This story has gotten better. I wasn’t sure about the first book. The main character, Nathan Briggs came across as a smart-aleck, know-it-all in the first book. Now he’s kind of mellowed out. He’s still a bit brash, but I think his crew has gotten to know him better and know when to ignore his behavior some times. Oh, he’s now the Captain of the *Spacehog* which is the name of the ship now that he’s in-charge.
The crew is still getting used to each other and trying to figure out what to do. His crew is a mix of humans and very alien aliens. Most of the aliens have been on the ship for a while and that includes Kaz the former Captain. He wasn’t very good at being a Captain and had gotten the ship in so much debt that he lost it several times. The last time, Briggs happened to be around and he bought the ship. Serena and Ben were the other humans. Both had arrived on the ship with Briggs. Raylin was humanoid but she’s an alien shapeshifter. Then there’s T’Chura, an eight-foot tall Sasquatch-like alien, and Grim, the most alien of them all, looking like an arachnid. Also, a member of the crew was Kierenbot, an AI robot who thought he had been a former human now uploaded to this AI body. No one else believed that, but you couldn’t convince Kierenbot otherwise.
They were on a contract to salvage wreckage from a crashed space vehicle. Briggs and Kaz were out on the skiff looking for salvage when Briggs detected something and decided to go exploring on his own. They were doing this contract since they had to make some credits someway. That was Serena’s concern. She really wanted them to get this contract fulfilled and didn’t want anyone on the crew to get distracted. Unfortunately, Briggs was still fixated on finding artifacts and specifically those of the Asherah Empire. He stumbles upon what appears to be an underground city long abandoned by whomever lived there. During his explorations, he finds an artifact and then Griff Tarken finds him. He demands the artifact which Briggs isn’t about to give up. Briggs manages to get away from Tarken and his army of battlebots, but he knows that not the end of this pursuit.
So, with the artifact, Briggs now decides he wants to follow the star map it has shown him. Not all of his crew are in agreement with this adventure. Raylin says she has something she needs to do off the ship. Serena isn’t happy with Briggs’ decision so she ask Raylin if she’d like some company and she says yes, so these two leave the ship promising to return at a later date. This really gets to Briggs since he was forming an attachment to Serena. But his desire to follow the trail of the Asherah was too strong to ignore.
The Spacehog heads to a very unstable part of space that hasn’t been explored. What they find there could lead them to anywhere and then they are probably going to run into Griff Tarken some where along the journey. This trip could be both dangerous and expensive, but the rest of his crew is willing to go along. If they could find any kind of Asherah technology, that would be extremely rewarding but the chance of doing so aren’t very great!
This book was much better than the first book. I’m not sure why Briggs wants to follow this Asherah artifact trail, but it was something he did while on Earth, although his specialty was in stealing artifacts. The story will continue in book three, “[Dark Menace](https://amzn.to/3T1lVcf)”, currently available on Amazon.