Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Imagine if you spent 100 years in suspended animation and when you woke up, you find out that you had become a mythical hero to your people. That the discipline in the military you had known was lost and they justified all sort of terrible tactics in your name. And now a twist of fate left you in charge of a whole fleet with the responsibility to take them home.

That's the situation that our hero, John "Black Jack" Geary finds himself in. After his survival pod is found 100-years later, Geary learns that everybody he knows is dead and that the Alliance is still fighting the same war in which he supposedly died. After the enemy kill the people in charge, he has to assume command even though that's the last thing he wants.

If there's something you learn in this book is that is that being a hero is a very lonely business. Everybody has a warped view of who he is, and they either worship him, think he's a relic or a danger to the Alliance. Nobody thinks of him as a human being.

That said, he has some people at his side. Co-President Rione, the only civilian in the fleet, is very wary of Geary, but has the potential as a future love interest. I really liked Captains Duellos, Tulev & Carabali, as they are the only ones that seem not to think of him as Black Jack. Capt. Desjani is on his side now but as one of the worshipers, you're afraid that she'll turn on a dime when he makes a mistake.

I'm not a Physics expert by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems Mr. Campbell has incorporated the constraints of traveling at the speed of light in this series. Incredible as it seems, this slows the action as there isn't instant communication (if a ship is 10 minutes away at the speed of light, it takes 10 minutes to get a message to them). This takes some time to get used to, but you understand later on that this makes Geary even more pivotal to Alliance victory, as he's the only one who knows how to fight taking into account relativistic distortions, instead of going pell-mell as it seems they've been fighting recently.

One thing that bothers me is that there are no descriptions whatsoever. I don't know how old Geary (or anybody) is and what they look like. I know the author probably does this so the reader can imagine the characters however she wants to, but it's still annoying. There's a lot to try to figure out in this world and I wish the appearance of the characters wasn't one of them.

Overall though, awesome start of a series and I'm definitely reading the next book.