I’m mad about Translator Dlique and it’s spoilerific, so it goes under the cut.
I’m mad at Captain Hetnys for giving Sword of Atagaris the orders that he gave, but that’s ok - I’m supposed to be mad at Captain Hetnys. That’s the natural state of things.
I’m annoyed with Sword of Atagaris, but given the information and orders it had, it did exactly what made sense for it to do.
I’m not actually mad that Translator Dlique was shot and “killed.” From a story telling perspective, it was a good death. It made sense in context and moved the plot along and led to various interesting results.
I’m mad that Translator Dlique stayed dead. On my first time through the books I was completely convinced that Translator Dlique would be back. Why? Consider the things that Dlique said herself in the small amount of conversation we had with her:
I’d much rather have stayed on my ship, but they said there was a hull breach and if I stayed I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like much, does it? Breathing?” She took a deep breath, gestured irritated indecision. “Air! It’s just stupid, really. I’d as soon do without, but they insisted.”
“Don’t dismember your sister, Dlique, it isn’t nice. Internal organs belong inside your body, Dlique.” She scowled a moment, as though that last one particularly rankled.
From this I got the distinct impression that the human body Dlique is inhabiting is mostly there for the purposes of making the humans more comfortable - she is in a diplomatic role after all. I came away from the conversation pretty sure that she didn’t actually need to breathe. The comment about the internal organs would only happen if there was some point when she had taken them out of her body. To my reading, the body is there as a puppet for her. A large part of her training was how to at least somewhat pass as a human by learning how to manipulate it. This perception is furthered when we meet Translator Zeiat and learn of her eating habits.
There are lots of ways things could have gone.
I half expected them to get back to Athoek Station at the end of the mourning period, for Breq to head back to her rooms in the undergarden only to be confronted with Dlique going “Fleet Captain! Where have you been? It’s been sooo boring with you gone!” and following up with some variation on, “It was just a flesh wound! Did you really believe I was dead?” (of course, no one on the station had realized that she wasn’t still in the suspension pod)
Or maybe when Translator Zeiat arrives and is presented with the suspension pod they’ve kept Dlique in, she chastises them for putting her in the suspension pod. With her body in the suspension pod everything is suspended including some sort of Presgar self healing capability (in keeping with what happens with Zeiat when it’s her turn to be shot). They transfer her to medical and we get to have very confused medics watching as an apparently dead body slowly heals and “comes back to life”.
Or Translator Zeiat takes the suspension pod back into her ship and leaves it there and then a few days later Dlique shows up because they had some sort of regeneration pod for the bodies they grow. This would fit well with the information we get that the Presgar have been making and selling high-quality medical correctives. Dlique went into the suspension pod pretty quickly after being declared dead - it wouldn’t be too shocking for sufficiently advanced medical stuff to have still been able to do something.
I even would have been content with discovering that the Presgar Translators use similar technology to Anaander Mianaai or Ancillaries - that, sure, this body was dead, but the body wasn’t really Translator Dlique, or that it was, but in the same sense that a single ancillary body is her ship. Then all of the stuff about her taking out her internal organs turns into the creepy but believable scenario that she has... accidentally... destroyed some of her own bodies in the past while learning how to use them.
Anyway, I’m mad that we didn’t get more of Translator Dlique and that we never got to experience the absolute chaos that would have come from having Dlique and Zeiat in the same place. The fact that she died permanently so soon after we met her seems far too boring to be in character XD
