Literature / Pale Grey Dot

"I promise I will always do what's best for you," She sent. "You know you were always My favourite."

— Her

Pale Grey Dot is a fusion of Space Opera and Cyberpunk set five hundred years in the future in a fully inhabited solar system.

Fifty years before the book begins, three super spies were involved in a cataclysmic disaster during an insurrection on Mars. Exiled from ESS (the Earth Security Service), they found themselves spread across every social strata.

• Jenna lived in dirty alleys, scrounging for food and supplies as she waged a one woman war against her former agency.
• Ezza landed a job commanding a warship with the United Fleet. James Bond to Captain Kirk is, at worst, a lateral move.
• Cherny wound up in a dead-end job pumping gas for a living.

But when ESS recalls them back to service, each operative must choose what to do. That choice becomes harder when the first assignment is to track their old friends down.

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Pale Grey Dot contains examples of:

• Abandon Ship: Ezza orders this for Starknight in the final battle against Pravedni.
• Absent Aliens: Although Earth has explored the solar system and has two extra-system colonies, there's no hint of alien life.
• Action Girl: No shortage of them, from Ezza and Jenna, to supporting cast like Bev Stroud and Amanda.
• The Ace: Everyone, both heroic and villainous, describe Sienar this way.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Due to their love-hate-fear relationship, most characters sympathize with Her death. Except for Jenna, of course.
• Arc Words: Ezza has "Remember the mask" for when trying to resist the Pull. It serves as a double meaning: Keep a brave face in front of her crew, and the literal mask of the guard that Brylan Ncube murdered.
• Asteroid Miners: Mentioned a few times in passing, but not focused on.
• Audit Threat: Ezza does this to Dilton Rowe.
  Ezza: Do you know what happens to someone labelled a Suspicious Person, Mr. Rowe?
  Dilton Rowe: I-I... but you're—
  Ezza: Your life is scoured. Every place you’ve visited, every cab you’ve taken, everything you’ve purchased, everything you’ve sold, and every person you know goes under the microscope. And that’s just the beginning. Your cybernetics package. A SineWave 85X, if I’m not mistaken. Every visual and audial scrap of information it’s ever held is sitting on an ESS server right now. How hard do you think it would be for me to pull that up? What do you think I’d find?
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Cherny' wanted nothing more than return to his days as a super spy. When he finally gets the call, he's ordered to hunt down his former teammates.
• Bad Job, Worse Uniform: Supreme badass Jenna is subjected to this when serving aboard the cruise liner Étoile. It makes her reminisce about her time in the slums.
  Part of her missed the alleys, Netcafes, VR sims, and wastelands on Earth. There, she didn’t have to rely on anyone but herself, she didn’t have to put up with nagging shrews, and she definitely didn’t have to wear stupid paper hats.
• Body Horror: The overwatches, machine-human hybrids who serve as Mission Control for the Earth Security Service, certainly qualify. Strangely, they seem perfectly content with their lives.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: A Syndicate member accuses Cherny of arresting her parents years ago. The accusation seems levied at ESS as a whole, but Cherny still questions if he was involved.
  "Pretty sure I’d remember doing that," Cherny retorted. "Though admittedly, after a while, all the raids start to blur together."
• The Captain: Ezza commands the space cruiser Starknight. Several characters question whether she excelled more as a captain or an operative.
• Colonized Solar System: We see Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and the moon of Ganymede, but we hear of many other inhabited settlements.
• Command Roster: We see much of UFS Starknight's crew:
  • The Captain: Ezza Jayens
  • Number Two: Rachelle Eday
  • Ensign Newbie: Xiang Adams
  • The Marine: Ajay Gole
  • Ms. Fixit: Carmen
• Cool Starship: Ezza is in command of Starknight, a fast and sleek cruiser.
• Crapsack World: Earth has fallen under such heavy pollution that the inhabitants need breather masks to survive. It is the titular pale grey dot—a riff on the Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan.
• Crazy Homeless People: What people think of Jenna, though it turns out she's Properly Paranoid.
• Cyberpunk: Humans grafted with machinery, augmented limbs, brain implants, and more.
• Cyberpunk with a Chance of Rain: We have Cyberpunk, and we have rain, all in the first chapter.
• The Dreaded Dreadnought: UNF Pravedni, the most powerful battleship in the fleet. Athabaskan also qualifies, but doesn't see action thanks to being blown up along with an entire fleet at Jupiter Station.
• Data Drive MacGuffin: Near the end of the book, Bev Stroud's memory data drive becomes key to proving ESS's culpability, and so Cherny races to Earth to deliver it to the authorities. But unbeknownst to both him and the reader, it's been given to Nirali to deliver.
• Determinator: Nothing will stop Jenna from getting her revenge against ESS, regardless of who's truly to blame.
• Diplomatic Back Channel: Clandestine communiques between the Premier of Earth and her subordinates are included within the text.
• Driven to Villainy: Very much debated, but She claims to have good reasons for her actions, and blames the Athena Six for her crimes. A few of the heroes even agree with Her.
• Earth Is the Center of the Universe: In the disastrous backstory, we're told of the Martian Insurrection. It failed, and so Earth remains the centre.
• Easily Forgiven: Ezza believes this to be the case after the Athena Protocols make her strike Nirali. Nirali tells Ezza it wasn't her fault, but Ezza feels otherwise.
• Establishing Character Moment: Done for all three point of view characters:
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Numerous times in the book, She claims to love her agents. Characters believe this to varying degrees.
  • Jenna wakes up in the grimy back alleys of a slum, ambushes an ESS operative, and refuses to save his life.
  • Cherny gets pushed around and belittled by his Mean Boss before getting a chance to return to his old glory.
  • Ezza's crew expertly captures a Syndicate vessel, she subdues its captain, and then tries and fails to avoid being dragged into ESS drama.
• Foreshadowing: Upon arriving at the United Fleet HQ on Jupiter Station, Ezza watches as supply shipments are loaded into every warship in the armada except hers. This is how ESS destroyed the fleet. Starknight, having been excluded, survives.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: The Athena Six broke apart fifty years ago and sent into disgraced exile. Pale Grey Dot picks up when they first start getting back together.
• Flawed Prototype: The Athena Six themselves are flawed prototypes of the loyalty chips. Later on, Amanda is revealed to be the next iteration.
• Future Food Is Artificial: How does meat paste sound?
• Given Name Reveal: Right near the end, Her first name is revealed: It's Karla.
• Glory Days: Cherny was apparently one of the smartest operatives in the Earth Security Service. Though we see flashes of it, it's clear his glory days are long gone.
• Government Agency of Fiction: ESS, aka the Earth Security Service.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: True to the title, most factions are grey. ESS engages in a conspiracy to wipe out the United Fleet, the Syndicate are anarchist seeking pirates, and the government as a whole is morally bankrupt. Even the United Fleet is accused of being bloated and overly-bureaucratic.
• Guilt-Tripping: Jenna does this to Cherny after he betrays her. He does it to himself also, though.
• High-Speed Missile Dodge: Averted. With the sort of maneuverability that no manned craft could hope to achieve, there is no dodging a missile. Either you hit it with a defensive mine or shoot it with lasers. Or you die.
• Honey Pot: Although we don't see it in action, the operative Victoria is apparently trained in seduction.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Cherny laments all the power and luxury he and his teammates once had. ESS as a whole seems to have fallen far from their Glory Days.
• Hunting the Rogue: Jenna spends fifty years on the run from ESS, ambushing their agents and stealing their tech. Finally, ESS brings Cherny, her former teammate, out of retirement to hunt her down.
• Impeded Communication: The speed of light causes delays during cross-world communications.
• Incapable of Disobeying: The loyal chips installed in the operatives force them to "do what She would want". They're forced to interpret that vague directive as accurately as they can.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Played with. Admiral Tolj comes across as an older mentor figure to Ezza, but in reality they're both hundreds of years old.
• Internal Reveal: A big one when Jenna discovers that her brother, Cherny, betrayed her. The reader already knew this, having seen it happen.
• In the Back: Jenna defeats Amanda this way in the final battle, literally stabbing her in the back.
• Jurisdiction Friction: All the damn time between the United Fleet and ESS. Ezza's first chapter leans heavily on this, and she spends most of the book with torn loyalties because of it.
• The Load: Numerous characters question why Ezza keeps dragging Nirali everywhere. It's because she serves as Ezza's Morality Pet.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The main strategy of ship battles, with the twist that thanks to physics, just one missile slipping through their defences is enough to utterly destroy it.
• Mission Control: The human-machine hybrid overwatches serve as this for their operatives.
• Morality Pet: Nirali serves as this for Ezza, reminding her of just how awful ESS can be.
• More than Mind Control: Even when Cherny is freed from the Athena Protocols, he still considers staying loyal to Her. Fortunately, his guilt over betraying Jenna helps him resist.
• No Name Given: ESS's mysterious leader, referenced only by a first-letter-capital Her or She, apparently doesn't get a name. Until the very end.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Dilton Rowe, Primary Adjunct to the Director of the Ganymede Travel Bureau, tries to pull this on Ezza and Nirali when they try to procure a train to take them to Uruk Sulcus-132. It works until Ezza gets fed up and threatens to ruin the man—a sign the Pull is affecting her.
  “The Regional Ganymede Board of Transportation declared those train lines off-limits to everyone. Even if I granted your request—and believe me, I am not—the lines out that way are in complete disrepair from the accident. Not to mention, transferring a train from another line would entail a service disruption we simply can’t afford. This isn’t Earth, Captain. In some places, these tunnels bore through ice half a kilometre beneath the surface. You don’t just”—Rowe swept his hand dismissively—“swap trains willy-nilly."
• One-Hit KO: Because missiles fly at such a fast velocity, it just takes one to slip through a spaceship's mine cloud and laser defences to destroy it. That said, Starknight survives a fragmented hit, but the crew is forced to abandon ship because of it.
• Powered Armor: Occasionally worn by soldiers that expect heavy resistance.
• Properly Paranoid: As mentioned above, Jenna has every right to think everyone is after her.
• Rank Up: For her heroics in bringing Her down, Ezza is promoted to Admiral and put in charge of ESS.
• The Reveal: Many revelations throughout the book, after stringing the reader along:
  • The Martian Insurrection is revealed to be the mission where two members of the Athena Six went insane thanks to their loyalty chips and decided to kill as many civilians in Olympus Mons as they could, since that would technically stop the insurrection.
  • ESS's leader, known only as She/Her, is revealed to be a decaying husk of a woman hooked up to computers and life support, controlling ESS with her mind.
  • Jupiter Station was destroyed by ESS, framing the Syndicate in order to destroy two enemies at once.
  • The Ganymede Blitz is revealed to be the mission in which Sienar betrayed ESS and joined the Syndicate.
• Revenge Before Reason: Jenna's MO. All other considerations are secondary to her intense desire to kill Her.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Albeit after waiting fifty years, Jenna finally gets to go on one against Her.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Averted. Travel time takes weeks or months, depending on how fast a ship can accelerate and how much fuel it's willing to spend. Space travel is not something taken lightly.
• Serious Business: Dalton Rowe takes his trains very seriously
• Space Mines: Slightly unusual for the trope, spaceships use defensive mine clouds to protect them from incoming missiles, so the area they must protect is significantly smaller than blocking a planet. The mines are also capable of moving to intercept their targets, but are subject to the laws of motion—meaning if their parent ship slows down or speeds up, any deployed mines may be unable to compensate.
• Space Opera: Mixed with Cyberpunk.
• Space Pirates: The Syndicate has shades of this. They have spaceships, but we never see exactly what sort of crime they carry out. It may be they're simply dedicated to bringing down the government.
• Space Station: Jupiter Station, "The last bastion of civilization," some called it. "The farthest reach of Earth," said others.
• Supervillain Lair: The Tower serves as this for Her. She even resides deep in the basement in a capsule reminiscent of a vampire's coffin.
• Sympathy for the Devil: A common theme throughout the book. Cherny heavily empathizes with Her, and even Ezza shows shades of this when affected by the Pull. Jenna, being The Determinator, never once has a positive thought for Her.
• Taken Off the Case: Offered to Cherny by Her, when it seems the former might stress out over having to hunt down Jenna. Cherny recognizes it for what it is: a threat.
• Terraform: Mars has been terraformed. Its environment actually seems nicer than Earth's.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: Captain Hecktor Ramirez threatens to do this to Jenna.
• The Tower: The, uh, Tower is an example of a tower. It's ESS's headquarters. And She lives in the deepest basement.
• Tragic Villain: The mysterious leader of the Earth Security Service. Thanks to our protagonists' mission fifty years ago ending in disaster, resulting in the death of thousands, She was forced to take drastic action to protect Her people. Or so She claims. Numerous characters recharacterizes Her actions as saving Her own skin.
• Travelling at the Speed of Plot: Mostly averted. Travel time matches what's stated for the three stages of spaceship travel: acceleration, coasting, and deceleration. It even takes into account where the planets would be in their orbit in early 2510. That said, there's enough wiggle room with how fast ships can accelerate, along with fuel usage, that ensures ships arrive when they need to.
• True Companions: The Athena Six, naturally. They met as children, trained together until adulthood, and consider each other siblings.
• Uncoffee: Of the café variety.
• Used Future: Ships, planets, and stations are all described in a way that suggests that the prime of humanity is far in the past.
• We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: Thanks to a ban on certain types of technology, humans (usually cybernetically augmented) still do most of the grunt work.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Marcus, the operative ambushed and killed by Jenna in the opening scene, may seem to be an irrelevant character, but winds up getting far more characterization after his death. Similarly, a nameless guard is slain by Brylan. Cue half a book later, and said nameless guard gets a name and proves to be a motivating factor for Ezza resisting the Pull and fighting against Her.

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