“Not the Most Romantic Thing” is the fourth of Vaughn’s stories set on the bounty-hunting ship Visigoth. It is the most light-hearted and (despite the title) romantic of the tales. Set much earlier in the timeline than the other stories, it relates Graff and Ell’s first mission together when their relationship was just blossoming. This time the Visigoth is hired to extract tissue samples from a defunct lab on an asteroid scheduled for demolition. Things go sideways when the “tissue samples” give the two men a little more trouble than expected and they run the risk of missing their window to flee before the asteroid gets mulched.

The story is structured as a flashback narrated by the illegally post-human Graff, whose enhancements give him perfect recall. As such, Vaughn doesn’t bother exploiting the story’s built-in countdown clock in order to ratchet up the suspense – Graff has already indicated at the start they will make it through alive, even if readers of the previous stories need no such prompt. The story concludes in the “present”, with the two lovers remarking on that long ago mission with particular attention to a detail that could have given away the secret Graff was (at the time) so terrified of letting out. In this way the story plays as something of a postscript to its tenser, heavier-themed predecessors; a “look where we’re at now” coda to the story so far. It’s a nice addition that works best for readers who have already been following the series, though I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t prefer the author to turn it back up to 11 the next time around.