2016 SF, fourth of its series. On an archaeological site light years
from Earth, an academic magician makes an interesting discovery… and
is promptly murdered.
Because this isn't, for the most part, a story about the
discovery and its implications. This is a story about a conspiracy of
secrecy, one that seems to have agents everywhere, and one which very
nearly succeeds.
I think that may be one of the things I like about this series. Damian
Montgomery, Hand of Mars and Rune-Wright, is tremendously powerful: he
can, single-handedly, defend a planetary base against kinetic and
nuclear attack from space! But he never feels as though he's getting
a free pass: there's a cost to this power, and even at his most potent
he still needs to be aware of an assassin or a bomb before he can do
anything about them. (So he gets a space marine bodyguard.)
A subtle point here is that the conspiracy probably started off as an
honest thing, temporarily keeping some secrets that would be revealed
when the time was right… but now it's two generations later, and
they've sunk far enough into the end-justifying-means mindset that
there is essentially no limit to the atrocities they're prepared to
commit, or the collateral damage they're prepared to accept, in the
name of keeping the secrets. It's ferociously hard to tell a story of
this sort and keep me engaged, and Stewart convinces me both that the
secret could have been kept this long and that this particular guy
could break it.
Yes, all right, it's a bit of a wrench from the overarching plotline
that we've been seeing in earlier books, but I suspect things will
become clearer as the story progresses. (This does end on a bit of a
cliffhanger, and with many questions unanswered.)
The series so far has been mostly military SF with a bit of a twist,
but this takes it in a different direction – which I suspect will
annoy the people who came for the military SF, though there's still
plenty of action here. There are various technical problems (like the
way certain pieces of tech are explained at length each book), but
there's something about Stewart's writing that keeps me enthusiastic.
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