What the heck is that on the front cover of this book? I have no clue what it is. Anyway, I finally got back to this series. I had enjoyed it pretty much, but then I got busy reading some other series and this one kind of fell behind. Now I see that book 12 is already out and I’m just reviewing book 9. I’ve got some reading to do. Thankfully, these books are pretty easy reads. The writing is excellent and flows very well.
When I last left the series, the New Terran Empire had sent an exploration task force some thirty light-years away to find a possible ally in their struggle against the Ca’cadasans. The Empire had no idea who they would find, but they did know through intel sources that the Ca’cadasans were having trouble fighting on two different fronts. So, if an alliance against them could be forged, then both the Empire and their new allies could possibly coordinate their attacks to really give the Ca’cadasans fits. Problem was, they had to find these new allies and hope they were friendly towards the Empire.
Turns out, they Empire did find a somewhat friendly ally, but not one they wanted to ally with if they had any choice about it. In the meantime, the Empire had it’s hands full trying to save New Moscow by evacuating almost four billion people through wormhole gates the Empire has invented. There was a fleet of Ca’cadasans on it’t way to finish off the New Moscow system and they were probably going to destroy the entire planet once they got there. Yet, the Empire wasn’t going to sit idly by and let that happen. Every day it seems as if the Empire was developing a new and more advanced weapon that the Ca’cadasans were not expecting. While the Ca’cadasans were temporarily more advanced than the humans, that technology gap was closing very, very fast. Now, with instant communications via wormhole technology, they Empire was getting ahead of the Ca’cadasans, but the Ca’cadasans still had numbers on their side. A lot of numbers.
That was also the problem for the potential allies on the other side of the Ca’cadasan empire. Even now, the Ca’cadasans were building a monstrous fleet larger than anything previously gathered. It’s purpose was to find and destroy the home system of these pesky aliens. The word did come of this home world location and the Ca’cadasan’s fleet move out. There was no way the unsuspecting potential Empire allies could defeat this gigantic fleet. So, what should have been a mutual exchange of interest between allies, turns into something entirely different. Should the Empire now send ships and weapons into this new system just to help out the potential allies there or would that be just a waste of resources. If the Ca’cadasans did wipe out this home system, the what kind of allies would these new people become. They might just be a drain on already scarce resources within the Empire. It didn’t help that the Emperor, Sean, didn’t like these new allies and neither did most of his subjects. In fact, most of his subjects were not told of these new allies because they would have definitely found them offensive and so alien that they could easily become a new enemy. And that’s not what the Empire wanted.
As I said, this is easy reading. There’s a lot of fighting going on and some of the battles get a little confusing. There are a lot of characters in this series, but the author has had the foresight to provide a good dictionary/glossary at the end of the book to help keep things straight. Now I’m on to book ten, eleven and then twelve. I’ve stopped counting after that one. I just need to catch up to there.