QARSOON

When humanity is threatened with extinction by a murderous cyborg race, a starship commander seeks aid from a secretive colony of rogue post-humans who might pose another threat.

Jeffrey continues his Space Unbound SF series with this volume; a previous entry introduced the Netvor, a vicious race of evolved “cloneborgs,” synthetic, soulless beings capable of passing as human with “hyperaugmented musculature along with carbon nanotubule skelature” and other sinister attributes. They are tough to kill, psychopathic, and bent on universal conquest. Their creator was destroyed by space hero Aiden Macallan, commander of the unique “zero-point drive” starship Sun Wolf, who serves as a troubleshooter for an alliance of Earth and off-world human space colonies. With the persistent cloneborgs on the offensive, there’s one unlikely hope: A mutation in Netvor factories has spawned an anomalous cloneborg variant with human-like emotions and superior ethics. This breed, the “Libera,” fled to the safety of a carefully concealed colony and developed technology able to defeat the hated Netvor…but they’re few in number, and they disdain and mistrust humanity as well. Jo, a Libera who’s lived with an accepting human settlement (also home to Macallan’s wife and child), knows the coordinates of Qarsoon, the Libera base. With a Netvor doomsday weapon nearing Earth, Aiden Macallan and the Sun Wolf charge into the void to seek the assistance of the Libera. This is action-filled, ray-gun stuff, offering a wealth of page-turning perils (a deux ex machina usually appears at exactly the right instant to foil the villainy) in addition to some imaginative faux astrophysics and mysticism. About two-thirds of the way through the narrative (this is no spoiler for readers of this series), Jeffrey reveals that the government of the endangered Earth is not a nice one. A cowardly America First–type president is supported by a right-wing trillionaire and a manipulated mass media—a sharp contrast to the courageous, tolerant, and multicultural folk aboard the Sun Wolf.

The virtues of tolerance are memorably underscored in this space-opera series entry.