Brechdan assesses Abrams as:
"A good opponent..." (p. 98)
- although he briefly wonders whether the Commander might be:
"...they call it a stalking horse - for someone or something else." (ibid.)
Someone else: he does not think of Flandry whom Abrams is preparing for greatness. Something else: he does not think of his own agent, Arlech Dwyr the Hook, a Merseian cyborg.
Dwyr is a brain with a partial, legless, one-armed torso that can be inserted into different robotic bodies, including vehicles and weapons. Ideal for spying on Abrams. Ideal indeed for Abrams since that "'...fiendishly good Intelligence chief...'" (CHAPTER THREE, p. 26) had turned Dwyr on Starkad.
Dwyr, if properly equipped, can sense electromagnetically, and can also intuit machine behaviour just as he used to be able to intuit the responses of fellow Merseians. What would such a cyborg point of view be like? We will find out in CHAPTER TWELVE.
2 comments:
Yes, that was a brilliant stroke for Poul -- showing an intelligence not only alien, but now alien to his own species.
Kaor, to Both!
And the Merseians made a very bad blunder in how they recruited Dwyr into become a unique cyborg spy--by lying and deceiving him, falsely claiming Dwyr could not be healed of his war injuries. It was the revelation of how he had been lied to which so infuriated him that he renounced the Roidhunate and transferred his allegiance to the Empire.
And that lying was probably unnecessary! If his superiors had asked Dwyr to postpone regeneration of the lost parts of his body and serve the Roidhun as a cyborg spy for five, six, or even seven Merseian years, he might well have agreed, from patriotic loyalty.
There are times when lies can come back and bite you in very uncomfortable places!
To be fair, Brechdan himself did not know of how Dwyr had been lied to. If had known from the beginning the facts of the case, would he had insisted on Dwyr being informed and and a free choice offered him?
Ad astra Sean
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