Brenjit Nessel

Brenjit Nessel is a colonist aboard the ark ship Gilgamesh who joins the mutiny led by Scoles rather than go to the moon base. She helps hold Holsten Mason and Isa Lain hostage, and she is one of the seven people who survive the crash of the stolen shuttle on the green planet.

Background

Nessel studied the classics as a student and did not follow it up. She read Holsten’s papers before the end of Earth, and she tells him that if she had kept at it, they might be in each other’s places. Scoles rates her learning highly. He tells Vrie Guyen that she is the next best thing to the commander’s own classicist and knows the ancient languages better than anyone else aboard.

The colonists had been shown the moon base before they were due to go down. She throws it back at Holsten during the mutiny: the commander made the mistake of showing them their new home, and never imagined anyone would defy him.

The mutiny

She is one of the four strangers who pull Holsten out of his suspension chamber, a woman who looks young and is heavily built. He hears her start to say “We need you” before Scoles tells her to shut up, and Scoles names her to Guyen with a hand on her shoulder.

Left to guard the prisoners, she is sullen at first and then talks. She gives Holsten her full name and admits that she was only a student. Her anger is aimed at Lain, who she believes arranged the shipping of the colonists down to the moon, and she says that shooting her would be justice. Her longest speech calls the colony an icebox built so that Guyen can claim the system for Earth, a place where generations would live inside boxes, tend the vats and never see the sun except as another star while the chosen sleep through the trip to the next world. She had been awake for too long, and it comes out as a shout. Holsten, she says, will go free if the mutiny wins.

The escape and the shuttle

In the run to the shuttle bay she wears an oxygen mask like the rest. She kneels beside a mutineer who has fallen, fixes his mask and gets him back on his feet, and she stays behind at a heavy door, working its controls, then catches up at a surprising turn of speed.

On the shuttle she sits behind Scoles at the consoles, reporting on the systems as they come up and watching for any weapon the Gilgamesh can turn on them. Her readings back up Lain’s word that the ship’s array only faces forwards.

She wakes Holsten for his turn at the comms panel, and speaks to him with the curious respect she seems to hold for him. When he considers asking Kern to stop the shuttle, she puts something cold against his ear and tells him that he and the engineer would not live to be rescued. He may be the expert, she says, but she is catching most of it herself. She reports the pursuers’ drone as it closes, and she objects that Kern’s words were not the threat everyone took them for. When the satellite goes quiet she asks whether they shut it down, and then points out that everyone from the Gilgamesh can come to the planet now.

On the planet

After the crash she asks Tevik about biohazard, connects the medical scanner to Bales’s suit, and says that the forest looks better than the inside of the Gil. Against his warning she hauls the airlock door open for Bales, and later she releases the catch on Bales’s helmet, when the woman is already dying.

The ant’s flame sends her falling back over Holsten and Tevik, beating at her arm. Outside, she is the first to see the spider at the treeline and asks why it is watching them, then what the sound in the sky is. With Karst’s shuttle overhead she puts a hand on Scoles’s arm and tells him it is over. When Karst’s men open fire on the mutineers, she reaches the trees and disappears into the dark.

Character

She is sullen and ragged with fatigue when Holsten speaks with her. She becomes angry when he questions the mutiny and blames Lain for the colonists’ planned fate. She treats Holsten with respect as a scholar, and puts a hand on Scoles’s arm when he loses hope after Karst’s arrival.

Unanswered questions

• Whether she survives the forest, and what she finds in it.

Trivia

Much later, Holsten remembers Scoles and Nessel and their talk of being sacrificed to an icy grave, and decides that they were right.