Waking up after two centuries of cold sleep on a starship with little memory of your last hours, finding the starship devoid of life, and the fact that the starship is an enemy vessel can be disconcerting, especially if you are missing part of your leg. Well that’s the situation in which Sanda Greeve finds herself. Except she isn’t totally alone, the ship on which she wakes – Bero (short for The Light of Berossus) – is sentient. That’s just what happens as Megan O’Keefe’s Velocity Weapon opens, the first of a Space Opera saga and the author’s first foray into pure Science Fiction after a well-received Steampunk/Fantasy series. (I reviewed the first book, Steal the Sky.)
The last thing Sanda remembers is her gunship breaking up around her as her preserving pod expanded, sealing herself away for salvage-medics to pick up. She expected to awaken in friendly hands, patched up and patched back into a new gunship. Instead, she awakens 230 years later upon an empty enemy smartship, The Light of Berossus or, as he prefers to be called, “Bero”. The war is lost. The star system is dead.
However, Bero may not exactly be telling the whole truth.
O’Keefe thrusts readers, just as she thrusts her protagonist Sanda, into a very harrowing and unsettling situation. This is a fairly standard trick to have the reader discover the situation as the character does, but O’Keefe does a great job of relaying the chaos and stress Sanda experiences. Bero tells Sanda the war in which she was fighting has concluded and there is little to no life remaining on either side of the conflict and in the region of space where she wakes. That is until Sanda and Bero finds another survivor named Tomas floating in space.
But that’s not the only story thread. There’s a parallel narrative structure which gives the story an added depth overall and specifically, more weight to Sanda and her plight. Back on Earth and 230 years prior to the Sanda storyline, her brother Biran is rising through the ranks of the military and is desperately trying to discover anything about her whereabouts. We learn more about the war, a little bit about Sanda’s family, and what led to Sanda’s disappearance. There’s a third parallel narrative that is seemingly at a far remove from both of the other storylines. This third narrative is centered around a character named Jules and a heist in which she is involved.
I don’t think it is much of a spoiler to say these three storylines will eventually connect in ways that are clearer than they initially seem. I was most connected to the Sanda and Biran storylines, O’Keefe did a marvelous job of maintaining palpable tension with both. One of the tricks she pulls off extremely successfully are the twists on the expectations these characters have and what seems to be the foundation for what each of the three stories are. It is a thin rope to balance, for sure. The writer shouldn’t throw these twists and turns at the characters like a storm of machine gun bullets because that will only potentially frustrate the reader. Rather, O’Keefe brings the characters and readers to a point where we and they can be relatively comfortable in their assumption of the status quo and then entertainingly to us (NOT the characters) change the questions.
All this clever plotting is great, but what elevates Velocity Weapon are the difficult questions and themes presented within this enjoyable storytelling. Questions about the validity of wars, why they are fought, and the lies and misdirections that help to maintain conflicts. There are some clear and uncomfortable parallels to the current world in which we live. Equally important a theme are the effects the war have on the people who fight them, both the physical effects like damaged limbs as well as the mental/PTSD effects, even the ramifications of PTSD on an AI. Of course we see much of this through Sanda, a remarkably imagined character. She’s suffered a great deal when we meet her, and continues to suffer as the novel unfolds. There’s a great deal of mental twisting for poor Sanda (though you should never say THAT to her) and she truly suffers some terrible mental anguish. There’s hope; though. She’s a strong enough person that the good in her wants to help another victim, a victim who may have equally been the one victimizing her. Right, O’Keefe is playing a complex game in Velocity Weapon and manages to do so in a fantastically entertaining fashion.
Velocity Weapon is just the first in The Protectorate series and shows much promise for what’s to come. O’Keefe has seamlessly switched gears in the genre with this novel and if anything has upped her already impressive storytelling/writing game.
A standout Science Fiction novel of the year, undoubtedly.
Highly Recommended
© 2019 Rob H. Bedford
Orbit Books | Trade Paperback
June 2019 | 505 Pages
http://meganokeefe.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher Orbit Books
Excerpt: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/velocity-weapon/
