We open up with a pretty exciting rescue attempt by a Scarab dropship going down to the planet Globakus. This dropship was from the small task force that had dropped part of the Alien Legion made up of humans and Verd-kris Kristang on the planet. The Legion forces were attempting to take control of the planet from the Kristang warrior caste in order to show other Kristangs that they could live without constant war.
Everything would have been fine and over now if not for the fact that a Thuranin fleet of warships had been in hiding when the Human flotilla arrived. After dropping off the Alien Legion, the Human flotilla had been attacked and was in a fight for its life. The Captain in overall command of the flotilla had ordered the evacuation of the Alien Legion while it was trying to fight off the Thuranin starships. One had just been destroyed with the parts and pieces of the starship heading down to the planet. It just so happened that the location the destroyed starship was going to impact was the same location that Dave Czajka, a very close friend of General Joe Bishop, was located.
The pilot of the dropship, Irene Striebich, knew that the crashing starship was soon going to impact the ground, but she also thought she could get her dropship down and begin evacuation of those in the immediate area. So she flew straight down in a mad dash hoping that she could stop the dropship, reverse its direction and then drop the loading ramp and load some people before she had to leave or before her dropship was smashed by the falling starship.
Well, she makes the pickup including getting Dave Czajka aboard, but then the dropship can’t make it back up to space. She has to crash it in a river and hope the Human flotilla can eventually come to the rescue of her and the people she just saved. Unfortunately, there were Kristang military in the area. They knew where the dropship went down and knew also that Dave Czajka was among that group. The Kristang knew that Dave was a Maverick, a valuable hostage for later use.
This is going to be the typical problems we read about in this book. Only this particular problem is going to be a very minor one. Back aboard the *Valkyrie*, General Joe Bishop was trying figure out how he was still going to save Earth from total destruction after the Maxohlx and the Rindhalu found out he was bluffing about shutting down wormhole networks. They had done this recently, only Skippy hadn’t really shut down anything. He just made it seem like he could. Bishop knew that sooner or later one of the two senior species would challenge him to do that again and if he didn’t, Earth would be immediately attacked.
Of course Earth had already been attacked and now had a floating gas cloud going between Earth and the Sun that would soon turn Earth into an ice ball. That problem also had to be solved. But neither he nor Skippy nor any of the smart scientists on Earth knew of any way to stop the cloud. Bishop was hoping that he could threaten one of the two senior species into voluntarily removing the cloud. It should be the Maxohlx since they were the ones that created it in the first place. But, Joe and Skippy knew that the Maxohlx weren’t going to do anything, in fact, they might attack Earth no matter what.
What they didn’t know was that the Maxohlx had a secret plan where they would send several ark ships out of the galaxy loaded with selected Maxohlx. They then planned to attack Earth with Elder weapons which would wake up the Sentinels who would scour the galaxy of all living beings. The Maxohlx on the ark ships would then return to the Galaxy as the supreme beings and rule the galaxy as they were destined to do!
Again, just another problem Joe Bishop and Skippy were going to have to face in this book. Strangely, you’ll read where it might not be the Maxolhx who wake up the Sentinels. Ah, Skippy and Joe might have just done this when they messed with the wormhole network! And it might be up to Skippy to figure out how to kill a Sentinel, something that he’s told Joe is impossible.
Lots of interesting stuff going on in this book. It kind of ends on an unexpected note so it’s going to be very interesting to read book 14, “Match Game”, 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. ]==