Fifth of a six-book series. In the distant future, a long-frozen
space-navy captain tries to lead his fleet home. Spoilers will follow.
A recovery from the slump that hit books three and four; we're
taking a run up to the finish line now, and the middle volume blues
are behind us. Plenty of space battle, though kept reasonably short,
and some of the bad guys have finally started learning from their
previous tactical errors. Some surface fighting too, and the problem
of how to deal with senior officers in a PoW camp who may have been
collaborating with the enemy just a shade too much.
There's more consideration of supply, as the fleet auxiliaries'
manufacturing capacity can't keep up with demand when the fleet isn't
stopping to loot raw materials from each world it passes.
The political strife within the fleet is wrapped up neatly and
quickly, perhaps too much so. So's the problem of the potentially
explosive hypernet gates: oh, here's a hardware patch that can be
trivially manufactured and applied. On the other hand, we get very
little additional information on the mysterious aliens; I imagine
that's being saved for book six, because the fleet does get back to
Alliance space at the end of this book.
Still not much character development, though distinctly more than
previous books have managed, and one of my favourite NPCs gets killed.
On the other hand, the plan to dive back into the hypernet system
(knowing that the mysterious aliens can redirect or lose ships from it
at will) seems… foolhardy. Still, we'll see what happens.
Followed by Victorious.
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