The Trader Team: Three Phases

The entire career of Nicholas van Rijn's original trade pioneer crew of David Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan begins and ends within The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume II, David Falkayn: Star Trader. Four instalments show just five incidents:

"The Trouble Twisters," Ikrananka

"Day of Burning," Merseia

Satan's World, Satan and the Shenna

"Lodestar," Tametha; Mirkheim

In true future historical style, this sub-series is interrupted by a contemporaneous account of van Rijn lounging on Earth while solving a problem on another planet, Cain:

"The Master Key"

- and by a second narrative recounting yet other events elsewhere in space:

"A Little Knowledge"

The entire career of the original team plus Coya Conyon/Falkayn occurs between one section of the Prologue and the opening chapter of the first Technic History instalment collected in Volume III. Falkayn reminisces about just two scenes from that period:

"...Coya beside him beholding the crooked towers of a city on a planet which did not yet have a human-bestowed name...

"Coya bringing him sandwiches and coffee when he sat far into a nightwatch studying the data readouts on a new world the ship was circling..."

-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 1-291 AT VI, p. 109.

The original team without Coya is reassembled just once and for a different purpose in Mirkheim. And that is our last sight of all these characters.

Between the disbandment of the crew that included Coya and the temporary emergency reassembly of the original crew, Chee Lan had joined another trade pioneer crew so there is another potential series.