RogerBW's Blog

2014 military SF, first of a trilogy. Ben Mason tried to kill himself when the PTSD got too much for him… but instead, They recruited him to go up against an alien invasion that most of humanity doesn't even know about.

And Ochse does at least realise that if you're recruiting your soldiers from suicidal and otherwise broken people you're going to have a lot of work to do to make them back into functioning grunts. That bit is moderately interesting, and certainly an improvement on the generic mil-sf boot camp, even if it's been done much better since by The Light Brigade. But then the aliens arrive in force and smash civilisation, and only one brave PMC is able to fight back…

During the rebuilding process we get lots of name-checks of other mil-SF authors. An author needs a lot of confidence to do this, because on the one hand it's a good signal of "yeah I've read this stuff too", but on the other they always risk reminding the reader that they could be reading those better books instead.

It turns out that school shootings are the result of Alien Influence (even though the scouting phase is meant to be world-wide) which lets Ochse talk about

the capriciousness of a universe that would allow a lone gunman to walk into the school and kill so many innocent children. That this same crime had been replicated in different states over the years made it beyond tragic. It should have been stopped. Some wanted to arm the teachers. Some wanted to post guards at every school. Some wanted to pull their children out and home school them. The only thing everyone could agree on was that they were sure it wouldn't happen to their children.

Is there a possible means of stopping school shootings missing from that list? One that's used in some form by basically every country in the world that isn't the USA? Hmm, I dunno, let me think.

I did find myself wondering where They are getting all this stuff from. This is a private company; they say they offered assistance to national governments, but they weren't prepared to pay enough, so now they're demanding mineral rights and so on in return for saving the world, and after they've fought off the invasion the company will take over (yay capitalism I guess). And yet they've devised powered-armour suits and built thousands of the things; they have apparently unlimited quantities of ammunition and other military hardware…

The aliens have effortlessly crushed Earth's military (off-page) because they constantly emit EMPs, and normal hardening just isn't up to the job. Ochse has some very strange ideas about how EMPs work, but more than that, he has to have his powered-armour troopers able to talk to each other. The answer: ELF through the ground, via boot studs. "But Roger", you ask, "weren't real ELF transmitters many miles long? And even if they could make that work, doesn't Nyquist say that the data rate of a transmission is fundamentally constrained by the frequency?" Oh, that's all right, they have "advanced digital modulation techniques".

And there's a mention of the suits carring "thirty anti-aircraft missiles resting in a left shoulder array". This is called a "Mini-Hydra", and you'd hope so, since thirty actual Hydra 70 FFARs would weigh somewhere between 250 and 500 lb and they're already carrying an XM214 minigun and 1500 rounds for it. (You can shield against EMP if it's important enough. A GShG-7.62, which is purely gas operated, would seem like a better choice, but of course that's a commie gun.) Still, Hydras only have about a 2lb warhead in the original size, so one starts to wonder what the point would be of a smaller one. My guess: Ochse has watched Fang of the Sun: Dougram (or played BattleTech from before 1996) and wants that great big drum on the shoulder of his powered armour like the ones on the Roundfacer (Griffin) and Ironfoot (Thunderbolt).

The B plot could mostly be summed up as

"I'm not going to help you get into her pants. She's even more broken than the rest of us."

but in the end, and in spite of Ochse's best efforts to persuade the reader that the bonds forged in battle are the most intense human relationship and that this is a good thing even if seeing your battle buddies die ultimately turns you suicidal, everything comes down to the "dick-swinging big strong man saves the world on his own when everyone else has failed" fantasy that one would expect to find in modern Baen's barrel-scrapings but is slightly surprised to see from a more reputable publisher. (All right, it was Solaris, an offshoot of Black Library which was itself founded to put out non-game Warhammer stuff, but they do publish Silvia Moreno-Garcia as well as Simon R. Green.)