The year is 4,000 B.C. To save the People of the Badger from extinction, Lt. Launa O'Brian and Captain Jack Walking Bear must lead them down a new path of war. For the survival of this wise and peaceful tribe is civilization's only hope to erase the thousands of years of brutality that lie ahead for the human race.
Things develop well in this second book of the series. Even the ending is well handled, in spite if its clear lead into a third book. The author has tackled two several difficult subjects at once: interpersonal relationships in a rapidly changing environment, the effect of time travel, and the origins of war. All are well handled.
Second Fire (Lost Millennium #2) by Mike Moscoe, Mike Shepherd
In the second outing of this series we rejoin Lt. Launa O'Brian and Captain Jack Walking Bear living among the People of the Badger. Even though the epilogue of the first book seemed to indicated they accomplished their goal, the fight isn’t over. The prologue jumps back to the future they were sent from, so does that mean they created an alternate future and didn’t change their own timeline (the only actual plausible time travel scenario)? The sequel gets more brutal than the first and more time is spent on the culture of the people, but not but the sequel wasn't really needed.
Launa and Jack continue training recruits from the People of the Badger to fight in the next wave of the horsemen. However, their efforts are often thwarted by the very peaceful nature of the people that they want to preserve. Most than the tactical problems of training and resisting the invasion, they must wage a PR campaign as well.
Much of the book is spent with the day to day life of the “old Europeans” as Launa tends to call them. Politics, religion (Speaker for the Goddess, etc), festivals, and sex.
When one of their wiseman (Kaul) goes to the horsemen in peace, he is tortured and mutilated, then Laura and Jack rescue him along with a captive woman (Killala). That brutality, sets the people on a different path, they didn’t believe Launa and Jack before but after that, they start becoming a true army.
As the war rages on (OK, it really just a couple of small battles), changing the people as war does, Launa and Jack constantly question how do they win against the horsemen without becoming them?
At the end, even though it was claimed to be a one way trip in book one, a gate opens allowing Launa and Jack to return to the future. But having been successful, they end up in an entirely different future. Unfortunately, the author made the mistakes time traveling /alternate universe stories often have. Alternate version of people from the original timeline. Alternate but nearly identical history (such as 1492 Christine Colon discovering the western hemisphere!).
The world is more peaceful but far from perfect. In the last line, Jack wonders if they will need to go back and try again! Queue the next sequel.
I am really enjoying this series! Combo of sci-fi and ancient history and war. Even the romance and sex involved were done well and made sense to the plot. While I plod through 5 or 6 books on Kindle at a time, I always seem to be reading a hardcopy of this series at a rapid rate! I could not find this series online, had to resort back to my wonderful local library!
I enjoyed this up until the end which I found fairly unsatisfying. If you really liked the first book, then you may find this worthwhile but if you were indifferent to the first book then you can probably skip this.