Wow! It’s been almost a year since I read the first book in this series, “Battleground”, so it was something of a first task to figure out what this series was supposed to be about. In the first book, we read about the Federation hero, Admiral Jackson Wolfe, and how he couldn’t stop the Eastern Star Alliance villain, Admiral Vadim Kohl, from destroying the planet Odmena. Of course Kohl will say it was all a mistake and he meant for those antimatter bombs to hit Jackson Wolf’s starship, but they did miss and billions were killed on the planet. Now Jackson Wolfe has sworn to bring Kohl to justice for his war crimes (although there isn’t actually a declared war).
Behind all of this is an uneasy tension between Federation and Alliance which could turn into an all out war with just the right spark. The Federation is pretty much devastated with the recent Phage War and the Alliance certainly has an advantage in starships, but not technology. So, for now it’s peace, but something or someone else is becoming a player. They are making moves within both the Federation and the Alliance that neither political or military leadership understand. The Federation find itself rife with turncoats that a causing great confusion within it’s military and political structure. Now, it appears that the Alliance is about ready to move in and activate a lot of sleeper agents to cause chaos within the Federation while they press some military advantages.
One such advantage they have is the secret Bluebird communication net that the Federation has developed with gave them a very serious tactical advantage. Through the Bluebird network, orders and direct communications over light-years could be maintained with allow the Federation to easily coordinate their movements that baffled the Alliance. Now the Alliance has obtain several of these Bluebird boxes and they are using this same network in secret to send their own messages and read what the Federation is sending. Yet, the Alliance wants more and they know where the secret Bluebird production base is located. It is thought that Admiral Kohl will be leading this Alliance armada to take star system B-1117 and the home of Exeter Base. That’s where Admiral Wolfe will be heading immediately.
Admiral Wolfe is now in charge of a small flotilla of five Super Valkyrie-class destroyers. He’s independent of CENTCOM and outside the normal military chain of command for the sole purpose of pursuing Kohl. Yet, at the same time he knows that he must protect Exeter Base and not let the Bluebird assets it contains fall into Alliance hands. There is also something else buried deep beneath the base that must be protected almost more than the Bluebird systems. This asset was placed there by Wolfe right after the Phage war and it cannot be allowed out.
While all this is going on, there appears to be a third entity made up of Alliance civilians who have decided they want to rule the entire galaxy and are willing to destroy both the Federation and the Alliance. They have their own military assets to cause great harm to both civilizations and have Admiral Kohl in their pocket too. Even he’s afraid of this group of secret and very wealth men. Will they be able to pull off their agenda? You’ll be surprised at how far they succeed even with the famous Admiral Jackson Wolfe fighting against them with all he has.
It’ll probably be another year before book three is released. It’s title will be “Empire” but no date for it’s release. Still, this will probably be one to read if nothing more to finish the trilogy!