At least this was a full book this time. Yeah, the author got raked over the coals last time for writting or publishing a book that was only 76 pages in length. The story line is pretty good, but it has one messed up main character, Defense Engineer Tara Royce. She’s either whining about going down to the planet Earth or whining about getting off planet Earth. That’s about the extent of her conversational ability! Ok, she does say other stuff, but most of what she says is ridiculous and you wonder where it came from.
Like, in the beginning of this book, she confined to a room aboard the Overwatch space station. She doesn’t really know if she’s a prisoner or not, and she doesn’t know if she’s going to be tried for destroying her Defense Pod, but she does know she wants out of that room. She also wants to go to Earth, again. Earth, as you’ll remember is a destroyed planet. Mankind finally set off so many nuclear devices that it cause the Earth’s environment to shut-down. Fortunately, a lot of Earth’s population had migrated to colonies or were living in space. But, there were still millions of people on Earth when the environment collapsed and everything died. Now, after a thousand years, you’d thing that Earth would have regenerated itself. But, no, it’s still covered in a thick blanket of black swirling clouds that are highly toxic and cause the destruction of any thing that tries to reach the surface. Except Tara has seen the surface, only a glimpse, and it was green and lush. Now she wonders why and wants to go back down to find out more.
So, aboard the station is one Lieutenant Danvers who seems to be in control of everything. He also wants Tara to go back to the surface and retrieve the parts necessary to complete the building of a power cell for a fission detonation device. This device could crack the Earth in pieces and might be able to destroy the galaxy. It appears that Lieutenant Danvers wants more power than he currently holds. He’s arranged for Tara to accompany another Defense Engineer Tyrese Gypsum, whom she previously knew since he rescued her and brought her to the station, and two military Sergeants, Enverly and Crestin. This team of four will go down to the planet and get the parts necessary to rebuild the nuclear device which Tara will repair. Only she doesn’t know how the thing works nor how to repair it!
The most irritating in the story is Tara’s constant insistence that she go back down to the Earth. Then, once she gets there, even though she does find it not the way she thought it was, she constantly whines about getting off Earth. She’s even exposed to some wonderful and surprising developments that should have made an engineer remain on Earth for a long time. Yet, she turns into a cowering, stupid female, that doesn’t want to accept her fate and work to improve or make it better. She’s pretty pathetic if you ask me and I don’t think she’s much of an engineer of any kind. It was down right hard to get through some of the conversations in the book because she kept repeating the same thing over and over again when it wasn’t necessary.
And then, the book ends. Yeah, I didn’t like the way it ended. It seemed like this was the end of a chapter, yet it really was the end of the book. I think the writer needs to consider better breaking points in his/her books. I don’t know if I’ll read the next book when it comes out, but I might. I hope the title of the next book has something to do with the story. This books title doesn’t. Earth isn’t contested, it’s just being destroyed.