Starcraft Ghost: "Nova"

[l33telboi]

I decided to re-read this particular novel, because the sequel is coming out soon and wanted to catch up on some of the details in it. I already did a brief quantification thing on SB, but I decided to do a more thorough job now that I know what stuff to keep a lookout for.

I'm going to leave this first post empty for now, except for the above text, and then when I've gone through all the chapters from start to finish, I'll add a sort of summary here, so people won't have to sift through several posts worth of information they're not looking for.

[l33telboi]

Prologue

AS SOON AS SHE FELT CLIFF NADANER’S MIND, Nova knew that she could destroy her family’s murderer with but a thought.

Nova, the person this entire novel is about, is a telepath and a Ghost, and we'll soon discover just what sort of stuff she can do with her mind. But according to the above, she can mentally kill people with a thought. Oh, and for those unfamiliar with the basics of Starcraft, Ghosts can be described as telepathic assassins.

Funny how I tried so hard to avoid this planet’s twin, and now I wind up here, she had thought when the drop-pod left her smack in the middle of the densest part of the jungle—before the rebels had a chance to lock onto the tiny pod, or so her superiors on the ship in high orbit insisted.

Ghosts can be inserted via drop-pod, apparently to avoid any surface defenses which could be used against slower moving dropships.

She’d spent days working her way through the humid jungles of the smallest of the ten continents of Tyrador VIII.

[…]

The eighth planet in orbit of Tyrador was locked in a gravitational dance with the ninth planet, similar to that of a regular planet and a moon, but both worlds were of sufficient size to sustain life. They also both had absurd extremes of climate, thanks to their proximity to each other—if Nova were to travel only a few kilometers south, farther from Tyrador VIII’s equator, the temperature would lower thirty degrees, the humidity would all but disappear, and she’d need to adjust her suit’s temperature control in the other direction.

Some basic information on Tyrador VIII and IX. There's also a mention of temperature control in the suit she wears.

For now, though, the formfitting white-with-navy-blue-trim suit—issued by Director Bick at the Ghost Academy when her training period had come to an end—was set to keep her cool, which it did, up to a point. The suit covered every inch of her flesh save her head. The circuitry woven throughout the suit’s fabric might interfere with Nova’s telepathy, and since her telepathy was pretty much the entire reason why she was training to become a Ghost, it wouldn’t do to interfere with that. This suit wasn’t quite the complete model she would be using when she finished this final assignment and officially became a Ghost—for one thing, the circuitry that allowed the suit to go into stealth mode had yet to be installed. Once that happened, Nova would be able to move about virtually undetected—certainly invisible to plain sight and most passive scans.

Some basic information on her suit. It strikes me as a particularly bad idea to outfit an assassin with a white and blue suit. But then, it does look good on her so I'm not complaining.

The suit is however not the standard issue you can expect full-blown Ghosts to use. It apparently doesn't feature the built-in cloaking tech most suits have. The cloaking, once installed, is said to be capable of shielding her from plain sight and most passive scans. So active scans can pick her up. But then, what sort of active scans?

The suit’s stealth mode would probably have been redundant in this jungle in any case. The flora of Tyrador VIII was so thick, and the humid air so hazy, she only knew what was a meter in front of her from the sensor display on the suit’s wrist unit.

[...]

All Nova was picking up was random background radiation, plus signals from the various satellites in orbit of the planet, holographic signals from various wild animals that scientists had tagged for study in their natural habitat, and faint electromagnetic signatures from the outer reaches of this continent or one of the other nine more densely populated ones.

A mention of a wrist unit on the Ghost suit with a built-in sensor system of some sort, as well as what it can pick up on. Background radiation, signals for orbiting satellites, holographic signals from tagged animals, as well as faint electromagnetic signatures from far away.

And now she was reading a completely dead zone about half a kilometer ahead, at the extreme range of the sensors in her suit.

[…]

She adjusted the sensors from passive scan to active scan. Sure enough, they didn’t pick up a thing— nothing from the satellites, nothing from the animal tags, nothing from the cities farther south.

500 meters is considered to be at the extreme range of her sensor systems. The sensors can also be switched from passive to active. Passive probably being a mode where you can see the basic stuff happening around you, while active would be a more focused and in-depth scan.

Within five minutes, she found the thoughts she was looking for. It wasn’t hard, once she had a general location to focus on, especially since they were the first higher-order thoughts she’d come across since the drop-pod opened up and disintegrated. (Couldn’t risk Dominion tech getting into the wrong hands, after all. If she completed her mission, they’d send a ship to extract her, since then they could land a ship without risk, as Nadaner’s people would be dead. If she didn’t complete it, she’d be dead, and her suit was designed to do to her what was done to the drop-pod if her lifesigns ceased. Couldn’t risk Dominion telepaths getting into the wrong hands, either, dead or alive.)

Nova can detect thoughts around 500 meters distant, as long as she knows there's something there to look for. It's also said that her drop-pod is designed to disintegrate upon planetary insertion to prevent the technology from falling into the wrong hands, which is a prudent precaution. And Nova's suit is also said to disintegrate if she dies. It's interesting to note that Ghosts in other novels haven't disintegrated upon death. But they were also all Confederacy Ghosts, not Dominion Ghosts.

No, singing. He was singing a song, and half his people were drunk, no doubt secure in the knowledge that no one would find them in their jungle location, with its dampening field blocking any signals. It probably never occurred to them that an absence of signals would be just as big a signpost.

A mention of dampening fields, which is the cause of the blind-spot on her sensors. One wonders how widespread these sorts of dampening systems are, are they employed on military bases, starships, etc?

She was to kill them from a distance, using telepathy. Yes, her training was complete, and she should have been able to take down Nadaner and his people physically with little difficulty—especially since half of them were three sheets to the wind—but that wasn’t her assignment.

The mission was to get close enough to feel their minds clearly and then kill them psionically.

Nova is said to be capable of taking down 13 armed men physically with little difficulty, but that her mission was to kill them telepathically from a distance, but still close enough to feel their minds clearly.

For the next two hours, Nova ran through the jungle, getting closer to her goal. After her “graduation,” the suit would be able to increase her speed, allowing her to run this same distance in a quarter of the time, but that circuitry hadn’t been installed, either.

The full version of the Ghost suit is capable of increasing the running speed of a Ghost by a factor of four, which is quite interesting considering that Ghosts, using nothing but their psionic powers, can already run faster then humans.

With just one thought, she could kill him. End him right there. You don’t need to see his face, you can feel his mind! You’ll know he’s dead with far more surety than if you just saw him, his eyes rolling up in his head, blood leaking out of his eyes and ears and nose from the brain hemorrhaging. And it’s not like you haven’t done it before. Kill him now.

Some information on what telepathic killing looks like.


Chapter 1

But other evidence had also presented itself, and soon Constantino realized that his darling Nova was a telepath.

Were he someone else, Constantino would have been forced to give in to the inevitable and turn his daughter over to the military for proper training. But the Terras were one of the Old Families, descended from the commanders of the original colony ships that had brought humanity to this part of space from Earth generations ago. The Old Families did not turn their daughters over to anyone they didn’t want to.

The novel now skips back in time to when Nova was 15 years old, before she became a Ghost. Here it's mentioned that people are normally forced to give up their telepathic children for military training, but that Constantino's influence managed to stop this from happening.

Also a mention of the Old Families, who seem to be pulling the strings behind the Confederacy. A typical shadow organization behind the official government.

A massive chandelier, six meters wide, hung in midair atop the dome, supported by state-of-the-art antigrav units guaranteed not to fail.

A mention of anti-gravity technology.

There were those who expressed confusion at his employing of human servants—most of whom were members of the younger, newer rich, the so-called bootstrappers who had made their fortune during the boom a decade earlier. Robots, they pointed out, were more efficient, and you only had to pay for them once. Constantino generally just smiled and said he was old-fashioned, but the truth was, he owned Servo Servants, the largest robotics company in Confederate space, and he knew that you paid for them a lot more than once. Planned obsolescence and sufficiently inefficient mechanisms that required regular repairs were what kept SS in business.

A mention of using robots as servants.

“Effectively, sir. I believe some of the structure is still intact, but the plant is functionally useless at present. This will set back production of the 878 and 901 hovercars and especially the 428 hoverbikes by—”

A mention of civilian-issue hovercars and hoverbikes.

He took a sip of the wine. This was an inferior vintage to the previous one. We must have run out of the ’09. This tastes like the ’07. As he recalled, the grape crop on Halcyon was awful that year. He made a mental note to ask the wine steward why they had any of that vintage in the wine rack at all.

A mention of a planet called Halcyon. I'm bringing up planets like this because I'd like to get a feel for just how many planets the Koprulu Terrans have under their control.