This series is a long one, but it’s still very good. We’ve grown a lot since the first book which saw ship full of colonist escaping Earth for a new life. They found that new life on New Earth. It hasn’t been easy and this was supposed to be a civilian led expedition, but thank goodness there was some inadvertent military leadership included.
Connor Gates was part of a special ops team that was caught on the colony ship when it left the Solar System. He and his team were not supposed to be going on the trip, yet they did even though they had left family on Earth who had no idea what had happen to them. Connor, especially, left a wife and young son whom he was never to see. There was no turning back so this team when into cryo-sleep along with the rest of the colonist.
That was a long, long time ago. Connor Gates is now General Gate and his team was the nucleus for the Colonial Defense Force (CDF) he created in the early days of the colony. New Earth wasn’t as uninhabited as they had thought and there were lots of threats through the years that the civilian population just could not handle without the CDFs intervention. They protected the colony all through the years and now it is thriving. So much so, that New Earth has already sent its own colony ship about 26-lightyears away to establish a new colony. That voyage was to take ten years and there wasn’t expected to be any communications between New Earth and the new colony for a long time.
But, Noah Baker and his wife Kara had recently invented an FTL drive they named the I-Drive. This changed everything! Now what would have taken 10 years to go the same distance as the previous colony ship, is now only a forty-day trip. So, Noah’s ship, the Infinity , had been given a two part mission. One and primary is to test the capabilities of the new I-Drive. If it is as capable as they say, their initial estimate for travel time could be even shorter. Their second objective was to find out why they were not receiving any communications from the Ark II, the colony ship that had left well over 10 years ago.
So, Noah and his crew headed out and soon activated the I-Drive and slipped into faster than light travel with no problems. And that was the way they had hoped it would be. So, as they cruised along, they were still in communication with CENTCOM back at New Earth. But, there was still nothing coming from the Ark II which should have been orbiting Zeta-Alpha 5 by now.
What would they find when they reached Zeta-Alpha 5. The crew of the Ark II would certainly be surprised to see them, that for sure. It would be interesting to see if the colony ship had been successful in getting a new colony started. Nothing was really known for sure about the target planet, but it was thought to be habitable by humans and it did have its own flora and fauna ecosystem.
But as usual, nothing seems to go as planned. The Infinity had no idea how the I-Drive might react to other space anomalies during their travel. Unfortunately, they found out very suddenly when their ship interacted with a strong unexpected gravity wave. It threw the ship out of hyperspace and not easily. There was lots of damage with the sudden stop and even engineering was pretty well messed up. Kara Baker, Noah’s wife was the Chief Engineer for the ship and she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She wound up getting seriously injured. This was unfortunate, but they had to continue the mission which they did after making extensive repairs.
The did arrive in the system containing Zeta-Alpha 5, but still no comms with the Ark II. What was even more curious was that the Ark II actually fired on the Infinity as they approached closer. Why was the ship acting this way. On further examination, they found the Ark II completely locked up. It had all it’s security measures in place and the Infinity couldn’t reach any of its system remotely. They did notice that two shuttles were missing or not still on-board so where did they go. Had they sent a scout team down to the planet? Lots of questions needed to be answered.
So, this is what the story is about. There are a lot of good characters involved in the story and you are familiar with all of them since they have mostly been around for the previous twelve books. And that’s the nice part of these books, the characters stay the same from book to book with each one kind of becoming the center of attention. There are some interesting developments with the colony at New Earth. Life expectance has grown to about 250 years! That’s a long time. Connor Gates is now ninety, but he has the physical attributes of someone in their forties. So, when do you change careers? And how does anyone move up in the chain of command if everyone above you can stay around for fifty years or more? That’s questions we might have to face even now as our population lives longer and longer.
But, this series isn’t over. Book fourteen, “Expedition Earth” is available on Amazon now and I’m already starting to read it. Should be just as good as all the rest of these books.