Tag Archives: coord book

Trader’s Leap – Chapter 13

Dutiful Passage
Pommierport

In which there is an unexpected detour or two.

I think that when Priscilla talks about “ambient noise”, she doesn’t mean quite the same thing as the Haosa do when they talk about “the ambient”. If it is, it’s noteworthy that the course of action suggested by her training is to try to block it out.
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Neogenesis – Chapter 3 part III

In which Admiral Bunter considers his options.

Oh, I see how it is: every time the story is about to shift to a different set of characters, something’s going to happen that will leave us worrying about one of the characters we’re parting from, until we see them again.
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I Dare – Chapter 47

Day 45
Standard Year 1393

Sherzer System

In which Boss Conrad goes on an outing with some pilots.

I’m not surprised, on reflection, to see Portmaster Borden among the pilots; makes sense a portmaster would be a pilot himself. Portmaster Liu is probably a pilot as well, but somebody’s gotta stay home and mind the store. I wonder how they decided who’d go and who’d stay. Flipped a coin for it? Or maybe Liu let Borden go because he’s the one who’s always upset about never having anything to do.

I want to know more about the “alternative courses of education” Er Thom offered the young Pat Rin: what they were, and why Pat Rin rejected them. I can think of several possibilities, but I’m not sure which best fits Pat Rin and Er Thom. One possibililty I’m pretty confident in rejecting is “education in useful non-piloting careers, which Pat Rin rejected because they weren’t piloting”; it’s clear that Pat Rin had already accommodated himself to the idea of not being a pilot. A more interesting idea is that they were not alternatives to being a pilot, but alternative ways of learning to be a pilot, since the family’s usual methods had failed – which Pat Rin rejected… why? The narration makes a point of mentioning that they were all offworld, which suggests several answers: perhaps Pat Rin just didn’t want to live anywhere but Liad (seems unlikely, stated so baldly); perhaps he feared the clan was trying to hide their non-pilot away from polite society; perhaps he’d already come to believe, as in “Heirloom”, that he was an unproductive load on the clan, and didn’t want the family to waste money sending him away for an education he was convinced would come to nothing.

Plan B – Chapter 35

Lytaxin
Erob’s Clan House

In which Val Con’s kin start arriving.

This chapter is still just as affecting, even though I knew what was coming.

The mention of Nelirikk wearing an arm scarf as a sign of troop affiliation reminds me that Miri wore an arm scarf when Val Con first met her, which got mentioned a few times and then never again. (I figure it maybe got left behind on Edger’s ship; if not that, perhaps when they had to leave Vandar in the Benish clothes they stood up, or in Miri’s case couldn’t stand up, in.) Makes me wonder if that was a marker of affilition too, and if so to whom.


Tomorrow: I Dare

Carpe Diem – Chapter 5

Orbit
Interdicted World I-2796-893-44

In which Miri and Val Con take a break.

Miri’s store of personal valuables has shrunk a bit since she took stock back on Lufkit. Probably the rest of it is still in her box, safe and sound on Edger’s ship, and this is just the stuff that was so important to her that it was in her belt pouch even for what she expected to be a short expedition. In which case it’s interesting to ponder what’s here (her grandmother’s House Badge, the jewelry Val Con gave her, the harmonica, and a cloudy sapphire whose story we’ve never been told) and what isn’t (several more bits of jewelry of unknown provenance, some papers, and the key whose story we will get later).

This is the first time Val Con’s mentioned Grandmother Cantra, and only the second mention of her in publication order (the first being when Shan told Priscilla about his family in Conflict of Honors).

Agent of Change – Chapter 25

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”.)

Agent of Change – Chapter 24

In which the Juntavas let Miri and Val Con go.

A nicely unobtrusive example of virtue being its own reward: if Miri hadn’t thought about notifying the dead stranger’s family, she wouldn’t have found the coord page before it was spaced, and they’d have been in a heap of trouble.

Well. Not that they’re not in a heap of trouble as it is, with an Yxtrang ship bearing down on them, but you know what I mean.