Continues the series where humans are attacked by Lankies, twenty-meter tall, incredibly resilient aliens, who come in giant, almost invincible spaceships. Mars has already been invaded. Earth will soon be next. Our hero is still on an ice planet where they managed to win against the Lankies and to destroy their mothership for the first time ever. They must use a Russian jump gate to get back to Earth, but apparently the chain of command of all Earth forces is badly broken, their ship is captured as soon as they get to the moon and no one really tells them what is going on. Soon the crew finds that they have been imprisoned for mutiny. But is everything - both the heroes and the Earth - lost?
A lot of exciting battles in this book. They seem to be better described than in the previous installment and didn’t feel boring at all. The technology seems to have changed a bit since the last book: in that book they had no trouble at all accelerating a giant spaceship filled with water to semi-relativistic speeds. In this book, the ships must resort to slingshot maneuvers to travel inside our solar system. I wonder where they lost their super-engines? On the other hand, the ships apparently managed to grow themselves some rail-gun-type weapons between the books, and battles are not limited to throwing nukes around – nukes which really aren’t very effective in a vacuum. On the other hand, the author seems to imagine that the penetrators launched by rail-guns have some sort of effective range. No, they don’t – in vacuum, those missiles could in principle travel lightyears without losing any of their effect.
In spite of some technical stupidities, an entertaining, light read. It suited very well for the purposes of reading during lunch hours, occasional commutes and waiting in lines.
352 pp
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