Admiral Jack Romanoff and his ships, the *Hunter* and *Aries* have headed for the DuPont system to see how deeply the Tardans have taken it over and also to see what the Poseidon Group is doing to the planetary governments. Unfortunately, this particular system has a problem in that there are no planets. It consists of a vast drifiting belt of asteriods around a very bright and dangeours sun. There is so much radiation and heat coming from this sun that it’s almost impossible for anyone to operate inside the system without substantial shielding.
Not able to build enough effective shielding for two battleships, Admiral Romanoff has to concentrate on equipping the spy ship, *Specter* commanded by Lisa Gain. They have a look around the system in stealth mode since the spy ship is quite capable of doing that and find that the Tardans are surprisingly not as active as expected. They do have a huge amount of Locusts in the system and since they aren’t manned, they aren’t effected by the immense radiation. Still, they do pose a problem to Jack and his people if they actually see the *Spector*.
As they cruise around the system attempting to find out just where the Tardans have concentrated their forces, the do find a huge space station which is probably the focal point of the system government, trading and commerce. They also find another smaller space station, but they don’t know exactly what it is being used for. This system is predominately used for mining activities since the asteroids are rich in exotic minerals. That mining activity hasn’t stopped even with the arrival of the Tardans which is kind of surprising.
Anyway, Jack sees two things they must do. One is to find out how the population has accepted the Posiedon Groups takeover and the second is to eliminate the Tardans and their Locusts so they can’t maintain a grip on this system or send reinforcements to the eventual attack of the Solar System and Earth. This is going to be very complicated since they can’t actually engage the Tardans within this system with the Confederation battleships due to their lack of shielding. They have to devise a plan to bring the Locusts out to the system edge, but not in too large a force or even his battleship could be overwhelmed.
As more intell gathering, Jack and a contingent of his people to include Lisa Gain, go aboard the large space station. There that find none other than Patrick Gibbs, the Kingdom of Kastelara spy, who has taken a liking to Lisa. Lisa is still on the fence about her relationship with Patrick but has decided to work with him as their goals are the same. Jack eventually leaves them on the station while he goes back to the *Specter* who is now ran by the Professor and Tina Chen. They take him back to the *Hunter* so he can command the overall activities within the system.
There is a lot going on, but one thing these characters do is have meetings to plan out what they are going to do. It seems like everyone has a perfect plan, eventually, to obtain a goal and those plans seem to work out a little too perfectly. Additionally, I’m getting a little tired of Lisa and her internal “soul searching” about her feelings for Patrick. Patrick is a spy but also a very good assassin, but Lisa doesn’t want to go down that road although she’s already killed people when it was necessary.
I think this series is coming to an end some where soon. They now head to Earth to defend it from the Tardans and see if the Posiedon Group has made any headway there. Once this is all done, they still need to get back to their original part of the galaxy and then get ready for the Kingdom of Kastelara to invade. That should/could be a whole new series.
More will come in book 16, “Operation Endgame”, available for pre-order and availabe for purchase o/a 10 November 2024.