This book should have been confusing, but , surprisingly, it wasn’t! We’re going back to Alliance space where Alex Racine and his Omnian’s had previously established a huge outpost now commanded by Commander Jess Cinders. It was there to immediately serve two purposes. One was to continue to clean the Colony, a race of deadly insectoids, out of numerous domed habitats on numerous planets in Alliance space. These insectoids were not communicate in any way with Alex or his people therefore they had no recourse other than to systematically wipe them out. Commander Cinders had been highly successful in doing that and now he was in-charge of all the war efforts against the Colony. The Outpost’s second purpose was to interface with the Tsargit, the governing body for the Alliance races.
That second purpose was very difficult since the members of the Alliance came in many size and shapes with varying degrees of temperament. Some were from very old and established races while others were fairly new to this larger community. The overall problem with the Tsargit was its size and that it required an inordinate amount of time to make any decisions. Commander Cinders was about ready to throw something at the Tsargit which very much needed a decision and not one when they could get around to it.
The Omnian’s engineers were an extremely talented group of people and they had been working on understanding the transportation platforms that came with the inhabitable domes. These platforms could move people and goods instantaneously between planets which obviously created some tremendous trade relationships. The only problem with this is that some domes only had one or two platforms while others had up to five. None of the domes had all six possible platforms. Until now, no one knew how to create new platforms or a much greater task, create more domes. But, the Omnian engineers again were on the verge of at least figuring out how to create new platforms.
Their first try didn’t turn out too well. It was very fortunate that no one was killed while a dome and the small moon it was on was turned to dust by a very, very massive explosion. It seemed that if the right combinations of glyphs and timing wasn’t done in establishing a new platform, the entire source station could cease to exist! While the Omnians were willing to continue the attempts at establishing new platforms, they would eventually need to know where these new platforms would be located and who would they connect to. This was something the Tsargit was supposed to answer. That answer wasn’t going to come any soon unless something was done by the Omnians.
So, while there wasn’t a lot of fighting in this book, there was a lot of political intrigue which can be interesting if written well. By now, you should know that Mr. Jucha knows how to write very well on this subject. How he treats people of different races and presents different solutions to problems is remarkable. For example, you’ll read about crimes against the Outpost by one of the older and established races who were also very powerful within the Alliance. How Commander Cinders goes about exposing their criminal activities and then punishing the guilty, is something of a remarkable solution that I probably wouldn’t have though of and neither would most people! That’s what so good about these books.
I need to say that this series actually has twenty-three books, but I did skip several when the Alliance segment was introduced. I don’t know why I skipped those books, but it gives me something to look forward to going back to. Does that make sense? Anyway, there looks to be a twenty-fourth book, “Conclave”, coming soon, I hope!