Spoiler Will a main good guy character die this book?

If I were to take a guess at a major good character being taken out in the next book, it would be Sharleyan or someone close to her. You have unrest brewing in Chisholm, reduced number of troops, and two failed attempts on her so far. I have always found it curious that Caleb gets Merlin, Hector and Irys get Nimue, but Sharleyan only has her original bodyguard. An alternate to Sharleyan would be her mother during an attempted coup.

Thirsk...there is still an ellipsis in that snippet, and the omitted chapters may make clear who is actually being shot.

Major casualties are not unexpected. Someone displeased with the Empress accidentally blowing up the crown princess instead comes to mind.

phillies wrote:Thirsk...there is still an ellipsis in that snippet, and the omitted chapters may make clear who is actually being shot.

Major casualties are not unexpected. Someone displeased with the Empress accidentally blowing up the crown princess instead comes to mind.

I don't think Weber is inclined to kill babies without killing a parent or more along with them, as a stylistic thing. Clyntahn and his Rakurai are monstrous enough without that sort of punctuation.

Hi everybody,

As an addendum to my own post, I wonder if Thirsk might instead be picked by a diver from a crank powered submarine [aka CSS Hunley] that Lt. Zhwaigair has developed?

L


*quote="lyonheart"*Hi JeffEngel,

Of course, if they dump his body overboard, Merlin could be waiting underwater to rescue Thirsk and get him to the recon skimmer or air bus etc where his wound(s) could be treated.

L

JeffEngel wrote:*quote="Larry"*Nope not the Emperor. I agree with the speculation about Hanath and I could see it being him, but my money is on Ehdwyrd Howsmyn. I foresee a Rakuri strike (either church type or OBS) on the Delthak works with resultant explosion killing our favorite industrialist. *quote*A simple, innocent industrial accident could do the same thing. With rapid expansion, so much on-the-job training, new processes, and wartime urgency, accidents are almost inevitable. Draconian safety procedures make the difference between many of them and some, not some and none.*quote*
Oh and count me among those that think Thirsk is not long for the living. I foresee him once again being on the losing end of a naval battle (through no fault of his own) and the Inquisition deciding he's just out of luck and time.
I think RFC was actually throwing us a curve ball by, for once, actually showing us exactly the truth, knowing we would suspect deviousness on his part.

Larry

Could be. And if the Inquisition was likely to come for him, Kahpyr may be shooting him dead first as a mercy, not an assassination. Thirsk would still, sadly, end up dead, and RFC would still have toyed with our expectations with selective snippetting.[/quote][/quote]

lyonheart wrote:As an addendum to my own post, I wonder if Thirsk might instead be picked by a diver from a crank powered submarine [aka CSS Hunley] that Lt. Zhwaigair has developed?

A very interesting twist. That would keep the entire facade within the navy and under Thirsk's control, so he actually could fake his own death that way, since the inner circle has no idea that he'd like to escape with his family.

Of course given the awful performance of the first few submarines designed and put into service here on Earth, which tended to drown their crews, I wouldn't put a great deal of faith in a model 1.0 NoG submarine! Now if it were an ICN sub, it would work perfectly and have a spotless paper trail outlining its invention.

I'd also wonder why Thirsk's wizard would have designed a submarine. My guess would be to deliver mines or torpedoes, and Dohlar has land mines now, so underwater mines are certainly possible. Of course the crews of those submarines would undoubtedly like to survive, so any mines they emplace would need some sort of underwater fuse. The ICN has them, but I doubt Thirsk's wizard could dream one up and make it work. (But I'm no expert and RFC is, so if he wants the NoG to have a submarine, it will have a submarine...)

Whether Thirsk's wizard would develop the submarine before developing a weapon for it to deliver is another question. IIRC early subs on Earth used spar torpedoes, which it seems should have destroyed them. (Correct me if I'm wrong...) This may be a jihad, but few of the sailors in the NoG are fanatics who can't wait to die for Clyntahn!

Larry wrote:... but my money is on Ehdwyrd Howsmyn. ...

Larry

Mine too.

jgnfld wrote:

Larry wrote:... but my money is on Ehdwyrd Howsmyn. ...

Larry

Mine too.

He's certainly the person whose death would most affect the allied war effort, and killing him would probably have the most devastating effect, next to possibly killing both Cayleb and Sharley. (Which obviously won't happen...)

He also runs around without bodyguards and his manufactories at Delthak make lots of firearms. It might not be particularly difficult for a TL or Rakurai fanatic to get his hands on a pistol or rifle - but they could bring their own quite easily as well...

I certainly hope Howsmyn survives. I suspect the coup attempt that's brewing in Chisholm might run deeper than Merlin suspects, so somebody high up in the government who doesn't have antiballistic undies might be killed.

If you are talking about this book, then the previous posters have good arguments.

If you expand the speculation to the entire series, I would be shocked if Merlin survives the last book.

Three reasons:

1) There is significant text evidence showing that Nimue is the "clean" version of the human character.

2) RFC likes Nelson. Nelson didn't survive Trafalgar.

3) I believe that some of the foreshadowing, especially in the later books, indicates that Merlin will be sacrificing himself for the human race. Perhaps to take out whatever is hiding under the temple, although that is pure speculation on my part.

ryndieum wrote:If you are talking about this book, then the previous posters have good arguments.

If you expand the speculation to the entire series, I would be shocked if Merlin survives the last book.

Three reasons:

1) There is significant text evidence showing that Nimue is the "clean" version of the human character.

2) RFC likes Nelson. Nelson didn't survive Trafalgar.

3) I believe that some of the foreshadowing, especially in the later books, indicates that Merlin will be sacrificing himself for the human race. Perhaps to take out whatever is hiding under the temple, although that is pure speculation on my part.

Since Merlin is the focal point of the entire series, I'll take the final paragraphs of OAR at face value:"As he gazed at Haarahld's bier and the wounded midshipman at its foot, Merlin Athrawes tasted the full, bitter weight of immortality. Of knowing how many endless years stretched out before him, how many more men and child-officers—and women, in days to come—would die in the war he had begun.
He felt that weight, saw it in his mind's eye, looming before him like an Everest of the soul, and it terrified him. But Haarahld's example—and Pei Kau-yung's, and Pei Shan-wei's, and even Nimue Alban's — burned before him, as well. That Everest was his, and he would bear it, for however long it took, for however far he must journey. He knew that. But for today, it could wait while the Kingdom of Charis—and the man who had been Nimue Alban—said their final farewell to King Haarahld VII.
It could all wait."

When the first fleet leaves Safehold space in search of the Gbaba, Merlin will be on the bridge, as timeworn and battered as he'll likely be by then. Nimue (or one of her PICA sisters) will likely be with him, with other PICAs of her scattered throughout the fleet. She was one of the most outstanding tacticians the Terran Federation ever produced after all.

RFC intended to kill off Honor during the Battle of Manticore in "War of Honor." His fans got wind of it and raised such a fuss that he changed his mind. She's past the days where she commands fleets with hundreds of capital ships now and is mostly a political figure, but the Salamander is still available, teaching classes at the academy and still sharp as a tack should Manticore need her again. She's also the brains behind their war with the Solarian League - which she saw coming when the concept was unimaginable to almost everyone else, and she also realized that the war was winnable if Manticore took the offensive.

So if it looks like Merlin may somehow get crunched before the end, we'd better be ready to scream loud and long. Nelson didn't survive Trafalgar, but Honor Harrington most certainly did, and she lived on because RFC realized that his fans couldn't imagine the Honorverse without her, even though he intended to continue it through her children. What is Safehold without Merlin?

Now I'll grant you that every human, up to and including Cayleb and Sharleyan, but not both, is a viable target for unexpected, violent death, as we've already seen. Fortunately Nahrmahn has managed to stay with us, although without a body, which ironically has made him even more deviously effective.

Unless the Big Reveal allows Merlin to begin prolong treatments on his human friends, they're going to grow old and die relatively soon. It's undoubtedly too late for many of the adults - in fact Cayleb and Sharley may be the only ones he'll be able to save, and even then they may be with him for only a century or so, since they'll have started prolong relatively late in life. Whether it works like it does in the Honorverse we have no idea - perhaps with the proper nannites and injections a person of any age can live for up to three centuries, but I doubt it.

Princess Alanna may be the first to receive the full treatment, and she ought to have a NEAT installed as well, since she'll be the ruler who will likely see the reintroduction of Terran Federation technology and all that entails. Her children may serve on starships rather than galleys, since as soon as the Big Reveal occurs and the power of the CoGA and the OBS are broken, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Stick a NEAT in the skull of every child in the EoC whose parents are willing, and teach those children high tech from an early age, and Safehold will leap centuries into the future. Figure out who the geniuses are, copy their personalities and put them to work as APs running in hyper-heuristic mode, and in just a few years, not the 75 years the TF figured it needed to catch up to the Gbaba's technology, Safehold will exceed the scientific accomplishments of the Terran Federation and will create the weapons and ships that will eventually obliterate the Gbaba from the universe.

After that it's just a lot of Merlin saying "You may fire at will..."

McGuiness wrote:

ryndieum wrote:If you are talking about this book, then the previous posters have good arguments.

If you expand the speculation to the entire series, I would be shocked if Merlin survives the last book.

Three reasons:

1) There is significant text evidence showing that Nimue is the "clean" version of the human character.

2) RFC likes Nelson. Nelson didn't survive Trafalgar.

3) I believe that some of the foreshadowing, especially in the later books, indicates that Merlin will be sacrificing himself for the human race. Perhaps to take out whatever is hiding under the temple, although that is pure speculation on my part.

Since Merlin is the focal point of the entire series, I'll take the final paragraphs of OAR at face value:"As he gazed at Haarahld's bier and the wounded midshipman at its foot, Merlin Athrawes tasted the full, bitter weight of immortality. Of knowing how many endless years stretched out before him, how many more men and child-officers—and women, in days to come—would die in the war he had begun.
He felt that weight, saw it in his mind's eye, looming before him like an Everest of the soul, and it terrified him. But Haarahld's example—and Pei Kau-yung's, and Pei Shan-wei's, and even Nimue Alban's — burned before him, as well. That Everest was his, and he would bear it, for however long it took, for however far he must journey. He knew that. But for today, it could wait while the Kingdom of Charis—and the man who had been Nimue Alban—said their final farewell to King Haarahld VII.
It could all wait."

When the first fleet leaves Safehold space in search of the Gbaba, Merlin will be on the bridge, as timeworn and battered as he'll likely be by then. Nimue (or one of her PICA sisters) will likely be with him, with other PICAs of her scattered throughout the fleet. She was one of the most outstanding tacticians the Terran Federation ever produced after all.

RFC intended to kill off Honor during the Battle of Manticore in "War of Honor." His fans got wind of it and raised such a fuss that he changed his mind. She's past the days where she commands fleets with hundreds of capital ships now and is mostly a political figure, but the Salamander is still available, teaching classes at the academy and still sharp as a tack should Manticore need her again. She's also the brains behind their war with the Solarian League - which she saw coming when the concept was unimaginable to almost everyone else, and she also realized that the war was winnable if Manticore took the offensive.

So if it looks like Merlin may somehow get crunched before the end, we'd better be ready to scream loud and long. Nelson didn't survive Trafalgar, but Honor Harrington most certainly did, and she lived on because RFC realized that his fans couldn't imagine the Honorverse without her, even though he intended to continue it through her children. What is Safehold without Merlin?

Now I'll grant you that every human, up to and including Cayleb and Sharleyan, but not both, is a viable target for unexpected, violent death, as we've already seen. Fortunately Nahrmahn has managed to stay with us, although without a body, which ironically has made him even more deviously effective.

Unless the Big Reveal allows Merlin to begin prolong treatments on his human friends, they're going to grow old and die relatively soon. It's undoubtedly too late for many of the adults - in fact Cayleb and Sharley may be the only ones he'll be able to save, and even then they may be with him for only a century or so, since they'll have started prolong relatively late in life. Whether it works like it does in the Honorverse we have no idea - perhaps with the proper nannites and injections a person of any age can live for up to three centuries, but I doubt it.

Princess Alanna may be the first to receive the full treatment, and she ought to have a NEAT installed as well, since she'll be the ruler who will likely see the reintroduction of Terran Federation technology and all that entails. Her children may serve on starships rather than galleys, since as soon as the Big Reveal occurs and the power of the CoGA and the OBS are broken, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Stick a NEAT in the skull of every child in the EoC whose parents are willing, and teach those children high tech from an early age, and Safehold will leap centuries into the future. Figure out who the geniuses are, copy their personalities and put them to work as APs running in hyper-heuristic mode, and in just a few years, not the 75 years the TF figured it needed to catch up to the Gbaba's technology, Safehold will exceed the scientific accomplishments of the Terran Federation and will create the weapons and ships that will eventually obliterate the Gbaba from the universe.

After that it's just a lot of Merlin saying "You may fire at will..."

I don't see Ahlanah getting the neat. Since they were installed at infancy, its probably too late for her. But her kids might...

Don