B is for Brandt

...who also happens to be Shayla's brother, so this post could have been entitled "B is for Brother". Any prizes for hitting the letter twice?

Brandt Carver is the technical brains, the backroom boffin, behind the revenge mission. (Look! More "B"s)

Brandt was just as affected by the loss of his home as Shayla was, and they kept each other sane in the following years until they finally made their insane pact to take on the empire.

While Shayla went the Rambo route, Brandt hid himself away on the university Freeworld, Chevinta. By day, a distinguished, if somewhat reclusive, professor of topological number theory, by night Brandt became a hacker extraordinaire.

Few networks were safe from his covert prying. He gleaned and squirreled away vast hoards of illicit intelligence to help Shayla. He also equipped her with an electronic arsenal of hacking tools which she used many times during the course of the story.

In Ghosts of Innocence, Brandt remains very much in the background. Shayla speaks to him a couple of times, thinks about him a lot, but he doesn't make an appearance in person until the last scene in the book.

It is not a happy ending for Brandt, as you can read here.


Note: For the A to Z, I'm posting topics about all sorts of aspects of Shayla's world. Shayla Carver is the main character in my (unpublished) sci-fi novel Ghosts of Innocence.