Seventy bottles of beer on the wall, seventy bottles of beer, take one down, pass...
Captain on the bridge!
As you were, gentlemen, Lieutenant, anything to report?
Negative sir, jump space readings are within normal tolerances, we are in the grove for a clean j-space transition in t minus… thirty now sir, right on schedule.
Very well, your watch is relieved.
I stand relieved sir, your con.
Get some shuteye son. Now Sparks! Que us up something.
Niko Landry and his crew thought a routine hyperspace survey would be easy money. But when the barrier separating their homeworld from the rest of the human race opens, they seize the chance to go exploring . . . finding an empire more dangerous than they imagined.
click pic for amazon
Every time, every single time, I continue to be impressed by brother Karl’s succinct and pithy add copy game. Pay attention kiddoes, this is the miniskirt of add copy game; long enough to cover what needs to be covered, and short enough to be interesting and mysterious. As before, my copy of this work was provided gratis, for the reviewing, and I must beg the good Master Karl’s indulgence in the tardiness of this post in response. Mea culpa. Now on to the question that springs eternal. Does the insides match the out?
In a word? Yes.
I will be upfront with you, my dear readers. This work is perhaps my least favourite Gallagher special to date, and yet I still was glued to my screen for two long nights back to back and finished in only two sittings. In short I devoured it. So when I say ‘least favourite’ perhaps you understand that I’m not saying anything particularly negative, just maybe this dish is good, but someone else might enjoy it more than I.
Meet the Landry Family; there’s the dad, Niko Landry, that’s Captain Landry to you, Mrs. Lane Landry, First Officer, and young Marcus, their son and Supercargo and Loadmaster. Together with their hired crew, the Landry’s own and operate the Merchant Registry Vessel Azure Tarn (modelled and illustrated by the legendary Winchell Chung of Ogre and Atomic Rockets fame). Unlike the tail-landing, skyscraper deck plan of the Fives we visited last time, the Azure Tarn is a belly-landing aerodyne deck plan type starship, something like everyone’s favourite. Complete with artificial electrogravitics, so think more Classic Traveller and less Classic BattleTech.
wWe goin’ EVA for this one, that there antenna wants to be stowed before we get under way…
Starships in this ‘verse make way across the void between stars by means of side-stepping the vast distances and speed of light limit by way of an alternate dimension, a sort of hyper-space. Yeah, they punch a hole into the aetheric filled astral-luminal realm, where the lumineferous aetheric fluid that is the medium for light and gravity waves actually resides. Since points in this realm correspond non lineraly and non euclideanly to points in our realm, transitioning this realm is a cheat code for point to point travel that is effectively superluminal in our realm but not in the other. Very convenient. Of course, since this realm’s space is filled with a super-fluid and is not a quantum vacuum, it has it’s own dangers and gotchas to be watchful of.
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Starting with pressure - all starships must be double pressure vessels, like submarines, rather than only pressure retaining vessels. Also there is the weather and tides, currents and eddies and storms. Yep, aetheric motion, weather of a sorts and of all kinds is a thing, the luminous-gravitic super-fluid of the aether is pressed and stirred by the masses of stars and planets and even larger macro structures; stellar nurseries, quasars, pulsars, and black holes, which can churn up ship wrecking storms. Oh and navigation is an issue because points in space are not 1 for 1, requiring a network of navigation beacons. Does this sound familiar? Well it should, you may recall such a setup from a little show called Babylon 5. Another reference point would be David Drake’s With the Lightnings series.
The Landrys live and ply the trade-lanes with the Azure Tarn all within the Fieran Bubble, a rough sphereoid of space cut off from the rest of humanity, by treacherous hyperspace eddies and shoals - gravitational anomalies - that wreck ships and are impassible to hyperspace vessels. For over 900 years the people of the Bubble have been isolated from the rest of humanity. Not that they were in any hurry to find a way our of their little hidey-hole. You see the Fieran’s ancestors where fleeing a Great War (hmmm what does that remind me of?), one that threatened the very survival of humanity. So no, our space survivalists have been entirely happy to pull the door shut after them and hide in the dark. One little problem. The Azure Tarn, on contract to conduct a routine survey of the Bubble’s walls, has found a gap, a cove, a passage into the great unknown.
Thus begins the first third of the story, a voyage of adventure and discovery, risking everything on the chance that humans have survived elsewhere and might want to trade something. The chance to go down in history as great explorers and the re-unifiers of man. Overall the structure of story and this first (and the last) part are overwhelmingly nautical in character. The model is less Skylark of Space and more John "Jack" Aubrey or Captain Kidd. This nautical and exploration theme is reinforced by the long middle third of the book, which I felt did kind of drag on a bit, namely, the stranger in paradise and the dawning horror that utopia means nowhere and big brother is always watching.
The Planet Corwynt is a water-world of archipelagos, sea-monsters, and routine hyper-hurricanes, against which the natives either live giant pyramidal hive-city fortress-arcologies or in great flotillas of wind-jammer ships, flying ahead of the storms or battening down and riding them out, and bringing in harvests of fish and sea monster meats. The people of Corwynt are inviting and more or less prosperous, land-lubbers and ship-born alike belonging great clans that also function as family businesses. This would all be fantastic enough for our heroes, as would the chance to sell a hold full of miscellaneous trade goods - toys and refined heavy metals - and buy on the cheap contra-gravy air-rafts and repulsar-lift speeder-cars that will flip for ten times or more profit back in the Bubble where contra-gravitics production has back slid in the long years of of isolation and the sheer effort of lifting and shifting an entire tech-base and industrial production chain while at the same time settling new worlds, making grav-cars of any sort a purely top end ultra-luxury good.
While the Landry’s family and crew have big eyes at the profit to be made, they are also running out of time, for their arrival has set a series of events into motion that could see them all captured and tortured for information by the local authorities. Well not the locals really. You see Corwnt is not a sovereign planet-state, but a member of stellar-polity. THE stellar polity according to it’s own story about itself. The 1000 millennium rule of the Censorate. Yeah… Take Classic Traveller’s Third Imperium mixed with Renegade Legion’s Terran Overlord Government, with a bit of Paranoia’s friend computer for spice..
Like the Third Imperium, the Censorate is mostly hands off the local worlds, as long as taxes are paid, laws enforced, and evildoers turned over to the governor’s men for punishment. Evildoers being those who break the Censor’s (GLORY TO THE CENSOR!) peace with nefarious activities. You know, like reading, writing, or arithmetic, or praying to the Sacrificed God. All information is distributed on a need to know basis. ALL INFORMATION. EVERYTHING NOT MANDATORY IS FORBIDDEN! Wait. What’s your clearance level citizen? Ah! I just committed a treasonous offence speaking to you! Ahhhhh!
Real power lies in the spaces between the Censorate’s worlds, in the clutches of the Censorate’s Spacy whose WarShips ensure that no planet, no sector slips from the Censor’s grasp (ALL HAIL THE CENSOR!). In the meantime the noose slowly tightening around the Landry’s belongs only to the planetary governor, who has this aching curiosity about this planet name in the records he can’t place. This itch just demands to be scratched. And every scratch leaves him unsatisfied with the answers.
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As I said, the middle section drags a little long for my taste, however, it also contains the emotional heart of the book. Despite all the adventure and exploration and subterfuge and big ideas, the heart of this story is… well call it a reverse regency romance. Young Marcus Landry, who stands to inherit his father’s business and standing in Fieran society, must hastily attain maturity and choose correctly between his puppy love for Alys, the help, and Wynny Goch, a young lady of high social standing in the local socity of Corwynt and the Goch clan, who have become allied to the Landrys through trade relations and even tentative marriage proposals. Of course the height of the dilemma happens at a debutante party and dance (which is also serving as social cover for the Landry and Goch patriarchs to trade written records, the true wealth of the Censorate’s many secret societies).
Sorry Alys dear, you never had a chance, simply out-matched.
From there we rapidly slide into the third overall section the flight and long stern-chase of the Azure Tarn, back to home and safety. Finally being driven to brave a hyper-space storm to give their pursuit the slip. Back the Aubrey and Martin and high seas adventure. I shan’t spoil the details for you readers, any of the hows and whys and wherefores. I shall only say, if it wasn’t for the emotional heart of the story, I probably wouldn’t have stayed engaged. As it is, I care more about Marcus and Wynny’s future wedding plans than about the big ideas of muh freedom fighters against the Censores.
You go you crazy kids, seize the day, seize your happiness. So now I have to buy book 2 just to see what happens with them. And I will be severely disappointed if that thread gets dropped. Which I don’t at all expect, as Master Karl doesn’t write big men with screwdrivers and big ideas, but fleshed out character dramas and romances (in both senses of that term) that just happen to have rockets and proper orbital mechanics in them. Which is why I can happily say that I am a member in good standing of the Karl Gallagher fan club.
This Book is a GO! at this Station!
Hail and Read!
All Hands, Jump Warning! Jump Warning! Jump in 3, 2, 1, Jump, Jump, Jump!
Real space transition complete, beginning location fix.
Well, we’re here now, deploy the jump beacon for the fleet and let’s find us a nice plump gas giant.
Sounds like a fun read - I'll have to add it to the backlog I'm still plowing through.
I can assure you the romance subplot doesn't disappear, though the big wedding doesn't happen until SPOILER.