XO
Executive Officer, second in command of a ship or other unit.
Dramatis Personae
Here is a handy list of the most significant characters (less spoilers) from Silver Enigma and Silver Search. There is a full crew breakdown by ship or department at iscfleet.com/bonus-material.
Who
Rank
Description
Alonzo Bass
LCDR
XO on Intrepid with Joanne Henderson.
Ann Cooper
LT
HQ Intel Analyst. Ann is the main inventor and driving force for the Sentinels.
Anna Nonna
CDR
Bondarenko’s Captain.
Ben Price
WO4
Worked in Plans at the beginning of the war and is later assigned to Intrepid when Henderson takes command.
Carol Hansen
ENS
Our Heroine. Weapons Officer on Antares.
Connor Davenport
ADM
Fleet Commander
Dan Smith
LCDR
Dan was a classmate of Carol and David, probably their mutual best friend. As Silver Search opens, he is in command of Columbia.
David Powell
LT
Our Hero. As this book opens, he is an Intel officer on Columbia.
Dean Carpenter
CPT
Liberty's Captain when she was destroyed at Inor.
Denise Long
WO1
A new, young warrant officer assigned to Liberty; she barely survived the attack at Inor. She continues with Terri Michael on Antares.
Donna Wright
CDR
Fleet Chief Public Information Officer.
Elias Peña
LCDR
Deputy Chief of FleetIntel under Harris.
Fiona Collins
CPT
Chief of Plans Division. Ben and Joanne were working for Fiona when the war began.
Frances Wilson
HQ Intel Analyst. Older than most of her co-workers, she worked for years at NSA before joining FleetIntel.
Gabrielle Este
Ph.D.
Gabe is an archeologist who goes back to Beta Hydri on Antares.
Gregory Cordero
Ph.D.
Greg's language research in recovering lost languages makes him perfect for the return trip to Beta Hydri.
Jack Ballard
SLT
Intel Officer on Antares.
James George
LCDR
XO with Terri Michael on Antares.
James Kirkland
SLT
Weapons Officer on Intrepid.
Joanne Henderson
CPT
Previously Deputy Chief of Plans Division under Fiona Collins, she now commands Intrepid.
Joe Bowles
MD
Joe is a retired US Army pathologist who goes back to Beta Hydri with Antares.
Kathy Stewart
LT
HQ Intel Analyst.
Kelly Peterson
CW3
HQ Intel Analyst.
Kieran Barker
CPT
Dunkirk's Captain.
Leah Farley
ENS
Communications Officer on Sigma, she was killed in the battle at the end of Silver Enigma.
Len Davis
LCDR
Navigation officer on Liberty. After Inor, he goes on to command Sigma, and is killed in the battle.
Linda Rodriguez
LCDR
XO on Sigma, killed in battle.
Lisa Briggs
LT
Weapons Maintenance Officer on Sigma. She was a friend to David, and was killed in the battle.
Marcia Soto, MD
SLT
Medical Officer on Antares and Carol's roommate.
Mark Rhodes
LDCR
Aide to Operations Chief Patricia Cook, he later commands Chaffee.
Melinda Hughes
LT
Surveillance Section Chief on Columbia.
Meredith Harris
Ron's wife.
Natalie Hayden
SLT
Weapons Maintenance Officer on Intrepid.
Patricia Cook
RADM
Fleet Operations Chief.
Randy Forstmann
Inventor of the Faster-than-Light drive.
Rich Evans
LCDR
Intel Chief on Liberty, he survived the attack on Inoria and is now in FleetIntel.
Roger Cox
ENS
HQ Intel Analyst.
Ron Harris
CPT
Chief of Intelligence. He and Fiona were SFU classmates.
Ryan Lewis
LT
Surveillance Officer on Antares.
Scott Morgan
CW2
HQ Intel Analyst.
Stanimir Yakovlev
VADM
Deputy Fleet Commander.
Susan Scranton
LCDR
An MD Exobiologist, she leads the mission to the Sigma battle site.
Terri Michael
LCDR
Terri was tjej he senior surviving officer from Liberty after the attack on Inor. She now commands Antares.
Acknowledgements
Thanks for reading Silver Search. Please leave a review on the platform where you purchased it. If you have questions, suggestions, or comments, please email me at [email protected]. I'd be glad to hear from you. Silver Victory should be out in the Spring of 2020. After that, who knows?
The origin of the 'fate whispers' quote is unknown. I found several references to it online, including one in a book by Jake Remington. I love the quote and the solemn bravery in the face of danger it radiates.
The character of Joe Bowles is in honor of Joseph Boccia, MD, a former US Army pathologist for whom I worked early in my career. Joe gave me my first break into the clinical lab software business, opening the door to a successful career. I owe him a lot. Beyond the name (boccia is Italian for 'bowl'), Bowles's personality and expertise are much different from his namesake.
Archeologist Gabrielle Este first appeared in a middle school creative writing project by my daughter, Becky. Her appearance, character, and the general outline of her recruitment is derived from that story. So nice to have smart kids you can steal from.
I hatched the idea that the Preeminent species were expatriate evolved dinosaurs soon after I started this story in the late-1990's. I picked Alpha Mensae because it the closest thing I could find to a 'South Star,' analogous to Polaris. But I have to acknowledge the similar concept in paleontologist Dale Russell's Troodon Sapiens, published in 1982. The Preeminent's are somewhat different in design and far more evolved.
Many of Greg Cordero's ideas on recovering the Seeker language are based on Dr. Marc Zender's lectures on Writing and Civilization from The Great Courses. (www.thegreatcourses.com) Additional ideas about the Seeker language are derived from Dr. John McWorter's lectures on the History of Human Language and Language Families on that same site. Any potential errors of fact or interpretation from these two very interesting lecturers are mine.
Cordero's translation process was also inspired/informed by two scholarly papers. The first is Unsupervised Machine Translation Using Monolingual Corpora Only, by Guillaume Lample, Alexis Conneau, Ludovic Denoyer, and Marc’Aurelio Ranzato. This was presented as a conference paper at ICLR 2018. (See https://research.fb.com/publications/unsupervised-machine-translation-using-monolingual-corpora-only/)
The other paper was Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation, by Mikel Artetxe, Gorka Lablaka, Eneko Agurre, and Kyunghyun Cho. This paper was also presented at ICLR 2018. (See https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.11041)
Neither of these papers describe a method quite like Greg Cordero describes, but together they made it seem much less crazy an idea. Again, any misinterpretation
of what these papers report is mine.
The scene where Susan Scranton says there was life at Enceladus but not Europa was written several months before NASA announced in April 2017 that the conditions were such that there might be life there. Not that I can take any credit for my insight. We already knew both had sub-surface oceans, so I flipped a coin and Europa lost.
I have again rummaged around the internet for supporting data to inform the places and situations in the story. I used the following extensively and recommend them to anyone interested in the nearby stars, or how to generate names, or spell stuff correctly.
www.solstation.com
https://theskylive.com
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/orbital-velocity
https://www.namegeneratorfun.com
behindthename.com
www.dictionary.com
I have some individuals to thank as well.
The support of Dina, Erica, Jan, Kurt, Mike, Steve, daughter Becky, and my wife Carey, who read and gave sometimes blunt feedback on the initial version helped make this a better work. I am in their debt.
Becky's friend Colin McCrone helped me with the math to inform the list of stars that would be on a line from Enemy Station to Earth. The calculation of a given point's distance from a line in 3-D is surprisingly complex, but with Colin's help I was eventually able to beat Excel into submission.
My Lorain County Community College professor Kimberly Greenfield-Karshner provided ongoing support during the writing and took on the unenviable task of editing the first proof version.
Finally, of course, my wife Carey supported this project even while there was a still-growing to-do list and I am grateful for her help and especially her tolerance of my long days in the office, playing with my imaginary friends.
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