A Call to Arms by David Weber and Timothy Zahn

And once again we return to the story of (mostly) Travis Uriah Long, a young officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy who is constitutionally incapable of breaking the rules, and who manages to get into trouble, mostly political, when he tries to make sure they're always applied, even to the politically connected.


It's rather interesting to visit Manticoran prehistory, to learn about events taking place before the wormhole in the system is opened up and Manticore becomes a major power in the area. There's a constant struggle in the halls of power between the royal family and their loyalists in the Navy who know that the best defense is a strong offense, and the opposition who believe that limited resources must be spent domestically, not chasing mythological creatures like pirates, nor threatening aggressive neighbors by patrolling too strongly in their back yards.


There's a plot afoot by secret agents employed by the Axelrod Corporation, who have come to suspect the existence of the Manticore Junction, and who are determined to control it and the system surrounding it, so they've hired a fleet of mercenaries to invade, just at the time when the Navy has grown weak.


The story jumps around between various POVs, as we've come to expect from a Weber book, and can be a bit confusing sometimes, moving from cliffhanger to cliffhanger.


Taking an awful long time to get from point A to point B. Glad we're not paying by the word.


By the way, though I've probably not reviewed any of his stuff here, I'm a big fan of Timothy Zahn, Weber's co-author. I eagerly snatched up the first half dozen or so novels he wrote, back in the eighties. He's a powerful writer all on his lonesome.

A Call to Duty by David Weber and Timothy Zahn

 A Call to Duty takes a chronological leap backwards, to the time before the Star Kingdom of Manticore's wormhole junction was discovered, when it was still at peace with Haven, the Solarian League was far away, and the Andermani Empire mere rumbles of thunder on the horizon. It is more of a young adult novel than most in the Honorverse assortment, and has also taken a step back in the magnitude of the multi-POV Weber style, and a step forward in comprehensibility to one who is not steeped to geeky goodness in the lore of Manticore.

Like many a story of the same type, it follows the journey of Travis Uriah Long, a man on the cusp of adult life, directionless, who decides to join the Royal Manticoran Navy for structure and discipline. As you might imagine, he finds a surfeit of both in the rigors of boot camp and beyond. Long gains the nickname of "Stickler" for his obstinate obedience to rules, regulations and procedures, but his career in the Navy is destined to give him a far broader education in the reality of how things work when the battle plan meets the enemy.

There's still plenty of good political machinations, but we actually get introduced to each of the players in this new series, rather than having to consult a monstrous compendium like The Book of Steel to remember the particulars about them, so it seems far easier for me to follow, much like the first handful or so of the original Honor Harrington novels. One faction of Parliament wants to dismantle the Navy, now that they are at peace, so the money can be spent on education and job creation, of course, while the others are not so sanguine about the continued stability, and want to expand the fleet to meet future threats. The downsizers have the upper hand at the moment, so morale in the fleet is not great as maintenance is deferred, and corners are cut.

Young Long gets up to plenty of adventures here, from rescuing damsels in distress fighting space pirates. Hopefully Zahn and Weber can continue to keep it simple for his old easily confused readers, who simply enjoy a well-spun yarn.

Judgement at Proteus by Timothy Zahn

So we finally come to the last romp for Frank Compton and his trusty sidekick, Bayta. They deliver Terese to the Filaelian Assembly's Kuzyatru Station, where she is to be treated for a genetic disease that endangers her and her unborn child. When they arrive, Frank is arrested under suspicion of the murder of six Fillies, who were indwelt by the Modhri and who died in a gunfight with police. While he is standing trial, he must also try to unravel the tangled web the Shonkla-raa have woven, and determine which of the Fillies are actually genetically modified enemies.

The plot is extremely complex, and alliances shift rapidly between Frank and his erstwhile enemies among the Modhri, who now want to enlist him to destroy the Sonkla-raa, who want only to return to their rightful place as galactic overlords. Every time they corner Frank and his friends, he must come up with another tightly held plot to defeat them. Zahn definitely has a twisty mind.

The only downside to this novel is that it proceeds at a breakneck pace for two thirds of the book, then really gets hectic, as Zahn wraps up the final installment in the series in what probably should have been two novels. Good fun, and I wonder what Zahn will come up with next.

In Fire Forged by David Weber

In Fire Forged is the fifth in the shared world Honorverse anthologies subtitled Worlds of Honor. This one contains three substantial stories and one compendium of "factual" information about space armor.

The first story, Ruthless, by Jane Lindskold, tells the story of an attempt by some political enemies of the Winton royals to disgrace Crown Prince Michael. They arrange to have his friend, Judith's daughter, Ruth, kidnapped and then threaten to return her to her father on Masada. Judith was one of his wives who was rescued by Honor and her crew in one of the earlier novels dealing with the Grayson alliance, The Honor of the Queen.

In a manner eerily reminiscent of Harrington's usual tactics, Michael decides to head directly into danger with only his personal Armsmen to rescue the child. The chase is interesting, the final crisis short and not terribly bloody, and the end of the story is just flat anticlimactic. Perhaps Weber is reserving the writing of Judith and Michael's tale to himself, so that Lindskold couldn't do it justice.

Timothy Zahn of Cobra fame pens a story, An Act of War, that is as twisty as a snake. An apparent arms smuggler, Charles Dozewah, is captured by State Security on Haven, and has to improvise a plan to avoid being tortured and put to death by them for an earlier swindle in Peep territory. He proposes a plan to Oscar Saint Juste that will use a captured and rebuilt Manticoran battleship to convince the Andermani Empire to side with Haven rather than the Star Kingdom.

The plan begins to go astray when the captain of the false-flagged ship has some plans of his own, and tries to turn it from a suicide mission into one that he and his crew will survive. In the end, the plots of Saint Juste are foiled, by a bit of legerdemain of Charles' engineering, and his former allies - and the reader - are left wondering just what happened.

Weber contributes Let's Dance to this collection. The terrorist forces of the Audubon Ballroom, anti-Mesa and anti-slavery fanatics, are heavily involved here, thus the title, their battle cry. The story takes place prior to the first Honor novel, when she is captain of a patrol vessel in Silesian space, hunting for pirates and slavers. When Honor is made aware of a space station that is being used as a waypoint for the slave trade, she must decide between obeying orders and saving her career and doing the right thing by capturing the installation, freeing the slaves and prosecuting the slave traders.

Well, if you've read any of the Honor novels, you know what her answer is going to be, don't you? Her creative solution, allying with a large force of Audubon Ballroom soldiers, leaves us cheering for the underdog (Is Honor ever really the underdog, though? I'm betting with a proven winner).

A couple of good quotes:

"That's the true measure of an officer - of a human being. Right or wrong, popular or unpopular, he has to know where duty, moral responsibility, and legal accountability meet the honor of his uniform and the oath he swore to his monarch and his kingdom. When that time comes, an officer worthy of that uniform and that oath and that monarch makes the hard decision, in full awareness of its consequences, because if he doesn't make it, he fails all of them...and himself."

"When that happens, when there's no choice but to kill evil, then kill it. It's your responsibility, your duty, and if you flinch, you fail - not just yourself, but everything important in your life. But if it must be done, if there truly is no choice, then do it because hou must, not because you want to, and never, ever exult in the doing. That's the price of your soul, Honor - the ability to do what has to be done without turning yourself int the very thing it is that you're fighting against."

This collection is worth reading for Weber alone.

The Domino Pattern, by Timothy Zahn

This novel is a slight departure from the usual format of the Quadrail series by Zahn. It's a bit of a locked door mystery, with a nod towards Murder on the Orient Express. Frank Compton and Bayta are on a Quadrail express, headed to investigate the Modhri presence on the far side of the galaxy, when passengers begin to drop dead. Given that no weapons or harmful substances are allowed on the Quadrail, this poses a bit of a puzzle and Frank seems to be the only individual equipped to investigate.




The victims are all part of a group negotiating a new medical services contract between a human firm and a couple of alien races. The obvious motive for the crime is to somehow disrupt the contract negotiations, but things get a little more complex than that as the novel moves along. The ending is a little surprising, and other things that come to light during the investigation lead Frank and Bayta into what I'm guessing will be the fifth book in this series.