2004 SF, second in a five-book series. Kylara Vatta survived her first
solo trading venture, but now someone's taking on the family firm. UK
vt Moving Target.
This reminds me perversely of the difference between Grimspace
and Wanderlust: the first book in the series was a fast-moving
stand-alone tale to get me hooked on the universe and the characters,
while the second is all about setup and establishing the players for
the remainder of the series. And indeed removing players who were in
the first book: most of the senior members of Vatta Transport are
killed off in the opening pages, and their pull with their own
planetary government mysteriously evaporates at the same time as they
suddenly lose all reputation elsewhere. And someone seems to have
taken out the FTL communications.
There are other major wrenches in direction: the space navy that Ky
had been training for is suddenly only a minor part of the homeworld's
military forces, and they make much more extensive use of privateers,
but nobody knew about it. Even people who were high up on the secret
information ladder. Well, more specifically, anyone who would
inevitably have mentioned it last book didn't know, while people who
might have kept it quiet mysteriously now did know… it reeks of
authorial artifice, of a world-building decision made for the first
book that needs to be reversed now that it's the first of a series.
(As far as I know it was always planned to be the first of a series,
though, which is just odd.)
Characters are reasonably developed. Ky still makes mistakes even
though she is clearly better than everyone else because she is the
heroine of the series, and she's fighting with her reaction to
killing: she's found that she enjoys it, which she knows is Not Right.
Some new family members are just as tied down by their reputations as
Ky was during the first book. The horrid old aunt who survives the
attack turns out to have been Space
Violette Szabo in the
last war.
On the other hand the plot is looking distinctly shaky. A certain
technical resource thought to be in short supply is now freely
available to the bad guys. A shop picked at random as a hiding place
turns out to contain the one person in civilised space who could be
really helpful. The new faces don't seem to have much psychological
depth yet. Every single public figure in a position to make Ky's life
worse (police, station administrators, etc.) immediately does so,
making the worst possible assumptions about her. Even though assassins
are known to be everywhere, a stowaway is brought onto the crew after
a few minutes' chat. The attack on the Vatta trading empire is huge,
apparently taking on every ship and the headquarters at the same time,
but nobody seems to be counting up the presumably limited number of
entities that would have the resources to fund such a thing.
On the third hand, after a slowish start, there's a really good
battle in space towards the end.
I still enjoyed it, but it went in directions that seemed less
interesting than those promised by the first volume. Followed by
Engaging the Enemy.
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