Ok, here’s another new author with a pretty exciting new series. And, yeah, there’s a group of aliens in this book that are Neanderthals. Still, they ain’t your typical Neanderthal that we think about. No, these Neanderthals suddenly arrived in a starship in a near orbit off the moon where the Sol Alliance Command is located, specifically at Port Clarke. They showed up with a small fleet of undetermined composition and so far, haven’t taken any hostile actions.
For some reason, Port Clarke is relatively undefended. Earth and the Sol Alliance have been in a continuous war with the Centauran Rebels. That war had just concluded with a seemingly uneasy truce in place. So, that might account for the lack of warfighter spacecraft in the vicinity of the Sol Alliance Command. As soon as the mysterious fleet appeared, word was sent to recall the AFS Victory (I wonder what AFS stands for?). That starship is a fleet carrier and is commanded by Captain Thomas Dalton. It was to be his last day in command as he was finally getting ready to retire. But things have suddenly changed.
The mystery fleet does turn out to be the Neanderthals, but they are not here to attack Earth. Far from it! The need sanctuary! Their tiny fleet is all that is left of their group of Neanderthals who have been fighting the same enemy for many, many years. Come to find out, the Neanderthals are much more advanced than Earth. They have technology far superior than what Earth currently has and demonstrate it to some extend when their dreaded enemy, the Cobrans show up right near their fleet and the moon. The AFS Victory immediately engages the new threat after it fired on the Neanderthals and then turned its weapons on Port Clarke. Captain Dalton, well actually Commander Rao quickly found out that most of the ballistic weapon systems they had were useless against the Corbran starships. Yet, she did find a way to use her beam weapons and torpedoes to eventually damage the enemy vessel. The Neanderthals and their starship were about to finish off the threat so things could calm down a little. All this happened during the first part of the book!
In the meantime, the Sol Alliance seems to have a serious security problem. Every time something bad happens, it’s because of some Alliance Officer decides he’s a turncoat and wants to steal Alliance secrets and give them to the Centaurans. Now, with the arrival of the Neanderthals, it seems like every Alliance Officer is trying to steal the Neanderthal starship or other weapons technology. That part of the story is a little too much. By now, with all the combat losses, you’d think the only Alliance Officers left would be those loyal to their purpose instead of a bunch of traitors. One is even a Commodore!
Also, this story once again has the Captain of a huge starship, abandoning his post and jumping into a starfighter to go off and do whatever! Instead of staying in Command of his vessel as he should he’s gone off tracking down traitors while his starship has to fight the Cobrans with the First Officer in charge. That’s not realistically the way things should be done, but this is science fiction so I guess you can do whatever you want. I think Star Trek and Captain Kirk has too much influence over sci-fi authors!
Alright, this is a very interesting story so far. The very last part leaves you hanging so you’ll want to read the next book whenever that is published. There’s no time-line on when that will happen so I hope it’s soon. The author does need to find a good proof reader since there are a lot of distracting missing words and just bad sentences. Still, you should enjoy this first effort.