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Ghost Ship – Chapter 30

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Boss Vine’s Turf
Surebleak

In which Theo is offered a trade route and a seed pod.

One advantage of re-reading is that when you know where the story’s going, it can be easier to make out what the foreshadowing is trying to tell you. For instance: Here is Clarence, who’s made himself unpopular enough that somebody came to shoot at him, and probably hasn’t helped his case much by being so unobliging as to shoot the person who came to shoot him. Might be he’ll soon be in a situation where a job that takes him offworld for a longish while will be just the thing he needs.

And Clarence’s visitor is interesting: Seems to have known him from when he was working on Liad, and got on the wrong side of him then. An independent operator, not a fellow Juntava, is my impression. It’s not just Korval’s friends who are making the trip to try their luck in the new land of opportunity.

Agent of Change – Chapter 10

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In which Val Con and Miri are troubled by old memories.

Miri remembers the first time she took a life, acting in self-defense. The event has previously been mentioned in “Fighting Chance”, the story about Miri signing on as a merc — it naturally touching on several questions a mercenary commander might want to ask a potential recruit — but not in much detail.

Val Con remembers Daria dea’Luziam, whom he loved and lost when they were both trainee Scouts. “To Cut an Edge”, the story about Val Con meeting Edger, is set not long after her death, and Val Con’s memories of her surface several times through it. I remember thinking when I re-read “To Cut an Edge” that there was something not quite all there about the way Daria’s tale is given in that story, as if there were a telling detail that hadn’t made it in. I think now that perhaps that telling detail is in this chapter; considering publication orders and so on, the authors might reasonably have expected anyone reading “To Cut an Edge” to have read Agent of Change already.

Or maybe it’s just me.

It’s interesting to reflect on why Val Con and Miri are remembering these particular memories, what it says about what each of them got out of their recent conversation, and what it says about each of them that they’ve had lives which produced such memories in the first place.