This story is good, but it’s kind of dragging on. We’re back with the remnants of the human civilization that fled through the Passage to a new part of the galaxy. Here we hoped to establish a new home for Earth’s civilization which has been chased from the Solar System by the Chian. This collection of military and civilian colonist didn’t turn out to be the best of the best. No, they have a lot internal problems starting with some of their largest starship Captains. There was to be an Admiral Warwick leading this collection of humans, but he and his ship got left behind. A retired Admiral was brought out of retirement to fill that job since none of the current Captains could agree among themselves as to who should be the new military leader. There’s even one of these ship’s Captain that believes he should be in-charge of the whole thing and he would now rule the galaxy! Hopefully, that’s not going to happen.
Turns out that this region of space is occupied by several other civilizations, all of which have managed to go to war with each other. Still, the planet that Earth’s colonist have landed on is not claimed by anyone and with good reason. It’s got monsters! Yes, by now you’ve read about the Cavers and the large, extremely large lizards that roam the underground of this planet. Efforts by the military are being made to eliminate these threats before any large scale civilian incursions take place on the planet itself. Lt. Col. Beth Warwick is in charge of the ground forces and they are just about done wiping out the Cavers. Now they are looking at and studying some very advanced technology. They have the help of some Bhalas scientist who are more familiar with some of this technology. They really need to figure out how to crack some of the coding used in this tech. If they can do that, then maybe they can figure out the purpose of the cloning facility they found on this new planet named Gaia. It might also led to the reason why the advanced Krelds are no longer around; they just disappeared, vanished without much of a trace.
On the other hand, Captain David Warwick, the son of the late Admiral Warwick, commanding the Earth starship Daedalus. was conducting a joint operation with the Torlas and Bhalas. They had the location of a large Ghrell fleet and arranged to come into contact with that enemy when a huge explosion almost destroyed everything. All ships in the area are damaged and the Ghrell have sent boarding parties to occupy and capture those ships still space-worthy. Each ship has a fight on their hands. While crew members try to recover from the explosion, they are immediately attacked by boarding Ghrell. Fortunately, security teams on each ship have been able to respond, but the issue is still not settled. Captain Warwick might not have a ship to command much longer!
Then we go out with Lt. Tori and her ship which has lifted from the Ghrell outpost planet, but still has some repairs that must be made. For now their cloaking device seems to be working and they know that because a Ghrell spaceship has arrived in the vicinity of the outpost planet. It doesn’t appear to have detected Lt. Tori’s ship so all her crew can do now is quietly and quickly make repairs so they can get out of this area and back to Gaia.
Back on Gaia, we are following the exploits of Captain Garland Quinn. He’s a former criminal that managed to get aboard one of the starships that fled Earth. Since he has no real function, he aligned himself with Captain Donald Carlton. This is the Captain that believes he should be in-charge of everything, and only so he can be rich and famous! He’s a control freak which is running his ship like a prison or so other people are saying. Captain Quinn is supposed to be doing things to bring discredit to Admiral Bachman and eventually to Director Shaw, but it’s not turning out the way he initially planned. Captain Quinn is not a real Captain, in fact, he’s never really been in the military. He’s a conn man and that’s why Captain Carlton created a factious personnel file, appointed him as a Captain and classified that file so no one could look at it. But, people are beginning to wonder about Captain Quinn. One of those is 1st Sgt. Dina Curran. She’s going to do some checking and things start getting pretty hairy.
Still, all of this is like some spy novel with not much action taking place. Oh, the scenes aboard the starships are pretty interesting, but they don’t last long. Lt. Tori’s story is going on seemingly forever. They always seem to have just one more thing to fix on her ship and of course they have to talk about that problem for ever! Still, overall the series is interesting and I’ll probably stay with it. Book 7, “Fuel of War” is available on Amazon and I’m adding it to my reading list. I suggest you do to!