==[Note: As of 12/03/2023, this will not be published on Amazon since I have been banned from posting reviews for some unknown reason. Once the ban is lifted, assuming it does get lifted, I’ll go back and post this to Amazon.]==
I’ve put off writing this review long enough, but I don’t know why. It’s not a terrible book, just kind of boring and somewhat confusing. We have three main characters, Sam, Liv, and Jason who previously were part of a troop transport ship way back in the Solar System when the war with the Raptors was going hot and heavy. In fact, Liv was to be a “war correspondent”. She had been drafted for that job and was being transported to the front lines by the starship *Tereshkova*. That was until the Raptors attacked.
Prior to the Raptor’s arrival in the Solar System, a ship from the Coalition had arrived and it provided humanity with a lot of A-gen technology in the hopes that humanity could stand up to the Raptors. That helped and the humans of Earth actually defeated the Raptors and chased them off the planet. Somewhere along in this story, Sam, Liv and Jason wound up boarding a Coalition starship which had an AI aboard that they named “Gray”. That was actually the color of the starship, but when talking with the AI, the name still seemed appropriate. The three found out that the Raptors did not like the Gray ship or at least didn’t like anything having to do with the Coalition. So, they managed to get the remaining Raptor starships in the Solar System to chase after them while going through warp gates. They lead these Raptors from galaxy to galaxy but couldn’t actually get rid of them until they found the black hole on the edge of a seemingly deserted system. By whatever you read in the second book, Sam, Liv and Jason aboard Gray, managed to trick the Raptors into falling into the black hole. Poof! They were gone!
Now the trio starts going back to Gray’s home system. Turns out that he’s actually a seed ship, a ship sent out into the void to collect samples of life that had been previously seeded by its predecessors. When it found the trio, something happened that hadn’t previously happened. Gray or the AI that was the ship, decided to meld with the three humans. In doing so, he actually sent his nanites of data into the bodies of these humans. Some were reluctant at first, but Sam as the pilot and Captain of their group had already absorbed some of Gray while piloting the starship. He said that it didn’t hurt and he was able to understand more and more about the universe and what the Coalition was about now that he had some of Gray’s nanites. Soon, the other two were also injected with Gray nanites to the point that Gray, the AI only existed inside the three humans. This was called a melding and something that the Coalition was seeking to do whenever they found a compatible species.
The Coalition was nothing more than super AI’s or self-aware entities that were so far ahead of human understanding that it would be difficult to explain. Yet, they felt they were not complete since they couldn’t feel emotions. So, they wanted a biological species that felt emotions to meld with them so they both could benefit from this new life. The AI in the form of nanites would repair and enhance any life form it occupied. That life form could and probably would exist for a very, very long time. Yet, until the three were found, no other species had been compatible. And time was running out for the Coalition as well as for humanity.
The Raptors were not the only enemy of humanity and the Coalition. There was another that was much more deadly and they were called the Rampage. The Coalition has built amazing Dyson spheres around stars with rings of super metals wrapped around the Dyson sphere. Here the Coalition AI resided, building new seed ships and seeking out previously seeded life forms. Now that the three humans were among the Coalition, they became to understand what they were about. The one thing that stood out the most was that the Coalition were pacifist. They did not directly fight the Rampage unless attacked first and without warning. The Gray ship that Sam, Liv and Jason had traveled in, when through several systems where the Dyson sphere and its rings had been torn apart. This was the results of the Rampage. It was out to eradicate any and all life-forms except itself.
They had also seen destroyed Rampage starships. So they knew that the Rampage could be killed. In this book, that is the planned set forth by the three melded humans, they must attack the Rampage on their home world and hopefully eradicated this threat. To do so, they need to recruit more humans to meld with the Coalition AIs. So, that’s what this book is about. You need to read it to see if they were successful.