In which Val Con declines to surrender to the Yxtrang.

I’m not sure how to picture the spin that Val Con applies to the yacht. Spinning around a central axis, perpendicular to the motion of the yacht? Tumbling end over end? Neither of those quite match all the other things that are going on at the same time.

A belated observation: when the Yxtrang first attacked the yacht, their scans reported three people on board, but Miri and Val Con only found one body. If Val Con’s right about the dead guy being a smuggler, it’s most likely that the other two were colleagues, rather than any of the family members he was carrying around photos of; and the fact that he was carrying around photos of his family adds to the likelihood that they were off somewhere far away. At least, this is what I am telling myself; given some of the threats the Yxtrang Commander utters in this chapter, I don’t like to consider the possibility that their previous victims included women and children.

We’re back in the land of short chapters which indicate increased pace if one reads them all at once but drag things out when one reads one chapter per day.

…which is why, presumably, my notes indicate that tomorrow I will be covering both Chapter Twenty-Six and the Epilogue in a single entry.

(And then we will be going straight on to the second chapter of Carpe Diem, since the first chapter is basically a repeat of this one, slightly reworded, with a few bits abridged and a couple of additions that don’t need an entire entry to cover. The more significant one is the addition of a dateline establishing that this scene takes in “Second Quadrant: Ramal Sector”.)