I read the first to books in this series sometime ago and then kind of forgot about it. At that time, I knew there would be a third book, but there was no announcement of when, so I moved on. Then I found this third and not necessarily final book in the series. It is a very enjoyable read in that Jake Taylor accomplishes what he set out to do so long ago on Gehenna, the portal world where he was sent to die.
As you read in the first two books, Jake is now not a normal human in the sense that he has been surgically altered into a superhuman. He and about 10,000 of his fellow soldiers were subject to UNGov’s experiment to make them more lethal against the Machines, a.k.a. the Tegeri Then, Jake was captured by the Tejeri and told he truth. Their enemy for the last thirty-years wasn’t really their enemy at all. They were a peace-loving race of aliens who had come to Earth to make friends and share their advanced technology. UNGov saw this as a threat to their power so they started a vicious lie about the Machines and that started a terrible war.
UNGov is an oppressive government where most of the Earth’s people live in poor to very poor conditions while the political elite live in unthinkable luxury. They have rounded up all the dissidents and sent them through various Portal worlds to act as an army against the Machines. These people were lied to and many thousands have died for no reason. Jake Taylor has learned the truth and has spread that truth throughout the army on Gehenna. They now see Jake Taylor as their leader of the Army of Liberation (AOL).
Jake sent several of his key Generals to other portal worlds in hopes of convincing those armies to stop fighting and join his revolution. He intends to return to Earth and destroy UNGov. This book is about that struggle and its culmination.
The author does a lot of writing through the journals of the main characters. You will read where Jake talks about things that have happened and his regrets on they way they happened, but also the necessity. He is losing his friends in this struggle although they would do anything to help his cause. It’s frightening to realize that people do tend to believe what they are told by their government and few try to find out if it’s true or not. On this Earth, UNGov controls all the media so their message is the ONLY message that goes out to the population. That’s not much different on our Earth except we have the news media controlling what we see and hear and who knows what is true!
Ok, so even though Jake does what he set out to do, barely, there is a warning from the Tegeri about an unknown darkness that will soon be falling over this galaxy and it will take both the Tegeri and Humans to stand and defeat this terrible new enemy. That’s why the Tegeri first contacted humanity. They were in hopes of forming an alliance against the coming dark. It has taken them longer than they thought to get the humans to understand they are not the enemy and now that Jake Taylor is in charge, maybe the Tegeri and Humans have a chance. We’ll see in the next book.