A Pale Light In The Black (by KB Wagers) Reread - Chapters 48-49 (Really Chapters 40-41)

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.

This is our penultimate installment of the reread, as we hit our final four chapters!  The Boarding Games are over, and the team has been called back to Earth to hunt down the mysterious Gerard and the LifeEx/System Jumper criminals.  Surely nothing bad could happen to the team at this point, now that they're celebrated champions right?  Right?

Oh yeah, things are going to shit real quickly......




Chapter 48 (40) - One Week Post-Games:

Quick Summary:  The crew gets called down to Earth to follow a new lead on the System Jumper/LifeEx case.  Tired from it all, Max heads to the local base gym to run, where she continues to look through her grandfather's journal for clues.  There she meets a young woman named Sammi....who Max realizes just too late is an impostor.  She gets a kick in, before it's lights out and she knows no more.

#NumberofTimesMaxIsKnockedOut: 3

The rest of the team scrambles to try and find Max, with Rosa telling Stephen there's no way he can keep the team out.  Meanwhile, Max wakes up to find herself bound, with her DD working but blocked from exterior communication, and quickly discovers herself to be in a secret forgotten underwater lab.  Sammi, who turns out to be Sammi Gerard, reveals to Max that her great grandfather, the Thomas Gerard from the journal, faked his death when Max's grandfather planned to expose his work on the serum - for the Gerard serum, as in the dupe, kills 1/20 people who take it, even if it is more effective in general. And then she asks Max to join her.

Thoughts:  And so we get the reveal - sorta.  Sammi clearly is just as she puts it a cog in a larger organization, which as Max notes has some really terrifying reach - able to hack into the ID system with ease, and having been able earlier in the book to kill those system jumpers crew members on the Navy transport without arousing suspicion.  But Sammi is terrifying in her own right, clearly a bit off her rocker, willing to compromise a ton of lives for what - a more "efficient" serum?  We'll learn more about Sammi's motives in a bit (see next chapter) but needless to say, Max is in a damn tight spot.

Chapter 49:

Quick Summary:  Zuma's Ghost continues to sweep the Atlantic for any trace of Max's lost signal.  She gives a call to Nika, who is not behaving as his rehab supervisor would like, but Jenks lets it pass a little for Max's sake.  Luis and Nika reveal that Ria finally came a little more clean with Max in jeopardy - about Sammi's heritage, and about how Sammi's great grandfather was a populationist, believing that the population increase was the cause of the collapse and that the Dupe's lethal side effect was thus a good thing.

Thankfully, Sapphi discovers the underwater lab, through a little hacking of LifeEx security in which she discovers the long abandoned lab in the area.  Rosa calls in assistance, but assures Luis/Nika that the crew will not wait, and are going in.

Thoughts:  Thankfully Zuma's crew is good at what they do - unlike Ria's crew, who remain assholes in covering this all up even when she'd promised to work with Max weeks earlier - what the hell was she afraid of, that LifeEx would be possibly liable if the Dupe was connected to someone from the company's origins?  Probably.  Which is Ria clearly following the mercenary spirit of their grandfather more than the public interest spirit alas.

I kind of love Enrique btw, the captain assigned to Nika's rehab who has to get him to comply with his rehab protocols - good luck with that normally, nevertheless with Max in danger.  If Nika could, he'd probably be on a ship following after Zuma, nevertheless rehabbing since his prosthetic is having rejection issues.

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Next Week:  The Finale!  Will Max join our evil populationist woman?  (Hint: Yeah no).  Will the team get there in time to save her?  Join us as we find out...

Thoughts: