Bechimo
Dockside

In which there are many meetings.

Any one of these problems would be relatively easy to deal with by itself; it’s the way they’re all happening at once that makes things difficult.

If the intern was sent, as Chernak suspects, to delay Kara until something else can happen, I have two questions. One is: For whose benefit is he acting? The other is: Why did they pick him, when he’s obviously not very good at it?

“Menolly” is the name of one of the heroines of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series. Somehow I suspect this Menolly isn’t going to turn out to be one of the heroines of this series.

I wonder what the Scouts are making of Stost. (They ought to be making something of him; to be so focussed on Win Ton and their prize that they dismiss him from thought would be understandable, but also a sign that they are not very good Scouts.)

The authors are playing with time a bit here. Well, actually, they’ve been playing with time a bit for the last few chapters, skipping back each time they switch to a new character to show what they’re doing in the same space of time (at least three different scenes set at the moment the pod docks with Bechimo, and so on), but the end of this chapter is something a bit special. In the penultimate scene, Theo hears a loud clang and then, after some time, a scream. For the final scene, we switch to the group at the docks, and skip back a bit to see the event causing the loud clang — Kara’s display with the star hammer, which incidentally is reminiscent of Jethri’s showdown in Trade Secret — but when the scene and the chapter ends, it hasn’t quite caught up with Theo, so we don’t yet know who it was screaming…