This was a strange book. It started off strange but then kind of flipped back to what is normally contained in these books. Yeah, there’s lots of humor and it works. James McGill. Centurion of Legion Varus, is off-duty at home in his shack in Georgia. That is until he’s rudely awaken by something huge that dropped right in his backyard in the mud just like everything else! James wasn’t expecting anything and certainly not what appeared next.
After banging around on the monolith or obelisk, he still couldn’t make out what it was. Then the ground he was standing on started shaking until the entire farm seemed shake. Then the gravity cut loose with everything floating in the air except for the humans standing around the thing. Then out of nothing appeared a whole bunch of Nairbs! These are translucent green baby seal-looking creatures obviously not from Earth. What they were doing here was not something McGill wanted to think about. Seeing Nairbs anywhere usually meant trouble. Not knowing what else to do, McGill contacted Imperator Galina Turov and she immediately decided to come down to his farm so as to prevent McGill from starting an intergalactic incident.
When she got there she met Chief Inspector of Province 921 who told her that McGill was wanted to testify in a Galactic court hearing. Galina then asked McGill what had he done and of course he swore that he was innocent of all charges. That’s when none other than Grand Admiral Sateekas appeared, again out of seeming thin air. Come to find out, the huge monolith was an intergalactic transportation device and all of these beings had come to Earth to drag McGill back to the galactic court! As long as it didn’t involve anyone else in the Legion Varus, Galina agreed that McGill should go and testify. Of course, McGill had no idea about what he was to testify but he was certainly going to claim his innocence.
So, they all got transported/teleported to Aquarius-Prime, the home of the Nairbs. Nairbs were all like galactic lawyers or accountants. They meddled in everything and were strictly trying to apply galactic law to everything anyone did, especially humans. First order of business was to place Admiral Sateekas’ son on the Galactic Empire thrown. Having defeated the Mogwa of Segin with McGill’s help, the Mogwa’s civilization was now united and claimed equality to all the other galactic civilizations. The Nairb court ruled that the Mogwa were in fact a top Galactic Civilization. Then the question of Nero, Admiral Sateekas’ son becoming the Galactic Emperor was kind of temporarily shelved since there was someone else wanting that position. But the court moved on.
Then James was astonished to see Drusus and the Investigator show up for the next part of the hearing. It seems that Dust World and one other world now called Rebel World had applied for independence from Earth. This will open a whole can of worms for Earth since both Dust World and now Rebel World are colonies of Earth. They can’t allow this to happen or the other colonies might get the same idea. The Nairb court puts this request on hold until they can further examine the issue. That gives Earth the time to go to Rebel world and stop this rebellion before it gets started.
McGill gets teleported back to Earth where he is immediately summoned by the Consul of Earth Wurtenberger. He arrives at his office with Imperator Turov at his side just to make sure he shows up. There they discuss what happened at the court and what to do about it. Wurtenberger decides they need more intelligence on what was happening on Rebel world. So of course, he orders James McGill to go there and act as a spy! Now is when the normal part of the story starts. Of course the leaders of the Rebels happens to be women. James usually gets along very well with females, well, sometimes. He doesn’t really want to be spying on some of these people because he has ties with Dust World and can’t understand why they would want to rebel from Earth.
Now you’ll find out just how prepared Rebel World is to defend their independence. It’s going to be a war with James McGill right in the middle of everything. He won’t survive without dying multiple times, but that’s part of the job as they say. I found the book much more interesting towards then end than at the beginning. So if you can slog your way past the first half of the book, you’ll be right in the best part until the end.
I don’t know if they’ll be another book, but I suspect Mr. Larson will continue writing these stories as long as he comes up with new world for McGill to mess up!