A Pale Light In The Black (by KB Wagers) Reread - Chapters 16 and 17

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 starting the Prelim Boarding Games, so we're into the 2nd third of the novel now!  But it's not that long a book so catching up won't take that long.....

Last time out, our team just arrived at the site of the Prelim Boarding Games.  It was the calm before the storm.  Now we're getting to the early rounds of the Games themselves.  How will Rosa do in swordfighting?  Will Max do okay in hand to hand?  We'll see a little of that this time as Rosa gets matched up with perhaps her toughest competition in the NeoG swordfighting in the second round.  Who makes these brackets anyway???




Chapter 16: Preliminaries Day One: T-Minus One Hour Until Opening Ceremonies:

Quick Summary:  The Crew is taken to their changing room, and Max has some serious butterflies in her stomach.  Commander Vera Till of Flux Capacitor - the team that always finishes last - gives Max some encouragement and tells Jenks with a blown kiss she'll meet Jenks in the cage.  Meanwhile Rosa finds herself with Intel Chief/Honorable Intent Commander Yevchenko in the 2nd round and is really shaken by the tough draw.  Finally, the team gets the last spot in the Big Game - the big team centered event....but gets thrown a twist: rather than an ordinary "every team gets the same mission and are compared based upon performance" event, each team is going to have to rely upon the others doing well.  Jenks is a bit worried about that since the other teams could screw them, but Max thinks with everyone's performance relying on each other and the NeoG being who they are, it won't be a problem......

Thoughts:  Okay, so some interesting things here, and some kind of baffling ones.  If you know me from twitter, you should know I'm a sports nut - really I'm a competition nut.  So things like brackets and competitions are things I live for - and I'm pretty sure I'd love the Boarding Games.

But uh, what the heck is with the brackets?  I might get the idea of random brackets for the real deal, but why on earth would the brackets be randomized for the prelims, where you want to get your best team to qualify for the real deal?  In the real world, brackets are seeded, and with the same competitors coming back year after year, this would be really easy to do - Commander Yevchenko is the top returning Swordfighter (Nika not being there anymore) so he'd be the 1 seed, and Rosa should also be a high seed presumably, so there's basically no way they should run into each other before the semifinals at worst, and certainly not in the 2nd round!  Like cmon now, what even is this?

Anyhow, enough of my sports rants.  Some interesting stuff here besides that and Max's anxiety: Jenks flirts with Luis!  Commander Till flirts with Jenks as well - so yeah, Jenks is definitely getting some during this event (which you know, would also seem to be a conflict of interest, but uh, I guess everyone's chill with this during the prelims?).  Jenks also reveals that for all her impulsiveness, she really does plan for every one of her fights meticulously, and offers to provide those services to Max as well (Jenks has a bye first round, which would make sense if the brackets are done properly, but instead it's a random surprise.  sigh).

Anyhow enough with the prep, time for the event to begin....

Chapter 17: Preliminaries - Day One:

Quick Summary:  Rosa and Stephan Yevchenko have a quick chat, where Stephan promises to pass along his codes from his Big Game run.  Shortly thereafter, Max calls Nika to get some tips she can convey to Rosa for her fight against Stephan (Max having already won her first two fights off page).  Max is escorted to Rosa's side by Luis - who Rosa reveals they've known all along is seeing Jenks.

And then it's Rosa's turn to swordfight with Stephan, a fight in which she's down 2 points going into the final round when Jenks shows up to help Max in her corner.  Jenks and Max have a heart to heart where the two seem to fully reconcile - not that they were ever really apart, and just after that, Rosa follows their advice to take 3 points from Stephan with 30 seconds to go.  30 seconds later, Jenks is picking up the victorious Rosa in a bear hug.

Thoughts:  Again another chapter that's less fun to recap than read, although again it brings up some frustrating questions about how the heck these competitions are set up: There's at least two rounds of hand to hand combat and swordfighting in the first day alone?  That's rough, and seems likely to result in a lot of withdrawals due to injury - and gives those with byes a huge edge.  Okay Okay, I'll stop with the sports analysis for now I swear.

Really here we see two things happen - Max manages to feel more accepted by Jenks - I mean Jenks had clearly accepted her for a while in her actions, but Max hasn't quite felt as such after this conversation - and Rosa manages to put her anxiety aside, and execute perfectly upon Max, Nika, and Jenks' advice and win.  Kind of a bad thing you'd think for the NeoG intelligence chief to be so predictable, but I guess his job doesn't require him to be swordfighting often lol.

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Next Week:  Max beings the piloting competition!  And Jenks faces an emotional crisis and takes it out on someone!  With a fist!