A Pale Light In The Black (by KB Wagers) Reread - Chapters 8 and 9

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.  We're just finished our introduction to our main cast of this book, a space opera featuring a SF space version of the Coast Guard in an optimistic future universe.  Still, it's not too late to pick up this book yourself and read along, as we're just about done getting to know our fun cast.

When we left off, Max Carmichael met the rest of Zuma's Ghost - our NeoG interceptor crew - from easily excitable and outgoing Jenks to hacker Sapphi, to everyone's favorite, the robotic dog DOGE!  (I promise I'll stop going on about Doge soon).

This time, we get our first intro to the Boarding Games, Max demonstrates her skills and gets onto her first mission, and almost gets into an interservice bar fight.  Surely Max would never get into any actual bar fights?  Right?  Well, we're getting ahead of ourselves (but she totally will).

Note: We're going to be covering here Chapters 8 and 9 and the letter section after Chapter 9, so technically a little more than these two chapters (not sure how the letter is divided up in the actual book instead of my eARC). A lot more things are discussed in these chapters too, incidentally, so this will be a longer recap.




Chapter 8:  T-Minus Fourteen Weeks Until Prelim Boarding Games:

Summary:  Max learns about the Boarding Games, a competition between the armed services - NeoG, Navy, Army, Marines and Air (Space?) Force - which is extremely popular for spectators (and have been in the title of many of our chapters).  The Competition features six events she learns:

A Hand to Hand combat tournament
A Swordfighting tournament
A Hacking Competition
A Piloting Obstacle Cousre
The Boarding Action
& The Big Game (the last two being team activities).

Max's swordfighting skills are at best average, so she's immediately pushed for hand to hand combat and tested against Rosa.  Max showcases some incredible ability to read Rosa's moves before Rosa makes them, but is overly cautious and Rosa eventually gets the better of Max.  Jenks is tasked with training Max up.

In other developments, Rosa talks Max's character with Ma, and Max tells Rosa that Max agrees with Jenks that something is sketchy with the captured System Jumper and Max actually went above and beyond investigating, including through the use of Non-NeoG resources - particularly Max's Carmichael connections.  Max is also introduced to another NeoG interceptor commander, D'arcy Montaglione and Max notes that there's no reason to worry about her sleeping with D'arcy as Max is Ace (Asexual).

Thoughts:  Wow, a lot of stuff goes on this chapter (it's about 3 times as long as the next chapter) and I have a lot of thoughts!  First, we get our intro to the boarding games which we'll get into more in a later chapter, but think of it like a mini olympics for the armed forces.  That countdown to establish the timeline of chapters is currently counting down to the prelims for those games, which will establish which NeoG squads will represent NeoG in the real events.  You can see why this would be a fun spectator sporting event, where just like the olympics you have a number of events for different types of fans.  Sadly this book doesn't get too into every event - I'm still not sure what the "Boarding Action" entails and purposely evades dealing with how the scoring really works: as much as this sporting event centers the novel, this is not necessarily a sport book, so it's not like i can run numbers and analytics on how to strategize for the games.  Which I'd want to damnit.  Anyhow, Max is going to compete in hand to hand, which basically functions like Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) except....without weight classes, which is kind of funky and makes no sense?  Again, we'll get to that later.

Secondly, we get Rosa (and the reader) learning more about Max through both Ma and Max herself.  Nika first thought Max was going to be a straight laced by the book kind of officer, but Max demonstrates otherwise here, with Max going first into Jenks' unedited report and then using her non official resources - her family connections - to further Jenks' guesses.  Max will get into trouble later (minor spoiler) for going too often to this type of resource and have to learn to be more judicious about it.

Then we have the discussion of sexual activity in the armed forces in this future.  Max is Ace (but not Aromantic, so Nika has some hopes there if he has interest in that direction) and that's not only accepted instantly by Rosa (and Rosa says D'arcy will as well) but actually put in his profile for superiors to purview.  This does bring up a bit of a question that I had in my review of this book - is there no regulation about sex between members of the armed forces?  D'arcy is a good guy, but he's a superior to someone like Max, and for that reason, typical armed forces would have some issues with a sexual relationship, casual, one-time, or otherwise - there are some serious consent issues here that never come up in this book.  The best explanation I can think of - and this is fanon - is that this is such a good future that sex is entirely normalized and carries no stigmas or other baggage, with rape inconcievable, but well, even for an optimistic future that seems a bit much for me (and Rosa doesn't suggest as much with her comments).  With someone like Jenks, whose very active sexual activity is mentioned here but not explored, that seems like a potential serious issue.

Chapter 9: T-minus Thirteen Weeks until Prelim Boarding Games 

Summary:  A week later, Max is settling in to the new space-traveling Zuma's Ghost.  Max's impressive ability to predict objects and people is displayed again in his navigating skills, leading to Ma suggesting he take over for Rosa in the piloting competition at the games.   Further talk of this is delayed by a distress call from a ship with a minor fire, and Max takes charge of the minor rescue mission, armed with swords because SAH - Shit Always Happens.

Shit clearly doesn't happen in the actual mission, because we don't see anything more.  Instead, we skip ahead to Jenks at a bar on the station after the mission is concluded, where she spots Max being accosted by a bunch of Navy jerks - mocking the NeoG as "space cops".  Jenks rescues Max with a little elbow, and invites Max to join them at their table, because Max is part of the team....and Jenks can't stand to see someone be lonely.

Letters: Nika to Max upon Nika's leaving:

Summary: This is the same type of letter Nika's predecessor left Nika, where Nika assures Max to have confidence as Max earned her spot with her own efforts and deserves to be here, even if she will make mistakes.  Moreover, Max needs to learn to work with her team...and if she has any questions, feel free to e-mail.

Thoughts:  Both Nika's letter and Chapter 9 kind of have the same themes, aside from showing off the basics of what a mission would normally be for NeoG (they can't all be boarding suspected smugglers) and showcasing Max's talents at foresight, this is the short segment where Max has to learn how to work as a team member.  Everyone aside from Jenks is fully willing to accept Max even now, just two weeks into his tenure with them, and even Jenks would rather have Max as a team member than an outsider - Jenks just has some full acceptance issues she'll eventually get over.

Really that's a key thing about this book - when a book features an outsider main character joining an established group, one of two plots may develop: the most common is that person has to prove themselves - often repeatedly - in order to get accepted, and a large part of the plot revolves around that.  That's not what this book is though - Max's acceptance issues are mostly in her own head and for her to figure out on her own - as you can see, even not won over Jenks is supportive rather than antagonistic.  It's more a book about each character figuring out their own mental problems - together with the help of each other, and is thus far more inspirational and pleasant to read.  Yet another reason I loved this book so much.
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Anyhow, that's it for today, join us next time we'll get our first proper mission we see Max actually do something, learn more about Jenks' sex and love life, and see Max possibly settling in!  See you next week.