Looking Glass 4 Claws That Catch by John Ringo

Looking Glass 4 Claws That Catch by John Ringo

There is a new commanding officer on The Vorpal Blade who appears to have significant difficulty understanding the difference between a conventional submarine and a starship. It’s an inauspicious beginning to what will be the Blade’s third voyage, and it adds tension to the story as new crewmembers screw with the things that kept the ship alive during the previous two voyages. Some of what is happening is the result of hubris and stupidity, but the biggest part is an inability of these men to understand that the culture of a spaceship is going to be different from that of a submarine because they have very different missions. This problem comes to a particularly infuriating head when the new commanding officer insists on restricting the movements of his female crewmember because submarines don’t have women on them. Again, note that he can’t quite make the leap to starship. He actually considers turning around and returning to earth to dump his female passenger—a woman who saved the entire ship in both of the last two books.

 

It takes a lot of time to reach the main problem of the novel—but it didn’t feel that way as I read. That problem is a bit funky. They encounter an ancient artifact that appears to create light shows out of the atmosphere of four Jovian giants in the system when music is played on the artifact. Naturally, the reader suspects that there is more to this artifact than a giant concert hall, and when a massive Dreen fleet arrives to take over the system, it quickly becomes a race to discover if the humans can decipher the secrets of the artifact before the Dreen crush them all.