2019 SF/romance, last in the Class 5 series. Ellie Masters wakes up in
an abandoned installation. But someone out there is talking to her…
While the series overall has tended to move into the larger
political picture, this book is back to the immediate: a Tecran ship
approaches the base for resupply, a Grihan ship in pursuit of it also
arrives, and there's a constant runaround of who's where and what
resources they have. There are plenty of sources of tension: the base
contains materials looted by the Tecran from alien worlds, some of
which may turn out to be Ultimate Weapons; meanwhile, is the Tecran
captain operating on his own knowing his government has surrendered,
or are they secretly backing him and potentially sending off-the-books
reinforcements? There's some naïveté on the part of the Grih, but it's
in keeping with the way they've been portrayed before in the series.
Some editions of this book have a Bonus Epilogue (or, as the ePub I
was supplied would have it, a "Bonus Epilgoue") which can also be
obtained by joining the author's announcement list. This is
functionally a separate novella to cap off the series: it gets all the
kidnapped women (and Grihan partners, and AIs) together in one place,
it sorts out some of the political dangling threads, and it deals with
one last bit of enemy action.
All right, it doesn't deal with several of the big points I
considered important (like how the UC, a United Nations-alike, is
going to get the Tecran population back on side after its corrupt
government has been propagandising about the Evil UC Coming to Take
Over)—but this series is SF/romance, rather than romantic-flavoured
SF, and I think it's functionally a genre convention that things which
don't contribute directly to the story of the main couple don't get
much word count.
Overall, it's enjoyable, but very slight by both SF standards (no
watcher of Star Trek or Firefly would feel confused by anything
here) and romance standards (there are minimal complications in the
path of True Love).