![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ultimate_cheetah posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
antishurtugal_rebornKira pulled herself along the walls to the front of the Valkyrie and strapped herself into the pilot’s seat. She checked the display: the Extenuating Circumstances was gone.
This woman just killed hundreds of people and has zero remorse. She shot the fuel line even though Dr. Carr was telling her to stop. Also, she's pretty calm for someone who should be shell shocked out of her freaking mind right now. Fun fact: that is literally a characteristic of a sociopath.
So too was the alien ship, destroyed by the explosion of the UMC cruiser.
Well that won't be a problem anymore! Can you imagine if Kira actually had to flee the system while the aliens were chasing her? God forbid there be any conflict in this book.
Kira asks the computer a bunch of things and finds out that there’s no joy in reading this book ships left in the system. The ship can also travel FTL.
She asks how much ration packs the Valkyrie has, and has the computer do the math for her, because:
“Not having her overlays was frustrating; she couldn’t solve even basic calculations on her own.”
Well, this is officially the most pathetic scientist and general protagonist I have ever come across.
She can’t do math. She can’t stand to be alone without something to entertain her, like when she was in the cell. She has NO interest in her job. I could go on.
Kira calmly thinks about if she has enough food to keep from starving. However, the suit has been an Ex Machina powerup so far, so we don’t know what it can and can’t do. For all we know, it can photosynthesize. Also, it’s literally less than ⅓ into the book. This entire scene just wastes the reader’s time.
She rubbed her temple, feeling a headache forming. “Ando, play the message Bishop left for me.”
An image of a harsh-faced man appeared on the display in front of her: the ship mind’s avatar. His brows were drawn, and he seemed in equal parts concerned and angry.
Just concerned and angry? He isn’t trying to hold back tears? Trembling? Clenching his teeth or fists?
The message is: aliens are jamming the signals, Obi-wan- I mean Kira’s their only hope (of course) Bishop the android, I mean, the ship mind, left recordings and stuff, yada yada yada. Kira can feel “the force of [Bishop’s] personality emanating from the screen: an overwhelming ferocity and intelligence bound to a single-minded purpose.” Damn, the video chat quality is way better in the future. Sometimes I can’t even see people’s faces properly! Also, they’re sorry that Kira had to suffer, and now they’re counting on her.
He returned to his former position. “And Ms. Navárez, if you see General Takeshi, tell him … tell him I remember the sound of summer. Bishop out.”
A strange wistfulness came over Kira. For all their intelligence, ship minds were no more immune to regret and nostalgia than the rest of non-augmented humanity. Nor should they be.
What sound of summer? Why should we care about this? This is supposed to be an emotional moment, but it falls flat. This guy is going to die, and he’s asking her to pass on a final message. The problem is that we have no attachment to this character. If Kira was sad, or even curious about this, this moment could've been saved. I would do something like this:
“Kira committed this message to heart. She didn’t know much about Bishop, but he had saved her. Who was this General Takeshi? A brother? A former flame? A friend, left behind? She probably would never know.”
THERE, I FIXED IT. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s definitely better than her reaction before.
Kira asks the computer about the alien spaceship, and in a very boring reconstruction of events, the computer talks about when it first appeared.
Kira is so awed by the description of the alien technology that a “cold sense of apprehension gripped [her]” Really? That’s all? A hostile alien species with superior tech just attacked, and you’re not- you know, panicking just a little bit?
So, more boring description happens when Kira tries to figure out how the preserves- the jellies- attacked. I won’t bore you with the details. She finally figures out this obvious conclusion:
It couldn’t be coincidence that the graspers had showed up a few weeks after she’d found the xeno on Adra.
YA THINK?
Anyway, the FTL antenna is broken, so Kira can’t send a message to the league in time. She sends a message (for some reason) that will take 11 years to arrive, and will probably freak out some poor intern in the future. Kira tries the radio, and, le gasp, someone responds.
Surprise, relief, and a sense of mounting worry took hold of Kira.
Wow. I can just feel the emotion. Why is she worried? Is it because the survivors mightl be angry at her for the whole attack, or because she blew up the whole goddamn ship?
Kira says this: “I’m still in orbit. Over. Uh, where are you? Over.”
Uh, Kira honey, ‘over’ is supposed to be said after you’re done talking, to let the other person know. Not after every sentence.
She learns that there are six survivors on Adra, including Major Tschetter. The other five are filler characters, so you don’t need to know about them anyway. However, each of them get named. Paolini also uses kilometers and klicks in the same sentence, because apparently it is too much to ask him to use a consistent unit of measurement. Kira tells Tschetter and the Redshirts that the League won’t be getting her message anytime soon, so that insurance claim on the ship will have to wait.
And then we get this: “Fug-nuggets,” Orso swore.
Oh my gosh, is that a different mode of dialogue than Kira? This is amazing! Good, Paolini. Keep this up. None of them are saying ‘over’ though. They were saying it at the start so this looks inconsistent.
“The suit calls them graspers,” Kira offered.
“Is that so?” said Tschetter, her tone cutting. “Any other pertinent pieces of information you’d care to share with us, Ms. Navárez?”
Why is Tschetter’s tone “cutting”? This isn’t really that important, and she had no reason to believe that Kira’s been maliciously keeping this from her. I mean, I understand why the woman’s grumpy, but still.
So, Major Cheddar (I’m not typing out that name again, and you can’t make me) says that she’s ordering Kira to go 61 Cygni without delay. Redshirt #7, objects but Cheddar says that the graspers could be on them by the time Kira picked them all up. Why Cheddar doesn't have Kira pick a few of them up, though? I mean, Kira’s a civilian, with little to no competency in this area, and she has a possibly out-of-control parasite attached to her. At least one person should go with her to deliver the message.
Kira says she’ll take that risk, but Cheddar says no. Cheddar tries to override the Valkyrie's commands, but Bishop has assigned them all to Kira. Um, why? Bishop doesn’t even know Kira. He has no reason to trust her. So why in hell would he ASSIGN A WHOLE DARN SHUTTLE TO HER OVER THE ACTUAL MAJOR? NOTHING MAKES SENSE! Oh right, it’s because she’s Speshul, isn’t it. Probably.
Cheddar says that she needs every ounce of fuel to get to 61- Cygni, but Kira insists that she will stay and try to rescue them, and “there’s nothing that they can do to force [her] to leave.” Now, this is pretty stupid, but I actually like it. For one thing, it shows Kira making a choice, and actually having agency. For another, this is important for Kira’s character. It shows that she isn’t a soldier, and doesn’t want to sacrifice the few. This also makes a nice change from Eragon, who would probably sacrifice them all and wangst about it later with a lot of single tears and shit.
Kira then thinks that she doesn’t want them to be starving and hunted down on Adra, which she “wouldn't have wished on even Dr. Carr.” My, how goddamn magnanimous of you. You wouldn’t wish a horrible death of someone who was just trying to do their job? Wow. Personally, I wish death on that dentist who had to pull four teeth of mine at once, but that’s just me.
The thought of Carr stopped her for an instant. The terror on his face, the warnings he’d shouted, the bones sticking from his skin … If she hadn’t shot the oxygen line, maybe he could have escaped the Extenuating Circumstances. No. The grasper would have killed both of them if not for the explosion. Still, she felt sorry. Carr might have been a bastard, but no one deserved to die like that.
Aaaaand she rationalizes her guilt away in one paragraph. She might not be the sociopathic level of Eragon, but she does fit a lot of the criteria.
She figures out that Cheddar and the Redshirts (which sounds like a weird band name) can get offplanet through a remaining dropshuttle. Cheddar agrees and cuts of contact temporarily.
So far, Kira’s choices have not affected the plot in any major way. (And I don't count this since we know that the redshirts are going to get forgotten by part 2 anyway.)
Kira puts on clothes and drinks tea. Of course, this literally takes five paragraphs to convey, which I won’t bore you with. She finds out that the shuttle works, and Cheddar gives her orders to leave after the redshirts join her.
Kira scowled. Why did the major always irritate her so?
Because you’re grumpy and annoying, Kira. Sorry, I don’t know what else to tell you.
She finds out that Cheddar is staying behind with the corporal, since the Valkyrie only has four cryo tubes. And then she looks at herself with the xeno on.
Where the suit faded into her skin, it formed a finely detailed fractal, the sight of which struck a strange chord in her, as if she’d seen it before. The sense of déjà vu was so strong, for a moment she felt as if she were in another place and another time, and she had to shake herself and move back.
Like this
Are there a bunch of tiny swirls at the edge of the suit? I’m confused.
And then… we get this.
Kira thought she looked ghoulish—a corpse risen from the grave to haunt the living. Loathing filled her, and she averted her gaze, not wanting to see the evidence of the xeno’s effects. She was glad Alan had never seen her like this; how could he have liked or loved her? She imagined a look of disgust on his face, and it matched her own.
What the actual flip-no. What. The. Fuck? Her first reaction to seeing herself in the mirror is that Alanbot wouldn’t have loved her because she’s UGLY? That sends tingles down my spine. Alanbot and her sound like they did not have a healthy relationship. In fact, I’d say that the relationship sounds downright abusive. Alanbot sounds like some sort of sociopath now. I’m wondering if he manipulated Kira by small, pointing comments about her looks, slowly wearing her down, making her more attatched to him. This makes the fact that Kira wanted to give her job up for him that much darker. Either that, or they were never truly attracted to each other in the first place, which would certainly explain why Kira doesn’t seem too broken up about his death. Unfortunately, this is being portrayed as a happy, healthy relationship.
On a meta level, this smacks of the ugly = bad thing that Paolini was so fond of throughout the I.C. It also sends a really damaging message about what relationships are supposed to be built around. GODDAMMIT PAOLINI, PEOPLE CAN HAVE LOVING RELATIONSHIPS WITH PEOPLE WHO AREN’T ATTRACTIVE, AND *GASP* PEOPLE WHO ARE DISFIGURED. Deep breath. I need to calm down before I burst a blood vessel. Moving on…
Kira sends a message to her family, telling them that there’s going to be danger, since she can’t tell them the details without them getting in trouble with the League. She also leaves a message for Alanbot’s brother, who gets a name, and the families of the first redshirts that she killed. I kinda like this detail, as it makes her seem caring and more human.
The last recording was no easier than the first. Afterward, Kira had Ando send the messages, and then she closed her eyes, drained, exhausted. She could feel the suit’s presence in her mind—a subtle pressure that had appeared sometime during their escape from the Extenuating Circumstances—but she sensed no hint of thought or intent from it. Still, she had no doubt: the xeno was aware. And it was watching.
Um, what? She’s aware that a sentient alien is in her head and invading her body, and she’s not creeped out by this? I would feel claustrophobic as hell if I were her. This passage legitimately gives me the shivers, but the thing is, this suit is treated as a powerup, not as the invading monster that it really is, and that just seems wrong to me. The fact that the possibilities of this body horror were wasted is one of the most frustrating things about this book.
Kira started and realized she must have nodded off. A voice was speaking: Orso. “—do you read? Over. Repeat, do you read, Navárez? Over.”
For the last time, you do not say ‘over’ after every sentence!
“We’re just refueling the drop shuttle. We’ll be blasting off this forsaken rock soon as our tanks are full. Rendezvous with the Valkyrie in fourteen minutes.”
And now they aren’t saying ‘over’ at all.
We then get a really weird piece of description.
The drop shuttle came up alongside the Valkyrie, and the two vessels fired their RCS thrusters as they gently mated, airlock to airlock. A faint shudder passed through the Valkyrie’s frame.
Uh, really Paolini? Aside from the weird-ass innuendo that comes to mind, using “mated” for anything other than actual mating puts a strange picture in my mind. “Connected” would’ve worked better. Just for laughs, I’m going to use “mated” for description in the future.
So, the second set of redshirts join Kira on the shuttle. They are all named, given a gender, and described despite not appearing in any scene after this one. Then, (even considering the “mated” description above) things get weird.
Orso’s got orders from Cheddar. He shows Kira his limbs and points out that they had to be regrown. (So they’ve already mastered stem cells. Based on this, a whole new body should be able to be grown for someone, as long as you have their brain. Or parts of their brain, who says you can’t grow an amygdala? Therefore, there should be no cyborgs in this setting, unless the robot arms come with lasers or something.) Tangent over. Back to orders. So, Cheddar has told Orso to let Kira cut his limbs off if she gets too hungry. That’s right, Cheddar thinks the woman who refused to cooperate with the tests, and got most of her comrades on that ship killed, is more important than one of the soldiers under her command, who she stayed behind for. It's because Kira's a Sue, isn't it.
Kira objects, because she is weirded out by eating human meat. That’s okay, I am too. I’m a vegetarian.
“No,” said Orso, grabbing her by the shoulder. “I expect you to survive. We aren’t playing games here, Navárez. The entire human race could be in danger. If you need to cut off one of my arms and eat it in order to stay alive, then you damn well should. Both arms if you have to, and my legs too. Do you understand?”
If this were me, I would not want Kira to eat my limbs because I most likely would not like her. However, if she were my friend, and my limbs could be regrown, I would tell her to eat my legs, but not my hands. I play piano, and I would not want to lose that muscle memory. I also would tell Kira to save the bones, so I could keep them, but that's just me. I understand that Orso might not want Kira to die, but still, he doesn't hesitate, or make any special request.
He was nearly shouting by the time he finished. Kira squeezed her eyes together and nodded, unable to look him in the face.
Jeez, this guy’s really eager to get his limbs chopped off. He must be a new grade of masochist. Props to Paolini, we usually don’t see them in fiction.
After a second, Orso released her. “Okay. Good … Just, uh, don’t get chop-happy unless you need to.”
Well, maybe he’s not as much of one as I thought, but it’s still there to some degree.
Sir Masochist goes into cryo, leaving Kira to sit around for a while, and eventually get bored. Then, oh god why…
Then she slid a hand under the thermal blanket she had tucked around herself—under the blanket and under the jumpsuit—and she touched herself where she hadn’t dared before. Breasts, stomach, thighs, and then between her thighs.
Paolini, why did you have to go there?
There was no pleasure to the act; it was a clinical examination, nothing more. Her interest in sex was somewhere south of zero at the moment
Okay, I do not need to know this. What I do need is for someone to send me a strong cup of hot chocolate.
And yet, it surprised Kira how sensitive her skin was even through the covering fibers.
Because that’s what we all think about when covered with an alien parasite!
Between her legs was as smooth as a doll…
And the good old hairless groin fetish crops up again! Tea, knitting and hairless groins. That’s how you know it’s a Paolini book!
....and yet she could still feel every familiar fold of skin.
Aaand, now I feel like a creep for reading this.
Let’s just think about this for a moment. (Following discussion may be triggering.) The alien is literally sexually assaulting Kira. It is violating her body inside and out. It exerts control over her in the worst ways possible. Later, it even controls her periods. This is absolutely horrible and sickening, and it is very bothersome it's just brushed off.
Also, I find it curious that this book includes all sorts of swearing, including the f-word, but apparently, the word “vagina” was too much. This book is the equivalent of a pre-teen swearing to sound more ‘adult’, yet still giggling about potty humor.
Instead, she experimented with the xeno.
Oh, god. Please, no.
First she tried to coax the suit into forming a row of spikes along the inside of her forearm. Tried and failed. The fibers stirred in response to her mental command, but they otherwise refused to obey.
Oh thank goodness. Also, notice that she’s immediately thinking of the xeno as a tool, rather than as a sentient being.
She knew the xeno could. It just didn’t want to. Or it didn’t feel sufficiently threatened. Even imagining a grasper in front of her wasn’t enough to convince the organism to produce a spike.
So Kira already knows that the xeno can read her thoughts? Also, instead of trying to communicate with it, she tries to force it under her control.
Frustrated, Kira shifted her attention instead to the suit’s mask, curious if she could summon it forth on demand.
The answer was yes, but not without difficulty. Only by forcing herself into a state of near panic, where her heart was pounding and pinpricks of cold sweat sprang up across her forehead, was Kira able to successfully communicate her intent, and only then did she feel the same creeping tingle along her scalp and neck as the suit flowed across her face. For a moment, Kira felt as if she were choking, and for that moment her fear was real. Then she mastered herself, and her pulse slowed.
Props to showing the fear, but something about this still seems detached. Kira feels like she’s choking, which is a horrible, frightening feeling, but we don’t experience it for ourselves. Also, notice the order of information here. First the reader is given the answer to the question. Then, it’s shown how Kira solves the problem. We’re outside Kira’s head. Paolini seems to write in distant limited, a perspective where it’s not omniscient, but not inside Kira’s head either. As a result, you don’t get the perks of a closer perspective, or the perks of omniscient. Here’s what this same passage would look like in close limited (this is the last one, I promise):
Kira closed her eyes and imagined the hull of the Extenuating Circumstances splitting open. She imagined getting sucked out into space again, the mere thought causing her heart to pound. Kira forced herself to picture what it would be like to run out of breath in space, how suffocating it would feel. Her forehead burst into a cold sweat. A tingling sensation creeped across her neck and face as the xeno flowed over her. The mask sealed itself over Kira’s mouth and nose. She was choking. Her heart pounded faster. She clawed at the mask, trying to tear it off. Then Kira remembered what one of her instructors had taught her. When you’re in a panic, breathe. A cool head will help you more than anything. Kira closed her eyes and breathed in and out, slowly calming herself down.
In this passage, I showed Kira’s thoughts rather than told them. I also showed Kira’s reaction to her fear. The problem with Paolini is that he pads the word count with filler and purple description, rather than focusing his words on the places that matter, the actual reactions.
At least she wouldn’t be entirely alone. She had Ando, and she had the suit: her silent companion, her parasitic hitchhiker, her deadly piece of living apparel. Not an alliance of friendship but of skinship.
So she’s actually comforted by the fact that the alien reading her thoughts and infesting her body is with her? Also, that piece of apparel line is quite telling, again. She thinks of it as a thing, not a being. That skinship line is just weird. Sure, they basically share the same skip, but the bond doesn’t go deeper than that. They’re not even friends. The xeno might as well be replaced with an inanimate object.
Pain shot through her skull, and she winced, eyes watering. “Dammit,” she muttered. She kept moving too quickly for the increase in g-forces and hurting herself as a result. Her joints ached, and her arms and legs throbbed from a dozen bumps and bruises. The xeno protected her from worse, but it seemed to ignore small, chronic discomforts.
Kira didn’t know how the people on Shin-Zar or other high-g planets bore it. They were gene-hacked to help them survive and even thrive within a deep gravity well, but still, she had a hard time imagining how they could ever really be comfortable.
Since the gravity is increasing, shouldn’t Kira be moving slower because it’s getting harder to move?
Kira gets comfy in a corner of the ship.
So far her choices have not done jack shit in the story.
Ando,” she said, “lower the cabin pressure to the equivalent of twenty-four hundred meters above sea level, Earth standard.”
“Ms. Navárez, at that level—”
“I’m aware of the side effects, Ando. I’m counting on them. Now do as I say.”
Here are a couple of quotes from a national geographic article I found:
“Areas are often considered "high-altitude" if they reach at least 2,400 meters (8,000 feet) into the atmosphere.”
“People who spend too much time in high-altitude locations risk more serious symptoms of altitude sickness. These may range from headaches and dizziness to much more serious consequences, such as brain or lung damage.”
So Kira’s counting on brain damage. Okay. Methinks someone may have been dropped on her head as a child.
This could be the parasite already taking over her brain, without Kira realizing. It wants Kira’s mind gone so it can take her body for itself. Or the suit could be a regular boring powerup, because anything else would be interesting!
Kira then strikes up a conversation with Cheddar. I’ll give you the gist: Kira’s going into FTL, and Cheddar got her leg splint. Then, Kira asks a normal question, for once:
Then Kira said, “Tschetter, what happened to Alan’s body?” It was a question that had been bothering her the past day.
THEN WHY DIDN’T YOUR POV GIVE ANY HINT OF THAT AT ALL???!!! I HATE THIS INCONSISTENT WRITING I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT! Ahem, sorry, lost control there.
… “His remains were transported to the Extenuating Circumstances, along with the rest of the deceased. Over.”
Kira closed her eyes for a moment. At least Alan had had a funeral pyre fit for a king: a flaming ship to send him off into eternity. “Understood. Over.”
Really??! That’s her reaction. She just found out that she can’t even bury (or whatever they do) her loved one’s body, and she’s just rather cool about it? Didn’t she and Alan ever talk about how they wanted to be buried? (I mean, they’re in space. It’s a dangerous job. ) She’s not disappointed about not fulfilling his final request or anything? What if he wanted to be turned into a space diamond? Kiss your Alanbot-bling goodbye.
Kira messages more with Cheddar and eventually, after several hours, asks about the xeno. Really curious xenobiologist there, huh.
… A sigh sounded on the other end of the line. “The xeno is composed of a semi-organic material unlike anything we’ve seen before. Our working theory was that the suit is actually a collection of highly sophisticated nanoassemblers, although we weren’t able to isolate any individual units. The few samples we collected were almost impossible to study. They actively resisted examination. Put a couple of molecules on a chip-lab, and they break the lab or eat their way through the machine or short out the circuit. You get the idea.”
That has to be one of the most boring ways to talk about an alien symbiote. I should be interested, but I want to yawn.
Kira says goodbye to Cheddar, and starts to leave the system. There’s a genuinely good bit of emotion here:
Alan’s face appeared in her mind, and her throat tightened.
“Goodbye,” she whispered.
Of course, this would’ve had more impact if we knew or cared about Alanbot, but, you know.
Kira glances at the Markov drive.
Though she couldn’t see the drive, she could picture it: a great black orb, huge and heavy, resting on the other side of the shadow shield, a malignant toad squatting in the spaces between the walls.
Seeing toads can be a sign of delusions, paranoia, or other psychological issues. If you or your loved ones are seeing toads, don’t hesitate to get help.
And then Kira leaves.
My final thoughts: Kira had almost no agency in this chapter. It was a bunch of people telling her what to do and where to go. Kira should be the one making the decisions. This chapter needs to be reworked drastically, and reading some of the scenes made me want to scream.
Chapter Curse Count:
Shit - 1
Dammit - 3
Ass - 1
Damn - 1
Bullshit - 1
Total: 7
Book Curse Count: 56
Next is “Exeunt 1” with Minion.