Character
Sable Tierce
Tierce is the Hard Bargain’s systems specialist: quick, exacting, and hard to read even when she is being honest. She carries a secretive past tied to forbidden AI research and the wreckage left behind when powerful institutions decide your work should not exist. Tierce’s reserve is partly temperament and partly survival strategy. She learned that institutions can reinterpret curiosity as criminality whenever powerful people become frightened. She therefore approaches every system as something that may contain a concealed purpose, every official explanation as a provisional claim, and every offer of protection as a possible trap. Her technical brilliance is inseparable from this suspicion.
Spoilers
Tierce learns that her grandmother Sarah Foley is the Green Minister, one of the Ministry’s resurrected echoes on Arenal.
See also: Hard Bargain , Jules , Matthias Byrne , Steve Gideon