Despite the grim setting, there's a fair amount of awesome and some true heroics in the story.
- Let's start, not with the main characters, but with Ranger Weese Red-Tail, a ranger on soft patrol around Defiance, a no-greenie zone that hasn't seen serious combat for decades. Suddenly he spots a blue courier, badly wounded and trailing blood, being tailed by five armed greenies - a virtual war party. He calls for backup and engages them solo, quickly discovering he's up against a squadron of battle-hardened aces. Despite this, he manages to kill one, assists in killing another and forces a third to bug out, all on a badly battered and failing shieldsuit. His efforts alone keep the courier alive long enough for the other Ranger squadrons to join the battle and mop up the remaining two greenies.
- The courier himself, Rine Blue, carrying literally world saving information (and not knowing it). Unshielded, he gets blasted with a flak cannon which peppers him with shrapnel and shatters the bones in his right leg. He proceeds to bite off his own foot, to prevent it slowing him down. Bleeding from that, a dozen more shrapnel wounds and pursued by an entire squadron of greenie aces, he proceeds to set speed and altitude records for a griffin and somehow get his package through. His reward is the best care money can buy, and when he's finally told the importance of what he was carrying, he gets an unexpected attaboy from the second highest-ranking Ranger in the world. It doesn't end there, either - he volunteers for the War Flock and is instrumental in scattering the greenie defense force, again with no working shield. With one foot, he's a nearly unstoppable Lightning Bruiser and an absolute terror for the greenie fighters. Vaniss is so impressed by the time it's all over, she offers him - a crippled griffin - a Ranger commission if he wants a change of career.
- Ant the hanz. She's the living embodiment of Never Mess with Granny and everyone at the courier command center in Flatland City lives in terror of her - she's not afraid to march right up to a white-shouldered griffin that outmasses her by about 20:1 and yank feathers to get them to behave. But her true moments of awesome come afterward, when a couple of Greenie assassins, fresh from trying to murder Kinnee, are turned over to her. She has their wings clipped so they're unable to fly for a few months, and hands them over to Nightmare, to in turn be handed over to a farmer who needs field laborers. One of them, apparently Too Dumb to Live, doesn't survive Nightmare's questioning, but the other "sang like a spring bobolink" and presumably ended up in hard labor for a while. Once the battle of Kaerling kicks off, she runs the central hub of battlefield communication, like an unflappable alternate-universe version of Mrs. Packard.
- Credit has to go to Kreet, the mother of two chicks and one of the griffin captives, unexpectedly coming up with a very effective deterrent to their tormentors - hosing them down with griffin waste. It's hard not to cheer when the griffins decide that if they're going to be treated like animals, they're going to fight like animals. Before long, all of the captives are duplicating her idea, making life hell for the lab techs before the Butt-Monkey Mook brings an end to it with a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown of Cerrick.Aera:What else can we do?! We can't talk to them! They treat us like herdbeasts, worse than herdbeasts!...What else can we do!!?
- Coro-er is made of sheer Awesome. Despite being severely neurotic, once she Heel-Face Turns against Whitehead she gives an even better inside view of greenie strategy than Kwap. She single-handedly comes up with a bunch of pad-based paper-and-pencil encryption schemes to turn the greenies' Trojan Horse against them and allowing the War Flock to plan in secret. She becomes what is effectively counterintelligence against Whitehead, and acts as the interface between the War Flock and the humans. Without her help, the War Flock would have never even made it to the lab building. She even translates for the human media when they offer assistance getting the many captives back to the gate.Coro-er:I do this for all of us. To prove that not all Builders are bad citizens, and to get revenge on Whitehead!
- Of course Harrell and Kwap both have many of them - especially after they become trapped on our Earth.
- Special mention to Harrell for managing to attack a lab tech, rip off their arm with blunted talons, and stuffing the arm down the waste hole to make sure it can't be reattached. Of course, like nearly every other attack, it only works once...
- Kwap is a four-legged moment of Awesome. He starts with the flamboyance of Liberace and the gaudiness of a fashion model, but when put virtually alone into a Death World with no shieldsuit to protect him, he not only finds a way to survive, he actually begins guerrilla warfare against the human facilities with the help of Tirrsill. All while being chased by greenie, wolfen and Tropica griffin assassins! When Harrell chews him out for leaving Tirrsill behind and accuses him of being a Dirty Coward, Vaniss boots Harrell right in the head and gives him a short What the Hell, Hero? speech.
