The Back Channel

[sawyl]

And so to The Back Channel, this week's episode of The Human Division, in which we catch up with an old frenemy, John Perry gets a namecheck, and an interesting clue is revealed.

When the more extreme members of the Conclave start pushing him to take action against both Earth and the Colonial Union, Conclave leader General Tarsem Gau, last seen in Zoë's War, decides to take advantage of unorthodox diplomatic channels to try and pull things out of the fire. He dispatches his trusted advisor Hafte Sovalh to Earth to eyeball Colonel Abel Rigny with a view to getting the Colonial Union to deal with some of its illegal wildcat colonies.

Rigny, it turns out, is only too happy to deal with 90 per cent of the colonies. But for political reasons, he is unable to touch the last — an enclave composed of some sort of strange futuristic neo-nazis.

"Do your people have racists? People who believe they are inherently superior to all other types of intelligent people?"
"We have some," Sorvalh said. "They're generally agreed to be idiots.
"Right," Rigney said. "Well, this other colony is made up almost totally of racists. Not only against other intelligent races — I shudder to think what they would think of you — but also against other humans who don't share their same phenotype."
"They sound lovely," Sovalh said.

Sovalh, as befits a consumate professional, comes up with a neat solution to the problem that not only sees of the racists but also strengthens General Gau's hand while simultaneously weakening his anti-human opponents.

There's lots to chew over here, not least the delightful character of Hafte Sovalh with her neat line in deadpan cynicism. Rigney gets a bit more depth — being on Earth for a rare visit, he's forced to confront everything he left behind when he signed up with the Colonial Union — and the easy way he and Sovalh divide the labour gives you hope for the future of humanity. Scalzi clearly has a lot of fun mocking his neo-nazi colonisers: when Sovalh finally meets them, she persistently complements them on the angularity of their skin markings — suggesting that that they've got swastikas tattooed all over them.

We also get an interesting titbit of information about the overall plot arc: members of the Conclave have also been losing ships along their borders with human space. They are, of course, include to ascribe these mysterious disappearances to the Colonial Union but since we know from the rest of the series that the humans are also losing ships in much the same way, this suggests that the disappearances are either down to a third power block, covert groups within one of the power blocs, or possible even all of the above.

Given that we know from Tales From the Clarke that someone has infiltrated the CU and CDF, I'm inclined to think the Big Bad might have compromised the Conclave in much the same way and might be trying to touch off a war between the two. So, cui bono? Someone new? Or one of the nasties we know and love from Old Man's War?