Earth is recovering from the devastating attack by the Collector ship. It took thousands of humans aboard using small atmospheric aircraft and some kind of transportation device. These humans were then processed to recover their “essence” which seems to be a valuable commodity for the galactic community. Human essence is used to enhance and extend other aliens bodies at a great expense to those who use it. Obviously, this makes the harvesting of humans are real profitable venture. Except, this time the humans fought back. That was all in book one.
Now, after recovering a ton of technology from the wrecked Collector ship, humanity have began to reverse engineer a lot of this new tech. It has pushed Earth two or three centuries up the technology ladder and has now placed them on the brink of experiencing FTL travel via a wormhole device. All the Earth scientist believe it will work, but they need to test it first. The Earth’s only starship, the Leviathan, was scheduled to conduct that test in the very near future. That schedule got change quickly when a distress signal was found suddenly activate within the debris field of the Collector ship. All the signal translates into is that someone outside the Solar System needs help.
Since Earth was going to have to find some allies somewhere and soon, it was decided that the Leviathan would leave immediately and use the wormhole drive to reach these aliens in need of help. Captain Warren Miller was all for getting his starship launched, especially now that they have a specific mission in front of them. He had no doubts the wormhole drive would work, but his entire crew was very understandably nervous when the time came to “flip the switch”.
The only thing usual about this trip, other than it would go farther than any human had before, was the inclusion of a reporter/journalist named Dirk Reidel. It was thought that he could report on something positive for humanity reaching out to the stars after their first experience with aliens turned into a colossal disaster. Whether this reporter could stand this trip in to space and if he was smart enough to stay out of the way was to be seen.
Now the mission of the Leviathan was to good through a wormhole and arrive in some distant star system and do whatever to help the aliens that sent the distress signal. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of intel as to what the ship might encounter, so this was a blind shot in the dark. Who knows how bad the situation will be on the “other side” and what happens if the wormhole drive breaksdown while they are a long ways from home?
A pretty good book with an interesting story. It’s just amazing that with all their now advanced technology, Earth scientist haven’t the brains to install redundant systems aboard the Leviathan. It seems that if some system breaks-down, it’s down until they can fix it. Not the best of any situation considering you’re deep in space when the breakdowns happen. Maybe they’ll figure that out in book three, “Revolution Rising”, already available on Amazon. Then, maybe not!