pbreed wrote:
Ok... I got a weird feeling about this snippet....
Merlin is taking people and Nimue to the one place where all the records, owl, Narlman etc is located. Suppose that there was more than one vest pocket nuke left around un-accounted for...
What would happen with no Owl, no Merlin, no Nimue, no federation records, all gone from a single blast....
BobG (me
) replied:
That's been worrying me, too.
Earldrygulch replied:
If that happens the seies is over.
Charybdis then replied:
While I too would feel the loss of such great characters, I disagree that this series would be over. The loss of OWL and most probably all communications would indeed be devastating but Charis has already started the Industrial Revolution and with that infrastructure, the semi-feudal theocracy of the CoGA and Go4 are trying to push the tide back. Their only (unknown) hope is in the 'Return' and/or 'The Thing Under the Temple', neither of which IMHO are slam-dunks in their favor.
Yes, this war will turn uglier and run far longer. Nonetheless the multiplication factor of tech superiority will doom the stasis proponents of the CoGA (already pretty much self-destructed!)
Actually, the scenario that really worries me is if Nimue is
not piloting the other skimmer. In that case, if they lost the cave, Owl, Nahrmahn, and Merlin, there would still be some continuation. In fact, I've viewed Nimue's creation as an indicator that one of the two of them, Merlin or Nimue, will be killed off.
Of course, an interesting spin on that would have been if Merlin was killed off before they created Nimue, and so instead of Nimue they created another Merlin, but without his Safeholdian memories.
That would have been an interesting twist.
I would think, BTW, that a skimmer's seat would include medical scanners. Whether it could detect a pocket nuke is another issue. For that matter, if they did detect a pocket nuke on (or in) her, what could they do? Is there an ejection seat on the skimmer?
My paranoid thought is that if she is an agent of the Temple (not the church), then it is probably not conscious, but that she was given the NEAT interface as a newborn by Temple remotes, then steered to her present path. She would be subconsciously programmed to do ... something. My first guess would be an implanted comm, to reveal her location to the Temple. But the skimmer would detect such as signal, and inside the cave I doubt a comm would work without OWL's approval.
OTOH, if Merlin did detect something odd about Sandaria (such as non-nuke implants), what would he do? Would he deliberately take her to the cave and remove or investigate them? Would he put her into cold storage?
Lots of unknowns. I really really hope DW isn't going to intersperse this thread with another one, and that we see what happens in the cave soon.
-- Bob G
SF & Fantasy: The only things better than Chocolate.
