2005 military SF, fourth of this ongoing series. With riots breaking
out after an officer who lethally suppressed a mutiny is found not
guilty at his court-martial, Daniel Leary ends up serving under him.
This is unlikely to end well.
The outline follows the standard pattern for the series: Leary's
sent off on a hard mission with superiors who dislike him, and ends up
fighting against an unsuspected Alliance operation at ridiculous odds,
but prevails through his own skill and the trust and skill of his crew
and other loyalists. Which is fine; it's not a bad pattern. Where it
would become dull would be if the details that distinguish this book
from what's gone before became repetitious, and that's not the case.
Each world, from would-be glittering civilisation to backwater
rubbish, feels fresh and new, and if some of the secondary characters
fall easily into stereotype, they still have distinctive
characteristics, and every death feels like a loss.
Mundy can still break into any computer anywhere, but this time her
skills are a bit less blatantly tied to whatever the plot needs at
that moment; they feel like another tool in the arsenal of the good
guys rather than the author's way of getting out of a tricky
situation. The viewpoint seems more with her than with Leary, which
works for the reader (she doesn't have the immediate familiarity with
all things spacey that he does, so has to think them out or have them
explained) as well as providing an interesting flavour to events.
There's some serious introspection here, too: Leary develops a plan
that's probably suicidal, but which he has a better chance of pulling
off than anyone else. Then his captain decides to take it over, and
will almost certainly die doing it. Obviously Leary can't argue: but
he knew this was a possibility, so did he do a sufficiently good job
of making things clear that the captain was making a genuinely
informed decision?
But none of this would work without a basic facility in storytelling
and writing, and that's here too. Drake knows what he's doing, and
does it.
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