I was really, really ready to finish reading this book. I’m kind of surprised I did finish it, but Peter Bostrom has written other very good books so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I shouldn’t have. This would make a better comic book than a science fiction book. It almost reads like a comic book and well, that’s where the main character is getting all his lines and actions.
This is about a maintenance guy turned semi-hero although I don’t know if anybody cares. He’s on one of the moons of Pluto called Nix and he’s a crew of a part of a crew of five or six people that are responsible for whatever is on this tiny moon. For some reason, an unknown enemy decides to open a worm-hole or portal to this tiny moon and start sending troops through. And again, for some reason, there are soldiers patrolling around this maintenance facility. They get attacked and killed rather easily buy the invading soldiers which causes Col Hiller and Private Walker to investigate their failure to report in. Col. Hiller is a war hero and some what of an idol of Private Walker. Why a Colonel and a Private went to investigate a possible perimeter breach is beyond me.
Anyway, they find the enemy and Col Hiller and Private Walker attack. The attack doesn’t go to well initially until Private Walker finds some gem stones that were attached to the enemy weapons and clothes. When picking up these stones, he notices that they start glowing and he finds he has some kind of magical power which he can now project like using an invisible weapon.
So from that point on, Private Walker, not Colonel Hiller becomes a comic book super hero fighting hundreds, if not thousands of bad guys all over this moon and on Pluto. There is some humor added to all of this as if the story was supposed to be told with “tongue-in-cheek”, but it didn’t seem to come across too well. Most of it was pretty juvenile and not my kind of reading.
I won’t be reading the next book in this series!