"For a word to be spoken," says one of Ursula Le Guin's characters, "there must be silence, before and after." Not that any of my rubbish deserves comparison with Ursula Le Guin, except on the very basic level of "Ursula Le Guin writes a lot better." But there's a point there, which I've sort of taken. Everything comes to an end.
This applies to recurring villains, even. The affably evil Kalevar Thrang would just get boring if he never stopped trying to take over the galaxy, wouldn't he? Useful though he is from a reusing-things point of view, eventually even I have to make the effort and think up a new antagonist.
I decided, for this one, to go back to the team that originally went up against Thrang - Tylha, Pexlini, and Heizis. It seemed appropriate, since all three had a personal history with him - and he is the kind of person who takes things personally. It also gave me a chance to wrap up another, unrelated, character arc... and to tidy up a few loose ends in the long-running background as a whole. A few subsidiary characters, locations and other details get neatly disposed of in this one.
I make no apologies for Pexlini, by the way. I find it amusing to have this scruffy little distaff Neelix crashing around doing the James Bond stuff. This story contains what seem to be the Three Obligatory Scenes in any story involving Pex - the bit where she can't work the log recorder, the bit where she gets a minor scalp wound, the bit where she writes off a shuttlecraft. It is positively as formal as a Jacobean revenge drama, this one, although possibly a bit more messy.
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