2014 military SF, tenth of this ongoing series. A variety of missions,
well outside the scope of anything official, brings Daniel and crew to
a planet in rebellion.
All right, to a certain extent this series is an exercise in
shaking up the pieces and seeing where they land this time. Adele's
boss, in charge of RCN Intelligence, has a failson who's turned up
again claiming to be a reformed character, but wanting help to go
treasure-hunting on a world with an active insurrection. Meanwhile
Daniel's sister is being blackmailed by someone on the other side of
that insurrection.
Of course the team will end up giving all the good guys (and even some
of the neutral guys) what they want, while making sure the bad guys
don't profit from their badness, but a lot of the fun here is seeing
just how they do it. The military action has shifted from the
space-navy emphasis of earlier books to small-unit tactics, and while
this is a thing that space navy (and wet navy) books in general tend
to do (if they don't just escalate to bigger and bigger battles) I
don't think it strikes a false note here; it's always been a
signifiant component in the series, and after all there is now a
tenuous peace between Cinnabar and the Alliance. (And once more
there's a concern that if the RCN gets involved on one side, the
Alliance will have to get involved on the other, the war will restart,
and both empires will destroy themselves trying to win it. Although
this isn't a repetition of the plots from recent books, several of the
same large-scale considerations remain in play.)
For me the most enjoyable element of the book was the way Leary and
Mundy were able to set things up for everyone to end up better off
than if they'd carried on and won the fighting. Drake often seems to
have the attitude that making the right side win quickly is the best
that can be managed in this imperfect world, and it's refreshing to
see him writing a situation with a bit of lateral thinking leading to
a more positive outcome.
There's a little development for some of the secondary characters,
which I always appreciate, and of course a lot of business as usual,
but this book left me with a rather more positive impression than the
last few.
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