This was a book about change, for the main characters as well as
Asterion society. It was about the relationship between Nika and
Dashiel, trying to incorporate her old life into the new one she’d been
forging over the last five years. It’s about confronting the Guides,
berating them for not coming up with another plan to evade the Rasu’s
interest. And it’s about the role of the Asterion Advisors, and if they
want to be part of a society that is dwindling because of the deal the
Guides made eight years ago. I liked all parts of this change,
especially the relationship between Nika and Dashiel. I can’t say that
any of it was riveting, but it kept my interest, and I liked what I saw.
I imagine something different is coming in the next book, and I look
forward to discovering what Nika comes up with.
Spoiler review:
A steady foray into ancient relationships and galactic disaster. The
book was consistent, but rarely rose above very good, even in the action
scenes. Our heroes have such a wide array of armaments and ingenuity
that it’s hard to see them losing to Security’s bots. I do enjoy their
ingenuity, though, making them smart characters working against a
difficult situation.
One of the Guides has finally realized that
their response to the Rasu demands is lacking in imagination, and can’t
continue for much longer. She provides clandestine information to Nika,
so she and Dashiel land on the planet that’s to be evacuated to provide
people for the aliens. I enjoyed all the scenes with Nika and Dashiel,
and could feel Dashiel’s frustration when he saw the old Nika poking
through, but couldn’t reach her. His theme for this book was acceptance
of who she is now, while hers is to incorporate some of her old self
into her new personality. She won’t be the same as she was –or is.
To watch the evacuation, Nika uses her contacts in an alien society
to get one of their cloaking devices. Nika’s travails there were fun and
interesting, though it was rarely in doubt that she would get the
device. Just as it’s never really in doubt that Dashiel will be able to
install it, especially with the help from Nika’s old lover, the one who
built the ship in the first place.
Nika stows away on the
evacuation ship after failing to plant a tracking device. Dashel
succeeds in planting one at the last minute and tracks Nika to a small
space-based outpost, where Nika discovers thousands of suspended bodies
ready for transport. She slices into the ship’s computer to find its
destination before escaping, out from under the nose of the Advisor who
is leading the task.
Meanwhile, one Advisor, and old friend of
Nika and Dashiel, has realized that the Guides have gone too far by
releasing this virutox that’s turning more people into criminals, and is
trying to get it off the street. He and his team develop an
anti-virulent, and contact NOIR to get it to the people. Joachim is
captured, but Perrin takes control of the group, showing her leadership
for the first time. She’s uncertain, but grows into the role through her
passion for Joachim and Nika. Even when she feels betrayed, and
confronts Adlai about it, she uses her gut to determine if he’s lying.
Her optimism is a great feature, and here it doesn’t steer her wrong.
With the failure of the virutox by way of the arm implants, the
Guides have developed an airborne toxin, which they release at a
closed-in market. The mechanic who build Nika’s ship gets caught, but
through Perrin and then Adlai, gets the anti-virulent and escapes. Adlai
and his team are under investigation, but not yet fired, and he still
has access to a lot of information and contacts. He convinces another
friend of Nika’s, a powerful socialite, to distribute the anti-virulent.
When Dashiel is captured and taken to the Platform, somehow a prison
and the place where the Guides reside, Adlai and Nika and Perrin can’t
wait any longer. Joachim’s mind is hacked so the Guides find the
location of NOIR’s headquarters, and Nika barely manages to get most of
her friends out through the cloaked ship. Joachim manages to get free
and finds Dashiel. This was the most plausibility-stretching part of the
book, as nobody physically searched Joachim, so he kept his hidden knife
and a whole bunch of other tools, and the prison is only manned by bots,
which are the equivalent of Stormtroopers- easy to destroy. It’s a
wonder there aren’t more prison breaks, especially among those with
black-market upgrades. Justice needs to sample more of these people and
upgrade their systems appropriately.
As Adlai, Nika and NOIR
infiltrate the access to the Platform, Joachim and Dashiel work their
way to the gateway from the inside. Joachim finds the Guides, and rigs
the Platform to explode after their gone. The battle to get them off the
platform was pretty standard. What I really enjoyed at this time was the
party Perrin and the socialite Advisor hosted to keep all the other
Advisors on this planet away from the escape. They told the Advisors the
truth, with reluctant help from the one who was sending Asterions to the
Rasu, and the Advisor who was subverting Adlai. It was a real politics
game, and well done, especially as we learn that the Rasu are demanding
more and more Asterion bodies because they are intrigued by how they are
constructed –except that the bodies always disappear. Are the Rasu
transferring their own consciousnesses into the bodies, or destroying
them, as Nika suspects?
Nika herself seems to be much older than
her thousands of years suggest. Her sex with Dashiel, which he takes as
her returning to him, unlocks several very old memories, as with the
last book they seem to stretch back to the beginning of the Asterion’s
flight from the human galaxy. One of these suggests that Dashiel is an
old lover reborn, whom she rediscovered, and she worries about him
leaving her as the old lover did, tired of life. Her rejection of him
after a wonderful night of love sends him into the trap that gets him
captured. She has also experienced help from an unknown source –I
suspect it’s her future self –in a game that she and Perrin played
showing the invasion of a world by the Rasu. I’m not sure what it
signifies yet, but it does showcase the power of these aliens, whom it
seems can’t be defeated.
There is a tease of advanced aliens in
another corner of the galaxy that shut humanity out as soon as they made
contact, and I wonder if they will be part of Nika’s plan to defeat the
Rasu –who seem to inhabit many galaxies and can travel between them at a
whim. Because now that Joachim has destroyed the Platform, and Nika has
revealed the nature of the Guides duplicity in sending bodies to the
Rasu, they’ve effectively torn up the agreement without a plan in place.
Nika is good at making things up as she goes along, but that doesn’t
seem quite enough in this case. Time, and the next book, will tell…
