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The Price of Peace | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Mike Moscoe | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | The First Casualty, The Price of Peace, They Also Serve, Kris Longknife: Mutineer, Kris Longknife: Deserter, Kris Longknife: Defiant, Kris Longknife: Resolute, Kris Longknife: Audacious | ||
The Second Chance, armed merchant scout for the planet of Wardhaven's Ministry of Science and Technology, has gone missing. It made a bad jump, entering a jump point at an uncontrolled - and unrecorded - speed and attitude. Nobody knows where they are. And that number also includes Minister of Science and Technology, Ray Longknife, who had been onboard for this inaugural mission.
Luckily, the ship finds itself in orbit around a habitable planet. An inhabited planet, in fact, for another lost ship from centuries ago had claimed it as their own. Now Ray and Mary Rodrigo and the rest of the Marines on board must learn to cope with the local politics long enough for the ship to find the right settings to get back to human space. As if that wasn't enough, a degenerate alien artificial intelligence that is imbued into the planet is trying to make contact. It could be a great discovery and a boon to humanity - if it doesn't kill them, first.
Although the problems start out right away - the Second Chance has her bad jump on page five! - things slow down considerably afterwards. The first half of the book is largely dedicated to re-establishing contact with the Santa Marians, and trying to get a handle on certain people whose status quo the newcomers upset merely by their presence. While interesting, it isn't the riviting tale the first two books were.
The second half is more intriguing, as humans make real contact with the planet's AI and do battle with portions of it. Even here, though, it never really reached the state of dramatic tension of the other books. Part of the reason, I think, is the small scale of it all; even in an absolute worst-case scenario, only those on Santa Maria would die. The rest of humanity, which already thinks them dead, was safe. Another problem was that a significant part of the fight took place in a kind of virtual reality, with Ray's mind interpreting the data and showing him analogous scenes. But sometimes - a lot of the time, actually - that leaves it less than clear what these scenes are analogies of. So while readers should have no problem determining how the fight is going, what they're actually doing to each other in the real world is unclear.
Overall, this really isn't a bad story. Despite its flaws Moscoe's writing remained entertaining throughout, while still scoring hits as it pointed out just how bad corporate greed could get - a favorite theme of his, apparently. The idea of a lost ancient race of precursor aliens is hardly new, but Moscoe largely avoids the cliché of trying to find out exactly what happened to them. It's not important, just now, and rightly so.
They Also Serve is a pleasant but unspectacular ending to this trilogy. Reading the first two books - especially the first - would be wise but isn't necessary to enjoy this one. If you've already read those, you might be a little disappointed in this one. But not very.
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