Ok, so this seems to be the best book out of the series so far, at least in my opinion. The “Merry Band of Pirates” led by Colonel Joe Bishop with a lot of help from “Skippy” finally get something done. And the do it right, for once! Additionally, Skippy might just find some humility if that’s even possible. He becomes somewhat bearable as this story goes on.
We don’t start out in very good shape. As you know, Colonel Bishop was in a stealth dropship orbiting the planet Rakesh Diwalen while his troops were rescuing a whole bunch of civilians adults and children that had been taken captive by the Kristang. These civilians were going to be used as medical experiments trying to find a lethal infection that they could spread to all humans or at least the ones on Paradise. Joe was not going to let that happen.
Yet, for some unknown reason, Skippy, his “magnificent, super intelligent Elder AI in a beer can” had disappeared right when Joe and everyone else needed him the most. That resulted in Joe’s stealth dropship becoming un-stealthed and very visible to a Thuranin starship also orbiting the planet. Joe has subsequently been captured and was kind of in a drug induced stupor not knowing much about where he was or what was happening. He did know that he was in serious trouble.
Meanwhile, back aboard the *Flying Dutchman*, Colonel Chang was having his own problems. Everything on the *Dutchman* quite working all of a sudden, to include the artificial gravity. Communications were all out and to Chang’s dismay, the factors were overloading. So, he immediately ordered everyone to the launch bays and to take every means possible to abandon ship. He wanted the crew to get as far away from the *Dutchman* as possible so they wouldn’t be coming in the coming blast!
About the same time, Lieutenant Colonel Simms aboard the *Valkyrie* was fighting against a rouge vacuums cleaner with other equipment also attacking her bridge crew. From the loud speakers all she could hear were the word, “Die, humans!”, obviously coming from the resident ship’s AI that Skippy was supposed to have subdued. Apparently, this Maxolhx evil AI had been hiding from Skippy waiting for just the right time to attack his human crew which he detested. Now he was actively trying to kill everyone aboard. Simms was in command and she didn’t know exactly how to get this idiot AI to shut down. So, she tries to reason with it telling it that it had been a slave of the Maxolhx who didn’t treat their AIs as sentient beings, only as tools to be used as they pleased. She even offered to the evil AI that it could become one of the “Merry Band of Pirates” and could join them in going after the Maxolhx. It was considering this offer when something else happened. It didn’t make the situation any better than before!
So, both ships are cut-off from each other and have lost all power and control. The crews are going to have to struggle nightly to get their ships back into working conditions or they will all be soon dead.
As for Joe, he’s now in a Kristang hospital about to become a Thuranin science experiment. He’s already been roughed up enough that he’s having trouble remembering who he is and how he got here. Skippy is nowhere to be found having just disappeared from the dropship about the time everything started going wrong. If Skippy doesn’t come back and do his thing, Joe is soon going to be something other than Joe Bishop. The Thuranin have already tried drugs to get him to talk but now they are getting ready to dissect his brain. They don’t understand why or how humans could come to rescue other humans. And since Joe didn’t get to activate the self-destruct switch on his dropship, the Thuranin now knew that humans were flying around in starships they definitely shouldn’t have.
As usual, this is a fairly long, drawn-out book. There is a ton of needless dialogue between Skippy and Joe Bishop, but by now you should be used to it. Skippy is going to learn some things in this book that kind of changes a lot of things. Let’s hope for the better but you’ll need to read the entire book to find out.
And again as usual, this series continues with book 11, “Brushfire”, now available on Amazon.
==[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. ]==