A Pale Light In The Black (by KB Wagers) Reread - Chapters 2 and 3

Welcome back to my reread of K.B. Wagers' "A Pale Light in the Black!"  You can find the other posts in this reread here.  Again, since we're just getting started, let me once again make the case that if you haven't already, you should pick up this book for reading now that we're in the middle of a pandemic keeping everyone home.  It features an optimistic world, recovered from a dim global catastrophe, as well as a group of people come together as family (with people of all genders and sexual orientations totally welcome), and - as might be important for many of you who follow me - features at its heart what's really a sporting competition.  It's a hell of a lot of fun, so I think many of you would enjoy following along with me for the ride.

Anyhow, when we last left off, the NeoG Interceptor team of Zuma's Ghost had just barely lost the last edition of the Boarding Games to the navy team, and heartbroken they left the area to go back to their normal jobs of protecting the space around Earth and beyond.  This time around, we fast forward a few months to see them doing just that!


Chapter 2: T-Minus Four Months Until Prelim Boarding Games

Quick Summary:  The crew of Zuma's Ghost finds a suspicious ship in the Sol System drifting around an asteroid and quickly match the ship's profile to that of a System Jumper - a ship from the pre-wormhole-tech era of space flight long thought lost as it traveled between Earth and the Trappist-1 System, which is supposed to be carrying over three hundred people in frozen hibernation and be far away from Earth by now.  As such, the crew, particularly Lieutenant Commander Nika "Nik" Vagin and Petty Officer First Class Altandai "Jenks" Khan, begin getting ready to board the ship.

Chapter 3

Quick Summary: Nika and Jenks board the System Jumper, take down the three people they encounter on the ship, one of whom both tries to bribe them and threatens them that they're getting into something they aren't involved in.  After the job is done, Rosa calls back home just in time to get in touch with her wife and family to present from afar a birthday gift to their youngest now 8 year old girl.

Thoughts:    These two chapters are basically two parts of the same story, a showcase of how the NeoG operate and who the particular NeoG crew is we're following here.  And taking a step back to just look at the NeoG in general instead of our crew - they're pretty damn cool: boarding ships in space sometimes through spacewalks, using swords and hand to hand combat?  Yeah that's awesome.

But again, back to our characters, particularly adopted siblings Nika and Jenks.  This section is told through Nika's point of view and you can see already in the two of them the varied cultures that have come together in this world - Nika is Eastern European (and while not Jewish in religion, certainly will later give the impression she might come from a Jewish cultural background), while Jenks is Mongolian, but apparently grew up in the same area as Nika's grandma, who adopted her for a few months before her death.  Jenks is pretty great and we see the first inklings of that here, in her natural curiosity and fun loving nature, to go along with her elite skills at combat.  Nika by contrast is a bit more serious, as befitting an officer, and helps keep Jenks pointed in the right direction - literally in fact!  It all ends with the System Jumper captured and you might think that's it for this plot point, but you would be wrong.....

But before we go anywhere, we also return to Rosa here!  She's got a wife!  And two kids and a mother who lives with the rest of the family!  It's clearly a loving and fun family - and an unremarked upon queer relationship, which we'll come to see is far from unusual to this world.  We'll see more of this later, as well as Rosa's family.
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So now we've really met Rosa, Jenks, and Nika, with cameos by the rest of Zuma's Ghost's crew.  Next time up, we'll meet our last main character, who may really be the closest thing to a central protagonist this book has - and who we still haven't met through three chapters.  Don't worry, she's a great one.