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Something that has always bugged me was how convoluted some of the reasoning was in Volume 1 regarding Hamron’s attack on the initial freighter. I wanted Roka’s crew to think something was odd about the attack, so I came up with these clues like he hit the ship harder than need be, he came in from an odd hatch, and he killed the crew.

While all that does still serve the narrative, at the time I was just trying to convey that Hamron was doing something very unusual for a pirate raid. Retroactively, I came up with the much simpler idea that he could have just had a bag of explosives with him that he was in the process of attaching to all the canisters. That would’ve very quickly and much more simply shown that he was not there to steal the goods, as expected.

Anyway, I liked that idea and found a way to incorporate it here. I did however have to double-check the sequence from Volume 1 to make sure the bag could be included and there was never a panel where it could not be accounted for!

This sequence was the second of three that I debated ending the book on. The first option was the previous scene with Grissom working with the police to bring down Roka, which I thought would have been a good reveal to end on. But there was also this scene which wraps up the main crew storyline and sets up the next volume, which also would have been a good ender for Volume 3. But ultimately, I went with option 3 to end the story, which will bring us back to Hiura’s crew one last time…