The last book, “War for the Empire”, ended so well that I couldn’t wait to get into this one. While the Confederation attempted to destroy the Human Empire after getting soundly defeated at Earth, that effort also didn’t work out so well. The Confederation has been exposed as being controlled by the Morag who have telekinetic abilities which they have used on the other six species of the Grand Federation Council. While all of these other alien civilization thought they were acting upon agreed to actions, some have now found out that their entire cultures have changed due to the Morag’s meddling into their thoughts. So, the Confederation Grand Council is about to break up since the Lormallians are definitely not going to put up with the Morag’s activities much longer.
Lormallian Councilor Ardon Reull has found a way to manufacture telepathic nullifiers that will prevent any Morag from taking control of anyone wearing such a device. He has provide these to a few other councilors much to the anger of Morag Councilor Damora. Still, the Lormallian’s have agreed not to provide the plans for these devices to everyone for now. They also have told the Morag that they and the Visth are now neutral in the war with the humans. Of course the Morag aren’t happy with this situation and they eventually decide to just dissolve the Grand Council and form a smaller alliance with the Lamothians, who are known to eat humans, the Druins and the Zynth. These smaller races are not very strong, but the Morag have been building up their fleets for centuries in secret and have plenty of warships to defeat the humans, or at least they believe they have.
Yet, the war with the Human Empire isn’t going so well. Earth has seen fit to provide additional assets to the Human Empire and they came at a most opportune time. Now those Earth fleets are regrouping and planning on taking the fight to the Confederation. Admiral Collison will attempt to enter Confederation space and specifically, Morag space to destroy shipyards of the Morag. It is hoped that with the recent defeats the Morag have suffered, they will not be so ready to jump back into major battles. Yet, the Morag still have huge numbers of warships that the humans know nothing about. They do intend to keep a large armada around their home world, but they still plan on defending against any and all attacks in Confederation territory.
There are a lot of battles in this book and it’s kind of difficult to keep up with everything that’s going on. With new characters being introduced in almost every paragraph, it’s hard to actually know who’s doing what to whom. Then there’s the simple problem with why the humans feel that an attack against the Morag with such a small fleet as has Admiral Collison would do any significant damage. It’s stated that the Morag have conquered over 92 systems each with multiple planets. Even if each system only had one shipyard producing ships, that’s a lot of production. The humans can’t attack everyone of them and actually are only able to destroy a relatively small number which would seems to effect the Morag’s shipbuilding abilities at all. So, it seems the humans are doing all this fighting for nothing.
It’s not clearly stated that the shipyards destroyed by the humans will cause the Morag any problems so I guess we’ll have to find that out in the next book. It also isn’t clear in this book that the humans actually wiped out the Lamothians. This was something Princess Starguard had declared would happen if the Lamothians continued to consume humans during their ritual feast. They continued so as the book ends we are lead to believe that the humans did attack and destroy the last two Lamothian planets, but the Lamothians do have a rather large fleet still flying around space.
Then we also get the information that a world called Falton Two has a large human population. Norhing is known about this planet which is deep inside Confederation territory. It apparently has been the source of most of the humans the Lamothians have used to consume. Something needs to be done about this situation, but again that must be coming in the next book titled, “War in the Confederation” which is supposed to be available in January of 2022. I’m putting it on my reading list.