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A review by mburnamfink
Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe
3.0
Velocity Weapon is a mystery-box of scifi tropes that trades development for frequent cliffhangers.
Sanda Reeve is a Prime gunnery sergeant and starship pilot who wakes up from cold sleep, the only living being on Bero, an AI starship built by her Icarion enemies. She's informed that it has been 230 years since her ship was destroyed in battle, that the two sides mutually annihilated each other shortly thereafter, and that not only is she the only living being on the ship, she's the only living being within lightyears. The good news is that the ship she's on has an experimental slower-than-light drive, and if she and the ship can survive the 75 year flight to the nearest inhabited system, it might be alright.
Meanwhile, Biran Reeve, Sanda's younger brother, is just being inducted into the ranks of the Prime Keepers, the central pillar of interstellar human government. Keepers have chips with the schematics of FTL gates implanted into their heads. Biran watches his sister's fleet being ambushed and destroyed, and is then plunged into political intrigues as a junior Keeper.
And elsewhere in the galaxy, a freelance thief and her crew running a job against some drug smugglers finds not just the drugs they were after, but also a dead smuggler and a secret lab full of high technology.
After the first few chapters, I was excited to see how all of these plotlines intersect, especially the 230 year gap between Sanda and Biran. Buuuut, it's a MYSTERY BOX and the contents are LIES. Turns out, everyone is in more or less the same timeframe. Bero has been lying its computer core off, and it is a traumatized relativistic bombardment weapon that has not yet blown up the Prime gate. The war between Icarion and the Primes is ostensibly over gate access, but really over a deeper philosophical issue that the gates are not human tech, but were built from plans recovered from a SETI transmission, and could be leading human civilization into a disastrous strategic place. For all that, the Icarions barely show up at all, with a North Korea-level of non-diplomacy with our Prime POV characters. And of course the whole thing is being manipulated by a shadowy senior Keeper who is very much not what he seems.
O'Keefe is a solid prose stylist who knows how to link together three or four chapters. But the plot and setting is all seat-of-pants improvisation, and I can feel it.
Sanda Reeve is a Prime gunnery sergeant and starship pilot who wakes up from cold sleep, the only living being on Bero, an AI starship built by her Icarion enemies. She's informed that it has been 230 years since her ship was destroyed in battle, that the two sides mutually annihilated each other shortly thereafter, and that not only is she the only living being on the ship, she's the only living being within lightyears. The good news is that the ship she's on has an experimental slower-than-light drive, and if she and the ship can survive the 75 year flight to the nearest inhabited system, it might be alright.
Meanwhile, Biran Reeve, Sanda's younger brother, is just being inducted into the ranks of the Prime Keepers, the central pillar of interstellar human government. Keepers have chips with the schematics of FTL gates implanted into their heads. Biran watches his sister's fleet being ambushed and destroyed, and is then plunged into political intrigues as a junior Keeper.
And elsewhere in the galaxy, a freelance thief and her crew running a job against some drug smugglers finds not just the drugs they were after, but also a dead smuggler and a secret lab full of high technology.
After the first few chapters, I was excited to see how all of these plotlines intersect, especially the 230 year gap between Sanda and Biran. Buuuut, it's a MYSTERY BOX and the contents are LIES. Turns out, everyone is in more or less the same timeframe. Bero has been lying its computer core off, and it is a traumatized relativistic bombardment weapon that has not yet blown up the Prime gate. The war between Icarion and the Primes is ostensibly over gate access, but really over a deeper philosophical issue that the gates are not human tech, but were built from plans recovered from a SETI transmission, and could be leading human civilization into a disastrous strategic place. For all that, the Icarions barely show up at all, with a North Korea-level of non-diplomacy with our Prime POV characters. And of course the whole thing is being manipulated by a shadowy senior Keeper who is very much not what he seems.
O'Keefe is a solid prose stylist who knows how to link together three or four chapters. But the plot and setting is all seat-of-pants improvisation, and I can feel it.