Surebleak Orbital Influence Zone
In which Bechimo discovers a new taste sensation.
Because of the name, and the fact that they’re first introduced as a breakfast food, I’d been picturing maize buttons as a kind of breakfast cereal, small and eaten in clusters. It appears from the description here that they’re more in the line of a pastry, large enough to be enjoyed individually (but small enough to be snatched up in a handful).
In which Val Con and Miri are not getting much sleep tonight.
Chapter 20 is shaping up to be a long chapter, to the point that I’m almost wondering if I need to subdivide the sections even further. Makes sense, though, since this is the chapter where a whole bunch of plot strands come together, not just from this book but from the four books preceding it.
Continue reading
Jelaza Kazone
Surebleak
In which a team comes together.
I was wrong about why Val Con found Tocohl’s voice familiar, but at least I was inside the ball park.
It occurs to me that Val Con thinking about his plans for his daughter’s future actually fits in well in the midst of Rys and the free agents planning, because the potential for Talizea to have a future is one of the things they’re fighting for.
Whatever plan they decide on, there’s no chance now they’ll get it done before the end of the book, but that’s no surprise; The Decisive Attack on the Department was always the kind of thing that was going take a whole book to tell.
It’s interesting that the free agents apparently don’t know about Val Con. The Department knows, of course, but it makes sense that a particular agent wouldn’t have been told unless there was some reason they needed to know. After the attack on Solcintra Headquarters, it would have become general knowledge that Korval was acting in opposition to the Department, but perhaps not the details of how that came about.
I wonder if Claidyne, the former director, knows.
Surebleak
In which Korval acquires a new neighbour.
It’s an evocative name, “World’s End”. There’s the obvious sense in which the place is named, referring to a physical boundary, a place where the world comes to an end, but there are other things it could mean, such as a temporal boundary, a time when a world comes to an end. Sometimes a person’s world can come to an end even though the planet continues untouched. Yulie’s world might have ended when he lost the last of his kin. It might have ended today, if Boss Conrad had been someone other than the person he is.
(And isn’t it interesting how, when he’s talking to Yulie, he’s mostly Pat Rin but sometimes he’s Boss Conrad for a moment or two?)
It’s also interesting to speculate how things might have gone differently if Yulie’s brother hadn’t got himself killed before Boss Conrad showed up, and had been the one handling the negotiation for road access.