The Shadow of Saganami

2004

In terms of continuity, this book takes place as the first half of At All Costs and follows directly on from War of Honor.

The war between Haven and the Manticoran Alliance has broken out once more and a group of midshipmen and women have been assigned to the brand new starship Hexapuma so they would have expected that they were to be assigned to the war front.

Instead, they find themselves on the way to the Talbott Cluster with a commander that was as unknown to his command crew as he was to the snotties. The Talbott Cluster was on the far end of the newly discovered seventh wormhole junction of the Manticoran complex and almost as soon as they had realised that Manticore had 'discovered' them, they had requested that they be annexed by Manticore.

Of course, there were those who weren't happy with the prospect; twenty percent of the Cluster's inhabitants had voted against the annexation, and of those who had, it was becoming clear to some of those priviliged under the old system that they were going to lose those priviliges big time once everyone was playing under Manticore's rules. The Sollies hated the fact that the new terminus gave Manticoran ships access to two thirds of their markets, and OFS hated the fact that Manticore was interfering in its backyard. There were those who really hated Manticore and saw this potential expansion as putting them far too close to their headquarters (anyone on Mesa).

But still, the crew of the Hexapuma was not expecting anything more exciting than an occasional pirate and showing the flag missions.

What they got was more.

Montana and Kornati proved to have particularly enthusiastic oppositions. Westerman on Montana was downright gentlemanly in his insurgency, doing his best not to kill anyone but Nordbrandt on Kornati went straight off for the biggest bangs she could make. Apparently not a lot in common between the two operations but there were deep currents flowing through the Talbott Cluster and captain Terekhov finds himself deeply embroiled in their depths.

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This is a bit of a strange book in that there are very few characters from earlier books and Dame Honor only makes a brief appearance at the start of the book. If you look closely enough at Terekhov's crew you'll find a couple of characters from an earlier book (and I'm not going to tell you who either!).

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