Wow! This was a quick read. Probably because it was very exciting. In this one, we’re mostly seeing the New Terrain Empire fighting off a major offensive from the Ca’cadasans. After the Ca’cas devastating strike against several of our key strategic locations, the New Terrains are just barely starting to recover. The New Terrain Empire lost a lot of ships when the Central Docks were almost destroyed. Many of those ships were in for repairs along with others that were brand new or almost finished. Repairs were underway at the capital as well as at the Donut. Fortunately, the Donut is repairable and can continue making wormholes as before.
Still, the loss of the heir to the Throne, Augustine, has put the royal family in a terrible, but understandable mood. While we know the tiny baby wasn’t killed, we don’t know who did it or why. In this book, that all becomes clearly apparent. And yes, it involves Time Travel!
Time travel has been eluded to in previous books, but it’s also brought up the disappearance of a previous ancient civilization that was thought to have been very advanced. They too had reached a point where time travel was something they were tinkering with when suddenly their civilization ceased to exist. It was thought that messing with time travel and the timeline was the cause of that civilizations demise and any effort to develop something along these lines were met with skepticism. Still, one New Terrain scientist had written papers about developing a time travel method, but he was dismissed from his position and thought insane.
So, if one of Emperor Sean’s subjects does come up with a method of going back in time, will he or should he even use it? It could save billions of his subjects and reverse the recent devastation that his home world had just experienced. And secondly, would his military leaders even let him tinker with time. Many were much older than Sean and had lived with the stories of how forbidden it was to mess with time travel that they just might have to do something if this young emperor got off on the wrong track.
But, now the Ca’cas were attacking again on three different fronts. We just barely enough ships to manage one fight, the other areas were required to conducting holding and delaying tactics until more ships could be brought to them. With the judicious use of wormholes, these battle groups could do the job, but they needed to be reinforced almost immediately. So now all the new technology the New Terrains have developed gets put to the test.
The Ca’cas Empire is having it’s own problems. Their Emperor is one of the smartest to sit on the throne and he knows how to manage his fleets. Yet, his ideas of leaving battles to fight another day goes counter to the Ca’cadasan military philosophy. Some of his Generals are beginning to question his leadership; not directly to his face, but it’s certainly something they are not comfortable with. The Ca’cadasan military always operates on the premise of attack until the enemy is destroyed or you have nothing left to fight with. What would happen if this current major offensive were to stall and the Ca’cas started incurring major losses. Would the Emperor have the smarts to withdraw his fleets and would his military leaders even let him? Interesting!
I do not believe the next book has been written yet, but I can assure you it will be forthcoming. This war is a long way from being over. Things are changing and in some big ways, but the New Terrains have a long way to go. Very interesting story and with this book, back to being exciting.