This week I decided to review The Lost Fleet: Beyond the
Frontier: Leviathan by Jack Campbell.
The story begins with the Alliance fleet
led by Admiral John Geary pursuing the AI-controlled fleet which was prepared
by the Alliance to stop Geary if he tried to launch a military coup. Unfortunately,
it has now gone out of control and is attacking any spacecraft or stations it
can find. After narrowly averting an attack on an Alliance base, Geary takes
some time to repair and refit his fleet while trying to provide the patches that
will eliminate the government-installed computer code which prevents Alliance
ship sensors from seeing the AI warships, only to find his efforts hindered by a
lack of funding and rogue government agents determined to keep the Alliance
navy blind to the rogue forces.
When Geary receives a distress call from a ship
fleeing a nearby system blockaded by the machine fleet, he senses a trap and, after
evading an ambush by taking a less direct route to the system, a running battle begins
which the Alliance fleet eventually wins by draining the fuel supply of the enemy
warships until they are forced to return to their base. While this severely
drains the Alliance’s own resources, it leads Geary to the idea of defeating the
enemy by destroying their supply and repair base before draining them of fuel.
This leads to an effort to locate the base, which is discovered to be Unity Alternate,
a fallback position in case the Alliance capital of Unity fell during the
recently ended war with the Syndicated Worlds, and that the AI feet was originally
part of that worst case scenario contingency plan. In time, Geary realizes that
the Dancers, so far the only friendly aliens the Alliance has encountered, have
been trying to point out the base’s location to him and soon the Dancers, who
have had very bad experiences with AI-controlled military units of their own,
send a fleet to join the Alliance force. But communications with the Dancers are
still difficult and grow more so when it is realized that they have been talking
to the Dancers in the equivalent of the grammar used by young Dancer children and
need to somehow form their messages as poems or songs to speak properly with
them. But the fleet must also find a means to access Unity Alternate, and when
they reach it, there will be many surprises waiting for them…
I give this book 9 out of 10. Watching the characters deal
with the variety of problems with fighting a fleet that pound-for-pound outclassed
them, as was watching Geary continue to struggle with fighting an enemy modeled
after himself that has fresh ships which can travel faster and hit harder the
Geary’s, while many of Geary’s ships are outdated and his funding and supply stockpiles at critical levels.
The battle sequences were very well done and I thought the communication with
the Dancers side-plot was handled well. The ending had many surprises and while
I am a little sad that the main Lost Fleet series is going on hiatus, this was a
great book to wrap the current plot on.
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