Well, this book is beginning to read like most of my other military sci-fi books in that we now have an enemy to focus on. Instead of mindless drones that the Confederation fought against in the last war, we now know there is an alien race behind them. We’re also soon going to find out not only who they are, but why they are attacking the Confederation planets.
These revelations don’t come easy. Commodore Jack Romanoff and his huge Confederation starship the Delta Orionis (a.k.a. Hunter) is orbiting above the planet New Copenhagen attempting to make major repairs and clear the planet of the Locust incursion. In the past war, some two-hundred years ago, the Locust didn’t send down troops to the planets surface. In fact, all the past Confederation saw were millions of deadly drone ships that swarm from Locust motherships. They practically wiped out Confederation forces in that war until a final battle that saw the Confederation victorious when the Delta Orionis was put to the task. There were twelve of this super battleships used to end that war, but they had fallen to the march of time. Most had been put in mothballs in a floating depot now called “Port Royal”.
Port Royal was surprisingly occupied by an interesting group of self-governing smuggler, thieves, malcontents and well, criminals. When the Hunter showed up at Port Royal, they didn’t know whether they would have to fight or be able to access the facilities and make repairs needed to get the Hunter back into the fight. Fortunately, the latter happened and the Hunter went back out again to defend New Copenhagen. But, doing so has once again, crippled the Hunter, her direct independent quantum drive was damaged in battle and the parts to the warp gate back to Port Royal were also destroyed.
So, Commodore Romanoff finds himself unable to repair the Hunter. He can’t even move his ship a great distance, but during the previous battle they were able to capture the first aliens that were behind these Locust drone attacks. These aliens were mostly humanoid in appearance, but had a very different language. Romanoff had to find a person smart enough to build some kind of language interpreter or at least program a computer to do so. He did find a person, Lisa Gane, a hacker from New Copenhagen who was a “hacker” and built a rudimentary device that allowed for limited conversations.
During one session with the original alien captives, another group was brought in but these appeared to be the military side. Unfortunately, a scuffle broke out during the interrogations and Lisa was shot as was one of the alien scientist by the name of Regex. What happened next is something you’ll have to read about.
So, now we know more about who and what we’re fighting. It’s just that unless the Hunter gets back to Port Royal, they won’t stand much of a chance in the next encounter. And that is coming soon. A new fleet of alien colony ships are soon coming and with them is a power alien military fleet. Seems like the fighting has just started.
This is a good series, but I don’t know how the Confederation expects to fend off an entire alien civilization with just one ship. It’s hard to believe that every other single Confederation military starship is gone. Nobody throws their entire fleet into one battle. But that’s the situation we face. Hopefully we’ll get some more insight into how Commodore Romanoff expects to defend New Copenhagen and the Confederation in book 5, “Command Authority” available as pre-order for 10/16/2022.