Hmm.
Looking back, I feel like I still don't understand the importance of any of the characters. There are more useless characters, though, and what I mean by this is - subjectively, of course - their relative lack of intersection with other characters. That is, the world of the Free Lunch is consolidated in real time, and very little of it gets out into the rest of the perceived world (I mean, the world that I spend time reading about).
I suppose that might be what most worlds might be like. This sort of thinking is gone along in "If a tree falls..."
I like, in hindsight, that the Free Lunch's destruction indicates the cavalier treatment a mercenary ship - or any ship, or individual - might be given when it's engaged in double-crossing somewhat unintentionally as a result of having no idea wtf its employers really want from it, in part because its employers are engaged in double-crossing themselves (that is, Warden is intentionally trying to double-cross Holt, Hashi IIRC is at least cursorily interested in not double-crossing Warden but does not actually know what Warden wants, and incidentally believes him to be much less ambitious than he is, therefore, he is double-crossing Warden at times).
(A bit of a forward apology/justification, which should address why I am posting the above with a weak memory of what I'm posting about):
(It's possible this assertion isn't supported at all by the book, but IIRC the Free Lunch engages in shooting down an Amnion ship, or Soar, which it had been operating in alliance with prior, because its mission was to capture when they had decided to kill, or vice versa. I suspect that the mechanisms which bring about this attack were intentionally made to resemble other decisions in which people end up destroying themselves in the process of, for lack of a better way of putting it, advancing the plot. I think one could get some mileage out of saying they suffer from symptoms resembling a less exaggerated gap sickness from an objective point of view.)
(Nick, in particular, I think has a tenaciously horrible and stupid destructive urge that makes him repulsive - I think what makes me dislike him in comparison to Morn and Angus isn't even the actions and backstory that gives him a relative presence or lack of justification, but that he goes about his behavior amongst the support of an apparently competent crew. Incidentally, he somewhat resembles Jack Vance's Kirth Gersen of The Demon Princes, though probably also a fair number of other pulp sci-fi heroes?)
Of course, that this gap in worlds has some relation to gap sickness is, IIRC, explicitly stated in the books, and to be honest I mostly find this aspect more interesting in terms of the effect of the communication devices than the fast transit of people provided by the gap drive - in terms of effects on personality...
So in comparison, Free Lunch's apparent lack of conflict (I mean superficially, looking back) seems rather ideal. What remains on my mind is whether that lack of internal conflict had a role in making them a particularly effective mercenary from the perspective of others (Hashi in this case, but presumably they took other jobs). I still don't understand why they are
particularly important compared to, say, the ship that Angus "sold" to the Amnion, the ship that failed to go after him (crewed by a later kaze), the crew of the ship that Morn was on, etc.
I can speculate about the nature of the extended cast of the Gap books, and it's good to have reminders that they exist, but if the core cast isn't getting much information about them, AND we more or less side with the inevitability of the overall plot (as we aren't actors in it
), it's hard to take their interesting attributes as having an important impact on the overall story.
OK, so I forgot why I was making this post, let me get back to the crux of the question,
I still got NO clue why you folks are hammering on about cousin sex, unless it's something about how incest makes even better mercenaries/soldiers/ship crew than the homoerotic approach, or is just less complicated than a crew of misfits, survivor misfits (Trumpet), Military-Police, Borg (Borg - I mean Amnion), or corporates (Space-Fort Holt).
I gotta buy the first one or two Gap books again so I can read through and develop my own opinion.