The Risen Empire is a loosely connected, independently governed, and interdependent series of eighty inhabited worlds controlled by a divine god. This emperor is over sixteen hundred years and is worshipped by untold trillions across a thirty light year radius. His sister, also a member of the honoured dead, a clique that uses technology and a symbiote to maintain their attenuated lifespan's, is being held hostage. An alternate branch of humankind known as the Rix has taken the Child Empress (the Emperor's sister) hostage and it is into this current crisis the novel opens.
In geo-synchronous over the palace where the seven Rix Commandos hold the Child Empress; the Lynx, a state of the art frigate, commanded by one Commander Laurent Zai, carefully prepares a daring rescue. From the opening pages of this novel the tension is palpable. To appreciate how much value is given to the Emperor's sister the implicit realisation that all other hostages are expendable is brought before the reader's attention. So much rests on the nothing happening to the Child Empress that if the mission is a failure the captain is expected to take his own life, a ritual suicide known as the Failure of Blood. The first segment of this novel is almost exclusively given over to the infiltration of the palace by technological marvels with the meticulous step by step preparation of targeting the terrorists from space while simultaneously planning to insert Navy marines to mop up any remaining Rix commandos. Honestly, the intensity of the pages comes to life in a barrage of wonderfully detailed technological terror, mayhem and close quarter battles. After this initial skirmish finishes, and it is a bloody skirmish with a high body count, the reasons for the Rix incursion into Imperial space slowly unravel and develop. In this novel one thing is made apparent: death is not necessarily the end, it is the means to an end. The background story is about a terrible secret being discovered by a compound mind let loose on the planet. The compound mind; one which the Rix revere and is the antithesis of what the Imperial worlds' are thought to despise is an anathema that the emperor fears more than death itself. His reasons for so are only hinted at, although I felt the author gave enough away in novel for any average reader to guess as to why. A pugnacious space opera littered with all the trappings of what the genre demands and what a reader has a right to expect of these days.
Events have stepped up a gear since the tumultuous events of The Risen Empire: War hero Captain Laurent Zai, now pardoned by the Emperor for his failure to save the life of the Empress, is sent on a near certain suicide mission aboard the Lynx. His task is to extirpate a Rix battlecruiser which heavily outguns the captain's vessel. On the home planet, the captain's lover, Senator Nara Oxham, opposes the might and righteousness of the risen dead while steadily challenging the Emperor's sanctimonious false godhood. Her fear for Zai's safety powers her resolve to bring down this sanctimonious regime of religious corruption and lies. Sandwiched in between these two connected storylines is the lone surviving Rix Commando, H_rd. Under the tutelage, aegis and guidance of the Rix collective AI "Alexander" she is instructed on how to unleash this fearsome intelligence into the information network of the planet.
Overall, this is one hell of a yarn. The first third of the book deals almost exclusively with the cat and mouse game played in interstellar space between the Lynx and the Rix battlecruiser. The various characters which populate the narrative all have their part to play and they play it very well. The professionalism of a well trained crew is tested to its limit by events which come to an incandescent point when the ship and it crew is strained to breaking point. Casualties abound, marvelous and terrible weapons of mass destruction abound, and decisions making officers thought processes are demonstrably brought to life. Very immersive storytelling. The Rix commando is given less coverage but her eventual foray into the arctic is an adrenaline pumping adventure all of its own. The politese that Nora Oxham experiences is a very subtle tale of political intrigue that is very carefully shadowed with a background menace that threatens to leap from the shadows at any moment. When the secrets of the Emperor are revealed, the animal fear of the near toppled Emperor threatens to let loose the dogs of a civil war; all in order to protect a secret. It provided a wonderful counterbalance to the laser light display of death and explosive decompression that her lover's crew suffers. At times the scientific recounting of some of the more surreal technologies left my mind a bit addled, but it is obvious that the hard science is representative of our current understanding of energy weapons causing cancers; relativistic speeds and velocities causing tremendous stresses on the human body; near-light speed objects no matter how small their mass, becoming near unstoppable weapons of mass destruction. Overall, this minor caveat is just a mote despoiling a marvelously entertaining science fiction creation. Special mention must go to the final chapter, especially the final few lines. They completely caught me off guard and it was such an original ending to a novel that it compelled me to read it twice. What more could you want?
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