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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 12

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Dutiful Passage
Jump

In which the crew of the Passage investigate the capabilities of the new weapon pods.

Okay, that settles it: the Passage has been in orbit around Krisko all this time.

There are several possibilities for the author of the message with the chess-based code, but I lean toward the Krisko Portmaster, whom the authors made a point of describing near the beginning of the chapter as an old chess partner of Shan’s.

Plan B – Chapter 4

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Lytaxin
Approaching Erob

In which Miri Tayzin Robertson meets her family.

I suspect Val Con of conscious irony when he says that Korval has never ruled the world, considering how many people over the centuries have glossed Delm Korval as King of Liad. There’s definitely irony, though unconscious on Miri’s part (but conscious on the part of the authors) in Miri’s reassurance to herself that she’s never going back to Surebleak.

Val Con’s address to the child of Jela’s hope is an example of a literary convention that makes linguists and historians wail and gnash their teeth: the use of “thee” and “thy” to indicate archaic formality. The problem is that “thee” and “thy” are actually archaic informality; to the extent that English has ever had something resembling Liad’s distinction between High Tongue and Low Tongue, “thee” and “thy” were Low Tongue, used when speaking with close friends and family — or, depending on context, to address social inferiors. Not the most appropriate of modes for the most junior servant to use in addressing the utmost authority!

I’m willing to buy that the guest apartment Val Con and Miri are staying in is bigger than Zhena Trelu’s house, but I think the bit about the bathroom the size of Lytaxin spaceport is probably an exaggeration.

Val Con’s recitation of his relatives has two or three notable omissions. Two are easily explained: Shan’s lifemating and Anthora’s children post-date Val Con being taken by the Department, so of course he doesn’t know about them. That explanation doesn’t cover the complete lack of any mention of Line bel’Tarda, but that may be covered by the disclaimer that he’s only touching on the minimum necessary to survive the evening’s social event; perhaps Val Con figured that the odds of anyone of Erob mentioning bel’Tarda at the dinner were low enough that they could safely be left, along with the attendant explanations, for another time.

I wonder what it portends that Emrith Tiazan is Delm Erob but Bendara Tiazan is Thodelm Tiazan. Perhaps just that Erob and Tiazan, unlike Korval and yos’Phelium in their present state, are large enough that one person cannot do both jobs well.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 53

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Dutiful Passage

In which the captain has a task for the first mate, as one member of Korval to another.

There’s something funny going on with the timing between last chapter and this. Since receiving Nova’s declaration, Dutiful Passage has visited three planets, shedding cargo and crew, a process that must have taken days if not weeks. (From Ardred to Raggtown alone was twenty days in Conflict of Honors, although that was on a trading schedule and they’re presumably travelling more quickly and more directly now.) And so, days or weeks after receiving Nova’s declaration, comes a pinbeam from Anthora, reporting an attack on Trealla Fantrol — which attack took place less than an hour after Nova declared Plan B to be in effect. Pinbeams, we’ve been told, are considerably more expensive than more common methods of long-distance communication, and part of the reason for that is because they don’t take weeks to get to their destination.

On the other hand, the name implies that a pinbeam message is sent directly to its destination, which might mean that it relies on the recipient being in a known location. Perhaps Anthora directed the message to where the Dutiful Passage was scheduled to be, but the Passage wasn’t there because it had already shifted to moving more quickly and more directly, and the message has been playing catch-up since.

Speaking of shedding cargo, there’s an interesting mention of the ship’s very outline having changed, become “lean and sleek”, which suggests that in the normal course of things the ship carries some significant amount of cargo attached to the outside of it instead of carried within internal cargo bays.

What Shan says in this chapter indicates how far off the mark the Department’s view of Korval is. The Department sees that Korval is powerful, and suspects Korval of being a rival for control of Liad’s interests, because that’s what it would be in Korval’s place. But Korval’s interests and priorities are not the same as the Department’s, arising from origins so different that the Department probably wouldn’t be able to understand them even if it was aware of them.

The way Shan tells Priscilla about his decision ties back to the conversation they had earlier about the necessity of seeking for Val Con, in which he said that since they were not yet lifemates Korval’s necessities were not yet hers.