The discovery of relkatite and its many properties - containing warp cores for interstellar starships, embedding enhancements in human bodies,
even the ability to transfer the human mind into new "prints" - opened up the stars and potential immortality... and also created a new system of
power with the MERIT clans at the top. As son and potential heir to clan leader Acaelus Mercator, Tarquin never felt at ease in the board room,
preferring to hide away at universities studying geology. But then a former employee, Naira Sharp, leveled accusations at the Mercators about
their fungal-based relkatite mining processes; she insisted that their proprietary fungus led directly to the spread of the shroud, a lichen
that has devoured whole worlds and their ecosystems and leaves nothing behind. It's the sort of accusation that radicals known as Conservators
have been bleating since the shroud first appeared, but never has anyone done as much damage or gone to such lengths as Sharp to prove it. Even
though Sharp's case went nowhere and she herself was "iced", her neural map locked away, questions linger about what she said. Thus, Tarquin
finds himself standing on the bridge of the Mercator mining vessel Amaranth as it approaches Sixth Cradle, the latest target for
colonization and mining. As far as anyone knows, no human has set foot on this world, and it is here that the Mercators will prove once and for
all that there is no connection between their canus fungus and shroud infestation. But things go wrong from the moment they drop into
orbit. The shipboard AI malfunctions, their sister vessel Einkhorn fires upon them with no warning, then the body printers go rogue and
spit out mindless, monstrous misprints that attack anything that moves. While Acaelus casts himself back to civilized space, sacrificing his
current print body and a few recent memories, Tarquin is trapped and forced to flee planetside with a handful of survivors, including his
father's chief bodyguard, Exemplar Lockhart... flee to a planet that, to Tarquin's horror, is already lost to the shroud.
Former Exemplar Naira Sharp gave up everything to try to get the truth out about Mercator and their dangerous mining techniques, and how they're
literally killing entire worlds, including Earth. When Acaelus Mercator, her former employer, last put her under, he made unpleasant promises
about her future, and she's worked for him long enough to know the man's brutal techniques, brutality that regularly breaks minds so
traumatically that they can never be reprinted. Now, though, her friends in the Conservators must have managed to crack the company systems to
get her neural map out, for she finds herself printed in the body of Exemplar Lockhart, Acaelus's current bodyguard... printed into a ship gone
mad. She should be doing everything in her power to destroy the Amaranth, but in the chaos she ends up with Tarquin and a few others
aboard a shuttle fleeing a vessel that is already doomed - and landing on a world where the shroud lichen has already devoured everything,
though Mercator has only just arrived and not deployed its devouring fungal mining process yet.
They should be deadly enemies: the heir to the Mercator mining empire and the revolutionary who wants nothing more than to bring it all down.
But on Sixth Cradle, they must work together to survive and begin to unravel truths that neither one suspected, truths that point to a danger
so insidious that none suspected its presence - and it might already be too late to stop it.
Review
I was intrigued by the concept, and I previously enjoyed O'Keefe's Protectorate trilogy, so I figured this one was worth a shot. While it did
explore some interesting ideas and it never lacked for action, with things happening from the first page to the very last, it took quite a long
time for the story to really grow on me, to the point where only the strong ending saved it from a lower rating.
From the start, of course, the reader is predisposed to suspect that there's more to the fungal mining and deadly lichen connection than the
wealthy and powerful Mercator clan will admit. Family black sheep Tarquin is so convinced of Mercator's innocence that he comes back into the
fold to prove it; it was his testimony that ultimately sealed rebel Naira Sharp's fate, though even he was a little unsettled by how sure she was
in her claims, how much she'd sacrificed by turning against her former employer Acaelus to join the Conservators. He needs to prove to himself as
much as the rest of humanity that the canus mining process is not at all linked to the unstoppable shroud lichen, a need strong enough that
he came to Sixth Cradle with his father to oversee the start of a new mining venture... and when everything goes haywire, he defies his own father
by staying behind to try rescuing the crew, Mercator employees and lower-ranked HCA members (who are paid less and who only rarely can afford the
"phoenix fees" for reprinting if they die) alike - only to discover that the planet they flee to is essentially a dead world. But what should be
a moment of vindication for him, seeming proof that the shroud was here before the canus fungus was deployed - soon becomes much more
complicated, as he finds evidence of a greater puzzle and conspiracy at play. Through all this, he counts himself fortunate to have his father's
steadfast bodyguard Exemplar Lockhart at his side - but there's something different about this print of Lockhart, and he starts developing
feelings he knows he shouldn't have.
Naira, meanwhile, finds herself unexpectedly resurrected, presumably through the intervention of her rebel compatriots, and printed in a new
body and identity, flung into a danger and a mystery that challenges everything she thought she knew about the blight that destroyed her world
and countless others... and stuck with the very man whose courtroom testimony landed her in the cruel clutches of Acaelus Mercator, who was
ruthless enough as an employer and absolutely brutal as a captor. She, too, finds her feelings toward Tarquin shifting in ways she didn't expect,
a chemistry sparking between the two under extraordinary circumstances... and here I struggled to buy the budding romance. Too often, I wanted
to shake them to get them back to matter of survival and the problem of the shroud and an invisible enemy that seems to be actively trying to
kill them on a supposedly uninhabited planet. Their flirtations and feelings could shift back and forth at a moment's notice, to a distracting
degree. It was only much, much later on, toward the end, that I started believing the attraction... when they'd actually invested enough time
and energy into figuring out the bigger problems.
Back at Mercator Station, Acaelus Mercator is dealing with the mess that Sixth Cradle has become. Sacrificing the print aboard the doomed
Amaranth means he lost memories - there are ties between printed bodies and memories that are not completely understood even by the
originators of the tech, particularly how exceptionally traumatic deaths can permanently "crack" a neural map, but are occasionally exploited
in the plot in interesting ways - but he knows something isn't right, even beyond the bizarre behavior of the Amaranth's sister ship
Einkhorn. He is not the flat rich and powerful villain that one might expect, but has his own suspicions about what's going on, and his
own incentive to figure things out; he just goes about his own investigations in a brutal and ruthless way, in keeping with his personality.
Eventually, the various threads come together in a decently powerful climax that resolves many mysteries, unmasks the real danger behind the
threat, and sets up the next book in the series with some nice new twists. It was the strength of the final chapters that ultimately lifted the
rating back up to four stars; the earlier parts, while never lacking in danger and twists and turns, sometimes felt like they were running
frenetically in circles to give the impression of forward motion rather than actually moving anything ahead.
Over three thousand years ago, humans reached out from a dying Earth to the stars through a vast technological leap known as Casimir gates... gates
that still control the flow of information and commerce throughout the galaxy, still held in the iron grip of the Prime protectorate. Many may chafe
under their control, but with absolute power comes absolute authority. Until the Icarions rebelled against the Keepers of the Ada Prime gate - a skirmish
with potentially galaxy-wide repercussions.
Sanda has always been the protector of her kid brother Biren, even well into adulthood; she even joined the Ada Prime military to protect him and their
fathers while "Little B" pursued an education, with an eye toward the exclusive Keepers. But while he navigates the shark-infested waters of the Keeper
elite, she finds herself facing down a rebel enemy that destroys her gunship. Sanda wakes up alone aboard an empty Icarion vessel, the Light of
Berossus, which delivers devastating news: two hundred years have passed, and the entire system - Ada and Icarion and the gate itself - has been
destroyed by a devastating new weapon... a weapon that may still be out there, a threat to the future of humanity itself. But there are pieces that
don't quite add up, and a danger that may make the Icarion threat look insignificant.
Review
I can't always explain my choice of reading material through strict logic, or more specifically, how I pick which title to read next; some books linger
in the pile for years, while others leap ahead. This book, a recent acquisition, jumped the line on perhaps the most subjective of all premises, even given
my history of subjective premises: I liked what the author had to say in an online video when asked about the name of a group of dragons, a pure gut
reaction that disregarded the fact that Velocity Weapon is science fiction and has no dragons in it. It may seem like a pointless thing to mention
in a review, but I figured I'd get it out of the way... and also, tangentially, it brings up the importance of listening to gut reactions. They don't always
pan out, but in instances like this, they strike gold.
The book starts at high velocity (as I suppose one might expect from the name), thrusting heroine Sanda into the strange and terrifying situation of waking
up on an unknown vessel after an unknown length of time, and missing part of a leg to boot. Meanwhile, Biren, back on Ada, finds his graduation and rise to
the status of Keeper marred by fallout from the very battle that destroyed Sanda's ship. Both have little time to catch their breath before the story rips
ahead, though never too fast to keep up with. Each must navigate mazes of tricky situations and possible deceptions and whip-fast alterations in trajectory
with each new plot revelation. On a seemingly-unrelated side story, a street rat in another system sets out to score a stolen crate of drugs and stumbles
onto a conspiracy with roots deep in the galactic power structure, and other interlude chapters chart the origins of the gates and the Prime supremacy; while
individually interesting, these two arcs don't tie into the events near Ada until much later, involving the greater Protectorate series more than this
installment. (Yes, this is another Book 1 of a longer series of unknown length. It's almost a given these days.) Characters are generally intelligent and
strong, able to keep up with the rapidly evolving events, if not without the odd misstep or slip, leaving things at a point of high tension for Book 2. The
whole story crackles with wit and energy, making its five hundred pages fly by. I'm already looking forward to the next installment.
(In the meantime, if O'Keefe wants to write a fantasy with dragons, I, for one, would most definitely be interested...)
The prototype AI vessel Light of Berossus is gone, fleeing the system rather than being used as a devastating weapon in the ongoing conflict between
Ada Prime - loyal subject of the star-spanning Prime civilization - and the breakaway faction on Icarion, which rejects the stifling rules of the Prime Keepers
and their terrifyingly effective guardcore enforcers. Major Sanda Greeve of Ada has been returned to her family, alive and well (if sans one leg)... but a
fugitive, framed for the death of rogue Keeper Laveaux. During her time in captivity, someone stuck a Keeper chip into her head containing coordinates that
Laveaux was desperate to obtain. Now, those coordinates are her only clue to the vast conspiracy she inadvertently unearthed, but to reach them she'll need a
ship and an unorthodox crew. Fortunately, one of her fathers still has contacts in some very out-of-the-way places, and she still has the trust and support of
her Keeper brother Biran. Unfortunately, the danger she discovered will spare no one, and the truth she finds will upend everything she ever thought she knew
about Prime and the Casimir Gates that connect humanity across the stars.
Review
The second installment of the Protectorate (probable) trilogy starts almost right where the first one left off, with Sanda and Biran still up to their necks,
or rather well over their heads, in danger. O'Keefe does not bother to recap, but jumps right back into the action; given that it's been a while since I read
Velocity Weapon, it took me some time to get back up to speed, but the writing is fun and characters distinctive enough to keep me turning pages even
when I was still scrounging the gray matter for memories of who was who and what was what. There are almost no lulls in the plot as Sanda, Biran, and the other
core characters race to uncover a long-lost secret, scramble to determine friend from foe, and try to stop a disaster in the making, all while facing an
essentially immortal enemy with many faces (or many versions of the same face) and who has had centuries to study humanity and plot its destruction. There are
few backslides in character intelligence, and while characters do make mistakes, they're mistakes made honestly and not because of an author deliberately
turning their brains to gelatin for the sake of extending a plot. Most find their sense of morality pushed from sharp black and white into increasingly dark
shades of gray, forced to weigh options where there is no pure or bloodless or oath-honoring solution, some being pushed to extremes they never imagined.
Throughout it all, there's a nice sense of humanity underlying the character interactions, making the devastation all the more stark. The ending sets up a third
book that looks like an even bigger thrill ride... one which I don't intend to wait quite so long to read, once it's released this summer. (I will be fully
vaccinated by then, and am already plotting a major bookstore binge to honor the occasion... future global or national disasters permitting, of course.)
Since waking alone on the empty ship of her enemies, Commander Sanda Greeve has had her world turned upside-down and inside-out. The interstellar government
to which she swore her life turns out to have been founded on a lie, its technology stolen from an ancient alien race and weaponized to prevent that race from
returning to snatch its toys back. The artificial intelligence of the enemy ship, Bero, achieved sentience and turned on its makers. And the man who helped her
escape and whom she fell in love with turned out to be part of a secretive ring of spies with unusual tech of their own, to the point where it's arguable
whether Tomas is even human. Meanwhile, her brother Biran has undergone his own journey and rude awakenings, rising to the role of Speaker of the elite
Protectorate only to discover the rot and lies within. Now Rainier, the legacy artificial intelligence originally tasked with guarding the alien tech, has gone
insane, ready to culminate a generations-long plan to exterminate the upstart primates for the travesty they made of her creator's gifts. Sanda and Biran
scramble to save their species from threats within and without, but their enemy has studied humanity for centuries and infiltrated every nook and cranny of
civilization. Even as they race toward the final confrontation, they may already have lost.
Review
The final installment of the (probable) trilogy maintains the high-octane pace of the series, shot through with firefights, betrayals, twists, and turns,
with some spots of humor and character interplay along the way. Sanda and Biran and their companions must confront the sins of their species and Prime's
founders, who built their entire spacefaring society on lies and bloodshed and greed and fear; even as they work to stop Rainier, they see just why the
artificial intelligence has grown so enraged with the crimes of the species. Former Grotta thief Jules Valentine, meanwhile, continues on the dark path that
led her to infect a large population with the corrupted "ascension" agent that helped her transcend her human limits (but which has devastating results on
over ninety percent of its victims), finding it increasingly hard to justify her extreme means even in the name of saving the only person in the universe she
has ever cared about. Things start at a high level of tension and only ratchet up from there, at times reaching near overwhelming levels, before a climactic
conclusion that alters the trajectory of Prime and humanity's future, with the door cracked open just enough for sequel potential. It narrowly lost itself a
half-star due to that sense of being a little overwhelmed and overloaded at times, plus some of the side characters and storylines felt a bit lost in the
shuffle by the end, but the whole still makes for excellent, action-filled space opera that never forgets the flawed individuality of the characters
involved.
