Speed kills. Especially when it’s designed as a weapon.
Velocity Weapon (The Protectorate Book 1) by Megan E. O’Keefe – Orbit / little, brown June 11, 2019
What if you woke up two hundred and thirty years from now aboard a starship belonging to your enemy and missing oh say, half your leg, everyone you ever knew, and oh yes…your planet. Ask Sandra Greeve, formerly gunship captain in a war between her world Ada Prime and one closer to they system sun Icaria. Sure, you’d despair, but where there’s life there’s hope, and besides, she’s got a plucky AI to help her out. Things could be worse.
And they will be.
Velocity Weapon switches back and forth between two separate time frames: one with the battle that puts Sandra in suspension until she’s picked up centuries later and the other after she wakes up to find her home planet missing. among other things. In the first, there are several threads to follow leading up to what happened to her world, including one which her brother, a newly graduated “Keeper” of the gate technology that her people controlled, and over which a war was fought for control.
In addition, the creation of the stargates and how the imbalance of power in the star system came about get some backstory in a few interludes along the way. It turns out that Alexandra Halston’s, an Elon Musk type entrepreneur discovered an alien artifact in our not too distant future, her engineers were able to build the stargate its schematics conveyed, and starship development got put on the shelf. Our main story picks up three and a half millennia later, when a group living next door to a planet with “Keepers” of the galaxy-spanning gates, have decided that they’ve had enough with being under the thumb of those in control and are putting together something that can achieve relativistic velocities. Slower than instant transit between star systems, but free from the Keepers controls.
The thing about any object traveling at a significant portion of the speed of light is that it packs an ungodly amount of energy. Pointed outward, it can take you to the stars. Pointed inward, and you can turn a planet into something more like an asteroid belt.
You don’t even need a Death Star.
The backstory timeline features Biran, Sandra’s brother, who’s just joined the ranks of the ruling Keepers when the Icarians use their new weapon to wipe their fleet off the board. He doesn’t believe his sister is dead, or if she is he wants to know for sure, against the wishes of the ruling protectorate. In a social media move that makes him perfect for the job, he outs the rulers as having given up on trying to rescue any survivors from the fleet and winds up being made “Speaker” for the Keepers as his punishment/reward.
Downstream, Sandra manages to salvage some needed parts from the wreckage still floating around before attempting a decade’s long journey to the nearest star system with Bero, and another survivor in the process. Tomas is a good looking guy, even if he’s wearing the enemy’s uniform, and Bero doesn’t seem completely thrilled. Well, that’s what you get for giving an AI feelings. Seriously, what could go wrong?
More than you might imagine.
There are a number of major plot twists along the way and the two threads will eventually come together, but it’s very well plotted. In fact, it’s very well done period.
Whether or not the author intended, the stories DNA shows in its features. Getting stargate schematics from aliens is a pretty standard trope, and in fact, her description of the gate in operation sounds very much like Carl Sagan’s in Contact, with counterrotating hoops and massive bending of space and time. It seems to me that I’ve seen a ship AI having trouble processing its relationship with humans before as well, and there are even touches of something that suggests protomolecule mutations toward the end of the book. How the author puts it all together is the important thing, and she’s done it deftly.
This is a strong debut novel and the beginning of a larger arc. It doesn’t skimp on the story to save more for later, and while it ties up the first novel pretty well, it leaves us set to jump off into what’s probably the middle novel of a trilogy. I’m looking forward to what happens next.