After twenty-nine books you’d think the author might be running out of bad guys for Van Tudor and his crew to go after. Well, you’d be mostly right. The only group that Van and company have not defeated to date is the Stillness. Yes, that’s the name of this long-time gang of criminals that seem to do what they do in the background and not draw attention to themselves. Yet, Van feels something is stirring with the Stillness.
They have already made an effort to attack the *AnaDarko* where several of the children of the Tudors and others were in-training. The Stillness also sent agents to Bogalusa to disrupt the training site for new Peacemakers including another child of one of the *Fafnir’s* crew. These attacks throughly pissed off the Fist of Orion organization which means Van Tudor and his crew were highly upset with the Stillness. Yet, where were they supposed to find the Stillness? Space was vast and not giving up any secrets it didn’t have to.
Van got one lead that he decided to follow even though it took him a long way from Earth to a place in the middle of nowhere. Here is where he finds some interesting residue of the Helem Gauss and the BeneStar Corporation. Yes, it seems that Gauss was messing with Calamity back in the day with the latter infecting everything it could come in contact with. Well, there happened to be a small, insignificant planet out in the middle of nowhere that was building luxury runabout spacecraft. These small were AI or Create Person spacecraft which just happened to have their programming corrupted by Calamity! These isolated spacecraft had formed kind of their own civilization all the while the automated factory was producing more of them.
So, when Van and the *Fafnir* approached their planet he was met initially by a trio of small but deadly spacecraft identifying themselves as the *Fo’rhalm Ansivar*. And not only did that small group of three show up, but another 400 came speeding from their planet towards the *Fafnir*! Van and his crew had to think fast as to how to handle this surprisingly large group of seemingly hostile starships. The key to this encounter turns out to be Fun Boy!
Oh, yes! Fun Boy has a major role in getting the “Fo’rhalm Ansivar” to clam down hopefully become friendly towards Van and company. Fortunately, this tiny spaceship didn’t have access to antimatter therefore they couldn’t twist long distances and were stuck in their system. But Van Tudor saw the significance of having over four hundred small, but deadly spacecraft as allies. They will play a major role later on in the book.
There’s also the interesting side story in this book about Van and the *Fafnir* needing to rescue some idiot human who took his personal workboat sized spaceship out towards Jupiter and got caught in it’s gravity well. The *Fafnir* has to do some pretty intricate work to get that spaceship out to a reasonable orbit. That work almost results in the demise of none other than Perry!
This part of the book has no connection with anything else so I’m wondering if the author was just filling up pages for the heck of it.
We also get involved in the Fist of Orion desiring to set up it’s own banking system. To do so they need to have a large sum of bonds and that would be based on finding a large deposit of an element not usually found in large deposits. Yet, they find a surveyor who had found such a thing and was willing to lead Van and company to it. Isn’t it interesting how things just always seem to work out for Van Tudor and his friends.
And lastly, there will be a big, very big battle at the end of this book. I think you’ll be surprised when you find out what target of the battle was supposed to be. Things are changing rapidly for planet Earth and Van Tudor doesn’t know how long he can keep Earth safe and secure.
There’s more to come with book 30, “Birds of Prey”, already available on Amazon and it’s looks like this series continues all the way to book 33, so we’ve got lots more reading to do.
[Note 1 (12/23/2025): I’m no longer associated with Amazon and will no longer provide any links to books from that website. You can usually find books that you like at your usual source.]
[Note 2: As of 12/03/2023, this will not be posted on Amazon since I have been banned from posting reviews for some unknown reason. ]