A Pale Light In The Black (by KB Wagers) Reread - Chapters 12 and 13

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.  For those somehow seeing this post first instead of the others, A Pale Light in the Black is a space opera featuring a SF space version of the Coast Guard in an optimistic future universe.  It's not too late to pick up this book yourself and read along, and I highly recommend doing so - we're just about done with the book's first part and up to the first part of the Boarding Games.

When we last left off, Max had gone on her first on-page mission, was growing into Rosa's confidant, and was exchanging very cordial letters with Nika.  Oh and we got see Jenks' sex game - both casual and long-term.  Good times for all and no small amount of confusing feelings here, no sir.

Today we'll be rereading Chapters 12 and 13 (and a letter column in between them).  This time around, someone gets a bloody nose, Rosa (!) almost gets into another bar fight, and the team finds themselves in an emergency situation with hundreds or more lives on the line.  Oh and the System Jumper case starts getting more and more sketchy.....


Chapter 12: T-minus Eight Weeks Until Prelim Boarding Games:

Quick Summary: Max and Jenks spar in the common room and Max actually gets a hit on Jenks!  And....has a momentary panic attack when she breaks Jenks' nose.  Jenks calms her a little by mentioning that Jenks killed her first guy at age 13 on the street.  Meanwhile, Max reveals that London PeaceKeepers (re: cops) discovered one of the missing frozen passengers of the system jumper....as a recently drowned corpse.

Rosa unfortunately has to give them the bad news: even this utterly confounding news isn't enough to put the System Jumper case back into NeoG jurisdiction - it keeps it in PeaceKeeper hands, and they're gonna have to keep digging.  To relax afterwards, Rosa and Ma go to a bar on Jupiter Station and Rosa almost gets into a fight defending Ma's honor with a young Navy ensign.

Letters: Nika to Max and Vice Versa:  Nika and Max are still corresponding, with Nika telling Max that the System Jumper's parts showed up with some smugglers in TRAPPIST.  Oh and Max wants to talk live on the com!  For business purposes clearly.

Thoughts: More long term plot development here, as we start to see the System Jumper mystery hitting multiple planets - clearly something fishy is going on with missing should-be-long-dead passengers showing up recently alive and parts showing up on a world they never should have made it to.  But hey, enough of that, we learn more of our characters!  Jenks details more about growing up on the streets - it wasn't good - which again suggests this isn't exactly a perfect world in this setting.  Still, we do see some asides that make it sound damn appealing - like Ma's daughter's poly relationship (she's got at least two husbands and a whole bunch of kids!).

Oh and given Rosa's attitude towards the Navy ensign, maybe she shouldn't talk when it comes to disciplining Jenks for bar fights....


Chapter 13:  T-minus Five Weeks Until Prelim Boarding Games:

Quick Summary: Max leads the crew in a VR sim of the big game - it doesn't go well, because Max hesitates, but Max fixes it for a second unseen simulation.  Unfortunately, their celebration at Jupiter Station is cut short by an emergency: a tanker full of Liquid Metal Hydrogen fuel suffered a containment failure.  Given the explosive nature of that (in our world not yet practically makable) fuel, the tanker could explode at any moment, doing serious damage to the station and the people within it.

Jenks and Max accompany the tanker's engineering assistant (the chief having been killed in the crisis) to the engine room and try to fix it.  Jenks tries to shove Max out of the danger zone, but Max refuses and insists upon both helping and that Jenks can do it.  With the encouragement, Jenks finds a manual way to get the remaining coolant where it should go, saving everyone for the moment.

Thoughts:  This is a far more exciting chapter to read than recap - I'm not going to get too deep into the action here, as that's the point of the book.  But through it all, this chapter is really mostly about learning more long term about Max - who is still not quite fitting in as well as one might hope....although really that's more on Max's self-consciousness than anything, feeling like she wanted a hug from Jenks at the end and her awkwardness sharing her past.  Some of that is pretty understandable - despite her parents' strict (and bad) parenting being very sympathetic (how do you not even play a video game?), Max can't help but compare her well off upbringing to that of Jenks and feel guilty to say anything about it.  Of course Jenks is used to everyone having a more well-off upbringing and isn't ashamed at all about it, which is what I mean by that being on Max.

But hey, like Max's fixing of her hesitation, Max can fix this too, as she showed by her bravery in refusing to leave Jenks during the crisis.  They can definitely be a close knit group and are soooo close.

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Next week: The crew gets to the Prelim Boarding Games.  We're finally almost here!  Well, not quite, but close!