or, let us say, no more real than the plain he recalls having been on earlier. In the Uncle’s viewpoint, he’s lying in the rebirthing unit the whole time with his eyes closed.

I’m getting really worried about Padi now. If she’d gone ahead with the plan to attack the guard she’d have been in a whole heap more trouble without having achieved any benefit — had she even got as far as thinking about what she planned to do after she’d killed him? (Failure to consider longer-term consequences seems to be a thing with her when she’s upset. Probably an effect of what she did to lock her fears away: if you don’t consider the consequences you don’t need to be frightened of what they might be. But you might also easily do something that solves an immediate problem by causing much worse problems later.)