2011 military SF novella, a later insertion into the Kris Longknife
series. After the triumph of the Battle of Wardhaven, Kris and crew go
out to train allied fast patrol boat commanders.
This feels like procedural spackle. The fast patrol boats of
Defiant are explicitly renamed fast attack boats, which I bet is
what they got accidentally called in the following novels. The hints
of the beginnings of a romance between Kris and her secret service
agent Jack Montoya are here ladled on with a spoon – and Jack is
carefully drafted into the Marines so that he can continue as Kris's
bodyguard even while she's on duty away from Wardhaven. But most
importantly, the next book Resolute isn't going to open with Kris on
allied-navy training duty, and this novella's job is to explain why
that's the case.
This ends up coming over as a "B story" cut from the following novel,
much as the "space Hawaii" sequence could have been cut from
Defiant; that it's a later insertion seems odd. Are there huge
narrative gaps between the two novels that were crying out to be
bridged and explained? Or is it just that the fans want more details,
more backstory, more things defined exactly thus and so?
Followed by Resolute.
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