I’m tired Sparks, tired of putting good men to rest in the black. Put something on.
Aye-aye cap’n, how about an good ole space shanty?
That’ll do Sparks, that’ll do.
A captain who’ll take any job if there’s enough money in it.
A pilot with an agenda of her own.
And a mechanic with an eye on the pilot.
The crew of the Fives Full are just trying to make enough money to keep themselves in the black while avoiding the attention of a government so paranoid it’s repealed Moore’s Law. They’re not looking for adventure in the stars . . . but they’re not going to back down just because something got in their way.
That’s the sparse and laconic add copy we get from friend of the casa-del-Sauvage, Karl K. Gallagher. Does the inside match? Short answer, dear readers, is yes. I must confess, my copy of this work was provided gratis, for reviewing, and I beg good Master Karl’s indulgence in the tardiness of this post in response. Sorry, life kinda happened in between, as it does. That being said, here’s my capsule review.
Yeah, I kinda stayed up all night and again and crashed through it all in two sittings. You could say I kinda liked it. Ooh, you want more than that? OK-OK, stop twisting my arm, here we go.
Meet Michigan ‘Mitchie’ Long, she’s a spacer’s-spacer; got her start in the planetary suborbital shuttle service, took all the continuing education courses she could, including orbital transfer mechanics, and got a break when a dropper reached port and kicked her co-pilot off. Since then she’s been honing her craft plotting burns for spheroid fusion torch dropships all over the known worlds. She has all the right references and they all check out. She walks the walk and talks the lingo, savy? The only problem? It’s all a lie.
Well, since it’s a professional lie, call it a legend. You see, Mitchie, or whatever her real birth name is, is an… asset for the Disconnect, the dissenting stellar polity that refuses the centralised control of the Fusion. Flying around on tramp merchant torchship, carrying speculative and contract cargos back and forth through the black between worlds is a great way to get your peepers on all sorts of military hardware and meet all sorts of drunk and horny men who know very interesting things, and slip away after asking your questions. Very useful to that sort of career.
War is coming, everyone knows it. The only question is when. For the Fusion cannot abide the existence of any intellect outside of it’s surveillance and control, as uncontrolled intellect might generate new AI, and the Abominable Intelligence must never be allowed again. So seriously does the Fusion take this prohibition, that a routine patrol vessel belonging to the Fusion’s Spacy casually drops a nuke on scientific and historic conference, taking place on a Disconnect world. A conference that happens to be discussing the history and theory of the Betrayal, as the machine rebellion is known, capital B most definitely included.
Of course it is hard to fault the Fusion for hating and despising the thinking machines, for as we all know…
It never ends well. And sure as heck didn’t end well this time. Old Earth is lost to the machines, the machines that rampaged and converted billions of humans on Earth and the core worlds to grey goo, extra molecular processing power to calculate infinity, or whatever daeomonic-machine nonsense is driving them. But that’s why Mitchie calculates her orbits and burns and transfers with a slide rule and graph-paper and old fashioned orbital calculus, the long way. No silicon, no processors, no qubits at all aboard the Fives Full. She’s a full four-square Disconnected ship, yes sir, nothing but analogue tech, slide-rules and vacuum tubes and electro-mechanics, nothing silicon or digital for the damn toasters to subvert.
But neither does the Fusion wish to give up all the digital conveniences and post-modern, post-industrial, post-scarcity way of life to which they have become accustomed. So they embrace a total hydraulic despotism, a digital surveillance state, all computer and all persons are under constant watch for wrong think, wrong calculation, wrong programming. So the future vision we have here is a three way cold war between the Space Cowboys, the Space Bugmen, and the Cylons. And as any student of the Soviet Union knows, the most unstable configuration in all of human political relations is a tripod.
So yeah, war is coming, as it always is. And I’m rooting for the Space Cowboys, because those cowardly Fusionites banned me from Argo!
Complicating Mitchie’s sweat little cover gig is the budding romance between herself and the Fives Full engineer and flight mechanic. Can she navigate the murky waters between love and strife? As a conflicted but ultimately committed and professional femme fatale spy, Michigan Long works much better than her obvious progenitor, Friday Jones. Nor is that the end of the winks and nods and references contained within these pages, and skilfully used I might add.
We have fusion-torchsips, all chrome and shiny and bright, guided on orbits calculated by sliderules. We have Skynet-Terminator AIs, clones, born-in-spacers, cyberware, VR gamers that are damn near wireheads, space lolberts and the rimward fringes, spheroid droppers, Kzinti lessons, stargates, a weaponized matter-energy converter, and the MC has the surname ‘Long’. The only thing we’re missing are the belters in single-ships prospecting for monopoles.
In short if you are genre fiction fanatic, maybe one who likes his space cowboy’s coats to have a brownish sort of colour, this book is for you. It certainly was for me. The characters are well realised and skilfully portrayed. The colourful crew of the fives engages in picaresque adventures trying to get paid and keep flying as the outbreak of war draws ever more nigh. I sympathised with both Mitchie and Chief (only) Engineer Guo once their marriage came under the soul-destroying strain of secrets and intel-work.
And the solution found by Captain Schwartzenberger was both elegant and plausible. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the next volume of the three book series opens with our love-birds on the outs again. But I’ll be rooting for them the whole way. And I think you will too, once you give this series the old college try. Which you should. Do it. Now!
This book is a GO at this station!
…
We’re done here Sparks, queue up something while we calculate our jump.
Aye-aye sir, any world you can think of, we carry the drink of, here at Hanrahan’s bar!