Pretty good series after three books, but couldn’t they have come up with a better title for this one? “Fangs Out”, what does that actually mean? I don’t know, but it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the story.
Now that I got that out of the way, let me tell you something you probably already know. The humans are fighting on the wrong side! Yeah, the Overlords are in a war with the Kardons, a vicious race of meat eaters that supposedly eat humans, other aliens and even their own kind. You do not want to be captured by the Kardons. or so we’re told by the Overlords. But, we humans have never seen a Kardon. We think we’ve seen an Overlord, but they look exactly like us, in fact, they look like some of us way, way too much! So there definitely is doubt among the humans as to why we’re fighting the Overlords war.
Right in the middle of this is Blue Blaster Squadron, commanded by Commander Lance Baker with Commander Sofia Jimenez as his XO. They have just been ordered to prepare to go into battle in the Tau Ceti where a massive invasion by the Kardons is underway. Not only must this invasion force be repelled, but they also can’t let the Kardons take the inhabited planet. So, with the barest amount of intel about this operation, the humans prepare their carrier Enterprise which has to be towed to Tau Ceti since we don’t have the technology to build a jump engine that will jump through space that far. Aboard her will be the Blue Blaster Squadron plus two other squadrons, the Panda Bears and the Pukin’ Dogs (who makes up these names?).
Well, the battle doesn’t go as well as hoped. The Overlords have a certain way of fighting and they fight that way every single time. They seem to direct all of their fighters and ships to do one simple thing and that’s to confront the enemy head on until there are no more enemy. It’s believed that the Overlords have a mind control ability over the aliens that they bring to the fight. They almost were successful in controlling the humans except for the fact some of the human starfighters have SIs (Synthetic Intelligences). These SIs managed to block the Overlords control programs and keep that software from infecting the brains of their human pilots. They managed to fix all the human pilots before the battle started so it was of some surprise when the humans didn’t react as the Overlords expected them to.
There is no way humanity is going to allow an alien to control their thoughts and actions. But that is exactly how the Overlords seem to operate. Still, the humans have to tread carefully since strongly objecting to anything the Overlords want could result in Earth being sterilized by the Overlords. They had done that to other “uncooperative” alien civilizations. So, the combined forces of humans and Overlords did have some success against the Kardons except for one major incident. Commander Lance Baker was shot down over the fourth planet in Tau Ceti!
Sofia was also shot down, but rescued immediately. Still, Lance finds himself in a swamp thinking he saw Sofia just be killed and it looks like he’ll be next. Not only is the swamp infested with all sorts of bugs and snakes, but it has lizards with hungry stares all over the place. Then his luck really runs out when he’s drawn the attention of a Kardon pilot whom he just shot down. So, now a human might get to see what a Kardon looks like, but will he live to tell anyone about it?
Like I said, pretty good story so far. The humans are a little dense on figuring out who the good guys are, but they’re getting a better idea in each story. Hopefully, in book 4, “Far and Away”, we’ll get on the right side of this war, if there is such a side!