Literature / The Ship Who...

"The Ship Who ..." is a science fiction series created by Anne McCaffrey, consisting of short stories and novels.

In The Future, infants with severe birth defects are placed in self-contained life-support shells in which they will spend their entire lives, and are trained to become the "brain" of a starship (or space station, megacity, etc.), into which they will be connected in such a way that the facility is effectively their body. Most "brains" are then partnered with humans, dubbed "brawns", who act as representative and counterpart, going where the brains cannot.

McCaffrey first visited the setting in a series of short stories written in the 1960s, following the adventures of a brainship named Helva; these were collected in The Ship Who Sang in 1969.

The setting was revived in the 1990s by Baen Books for a series of co-written novels: PartnerShip (1992, with Margaret Ball), The Ship Who Searched (1992, with Mercedes Lackey), The City Who Fought (1993, with S. M. Stirling), and The Ship Who Won (1994, with Jody Lynn Nye). These were followed by The Ship Errant (1996, a direct sequel to The Ship Who Won, by Jody Lynn Nye solo) and The Ship Avenged (1997, a direct sequel to The City Who Fought, by S. M. Stirling solo).

McCaffrey also wrote two more short stories in the "ship who sang" sequence after long gaps ("Honeymoon", 1977, and "The Ship That Returned", 1999), and "brainships" have made occasional cameos in her other science fiction series, including the Crystal Singer series.

This series provides examples of:

Tropes common across the series

• Aerith and Bob: Names are all over the place, and not just the aliens'. Hypatia "Tia" Cade's parents are Braddon and Pota. The last batch of brawns presented to her consist of Donning, Garrison, Chria, Carl, Andrea, and Alexander.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: It's inconsistent if this is a feature of the setting.
  • Its inverted in Honeymoon, where a representative of MM is uneasy about further contact with Beta Corvi. Corviki are willing to provide technology beyond what's available to The Federation but that means inhabiting Corviki envelopes and The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body - and some progress is too costly in terms of human emotions. Helva scoffs at this at first, deliberately ignoring how frightened she'd been in Dramatic Mission, but her return and second experience has her seconding this opinion and wanting the system interdicted, "to prevent the unwary from ever encountering those devastating sentients."
  • Contact with well-meaning humans was ruinous to the natives of Angalia before PartnerShip, but there's no word of legality or, for that matter, morality.
  • Carialle realizes to her dismay that the Thelerie should be in a pre-industrial age, but the humans who made contact with them fifty years ago have haphazardly given them a great deal of more advanced technology that has been somewhat erractically implemented, and comments that this is strictly against the code of Central Worlds.
• Aliens Speaking English:
  • The alien in The Ship Who Searched who's called himself "Fred" has a vocal apparatus that gives him a native language humans can't manage but is perfectly adept at the human language, hence giving himself a nickname humans can pronounce.
  • Much of the first half of The Ship Errant deals with Keff and Carialle bringing froglike aliens from their Lost Colony back to their ancestral homeworld and painstakingly learning the languages of the homeworld Cridi. Translation programs help but a lot of human effort is still required. So it's rather a shock to encounter a new species of griffinlike aliens, carefully piece together some of the language from listening in on their phone conversations, and land near a town and then be greeted by cheerful aliens speaking the humans' language, Standard. It's because this isn't First Contact between humans and Thelerie - the griffin aliens thought humans might be the benevolent wingless people of their legends, and the Space Pirates who'd actually made contact with them years ago fostered this to their benefit, including encouraging Thelerie to learn Standard.
• The Alleged Car:
  • In The Ship Who Searched, Tia and Alex meet a tramp prospector whose ship tends to fall out of hyperspace, sometimes resulting in unplanned discoveries. Like The Plague. Allowed to investigate the ship, they're shocked to see just how patchwork it is, with exposed wiring everywhere and control panels salvaged from a dozen sources. Tia is surprised that it managed hyperspace at all, noting also that a lot of automatic processes were made manual.
  "I can't believe this stuff. It must have taken both hands and feet to fly this wreck!"
  • Played for Drama in The City Who Fought, as the ship that had brought colonists to Bethel centuries ago and converted into an orbital station since, is very hastily rigged to allow about a hundred refugees to flee in it. Since the refugees couldn't bring Guiynon's shell inside with them, they bolted it to the outside and inexpertly connected his leads through to the bridge. It barely makes it to the vicinity of Simeon's station, and melts down soon after. Less than half the refugees survive to be brought onto the station.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Kolnari. Admiral Questar-Benn scoffs when she hears that "Psych" thinks they can be rehabilitated and would prefer to exterminate them wholesale. A few in The City Who Fought seem more sympathetic than others, like the very low-caste "medicos" that are considered slaves rather than actual Kolnari, but since they're never depicted doing anything but subserviently reporting to the captains, they don't get to show if they have better natures. In The Ship Who Returned, Helva blithely says they don't have souls.
  • The Ship Avenged has a token heroic Kolnar, more sensitive than most, who would have been culled young if plague hadn't so dramatically reduced their numbers. Between his youth and his low confidence when it comes to doing evil his head is turned by a human prisoner and he fully defects for her.
• Ambiguously Bi:
  • Helva considers brawns in somewhat romantic terms. She distinctly prefers to have a male brawn and is a bit put out to be temporarily assigned Kira, a woman, but after that assignment ends she's open to choosing women. In Honeymoon when she's trying not to think about sex or romance she has to stop watching videos of women dancing.
    • During Dramatic Mission Niall suggests that she use mind-projecting technology to inhabit the vacated body of an actress, or if she doesn't care for that, a male actor if she wants "a change in pace". We find later that he's in love with Helva and wishes she had the kind of body he could have sex with.
  • A character in PartnerShip, looking at how Fassa seduces men to get her way, muses that her techniques would work as well on women, but it's not mentioned if she's done so.
  • Everyone in The City Who Fought is struck by Amos and his good looks - including Simeon, who constantly calls him handsome, with some annoyance.
  • In The Ship Avenged, Joat is looked at with some interest by gay women thanks to the way she dresses. She ends up with a man, but gets a few chills up her spine while talking to a sulty-voiced Femme Fatale.
• And I Must Scream: Shellpeople are entirely reliant on sensors hooked up to their shells to percieve the world, and need outputs to act on it at all, including to speak. They universally have a strong horror of those connections being disrupted.
  • In "The Ship Who Dissembled", hijackers capture several brainships and remove from each the life-support shell containing the "brain", leaving the shellperson inside unable to see, hear, or otherwise sense anything outside the shell. Their captor capriciously allows or denies them sensory input, and one goes mad before rescue arrives. In direct response to this incident, subsequent shells are designed with integrated audiovisual inputs, and older shells are converted to also have these modifications.
    • In PartnerShip, Caleb's previous brain hadn't had the Helva Modification and a catastrophic accident that disconnected him from his ship left him in the dark for too long. By the time Caleb was able to pilot his way to help, it was too late. Later in the book, Nancia is struck by Polyon's Computer Virus sending painful and chaotic junk data and has to shut down all of her inputs. She recites limericks to hold on to her sanity and give herself the courage to start opening them again looking for non-contaminated parts of herself.
    • The inhabitants of Simeon's Space Station, him included, all conceal his existence from the Kolnari invaders because if they capture him, they can torture him with sensory deprivation to force his cooperation - and his military expertise, however hobbyist, would increase their threat considerably. They do discover him in the end and Belazir manages to cut his shell from his column and switch off those integrated sensors, but is scared off by Channa, Joat, and Patty. Even after just a couple minutes in the dark, Simeon's wailing when they switch his connections back on, and has to take a moment to babble in gratitude before he can recover his faculties.
    • Before the events of The Ship Who Won, Carialle survived an explosion that killed her brawn and left her ship rent and torn. Only just able to send a distress beacon, she had no visuals and just a scattering of sound and touch based sensors left, and tried to stay sane by reciting, translating, counting... She thought part of her was then scavenged by Salvage Pirates, but her later rescuers didn't agree. The experience left Carialle with a fear of the dark and of being alone, and she spent quite a lot of time in therapy and working a non-challenging job before she was ready to become a brainship again.
  • The reason why typically only children age one year or less become shellpeople is because of different sensory and motor input; most people old enough to be used to being able to move and use normal senses have great difficulty adjusting. Tia, who became paralyzed from the neck down as a child, acclimated to being shelled as only being somewhat worse. When she's fully hooked up into her own brainship she feels like her sense of touch is restored, and that now the ship is her body.
  • A disease in The Ship Who Searched leaves victims progressively more covered in painful suppurating sores, but still alive, conscious, and able to speak. A horrified Tia viewing one man thinks "Those were once hands. Those were once feet", and he can't be easily identified because there's not enough left of his fingerprints or retinas to read.
  • In The Ship Avenged, the Kolnari inject a drug into Amos that has him completely paralyzed. They also make him a carrier for a Synthetic Plague and load him into an escape pod, with the intention of returning him to Bethel like this - unable to warn his people, or kill himself to preserve them. It does wear off eventually.
• And the Adventure Continues: Each book is self-contained and they tend this way.
  • The Ship Who Sang ends with Helva taking a new brawn who she's delighted with and looking forwards to their time together, planning to return to Corviki and then test a new FTL system capable of facilitating intergalactic travel. Honeymoon, which picks up immediately after that and may as well be a missing chapter, leaves off with them having succeeded, formed a mind link, and being eager to return and pay off Helva's new debt.
    • The Ship Who Returns ends with Helva singing at Niall's funeral and then deleting the hologram program of him that she'd created to keep her company, feeling at peace with his loss, and eagerly petitioning for a new brawn and a new assignment worthy of her experience.
  • PartnerShip ends with Nancia embarking on a new mission with her two new brawns. The last few lines have her exulting in being in her element and making her own decisions, and say that she continued to do so for her entire career.
  • The Ship Who Searched has Tia and Alex assigned to help archaeologists explore the homeworld of the Precursors ( and in the meantime exploring Tia's new Remote Body).
  • The City Who Fought is more downplayed and ends with Amos giving his head follower Joseph his blessing to return to Bethel to lead rebuilding efforts, while Amos stays with Channa and also keeps charitable organizations from overwhelming their quiet backwater world. As befitting a station rather than a ship, Simeon and Channa look forwards to quiet daily work and recovery, but Joat wants to go on to help the Fleet, and Admiral Questar-Benn believes that Simeon and Channa will follow suit once recovered.
  • The Ship Who Won ends with Carialle and Keff, having saved Ozran and discovered their "Holy Grail", an intelligent and technologically capable friendly alien species, lifting off from Ozran ready to report their findings and prove that they're regarded as screwballs but get results!
• "Angry Black Man" Stereotype: The Kolnari's ancestors were dumped on a Death World, which Central Worlds then bombed, Homeworld-style, when they left it and spread into space. Kolnari are proud of what they've become, and hate all other humans as "scumvermin". Other characters compare them to cockroaches. Helva says they have no souls. Even in The Ship Avenged, with a Token Heroic Kolnar who defects for love and in so doing is "given his humanity" by his lover, there's absolutely no consideration from the other characters about why the Kolnari are monstrous and if there's a way to resolve things peacefully with any but the few willing to placidly give up everything.
• Artificial Limbs:
  • An old general in PartnerShip has an artificial arm and leg which have compartments for weapons and tools she can smuggle about.
  • Dr. Kenny in The Ship Who Searched is a paraplegic research scientist whose field is prosthetic limbs. He starts the book in a kind of wheelchair but is volunteered to test bionic legs, and tells Tia that existing prostheses are good on the weight and movement front, touch and proprioception are harder. His work addresses that and he shows Tia a video of a ballet dancer with a new prosthetic leg, but he also says that the more sensory nerves are duplicated the heavier the limb is, and that there are still problems and pain is still involved. It's also expensive, so on balance it's a good thing that dancers are used to pain and her insurance had decided compensating for the dancer's lucrative career would cost more than an artificial limb.
• Beauty Is Bad:
  • PartnerShip has Polyon, who looks like he stepped off a recruiting poster. Before coming to realize how volatile, ruthless, and sadistic he is his cousin Nancia is inclined to believe he's noble and principled; after finding out, she keeps tabs on him and is aggravated by the puff pieces journalists publish about him, which always include commentary on how attractive and elligible he is.
  • The City Who Fought and The Ship Avenged have the Kolnari, a Human Subspecies with truly black skin, platinum hair, and golden eyes. The ones who aren't horrifically scarred or above the age of thirty-five or so (at which point they age with catastrophic speed, being more short-lived than normal humans) tend to be very beautiful. They're also basically a species of the worst possible Angry Black Man Stereotypes, played completely straight but with Breeding Cult and Social Darwinism added on, and Recycled IN SPACE!.
• Become a Real Boy: For the most part shellpeople rarely mind their limitations compared to unshelled humans and in fact think of their own capabilities as being more impressive, though some do envy "softshells" things like the ability to shed tears and smell or taste coffee. Presented with the option to swap her consciousness into the body of a young woman, Helva is only tempted for a second or two. Tia, who unlike most others does remember having a healthy body, is also pretty happy as a ship except now and then, like after falling in love with Alex. So she commissions a very humanlike Remote Body to use now and then when she's parked. Simeon wishes he could hold and comfort Joat and Channa when they're upset, but he also remarks that even if he could do that he wouldn't want to stay human. Both Carialle and Helva, presented with the Remote Body technology, find the concept of using one even briefly to be rather repellent.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: This isn't a setting that has Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions, but when religious belief comes up in the first novel it's associated with people who have to be argued into starting a Homeworld Evacuation, or a Cult Colony that's turned to death-worship to deal with living in a miserable place.
  • In The Ship Who Searched, Tia has nothing but contempt for native people objecting to archaeologists digging up their ancestral artifacts, thinking that only religious fundamentalists would do so and that they'd happily, mindlessly Zerg Rush outsiders.
  • The City Who Fought has Amos's Space Amish background make him struggle with more technological aspects of the setting, particularly shellpeople. He was considered "godless" at home for going against traditions and is quick and adaptable, but he still has some degree of lingering sentiments that toe up to a downplayed Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like, though he's smart enough to remember that Guiynon has rescued him and his followers and knows he shouldn't think of him as an abomination. More devout Bethemites, Amos reflects bitterly, basically offered their throats to the invaders.
    • In the same book the Kolnari's "Divine Seed" beliefs, which extend to not taking care of their own when they're sick and introducing deadly diseases to their young, make them outright Stupid Evil.
• Black Sheep: Nancia's brother Flix is a musician rather than having a "Real Career", which has him at odds with all the rest of their family save Nancia herself. Chria Chance in The Ship Who Searched is also evidently one; Alex recalls that her parents only let her into the Academy at all because she swore to join a shatter-rock band under her family name if they didn't.
• Brain in a Jar:
  • The back of The Ship Who Sang reads "Helva had been born human... but only her brain had been saved." Which is inaccurate, but does get across the fact that a shellperson's physical body is as mobile as an isolated brain.
  • In The Ship Who Searched while talking about prosthetics and how Long-Lived shellpeople are Dr. Kenny speculates that the day will come when softpeople like him will tuck their brains into "minishells" and install them into new bodies, and says they have the technology for most of that already but haven't worked out life support for an isolated brain yet. Tia, hearing how expensive even one full sensory limb is, is skeptical.
  • In The City Who Fought, Simeon and Channa discuss misconceptions about shellpeople with Joat and these include that shellpeople are just brains. Not surprising, considering that they're often called "brainships", and when talking about partnerships with brawns the shellpeople often call themselves "brains" to contrast them.
• Brains and Brawn: In name if not in spirit; each "brainship" is assigned a "brawn" who acts as companion, ambassador and muscle for the immobile ship. Averted because brawns are also required to be pretty smart, though their brain partners tend to regard them as being more intellectually limited than the brains themselves.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Helva is Famed In-Story for, well, her Beautiful Singing Voice. When she first started service, her brawn would fight people who disparaged her penchant for singing. Across The Ship Who Sang, Helva leverages her voice along with her quick wits and readiness to creatively disregard orders to great effect.
  • Tia graduated with a class of brainships who strive to act and speak like advanced AI rather than shelled humans; as such, Tia's willingness to admit to and express emotions and preferences, her "humanity", set her apart from them and raise some eyebrows. She proves herself rapidly, though.
  • Carialle and Keff are a First Contact Team regarded with some skepticism as they love fantasy role-playing games and LARP, and whenever they name a new species they tend to break convention and choose very colorful, unusual names like the "Beasts Blatisant". At the end of the book, Carialle triumphantly says that they might be considered the screwball crew but they get the results in the end!
• Bury Your Disabled: The Ship Who Sang starts with the assertion that Helva's birth defects meant she was born a "thing" and "as such would be condemned" if she didn't pass the encephalograph test required of all newborns. Because she was found to be intelligent, her grieving parents were presented with the choice of euthanizing her or surrendering her to be converted into a "shellperson". By implication, most disabled babies are killed.
  • Subsequent books, published a good thirty years later, try to soften this by portraying non-shelled disabled characters who are active in the plot and often happy, reframing shelled children as babies and children who need life support to survive rather than being a way to make "things" useful, and explaining to a Naïve Newcomer that shells are the end point of technological advances made to allow the disadvantaged to live as normal a life as possible.
• Can't Have Sex, Ever:
  • A problem for any brain and brawn pair who fall in love. Sometimes these brawns get so obsessive over this that they break the brain's life-support equipment open ("shellcracking") trying to get at their bodies, inevitably killing them. This is referred to as "fixation". In The Ship Who Searched, Tia, after becoming very rich, deals with the problem by commissioning a remote-controlled full-sensory human body.
  • In The Ship Who Returned, Niall had commissioned Helva her own Remote Body so he could have sex with her - the closest he'd ever come otherwise was in Honeymoon. She refused to use the gift. Between the expense and the ensuing arguments, this was apparently the lowest point in their relationship.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: Certainly it's casual for Courier Service ships, who are most of the protagonists. Helva and Kira pick up a cargo of tens of thousand of embryos to relieve a planet that's suffered a Sterility Plague, and are unworried about the four-week deadline they have before the embryos have to be implanted or decanted, stopping on several other worlds along the way to pick up donations of more. For ordinary people interplanetary travel is common, but interstellar distances seem to take more scheduling. There are some tramp freighters about, though.
  • It's difficult enough that the Space Station in The City Who Fought can evacuate children, the pregnant, and the invalids by loading them on to the ships currently docked there, but it's not possible for enough ships to come to evacuate the rest of the population before the Kolnari arrive.
• Child Prodigy:
  • Tia of The Ship Who Searched is quite unchildlike and regards not being treated like an adult as Condescending Compassion. Her large vocabulary helps convince Child Services that her situation is actually fine; she's left alone constantly with a library, after all. At one point she bitterly thinks, "Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?", which is a bizarre thought for a girl of seven.
  • Joat of The City Who Fought acts more like the kid she is but is astonishingly good with machines.
• Clingy Jealous Girl:
  • Helva is rather jealous of her male brawns finding female companionship, although she carefully tries to rationalize it away.
  • Rachel has a bad reaction to an overdose of expired coldsleep drugs and becomes too paranoid to take the medicine that would help. She becomes steadily more paranoid and deranged, including thinking that she and Amos are engaged and beloveds and that Channa is stealing him from her, culminating in going to Belazir and telling him about Simeon. When she finally comes out of it, she's horrified by what she's done and has permanently lost Amos's respect.
  • Plenna, falling for Keff after rescuing him, is jealous when she meets Carialle, correctly deducing that the Sapient Ship is very important to Keff. She manages to mostly keep this to herself as there are plenty of other things going on and works with Carialle with only a few twinges. Carialle for her part is all for Keff having Friends with Benefits but neither she nor Keff want a long term and romantic relationship for him, so she convinces Plenna that she will be sick if she goes to space.
• Code Name: Brainships are given two-letter designations followed by numbers, with lower numbers belonging to older ships. The second letter is from their name, the first letter is the name of their brawn, or X if they have none. Unpartnered, Helva is the XH-834. Tia is the XH-1033. Simeon, not being a ship, is the SSS-900-X.
  • Gently mocked in PartnerShip; when Nancia realizes her current brawn is a spy, he says she can call him X-39. When she points out that she already knows his name, he cheerfully agrees; he just thinks it would be fun to be called that.
• Coitus Interruptus:
  • When Channa and Amos use camera-blanking devices Joat gave them to try and have sex without Simeon watching, he gets resentful and discovers that he can still tap into Channa's implants to see and hear what she does and mentions this in triumph. Naturally this ruins the mood and genuinely, strongly upsets Amos.
  • In "port", Keff finds another brawn to be his "playmate". Carialle interrupts and he complains that he's happy to be alone with her ninety nine percent of the time but he needs this one percent! Then she mentions the Inspector General and he immediately kisses his lover in apology and departs, knowing how much being cornered by this man upsets Carialle. Carialle apologizes repeatedly after they leave the station, and after a LARP session followed by a workout she can tell that he's now responding with full honesty that he doesn't mind.
• Coming of Age Story: Shellpeople graduate and can become brainships at sixteen. Helva, Nancia, and Tia's stories all pretty much start from there, and Nancia and Helva's book in particular are about them coming into their own in the setting and considering themselves adults.
• Commonality Connection:
  • Helva and Theoda are both deep in mourning but don't feel that they can stop pushing on and trying to do good. They also both hurt each other in their initial conversation, but come around to a better understanding later.
  • Simeon and Channa are able to call a solid truce when Simeon plays a recording of Helva's Reticulan croons for her, followed by discovering a shared appreciation for classical and opera music.
• Continuity Nod: Helva is mentioned in just about every sequel at some point. Simeon claims friendship with her and Carialle idolizes her and is disappointed to be a mediocre singer herself. Apart from that:
  • PartnerShip references the "Helva Modification" invented after "The Ship Who Dissembled".
  • The Ship Who Searched references the "Nyota Five" incident from PartnerShip.
  • The City Who Fought references Moto-Prosthetics from The Ship Who Searched, specifically Artificial Limbs and Super Wheelchairs. Simeon, the titular city, was also a minor character in PartnerShip, and late in the book Admiral Questar-Benn appears - the "dull sister" of Micaya.
  • The Ship Who Won recaps the events of The City Who Fought early on (together with cameos from Simeon and Dr Chaundra), and references the Moto-Prosthetics. Software used to translate alien languages also has an add-on inspired by Blaize from PartnerShip.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: The first three protagonist shellpeople are women, installed into spaceships, and start their careers and come of age during the books that they star in. The fourth book, The City Who Fought, stars Simeon, who's male, part of a Space Station, uses a human avatar on screens, and is introduced at age sixty-eight, shortly after the retirement of a long-term brawn, though he does have to do some growing up in his book. (The fifth book stars Carialle, who's female and a ship but likewise several decades old and on her second brawn).
• Cool Starship: Depending on how inherently cool you consider the idea of a brainship. The actual ship body is usually something ordinary and middle-of-the-range, even on the shabby side; only brains working for military and law enforcement get top-of-the-line ship bodies. Even though Nancia's family is fabulously wealthy and influential, her ship has the regulation sand-colored synthetic carpet, something that her brother thinks is quite beneath her.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • The Ship Who Sang's back cover calls Helva a Brain in a Jar, and the front cover portrays her as a beautiful woman with long, flowing locks, superimposed over a spaceship.
  • The cover of PartnerShip features an astronaut walking next to a female humanoid hologram being projected from a device that floats next to him as he walks away from a spaceship, giving the impression that the brainship of the novel gains the ability to project an image of herself as a human woman. This never happens; most brainships are not interested in portraying themselves as softpeople and don't have 'avatars'. The blurb on the back cover also misidentifies the main character and misses the plot entirely.
  • The back cover of The Ship Who Won claims that life is scarce and no one's ever found living, intelligent aliens before, which is definitely untrue of the rest of the series. The book itself does portray them as rare and makes finding advanced aliens who can be directly interacted with into Keff and Carialle's "Holy Grail".
• Crew of One: A brainship usually appears to have a crew of one (the brawn), if you don't realise it's a brainship. It's also perfectly capable of flying itself with a genuine crew of one (just the shellperson), but they usually don't except in emergencies.
• Cult Colony: Several different ones, some more malevolent than others.
  • In the first short story, The Ship Who Sang, fanatics were attracted to the icy planet Chloe to live in ascetic contemplation. When the star destabilizes they're quite reluctant to accept help evacuating them as they've come to regard outsiders, and the outside, as impure. The resultant delays cause the death of Helva's first brawn.
  • In The Ship Who Killed Helva visits Alioth, a miserable colony ringed by active volcanoes and a crashed brainship turned into a kind of temple. Volcanic activity regularly floods the colony with hallucinogenic vapors, and the brainship, Lia, is a Death Seeker trapped in place and unable to die. Between Lia's maddened babblings and the gas, the Aliothans have formed a Religion of Evil that is very into Human Sacrifice.
  • The City Who Fought has Bethel, a pretty standard Space Amish colony which has had a youth movement agitating against the strictly conservative lifestyles imposed on them. There are also the Kolnari, the descendants of various hate groups dumped onto a Death World. After evolving into a brutal Human Subspecies and developing industry and space travel, the Kolnari and their Breeding Cult spread to make trouble on other colonies, Bethel included.
  • The final story in the setting, The Ship Who Returned, has Helva visit Ravel, which is populated by the descendants of people from Chloe. The Ravelians have built houses of worship to look like Helva and their religious leader took the title Helvalene - unsurprisingly they hold Helva herself in high regard, much to her confusion, but brush aside her warnings about the incoming Kolnari, claiming Ravel itself will protect them. The Kolnari are torn apart by spiky vines upon landing.
• Cyborg: The "brains" are cybernetics carried about as far as possible, with human brains controlling entire space ships and space stations as their prosthetic body parts. The human body is still there, but only as a life-support system for the brain. Advances in this technology are also used to benefit more traditional cyborgs.
• Deadpan Snarker: Many characters qualify to various degrees, but particularly Simeon, the shellperson at the core of a city. He gets quippy when anxious.
• Defecting for Love:
  • Aside from Blaize, Fassa was the least evil of the Nyota Five and falls for a handsome inspector. After she's arrested and he's hurt, she is besides herself and when he tells her he loves her she's inspired to turn on the other Five, even Polyon. She even has a symbolic dream where she's held deep underwater by the men she seduced and abandoned and is able to swim to the surface after returning a bracelet containing their "souls" to them. She gets a reduced sentence but does still end up going to jail for ten years. Sev takes work that keeps him nearby for her whole sentence so that he can see her and be there when she's released.
  • Karak never fit in with the other Kolnari anyway and finds himself loving and wanting to help Soamosa, even though it means turning on his people.
• Department of Child Disservices:
  • In The Ship Who Sang, Helva's class is investigated by the Society for the Preservation of the Rights of Intelligent Minorities, who wanted to make sure that "shelled children" like her weren't suffering or exploited after having been physically paralyzed and shut into metal "shells". The narration paints their concern as ridiculous, but unlike most examples the investigators decide the children are doing just fine and move on after Helva shows off her art project^note a miniature replica of The Last Supper on the head of a screw, and SPRIM is useful in other circumstances.
  • The social worker assigned to the orphan Joat in The City Who Fought proves to be an outright bigot, and denies Simeon's application to adopt Joat on the grounds that "a shellperson can't possibly raise a child," apparently in complete ignorance of the Federation's anti-discrimination laws. Actually, the heroes sic SPRIM on her.
  • Various strawmen who opposed young Tia's unusual living arrangement at the start of The Ship Who Searched are portrayed this way, though given what happens to her it's hard to say they don't have a point. No matter how smart and independent a child is, leaving a seven-year-old alone for weeks on end with the implication that this isn't the first time is not good parenting.
• Embarrassing Nickname:
  • Polyon doesn't like being called "Polly". His promising Space Academy prospects tanked immediately when he responded by not just breaking someone's arm, but mangling it, continuing to fragment the bones while his victim begged for mercy. It's not a Berserk Button, though; he only gives Blaize a Death Glare for using that name.
  • Simeon realizes quickly that he can call Channa Hap "Happy" to annoy her. As it turns out though, she doesn't really care.
• Disability-Negating Superpower: Shellpeople tend to consider being enshelled as this, since they're carefully conditioned to prize what they're capable of over the things they have to rely on their brawns to do.
• Encyclopaedic Knowledge: Very common for shellpeople, who can casually obtain information modules to add to their databanks, which they can reference like truly accurate memories.
• Exact Eavesdropping:
  • Usually justified. The lead shellpeople have numerous audio pickups on board their ships/stations and (after the first book) can rapidly review recordings and amplify the audio to be aware of anything said in their quarters. Nancia in PartnerShip records extensive collusion to commit crimes and abuse power among her passengers, but can't use it because she neglected to inform them that she's a brainship.
  • Brawns also usually wear "contact buttons" when going out while on duty that have an audio/visual feed which the ships can adjust in various ways, and sometimes use to perceive things that the more human senses of the brawns miss.
• Exposed Extraterrestrials: Humanoid aliens seem to be expected to wear clothing.
  • Being exposed is one of the reasons why the natives of Angalia were evaluated as non-sapient. They pick up the habit, with Blaize's help, as part of a general effort to be reconsidered as people, as well as doing enough local terraforming to be able to mine and start farms.
  • Cridi wear some accessories rather than being fully covered up, and Thelerie go naked.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon:
  • Nancia looks at her cousin Polyon quite approvingly before realizing that he's frankly evil, and is quite aggravated when reporting on him always seems to come back to how handsome he is.
  • Those Kolnari who aren't horrifically scarred or above the age of thirty-five or so (at which point they age with catastrophic speed) tend to be very beautiful.
• Fan of the Past:
  • Tia's parents named her Hypatia after a librarian who worked in the Library of Alexandria. She is herself more a fan of ancient Egypt.
  • Simeon plays historical videogames and considers himself a serious enough historical scholar to sneer and feel wistful at Very Loosely Based on a True Story films.
• Fantastic Drug:
  • In "The Ship Who Dissembled", the hijacked ships are carrying tightly-controlled drugs that have important medical uses but also other less reputable applications.
  • An older actor in Dramatic Mission has been using "mindtrap", a memory-enhancing drug generally regarded as harmless, so heavily and for so long that it's literally killing him.
  • PartnerShip has several designer drugs, including Blissto and Seductron. The latter, rather than being an aphrodisiac, makes people very stupid and suggestible to the point where Polyon doses an employee who wants a cut of his profits with it and tells him to walk, unsuited, into a room full of Ganglicide vapor. Alpha likes to dose charity patients addicted to Blissto with a variant of that drug that seemingly cures them, only to inform them that they'll die if not regularly dosed, all the better to have minions who value her life highly.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Shellpeople are reared to find the senses and capabilities of softpeople, who they sometimes refer to as "softshells", pitiably limited and look down on them. Softpeople for their part often either regard shellpeople as machinery without feelings or preferences, or pity them in turn. The Indentured Servitude all shellpeople start with also means they tend to have to put up with a certain degree of ill treatment from brawns, passengers, and other softpeople with power.
  • Kolnari call other variations on humans "scumvermin" and regard them as little more than useful slaves and vessels of the Divine Seed - the first several generations of a "scumvermin" woman's female descendents, bred back to Kolnari, are still considered slaves until the point is reached where they're considered low-caste "commoner" Kolnari. They detest nonhumans even more. They're hated right back; Admiral Questar-Benn refers to them as "cockroaches" and plans for a Guilt-Free Extermination War.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Very expensive, and you still have to accelerate and decelerate relative to your destination on conventional drives, making the trips less than trivial. PartnerShip introduces the Singularity Drive, which is considerably faster, but can only work between specified Singularity points which are not evenly placed, and Hyperspace Is a Scary Place.
• The Federation: The Central Worlds Federation is almost always referred to as the Central Worlds, and its (undescribed) government as CenCom. How good it is varies Depending on the Author. In all cases it saddles shellpeople with Indentured Servitude and makes them Work Off the Debt. In The Ship Who Searched it's simply good, run by well-meaning powerful people, and there are checks in place to keep shellpeople from being abused or made to do anything they truly don't want to do, so it seems reasonable for Tia not to buy her freedom with the riches she has by the end of the book. The City Who Fought goes to the opposite extreme, making it bloated and in the main indifferent to its citizens. The Ship Who Won takes more of a middle road; Carialle notes that shellpeople can turn down assignments if they've made payments towards their debts recently but when more cash-strapped they're in more of a bind, and in The Ship Errant she bitterly muses that she was given extensive therapy and care after the traumatic loss of her brawn because she's an investment, while a brawn who traumatically lost her brainship was all but cut loose.
• Fingore:
  • A Kolnari who walked into Razor Floss in The City Who Fought reaches for her severed legs and in the process maims her hand on the same wire.
  • In "The Ship Who Won", the furface farmers each have a finger removed as a means of control, making it harder to use the magical equipment.
• FTL Travel Sickness: One of the reasons to rely on brainships is their near-total immunity to discomfort when it comes to faster than light travel.
  • The common, "regular" FTL drive takes some getting used to for regular humans. The transition into and out of it is uncomfortable and alarming, and even spacers who're trained to and accustomed to it appreciate being warned. The more capable of reason a person is the more easily they can shrug it off - in The Ship Who Searched, when Tia transports a hold full of people rendered into Technically Living Zombies by The Plague, she finds that they moan and scream in acute distress the entire time. One even goes into anaphylactic shock and dies.
  • A different, more 'advanced' form of FTL is the Singularity Drive, which rapidly takes a ship between two preestablished points in space. Trained spacers can tolerate Singularity stoicly, but it's hard on most people as it cycles the reality within the ship between several very different versions. In PartnerShip a Computer Virus strands Nancia and her passengers in Singularity, and two of the realities involved are one where teeth are mushy and oozing, and one where they're long and needle-sharp.
• Future Food Is Artificial: Some brainships are equipped with "kitchen synthesizers" of some sort, though brawns and passengers in some books, such as above in "The Ship Who Killed", can still cook dishes using stored food or synthesized ingredients. In PartnerShip, Nancia serves a passenger who asks for "Rigellian smokefowl" some "synthobird slices". When faking Sev's death she synthesizes a lot of "bone" and "algal-protein flesh" to char in her incinerator and present as cremated human remains.
• Full-Conversion Cyborg: The Brainships are cybernetics carried to an extreme, with human brains implanted into and in complete control of entire space ships and space stations. The human body is still there as a life-support system for the brain, but thanks to an alteration of the pituitary gland it hasn't grown since infancy.
• Future Music: In The Ship Who Sang, Bob Dylan is a popular classical musician of the future. Singing in his style is banned on some planets, because it's too persuasive. Shatter-rock is a genre in The Ship Who Searched.
• The Grotesque: In The Ship Who Sings, when the Department of Child Disservices investigates Helva's class in her youth part of what gets them to decide shellpeople are fine is seeing photographs of the childrens' faces, making them glad those aren't visible. Aside from Tia, Simeon, and Carialle the brains aren't particularly interested in presenting themselves as human-shaped at all. Niall, Forister, and Alex - brawns to Helva, Nancia, and Tia respectively - all have images or sculptures made of what the brains could have looked like if they'd grown up as pretty unshelled women.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: The Kolnari are out to steal, rape, and kill. Dr. Chaundra, who swore never to harm another human being, rapidly decides that Kolnari don't count as human. Admiral Questar-Ben scoffs at the idea that they can ever be rehabilitated and compares them to cockroaches. When the last remnants are killed in The Ship Who Returned Helva tells nuns who want to pray for their souls that Kolnari don't have them.
  • The Ship Avenged, between The City Who Fought and The Ship Who Returned, has a token heroic Kolnari, less aggressive than most and mocked for it by his people, who gets to defect for love and is then defended and protected by his lover from her people. Soamosa is said to have "given him his humanity", but there's no consideration about if others could benefit as well.
• Handy Helper:
  • Within their ships or stations shellpeople generally have servos they can use to manipulate objects. Outside of them, and when servos aren't available or suited, they have their brawns. Brains and brawns can have distant, cordial relationships and do just fine, but all the protagonist brains like to be treated as people rather than AI, and to have brawns they can be great friends and companions with.
  • At the end of The City Who Fought Simeon helps Channa to cope with her hopefully Temporary Blindness this way, guiding her with his voice.
• Happily Adopted: Shellpeople are usually surrendered by their parents and raised in a creche with age-mates, and The Ship Who Sang takes pains to show that Helva was a very happy child, although conditioned to want to please and not rock the boat.
  • In The Ship Who Searched, Doctor Kenny is frankly a much better guardian to Tia than her parents. She still thinks of them as Good Parents and talks to them regularly, but it's her doctor who saw her through being installed in her shell, and he's the one she goes to as a brainship to discuss her fears, her future, and her feelings. The first words she transmitted from inside her shell were "I love you, Doctor Kenny!"
  • After Channa pushes him into trying to adopt the Street Urchin living in his crawlspaces, Simeon finds that actually he's never been happier than he has been on earning some of Joat's trust, even if that also exposes him to new worries. After some hiccups Joat is also quite happy with him and Channa.
• Heavyworlder:
  • Niall, the man Helva chooses at the end of The Ship Who Sang, is short and stocky thanks to being from a higher-gravity world, which also means that he's too short to be a "normal" brawn.
  • The Kolnari are a Human Subspecies from a higher-gravity world, which contributes to them being stronger and faster in normal gravity.
  • The griffinlike Thelerie hail from a world with 1.2 times the gravity of Earth. They're quite large and powerfully built and can fly, so poor Keff finds even playful, curious children to be alarmingly strong.
• Helpless Observer Protagonist: Normally shellpeople are more than capable of affecting the plot around them, even if a lot of the time it's only by being able to speak and be heard. Several end up in this position in luckier And I Must Scream moments - when they retain enough inputs to be able to observe to some degree, but can't communicate. Brawns often take "contact buttons" when they leave their brainships which let brains see and hear what they're doing but which have a setting that doesn't actually let the brain be heard.
  • Tia during The Ship Who Searched finds herself as this while jackal-dogs chase archaeologists. She begs Alex to do something, but the only thing he can think to try is jump in a hoversled and distract the animals with fancy flying, as she watches without being able to do anything for him but open and close the door of her hold.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: In The Ship Who Searched, "decom it" is seen for "damn it", and shellpeople use "shellcrack" as a higher expletive. The City Who Fought is more "earthy" with its curses. Books and data are also contained in "hedrons".
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Helva's fourth brawn Teron goes down Helva's service record to point out all the times she's been "unreliable" and acted outside of orders, something he believes she should never do. The first time this came up she laughed at him, quoted the Charge of the Light Brigade, and asked for clarification - does he really mean if she's ordered to her preventable death, she should go? Teron tells her that Central Worlds Ships aren't given irresponsible orders and refuses her examples to the contrary. He's even mad that she had a channel open when strangers boarded, even though it meant their abduction was noticed and both of them were rescued.
  • Nancia's first brawn, Caleb, is certainly more personable and better in general than Teron, but is far too inflexible to handle situations involving real ethical complexity and he has a particular, vocal dislike of "spying", and is quite critical of her choices. Before Nancia and Caleb met, Simeon, annoyed by Nancia's lawful smugness, says they'd be well suited, and at first they are.
• Human Hard Drive: In the original stories from the 60s, where computers barely factor and aren't part of brainships, shellpeople are trained to intensive recall. The 90s books give them Brain Computer Interfaces, so they can access and archive great stores of memory with great ease. Computer memories can be wiped or destroyed, but they still remember the fuzzier information stored in their human brains.
• Human Subspecies:
  • Shellpeople are sometimes considered this way, since their experiences of life are very unlike those of their parents and siblings and they're much more Long-Lived.
  • The Kolnari, whose ancestors were stranded on a Death World with higher-than-Earth gravity. Their skin is black, they're stronger and faster and resistant to many diseases, and their culture is incredibly aggressive. They hit puberty at eight and breed like rabbits, giving birth four months after conception to anywhere from two to five at a time, and place a high priority on spreading their "Divine Seed" even among "scumvermin", their term for any other humans. Also, while most humans in the setting are quite Long-Lived and refer casually to their "first fifty", Kolnari consider thirty to be "ripe" and fifty to be "old and senile".
  • The people of Ozran are split into two of these. There's the more human "mages", who've cultivated slightly more in the way of Psychic Powers than average humans and who modified the other humans into "furfaces". Furfaces have fur and animal-like faces, as well as Four-Fingered Hands thanks to mutilation in infancy. The two subspecies can and do interbreed and most house servants are lightly furred with more human facial features. Some lesser mages shave meticulously to keep their heritage from showing.
    • Before discovering the truth, Keff and Carialle speculate on if the furfaces are humanlike aliens or a subspecies. They don't believe enough time has passed for the people of a Lost Colony to evolve fewer fingers and faces with muzzles.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: FTL drive is pretty tame — going in or out is uncomfortable and some people react to it with temporary nausea, and there's always a lingering sense of unreality, but it's perfectly normal and safe. Singularity drive, on the other hand... involves "translating" between two linked, mapped nodes instantaneously by taking a mathematical jaunt through several realities, all of which inflict temporary body horrors on the poor passengers. The usual transit time is on the order of seconds. However, sometimes ships get stuck, at which the horrors can last for weeks. One notable example involved a brainship having to burn out dozens of powerful processors, put down a mutiny, and finish the translation using a handful of known good processors (including the graphics processor for the screens and a processor or two donated from the body of a cyborg), all while looping between two realities that turned your teeth to rotten mush in one and long stabbing needles in another.
• I Can't Feel My Legs!:
  • Tia's paralysis starts with pins and needles in her toes that becomes numbness that spreads up from there, and then starts in her fingers.
  • Seld has nerve damage which accumulates over time and is degraded faster by stress, and is introduced walking with a cane. He becomes paralyzed from the waist down thanks to the strain of living through the Kolnari invasion, but says that even in the best case scenario he would have ended up like this within a decade anyway.
• Indentured Servitude: The cost of converting an infant into a shellperson, raising them, and installing them into a ship or a station is considerable. Shellpeople are expected to serve for decades to pay off the debt of their own creation and are often subject to terrible working conditions. Later books soften this a bit; with how Long-Lived shellpeople are they tend to become wealthy and some of them are quite philanthropic towards their fellows, keep them from being abused, and try to help them invest and get enough money to buy out sooner rather than later.
  • Thanks to some good investment choices Tia earns enough money to buy her bond within a few years and decides that she likes her work so well that she's content remaining indentured for now. Instead she invests in prosthetics technology and has a Remote Body made.
• Inscrutable Aliens:
  • When Helva's told about the Corviki they seem comprehensible enough, Living Gasbags with a lot of technological know how but who are fascinated by human theater. This remains true but they turn out to be be much more alien than that, even if they are generally on the helpful side, to the point where Helva eventually decides that it's better to leave them entirely alone because further contact with them is a risk to the human psyche.
  • Played with in PartnerShip. After a First Contact Faux Pas destroyed the lifestyle of the natives of Angalia, a lazy survey team that expected intelligent aliens to wear clothes, speak verbal languages, and have technology determined that they were merely animals. Blaize idly taught them Sign Language - a nearly lost language in The Future, apparently - and discovered that actually, they were quite scrutable. It's just that no one before him had actually bothered to pay enough attention to figure out their situation and that they can't speak verbally.
• Instant Sedation: Brainships are able to flood their compartments with "sleepygas" to knock out passengers. This is actually not instant, but it is quick.
  • In Partnership, Polyon hears the tell-tale hiss of its release and leaves the room in time to avoid more than momentary lightheadedness. Sev, about to cross a flooded hallway that's too long for him to hold his breath the whole way, first hyperventilates in clean air to lessen the effect of the gas.
  • In The City Who Fought an enemy who's started to feel the effects of sleepygas immediately kills himself.
• Instant Turn-Off:
  • Amos in The City Who Foughts is beautiful and very charming around women, but he's also Space Amish and rather believes that women who are in charge don't really know what they're doing and are just kind of holding space for men. This leads to several women initially being quite attracted to him only to then become enraged when they try to discuss serious topics and feel dismissed, and Amos has to be sternly talked into giving a genuine effort.
  • In The Ship Who Won, Keff is instantly and intensely attracted to the first magess he sees, a golden Vain Sorceress. This drops off instantly as she proves to be quite cruel, including to him, and he instead winds up in a Rescue Romance with the token good mage after she saves him.
• Inverse Law of Fertility:
  • It's common in the Central Worlds Federation for adults to bank their gametes, particularly if their lifestyles are hazardous, thus ensuring that they (or their widows/widowers) can have children later. Kira had already met Thorn and knew exactly how and when they wanted to have children, so they waived this and even Dylanized about it, singing derisively about the concept. By the time Kira meets Helva, Thorn has been dead for some time and Kira has had some kind of traumatic miscarriage leaving her infertile. Helva reflects that Kira clearly knows how foolish they both were and doesn't comment on that. Later though, Helva suggests combining eggs reserved by Kira's mother with sperm reserved by Thorn's father.
  • Kolnari are so fertile that typical hormonal birth control, which causes a body to regard sperm as a foreign material and destroy it, doesn't cut it and fertilized eggs implant in fallopian tubes and other dangerous places. Dr. Chaundra and his staff perform a lot of covert abortions after the Kolnari take over.
• Intergenerational Friendship:
  • Certain brain-brawn pairs. Nancia is twenty-one by the time she meets Forrister who is quite a bit older. Simeon is about twice Channa's age, though markedly less mature. With how Long-Lived shellpeople are, a point comes when all their friendships with "softshells" qualify.
  • Joat and Joseph. For all that Joseph is Space Amish and dedicated to a religious leader, while Joat has lived most of her short life on ships and knows a lot about technology, they were both Street Urchins who struggled to survive and have that as a Commonality Connection.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing:
  • Shellpeople don't like being called "it" and find it a sign of tremendous disrespect. It grates on Helva when her brawn Teron, discussing brainships that have vanished, refers to them this way, and while considering the issue herself she has a parenthetical aside calling them "they/she/he never it, please".
    • In The Ship Who Won, Keff refers to Carialle as his flying tower. Neither likes dehumanizing her like this and treating her like an object, and once her personhood can be revealed Keff immediately starts correcting the pronouns people use for her.
  • Kolnari taking "scumvermin" breeding slaves sire children on them until they die and keep the girls to breed - after this is repeated for several generations, their children are considered low-caste Kolnari - and castrate the boys, which fill disdained and low-priority roles like medics and are referred to as 'it'.
• Karmic Protection:
  • Between Fassa's lesser degree of villainy, her Freudian Excuse, and her Heel–Face Turn, Nancia submits a sympathetic testimony on her behalf which includes her replacing a factory she'd made for a client after it collapsed, free of charge, but does not include that it was for Polyon who would have had her horribly killed otherwise. As a result, she gets a ten-year prison term, instead of the twenty five years two of the other Nyota Five end up with.
  • Recognizing that Mirina is her Foil and doesn't deserve the kind of punishment coming to the other Space Pirates, Carialle allows her, the brother she'd become a pirate at all to try to help, and the Thelerie who adores her to escape, and take the painting Mirina had admired with them in the process.
• Lame Pun Reaction:
  • When Kira sees the hooded Alioth cultists who're supposedly donating fertilized embryos, she jokes that their babies are born with a cowl. Helva asks if she means born with a caul, and Kira "threatens" her with her guitar.
  • Keff befriends the Frog Man Big Eyes, who introduces him to her father Narrow Leg. Narrow Leg is tall and thin for a Cridi, and in an aside to Carialle Keff says "This is an old, thin lad, Big Eyes' dad. No, Tad. Tad Pole." which makes Carialle groan.
• Larynx Dissonance:
  • Helva's inhuman vocal range allows her to sing any part she wishes, basso profundo included - which also means that when she's roped into performing Shakespeare in Dramatic Mission she can play any part required.
  • As a Game Master Carialle does all the voices, male ones included, while LARPing with her brawn Keff. At one point outside of LARP, she switches to the baritone register so she can be heard above shrieking alarms.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail:
  • Pretty heavily used in PartnerShip. Micayah and Forister appear as minor characters transported by Nancia well before they return as major ones. The man who'd supervised on Angalia proved similarly incompetent in another position, requiring Nancia and Caleb to transport an emergency supply of vaccines.
  • Just as heavily averted in The Ship Who Searched, as it shows one of Mercedes Lackey's Creator Thumbprints (a large cast of minor characters given interesting details and not appearing again).
• Long-Lived:
  • Shellpeople are explicitly stated to have a life span of centuries; in the first story, Helva mentions meeting a brainship who was three hundred and twenty two. The upwards limit isn't stated but in that same paragraph she says shellpeople live until they die in the line of duty or choose to self-destruct.
  • Several other characters in The Ship Who Sang are casually mentioned to be over a hundred years old and still in their productive years, including Theoda in "The Ship Who Mourned" and Nia in "Dramatic Mission" - it seems 'normal' humans do tend to live long lives, just not as long as shellpeoples'. Niall becomes Helva's brawn in his forties and is with her for almost eighty years before dying - she thinks of this as a reasonable lifespan for a normal human.
  • A senile old celebrity in PartnerShip is a hundred and seventy-five, and it's mentioned that rejuvenation treatments can get the very fortunate to two hundred years of age. Dr Kenny speculates that one day softpeople will escape their aging bodies and put their brains into miniature shells to enjoy the longer lifespans of shellpeople.
• Machine Monotone: Shellpeople are taught not to do this but to have lively, engaging voices, as they don't have visible expressive faces.
  • In PartnerShip, Nancia impersonsates an AI drone and speaks in what she thinks is a very convincing dispassionate monotone. Fassa, who she's trying to fool, repeatedly thinks wow, speech synthesis for AI has become so expressive! and would have immediately caught on that this is a shellperson if she hadn't already been convinced from Nancia's exterior and interior that she's not a brainship.
  • Tia complains that her classmates pretend not to have emotions and are needlessly verbose - not monotone exactly, but they seem to be trying to appear to be AI and pleasantly, vaguely interested in anything and everything.
  • A stressed and multitasking Simeon temporarily speaks more robotically than usual as he can't dedicate as much attention to seeming personable at the moment.
• Malicious Misnaming:
  • When Blaize Armontillado-Perez y Medoc reports to his assignment on Angalia, the man he's replacing refers to him, all in one scene, as "Sherry", "Madeira-y-Perez", "Port Wine-y-Medoc", "Claret-Medoc", "Sake-Armontillado", and "Burgundy-Champagne".
  • After Ms. Dorgan from the Department of Child Disservices tries to get Joat to answer by a more conventional name like Jill or Joan and says that a shellperson can't possibly adopt her when a more human couple want her, Joat and Simeon both start referring to her as "Gorgon" and "Organ" and enjoying that that's a Berserk Button.
• Man-Eating Plant:
  • A plant on the Kolnari homeworld likes meat. Belazir keeps one in his quarters in The Ship Avenged and likes to feed it flesh from people who've displeased him.
  • In The Ship Who Returned, the remnant Kolnari fleet lands on Ravel and is promptly completely eradicated by moving plants that also spray Hollywood Acid and take their ships apart.
• Man in the Machine: Each of the main characters is a disabled person inside of a nearly unbreakable titanium life-support capsule, cybernetically attached to a ship which they see as their true body. Or, for less adventurous shell-people, space stations. Eventually, technology is developed that allows the shell-people to control human-sized robot bodies, but not all shellpeople find that affordable or desirable.
• Mayfly–December Friendship: Brain-brawn partnerships at their best are close, long-term relationships that invariably have an expiration date. Brawns retire after seventy-five years of service if they're lucky while "brains" remain in service for centuries if not killed. Simeon's previous brawn retires just before The City Who Fought, leaving him bad-tempered and antagonistic towards Channa Hap. There's often a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship and general subtextual aspect to these pairings. With Carialle and Keff it's a Courtly Love situation in which he seeks out Friends with Benefits but is dedicated to her.
  • In rare cases usually involving a castastrophic accident, a brawn outlives their brain and is seen as bad luck and given little support. Nancia despised Caleb for surviving his brainship, until over the course of transporting him back to Central she got to know him better and found qualities she liked, leading her to take him as her brawn. Mirina wasn't lucky enough to hitch a ride with a solo shellperson and was basically cut loose.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Brain-brawn partnerships sometimes verge into this. These are frowned upon, partially because of the danger of brawns killing brains to get at their bodies and partially because of the intense grief brains in love feel upon their partners' premature deaths. Helva and Niall love one another without that danger, but he does die decades later, before The Ship Who Returned. Tia and Alex also enter a relationship. Alex isn't in any danger of killing Tia and she has a Remote Body made so they can have sex and she, still quite young and newly installed in her brainship, simply doesn't think about the inevitable end of their partnership.
• A Minor Kidroduction:
  • The Ship Who... Sang starts with Helva as an infant, with her severe birth defects relegating her to either euthanasia or becoming a shellperson, thereby introducing shellpeople, the central conceit of the series. There's also a short section of her at fourteen, humming as she paints a replica of the Last Supper on the head of a pin, and being complimented on her voice, which leads to her developing it and becoming the titular ship who sings.
  • The Ship Who Searched spends several chapters on Tia and shows how Parental Neglect led to her being paralyzed and scouted for the shellperson program, also establishing her lifelong interest in xenoarchaology. Other than her and her doctor, none of the characters in this section appear in the rest of the book.
• Missing Mom:
  • Nancia's mother is not present or discussed in PartnerShip except in a mention near the end of the book - she's a Blissto addict who's been relegated to live in a pleasant haze in some distant clinic.
  • Joat's father was nightmarish, her uncle was worse, and the captain he lost her to in a game was yet worse. She vaguely remembers a mother who held and loved her and doesn't know what happened.
• Mission Control: Some stories have the brainship serving as a mission control for their mobile "brawn" partner when they leave the confines of the ship.
• Myself, My Avatar:
  • In order to inhabit the "envelopes" awaiting them on the Corviki planet, the Dramatic Mission actors, Helva included, are entirely unaware of their bodies.
  • Likewise in The Ship Who Searched Tia's new Ridiculously Human Robot peripheral takes up so much processing power that the rest of her is basically inert, meaning using it is restricted to when she's parked somewhere safe.
• Named After Their Planet: This seems to be common. Certainly humans call the residents of Beta Corvi "Corviki". Keff finds this practice boring and likes to give animals and aliens more colorful or descriptive names, which earns him some skepticism from others.
• Neural Implanting: Shellpeople can casually have databases added to their incorporated computers in order to understand other languages, recognize and name the stars visible from particular locations, or have whichever other knowledge-related abilities they'd like. In PartnerShip, Nancia has to destroy her memory banks to stop a Computer Virus and is dismayed at how ignorant she feels.
• Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious: Ration bars are referred to as "kibble" sometimes and are the basic foodstuff of the Central System Federation, handed out in bite-sized pieces to client worlds. In PartnerShip after a First Contact Faux Pas the natives of Angalia became entirely dependent on ration bar distribution, with a population too large to be supported with the amount of food their environment could provide. Bases stockpile them in case of something happening to food synthesizers.
  Tia had been told that while it looked, smelled, and tasted reasonable, its very sameness would drive you over the edge if you had to eat it for very long.
• Non-Standard Kiss:
  • For Helva, having a brawn touch the access panel of the column where her body is suspended qualifies as an intimate gesture, though it's often platonic. Someone who wanted to kill her, either by flooding her shell with anesthetic or opening it, would do so at her panel. Niall likes to lean against or embrace it.
  • After Tia became a shellperson her doctor and guardian, and the shellperson running the hospital where he works, started telling her "Zen hugs", meaning "The hugs that we would give you if we were here and could hug you, but we're not and we can't." The phrase spread to her classmates and her doctor's patients, to the point where he mentions one patient's technophobic relative telling them "Zen hugs" over a video call.
    • However, this isn't enough for Tia when she falls in love with a man who would greatly like to hold her. Her Iconic Item is a teddy bear in a glass case in her cabin; during an emotional moment, she pops the case open and asks her brawn if he'd like to hug the bear. He understands the significance of the gesture and later has a symbolic dream about her as a soft-skinned human in his arms who then turns into an animate plush bear.
• No Seat Belts: Pretty consistently averted, not that drama can't be had from ships having to move from a standstill very abruptly, rattling unready passengers. Tia actually breaks Alex's nose against his acceleration couch while evading hijackers.
• The Noun Who Verbed: Many of the titles, taking full advantage of being able to refer to ships (and cities) as people. Helva is also known as "The Ship Who Sings" In-Universe.
• Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap:
  • In the 90s books, synthesizers create most things people need or want. Meat, and plants grown outside of hydroponics, are common enough on planets that produce them but a great luxury in space. An expensive restaurant in The City Who Fought, a station far away from any habitable worlds, boasts not just real meat but wooden furniture.
  • One of the missions that Nancia considers taking is transporting a bull bison to a zoo on another world that has cow bison. The hassle of moving the big animal without harming him is considerable, but these are very rare animals.
• Only One Name: Shellpeople who don't know their families - everyone but Nancia and Tia - don't have last names.
• Parental Abandonment: Theoretically, once parents give consent for their babies to become brainships, they have no further contact with them and the kids grow up knowing nothing about their background. This doesn't generally bother them, as they consider their peers to be their family and regard themselves as Happily Adopted.
  • Nancia of PartnerShip and Tia of The Ship Who Searched avert this totally, however. Nancia's parents belong to the wealthy and powerful 'High Families' class so they could screw the rules setting a precedent for Tia's parents continued involvement in her life. Tia is also a rare case of having become a shellperson in childhood rather than infancy, and thus actually knew her family.
• Pardon My Klingon: The multipurpose swearword of choice is "fardle" and its variants: fardles, fardling, fardled, etc. There's also "nardy" which is a surprisingly effective insult of unknown meaning, and "shellcrack" which is an expletive that only seems to be used by shellpeople, who probably invented it on the first place. Some books, including The City Who Fought, use more real-world profanity, but also has Joat's creative invective of unknown origin, baffling the older characters.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Blaize figures out that the ship transporting him and the other members of the Nyota 5 is a brainship and treats her like a person, if with a certain insouciance that gets on her nerves. Later, on his assignment, he's appalled by how the man he's replacing is treating the native species whether or not they're sentient. He's the Token Good Teammate.
  • Another member of the Nyota 5, Fassa, reflexively thanks the ship for letting her into her room and giving her a damp cloth when she's sick, although she doesn't know Nancia is a person. She treats her employees well and enjoys their loyalty as a result. She's the Anti-Villain.
  • Mirina is marked as being different from the other humans of the Melange by actually caring about Sunset, the Naïve Newcomer Thelerie joining the crew of her ship.
• People Jars: As the name implies, shellpeople. The occupants soon adjust to see themselves as a brain controlling a mechanical body, which translates easily into becoming the mental controller of a ship or something even larger.
• Physical Disability in Media: All shellpeople are seriously physically disabled, either from birth or in early life. Being enshelled cuts them off entirely from their human bodies and whatever those were capable of, rerouting their nerves through the shells and their connections to larger machinery. The 90s books try to get away from the degree of ableism displayed in The Ship Who Sang, in which Helva's parents were presented with the choice to either euthanize her or sign her away - for Nancia, Simeon, and Carialle being enshelled was a matter of survival, wheras for Tia it's empowering and gives her a sense of touch again.
• The Plague:
  • In "The Ship Who Mourned", a plague has wiped out most of a planet's population. Some of the people were immune. The survivors of the disease are left with locked-in syndrome. Helva supports Theoda in an attempt to demonstrate that physiotherapy may be effective for the latter.
  • Tia and Alex, the Brain and Brawn of The Ship Who Searched are forced to deal with more than one plague spread by contaminated artifacts. One is actually spread by insects the size of dust mites and turns those afflicted into Technically Living Zombies, while another spares the mind but turns the body into a horrendous mass of sores to the point where fingerprints and retinas can't be used for identification.
  • Dr Chaundra lost his wife and is losing his son to one in The City Who Fought. [[He recreates it for the Kolnari after deciding they're so inhumanly evil that he won't be violating his oath to do no harm.]]
• Platonic Life-Partners: Ideally brainships and brawns become very close and work together for decades at a time. Good pairings are regularly compared to a marriage and the participants are considered a couple for legal purposes such as adoption, but brainships as "shellpeople" Can't Have Sex, Ever and most are not bothered by this. There's a certain overlap with Chastity Couple in some cases.
  • In PartnerShip, Nancia wants to earn the respect of her first brawn Caleb and so tries to be just as straightforwards and honor-focused as he is, while keeping parts of herself that he might not approve of hidden, but the way he ignores her feelings and embodies Honor Before Reason starts to bother her, especially after she temporarily takes on a different brawn who does care about her thoughts and feelings and is more flexible in complicated situations.
  • In The Ship Who Won, Carialle and Keff enjoy LARPing Myths & Legends together and have fostered a Courtly Love between two of their characters which has bled over into how they treat one another out of the game. Theirs is a deep and enduring affection with no sensual or sexual element, and Carialle readily points her Knight in Shining Armor, who she thinks of as the other half of her soul, towards romantic partners and "playmates" without jealousy. While he'll complain if she interrupts a liason, Keff cares about her to such a degree that he can tell if it's important and put his clothes back on to go to her with barely a pause to kiss his partner in apology.
• Political Correctness Is Evil: There's a whiff of that here and there. The setting's two noteworthy minority rights advocate groups are portrayed as sometimes-useful idiots who're overly meticulous and who love picking fights. The City Who Fought also sneers at the thought that the Kolnari could be rehabilitated.
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • In The Ship Who Dissembled, Helva is captured by someone who refers to her as an "obscenity", and to his collection of helpless disconnected shellpeople as his "zoo of obscenities".
  • Some of the Nyota Five, in particular Alpha and Polyon, are quite accustomed to their families' connections insulating them from consequences and see people without wealth or influence as nothing more than fodder for experiments or dangerous factory conditions. Polyon, finding that he's being transported by a brainship, sneers internally that he doesn't understand why freaks like "it" are allowed to live, let alone given jobs that could go to people like him.
  • The Kolnari are Social Darwinists who only believe that people with the "Divine Seed" are true people, to the point of A Nazi by Any Other Name.
• Precursors:
  • Downplayed with the long-vanished alien species dubbed the Salomon-Kildaire Entities (almost exclusively called the EsKays), which had outposts or settlements on various lifeless, airless planets and whose homeworld was unknown. There's not a lot reputably attributed to them. The book's protagonists eventually find caches on a non airless world that contain artifacts from across the galaxy and multiple different civilizations that includes EsKay items but who made the caches is unknown. Nonetheless, part of the And the Adventure Continues ending is the protagonists being assigned to use this new evidence to take a party of scientist to that mysterious homeworld.
  • On a smaller scale that did leave some spectacular artifacts, the Cridi on Ozran are referred to by humans as the "Ancient Ones". They built a generator called the Heart of Ozran and made devices that use its power in semi-magical ways. Then another set of aliens that humans call the "Old Ones" landed and were welcomed and taught to use their technology, only to steal it and resettle in mountainous terrain that the Cridi couldn't reach on their own. The Old Ones declined in population, with a few surviving long enough to welcome human colonists and teach them how to use the artifacts. Those humans who took to the artifacts styled themselves as mages, and thought the small, gesticulating frogs in the lowlands were mere animals.
• Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: Brain-brawn pairings regularly veer this way, though inevitably they're Mayfly-December. In The Ship Who Sang, Helva regards picking her first brawn as beginning "the first of several marriages" even before falling in love with him. Said first brawn's father had been a brawn himself and gave the impression of being married more to his brainship than to his actual wife. In The Ship Who Searched, Moira tends to choose brawns based on their looks, which leads to having to pay a lot of severance fees when they start to quarrel and she wants a change. In The City Who Fought, Simeon mourns the retirement of his previous brawn and gets on the wrong foot with Channa Hap by outright hitting on her, then has to earn her respect from there.
• Quitting to Get Married:
  • Kira had left brawn training almost complete to marry Thorn and have a baby. Unfortunately, that ended in tragedy. When she returned to the academy, Kira went into medicine instead of resuming the previous track.
  • Moira has quite a succession of brawns that she takes and then rejects. The last before Tomas quit their partnership so he could get married, so she tells Tia that that one definitely wasn't because she'd chosen poorly.
• Resignations Not Accepted: Shellpeople graduate with tremendous debt. They are paid salaries with bonuses for various assignments that can go towards repaying that debt, but in many circumstances they have to cover their own repairs, and if paired with incompatible brawns, "divorce" incurs its own fee. Some struggle for centuries to pay their debt, and plenty just give up on it - and dully accept indenture as not being too bad. Helva manages to reach Buy-Out in a mere ten years and notices that the base chief is trying to fudge the numbers. Once those are hammered out he tries to get her on the hook to be refitted in such a way that she's given a new debt. While thinking about freedom, Helva finds herself feeling empty. Between being a ship and her own conditioning driving her to find Courier Service satisfying, she doesn't have a lot of options and finds the idea of working for a company rather than the higher good she'd been trained for distasteful. She winds up contracting back into Service - though she drives a bargain to become a freelance agent, with more choice in the matter and at a higher rate of pay.
• Retcon:
  • Brain-computer interfaces aren't mentioned in The Ship Who Sang. Computers seem to be huge things, limited to planetside - presumably, in 1961 (the publication date of the first story in the setting) when a "computer" mostly meant "a person who does math very quickly" it was easier to imagine a human controlling a ship. The books that came out in the 90s do involve computers which are heavily integrated with brainships, and AI which are primitive and limited in comparison. Of course, the first of these books does say that Helva's been around for almost two hundred years, so it might be less a retcon and more that the technology was introduced and caught on in that time.
    • The Ship Who Returned retcons that statement about how long it's been since Helva's original adventures, as her brawn has just died after seventy years with her.
  • The 90s novels also try to soften the ableism of the 60s book and don't have eugenics be the standard - it's instead something many of the villains like the idea of.
• Sapient Ship: Brainships, which are not sapient in themselves until connected to the neural network of a specially-trained and modified human being.
• Saved to Enslave: The first page of The Ship Who Searched says that Helva was "born a thing and as such would have been condemned" if her brain hadn't been scanned and deemed favorable, and her parents were then given the decision to euthanize her or surrender her to be converted into a shellperson. Conversion, raising and schooling, and installation into ships or stations are all very expensive and shellpeople always start out in Indentured Servitude. A few can recoup the costs quickly but others take decades, and their choices are limited in many ways. Shellpeople are often treated as equipment and sometimes killed by their own brawns. In the 90s novels the authors generally try to soften this, with some families who do keep in touch and in-universe advocates and human rights activists protecting the rights of shellpeople.
• Seeing Through Another's Eyes:
  • Honeymoon has Helva and Niall partially combine in their Corviki envelopes, only for the timer to run down. The failsafe brings them back to their own bodies, but a little of Niall is in Helva and vice versa - enough so that she can taste the coffee he drinks and remarks that it's good.
  • Usually, brains keep track of their brawns through contact buttons that have integrated cameras and pickups for sound. Channa however has implants that allow Simeon to directly percieve what she does.
  • Keff also has implants that Carialle can use, which is fortunate since he's quite far away from her through most of The Ship Who Won.
• Self-Made Orphan:
  • In PartnerShip, Darnell mentions having killed the father who established the shipping company that Darnell is now heir to.
  • It's mentioned that due to their harsh culture, all Kolnari in The City Who Fought and The Ship Avenged hate their fathers and seek to kill them, and are killed in turn if they fail or are too unsubtle about it.
  • Mages in The Ship Who Won generally become mages by killing other mages and taking their power items. Plennafrey defended herself when her father tried to kill her, accidentally killing her brothers as well in the process, and so inherited two power items. She's wracked with Survivor's Guilt and hates even thinking about murder.
• Sense Loss Sadness:
  • Most shellpeople were converted in infancy and don't have any memory of being "softshell" humans, and while growing up are conditioned not to mind their limitations - it wouldn't do for a ship to long to touch someone or to walk around on a planet's surface. Helva, in the original story, doesn't appear to have much of a sense of "touch", but the 90s novels let shellpeople pick that up through sensors installed in their ships and etc.
  • Helva's roped into participating in a Remote Body staging of Shakespeare and finds the experience of sensing atmosphere and pressure against flesh, even if it's methane-ammonia against an amorphous body, "somehow unclean". Smell is also strange. She gets used to both and the intense alien environment quickly though, as do the other actors, all of whom feel somehow diminished when on break and in their normal bodies. Hit by tremendous "accolades" upon performing for an audience, Helva both blesses and curses the mechanism that jerks her back to herself. The energy tranferral was amazing but also overwhelming. In fact three of the other actors decide to Stay with the Aliens.
  • Tia was seven when she became paralyzed and was converted. Grown up she's even more pleased to be a spaceship than her fellows, as she feels like she does have a body and can feel again. However, she also feels her inability to enter a physical relationship more keenly than most shellpeople hence her funding a Remote Body that looks like she would have if she'd never become sick.
  • Simeon, unlike most shellpeople, creates a human-looking digital avatar with a face and hands, but his only actual regret about not being a softperson is that he can't smell or taste food and coffee, something he's seen countless people relish. And that, indeed, he can't hold the people he cares about when they're upset.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • PartnerShip takes place two hundred years after The Ship Who Sang, and The Ship Who Searched and The City Who Fought take place some time after that, but The Ship Who Returned takes place less than eighty years after The Ship Who Sang, yet references characters and technology from the other books.
  • In the first few stories of The Ship Who Sang, intelligent aliens aren't mentioned at all, one way or another. Then the Corviki come up in Dramatic Mission, and there are some implications that other aliens exist in that story. Evaluating alien species to discern if they're people is significant to the backstory of PartnerShip, and various alien peoples, long-dead or alive and mingling with humans, are quite common in The Ship Who Searched and The City Who Fought. The Ship Who Won makes them out as being quite rare and unusual.
  • Generally this is a setting where AI can be useful but have limited abilities, which is why shellpeople are Wetware CPUs. But The Ship Avenged has Joat make a personal AI to run her ship, who's indistinguishable in ability and personality from a shellperson and she even comes to see as a full person by the end.
• Sequel Hook:
  • Several characters in The City Who Fought note that there are many more Kolnari out there, and that as long as there are two there will be a lot more soon. The last page has Belazir escaping the station on the Dreadful Bride wracked with fever and swearing revenge.
  • The Ship Avenged has Belazir die but also has characters note that there are more Kolnari around. The Ship Who Returned has Helva witness the deaths of what she believes are the last of them.
  • The Ship Who Won has Carialle and Keff leaving Ozran, but they've figured out where the homeworld of the globe-frogs is and think they'll be the ones to take representatives back to it.
• Sequel Non-Entity:
  • While The Ship Avenged is a direct sequel to The City Who Fought and Joat is its main character, it really only focuses on a new cast and her, Joseph, Amos, and Belazir. Almost no one from the previous book is mentioned, let alone appears - including Seld, the first friend Joat had made that was her age and who was quite important to her. Channa and Simeon are mentioned repeatedly but unseen, aside from Joat briefly remembering them welcoming her home after she was expelled from Brawn training.
  • The Ship Errant is a direct sequel to The Ship Who Won, taking place two years later. The central characters are still Carialle and Keff. The leader of the globe-frogs, Tall Eyebrow, became a significant character late in the first book and now becomes more prominent. None of the humans of Ozran reappear.
• Shout-Out:
  • Tia gets in contact with Friesner, Sherman, Stirling, and Huff, shellpeople investment brokers. These are the names of contemporary authors - Stirling even wrote The City Who Fought.
  • There are quite a few in The Ship Who Won and The Ship Errant. Carialle and Keff discovered ROUSes, reference Star Trek's "To boldly go..." and the Prime Directive, and LARP a session set in Castle Aaargh.
• Signed Language:
  • Blaize happened to know sign language and idly taught it to one of the Loosies he was assigned to oversee, discovering when he did so that not only were they actually sapient, but telepathic with one another as soon the entire population was talking to him in sign language.
  • The globe-frogs or Cridi use sign as their primary language and create sign-names for Carialle and Keff. One explains that inventing a verbal language was a landmark in their advance as a society - they have keen eyes and poor hearing, but when they were hunters, they sought prey and hid from predators with good ears and poor eyes, so silence was important. When they had the werewithal to gather together and develop technology, keeping their hands free to work became important and so they consider their verbal language to be "the language of science". Still, most of their communication is sign and a broadcast is made in The Ship Errant which is entirely visual, with the camera focused on the Cridi's hands rather than face.
• Silent Running Mode:
  • Late in The Ship Who Searched Tia and Alex bury themselves under an avalanche and go as silent as they can - shutting down most of Tia's systems and having Alex move as little as possible - to avoid detection from pirates. This is planetside, so sound carries.
  • While the Kolnari are sizing up the SSS-900-C some of them discuss it in hushed tones. Their leader, amused and scornful, says they don't need to do that; they are stealthed, but sound doesn't carry in vacuum.
• The Sleepless: Whether shellpeople have to (and can) sleep depends on the book. Tia takes three hours of DeepSleep every twenty-four hours and likes to schedule this for when her brawn is freshly awake and too grouchy to chat with, but this may be because she was unshelled for so long. Other shellpeople mention not sleeping. A sufficiently fatigued Helva is "on the verge of unconsciousness" and can't worry or think, but that's not the standard. Carialle mentions "nightmares", visions that just come upon her sometimes in quiet moments when there's nothing to occupy her attention.
• Social Darwinist:
  • The Ship Who Searched has a minor character — Haakon-Fritz — who actually belongs to an organization called the Practical Darwinists and fits this completely. He justifies leaving the other members of an archaeology survey to (almost) die in such harsh terms, readily talking to reporters and becoming a media villain.
  • The villains of The City Who Fought are an entire race of these, as a Human Subspecies from an extremely harsh environment who kill their own readily and know little about medical care beyond treating wounds. Their leader muses that those of his men killed in ambush or by a virus were weak and their deaths reduce imperfections in the Divine Seed, and plans to spread that same virus among his peoples' children.
• Someone to Remember Him By:
  • Part of why it's standard practice for a lot of people to bank their gametes when they become adults - widows or widowers can easily combine their genes with their lost partners' and still have children. Kira and Thorn had pointedly not done this, which Kira regrets deeply after Thorn's death - but their own parents had followed custom, and Helva suggests Kira draw on those.
  • Dr. Chaundra in The City Who Fought is a widower with a son that reminds him painfully of the wife he lost. Much trouble arises when Seld, as Joat's friend, does not evacuate with the other children - especially since thanks to the same illness that killed his mother, Seld has nerve damage that's accelerated by stress.
• Spaceship Girl: For the most part, despite cover art shellpeople are happy as they are and don't percieve themselves as "softpeople" or really care about showing people a human face, but Helva and Nancia each get a brawn who has artwork made depicting her as a healthy human woman. Helva is touched, Nancia basically shrugs.
  • Tia, The Ship Who Searched, became a shellperson late and sees herself as more "human" than most brains. She falls in love with her brawn Alex, but they Can't Have Sex, Ever without killing her, and allowing him to hug her Iconic Item only goes so far. So she finances the creation of a remote-operated android accessory made in the shape of the person she would have been if she hadn't been paralyzed as a child.
  • Simeon, The City Who Fought, makes up an expressive human avatar to appear on screens when he's talking to people. It has nothing to do with what he might have looked like, it's just a rugged face that he thinks looks cool, complete with a Dueling Scar. In cyberspace this is the shape that he takes, since as a station he doesn't otherwise conceptualize himself as mobile.
  • The Ship Who Won's Carielle went through a terrible traumatic event. In therapy afterwards, a counselor had her channel her emotions and frustrations into art, including by creating a self-portrait. He expected her to paint a projection of herself as a human, but she painted her shipself with some anthropomorphic elements. After recovering her interior is equipped with screens and holographic emitters which she uses in LARP, and she creates a "Lady Fair" design that she sometimes uses to communicate with Keff and other humans even outside of the game, but it's not actually how she sees herself. When making First Contact with the Cridi, she creates a holographic Cridi avatar to sign with them, and uses it throughout The Ship Errant as well.
• The Spock: Shellpeople are often not very expressive, but this is variable and can change. However, they're all still expected to weigh hard logic in their decisions. Tia is very "human" for a brainship, but she has to take a cold stance when her brawn Alex wants to take off his suit around ailing "Zombies'', which saves his life.
• Stay with the Aliens:
  • The choice of several actors in Dramatic Mission and forced on one of them, after she tried to sabotage her rival's Remote Body equipment.
  • Plennafrey tries to pull this to stay with Keff, but he doesn't have any romantic interest in her and Carialle manages to convince Plenna that she'd do poorly in space, at which point Chaumas charms her into remaining on Ozran.
• Stepford Smiler:
  • Kira in The Ship Who Killed swings between wildly enthusiastic displays of happiness and explosive rage, covering her profound grief at her husband's death and her own Death Seeker tendencies.
  • Young Tia puts on the face of a Cheerful Child when around other people. Before she was paralyzed she worried that otherwise either her parents would withhold time with her as punishment or the Department of Child Disservices would take her away and make her go to school and interact with other children. Afterwards, she just didn't want them to worry. As a brainship, she's professional but a bit more willing to share how she really feels.
  • Especially in The Ship Errant, Carialle insists that she's cured of her old trauma and downplays her anxiety and panic attacks to present herself as cheerful and enthusiastic about the mission.
• Stupid Evil: Kolnari are The Social Darwinists to such an absurd degree that they kill each other and their own children for any perceived weakness, whether that's insufficient enthusiasm for rape and murder or any degree of physical infirmity. They regard medicine and medical treatment with contempt.
  • On the SSS-900-C Belazir writes off and refuses to investigate any of his people covertly killed by station personnel, deciding that if they were killed they must have been weak, so their deaths make his people stronger. Kolnari catching a "disabling illness" such as the Synthetic Plague either kill themselves, are left to recover or not on their own, or are killed for being weak enough to fall ill. Belazir even says he'll take the disease back to introduce to all his people - and in The Ship Who Avenged we see that that killed almost all the Kolnari children and has disastrously reduced the population.
  • In The Ship Who Returned the Kolnari all land on Ravel at once, enticed by a planet whose entire population is monastic women, and subsequently are all overwhelmed by the Man Eating Plants.
• Super-Scream: Downplayed, shellpeople use speakers which can be quite loud but aren't usually on the level of a weapon.
  • In Dramatic Mission Helva tries shouting to stop a murderous passenger and only manages to stagger her. When she's kidnapped in The Ship Who Dissembled and forced to perform, she pretends she wasn't given enough volume to sing properly and so is given more power. Starting low and quiet, she gets the kidnappers to lean close so they can hear her song and then subjects them to a Last Note Nightmare. Because the drugs they were on accentuated any shock, this actually kills some of them.
  • In The Ship Who Searched, Tia uses her external speakers to play "shatter-rock" loudly enough to cause an avalanche and bury herself under snow.
• Tagline: The tagline for the Baen novels was "The Ship Who Sang is not alone!"
• There Are No Therapists:
  • Zigzagged in The Ship Who Killed. Someone "conditioned" Kira to be unable to kill herself and barred her from going anywhere where euthanasia was legal but didn't actually help her or even prevent her from working, leaving Helva to give her Epiphany Therapy when they visit a Death Seeker Cult Colony. As they leave it, Kira recommends to Central Worlds that they sent a "planet-therapy team" to the colony immediately.
  • Bartenders, according to The Ship Who Searched, often have this sort of training so they can give good advice to troubled clients. Well, Epiphany Therapy, anyway.
  • Averted for The Ship Who Won. After her traumatic experience, Carialle has had extensive therapy that's included art. Her art therapist was not used to treating shellpeople but a few hiccups aside it wasn't a big issue.
    • However, she has a foil in The Ship Errant who had a similar experience but, as a brawn who survived the death of her brainship, was seen as aberrant and unlucky, given much less help. Mirina slipped through the cracks. Carialle reflects cynically that after all, a brainship takes many years and a lot of money to go into service and is Long-Lived, while a brawn is a regular person given several years' training and has a career of maybe seventy years, of course Central Worlds had been more generous in helping her return to duty.
• Token Heroic Orc: In The Ship Avenged, Belazir opens the book feeling his age, gloating over a new Synthetic Plague, and sneering at his weak, stupid eldest son Karak - if not for how low the Kolnari population has become, he would have killed Karak already but at the moment they need bodies and Karak hasn't actively failed him yet. When Karak gets POV we find that he's never fit in with the other Kolnari and has been mocked for his lack of martial ambition - and when he fails to intimidate a Defiant Captive who has a less hostile outlook than his fellows, Karak rapidly falls in love and defects.
  • The mages of Ozran are intensely competitive and disloyal. Almost anyone who becomes a mage does so by killing a mage and taking their items of power, which they have to guard jealously. Plennafrey, who became a mage by defending herself from her father as he tried to kill her and accidentally becoming a Self-Made Orphan, is gentler and less aggressive than her fellows - when the offworlder Keff is captured and tormented at a dinner with a host of mages, Plenna intervenes and rescues him. He decides to repay her with Rescue Sex, and she's so taken with him as a kinder person than any mage she's met that she really wants a full, enduring romance.
• Transhuman Aliens: Overlaps considerably with Human Subspecies.
  • The Kolnarians in The City Who Fought are so dramatically different from the human baseline that the station's head of medical only believes they have human ancestry because some of the women they raped got pregnant. They adapted to their radioactive planet with high heavy metal concentrations by developing jet black skin and an immune system that uses heavy metals to poison pathogens.
  • The planet in The Ship Who Won is populated by an underclass of four-fingered farmers who look like anthropomorphic animals and a ruling class of human-like "mages". It turns out that both "races" are descendants of a human Lost Colony that found Precursor tech and the "mages" used genetic engineering to suppress the others, along with amputating their pinky fingers at birth so they couldn't use the artifacts that required ten fingers to operate.
• Unable to Cry: For obvious reasons, shellpeople are physically unable to weep, and they occasionally wish they had that release.
• Veganopia: Most humans in the setting are vegetarians who quite happily eat synthesized meat made from soy and algae. Meat is still consumed, mostly by the very rich and on or near planets where animals are raised and slaughtered. A spacer character regards real meat with faint horror and thinks she'll stick with the proper kind grown in vats.
• Wetware CPU: Again, shellpeople. After adapting to control their 'shell' body, they are wired in as the nerve center for something larger, like a ship (or a space station, or a city).
  Computers were wonderful at collecting and collating data, but they could never really interpret it the way a human could.
• Work Off the Debt: The time and expense required to raise a suitable human infant into an adult Wetware CPU known as a "shellperson" is quite considerable. Central Worlds doesn't like words like "slavery" or even Indentured Servitude but they do expect shellpeople to serve in an area that interests them - military, general courier, archeology, as a Space Station, First Contact, etc - until they can achieve "Buy-Out". Helva achieves this in a mere ten years. Unluckier shellpeople take decades or even centuries if they're unfortunate and have to pay for their own repairs, the fee for switching partners etc - fortunately, the process that converts them into shellpeople also makes them very Long-Lived.
• Wrong-Name Outburst:
  • At the end of The City Who Fought, Chaundra calls her boyfriend Amos "Simeon", the name of her shellperson partner. Amos, who has always been jealous of her relationship with Simeon, storms out. Simeon promptly calls him on it, pointing out among other things that Amos took Simeon's name to deceive invaders on the station, and it's not surprising Chaundra slipped when she's been calling him that for several weeks.
  • In The Ship Who Searched, Alex accidentally calls his random hookup partner Tia. Fortunately she isn't bothered by it and just laughingly calls him Giorgi in return, and says when they part that his Tia is a lucky woman. Alex is more disturbed by it because it makes him realize that he is falling for Tia (who is a Brain and therefore can't leave her life support tube).
• You Are Number 6: Shellpeople all have names but are given numbered designations upon graduation and installation. Helva is XH-834 to start. The first letter is swapped out for the first initial of whatever brawn she's partnered with, the second letter is from her name. An older brainship that she talks to, the MS-422, tells Helva not to call her "Silvia" as Silvia died long ago, but rather to refer to her as 422.
• Zombie Advocate: Much of Central Worlds regards shellpeople as useful but repulsive. Shellpeople struggle with debt and Indentured Servitude and are frequently dehumanized. The two organizations mentioned to be trying to change and mitigate this are the Society for Protection of Intelligent Minorities (SPRIM) and the Mutant Monitors (MM, Double-M), though the shellperson protagonists of the series often regard them as somewhat ridiculous. SPRIM first appears inspecting a shellperson school to see how the "shelled children" are treated, which is portrayed as a minor visit from the Department of Child Disservices. However, when Helva thinks her commander is fudging the numbers to avoid accepting that she's paid her debt and is free, the MS-422 indignantly recommends the heads of the local chapters of SPRIM and MM to her.

The Ship Who Sang, Honeymoon, and The Ship Who Returned

• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Human actors perform alien theater if Dramatic Mission is any indication, as an actress is given this accolade by a port official.
  "Your Phorus II monologue made me appreciate for the first time the vital interplay of color, odor, and rhythm."
• Alien Catnip: Getting accolades for putting on a play in front of Corviki, while in a Corviki envelope, is overwhelming and intense, something an actor can get used to.
• Beautiful Singing Voice: What Helva's known for. We're told that she uses her diaphragm and throat while speaking but the actual sound is emitted by microphones, and she does not technically breathe and cannot open her mouth. After someone noticed the warm and vibrant quality of her humming she applied herself to finding a way to sing and developed ways to manipulate her diaphragm and vocal chords, and "expand the oral cavity well into the frontal sinuses", to good effect. Helva can sing any role in any song that she cares to try, masculine parts included, and can even imitate voices.
• Bizarre Alien Psychology: The Corviki, once characters are actually communicating with them, are more strange than anticipated. They do still love Romeo and Juliet, but in their own context.
  The Corviki audience understood the conflict of the two warring energy-groups, of the desire of the two new, but not shallow, entities to combine into a new force group, of the energy-stoking of herself as the Nurse, of the brilliant light of beta particles exchanged by the two new entities, swearing neutron coalitions and, finally, forced to expend the vital energy of their cores to bring the warring groups to the realization that co-existence was possible on their energy level.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Whether it's actually a prelude to reproduction is not known, but - as mentioned above - two Corviki can combine to become a new entity. In Honeymoon Helva realizes that two of the actors who Chose To Stay With The Aliens have combined. Niall, eager to have sex with her even as aliens, insists on trying to combine with Helva. A failsafe pulls them back at a crucial moment so that they're only partially combined - enough that Helva can taste through Niall's mouth.
• Bungled Suicide: Kira has numerous scars on the inside of her forearms, but she was given extensive conditioning that makes part of her refuse to actually kill herself, no matter how much the rest of her longs for death. She and Helva discover Lia, a crashed brain embedded in the side of a volcano by a Cult Colony - she had also wanted to die to join her beloved, but hadn't been able to crash hard enough to breach her shell and now couldn't move, so used her Compelling Voice to nudge the cult into a Religion of Evil that practiced Human Sacrifice. After Helva gives Kira some Epiphany Therapy that has her shedding the death-drive, they give Lia a Mercy Kill and alert planetary therapists of the condition of the colony.
• Compelling Voice: In The Ship Who Killed a Cult Colony obeys the Voice of the Temple without question - even if that voice is Helva, imitating it. Dylanists such as Kira and Helva, with no other way to reach her after said Cult Colony takes her away, can use songs styled after the work of Bob Dylan to influence others.
• Cult Colony: Alioth, a miserable colony ringed by active volcanoes and a suicidal crashed brainship, is regularly flooded by hallucinogenic gas that makes the population suggestible. The brainship, Lia, is out of her mind and has been since the death of her brawn, but crashing did not help. Between what she says and the gas, the Aliothans have formed a Religion of Evil which performs Human Sacrifice.
• Death Seeker: Kira, Helva's brawn in "The Ship Who Killed", is this due to the death of her husband... causing Helva enormous panic when they unknowingly wind up on Cult Colony where everyone is one of these.
• Dramatic Choir Number: In The Ship Who Killed Helva finds that the hallucinogen-addled Alioth cultists who've abducted Kira will repeat everything that the rogue brainship Lia says. To reach Kira, she starts to sing a Protest Song that sarcastically longs for death. The cultists chant along dutifully, amplifying the effort. Kira, who was dedicated to such songs before she became a Death Seeker, is shaken out of her trance.
• Epiphany Therapy: After Kira's kidnapped by cultists and seems mesmerized and entirely too willing to become a Human Sacrifice, Helva remembers Dylanizing and sings about longing for death in a cutting, sardonic tone, backed by the cultists in a Dramatic Choir Number. Kira snaps back to herself. Publicly singing sarcastic songs is illegal on many worlds and Mission Control shouts at Helva for breaking that rule. She retorts that she just gave Kira some "rough but effective therapy".
• Failsafe Failure: The Corviki mission involves technology allowing actors, Helva included, to project their minds into "envelopes" on the planet. Helva controls that technology and can toggle herself and the others back at will, and there's also a timer that brings everyone back automatically after six hours. Helva's able to come and go without a problem but The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body issues trouble the others. After a particularly intense performance, she's unable to bring the others back without intervention. And when some of the actors elect to Stay with the Aliens she can't bring them back.
• Famed In-Story: Helva earns that moniker early because of her Beautiful Singing Voice. In the first few years of her career, her brawn gets into fights for her sake when other people ridicule her for it and it becomes a small thing, a curiosity. Her extremely eventful first decade in service, in which she uses quick thinking and those same musical and voice-imitating skills to get herself through some very difficult situations, leads to greater fame as she pays off an Indentured Servitude that takes other brainships decades or centuries. She doesn't appear herself in the other books, but now and then is mentioned with respect.
  • In The Ship Who Returned, Helva encounters the descendants of the women she rescued from Chloe almost a century ago.
• Famous, Famous, Fictional: In The Ship Who Sang, young Helva's education includes a music appreciation course that covers classical works (such as The Marriage of Figaro and Oklahoma!), singers of the atomic age (such as Bob Dylan), and alien musical genres (with specific examples cited from Venus, Capella, Altair, and Reticula).
• Fiery Redhead: While Theoda is trying to relieve a red-haired child's locked-in syndrome she and Helva discuss his personality, with Theoda saying that by his face he must be sweet, and Helva seeing the boy's eyelids twitch in response and suspecting that he's a young hellion. At a crucial moment, when they have to prove that Theoda's therapy is having an effect and the child is regaining control of his body, Theoda's encouragement doesn't get more than slight motion in response. Helva then insultingly says "Come on, momma's sweet little freckled-face boy" and the child jerks an arm and leg visibly and croaks.
• Foreign-Language Tirade: Played with in "The Ship Who Killed". Helva's brawn curses a hapless functionary off the ship by reciting a particularly vituperative string of syllables; when Helva asks what she was saying, she explains that she was reciting her grandmother's recipe for paprikash, which she then proceeds to cook and eat.
• FTL Test Blunder: The Federated Sentient Planets have a well established FTL drive, but they're never able to use its full capacity due to a lack of sufficient fuel. Then they encounter the Corviki, a species with expertise in stabilising unusual isotopes, which opens the possibility of building a fuel source that will really allow ships to cut loose. However, the system needs some refinement; the first test sends a ship so far away from known space before they can disengage the drive, that it will take years for them to fly back. Which is why in Honeymoon Helva is sent to meet the Corviki again and try to get their help in working out the kinks.
• Gaia's Vengeance: In The Ship Who Returned, when Helva tries to warn the inhabitants of Ravel about the approaching Kolnari she's told that the nuns live in harmony with nature and will be protected. Flying about between settlements, Helva notices that new plants have sprouted and are reaching for her. The Kolnari land all at once, and the plants tear their force completely apart.
• Gaslighting: Helva makes a poor choice of brawns before The Ship Who Dissembled. Teron likes to second-guess her and her reliability to an extent that she finds infuriating, and she's pretty sure his goal is to convince her that her judgement is bad enough to make her a menace to Central Worlds Authority and break her into an automaton that only does what he tells her.
• Hates Being Alone: Helva doesn't like being without a brawn and it chafes at her that for three missions after Jennan dies, she's only assigned short-term partners. When she manages to buy her way out of Indentured Servitude she contemplates the dream she'd shared with him, flying to the Horsehead Nebula, but the idea of being alone for as long as that would take doesn't appeal.
• Hero of Another Story: In The Ship Who Dissembled, two ships' brawns were put in padded cells when captured. Helva's brawn decided escape was hopeless and sat stoically. The other brawn made a spirited attempt to break out - lacerating his hands and feet clawing footholds in the padding to reach the ceiling access hatch and going through and as far as the airlock, despite being dizzy from being starved and drugged, when rescue arrived.
• He Will Not Cry, so I Cry for Him: In The Ship Who Mourned, directly after losing her first brawn Helva is compelled to go on a new mission and despite herself is drawn into it and exerts great effort on behalf of her passenger Theoda. After triumphing Theoda takes a moment and cries for Helva's sake, having established that brainships are Unable to Cry. Helva is touched and gratified.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: In Dramatic Mission, a leading lady tries to sabotage the Remote Body equipment attached to the actors she's jealous of to keep them from returning to their bodies. The other actors decide to put her back into her envelope and destroy her equipment, stranding her as a Corviki with them. Ironically, if she'd kept it to catty comments she would have come out ahead - her rivals had chosen to Stay with the Aliens.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: In The Ship Who Killed, Kira is a Death Seeker who's barred from the few worlds in Central Systems territory where she can freely and reliably commit suicide. Her arms are marked with scars but she hasn't been able to kill herself. On Alioth, she and Helva find a brainship that had rammed itself into a volcano, intact but stuck. This is the SL-732, who on hearing what she thinks is her dead brawn's voice babbles "Seber? I'm trapped. I was thrown off course when the edge of the volcano blew. I tried to die. I tried to die, too."
• I Choose to Stay: In Dramatic Mission, inhabiting strong young Corviki envelopes takes some getting used to but is quite compelling. Older actors revel in the sense of youth and power they feel as alien jellyfish. Chadress has recently retired but was bored, and Prane is slowly dying from the Fantastic Drug use. They both elect to stay, as does Kurla who is in love with Prane, allowing their human bodies to slowly wither. All try to convince Helva to stay as well. She is tempted enough that it scares her and flees back to her ship body.
• Kill Me Now, or Forever Stay Your Hand: In "The Partnered Ship", brainship Helva learns that one of the crewpeople at her home spaceport has fallen in love with her. He tells her that he's afraid if she lets him get too close to her, he'll succumb to an urge to crack open her life support unit, killing her, in an attempt to get at the real her (a thing that has happened before in comparable cases). She deliberately eggs him on, confident that she knows him well enough to be sure he won't go through with it. She's right; he doesn't.
• Klingons Love Shakespeare: In "Dramatic Mission", humanity makes contact with methane-breathing Starfish Aliens that are intrigued when they learn of this Earth thing called 'theatre' and offer a valuable technology in return for a theatre troupe visiting their home planet and performing Romeo and Juliet. From the sound of it, this is the case elsewhere as well.
  "The Bard has been translated into every conceivable language, alien and humanoid, and somehow the essence of his plays has been understood by the most exotic, the most barbaric, the most sophisticated. There is no reason to suppose that Will Shakespeare hasn't got something to say to the Corviki if we do the job wholeheartedly... or whatever our Corviki envelopes use for that organ."
• Ladykiller in Love: Niall falls hard for Helva, though he doesn't give up womanizing. She's jealous for a bit before coming to accept that she can't fill that particular need for him but what they have is truly unique.
• Last Note Nightmare: When captured and forced to sing, Helva manages to finagle her way into being given more vocal power than her captors intended and sings "Reticulan croons", then pumps "pure sonic hell" into the final note. This actually kills some of her captors and knocks out the others, as they're on a particular Fantastic Drug that heightens their response to music.
• Legendary in the Sequel: In The Ship Who Sang Helva manages to achieve Buy-Out only ten years after graduation - she earns enough money through her adventures to pay off her Indentured Servitude debt, which many other shellpeople don't manage in decades (or centuries, if they're particularly unlucky). Each of the Ship Who books is largely independent of the others, but whenever Helva's mentioned it's with considerable respect as a forceful personality who can leverage quick thinking and an unusual Beautiful Singing Voice to great effect.
• Living Gasbag: The Corviki in their methane-ammonia atmosphere, though humans in Corviki 'envelopes' feel more as if they're swimming in water than floating in air.
• Lightworlder: Helva wonders if Solar Prane, whose people want her to adjust her gravity to suit him, is this. It's really because his bones have softened from overuse of mindtrap.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In The Ship Who Returned, the hologram of Niall that Helva makes to comfort herself and have a little company after he died is programmed to talk as he would have talked in life. She notes a few times that the hologram is smarter and more insightful than the stimulus-response she would have expected. After his funeral she deletes it and sees his ghost laying his hand on her column and wishing her well before fading out. Of course, in Honeymoon we saw that their personalities partially merged and left her partially able to use his senses; that isn't mentioned in this final story, but it could have been some remaining vestige.
• Mercy Kill: Helva kills Lia, the rogue SL-732, by having Kira speak the release word at her panel and flood her shell with anesthetic. She decides to think of this as mercy.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: The Corviki "envelopes" that the actors in Dramatic Mission inhabit are very inhuman but somehow it's quite easy for everyone, even Helva, to get used to them. Before rehearsal is over, even while in their own bodies they're talking differently about "energy" and describing emotion as color and deferring to superiors in the Corviki way. Indeed, three of the actors elect to remain, letting their human bodies be permanently disconnected and inaccesible.
  "There's something seductive about that freak-out place that gets to you. I'm having a hard time thinking human."
• Mindlink Mates: Helva and Niall end up as this in "Honeymoon" thanks to partially combining while projected into Corviki envelopes.
• The Mourning After: Helva's first brawn dies in the same story where he's introduced, and she struggles with loss most heavily in the next story, The Ship Who Mourned. She takes Niall as another much-loved brawn at the end of The Partnered Ship - according to the later story The Ship Who Returned they had a seventy-eight year partnership, only for him to die two months before the start of this later story. To ease her grief and loneliness while traveling alone back to Rigel Base she makes a talking hologram of him that says the kinds of things he would say.
• Mundane Utility: Child Helva takes a fine arts class where she uses her adjustable camera and a microscopic tool designed to adjust her own machinery to paint a replica of the Last Supper on the head of a pin.
• Naming Your Colony World: In "The Ship Who Sang" (the original short story that became the first section of the novel), the climax takes place in the Ravel star system, with its two colony worlds Daphnis and Chloe.
• Never Gets Fat: Helva comments that she's never seen anyone enjoy food with the same gusto than Kira does, and yet she never seems to gain weight. Kira, who generally either seems wildly happy or easily enraged to cover her depression, shows a bit of bitterness saying she can't gain weight or have her body change in any way, a reference to her infertility.
• No Infantile Amnesia: Helva can easily remember her first birthday. She was "walking" and "talking" in her shell by then.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The colonists Helva and Jennan rescue on Chloe physically can't all fit into Helva's interior. Jennan and three colonists have to suit up and ride in her airlock, where they're less protected from the wave of heat that strikes as Helva tries to flee. Still they probably would have made it with burns and heatstroke, but Jennan tried to calm his panicking companions and was struck by a flailing limb which disconnected something in his suit, and quickly died.
• Numbered Homeworld: In "Dramatic Mission", the homeworld of the methane-breathing Starfish Aliens is Beta Corvi IV.
• One Last Job: In Dramatic Mission, actor Solar Prane's job is literally killing him, as the Fantastic Drug he's been taking for decades to keep dialogue fresh in his memory is softening his bones. Various characters pitch his final appearance on Corviki as this, but he doesn't actually want to stop acting; what they really mean is that he's about to die. Instead, because this particular performance requires having his brain projected into a Remote Body designed for the methane-ammonia atmosphere, he just never returns to being human.
• Patchwork Story: The Ship Who Sang is composed of previously-published short stories - The Ship Who Sang, The Ship Who Mourned, The Ship Who Killed, Dramatic Mission, and The Ship Who Dissembled with a final story, The Partnered Ship, added to round them off.
• Physical Therapy Plot: The Ship Who Mourned has Theoda put a five-year-old boy paralyzed by The Plague through a gruelling physical therapy course to try and prove that her methods have an effect. Meanwhile people are pounding on Helva's hatch, convinced that she and Theoda have kidnapped the child.
• Pregnancy Does Not Work That Way: The storage of sperm and eggs for later use, artificial insemination, and implanting of embryos into a surrogate that are discussed in The Ship Who Killed are all more or less realistic. Where this comes in is Helva's joke that she's giving birth to the thousands of embryos carried in and then out of her hold.
• Saved by the Awesome: Helva is always willing to disregard a regulation and sees incredible success for it. In The Ship Who Mourned she shelters a therapist who's trying to prove she can relieve the symptoms of a paralytic plague despite the authorities demanding she hand the woman over. This leads to the therapist's techniques being widely adopted, saving untold people. Her quick thinking in The Ship Who Killed saves Kira and gives her some Epiphany Therapy, despite the fact that singing sarcastically in public is illegal on many planets. One of her brawn partners disapproves of this well past the point of Honor Before Reason and she ends up shouting him out of her living quarters. During one of these she yells that the ends justify the means to someone trying to stop her.
• Serenade Your Lover: Helva throws a little party to get a look at all her prospective brawns, and knows Jennan is the one when he enjoys singing with her. She first became known as The Ship Who Sings because of comms picking up on her singing for him.
• Space Cadet: The first of The Ship Who... stories was published in 1961. Courier Service is not specifically associated with law and order, but the brains and brawns fly between colonies making vital deliveries, transporting personnel to emergencies, trying to evacuate endangered colonists, and along the way encounter some of the kinds of things Space Cadets have to address, usually while complaining that they are not "spacerangers".
• Starfish Aliens: Dramatic Mission, is about an attempt by the primarily human Central Worlds Federation to trade technology for art with the people of Corviki, a world with a methane-ammonia atmosphere. Corviki resemble hydrozoans, having large sac-like bodies trailing complex tendrils, and live in what humans percieve as similar to an undersea Carribean landscape surrounded by colorful seaweed. The Corviki were quite intrigued by Shakespearean plays and worked out a deal where human actors in orbit would inhabit Corviki "envelopes" prepared for them and stage a production of "Romeo and Juliet", teaching it to native understudies if it proved popular. The Corviki prove to be rather more alien in thought than the actors might have expected. One identifying itself as their "Manager" says this to an actress who's not feeling it.
  "There is no logical reason to withhold energy. Conservation is not the aim of this experiment. We are assessing the effects of this form of energy expulsion on the pressure-senses and dominance factors. You inhibit this experiment. Therefore, lose energy as the equative factors require."
• Sterility Plague: In The Ship Who Killed, a colony in the Nekkar system is hit by an unexpected radiation flare that sterilized the population, and then a freak power outage led to all their banked sperm and ova dying. Helva was dispatched on a "stork run" to pick up about thirty thousand fertilized ova donated by people of similar genotypes and deliver them to the Nekkarese.
• 10-Minute Retirement: Chadress Turo, a recently retired brawn who was a classics buff and knows Shakespeare as a hobby, leaps to get back to work in Dramatic Mission. He also tells Helva, his temporary partner, that he should be allowed to "die in harness". Enamored of feeling young and strong in a Corviki envelope even if that envelope is very inhuman, he doesn't come back from that mission.
• That Man Is Dead: The XS-422 doesn't like to be referred to as Silvia. Having lost too many beloved brawns, she says that "Silvia" is dead and that she should be called 422, though she'll accept that name from Helva.
• Title Drop: Helva quickly becomes Famed In-Story for being "The Ship Who Sang".
• Uterine Replicator: The Ship Who Killed discusses how while "natural" childbearing is more common, it's standard practice in the Central Worlds for young adults to bank their sperm and ova; they're Long-Lived but women still have a limited number of eggs, it's possible to be accidentally sterilized by injury or radiation, and it makes it easier to have Someone to Remember Him By. This also means that when a world is hit by a Sterility Plague and a freak accident destroys their gene banks, as in this story, they can have fertilized ova donated to them. Surrogates who can carry unrelated fetuses are mentioned as a precursor to this technology but not uterine replicators specifically - still, while Kira is not physically capable of bearing a child, she looks forwards to having one at the end of the story.
• Virgin-Shaming: Whenever Niall's annoyed with Helva he calls her a "tin-plated virgin". At one point, after he proposes that she transfer herself into a vacated healthy human body and she declines, he calls her ship a "titanium chastity belt". Naturally, he's in love with her.
• Voice Changeling: In The Ship Who Killed Helva's able to use her astonishing vocal range to to imitate Lia's dead brawn and distract her until Kira can kill her, then mimics Lia's voice to her cultists to order Kira returned to Helva rather than killed. The cultists, addled by long-term exposure to hallucinogenic gases, obey their "Temple" without question.
• We Will Have Euthanasia in the Future: It's discouraged and brains and brawns in the Courier Service are given extensive conditioning meaning that even when they become suicidal, they're unable to fully commit to killing themselves. Indeed, Helva posits that it's not possible. There are a few member-worlds with local laws allowing people to legally seek self-euthanasia, but someone like Kira who's displayed suicidal tendencies can be barred from visiting them. Not that anyone actually helps her, leading Helva to have to give her Epiphany Therapy in a rough moment instead.
• The World Mocks Your Loss: After losing Jennan, Helva is immediately pushed into transporting a passenger to an emergency situation. While inspecting Theoda's hands and wondering that she seems to be familiar with manual labor which is unusual in The Future, Helva suddenly thinks that Jennan had used his hands too and has to look away.

PartnerShip

• Anti-Villain: Fassa in PartnerShip is worse than Blaize, running a construction company that cuts so many corners that sometimes the things they build simply collapse, but she's A Lighter Shade of Black compared to the other three members of the Nyota Five. She has a tragic backstory, doesn't abuse her employees, and defects for the sake of the inspector she falls for.
• Armor-Piercing Question: The "Loosies" on Angalia were the victims of a pretty serious First Contact Faux Pas. Blaize, who was assigned to oversee them, idly taught one sign language and was soon asked a question that he paraphrases as "Why did Paunch Man throw ration bars in mud and treat us like animals, and why do you make stacks and hand them to us one at a time with proper respect?"
  "Can you imagine how it felt to hear a question like that coming from somebody I'd been thinking of as - oh, like a trained spider to while away the hours of my prison sentence?"
• Because You Can Cope: Nancia's father's excuse for not showing up for her graduation or before her first mission, and then for being all but absent for the five years that followed, is this and that he was following her brother around trying, and failing, to get him to quit music and start one of the "legitimate" jobs he kept offering him.
• Benevolent Boss: Fassa of the Nyota 5 inspires fanatical loyalty from her employees, many of whom are on their Last-Second Chance and appreciate the stock options and high financial incentives she offers them. This is a sharp contrast to how the other members treat their workers although Blaize's harshness is a smokescreen as he doesn't want the others to think he's soft.
• Chemically-Induced Insanity:
  • In PartnerShip, Alpha keeps a man who wants to testify about Darnell's business practices on a dose of "Blissto" for months, in a vague happy cloud unable to do much at all, to both get him out of the way and use him as leverage against Darnell - if he moves against her, all she has to do is taper the dose and let the man say his piece. Naturally, when more heroic characters take her in for unethical medical experiments and he's cut off, he immediately testifies against them both.
  • One of Alpha's other drugs, Seductron, makes people stupid and highly suggestible for the duration of the high. Polyon keeps everyone technically above him in rank, like the administrator of the planet he's on, on a constant dose that makes them happily agree to anything.
• Clandestine Chemist: Alpha is a higher-class version than most, able to use official medical resources to create Fantastic Drugs, both 'normal' versions and original variants. It's also suggested that she created the various recreational drugs she brought to pass around on the ship that took her and the other Nyota 5 to the system.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: As far as the Nyota Five go Blaize has the least to work with in generating a profit, but he proudly shows them how he's put the "Loosies" to work serving him. Darnell gets really into the idea of "discipline" being a problem to be solved with beatings, Alpha starts speculating about using the Loosies to test Fantastic Drugs, and Polyon is just bored - so Blaize breaks out his demonstration with a Loosie who dropped a serving platter, having two others drag it to a boiling mud pit, push it in, and use long sticks to keep it from climbing out. This manages to impress the others and appalls Fassa. The twist is that the Loosies actually are people that Blaize has great mutual respect for and is helping, and while the mud is bubbly it's only about sauna-heat. But he had to keep the others from thinking he was soft or exploiting them, hence the demonstration.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: When Nancia runs a video game on her computer system, she's aware of the whole thing, so isn't surprised by the locations of NPCs or whatever other players are doing. Her brother protests that this is cheating, but Nancia can't imagine doing otherwise.
• Computer Virus: The hyperchips Polyon manufactures are even better than the megachips the factory was making before he took over and are quickly adopted by everyone. General Questar-Benn has them in her artificial heart and liver. Nancia gets them in her lower deck sensors, navigation computer, and some of her maneuvering system. There's a virus on them that can do anything Polyon wants them to do after he activates it - spread and corrupt data, transmit itself into untouched systems, scramble sensor input, let him remote control prosthetic function - and with which he wants to conquer known space. Fortunately, he's arrested a few years before his plans are complete, and when he activates the virus he's in Singularity, so the other chips aren't activated and the virus can't spread.
• Cool Old Lady: General Micaya Questar-Benn in PartnerShip is a cyborg, a spy, a general, and has impressive diplomatic chops. Early in the book she's brought to try and prevent a war by negotiating with two sides and manages to deescalate the tension by the time Nancia leaves. Later, she investigates Alpha's clinic by being admitted as a patient, disguised as a homeless woman. Nancia and Sev regard her highly and Sev successfully convinces her to lead the effort to apprehend the other members of the Nyota Five.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Multiple of the Nyota Five but primarily Darnell, who enjoys driving competitors to ruin, sending thugs to beat and kill people who make trouble for him, and installs a hidden camera in the desk of a pretty secretary so he can look up her skirt.
• Death Faked for You: When Sev escapes Polyon's Private Profit Prison and runs to shelter in Nancia's hold, she quickly prints up a good quantity of algae-protein 'flesh' and 'bone', puts it through her incinerator, and shows the ash and charred bones, still smoking, to the guards following at a leisurely pace. She tells them she's authorized to kill any intruders and laughs when they call her cold and hard.
• Did You Think I Can't Feel?: After a bad first impression, Nancia values her first brawn Caleb highly and spends the first five years of her career trying to live up to his high Honor Before Reason standards, carefully not even using slang or making misleading statements. Those five years dull some of the shine for her, though, especially as she finds herself more flexible when it comes to the letter of the law than he is. When he's out recovering from an injury she temporarily takes on a less rigid brawn who's more attentive to Nancia as a person and they manage to win the day together. A healthy Caleb takes Nancia to task for every broken rule and deception and she gets angry - but realizes that it won't do any good to actually yell at him, and she just gets a transfer and is quietly disappointed that he immediately agreed.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Fassa's plans for her illegal Nyota 5 profits are to cook the books, use general shoddy business practices, and charm anyone who might ask questions. This backfires for her when the chief inspector turns out to be sexy himself and won't go away. One of the other 5 has him beaten and thrown into a dumpster but since he doesn't die, he does not stop being a problem for them.
• Doctor's Disgraceful Demotion: Alpha never actually got a doctorate, but had been well on her way until her research on Ganglicide treatment was scrutinized and it came out that she was kidnapping people to expose to Ganglicide. This should have led to serious consequences, but because of her connections it was hushed up and she was simply denied her license and sent to work in a clinic in the distant Nyota system
• Eviler than Thou: On their two-week trip to the Nyota system, the teens who'll become known as the Nyota Five trade notes about what they did to end up Reassigned to Antarctica, which devolves into competing about who's the most dangerous and amoral. Polyon is the unquestionable winner and suggests they stay in touch and compete to make the highest profits in their new assignment. The others bicker, get in each others' way, and don't always cooperate, but all fear him and carefully toe the line where he's concerned.
• Fat Bastard: Darnell starts pudgy and gets markedly fatter in his five years in the Nyota system. He doesn't appreciate Blaize pointing it out.
• First Contact Faux Pas: When the roughly humanoid inhabitants of Angalia were discovered, they were reported as possibly intelligent. Seeing the way the "Loosies" scrambled for sustenance on their marshy homeworld, Planetary Technical Aid started giving them huge amounts of ration bars. In three generations there were more Loosies than their old hunter-gatherer lifestyle could support, completely dependent on the ration bars. A cursory survey was made determining that they had no language - not picking up that they use telepathy with each other - and dismissed them as non-sapient.
• Forced Addiction: Alpha invents a variation on Blissto that turns an Addled Addict into a Functional Addict who goes into painful withdrawal and dies if she doesn't regularly supply them with more - and given that she and her dependent stooges run the charity ward of a medical clinic without meaningful oversight, she can and does readily force her drugs on impoverished patients if she thinks she can use them.
• Freudian Excuse: Fassa is actually highly skilled as a contractor and could run a perfectly competent and profitable business, but she cuts every corner possible and seduces and abandons as many middle-aged men as it takes to get away with it. The corner cutting is because of the influence of the rest of the Nyota Five. The rest is because of her father abusing her since she was eight. When Sev doesn't judge her for the abuse or slut shame her, her defection is sealed. Fassa also sees Polyon's plan as horrific and opposes him and tries to take the needler burst for Forister. Between her Heel–Face Turn and pity for her, when Nancia turns over evidence on the Nyota 5 she deletes a key word or two to make Fassa seem more sympathetic, getting her a reduced sentence of ten years compared to Alpha and Darnell's twenty-five..
• Galactic Conqueror: Polyon's eventual plan.
• Getting High on Their Own Supply: Alpha partakes in a bit of her own product, which she also provides to the other members of the Nyota 5. Because she's quite cautious with it, not using the harder stuff, and none of them have an "addictive personality", none of them suffer ill effects whatsoever.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!:
  • After the rest of the Nyota Five share their plans to abuse their positions in the Nyota system to make a profit, they all turn to Blaize, who's irreverent and can be meanspirited but is not actually a bad person. But he considers them his friends and wants to fit in, and they make a few threatening comments to the effect that if he's not in he might tattle on them, so he quickly starts speculating about how he can abuse the creatures he's assigned to oversee.
  • Four years later the five meet on Blaize's assigned world and he shows off how he's trained the Loosies to work for him, turning down the 'offer' to let Alpha test Fantastic Drugs on them as motivation by staging a spectacle - having two Loosies drag a third to a boiling mud pit and keep it from escaping. This manages to impress or appall the other four. In fact Blaize is lying about how he's 'controlling' the Loosies and the mud, while bubbly, is about sauna heat, as he demonstrates to investigators later.
• Immune to Drugs: General Micaya Questar-Benn is a cyborg with an advanced artificial blood-filtering system replacing her kidneys. When a Alpha doses her with Blissto, the general feels the effect but is able to cycle it out of her system and be clear-headed and mobile long before expected; Alpha then tries to inject her with something lethal, but the injector hits one of the general's Artificial Limbs and, naturally, has no effect.
• In-Series Nickname: The five teens Reassigned to Antarctica in the Nyota system, who form a corrupt cabal, are later referred to as the Nyota 5.
• Kidnapped for Experimentation: In order to test treatments for Ganglicide exposure Alpha needed subjects that had been exposed to Ganglicide. No one would agree to that. Rabbits are smelly and cause people to think she has pets, but Disposable Vagrants are right there. Reassigned to a clinic in the Nyota system, Alpha stops doing this... because she's put in charge of the charity ward and has all the subjects she wanted right there, without the money or connections to cause trouble if some of them just vanish.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: In the climax of the book, Nancia is in Singularity when Polyon's Computer Virus strikes and starts to spread outwards from the hyperchips installed in her sensors and navigation computer. Nancia has to take drastic action to contain the spread, fusing some of her components and deleting quite a lot of her own code, something that she explicitly compares to an animal in a trap gnawing off one of its own limbs. This includes most of her recorded memories - she still had the memories stored in her human brain, but that doesn't have the detail and precision of something she can look up again in her databanks. Nancia gets new components and databanks but can't replace those memories, and gains a physiological response to emotions that shellpeople normally don't have.
• Longevity Treatments: Treatments are mentioned which can get rich people who respond well to them to live to about two hundred. Even ordinary people are on the Long-Lived side and commonly reach an age of a hundred twenty, so these don't have as pronounced of an effect as many other uses of the trope.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Polyon kept his "boss" on a high enough dose of Seductron that the man basically smiled and gave his approval to anything Polyon wanted to do. When Nancia and company arrived to arrest Polyon they had to go through this administrator first... and he rubber-stamped approval just as he'd been drugged to do.
• Out of Focus: Of the Nyota Five, Darnell gets the least focus. He's just a scummy young Corrupt Corporate Executive who likes recreational drugs and expensive food, hot secretaries, ruining competitor's lives, and having people beaten.
• Parent–Child Incest: Fassa was abused by her father until her mother killed herself, at which point her father sent her to a boarding school so she wouldn't give anything away in interviews. The experience leaves her filled with self-loathing, inclined to see her sexuality as a weapon and a way to manipulate men, and also willing to go along with the schemes of the other Royal Brats despite not being particularly malevolent on her own.
• Portal Network: Ships with a Singularity Drive like Nancia's can enter Singularity Points to cross distances much faster than by using "normal" faster-than-light. Hyperspace Is a Scary Place that warps the ships people use and their bodies in upsetting, unpredictable ways - such as making teeth switch between rotting mush and long, stabbing needles - so brainships are a better choice than ordinary humans.
• Private Profit Prison: The factory that Polyon is assigned to uses prison labor to manufacture "hyperchips", which is a hazardous affair already. After he takes over he removes all safety-related regulations and increases production considerably, at the cost of the planet becoming poisoned and the prisoners - many of them innocent - frequently dying in various horrible ways.
• Royal Brat: Nancia's got a bratty side, with a propensity to sulk, yell, make unfavorable snap judgements, and punish people she doesn't like with rough takeoffs and landings, but she's Spoiled Sweet in comparison to the people she transports on her first assignment. Later known as the Nyota Five, they're well-connected teens who've all been Reassigned to Antarctica. Two of them are related to her, and she takes against all of them. Blaize is a smarmy Black Sheep who's susceptible to peer pressure, Fassa openly plans to cut corners and use her sex appeal to get away with it, Darnell is a Self-Made Orphan, Alpha had been testing ways to treat Ganglicide (and applying it to unwilling subjects in order to do so), and Polyon is a vicious sociopath with a master plan who goads them all on.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Alpha was in medical school and specialized in finding new treatments for Ganglicide poisoning - but to get patients to treat, she applied Ganglicide to Disposable Vagrants, claiming that they weren't doing society any good. She was caught and this should have resulted in serious consequences for her, but Alpha was a child of one of the High Families and was instead denied her license and Reassigned to Antarctica to work in the charity ward on a distant world... with no one so much as forewarned about her lack of ethics.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: In PartnerShip, after being peer-pressured into promising to illegally make as much profit out of his new assignment as possible, Blaize is assigned to oversee the bipedal humanoids native to Angalia, which were evaluated as unintelligent. He soon finds that they're people and decides that he has to not just get them reclassified, but make sure whoever evaluates them doesn't just see them scrambling in the mud and dismiss them like the last team did. Not having many resources, he reports that the population has boomed in order to get sent more ration bars which he then sells to fund mining operations, that he then uses to fund small scale terraforming so the Loosies can grow some crops and not be dependent on ration shipments. Then he gets them registered. His punishment is community work with another native species who might turn out to be sapient.
• Secret Test of Character: General Questar-Benn and Forister give Nancia a light one at the end of PartnerShip, wanting to determine if she has the ability to act flexibly and choose to be good over being strictly lawful, without outright abandoning laws. They like that Nancia slightly alters her testimony before Fassa's trial to present her in a better light, thus ensuring her punishment is less severe. While they had the chance to correct this testimony, they don't do so and go on to become Nancia's partners for a new mission.
• Shameful Source of Knowledge:
  • In PartnerShip, the five Royal Brats that Nancia ferried to their remote postings in the Nyota system are all planning to use their positions for various kinds of corrupt practices (they even have a bet going; the one who makes the most shady money in five years gets a cut of the others' operations). However, Nancia can't tell anyone about it because she got the information by refusing to introduce herself and letting them think they were aboard a mindless drone, which is considered tantamount to spying.
  • Soon after boarding Polyon hacked himself a high access level so he could poke around in the others' records. Nancia shut off his access to her computer, but didn't immediately terminate the access level and saw just what Polyon had done to tank his Academy prospects. She immediately feels she's committed a terrible violation of privacy but is also unsettled and disturbed by him.
• Smug Straight Edge: Caleb, Nancia's first brawn, has such a strict and limiting code of honor that even a single off-duty alcoholic beverage would compromise it.
• Taking the Bullet: At the climax of PartnerShip, Fassa completes her Heel–Face Turn by standing up to Polyon and trying to keep Nancia's brawn Forister from being shot. Forister sees this coming and takes Fassa's shoulders, spinning her back out of the way - he'd rather be killed than allow Polyon's virus to be taken back into normal space and spread. Forister makes a full recovery and Fassa's effort gets her a reduced prison sentence.
• The Teetotaler: Alone of the Nyota 5, Fassa doesn't touch recreational drugs.
• Tested on Humans: Alpha has some history testing experimental drugs and treatments on rabbits, but rabbit cages stink and taking care of them is a lot of work, and people will get tiresome if they think she has pets - she's much happier testing on the homeless, or on people in her clinic's charity ward. This got her in trouble in school, but her family connections insulated her from most consequences.
• Token Good Teammate: Blaize isn't a bad person, but he folds easily to peer pressure from the rest of the Nyota Five, which disgusts Nancia. After him, Fassa's morality is questionable but she doesn't have the depravity of the other three and undergoes a Heel–Face Turn that earns her a shorter sentence when they're all caught.
• Toxic, Inc.: After he takes over the megachip factory, Polyon dismisses all safety and environmental concerns and sets up additional facilities, which all emit prodigious quantities of corrosive chemicals. Within five years he's turned cold but life-sustaining Shemali into a lifeless planet so poisoned that even the buildings and the tarmac of the spaceport show damage. Amazingly, Nancia notes that this isn't illegal in the Nyota system.
• Two Girls to a Team: Of the Nyota Five, two are women - sympathetic and troubled Fassa, and the much more intensely amoral Alpha.
• Unified Naming System: The Nyota system was named by a descendant of African-Americans who chose Swahili names for everything - the star itself, Nyota ya Jaha, is Lucky Star; the pleasant and habitable Bahati is Fortune, frigid Shemali is North Wind, and Angalia is Watch Out!
• Unbelievable Source Plot: Nancia is depressed when Daddy Didn't Show up to her graduation, her installment into her ship, or even before her first assignment, which is to transport several Royal Brats to unlikely obscure postings. Said brats immediately leave such a bad impression on her that she doesn't introduce herself and allows them to think she's a drone, so they freely discuss their past crimes, proclivities, and highly illegal plans. She records all of this, but when she mentions it to another shellperson he immediately tells her that it's illegal of her to share anything she's learned unless it's the highest of treason - and because of how well connected these brats are, if she said anything she could be the one convicted of treason. Fresh out of training, Nancia has to decide To Be Lawful or Good and decides, at the time, on Lawful.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Unlike three of the other members of the Nyota Five, Polyon played it careful and concealed all his horrific practices, so there were no rumors of his corruption and malice. He was heralded as being a captain of industry revolutionizing the megachip market and going on to invent the even more advanced "hyperchips". Such coverage also always, invariably, included commentary about his handsomeness.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: It's not described to the reader, but Nancia is subject to this when her brawn, who she's monitoring through a contact button on his chest, throws up into a basin and she sees the results in high detail at close range with the camera on the button.
• We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: Blaize has the Loosies wait on him and the other Nyota Five members when they meet on Angalia, callously telling his fellow humans that the aliens have accepted his new rule that if they don't work they don't eat.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: Nancia, unlike most shellpeople, has contact with her family, but they're all busy and her father likes to remind her that every time he visits her he's taking a lot of time from his busy schedule. None of the family makes it to her graduation to hear her honors read out, or to her being installed in her first ship. Her brother manages to visit before she takes off on her first assignment, and her father sends her a very short, distracted message. She finds this rather crushing and wonders if she's embarrassed the family.

The Ship Who Searched

• An Alien Named "Bob": A minor character in The Ship Who Searched takes the name Fred around humans because while he can speak human languages just fine, humans can't pronounce his name.
• Auto Doc: The Cades have one of these in their habitat. It is not up to diagnosing her tingling toes and suggests she might want to talk to a counselor about how her parents treat her, which causes her to stop using it entirely and become paralyzed.
• The Bartender: There's a scene where Alex pours out his woes to a bartender and receives some good advice — along with a Lampshade Hanging, as it's revealed that a lot of bartenders in this setting have received formal training in psychological and relationship counseling because of how often they're in scenes like this.
• Blind Jump: A tramp prospector had a ship so ramshackle and cobbled together out of so many parts that it often "fell out" of FTL, dumping him into strange places. He was fine with this since it sometimes meant unplanned discoveries and new opportunities. This went poorly for him, but not due to appearing next to a star or anything, it's because he investigated an interesting planetary system and contracted The Plague.
• Chased by Angry Natives: Mentioned as a peril of doing archaeology on planets that have native sapient species. Tia skips right over any justifications local people might have for not wanting outsiders mucking around with their cultural artifacts to complain that they're brainless fundamentalists.
• Cheerful Child: Tia seems to be this - she knows that her parents will withhold yet more attention from her and someone might outright take her away from them if she's not cheerful and precocious, and she vigorously denies being unhappy. Then they leave her alone for several weeks and she becomes paralyzed - and if anything presents as being even more cheerful, but by then it's as a Stepford Smiler since she doesn't want them to feel bad, even when they transfer guardianship to a doctor so they can return to their dream job.
• Child of Two Worlds: Tia, as she was a softperson until the age of seven, has a better understanding of them than most other young shellpeople. That, plus percieving her peers as wannabe emotionless AI, has her feeling a little apart from everyone.
• Custom Uniform: In The Ship Who Searched, Chria Chance wears an identical uniform to everyone else in the Academy — except it's personally tailored and made of genuine animal leather. Tia figures she's allowed to get away with it for the same reason people accept her patently fake name; she's almost certainly a Black Sheep daughter of a High Family who wants to make her own way.
• Decontamination Chamber: In the research station at the start of The Ship Who Searched, decontamination procedures are required whenever someone comes in through the airlock. Readers are treated to some graphic depictions of what can happen when decontamination procedures prove inadequate or aren't followed properly.
• Delusions of Parental Love: Tia regards herself as having had a happy childhood with Good Parents rather than one of horrific neglect barely papered over by access to a library, and thinks of her parents abandoning her when she gets sick as work forcing them to return rather than their choosing their job over her yet again.
• Dream-Crushing Handicap: Tia, stricken with paralysis, puts on a smile for people but knows that she can't do any of the things she's always yearned for and cries over them in private. Her doctor remembers when he was in the same boat, though he's "only" paraplegic. Oddly, he had thought his injury was dream crushing as well until his mentor got him a Super Wheelchair, though you'd think even without that he could still go into medicine.
• Emotionless Girl: According to The Ship Who Searched this is common in young shellpeople (who seem to be mostly women), and their counselors encourage it. Tia, who was a softperson until she was seven and feels and expresses emotions readily, feels rather alienated by her peers. Alex had grown up with a friendly and personable shellperson and complains that before meeting Tia all the young brainships he'd talked to were like AI. Another character tells Tia that shellpeople start becoming more expressive given a decade or so around softpeople.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Tia considers her classmates to be quite robotic, articulate but very detached and reluctant to admit to having emotions or preferences. Dr. Kenny consoles her and says that a decade or two spent among softshells will have them all acting more human.
• Hands-Off Parenting: The most charitable read on the Cades' treatment of their daughter Tia is this. They boasted to friends that they were able to have and raise a child without changing their lifestyle or compromising full time work on their dream job - archaeology on airless worlds with no one else around. Their habitat featured food synthesizers, a limited medical AI, and a large library, so they happily left their daughter in it, alone, all day every day while they worked, ever since she became mobile. She could contact them, but they hated to be interrupted and would punish her by withholding attention such as the rare "Family Days" in which they spent an entire day with her.
• Humongous Mecha: Dr Kenny mentions that a wealthy filmmaker is planning to have enormous constructed Kaiju bodies made that can physically house shells, and wants shellpeople to be installed into them to be dinosaurs and monsters in upcoming movies.
• Iconic Item: Tia's is a blue teddy bear which she names Theodore Edward Bear, which appears on the back cover of The Ship Who Searched. Conveniently, it can take decontamination procedures, so when Tia gets sick and is taken to a space hospital she can still keep, cuddle, and confess her fear and loneliness to it. Tia becomes a shellperson and then a brainship and is much happier. She installs Teddy in a glass cabinet in her main cabin. In a moment of high emotion with her brawn Alex she pops the cabinet open and asks if he'd like to hug Teddy, which he understands is the closest substitute she has for intimacy. When she has a Remote Body made and shipped to her, the first thing she does with it is pop the cabinet again to cuddle the bear.
• Lonely Doll Girl: Tia knows that if she appears childish or "needy" in any way her parents will either withhold still more affection from her or the Department of Child Disservices will take her away from her totally good and happy life. So she presents herself as a Cheerful Child, even after becoming paralyzed, and only confesses her unhappiness or cries when alone with her stuffed bear. As a shellperson she's much happier overall and keeps her bear in a glass-faced cabinet in her cabin, more of an Iconic Item. When she has a Remote Body made, the first thing she does it take Teddy out to cuddle.
• Majority-Share Dictator: A benign version takes place over the course of The Ship Who Searched. Hypatia Cade is seen telling her stockbroker to invest some of her earnings into a cybernetics company that is apparently not very profitable. Later, now owning a majority stake, she introduces herself as their new owner. She didn't want to do anything untoward, she just wanted them to build her a robot body so she could have a physical relationship with Alex.
• My Biological Clock Is Ticking: Tia's parents boast of planning her life out exactingly, including conceiving and bearing her just before Potria's menopause.
• Not a Morning Person: Alex isn't fit to talk to for some hours after waking, even if coffee makes him functional. Tia, who likes to always have someone awake and on watch, only needs three hours of sleep in a day and likes to get those in in the mornings when Alex is grouchy and incoherent.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: When Tia and Alex check a colony and find three quarters of the people have died and the emaciated survivors are stumbling around and seem to have lost their higher brain functions, Alex immediately starts calling them Zombies. Tia protests this, seeing using a pop culture term like that for sick people as disrespectful, but he won't be moved on it, and gradually Tia starts calling them that as well. As they do the hard work of capturing the Zombies to take to the medical quarantine center that can cure them, a little dehumanization helps.
• Only Known by Initials: The Precursors archeologists study are referred to once as the Salomon-Kildaire Entities, but otherwise are constantly called the EsKays.
• Parental Neglect: Tia's parents were loving when present, but put their careers ahead of their daughter at every turn, and boasted that they'd had a child without changing their lifestyle (solo archaeology on airless planets) in the slightest. Whenever they found something interesting they would leave her alone in the habitat for weeks on end, and if she contacted them they suspended "privileges" like spending a whole day with her - a rare treat she'd do anything for. This means that when she gets sick in a way the auto-doc can't diagnose, they don't find out until she's in bad shape - and after taking her to a hospital they transfer guardianship to one of her doctors so they can return to their work.
• Rapid Aging: Moira, the brainship who'd swing by the Cades' dig site now and then, was born with a form of progeria that rapidly aged her body, but mentally she was sound enough to be a shellperson candidate. Her parents held off for a time trying to find a cure, but agreed to have her encapsulated when she was about four.
• Remote Body: At the end of the book Tia finances the creation of a completely human-seeming remote-operated android accessory so she can be her human partner's... partner. Other ships often have drones of some kind which may be able to leave the ship but they don't generally have the ability to control them directly.
• Super Wheelchair: Downplayed, the Moto-Chair that Doctor Kenny uses 'glides' over the floor and can be vocally commanded. The one Tia is put into has incorporated plumbing and attached 'arms' that respond to voice commands, and it takes her about half an hour to work out how to feed herself with and use to cuddle a teddy bear against her cheek. An amazing quality of life enhancer that grants her more independence than she'd had since she fell ill, but she's still limited to sterile cleanrooms and feels she's suffered a Dream-Crushing Handicap.
• Technically-Living Zombie: In The Ship Who Searched, Tia and Alex check up on a two hundred person archaeological dig that had gone silent and find it was stricken by a disease that had left fifty survivors, shambling about filthy and starving and without their higher brain functions. Alex immediately calls them Zombies. Whether or not they'd like to eat him is never tested because they're afraid of him in his space suit, and Tia prevents him from removing it. The two manage to trap all fifty in crates in Tia's hold to take them to a medical center. Happily, decontamination procedures are enough to keep the disease from spreading and it's expected that within a year of treatment the survivors will make a full recovery.
• The Unpronounceable: "Fred" lets humans call him that to make things simpler.
  "Very few humans would be able to reproduce his real name. His vocal organ is a vibrating membrane in the top of his head. He does human speech just fine, but we can't manage his."

The City Who Fought and The Ship Avenged

• Alien Blood: Kolnari are a Human Subspecies who incorporate various heavy metals into their physiology. Their blood is orange.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The back cover of The City Who Fought says that Simeon is bored of running the mining station/city that is his "body"; he never actually says anything about wanting a change, only feels bad and realizes how good boring routine is later. The chief environmentalist on board, Patsy Coburn, feels like her job isn't more than "algae-herding" and admits to Simeon's new brawn Channa Hap that sometimes she wishes for something special, a real disaster. Channa says this stock phrase in response.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The City Who Fought contains far more combat than the other entries and doesn't often use a Gory Discretion Shot, for example portraying multiple cases of Your Head A-Splode. When Joat sets up her Razor Floss trap she's filled with gleeful anticipation that evaporates when she comes to gloat at the carnage - there's so much blood, she sees internal organs sloshing onto the deck, and a maimed survivor is screaming in incomprehending terror of what had just happened.
• Centrifugal Gravity: Simeon's space station in The City Who Fought is the cylindrical spinning type.
• Coitus Uninterruptus: A chastised Simeon has learned his lesson and would really rather not interrupt Channa and Amos again, but he has to for an alarming ship that will dock in forty minutes. Channa declares that there's enough time to finish if they're quick, and both she and Amos are in a better mood about it than they had been for Simeon snooping.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: Downplayed in The City Who Fought. The shellperson Guiynon saved Amos and his followers and is their only hope of survival. In the stress of fleeing with him, Amos feels acutely uncomfortable but chides himself for "archaic fears" and ingratitude, and only shudders a few times when Guiynon talks to him.
• Computer Voice: Simeon's the one male shellperson with his own book, but when making public service announcements he uses a feminine voice.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Simeon and Amos are very jealous over Channa, who they both find very attractive, Simeon in a more abstract sense and for her personality, Amos carnally. Simeon doesn't like that she's immediately drawn to Amos and tries to spy on and interrupt them. Amos doesn't like that Simeon is such a high priority for her and thinks the shellperson is using hims as a kind of sex toy, culminating in storming out when she has a Wrong-Name Outburst. They end up with a somewhat uneasy Threesome Subtext as each of them makes her happy in different ways, which Simeon is more comfortable with than Amos is. Notably, on Bethel men often take multiple wives, but apparently women don't take multiple husbands or Amos would probably be less upset about it.
• Cryonics Failure: There is cryonics technology in the setting, but it's largely obsolete thanks to developments in FTL technology. When Bethel is invaded, Amos and his followers board their ancient Colony Ship and flee. The ship was centuries old and had been reconfigured to serve as an orbital station, and the survivors didn't have the time or resources to properly convert it back, so it was in terrible condition. On top of that they had to vent some of their life support to slow down pursuers, which all together means that to survive to reach any destination the survivors had to take long-expired coldsleep drugs to slow down their oxygen consumption. When rescuers board the ship a few months later they find clouds of flies and countless maggots - half of the people in coldsleep had died. Rachel survives but has a bad reaction to the drugs, making her Improperly Paranoid to the point of refusing the medications that would help even as psychosis makes her steadily more deranged.
• Darker and Edgier: The City Who Fought has a darker tone than the other books. Certainly bad things happen in the others too, but they don't focus on prolonged desperation and the responses to trauma in nearly as much detail as this one. Its sequel is actually lighter.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Joseph is horrified to find that Soamosa has fallen for a Kolnari - for Belazir's son! - only one decade after the Kolnari invaded and destroyed the capital of their homeworld. He says her father will disown her. Amos, her cousin, immediately says that if she's disowned, he'll adopt her. And take Karak as a son in law.
• Death World: Kolnar, the homeworld of the villains of The City Who Fought is a volcanic, radioactive, heavy gravity nightmare world, in orbit around a sun with a spectral category of blinding. It was colonized by a particularly nasty group of prisoners, who evolved into nigh-unkillable superhumans. They have a nuclear war once every generation — and they get their weapons-grade nuclear material by hunting a creature best described as a jet-propelled submarine with fangs. And that's one of the nicer critters on the planet.
• Defiant Captive: In The Ship Avenged, Amos and his niece Soamosa are captured by Kolnari. Soamosa tries to hide her fear with a calm dignity. Belazir's son Karak, attempting to push her about, is completely astonished by her defiance and immediately finds himself on the back foot, unable to tell that she's afraid at all and rapidly coming to admire her.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Channa Hap, from Simeon's perspective. Unhappy about his previous brawn's retirement, he sought out ways to discredit her as his prospective new brawn and in so doing destroyed her reputation and prospects for another assignment; then, when they finally meet, he immediately hit on her. She takes him to task for this and he's forced to admit that he did her wrong, but that doesn't entirely thaw the ice, especially since she's got strict standards and refuses to let him overrule her. Gradually, Channa warms up to Simeon and comes to trust and like him, and he is more considerate towards her.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: The City Who Fought puts a lot more emphasis on male on female, but one of the several scenes shown where station personnel take revenge for being attacked has a station man and the Kolnar woman who liked to torment him.
• Double Standard: Rape, Male on Male: Similarly, one of the Kolnari captains likes men (and boys).
• Dueling Scar: In The City Who Fought, Simeon's onscreen avatar has a dueling scar because he thinks it's cool. Only one other character recognises it.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: Men of Bethel often take multiple wives. So do Kolnari, as they consider spreading their share of the "Divine Seed" of paramount importance, but nobles claim most Kolnari women - one commoner male and his four brothers share two wives. A miner on the SSS-900-C also mentions having two husbands on the station.
• Explosions in Space: Used correctly in The City Who Fought; an exploding starship releases enormous quantities of debris which make the immediate environment of the protagonists' space station very dangerous for a period of time.
• Faux Affably Evil: Belazir, leader of the Kolnari force in The City Who Fought, likes to speak softly, smile, and put on an appearance of being benign when things are going well for him. He reflects that his nurses never managed to break him of the habit of playing with his food.
• Forced to Watch: When the Kolnari invade the SSS-900-C they decide to prove their dominance through batting its command crew around, then beating and raping one while making the others watch - and broadcasting the footage throughout the station on a loop to cow the station's population. Similarly, they broadcast whenever they flog station personnel.
• Heroes Love Dogs: Simeon's companion AI that helps him to run the Space Station is something he's conceptualized in virtual reality as a shaggy red dog, since he's always liked the idea of having one.
• Hotter and Sexier: The City Who Fought centers sex more than any of the other books - Simeon appreciates his new brawn's appearance and immediately hits on her and gets defensive when she doesn't appreciate it. Said new brawn, Channa Hap, is extremely attracted to the leader of the refugees from Bethel and when he's playing court to her she thinks that if this was a holo, "there wouldn't be a dry seat in the house". She also has to enter a very questionable relationship with the Kolnari leader to keep his people from brutalizing station personnel too badly.
• Hysterical Woman: Rachel was level-headed in a crisis while on Bethel, but the long-expired chemicals used to put her into cold sleep made her wake up in a fit of screaming hysterics. She refuses to take medication that would help and becomes increasingly deranged through the course of the story, convinced that Amos is her betrothed, Channa is stealing him from her, and that somehow going to the Kolnari will help this situation. She gets better and is horrified by what she's done, but has permanently lost Amos's good regard.
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: On SSS-900-C, Dr. Chaundra, tasked with creating a virus that will ideally make the Kolnari reluctant to bother the station's citizens, complains to himself that he's a doctor, not a gene-sculptor!
• I'm a Humanitarian: According to Karak, Kolnari will eat each other, but it's not typical and tends to be restricted to particular rituals and survival situations.
• Inside a Computer System: Simeon has a virtual reality program where he controls a humanlike body and his semi-intelligent AI assistant is an Irish setter, who roams with him across a landscape that they can adjust together. When the Kolnari give the station a Computer Virus, it appears in virtual reality as a monstrous alien worm spewing a storm of alien wasps. Simeon has to completely stop following what's happening in the real world to deal with it, since he doesn't want it to actually take control, but if he just destroys it the invaders will know he's there. Simeon allows it to think it's won, letting the worm destroy a castle and an avatar of himself. When the time comes to openly fight back, he appears in the simulation again heavily armed, with his AI dog as a huge fire-breathing cerberus.
• It's All My Fault: Mentioned in passing. Joat gets her friend in trouble and bemoans that the entire situation - Bethel refugees accidentally leading the Kolnari to the station included - is her fault. Channa and Simeon privately tell each other that as bad as the situation is, at least neither of them is twelve years old anymore and subject to this particular depth of feeling.
• Kneel Before Zod: Upon boarding the SSS-900-C the Kolnari force its command staff to lie face-down and address the invaders as "Master and God" on pain of being beaten. For the two weeks of their occupation, usually the crew "just" have to kneel in their presence.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Despite their towering egos, Kolnari are afraid of being discovered by a stronger force such as the fleets of the Central Worlds Federation and have protocols to scatter and go into hiding.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: The Kolnari are sex-obsessed but regard normal humans as "scumvermin" to spread their "Divine Seed" to. Consequently they are not good lovers even when they aren't outright raping the stationers. As part of his general Smug Snake-ery, Belazhir thinks of himself as irresistable to "scumvermin" women. When he and Channa have sex, he's gentler than his people generally are with station personnel and it takes twenty minutes... and since he's so self absorbed and convinced that he's a Sex God, she finds it tiring and annoying.
• Mental Shutdown: The Synthetic Plague Belazhir commissions in The Ship Avenged is intended to leave one fifth of the population unaffected and destroy the minds of everyone else. He makes his old enemy Amos immune and a carrier for the plague just to torment him, and shoves another character into Amos's cell to prove the effects. Within a couple of days the other man has lost his memory of himself, any knowledge of toilet-training, and language. He's still mobile and retains enough faculties to run from Kolnari and to cling to Amos for comfort. It's never stated if victims can be recovered, or if the new one can even start over.
• Minion with an F in Evil: Karak comes to Soamosa's cell planning to intimidate and bully her, but he's been ordered not to hit her and fails completely at establishing dominance. He sees her defiance and unwillingness to show fear as true fearlessness. Her automatic polite response ("That would be kind of you, thank you") when he sneeringly offers to get her something to replace her torn dress has him genuinely going to get her clothing. Karak ends up entirely on the back foot and happy to generally do as Soamosa wants, including inoculating her against the Synthetic Plague and outright Defecting for Love.
• Names To Run Away From Very Fast: The four Kolnari ships that beseige the SSS-900-C are Strangler, Age of Darkness, Dreadful Bride, and Shark.
• No Dead Body Poops: Averted in The City Who Fought, as the edgiest entry in the series and the one with the most deaths. A Kolnar man killed in a duel "voids" as he dies.
• Non-Human Non-Binary: The Sondee in The Ship Avenged do have a gender binary but the difference between them is completely invisible to human eyes, and Sondee consider being asked if they're either to be the same thing as being asked "What is the exact shape, color, and texture of your genitals?". Many Sondee quickly announce a preference in conversation, but otherwise humans refer to them with the pronoun "et", as "It" Is Dehumanizing.
• Open Relationship Failure: There's a definite Threesome Subtext to Channa, Simeon, and Amos in The City Who Fought, with her getting something different from her relationship with each man and both of them being jealous of the other, though Simeon is the first to sigh and accept the situation. Ten years later in The Ship Avenged, Amos is still jealous of Simeon and believes Channa actually wants to leave Simeon and live quietly with him on Bethel, despite other Bethelites hating her and her not having anything to do. We don't see her at all, but we know from the first book that she hates when people don't take her career seriously and get possessive of her.
• Plasma Cannon: Kolnari pirates ignite slugs of fissile material.
• Razor Floss: Monofilament wire used as a weapon in The City Who Fought.
• Recycled IN SPACE!: The Kolnari are racist 90s fears about urban black people, but made into Human Subspecies Space Pirates.
• Reluctant Retiree: Simeon views his previous brawn this way, but his new brawn suggests that he'd actually wanted to retire and just kept letting Simeon, who didn't want the change, overrule him. Simeon, replaying recordings to himself, is dismayed to notice microexpressions that back up her theory.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The City Who Fought is contemporary with fearmongering narratives about black "superpredators". Other than not having any particular association with drugs, the Kolnari have a lot in common with that concept. They're even referred to as soulless vermin to be exterminated rather than reasoned with or rehabilitated.
• Samus Is a Girl: In The City Who Fought, Simeon has been talking to the stowaway child Joat for a while before his brawn pushes him into offering to adopt "him". While explaining that Simeon is in fact a human and not an AI he calls himself "as masculine as you", and is a little surprised that Joat takes to his new, female brawn Channa easily. They're both surprised when Joat tells them she's really a girl, which she finds funny. According to Joat, it's been safer to let people think she's a boy.
• Sand Worm: The Kolnari like to introduce a Computer Virus referred to as a "worm program" into the systems of ships etc that they attack. In Simeon's cyberspace it manifests as a literal worm, two metres thick with rows of rotating concentric teeth — apparently based on a real creature.
• Scary Black Man: The Kolnari aren't specified as being of African descent but rather are basically Space Australians, the descendants of criminals abandoned on a Death World who evolved truly black skin to protect them from the world's harsh sun. They're depicted as completely savage Social Darwinists and descend on the titular city looking to loot it, kill anyone who resists, and have as much sex as possible, consent not required.
• Sharpened to a Single Atom: In The City Who Fought, Joat lays a trap using monomolecular wire. The effects are messy.
• Solid Gold Poop: Sainians produce "mouth rubies" that humans rebrand into "crown rubies". The result of a socially embarrassing gastric disorder that they hate to admit to, they're both amused and disgusted that humans so value what they regard as malodorous solidified drool. The rubies are almost always quite small, as generally Sainians with the disorder discard the stones soon after they form and can't normally be induced to let them grow, but in The Ship Avenged Joat's tasked with moving some enormous ones and is told "Everything has its price." She knows they're real because they do smell, though to humans it's a pleasant musky scent.
• Son of a Whore: Joseph, one of the secondary protagonists from The City Who Fought describes himself as "the son of a pimp and dockside whore."
• Synthetic Plague:
  • Dr. Chaundra introduces a variant of the flu that the station inhabitants try to give to the Kolnari, only to find that the invaders experience far lesser symptoms than the station's people. He then turns to a variant of the same hybrid virus that killed his wife and is killing his son. This has much more effect - as part of their Stupid Evil, when Belazir retreats he deliberately infects every other group of his people that he meets, resulting in catastrophic losses.
  • In The Ship Avenged, Belazir commissions a synthetic plague meant to destroy the memories and personalities of four fifths of the population.
• Temporary Blindness: While rescuing Simeon from the Kolnari who've cut him out of his column Channa, Joat, and Patty are hit with a flashbang grenade and subsequently have to grope around and reconnect his shell to the station by touch. Patty and Joat soon recover, but Channa was the closest to the grenade and it's in question whether her blindness is temporary. Simeon mentions that she may need some kind of cybernetic implant.
• Threesome Subtext: Channa with Simeon and Amos. After a difficult start Channa and Simeon become pseudoromantic friends and devoted to each other as brawn and brain should be, even adopting a child together. Channa is both attracted to and romantically interested in Amos, but he doesn't respect her as readily or need her in the same way. There is mutual respect between Simeon and Amos but they're both quite jealous of the other. Simeon, being older, more readily accepts that Channa gets something different from each of them and just wants her to be happy. Amos is uncomfortable even ten years later in The Ship Avenged and wants Channa to leave Simeon and be devoted to him instead.
• Unusual Euphemism: The Kolnari, abusing the head staff of SSS-900-C and making everyone on board watch, tell environmental specialist Patsy Coburn that they're going to "explore her internal environment" and then grope her - she spits in one's face and is then badly beaten and abused.
• We Will Not Use Photoshop in the Future: When a bigoted representative from the Department of Child Disservices tries to deny Simeon's request to adopt Joat, Simeon and Channa record the whole exchange and plan to send it to the Society for the Protection of Intelligent Minorities. Joat takes the time to edit the representative's responses beforehand to include her saying a few more inflammatory things like that shellpeople make her sick.
• Women Are Wiser: The only female Kolnari captain in The City Who Fought is much more cautious and measured than her colleagues. She doesn't get into conflicts of ego or underestimate the enemy, and in fact is an arbiter in the disputes among the other captains. During the climax of the book she sacrifices herself and a ship to buy time for the Big Bad to escape, which he takes with a grave respect he doesn't show anyone else.
• Would Hurt a Child: The Kolnari certainly would. Footage of their invasion of Bethel shows the corpse of a child flung against a wall with skull-denting force.

The Ship Who Won and The Ship Errant

• Awesome, but Impractical: The Ship Who Won has Carialle briefly consider the Remote Body technology pioneered by Tia and decide that it's this. It would be useful sometimes to interact with the world the way a human does, but the body can't go too far from the ship without losing the signal, it's very heavy, using it takes so much attention that a brainship can't do anything else for the duration, the technology is unbelievably expensive, and as a 'normal' brainship who has no memory of life before the shell she's quite comfortable as a ship anyway.
• Being Evil Sucks: Mirina has no stomach for murder or for getting people under her command killed and so hates being a Space Pirate. Her influence kept the Melange from being as evil as it could have been but Bisman is too touchy and murderous to listen past a point.
• Bullying the Disabled: Carialle feels that Inspector General Dr. Sennet Maxwell-Corey is out for her in particular. Not for being a shellperson, but for having endured serious trauma and slowly recovered with the help of a lot of therapy - she thinks he picks on her looking to disqualify and take her from the job she loves.
• Cope by Creating: After she was rescued, Carialle was nudged into art therapy as part of her general therapeutic regimen, starting with the suggestion that she paint her fears. She started by flooding canvases with utter blackness, only gradually working her way towards more visually complex work. Even after recovering she enjoyed painting and took it up as a general hobby. She's also Keff's Game Master and enjoys designing locations, characters, and challenges for him.
• Cosmic Deadline: The Ship Who Won takes its time establishing Keff, Carialle, and their relationship and circumstances. The rest of the book takes place on the planet Ozran and mostly consists of First Contact Farmers, being captured by mages and dining with them, a wild escape with Plennafrey, and Rescue Sex followed by a resumption of the chase. Discovering the mages' source of power, talking them into reducing their influence, meeting the Precursors, and resolving the whole situation afterwards is altogether rather compressed in comparison.
• Courtly Love: Carialle and her brawn Keff play this up in LARP, with Keff playing a Knight in Shining Armor and Carialle being the Game Master setting up hologram-enhanced adventures and playing all kinds of characters, including Keff's Lady Fair. Even outside of the game, Keff likes to playfully address her as his liege and lady-love. He's protective of her and they're very close but have no sensual desire for one another, with Carialle cheerfully nudging him towards potential lovers who can understand that his tie to her is his top priority.
• Cute Little Fangs: Cridi are Frog Men but they're not exactly frog-shaped - they have small, cute, sharp fangs in their mouths.
• Debating Names: Carialle and Keff get to name the species they discover. Because they both enjoy LARPing from Myths and Legends and Keff thinks the usual convention of Named After Their Planet, or just asking what someone's called, is boring, they tend to use goofy or referential names. The Beasts Blatisant, ROUSes, etc. Other teams regard this tendency with some dismay and think they aren't taking their mission seriously.
• Easily Forgiven: Mage Chaumel in his introduction is presented in a very unflattering light, callously talking about amputating the fingers of furfaces to keep them unable to use items of power. Later in the book he boards Carialle and screws around with her systems, even inducing a flashback of her worst memory and complaining about how loudly she starts to scream. He has a Heel–Face Turn and is instantly forgiven - in that same scene where Chaumel tortures Carialle, Keff recognizes that Chaumel is an honorable man. Once Chaumel turns her senses back on Carialle apparently bears him no ill will.
• Eternal Engine: Ozran is an alien world with an enormous weather-control system inside the planet.
• First Contact Farmer: Carialle and Keff, on Ozran, first observe and make contact with furface farmers.
• First Contact Team: Carialle and Keff work in this division, though they're regarded as absurd and not taking things seriously by their peers. In The Ship Who Won Keff has a habit of boisterously slapping new acquaintances on the back which they don't take offense to, thankfully, but tends to rattle people for whom that's not a friendly, casual gesture. He seems to take this more seriously in The Ship Errant, where he has to learn a new language and make a case for welcoming the Cridi into The Federation.
• The Fog of Ages: Carialle worries that she won't remember Keff in the future. As a shellperson, she does have memory banks giving her perfect recall, but those can be lost, as she's lost most of her memory of her first brawn.
  In three hundred, four hundred years, would she even be able to remember him? Would she want to, lest the memory be as painful as the anticipation of such loss was now?
• Foil: Carialle and Mirina. Carialle is a brainship who lost her brawn in a horrible incident and was given years of careful, loving therapy that saw her returning to service with a new brawn who desperately wants to protect her. Mirina is a brawn who lost her brainship and was given minimal counseling - she felt her own recovery was seen as less important than the loss of Charles - and seen as bad luck, cut loose by service and given little to no support.
• Former Bigot: Mage Chaumel comes around really fast given a little Enlightened Self-Interest.
• Four-Fingered Hands: The 'furfaces' on Ozran have these. Keff, arguing with Carielle that they're not a Human Subspecies but true aliens, doesn't think universally losing a digit, among other changes, would evolve quickly on a Lost Colony. In fact mages sever the forefingers of most furfaces as a matter of enforcing Interface Incompatibility.
• Fresh Clue: During The Ship Errant the heroes get a mayday from a friendly ship and track ion trails trying to find out what happened. Following them to the rocky, airless planetoid where Space Pirates force ships to land in order to strip them for parts, Carialle notices most of the ship she's looking for - it's more obviously new than the others as condensation from its ruptured life support still clings to the hull and the interior lights are on.
• Frog Men: The "globe frogs" that the heroes have been noticing trundling around in pods similar to hamsterballs, watching them curiously for the entire Ozran section of The Ship Who Won, turn out to actually be intelligent aliens and Benevolent Precursors, referred to in the second book as Cridi.
• Gasshole: Carialle and Keff reminisce about the "Beasts Blatisant", a noisome species of sapient aliens they made First Contact with. The Beasts could imitate human speech with their mouths quite well but didn't seem to understand it - eventually, the two made the breakthrough that most of the Beasts' language was based on their constant flatulence, with their voices mainly adding tone and emotion.
• God Guise: The griffin-shaped Thelerie have myths about small bipedal aliens descending from the sky and giving gifts, including the ability to fly to places the Thelerie can't reach on their wings. When humans make First Contact, they resemble those aliens just closely enough that the Thelerie give them instant respect and the humans, being Space Pirates, immediately find a way to leverage this. At the end of the book, the heroes consider the origin of the myths and realize they line up quite closely with the Cridi visiting.
• How Unscientific!: Watching Ozran mages at work, Keff immediately and unquestioningly declares that magic is real! Carialle is more skeptical. There must be a rational explanation.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: A section in The Ship Errant has a young griffinlike alien encounter humans for the first time, after only having heard a description.
  The tallest alien, whose V-shaped torso lacked mammary protuberances, meaning that it was a male, grinned, meaning the corners of its mouth lifted, but the lip did not part in the center. What hair it had was mixed black and white. Its bare face was a narrow wedge, point down. Its mouth showed flat, white teeth like those of a rodent. Sunset noticed with a shock that the human had eyes of two colors arranged concentrically, with the pupil a round dot in the center. How incredibly strange. [...] Humans were not so unattractive after all, even though they lacked proper haunches, tails, and wings.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: In his LARP, Keff uses an epee-shaped prop to fight holographic enemies. At the climax of The Ship Who Won he takes up a three-foot drill bit with which to fend off much more real foes. LARP experience has at least taught him how to stand and move with an item of a similar size and weight and given him appropriate reflexes. That his enemies are if anything even less trained in actual physical combat presumably makes up for the difficulty of hitting opponents who actually have mass - regardless, he doesn't skewer anyone but does successfully keep them from what he needed to defend.
• Last-Minute Hookup: At the end of The Ship Who Won Carialle tells Plennafrey that she can't leave Ozran to stay with Keff. Plenna is devastated. Cue Chaumel calling Plenna a treasure and asking her to marry him. They've barely spoken, but she's delighted and goes away with him immediately.
• LARP: Keff got into "Myths and Legends" or "M&L" in primary school and is paired with Carialle, who also enjoyed the game and was entirely happy to be his Game Master, holographically creating characters and scenes for him to physically inhabit. While Keff is perfectly capable of telling that the game is fiction, he also on some level does see himself as a Knight in Shining Armor - he stood a night-long candlelight vigil to "earn" his knighthood - and applies something of his game persona to his real life.
  • He teaches the game to Cridi in the second book. Not all of them take to it, but some find it tremendous fun.
• Lost Colony: Ozran is one three times over. Small froglike aliens from Cridi established a colony and set up a generator at the core through which they could use their magiclike technology. Then another, unnamed alien race landed and were welcomed and taught how to use the technology - and then stole it from the frog aliens and resettled in mountainous regions that the Cridi couldn't reach on their own, only to slowly decline. At that point humans arrived and were welcomed and taught the technology in turn by the last few generations of the middle aliens. Some documentation and even recordings exist of humans new to the planet, having landed in an early-gen colony ship.
• Lost Food Grievance: While at a dinner with Ozran mages, Keff observes that food appears and vanishes constantly. Partly because poison also appears in food, the other guests are often quite picky eaters and wave a course away untasted. Keff's barely able to get a few mouthfuls as the chair he's in is continually jerked towards another diner asking him a question. Before long, on the run in the tunnels under the mages' mansions, he sees the kitchen where furface servants slave away making this food - and a huge, rotting pile of everything that the mages rejected, a waste that stuns him both because of his own hunger and thanks to having met the impoverished furface farmers that the mages rule over.
• Low Culture, High Tech: The humans on Ozran have a feudal society where powerful "mages" bicker with each other and rule over dehumanized "furfaces" who do all the physical labor. Mages have strange, magic-seeming powers accessed through small devices, such as belt buckles, bearing indentations for each finger. The devices are of course sufficiently advanced technology created by the Precursors, and the mages have no idea how to repair it, make more, or understand that they're overtaking the generator powering their devices by throwing fireballs around and teleporting.
• Lying by Omission: At the end of The Ship Who Won, Plennafrey intends to give up her items of power to leave Ozran with Keff. Carialle takes her aside and gives her a presentation about the dangers of space travel and the ways that Plenna's biology has diverged over the past thousand years, which ends with Plennafrey bursting into tears, having been given the impression that her blood is too thin to allow her to be healthy in space. Keff, who does like Plenna but isn't in love with her, privately asks Carialle about this presentation. Carialle says she's been truthful - there's no guaranteeing anyone's safety in space.
• Magic from Technology: In The Ship Who Won, the "magic" discovered on an alien world is powered by an enormous weather-control system inside the planet, which the mages are abusing to cast "spells".
• Magic or Psychic?: Psychic Powers do exist in this setting but are fairly minor and mainly restricted to aliens - the Loosies can communicate with each other using telepathy, for example. When Carialle and Keff visit Ozran, they find it has "mages" who can do things that seem impossible. Keff immediately declares that magic is real. Carialle is more skeptical and thinks it must be somewhat more advanced psionics plus technology they don't understand. She's right.
• Memory Wipe Exploitation: The mages and magesses of Ozran control the "furfaced" underclasses who farm and labor for them by feeding them heavily drugged meals that have serious deleterious effects on their minds and memories, making it difficult for them to remember thing that happened earlier in the day, let alone make long term plans. Carialle fears that continuing this diet will result in the furfaces becoming a Formerly Sapient Species. One furface who missed a few meals due to illness noticed the change in his thinking and switched to scrounging raw food - and grew stronger and heartier for it as well as being better able to think and remember.
• Mistaken for Aliens: Carialle and Keff's mission is to travel space documenting the life they find, always hoping for the "Holy Grail" that is an advanced, friendly alien race that can be interacted with on a personal level. When they find subsistence farmers, Keff thinks these could be it. Carialle argues that it's improbable that people this much like humans, with the only differences being Four Fingered Hands, furred skin, and animallike faces, would evolve on a world where other large furry animals are all hexapods and these must be the descendants of a Lost Colony. Keff doesn't think any colonies were lost long enough ago for evolution to make them into this. In fact these are humans, an underclass genetically modified by a privileged and more human-looking higher class to resemble animals.
• Noble Savage: Keff, observing the Ozran subsistence farmers and enamored of how human they appear, sees them using long-broken pieces of more advanced technology to hoe, plow, and transport water, and living simple lives of toil. He dubs them the Noble Primitives. As it turns out they're descendents of a human Lost Colony, enslaved by an upper class that drugs them to be unable to remember much and so keeps them docile. One individual who hasn't been eating the drugged food is more ambitious and bitter. When more of his people are taken off the drugs some fear their expanding memories are some kind of trick or delusion and turn murderous.
• No Conservation of Energy: Played with in The Ship Who Won. A brainship finds a world where magic actually works, complete with all the standard no conservation of energy tropes. Then they discover that there's actually a huge generator complex powering all this, which the magicians have completely wrecked by using it for stupid things like fireballs and levitation.
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: After Keff's captured by Mage Chaumel, Chaumel shows off where and how he lives and hosts a dinner with other mages, whose purpose is really to show off Keff as his prize. Between the rampant Tampering with Food and Drink and being yanked around constantly so mages can question him and keep him disoriented, Keff barely gets a bite to eat and when he finally has enough of this treatment and protests it he's bombarded with horrific visions, until Plennafrey rescues him.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Carialle had a major trauma sixteen years ago and considers herself cured. The Inspector General Dr. Sennet Maxwell-Corey believes otherwise. He seems to approach her every time she makes stationfall and has what Carialle sees as an obsessive desire to prove she's unfit for service, demanding lengthy psychological profile sessions, prodding the old trauma that rarely bothers her otherwise, and fixating particularly on her LARP hobby. Avoiding him kicks off the plot of The Ship Who Won, as she and Keff hare off somewhere he's not going.
• Our Gryphons Are Different: Keff immediately compares the Thelerie to bat-winged gryphons with pointed flat faces, noting that they're quite feline from the shoulders back. Thelerie are flighted Heavyworlders that can use fingers on their wings and forepaws to manipulate objects, so they construct furniture that allows them to lounge and use four "hands" at once.
• Operator Incompatibility: On Ozran, there is magic-seeming technology that requires all five fingers to be pressed into appropriately placed recesses. These were not made for human hands, but the 'mages' wear realistic-looking prostheses extending their thumb and pinkie fingers appropriately. They keep lower classes as a downtrodden Servant Race, genetically altered to have animal features, and amputate a finger from each lower-class infant to prevent them from using the technology.
• Pair the Spares: Plennafrey becoming engaged to Chaumel comes immediately after she's gently discouraged from going offworld to follow Keff.
• Power Nullifier: In The Ship Who Won, Carialle eventually figured out how to prevent magic from being worked. This was Magic from Technology, and the spells were made using microwave transmissions. After identifying the individual frequencies used, Carialle could jam them.
• Rescue Sex: Plennafrey rescues Keff from her fellow mages. He's very grateful and realizes she's attractive, and once they're safe and he recognizes that she finds him attractive as well he makes a move that she takes eagerly. Keff wants a Friends with Benefits situation but, since he's just a much kinder person than your average mage Plenna rapidly falls for him and wants a serious, long-term romance.
• Salvage Pirates: The brainship Carialle once suffered a fuel tank explosion as the result of sabotage. As she drifted in space, she detected movement on her outer hull, but was unable to generate a signal to get the attention of whoever it was. Later rescued, repaired and returned to service, Carialle re-encounters the salvagers almost twenty years after the fact. The younger members of the group are profoundly shocked and apologetic; they hadn't realized that the ship they had salvaged parts from was a brainship. Their leader, however, certainly knew - he stole Carialle's ID plate from the wall of the control room. He winds up going to prison for a long, long time. Carialle, however, manages to help the younger crewmembers get away, since they helped her resolve the current crisis.
• Science Fantasy: The Ship Who Won and its wizards seems like a sharp contrast from the (relatively) more hard sci fi The City Who Fought, the novel immediately preceding it.
• Schizo Tech: In The Ship Who Won, most of the colonists are living in a neo-feudal situation while their masters are in control of technology so advanced it looks like magic. The technology they're using was created by aliens and is hugely durable and versatile.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: When Ozran mages dine together in a group they are attended by furfaces who taste everything, because the mages are a quarrelsome, backbiting lot who constantly teleport poisons into each others' food and drink. Conveniently these poisons act instantly. The mages are so used to tasters dropping dead that dinner is not interrupted by it and they don't even raise the issue of who left them the poison, they just teleport in new, unfortunate furfaces.
• Your Worst Memory: Sometimes when she's alone Carialle flashes back to being stranded and alone in space.