ItisWritten wrote:You forget how damaged Nick was, and the truth about revenge. If Nick had won over Sorus, he would have continued to aim himself at anyone who opposed him (and you must realize Morn and Angus would have), including UMCP and Dios.
Because he was damaged, every slight and insult caused a predictable reaction. This made him an easy pawn for Fasner (see Chaos) and, if he had lived that long, the Amnion.
Nick would no more have fought against the Amnion menace than the Angus of TRS.
As for forgetting how damaged Nick was, I thought we had already dealt with that and moved on. And anyway, damaged people can still win either through skill or luck. Somebody stated that Nick went off the deep end the time he was cut by Sorus. However, he did go on from there to begin a very successful pirate career.
Nick was predictable, as you say, but devious. I certainly could not have predicted what his plan would be in this or that scenario. Here's the truth about Nick's downfall: deviousness only works where there are various options, and Nick was running out of both time and options. It was on Billingsgate where Nick found that more and more doors were being closed to him. He became crazy like a trapped animal, and focused on Sorus as the source of all his problems. But he was seeking that kind of revenge for a long, long time before events in the novels even occurred.
Nick's old mission for the UMCP was irrelevant anyway, although he didn't know this at the time. But the plot to reduce the Bill's credibility by giving him an antimutagen which would turn out to be a fake, is really weak in comparison to simply destroying the Billingsgate planetoid and the Bill. So it's just as well that Nick's priorities had changed.
But I see nothing self-destructive about revenge itself, only the obsession with it. If Nick was completely overwhelmed with the desire to destroy Soar and Sorus Chatelaine then perhaps he would gladly die in the endeavor to do so. However, I think you stated that Nick still wanted to live. So this leads me to believe that Nick had a way out of the dilemma on the surface of Billingsgate if only Liete would have followed his orders. But we will never know what this ingenious plan was, it is not very predictable, none of Nick's plans really are, thus my original question.