This was a surprising book. I don’t read previews of books I choose, just look at the covers and if they look decent, I’ll read the book. Most of the time I do exceptionally well since there are a lot of great military science fiction authors. Rachel Aukes has hit that level yet. She’s a good author, but I’m a male chauvinist so I don’t really care for female lead characters.
Our main character is Olivia Ann Reyes. She’s a Youtuber/Influncer in that she makes “news” videos that reach out to her sixty-two million followers. This is not what she had trained to do, she previously was a computer nerd but got involved in filming or vidography and found out that she projects a favorable persona to get people interested in what she has to say. Currently, she is covering a “peaceful” protest until it wasn’t peaceful any more.
She saw the riot coming and decided to leave the area quickly before the police started arriving. Unfortunately, she started too late. A cop stopped her and put her in handcuffs even though he mentioned that he was a fan of her broadcasts. Still, he was ordered by his boss to bring her in. Olivia, a.k.a., Liv didn’t know why someone would pick her out for arrest just because she was doing her job. Well, that job was being paid for by the Voices of Peace Front which had just caused the riot.
So, she gets to the police station and meets with not “the boss”, but someone representing the Aegis Group. See, humanity is at war with the Raptors. These are alien bird-like reptiles that seemed to have come out of know where invading the Solar System several years ago. Humanity had been fighting against this invasion and not making much headway. It’s also curious that humanity had been given some advanced technical knowlege at about the same time as the Raptors started attacking. We had put that tech to good use and were using it to fight back. But, the Raptors had the same tech, only more of it. They seemed to be winning but they hadn’t yet attacked as far in as Earth.
While the Space Corps was the military forces doing the bulk of the fighting, they had to be augumented by Private Military Contractors (PMCs). One of these was the Aegis Group which was now telling Liv that she had two choices. One was to go to prison for being part of a riot against the governement, a felony, or two, she could join the Aegis Group and ship out with the other conscripts only she would go as a war correspondent. She knew that conscripts sent into this war didn’t last very long, but she also knew she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life in prison.
She joined the Aegis Group and went to join the troop transport named *Tereshkova*. It was a transport now configured to carry troops in stasis out to Forward Operating Base Enceladus. This base was on a tiny moon of Staurn by the same name. Liv didn’t know what to expect at all. She assumed she’d be placed on the ship in a stasis pod and awake some four-months later. At least she wouldn’t have to make videos all during the four months on what could be a boring trip if it wasn’t for the fact that the Raptors could attack at any time. They hadn’t been sighted inside Saturn’s orbit yet so maybe this would be an easy trip.
But things have a way of changing and quickly. Liv found out she wouldn’t be put into stasis, but kept awake with the flight crew. She was to be something of a VIP but her accomodations were anything but special. She also soon came to realize that this trip wasn’t going to be a routine and uneventful as everyone had hoped. The war wasn’t going well for humanity and the Raptors weren’t as dumb as everyone thought. Life was going to change and change rapidly for Liv. She just hoped that she could continue to live, but that didn’t look like a great option or choice once the ship got going towards Enceladus.
This is an exciting book to read. LIv soon meets O.T.I.S., the ship’s primary computer for all flight and crew support. OTIS has a strange relationship with the crew in that they don’t or won’t trust it to do everything even though it could. OTIS is primarily concerned with the ship’s functions and not so much about the humans on-board. Liv has to find something to do for the next four months but that isn’t a big problem since things start to go haywire pretty quickly after launch.
We get pretty far in this book, much further than I thought we would, but there’s more to come in book 2, “Besiged”, now available on Amazon. I’ve got it on my reading list even if the lead character is a female!