It’s always satisfying when a conversation or argument feels organic but hits a lot of different but necessary beats. In this case, I wanted this scene to 1) cover the different positions of Roka and Ril vs the rest of the crew, 2) reiterate the conflict of just delivering the goods vs considering the morality of it, 3) continue to address the mystery of Sky’s origin & abilities, 4) echo the earlier scene with Ril about the burden of being a decision-maker, and 5) end with Roka voicing quite clearly how he truly feels about his life.
I really like how this scene puts Roka in a new light that I find very different from other sci-fi captains. I feel like Han Solo and Mal Reynolds (Firefly) had a lot of swagger about how being a captain let them live lives on their own terms. Their ships were their sources of freedom, and they consequently had a lot of affection for those ships. With Roka, the Brimia has become a cage. While it does give him an ability to chart his own course, it’s not a course he wants for himself, and I like that it makes him a different captain than what I’m used to seeing.
From what we’ve seen as readers Roka certainly appeared to be that usual sci-fi captain. I’m thinking about the way he broke up the card game, the bluffing, the who’s freighter is this exchange and the escape pod move. Seems like the current events and confrontations with his past brought something to the surface. Shattered a mask perhaps?
I had to look back at the cover of chapter one from this volume after reading your commentary.
Who/what’s next?
I definitely still wanted to keep Roka fun and likeable, so he does have his moments of levity throughout. But from the beginning, I also tried to write him with an air of melancholy as well, knowing where I’d be going with him. Glad to hear people found him entertaining as I would’ve hated for him to be a downer all the time!
I’m half expecting the tension to be broken next page when someone realises the ship’s been hurtling through the cosmos with no shields, no engines and no one at the controls just in time for the Brimia to plough through the wall of a Space Ikea or something. …or two astronauts manhandling a huge pane of space glass if you prefer the classics.
ACK!! No engines, but yes, momentum would still keep the ship moving forward. ACK! Let’s say when engines are unexpectedly crippled, the ship automatically fires thrusters to decelerate and come to a stop, to avoid just such a catastrophe. So it is dead in space and not moving forward. Gotta protect those Spaces Ikeas and their Blomkerblorgenstaag shelving systems.
The thing is that in space, there’s no such thing as a “stop”. You literally cannot be immobile in space, because there is no universal frame of reference. Closest approximation would be a stable stationary orbit around the locally-strongest gravity well, but that’s not really something that can be done easily and quickly and automatically.
Fortunately, space is also extremely big. Like, astronomically large. That makes risks of collisions rather small, except when you do get into those crowded hotspots like the lower orbital layers of a busy planet. (Space is in fact so big that the first thing every sci-fi setting does is shrink it by several orders of magnitude to allow for situations that are more comparable to seafaring than to actual spacefaring.)