Angelmass (continuing)

I've made enough progress in the book to answer some of my questions from last week. Apparently, the book doesn't kick off with some random narrator coming from the middle of nowhere and saying, "It's the year ---- AD and humanity has to fight against blah blah blah." It actually starts off with Kosta boarding the Kotamdiji, a grand space battleship that is the pride of the Pax space force. he describes the trip as a honor for someone who barely got eight weeks of military training and that his nerves seem to be shot. He meets the captain of the ship, Commander Lleshi and Adjutor Corps representative Telthorst. In my mind, these two officiers play the popular two military figures of the military hero who can think rationally, Lleshi, and the high ranking political figure who cares nothing more than to get the job done, or realpolitiks in other words, Telthorst. Anyway, the two officers remind Kosta about the situation in the Emphryean empire is critical due to the influence of the angels' strange powers to subdue any tpye of lying what-so-ever, and that his role in the mission is to secretly land on Seraph, the empire's home planet, and gather as much data as possible about these strange entities. Apparently, I was wrong about the whole Pax/Emphryean connection: the whole human empire was known as the Pax but then there was a schism between the colonies that discovered the angels and created the Empyrean empire. In addition, I also cleared up that Chrandis is not an offcial companion of Kosta: the government gave her a fake ID card to get her onto a spaceship that was departing for Seraph. In the spaceport, she metions that she feels like that she's being followed by a man called Trillings and that she can't detect him because he's that good, so I'm assuming that it's the one who taught her how to be a thief. Timothy Zahn has been added to my list of favorite authors, along with Greg Bear, thanks to his amazing indirect method of explaining the plot, which most sci-fi artists tend to fail at. Now I'm even more curious as to how Kosta will proceed with this mission and if he'll manage to meet up with Chrandis.