One thing I have said before about the book in this Legacy War series, is that they are mission focused. When the Gnosis is assigned a mission, that’s what it does and nothing else. The Gnosis’ mission is pretty simple, go get the third Orb from a desolate and abandon space stations in an isolated sector of space. This space station was built by a civilization that has now gone extinct. The Pahxin have sent a small contingent of scientist to try and restart the power core of the space station and to see if the Orb is still there. While that mission was going on, the Tol’an also found out about this space station and they sent an armed ship to capture the space station and the Orb it contained.
For some unknown reason, their scientific team has gone silent. There have been no communications with the team since shortly after they arrived. This causes the Gnosis’ mission to be started. Usually, the Pahxin send an escort with the Gnosis, but not this time. Meanwhile, the Tol’an warship has also gone silent and not reporting back to Tol’an headquarters. The Tol’an don’t have any better idea as to why their entire ship and crew had gone silent, so they decided to send another ship with a smaller flotilla as backup. Something is going seriously wrong aboard the derelict space station.
The Gnosis arrives without any trouble. They find the space around the space station strangely devoid of anything. There is no space debris usually floating around such a large space object. They plan to send in two shuttles of Marines, entering from two different docking ports. They have already identified the Pahxin scientific team’s ship docked at one port as well as the Tol’an ship docked at another. The Marines have no idea what they’ll find and there seems to be some heavy interference blocking all and any signals coming from the space station. Once the Marines shuttles dock with the station, they also loose communications with the Gnosis.
So, what could be happening on the space station. Sensors do know that the space station has power and it is coming from the central hub. They don’t know if the science team was able to fully power up the station or if there is some other source of power. The Captain of the Gnosis is also very concerned about the loss of communications with both Marine combat teams. Still, he’s not willing to commit more troops until he finds something out.
What happens on the space station is the stuff of nightmares. Twenty Marines went into the space station, but far fewer make it out. They also were supposed to capture and retrieve the Orb. They are in no way going to let this Orb fall into the hands of the Tol’an. With the capture of this final Orb, they should be able to finish the war rather quickly. Except the conditions on the space station are not making things easy and then the Tol’an reinforcements start to arrive.
The Gnosis has to defeat the lead scout ship which they do because they have found a way to fight through the interference around the station only to realize that the missing space debris is actually still there and it is massive. They were lucky not to have collided with any of the larger pieces, some of which were larger than the Gnosis. Then the rest of the Tol’an flotilla shows up and immediately demands the Gnosis’ surrender. The Genesis hasn’t yet retrieved their Marines nor have they recovered the Orb. Things are getting a little tight.
I don’t know if this is the end of this series. The author doesn’t mention a follow-on book, but with the recovery of the final known Orb. I’m not sure what he would write about, except there could be a final battle between the Tol’an, Pahxin and Humans. That would be a good read.