March to Other Worlds Day 8: The Defense of Exeter Station by Thom Bedford

Day 8 The Defense of Exeter Station by Thom Bedford

We open the second week of the March to Other Worlds by returning to the far future where we get to witness The Defense of Exeter Station. This is the story of an important early military action in a complex war between the Alliance and the Union. Part of the complexity of the novel is that neither the Alliance nor the Union appear to be particularly admirable political entities. The Alliance is a military and economic powerhouse that has been using its resources to take advantage of a large number of colonial systems. Many of those systems resent the domination by the Alliance core systems and accuse the Alliance government of having created a government that gives the pretense of political participation to the colonies without any real influence or power. The Alliance, quite understandably, sees matters differently.

 

The Union, on the other hand, is also a highly disturbing political entity. While it tries to position itself on the moral high ground, it is the power that initiates violent hostilities and it does so by recruiting thousands of agents inside the Alliance military and key civilian locations and using them to commit acts of mutiny and sabotage that cripple the Alliance fleet and kill millions of people. There’s also something unsettling about the style of Union propaganda that gives their government an almost cultish atmosphere.

 

After hostilities commence, Exeter Station discovers that the new political realities have changed it into an Alliance border system with badly weakened defenses and a Union fleet on the way to take possession of it. The whole novel revolves around the determination of a few Exeter personnel to prevent that from happening.

 

The Defense of Exeter Station is a very exciting novel. As Exeter Station attempts to rebuild its sabotage-weakened defenses in time to stop the Union from capturing it, a mystery ship—possibly a ghost ship—enters Exeter’s proximity further complicating their situation. They have a serious staffing shortage and very little reach thanks to their lack of a defensive fleet. This is really the crux of the novel—can Exeter solve the mystery of the ghost ship and can they create a plan that will bring the enemy ships into reach of Exeter’s superior firepower? Watching the heroes grapple with this issue makes for a great story.