2009 military SF, seventh of this ongoing series. An irked senator, a
shaky ally, and a major defeat for the RCN…
Drake continues to recycle incidents from classical-era history
for this series, but he continues to do it well (and I'm not as
well-versed in the subject as he is). The senator had to give up her
high ministerial position to try for the top job, and lost, so now
she's got a lot of work to do to regain her status (and finances); can
she be brought round to the correct (i.e. military) way of looking at
things in the field? When the RCN's forces in the cluster are handed a
major setback by what should have been a peer-level opponent, and the
new local dictator trims his sails to suit the wind, what will Leary
do?
Well, obviously, whip up a force out of nothing, take on a vastly
superior enemy, and hand them utter defeat. I mean, that's what he
does. What keeps the series interesting is not this repetition of
what's fundamentally the same plot, but how he does it; it certainly
helps that this is a setting in which common spacers are expected to
change sides and join up with the force that's just beaten them, quite
possibly crewing the same ships they were fighting in before.
It's also interesting to see Leary posted to a more substantial ship
than the Princess Cecile that's been the usual focus of the books so
far; not so much for any escalation of personal stakes, which are
after all about the same (it doesn't matter how large your ship is if
you're where the missile hits), but to see his tactical thinking, the
consideration of the things that a larger ship (and this ship in
particular) can do that the other one couldn't, and indeed vice versa.
The other strong thread in this book is everybody else, the spacers
and others who've thrown in their lot with Leary, and how they're
developing: this one makes all the stupid mistakes, but only makes
each one once. That one shows a genius for parts of the job that are
hard for most people, but do they have the killer instinct to be a
ship's captain? And so on.
This time there's also a distinct contrast between the ideals that
Cinnabar and the RCN stand for, and the practicalities of what some of
its rich and powerful people get up to when nobody can be bothered to
gainsay them. Yeah, everyone's sure that they'd rather be on this side
than with the space-tyranny of the Alliance (complete with political
officers), but that still leaves plenty of headroom.
All right, I might prefer it if the heroes' plans didn't always come
off. And with the number of names needed, Drake has started using some
from real people (fans, wargamers, etc.), a few of whom I know, and
it's a bit distracting. But this is still an enjoyable series.
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