After some tough, long, difficult reads over the last year, I decided to reward myself with a shorter, faster-paced book. I like military SF, and I like spaceships and space battles, and this book seemed like a good fit. It was. I very much enjoyed it, and it ended up being a lot deeper and developed into a much more interesting story as the plot moved along.
The book starts with ground forces invading and putting down some heretical resistance forces. Kel Cheris, the commander on the ground, makes an unorthodox choice going against “formation instinct,” a programmed behavior that keeps soldiers in line and allows them to use poorly described weapons that take advantage of the mathematical system currently being employed by the hexarchate, the government. There is some suspension of disbelief here, and the explanation for the mathematics and weaponry is never fully explained, which I found perfectly fine.
Because of her choices, she is selected to bid on an attempt to take down a fortress which has been overrun by heretics who oppose the hexarchate, wanting (we later learn) to return to the heptarchate. She chooses her weapon, a long deceased and dishonored general Shuos Jedao, who not only was highly successful in his campaigns, but also murdered his own crew. However, he is such a good general that they occasionally bring him back to life to win the toughest battles.
Cheris learns, to her dismay, that the way Jedao is brought back to life is by attaching him to her as a “shadow;” he is in her mind, they can communicate, but no one else can see or hear him. And, it seems that the only way to get rid of him is to overthrow the insurrection, and even then, it isn’t clear she’s going to get out of this alive.
This was a fairly fast paced book, and there was a lot of unexplained tech, as I already mentioned. The tech was sufficiently advanced that it felt like magic to me, but since I’m not a member of this future society, I couldn’t be expected to understand it. The characters used it as necessary and I really didn’t mind not knowing how or even that the author didn’t even try to explain it. Cheris and Jedao work together cautiously, and by the 3/4 point of the book, when things seem to be wrapping up, I knew to expect a twist, and I was rewarded with an unexpected one.
To be honest, I think that I might have been able to see the twist coming; I’m thinking about rereading this one before hitting up the sequel, because I felt a little lost at times. It was a quick enough read that I think it would be worth my time to revisit the story before attempting the sequel, which is well set up and I am definitely curious to find out what happens next in this really interesting world!
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