After encountering gravitational shockwaves, John and his alien friends traverse the Orion nebula to help save sentient stars from a hidden enemy.

My first impression was that the characters reacted too much to what was going on, rather than initiating action or even learning anything. Stuff happens to them, but they don’t know why, until much later in the book, and by then, it was almost too late; I was close to cruising at that point, just about ready to ride it out without the story mattering. At least the writing was enjoyable. Fortunately, things started picking up at that point, finally drawing me into the story. And what an imaginative story –it goes beyond physics almost into fantasy, with talking stars, n-space technology that can act as nearly-magical shields or hyperspace lanes, sentient clouds, and all sorts of bizarre stuff that the characters just have to take for granted. It’s almost too much, as I wish there were more explanations, but I’m sure I wouldn’t understand them. The knowledge the crew does gain comes only when they start taking risks, and most of that comes from John himself. I felt like most of the other characters were under-utilized. They contributed some information, but very little of it was all that critical or essential. Finally, I suspect the secondary storyline, which takes up a very small percentage of this book, will bring about a love triangle later on. I didn’t think it was necessary, but hope I’m proven wrong.

There was a certain point in this novel when I wondered what was the point of it all? The main cast of characters, which has grown with every book, did essentially nothing for a significant part of this story, reacting to circumstances that grew more and more outrageous. The characters, while different in attitude, were similar enough in reaction that I think most could have gone to any one of them.

The timid Li Jared was probably the exception, as he ran around freaking out about their lack of knowledge and calm acceptance, filling in for the reader as events kept passing them by. Ik only grew later, when he could communicate with the star. Antares, besides being John Bandicut’s lover and a telepath, didn’t have much to offer for most of the story. She gave support where necessary, which was required when they started getting emotions from the stars, or when Ik’s stones were infected, or John needed to recover from too much stimulation, which he did with sex.

Only the two robots, Copernicus and Napoleon, showed any incentive of their own in the first part, familiarizing themselves with the ship, strangely reading romance novels, and talking with the AI in control. I found them to be engaging and often hilarious, and fully competent, and their presence kept me advancing without too much boredom.

That’s a good thing, because after a certain point, things were getting tiring. And just when I found myself starting to glaze over into a “let’s finish this book” mode, knowing that I had a large amount of story left, things started to pick up. I think the turning point was when the Mindaru object trapped them and started infecting the ship –and when Copernicus joined with the AI to improve their defenses, eventually shutting down the infiltration.

We dealt with some n-space manipulations in the previous books, like threading space in Neptune Crossing, or just the advanced space travel that brought them to Shipworld or the marine planet. But here, the technology is augmented to the n-th degree. The shadow-beings live in n-space, but they seem to have immature versions that can live as partial beings, like Delilah. They are protected by an n-space shield which separates them from the vacuum of space. The ship can transform inside and out where necessary.

Space itself is completely contorted by this new physics. Some stars are sentient, and can talk to each other across light-years. The horsehead nebula is an art construction –why not? It seemed like every chapter introduced some more far-out change in physics as we know it, allowing them to make almost magical transformations. They can travel inside and through stars, alter the rate at which time flows, and so much more. The science is almost fantasy.

This book introduces a new alien threat, the same one that threw a comet at Earth in Neptune Crossing. Probably the same one that created the boojum in Strange Attractors, or the underwater stargate in The Infinite Sea. Here, it gets a name, the Mindaru, agents of the Survivors, sentient AI that hid after the war of biological life against it. Now it is destroying stars in an effort to eradicate biological life in the galaxy (including stars), making heavy metals in the process, which it will use billions of years in the future to augment itself. It has traps and devices all around the galaxy, taking care of pests like humans and other aliens trying to stop it.

So here they are, all together in the Orion nebula (or Starmaker, as it’s known to the alien conglomeration). Their transfer station is hit by gravitational waves, and Jeaves, the robotic administrator, sends them on the n-space ship into the nebula as the station falls apart behind them. It takes a long time to get to the Mindaru trap, but they work together with two cloud-like aliens from another galaxy, as well as a sacrifice made by Delilah (it wasn’t a good distraction, as they did nothing while she flew the tiny shuttle toward the device). She discovers a hole in the trap, and they eventually escape because of her, past a ship graveyard, back into normal space.

Dark and Deep, the living clouds, guide them to stars named Brightburn, who explodes, then Thunder, who is being used to funnel dark matter into Nick. Deep is able to change time so that the stars and the so-called ephemerals can communicate. They find a device that’s infecting Thunder with dark matter, and John goes inside as it expands to his size, taking Napoleon with him. They are able to divert one stream, but find there are dozens more flowing into Nick. Deep carries part of Charlie (or Charlene) in him, after the quarx died again, allowing it to communicate through the newborn quarx Charli. They hatch a plan to convince the Mindaru sentry to release the dark matter early, which then Dark funnels into her dying galaxy through a rip in spacetime caused by the gravitational overload.

Nick doesn’t explode into a hypernova, which doesn’t destroy the remaining stars in the Orion nebula. This part of the book was very exciting, and well-constructed in the way John executed it, allowing himself to be seen by the Mindaru attacker, triggering Ik’s infected stones when they think John has also been affected. Having truthfully left Napoleon near the center of Nick, which might prove a threat, Ik (infected) agrees that the plan needs to be completed before the robot can interfere with it. The setup was long in coming, but worth it when all the pieces were put together.

Julie Stone, John’s love interest from the first book, has another important part to play, in a different time, and back in Earth’s solar system. She’s had minor parts to play in completely disconnected scenes in the other books. I was willing to ignore that previously, but here her role finally becomes more important. She manages to get the translator off of Triton and on its way to Earth, but it discovers a Mindaru agent getting ready to attack Earth, and arranges to have Julie alone on a shuttle to hunt it. The fight between the translator and the object, which was more a battle of wills with physical side-effects (like almost disintegrating the shuttle), made many of these sequences very interesting, adding something to the journey to drop it into the sun. I don’t have a sense of Julie as a character, even after this story. She ends the book on Shipworld, and all I could keep thinking through her chapters was how she would eventually become a threat to Antares and John’s relationship, creating a love triangle that I’m not sure I’m interested in seeing. I hope the author can prove me wrong. She seems to be in a different time from John, whom I believe has been gone a lot longer than Julie has experienced, but anything is possible with the physics as seen in this book.

Antares herself got more interesting as the story progressed, but she was mostly support, first for John as he navigated the uncertainties of their mission and circumstances, then for Ik as his stones were infected and then finally ejected. Ik is now the odd one out, without a proper way to communicate with the others. We learn that he escaped his homeworld through his own sun as it exploded. Charli was also victim of the Mindaru, who destroyed her/his home. The love scenes between Antares and John were truncated before they became sensual, which allowed them to be tender, with a more telepathic and therefore mental angle than most stories would do, which was welcome.

I wonder how or even if this crew can defeat the Mindaru, which thinks along thousands of millennia instead of days or years. I wonder if that’s the point at all. As an adventure, this story was a strange ride, which I finally grew to enjoy before the halfway mark. I suppose future stories will continue that, and maybe help grow the strange universe with its strange future physics even more.