>"If you have any concerns, any questions, about our mission or our situation, now is the time to raise them."
>"We are supposed to be a peacekeeping force, ser," Albertosaur's captain said slowly. Lieutenant Colonel Omobolanle Abiodun was an immense African with swirling tattoos inked across their face. Henry didn't know quite what the tattoos meant, but he understood them to be related to Abiodun's culture's traditional third gender.
Okay, so another author who thinks a reasonable way to evade pursuers is to beeline for the nearest "meteor swarm" that just happens to be there and "fill" space (all the famously vast expanse of) with debris to confuse enemy sensors that I guess were salvaged from sunken WW2 German submarines. He may speak the language of hard science fiction, but he's writing space opera after all. As a bonus he uses the terms "meteor", "asteroid" and "comet" interchangeably for "rock floating in space". Are they about to enter a planetary atmosphere as a screaming fireball of plasma and disintegrating matter? Are they on a highly elliptical orbit that takes them both extremely far from the parent star and so close that they exhibit outgassing? No and no? They're asteroids, man. Semantics aside, formations of rocks also usually need some kind of an active force to keep them as a "swarm", let alone one dense enough for anyone to hide in. Otherwise they spread out into an extremely thin ring around the supermassive star that the breathless finale of this novel is set near. I might have given it a pass, if he had provided any explanation at all, even if it was just the typical "Lagrange points lol", but no. I'm supposed to think this anomaly is commonplace I guess. I'm also not particularly happy with how things appear to be moving toward inertialess drives being an actual thing, even though I like the explanation that this is an inevitable consequence of the gravity technology that so far has been used for generating gravity on board ships as well as shielding against weaponry. Yeah, I suppose it would be. But it's still another nail on the coffin that condemns this series as another wannabe Trek and something I can't take particularly seriously as science fiction.
The tense and action-packed finale was needed, however, since the first two-thirds of the book were so slow I considered putting it down several times. If you ignore the liberal bending of science and bland characters, there's a very compelling military space opera scenario here, comparable to something like The Wrath of Khan , but with fewer Trek-isms, more high-yield nuclear warheads and with technobabble that is most of time on point. The first two acts, though, man. There's nothing wrong with slow, but when the plot revolves around high stakes diplomatic maneuvering, I would expect the character writing to be up to nuff. Detailed descriptions of space combat remain Glynn Stewart's strength, interesting and likeable characters and dialogue not so much. The alcoholic rage-head CAG Samira O'Flannagain has sort of grown on me, but there aren't a lot of standouts like her. I can forgive the fact that I'm not quite sure how she still has a job. I'm just glad that she's there, because without her the entire cast would be almost insufferable. I actually ended up disappointed in a few fakeout deaths not because it's a trope but because I wanted those characters dead. I start to realize that the reason I like O'Flannagain is because she's the only character here with some actual severe flaws. In some other series, she might have been the standout annoying mood wrecker, but here her comedic relief actually provides some welcome respite. I get that the setting of highly ranked military personnel and elite diplomats in the forefront of space travel kind of automatically steers the cast toward highly trained peak humans with little room for colorful flawed personalities but dammit this class needs more clowns. Even Arthur C. Clarke is better at making you care about his stoic spacemen even if his stories suffer from similar problems from time to time.