2015 SF, sequel to Lines of Departure. The alien Lankies have moved
into the solar system, and a random assortment of ship crews from the
two previously-warring powers must decide what to do next.
The book begins where Lines of Departure left off; it's easy
enough for the new reader to get up to speed on the basic space-navy
stuff, but our hero's background and motivations are largely
un-mentioned. He wants to stay alive and get back to his girlfriend in
time for their wedding date; that's about it, and he's even more of a
cipher than he was in the earlier books.
On the other hand the invincible alien menace of the Lankies seems
strangely inconsistent. In the ground action that opens the book,
they're without their usual orbital support and, for unknown but
possibly related reasons, are very easy to kill; towards the end,
they're still without orbital support but are just as tough as usual,
and nobody wonders why. Nobody thinks of repeating the trick of
ramming their ships with a robot freighter that capped the previous
book, though there are some heroic sacrifices because, well, you need
heroic sacrifices, right?
The experienced mil-sf reader will note that, although Kloos talks a
good fight, his heart still isn't in the crunchy bits. He doesn't seem
to realise that a kinetic strike from orbit will be hypersonic:
The kinetic warheads from the Avenger announce their arrival with
an unearthly ripping sound overhead. Then the first warhead strikes
the ground three kilometers away, at the entrance of the ravine.
There's a blinding flash in the distance, and a few seconds later,
an earth-shattering bang shakes the ground so violently that I have
to regain my footing
and has continuing problems distinguishing acceleration from velocity:
A ship keeps the forward momentum it had when it entered the bubble,
and Colonel Campbell hit the node at four gravities of acceleration
with the fusion engines going at flank speed. When we pop out of the
bubble on the solar system side in a few minutes, we'll be shooting
out of the node like a ship-to-ship missile.
But more seriously, with a military force that may as far as it knows
be all that's left of humanity, there are two people left who can do
the "combat controller" job, and they're both sent into the same
action – aboard the same fragile dropship? Um. I really don't think
so.
There are lots of unanswered questions which nobody seems to be
bothered enough to look into; yeah, our hero is a grunt rather than a
researcher, but he's weirdly incurious about things that might kill
him if they don't get solved.
I'm talking about the tech because there isn't really a lot of
characterisation here. There's still cynicism about the military power
structure, and still months of boredom and moments of terror, but
really we barely get a feel for the people as people at all. This
series has got down to the guilty-fun level of a BattleTech novel or
Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series: sure, I can enjoy them by
suppressing my critical faculties, but I don't like having to do that,
and for the most part they just aren't terribly good. And this book
isn't terribly good either, even compared with the previous two
volumes; the occasional interesting bits of commentary about things
like the state of Earth are pretty much gone, in favour of more boom.
To be followed by Chains of Command, though I probably won't bother.
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