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So usually I buy my books based on personal recommendations I get from friends, or what I've heard good things about on this forum, or books that I read the first few pages in the bookstore and I'm hooked. Sometimes, though, I literally pick a book off the shelf at random because it catches my eye or because it looks bad. This book is in the latter category. Forsaken Skies by D. Nolan Clark (AKA David Wellington) Published in 2016   First Impressions: Ok so, just going by the cover, looks like a sprawling, sci-fi epic bought up in a hurry by a publisher scrambling to cash in on the success of The Expanse. Notably, this book is billed as Book 1 of The Silence. You know, the famous The Silence trilogy(?) everyone is buzzing about. I know you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, but I judge it's going to not be good. I've never done a Let's Read before so I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. I want to commit to a chapter a day at least but if they're short I'll try to do more. Chapter One: quote:Opening line: So "the kid" is named Thom and his pursuer is a Navy-trained pilot named Lanoe. This is how you know it's space because the names are weird. quote:"I killed him! I can't go back now!" Thom has murdered his father and is now fleeing in a random direction as fast as his spaceship can carry him. They are feeling through "wormspace" which, according to the book, "doesn't operate by newtonian rules" and that they could theoretically be on "the wrong end of the universe." An interesting concept, but how much do you want to bet that the Planetary Coalition or whatever interstellar government undoubtedly exists across an area of contiguous space, and that planets that are close to each other by wormhole are also close to each other in real space? Thom is a hotshot pilot, slated to compete in next year's "Earth Cup" (so we know Earth exists, or did exist in historical memory, in the universe of this story), but Lanoe is "Navy trained" and knows a few tricks not taught to civilians. Thom tries to zigzag down a side tunnel, but Lanoe keeps up with him easily. Throughout the pursuit, Lanoe is trying to talk Thom down by flashing him with a communication laser, but Thom is having none of it. He breaks out of wormspace and Lanoe follows, emerging into a searing red light that burns his eyes. Perspective shift to a man named Valk. An orbital traffic controller who's having a dull day. We're treated to a bit of radio chatter that brings us into the scene. Then the book informs us: quote:Orbital traffic control wasn't an exacting job. I am not an expert on space by any stretch of the imagination but I know enough about orbital mechanics from watching TV that even I can tell you that's bullshit. The job also doesn't pay well, but Valk likes it because he gets to work in zero-g, which helps with the severe pain he feels on a daily basis after having been burned over a large portion of his body in an incident seventeen years ago he calls "an accident" but that the narrator tells us was not an accident. quote:The Hexus sat at the bottom of a deep gravity well, a place where dozens of wormhole tunnels came together, connecting all twenty-three worlds of the local sector. Ah huh. "Local sector." What did I say? I'm betting sector lines aren't drawn around wormspace. quote:A thousand vessels came through the Hexus every day, to offload cargo, to undertake repairs, just so the crews could stretch their legs for a minute on the way to their destinations. Keeping all the ships from colliding with each other, making sure they landed at the right docking berths, was the kind of job computers were built for, and the Hexus's autonomics were very, very good at it. Valk's job was to simply be there in case something happened that needed a human decision. If a freighter demanded a priority mooring, for instance, because it was hauling hazardous cargo. Or if somebody important wanted the kid glove treatment. It didn't happen all that often. Important people and dangerous cargo don't come through the biggest hub in the local sector all that often. Anyway Valk witnesses Thom and Lanoe emerge from the wormhole at unsafe speeds barreling straight for the Hexus, a structure that I still can't fully visualize even after it is described. quote:Then he saw the Hexus floating right in front of him. Fifty kilometers across, a vast hexagonal structure of concrete and foamsteel, like a colossal dirty benzine ring. I have no idea what "dirty benzine" looks like but this is basically what I'm picturing:  I'm not sure if I got it right though. Anyway, it turns out Thom is on course to blow straight through the center of the Hexus. Time for Valk to spring into action. He works feverishly to route the traffic in the ring away from the path of the two ships. quote:Valk worked fast, moving from one virtual panel to the next, dismissing displays and opening new ones. His biggest display showed the trajectory of the two newcomers, superimposed on a diagram of every moving thing inside the Hexus. Tagos on each object showed relative velocities, mass and inertia quantities, collision probabilities. I feel like there are computers in the present day that could automatically perform this task, and even if there aren't, that it's almost certainly beyond human capability. Anyway he somehow manages it except for one big, fat slow-moving freighter. This freighter is mysterious because it's an automatic freighter for carrying cargo, but it refuses his orders because the maneuvering instructions he gives would cause "distress to passengers." This is very mysterious and Valk wonders how it's possible for an automatic hauler to be carrying passengers. Lanoe considers shooting Thom's ship so that it will explode into "tiny debris" that will be "too small to do much damage when it rained down on the Hexus." I feel like D. Nolan Clark knows gently caress all about space. Blowing up a ship traveling at "an appreciable fraction of the speed of light" would just turn into a shotgun blast. Anyway Valk solves the mysterious freighter problem by causing it to jettison its cargo pods and that makes it small enough that the two ships are able to squeeze by. Thom's ship clips one of the cargo pods with its wings and goes spiraling down toward the planet. Lanoe turns his FA.2 fighter to follow. I forgot to mention Lanoe is flying an "FA.2 cataphract class fighter," a fighter craft model that is apparently a century old. The book asks us to wonder why anyone would fly such an antique. Anyway that's it for chapter one. There's no table of contents but skipping to the back it looks like there's thirty five chapters. Yay!
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Oct 9, 2020 19:01
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No human being has the reflexes to fly anything going "an appreciable fraction of the speed of light". So in my eyes that leaves us with three options.
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Oct 9, 2020 19:29
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Oh also apparently medical technology in the far future can’t heal burns.
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Oct 9, 2020 20:36
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So is this near a black hole? Is that the "gravity well" they were talking about? Or is it just the author's way of bullshitting two ships in THE VAST EXPANSE OF SPACE into a high-speed chase (sorry, "fraction of lightspeed chase) straight out of a 90s movie? (Or any cheap 20th century action film.)
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Oct 10, 2020 02:18
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Cobalt-60 posted:So is this near a black hole? Is that the "gravity well" they were talking about? Or is it just the author's way of bullshitting two ships in THE VAST EXPANSE OF SPACE into a high-speed chase (sorry, "fraction of lightspeed chase) straight out of a 90s movie? (Or any cheap 20th century action film.) The gravity well is that of a massive star (or, as the book puts it "very big star" which I assume refers to mass as opposed to diameter). Massive stars push down far enough into wormspace to slice through the tunnels to create exits.
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Oct 10, 2020 03:48
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Chapter Two Picks up immediately where chapter one left off. quote:Lanoe had to lean over hard into a tight bank to avoid the swirl of cargo in the Hexus but he almost laughed as he worked his controls, throwing his stick to the left and then right. Whoever was running traffic control back there was a genius. I guess he must be to do something a computer from the future couldn't manage. Lanoe finds himself spinning down towards Geryon "a boiling hell cauldron of a planet." quote:Geryon was a gas giant, a world with no surface, just a near-endless atmosphere. From a distance it looked like it was tearing itself apart from inside out. It was banded with dark storms, nearly black, that hid an inner layer of incandescent neon. The buzzing red light streaked outward through every crack and gap in the cloud layer. Rays of baleful effulgence spearing outward at the void. Apparently Geryon is a sub-critical star? Not sure what else would be causing the glow. Lanoe plunges down into the cloud layer after Thom, who is spiraling down into a storm the size of an ocean on earth. (So from this we can probably assume Earth is still extant in this time and probably inhabited). Thoms space-yacht is still tumbling out of control, spinning end over end and shedding parts. As Lanoe dives down after him, Thom unexpectedly makes contact. quote:"drat it Thom," Lanoe said. "What were you thinking back there? There were people on that freighter. You could have killed them." In fairness to Thom here, neither did the space traffic control guy until the last second. Lanoe proceeds to try and calm Thom down and talk him out of his flight. He also takes a moment to be impressed by Thom's piloting ability, keeping his ship steady with only one wing in the stormy weather. But Thom is unmoved. quote:"I'm not going back," Thom replied. "I'm never going back." Perspective shift to Thom, who we learn is disappointed that he didn't strike the freighter and die instantly. quote:It should have been quick and painless. He should have hit the freighter dead-on and that would have been that. If he still wants to kill himself, I sort of wonder why he bothered to fight so hard to stabilize his ship. Also, he reached out to Lanoe but whatever. quote:"There's no way forward here, Thom. If I have to shoot you to stop this idiotic chase, I will. Turn back now." I'm pretty confused by the characters' motivations at this point. Does Thom want to die or not? Why would Lanoe shoot down a man who is about to die in a storm? Thom waxes self-pitying for a few paragraphs about growing up in the lap of luxury and never being denied anything. He wasn't even bullied at school because he had bodyguards. quote:Thom wondered why he didn't just switch off the comms panel. Block Lanoe's transmission. Maybe, he thought, he just wanted to hear another human voice before he ended this. Then there's two pages of expository dialogue where Lanoe explains he's only Thom's father's escort pilot and not a lackey trying to drag Thom home. Thom reveals that he killed his father because he'd discovered his father was only raising him to be a backup body. His father was ailing and soon would transplant his consciousness into his son's brain. quote:The old man could have arranged for Thom to have an accident that left him brain dead. Then he could have his own consciousness transferred into Thom's young, healthy body. It happened all the time in the halls of power. The legality was questionable but a lot of rules didn't apply to planetary governors. Thom's father was a planetary governor by the way. So I feel like any accident that left Thom braindead would render his brain tissue unable to sustain any sort of consciousness, not just Thom's specifically. I'm picking up from context that it's not just a brain transplant because the book talks about "matching neurology" which leads me to believe this is an information overwrite. But whatever. Anyway, we find out Thom killed shot his father with an ancient dueling pistol, and that he must keep moving for another thirty six hours, because that's how long they can keep his father's brain functions alive without his body. The whole exchange leaves me further confused about whether Thom is trying to kill himself or simply escape. He killed his father because it was life or death. quote:"...So I had to kill him if I wanted to live..." But he doesn't want to live? But he's fighting for his life? I'm all turned around. Anyway, Thom plunges into "a dark cloud bank, a wall of smoke thick enough to block Lanoe's transmission" and the conversation ends. The book goes back and forth on referring to the clouds in the gas giant as being "soot" "smoke" or "cloud." Maybe whatever phenomenon responsible for the planet's incandesce throws up huge clouds of ash? I think that over millions of years the planet would just be one big ball of ash, or that the ash would build up until it snuffed out whatever process caused the glow. Either way it seems stupid to me. Anyway Lanoe dives down after Thom and plunges below the ash layer into the red glare of the neon layer. quote:He spared a moment to check his instruments and saw just how bad it was out there. Over 2,000 degrees Kelvin. (1726.85c or 3140.33f) quote:Atmospheric pressure hard enough to crush the fighter in microseconds. The FA.2 possessed enough vector field strength to hold that killing air back, according to its technical specifications. Well that's lucky. Also spaceships in this time have "inertial sinks" to protect the crew from becoming a red paste from hard acceleration. Lanoe wonders whether Thom's ship would be able to survive the intense heat and pressure, or whether he would find the yacht "a crumpled ball of carbon fiber, tumbling slowly as it fell toward the center of the planet." quote:Yet when his airfoils carried him rattling and hissing through the the floor of the neon layer, he saw the yacht dead ahead, still intact, still hurtling downward on a course that went nowhere good. Kind of like the plot of this book amirite  Also, the fire part of the planet has a bottom?????? That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. quote:There was nothing but murk down there, pure hydrogen under so much pressure it stopped acting like a gas and turned into liquid metal. No ship ever built could handle this kind of strain for more than a few minutes. It's stretching credulity to believe they could handle it for more than a few microseconds, frankly. quote:"Thom," he said. "Thoms—is this what you want? Did we just come here so you could commit suicide?" I've been extremely confused about that myself. quote:There was no reply. Thom is just about ready to lose himself in the crushing embrace of death when he is startled by a bottle of champagne going off. quote:Wine made from grapes actually grown in the soil of Earth. That bottle had been almost as expensive as the yacht itself. The feeling of being scared by the bottle snaps Thom out of his daze and he has second thoughts about killing himself. quote:"Lanoe?" the kid said. "Lanoe, I think I made a mistake." No, Lanoe! You're never supposed to close your eyes when you're flying! You have to be alert to your surroundings at all times! Thom is really sorry he dragged Thom into this and wishes he could go back. quote:Lanoe shook his head. The kid had some guts to have gotten this far, but what a damned idiot he was. "Pull up. Come on, Thom, just pull up and get out of here." A clever bit of worldbuilding here, showing us that spaceships in the future don't have horizon displays. quote:"The Hexus. Look for the Hexus. Its beacons should be all over your nav display—latch onto them. Pull up, Thom. Come on! Don't go any lower." Anyway it goes on like that for a full page. Lanoe urges Thom to go higher, but the controls don't respond. The yacht is too damaged. Lanoe urges harder and Thom tries harder, but still can't get his nose up. Lanoe tells Thom to transfer some of his Vector field strength to the thrusters. quote:"I'll be splattered," the kid pointed out. Transferring five percent of the vector field causes five percent of the ship to collapse. Makes perfect sense to me. The extra thrust is enough to angle the yacht up and back towards space. Lanoe follows it up through the neon layer and back out into space. Unfortunately, the pressure was too much. When Lanoe catches up to the yacht, he sees that the cockpit has been completely crushed. quote:"Oh hellfire, Thom," Lanoe whispered. "I'm sorry. I'm so damned sorry." End of chapter 2 I'm sorry, too. Sorry this book is so BAD!
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Oct 10, 2020 18:09
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKLmZNnMT0A
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Oct 10, 2020 18:16
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Where the gently caress did the champagne come from? (plot-wise) The garbled mental state sort of makes sense; it's someone who's traumatized, under pressure, and not thinking logically. But he's fridge-fodder anyway. Still reading like generic action movie with Science Fiction set pieces copy-pasted in haphazardly. Has this guy written anything else?
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Oct 10, 2020 19:33
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Cobalt-60 posted:Where the gently caress did the champagne come from? (plot-wise) The champagne was in the drinks cabinet onboard the yacht. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wellington_(author)
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Oct 10, 2020 19:38
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Applewhite posted:The champagne was in the drinks cabinet onboard the yacht. "The first novel, Forsaken Skies, was reviewed by Kirkus Reviews as containing "the usual complications, heroics, and surprises (...), all professionally packaged and produced and entirely unmemorable"." They beat me to it...
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Oct 10, 2020 19:41
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Cobalt-60 posted:"The first novel, Forsaken Skies, was reviewed by Kirkus Reviews as containing "the usual complications, heroics, and surprises (...), all professionally packaged and produced and entirely unmemorable"." Yeah this story reads like it was run through a focus group.
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Oct 10, 2020 19:43
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Honestly, I don't really hate this? Like, it's not great by any means, but it seems like it's trying to be unambitious pulp and largely succeeding. The biggest flaw, aside from a few odd typos, is that it feels focus-grouped, as mentioned. Given some of the other poo poo that people give derisive Let's Reads to, this seems frankly fine, it's not even in the same universe of bad as something like William Control's book.
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Oct 12, 2020 01:55
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It feels like it's taking itself too seriously to be true pulp. Like it wants to be pulp with legitimacy.
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Oct 12, 2020 02:33
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Chapter 3quote:As usual, Valk had been left to clean up the mess. Geez, how often does this happen, Valk? I'm beginning to wonder if he is good at his job. quote:Already the synthetic voices were burbling away with demands and threats. Centrocor owned both the freight hauler he had nobbled and the Hexus itself, and he had damaged both of them. Presumably from "monoPOLY." quote:one of the big transplanetary commercial monopolies that owned, de facto, this entire sector and all twenty-three of its worlds. They had much more pressing concerns than asking if there had been any casualties. The fact that Valk had saved some lives here was far less important than those barrels he sent spilling out into the void. So generic corporate oligarchy future, just like the present day. Valk is worried he will get fired and reflects the job is all he has. quote:So he sent a drone swarm out to recover the cargo containers and as many of the barrels and boxes and broken crates as they could chase down. He sent a quick message to the maintenance staff asking them to make sure the Hexus hadn't been damaged irreparably by flying debris. Then he switched traffic control over to autonomics and logged out for the day. No mention of waiting for a relief to show up. He just... logs out for the day. His job (that's all he has) is already hanging by a thread but he decides to just check out halfway through his shift in the middle of a crisis. Also, I feel like maybe it's someone else's responsibility to make sure the Hexus hasn't been damaged? Doesn't anybody else work on this station? Valk should be working with an entire team of people who keep the Hexus (an important trade hub) humming. But he's got more important things to do than his job: quote:He had a mystery to solve. To wit: What the hell were people doing onboard a cargo ship? We perspective shift to the people in question. We are introduced to new characters: Roan and her teacher, Elder McRae. Roan and Elder McRae have been traveling in the cargo container for twelve days. They're low on breathable air and the air that is there stinks from the chemical toilet. quote:The only illumination came from a single display foam-sealed to one wall, a flickering pane of light no wider than Roan's two hands side by side. This is how you know this is a gritty, serious future. Gritty serious futures are always using foam for things. That sucks for them being sealed in a shipping container for twelve straight days with nothing but a Nintendo Switch for illumination. Also they're in zero gee. Roan and Elder McRae are members of a religious order. Predictably, Roan is the impatient, young padawan while Elder McRae is the long-suffering older mentor. quote:"How much longer?" she asked, just to hear her own voice. Finally the drones snag the cargo container and transport them to the Passenger dock. The pair get shaken up but are otherwise okay. Perspective shift back to Valk. We're also given a more detailed description of the Hexus. quote:The Hexus had six long arms, each of which rotated on its long axis to generate artificial gravity. Valk's traffic control station was in one of the vertices between the arms, a place where he could just float and not have to use his legs. So a sort of hexagon shape with a bunch of O'Neil cylinders attached. Not sure how well that balances out with all the centripetal force involved but maybe it's perfectly feasible. Revised Picture of the Hexus:  quote:Going into one of the arms—going into any place with gravity—meant agony. But the only way to pop open that cargo container and extract its stowaways was to bring it inside, into heat and air. If Valk wanted to see what was inside that container, he had no choice. Would they have not brought the container into heat and air if the passengers hadn't come to Valk's attention? That would have sucked. quote:The second his feet touched the floor, it began. Cramps in what were left of his feet, first. A throbbing in his thigh muscles. He became far too aware of the shapes of the bones inside his legs, felt his kneecaps grind back into place. Blinking away the white pearl is a personal thing for Valk. Though the drug is allegedly not habit forming and does not impair one's ability to do one's job, he figures that since his pain will never go away, he'd best learn to live with it. I wonder if maybe his bones might not creak so much if he didn't spend so much time losing bone mass by hanging out in microgravity for extended periods of time. quote:Blinking the white pearl had become a reflex after a few years. Now it was a tiny victory every time he did it. Valk forces himself to suffer needlessly on purpose. Is he punishing himself for something? Does Valk have a dark past? So many mysteries I'm completely incurious about. Anyway, Valk hobbles down to the cargo bay to watch the drones cut the cargo container open. There's no mention of any damage to the door mechanism on the cargo container. In fact, the book describes specialized drones designed to cut open cargo containers without damaging anything inside. So in the future do they just weld all the cargo containers shut and slice them open when they get to where they're going? Are cargo containers not reusable? Apparently its a common enough practice that a special type of robot exists for the purpose and is readily available. Even though Centrocor has "more lawyers than the Navy had pilots" they are skittish about harming the stowaways because they might get sued. Roan and Elder McRae emerge from the cargo container and are immediately swarmed by dozens of drones. quote:Please do not move while the scan is in progress. I get the feeling this scene is supposed to be funny but to me it's more like something that would get a forced chuckle from the audience if this scene were played out in a movie. Anyway, Valk shows up and shoos all the drones away and we're given our first look at him from an outside perspective. He's really big and tall with broad shoulders. We don't see his face because he keeps his space helmet visor down. Anyway, he angrily questions them about what they thought they were doing in a cargo container and where did they come from and what business they're on, but Elder McRae is tight lipped. Roan, however reveals that they come from a place called Niraya and that they traveled by cargo container because they don't have any money. Valk tells them that even though they illegally stowed away, they probably won't be charged with anything because Centrocor doesn't want them to sue for being put in danger when he jettisoned their pod. I guess tort lawyers are still a thing even in a corporate dystopia. Once Elder McRae establishes that she and Roan are not being detained, they tell Valk to gently caress off and leave as quickly as possible. After McRae and Roan depart, Valk examines the cargo container and decides it's way too clean. There's no videogames or movies on the Nintendo Switch foamsealed to the wall, so he deduces that the only thing the pair had to keep them occupied during the journey was to clean things. Though the book gives an inventory of the container's meager furnishings, cleaning supplies are not among them (perhaps the passengers carry them at all times). It's also left up to the reader to imagine how the passengers managed to keep the place so impressively spotless despite working in the dark. Valk checks the database to learn about Niraya. It is a planet about as far as you can get from Earth and still be in human space, hundreds of light-years away toward the galactic center. Settled during "the Brushfire" as a colony for the followers of some minor religion or other. Centrocor kept a mining colony there. quote:Niraya was dirt poor, so broke it hadn't even finished terraforming operations. Even now, a hundred years after it was settled, it was barely fit for human habitation. Valk gets a ping from the traffic control autonomics informing him the FA.2 is requesting permission to dock. Apparently he can work remotely and still doesn't have anyone covering his shift. Also I thought he'd logged out? And why would this require his attention unless the FA.2 was requesting priority clearance the autonomics couldn't handle? If there was a request for priority clearance, it's not mentioned in the text. Back to Roan and Elder McRae. Vairside is a wretched hive of scum and villainy and there's a bunch of colorful sights and sounds, weird looking people, vice, drugs, noise, neon lights etc etc... Roan is of course spinning around with her arms out drinking it all in while Elder McRae keeps her eyes straight ahead and marches stoically through the whole thing, dragging Roan behind her. They come to a bar called "The Walrus and the Carpenter." A name dripping with symbolic significance I'm sure. Elder McRae tells the maitre d' that they're there to see "Auster Maggs." The maitre d' goes all serious and tells them they've been expected. quote:"This time," the elder said, leaning close, "let me do the talking, all right?" Possibly because she is more imaginative than the author and didn't expect so many cliches. Anyway that's it for chapter 3! Applewhite fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Oct 12, 2020 |
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Oct 12, 2020 02:57
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WeedlordGoku69 posted:Honestly, I don't really hate this? Typos are mine. I'm transcribing the book by hand.
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Oct 12, 2020 02:58
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So far neither Valk nor the narrative text have made any mention of a single coworker of Valk's. Perhaps he has none? Or maybe they're all computers but him.
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Oct 12, 2020 03:01
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It's missing details like the complete absence of any sense that Valk actually works with other people to do a real job that make the novel fall flat for me so far. Why is Valk "left to clean up the mess"? Where is his supervisor? There's brief mention made of "the maintenance staff" but why don't we get to meet one of them bitching him out for making their job harder? There's been a major incident, but nobody seems to care but Valk. His internal monologue spends no time lingering on how he will explain this to anyone in particular beyond some vague consequences with the company itself.
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Oct 12, 2020 03:30
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Chapter Fourquote:When Valk arrived at Vairside's docks, the FA.2 had just set down, the air around its retros still shimmering with heat. The canopy lifted away from the cockpit and revealed the man inside. He wore a heavy suit much like Valk's own but painted with battle flags down the sleeves and legs. Reaching up to his throat the pilot touched a recessed key and his helmet rippled and then dissolved away, melting into vents in the hard collar of the suit. AH AHHH! quote:and Valk knew what that meant—the pilot was an ace, with more than five confirmed kills to his name. Valk used to have a Blue Star AH AHHH! (ok I'll stop) quote:himself, until they took it away. The cryptab confirmed the pilot's name, too. The text jerks Lanoe off for several paragraphs, describing the ace pilot's three hundred year service history at length. Lanoe signed up for the space Navy back when humanity was still confined to a single solar system. He helped put down the Mars rebellion (the Century War, a conflict that claimed 50% of the human race), then the second Mars rebellion (the Short Revolt). quote:By then the first wormholes were open, and new planets around distant stars were being settled. Dozens of new systems were opened up all at once, planets discovered and terraformed and colonized in only a few decades. That had been a wild time (or so Valk had heard—he wouldn't be born for another seventy five years), an era of warlords seizing entire sectors and battles erupting in space light-years away from any front. A time so chaotic that later historians simply called it the Burshfire. Earth—and Lanoe— had fought on the side of the polys, because at the time the big interplanetary corporations were the only powers capable of bringing peace to human space. A band of rebels called "the Establishment" sprang up to oppose the megacorps. They established themselves on a planet called "Sheol," a name I'm sure is also dripping with symbolic significance. Valk was one of the "Establishmentarians" fighting to throw off the yoke of corporate oppression. Valk and Lanoe had even faced each other in a dogfight once. Valk had barely escaped with his life. The establishment ended up losing, and its supporters scattered to the wind. Lanoe resigned his commission and the megacorps began waging war on each other. Lanoe knows Valk, too, recognizing him as "the Blue Devil." But there's no beef between these two old warriors. quote:Lanoe jumped down from the cockpit and strode over to get right in Valk's face. "We were sworn enemies back then." He shot out a hand. "Damned good thing that stupid war is over and we don't have to try to kill each other anymore, huh?" Meanwhile, back at the Walrus and the Carpenter, we get a look at the person Elder McRae and Roan have come to meet. quote:Maggs took his time in the washroom. I tell you what, the Blue Star becomes less impressive as a decoration when the book goes on to name three people who have won it immediately after it is introduced to the reader. Maggs is a fastidious, self-absorbed and somewhat effeminate man. Good money is on him being a bad guy. I also suspect that the ceremonial dirk is meant to evoke Nazi imagery. Elder MacRae and Roan are there to talk business with him. He smarms at them for a bit and the book wastes a page on their little tet a tete, where we learn that he's responsible in some way for Niraya and several other worlds. Anyway he refuses to talk business until after they've eaten. Also we learn Elder McRae it a teetotaler because she has a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. Back to Valk, we get another quick tour of the station. We learn that Centrocor is at war with DaoLink and that the Hexus is a military hub in addition to being a major trade port. Navy personnel have reserved cars on the train and all the space sailors cower in fear when they see Lanoe going by. Valk takes Lanoe to his favorite dive bar. quote:He took Lanoe up a staircase to a door made from an old salvaged pressure hatch. It hung open, one hinge rusted in place, and noise and light blasted out from inside. The place looked packed, mostly with people in space suits. A woman bumps in to Valk, causing his pain to flare up. Lanoe seems to recognize the woman. quote:"Ehta?" Lanoe said. It sounded like a name. It sounded like a name, but it was hard to tell because all names had become nonsense words ever since it had become the future. Ehta doesn't respond and leaves as quickly as possible. quote:"Somebody you know? Valk asked. The damned white pearl kept popping up every time he blinked it away. It's true. He knows enough people that he randomly runs into two old acquaintances in the same day on the same space station. Back to Elder McRae, she is having none of Maggs's smarmy act and presses him about getting help for her planet. Apparently they sent out a distress call. Dozens of people are dead and thousands more are at risk. Maggs feigns concern and pretends that the bureaucracy has kept him in the dark about Niraya's plight. The narrative reveals he is dissembling, and in fact knows more than Elder McRae does about the situation. However, corporate crunched the numbers and decided that whatever disaster was befalling the colony was not worth the money it would take to clean things up, and had already decided the write the whole planet off as a loss. McRae presses the issue and Maggs seems sympathetic. quote:"This is why you have a Sector Warden," Maggs said, keeping his voice low. "To catch exactly these sort of oversights." He sat up. Clasped his hands together in front of him. "I can help." Maggs and McRae stare each other down for a moment. quote:"There is the question of money," he said. I'm full of questions as to why this meeting is taking place in a restaurant and not the Sector Warden's office. Also I wonder how they managed to arrange a meeting at such a precise place and time when Roan and McRae were scheduled to arrive by illicit cargo container with no apparent means of contacting the outside world. "We're sealing ourselves into a shipping container and heading to the Hexus. Please meet us at the Walrus and the Carpenter in twelve days or so. Whenever the cargo ship gets there." Elder McRae seemed to find the restaurant easily enough. Maybe she's familiar with the Hexus from before she became a recovering alcoholic. IDK. Back to Lanoe and Valk. They are swapping old war stories at the bar. Lanoe relates to Valk the story of how Valk's fighter got lit on fire by an anti-vehicle round, but that Valk fought through the pain and completed his mission, blowing up two Navy ships before returning to base. Lanoe was so impressed he wondered if he was fighting on the wrong side. All the Establishmentarian officers got amnesty after the war, but suffered the stigma of being rebels, so Valk was forced to find work as apparently the only space traffic controller on the Hexus. Valk subtly pumps Lanoe for information, turning the conversation to Lanoe's FA.2. Apparently they don't make 'em like they used to and the FA.2 can still outfly any fighter in the Navy. Lanoe loved the FA.2 so much he's flown the same one his entire career, then cashed in his decommissioning bonus to buy it when he retired. quote:"You own that crate?" Valk had never heard of such a thing. Apparently there's no room for sentimentality in the space Navy. You'd think the fighter that had been the only thing the galaxy's greatest flying ace had ever flown for two centuries would have a spot reserved for it in the Smithsonian or something. Also, I'm not sure the author understands how aeronautics works, or how technology works, but I'm pretty sure you can't build a next-gen plane from the scraps of a last-gen plane. Especially in a corporate oligarchy where every piece of military hardware would almost certainly have to be built out of exclusive components that cannot be exchanged between models or generations. Anyway Lanoe explains he's made a few special modifications to the old bird, including a new power plant and a Goblin rotary drive that increases thrust by fifteen percent. It gets him where he's going and is more than good enough for him to do his new job as a civilian escort pilot. Valk admits that this isn't just a friendly conversation and that he wants to know what was going on with the yacht and the chase through the Hexus. Lanoe admits that he's curious about the passengers on the cargo ship for some reason. quote:"I'd like to talk to them." Lanoe said. Valk decides that letting Lanoe talk to the passengers might help unravel more about the mystery of what the passengers are doing at the Hexus. quote:"Let's pay them a visit," he said. Back to Maggs and the Nirayans. Maggs wants to know how the Nirayans will pay for his services. Apparently mercy fleets don't come cheap, and the Nirayans are expected to pay for them out of pocket. McRae produces four plastic chits. quote:Maggs couldn't suppress a tiny intake of breath, not quite a gasp. Each of the chits is worth as much money as the cost of a year's worth of terraforming. McRae reasons that if they don't save the colony, there will be nothing left to terraform anyway. Maggs scoops up the chits and asks the pair if they plan to stay on the Hexus long. Valk is able to track the movement of the Nirayans and is surprised to see that they're dining at one of the most expensive restaurants on the Hexus. He hopes that he can save his job if maybe the pair offer an interesting enough explanation for what is going on so he can put it in his report. Valk and Lanoe travel by miniblimp down the central axis of the habitat cylinder toward where the Nirayans are. From the air we see the interior of the cylinder is split up into hexagonal districts. Valk describes the Nirayans to Lanoe as stuffy religious types. quote:"You'll like them, though. They're just like you—stubborn asses." He says. This seems like an awfully familiar thing for Valk to say. It's not like he and Lanoe are old friends, even if they shared a dogfight once. Nothing in Lanoe's behavior toward Valk suggests he's a stubborn rear end to me. Valk and Lanoe catch up with the Nirayans. Lanoe apologizes for almost killing them and offers to pay their space-ticket back to Niraya, McRae tells him that's not necessary and blah de blah and finally even Valk get's fed up and yells "Stop!" Once he has their attention, he demands to know what's going on. McRae huffily tells Valk that they're there to see the Sector Warden. Valk shows them a hologram of Maggs and asks them if this was the man they'd met. When they answer in the affirmative, Valk tells the pair they're mistaken. Sector Wardens never leave Earth because they're too important. The Nirayans have been had! End of Chapter Four
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Oct 13, 2020 05:19
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So at least we know why the meeting didn't take place at an office, though the logistics of how it was arranged are still a mystery. The reader hasn't yet been told anything about the pace of communication between worlds.
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Oct 13, 2020 05:23
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I neglected to mention that when Valk demands the Nirayans tell him what the heck is going on, he threatens to detain them if they don't. He doesn't threaten to "have them detained" but to detain them himself. Unless this is a bluff (it is not presented as such), the authority of air-traffic controllers is apparently much broader in the future than it is today.
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Oct 13, 2020 05:45
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This novel has the strong vibe of the sorts of dumb sci-fi fiction I wrote as a teenager after reading loads of military SF and other sci-fi of varying quality (from Black Library books to stuff like Elizabeth Moon's Heris Serrano novels, the Dune prequels, basically anything that promised spaceships, lasers and explosions). I'd have eaten it up when I was younger I'm sure.
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Oct 13, 2020 13:39
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"Benzine" is another name for gasoline. So either the space station is a clear yellow/straw colored carcinogen, or the author is just pulling sciency words out of the air like with everything else.
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Oct 16, 2020 00:11
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