This story line sees to be going on forever. That’s not necessarily bad, but it seems to be almost the same thing in each book. General Conner Gates in the Commander of the Colony Defense Force (CDF) and he does his job very well. He is on New Earth, a colony of Earth, but they have lost contact with the home planet so many of them consider New Earth to be their home and only home. While New Earth was thought to have been an uninhabited paradise when first found, it turns out that it’s native population were the Ovvarrow.
The Ovvarrow race had been on New Earth for many, many years but had been attacked by the dreaded Krake who wanted to rule not only their own universe, but multiple universes, including the one New Earth and even Earth is located in. General Gates and his CDF understand the threat the Krake are and if they come back to New Earth, it will be a very hard fought battle that the humans might not win. They have been reviving Ovvarrows from their self-imposed cyro-pods where they chose to go when they thought the Krake were coming. Over sixty-thousand Ovvarrows have been awakened and they have established their own city near one of the humans cities. Slowly, over time, the language barrier has been breached and had become much more easily to do so with some newly discovered Krake technology.
The CDF has gone through the interdimensional gates that the Krake have left behind and their intent is to find the Krake home-world and finish off the Krake. It won’t be easy and the CDF have been finding other Ovvarrow colonies that they have freed from Krake control. These Ovvarow have become allies with the humans as have the Ovvarrow on New Earth. The Ovvarrow can produced strong warriors, but their numbers are not large. General Gates wife, Lenora, is an archelogist who seeks out hidden and remote sites that the Ovvarrow once occupied on New Earth. With General Gates on one of her exploratory missions, they do run across some interesting Ovvarrow artifacts which lead them to a confrontation with a new group of Ovvarrow. This new group, called the Konus, a very militaristic, large group of Ovvarrow. If they would ally with the humans and the other Ovvarrow, then this would give New Earth a significant boost in strength and might be enough to hold back any Krake attackes.
Unfortunately, these new Ovvarrow, the Konus, have other ideas about their planet and who should be leading the Ovvarrow. While they talk like they want to be allied with the humans, their actions speak otherwise. It would not be good for the humans and Ovvarrow to start fighting themselves.
The writing is good in these stories and the characters are the same and very familiar. There are some side-stories that seem to just be fillers for the book, like the section on Lars Mallory. He’s in prison awaiting trail, but what he did has already been covered in other books. Everyone knows he’s going to be exiled so why bring that all up again in this book. I guess it did add a few chapters, but it wasn’t relevant to the rest of the story.
I’m sure this will continue in book 11, “Invasion”, because they have yet to really battle the Krake. That will have to happen sometime in the future and that will be a very good book to read.