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The story opens with Traviss Uriah Long
leaving his house on what he believes is a trip to take some of his classmates
jewelry shopping. Long is asked to stay with the air car because his classmates
have reservations at a club soon. Because
he has no girlfriend to buy jewelry for, Long agrees. However while waiting, Long
sees a recruitment station for the Royal Manticoran Navy and, inspired by his
deceased father’s tales of his, service in the navy of the Eris system,
decides to enlist.
But while Long is
discussing enlistment with the recruiter, all hell breaks loose as Long’s
classmates attempt an armed robbery of the jewelry store which swiftly
transforms into a firefight with police. As the botched robbery rages Long and
the recruiter discuss the flaws in using an air car as a getaway and using someone
who doesn’t know the plan as a getaway driver.
Despite the recruiter’s best
efforts, Long refuses to apply for officer training, but early on
Long faces a crisis of conscience when his belief in rules clashes with Chomps,
one of his squadmates, stealing extra food because the new ration scheme doesn’t
make allowances for people who have inherited genetic enhancements which
require extra food as a side effect.
Then, later in training, Long discovers
students cheating on tests and after sending several messages to the head of
his section he is pulled aside by an instructor who explains why the problem will
be dealt with later. Unfortunately, Long soon rushes into a figurative minefield
after observing a simulation where the hostile force uses a theoretical weapon,
a missile equipped with two drive systems. Long writes a paper explaining why
such a weapon is impossible--or at least extraordinarily impractical and can
never function as portrayed in the simulation. Long doesn’t know that creating
a program to develop such a missile is the pet project of his chief instructor and only a transfer to another
department saves him from retaliation.
Meanwhile, a struggle is raging in the Manticoran government as
a faction that believes the navy is a waste of resources and manpower in an economy
still reeling from a plague that devastated the system’s population is gaining
power, a faction that includes Long’s half-brother. Believing that Manticore
will never be attacked, they intend to gut the navy in favor of the Manticoran
Patrol and Rescue Service, essentially a spacefaring coast guard. Their initial
plan is to divide the navy’s battlecruisers with each warship forming the cores
of two MPARS sloops. A test is run with a single battlecruiser and eventually this
leads to the sloop HMS Phobos and the battlecruiser HMS Vanguard both moving to
assist the disabled mining ship Rafe's Scavenger. Urged on by her superiors, the
captain of the Phobos pushes her ship, only for a flaw in the vessel’s engines
to wreck the sloop, leaving two ships in need of rescue.
Long develops a plan to
save both ships and passes it on to one of the Vanguard’s officers, but the
captain rejects it because it would delay aiding Rafe's Scavenger by a few minutes.
This leads to the Phobos being lost with all hands, a tragedy made more personal
for Long when he discovers that some of the people who helped him through
training were on board the sloop.
Around a year later, Long is serving on the destroyer HMS Guardian
which is being sent to a summit where the Republic of Haven is seeking to sell
warships to its neighbors. While Guardian’s official role is to look into the possibility
of selling used battlecruisers to the systems sending agents, its real goal is
to assess the possibility of exporting future warships produced by Manticore.
However it is soon revealed that the true purpose of the summit is to organize
an alliance and develop plans against a pirate fleet believed to be operating
in the region. But the pirates seize the Haven warships at the summit along,
with the Manticoran ambassador and Guardian’s captain leaving the remainder of
Guardian’s crew scrambling to find a way to prevent the escape of the captured
vessels without killing the prisoners and any surviving Havenite crew members.
I give this book 9
out of 10.. It does a great job of recreating the peak of the setting
when readers were left wondering who would win and who would survive each
battle, without duplicating what came before. It is also nice to see Haven’s
first golden age before it becomes the finically starved conquest-driven superpower
of much of the setting’s main era However some of the political events on
Manticore strike a little to close to part of the main era for my taste.
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