I’ve enjoyed Currie’s writing – see my review of Heirs of Empire – and this is a series Himself has been nagging suggesting that I read for a while now, so I’m linking my review with Sci Fi Month…
In the future, mankind has colonized other worlds, mined asteroid belts, and sent ships so far into the blackness of space that light from their drives won’t reach Earth for centuries. Through it all, life has been found in almost every system we visited and yet we’ve never encountered another intelligent species. Until now.
When the Colony on the planet known as Hayden’s World stops transmitting on their CASIMIR FTL 
system, a Solari Fleet Task Force is sent to investigate. When they arrive there are enough oddities in the situation that they in turn send in a special operations unit to contact the colonists and determine what happened. Only one of those operators survives to make planetfall. Sergeant Sorilla Aida finds herself against an alien force of unknown power and capability. Her only assets? A depleted suit of power armor, her rifle, basic kit, and a few hundred Hayden born civilians looking to take back their home. Just what she was trained for.
That is the starting point of the book and the opening sequence is punchy and full of drama. I love Sorilla and the cool high-tech toys she has to play with. I also enjoy the fact that the medical tech is also very whizzy and high-functioning so we don’t have a single soldier going up against a powerful alien enemy with a collection of serious injuries when by rights she shouldn’t be moving from a hospital bed. That’s a scenario I get a tad tired of in this sub-genre at times. Currie is careful to ensure the physical limits of his super-soldier are sufficiently realistic so that while I’m sympathetic and concerned about her pain – I’m not rolling my eyes at being yanked out of the story at the unfeasibility of it all.
Currie also handles the scene changes and inevitably wide cast of characters that have to be involved in this type of scenario without holding up the pace with lengthy info-dumps or those wincing, ‘As you know, Bob…’ conversations. I found some of the early engagements both exciting and the aftermath genuinely poignant. The outcomes matter – not just on an epic Earth-is-at-stake scale, but on the personal level where friends and lovers are lost.
There is plenty of action and tension to make me continue turning the pages in order to find out what happens next in this exciting military sci fi adventure. One of the reasons I wanted to continue turning those pages was to find out more about the mysterious aliens and their terrifying weapons. Currie’s deft handling of the steadily increasing bank of knowledge about these creatures was a major contribution to this enjoyable opener to this series. I now know why Himself kept banging on about it.
Highly recommended for fans of epic and engrossing military science fiction.
9/10
Brainfluff 