Orbital v6: “Resistance”

Things go from bad to worse.

Prelude to a Review

Whoa.  Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Things just got even more serious.  Everything is falling apart and it’s glorious! It’s time for war!

To sum it up: The humans don’t trust the Confederation.  The Confederation doesn’t trust the humans.  Humans are split on the topic of the Confederation.  And the Confederation is split on the topic of the humans.

The only solution to this is war.

And nothing will ever be the same.

But, first, a reminder of how we got here:

The Story So Far…

Click on an image to go to the review:

What’s Going On?

And here we are.  Caleb and Mezoke are on the run, wanted and hunted by the organization they swore to serve, villified by a political power grabber with an ax to grind and aspirations to meet.

Caleb and Mezoke’s attempts to keep the peace and promote unity involved a few lies and secrets, and those proved to be a house of cards, landing everybody in a bit of hot water.

The story begins a little bit into the future. (And there’ll be another weeks-long jump in time later in the story.)  Mezoke has taken Caleb to a planet that’s effectively “off the grid” in order to heal. On the planet, the Sanjarr’s harvest the moss on the side of cliff walls to provide heat and light and all the things.  Living off the land and away from tech has provided the Sandjarrs with a place to clear their heads and ease their minds.

Caleb is recovering nicely, though he’s having intermittent psychic issues that we’re quickly lead to believe to be linked to Angus, the organic ship he barely escaped from alive in the last book.  I mentioned in my review of that book that his recovery did closely parallel Angus’, excepting that Caleb had to jump out of recovery early to keep from being captured by the court.

Angus, meanwhile, is off recouping and recovering somewhere else.

All the players are still in play. And by the end of this book, they’ll all see action and not all will make it out alive.

A Note on Gender

Amongst the population of the planet Caleb is recuperating on is Mezoke’s parents.  There was a bit in the first volume about how Caleb doesn’t know Mezoke’s gender, and how in her society, that’s normal and not something to be revealed to mere co-workers.  Gender amongst the Sandjarr’s is not linked to their physical appearance.

Sylvain Runberg gets cultural points for being almost a decade ahead of that conversation in popular culture.

Though, to be fair, he hasn’t really done anything with it. I suppose it’s saved us from the Will They/Won’t They cliche trap that these kinds of series usually get into.  There’s not a lot of romantic tension between the two, though it’s obvious that they’re there for each other.  She did break him out of a hospital before the court could take him in for questioning, after all, giving up her career for the sake of his life and safety.

At the end of volume 5, Mezoke introduces Caleb to her parents, who she refers to as her progenitors, not mother and father. Runberg is showing consistency on the gender point there.

Yes, I refer to Mezoke as “she” in these reviews.  I’m not going to confuse things in my review by using the alternate pronouns they use in the book. Pelle draws Mezoke as female, and for the sake of easy identification and clarity in these reviews, I’m simplifying things a bit.

And after six books in the series, the gender thing has never really been a serious issue or plot point.  It’s just color to the story. I’m a little surprised it hasn’t popped up yet as a bigger issue in some character-based way.  I haven’t read Book 7 yet, so maybe it does.

In volume 6, we get as close as we’ve ever gotten to the Will They/Won’t They question. Mezoke just broke Caleb out of what was assuredly a jail sentence.  She could have given him up and gone on about her life as usual.  She didn’t. Instead, she made a great personal sacrifice to do the right thing, and so the natural question is, “Is there more to it?”

She doesn’t exactly answer, does she?

Once it becomes an issue to be more seriously addressed in the story, I’ll probably switch to the alternate pronouns and try to keep them all straight.  At this point, if she identifies as female, it’s going to be considered a cop-out by many people….

The Inevitable War

Everyone is working at crossroads at this point. There are no two groups of people in this series at all who are listening to each other or who would even want to listen to each other. Everyone has gone a little power mad, wanting it all their way or the highway.

The stakes have never been higher, and the same tactics that worked in the last five books on either side are about to work again in this book.  Everyone pushes to their breaking points, and there’s someone who’s willing to take advantage of that and press the war forward.

It’s gotten so bad that Angus is even in trouble, this time from the rebellious coup-like leaders who trumped up a trial in the first place to take over the reigns of power.  And when the battle begins over Angus, Caleb feels it and knows he’s next.  The armed forces who went after Angus know where he is now, too. Even the most peace-loving Sandjarrs in the universe are about to get caught up in this escalation.

Suddenly, with the Confederation turning on its own and carrying out a war-like vendetta against Caleb and Mezoke, the earth isolationists arguably look to be on the right side of history.  They’re right not to trust the UN of outer space, as it picks fights with everyone else it can while suppressing the locals on earth.

This is going to be very messy and hard to clean up, but it’s interesting to see how politics does, indeed, make strange bedfellows.

The Friendly and Helpful Terrorists

The big surprise in this book might just well be the assumed-terrorists we saw in the last book kidnapping Hector and Lukas.  The revelation at the end of volume 5 that one of the terrorists was Caleb’s sister was a nice callback to the first book.  This book spans the gap in the backstory from their time together in a South American boarding school to now.  She turned out to be more of a wild child than he did, but he covered for her.

Now, she may hold the answers to everything going on around them, including some pretty shocking and upsetting truths that put some assumptions into new lights. Is it possible that nobody in this universe has clean hands?

And what kind of madness will that drive Angus into?  It’s a big one. Nobody walks away from this book the same.

It kills me sometimes to do these reviews without spoilers…

Recommended?

Yes.  Things are blowing up but good now.  This book is war, and that’s always an exciting read in a comic like this one.  The stakes are huge.

Coming up next: The Neuronemes. Some street level stuff.  And sibling strife.

— 2018.066 —

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