The Blighted Stars
The Devoured Worlds series, Book 1
Megan E. O'Keefe
Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: The discovery of relkatite and its many properties - containing warp cores for interstellar starships, embedding enhancements in human bodies, even the ability to transfer the human mind into new "prints" - opened up the stars and potential immortality... and also created a new system of power with the MERIT clans at the top. As son and potential heir to clan leader Acaelus Mercator, Tarquin never felt at ease in the board room, preferring to hide away at universities studying geology. But then a former employee, Naira Sharp, leveled accusations at the Mercators about their fungal-based relkatite mining processes; she insisted that their proprietary fungus led directly to the spread of the shroud, a lichen that has devoured whole worlds and their ecosystems and leaves nothing behind. It's the sort of accusation that radicals known as Conservators have been bleating since the shroud first appeared, but never has anyone done as much damage or gone to such lengths as Sharp to prove it. Even though Sharp's case went nowhere and she herself was "iced", her neural map locked away, questions linger about what she said. Thus, Tarquin finds himself standing on the bridge of the Mercator mining vessel Amaranth as it approaches Sixth Cradle, the latest target for colonization and mining. As far as anyone knows, no human has set foot on this world, and it is here that the Mercators will prove once and for all that there is no connection between their canus fungus and shroud infestation. But things go wrong from the moment they drop into orbit. The shipboard AI malfunctions, their sister vessel Einkhorn fires upon them with no warning, then the body printers go rogue and spit out mindless, monstrous misprints that attack anything that moves. While Acaelus casts himself back to civilized space, sacrificing his current print body and a few recent memories, Tarquin is trapped and forced to flee planetside with a handful of survivors, including his father's chief bodyguard, Exemplar Lockhart... flee to a planet that, to Tarquin's horror, is already lost to the shroud.
Former Exemplar Naira Sharp gave up everything to try to get the truth out about Mercator and their dangerous mining techniques, and how they're literally killing entire worlds, including Earth. When Acaelus Mercator, her former employer, last put her under, he made unpleasant promises about her future, and she's worked for him long enough to know the man's brutal techniques, brutality that regularly breaks minds so traumatically that they can never be reprinted. Now, though, her friends in the Conservators must have managed to crack the company systems to get her neural map out, for she finds herself printed in the body of Exemplar Lockhart, Acaelus's current bodyguard... printed into a ship gone mad. She should be doing everything in her power to destroy the Amaranth, but in the chaos she ends up with Tarquin and a few others aboard a shuttle fleeing a vessel that is already doomed - and landing on a world where the shroud lichen has already devoured everything, though Mercator has only just arrived and not deployed its devouring fungal mining process yet.
They should be deadly enemies: the heir to the Mercator mining empire and the revolutionary who wants nothing more than to bring it all down. But on Sixth Cradle, they must work together to survive and begin to unravel truths that neither one suspected, truths that point to a danger so insidious that none suspected its presence - and it might already be too late to stop it.
REVIEW: I was intrigued by the concept, and I previously enjoyed O'Keefe's Protectorate trilogy, so I figured this one was worth a shot. While it did explore some interesting ideas and it never lacked for action, with things happening from the first page to the very last, it took quite a long time for the story to really grow on me, to the point where only the strong ending saved it from a lower rating.
From the start, of course, the reader is predisposed to suspect that there's more to the fungal mining and deadly lichen connection than the wealthy and powerful Mercator clan will admit. Family black sheep Tarquin is so convinced of Mercator's innocence that he comes back into the fold to prove it; it was his testimony that ultimately sealed rebel Naira Sharp's fate, though even he was a little unsettled by how sure she was in her claims, how much she'd sacrificed by turning against her former employer Acaelus to join the Conservators. He needs to prove to himself as much as the rest of humanity that the canus mining process is not at all linked to the unstoppable shroud lichen, a need strong enough that he came to Sixth Cradle with his father to oversee the start of a new mining venture... and when everything goes haywire, he defies his own father by staying behind to try rescuing the crew, Mercator employees and lower-ranked HCA members (who are paid less and who only rarely can afford the "phoenix fees" for reprinting if they die) alike - only to discover that the planet they flee to is essentially a dead world. But what should be a moment of vindication for him, seeming proof that the shroud was here before the canus fungus was deployed - soon becomes much more complicated, as he finds evidence of a greater puzzle and conspiracy at play. Through all this, he counts himself fortunate to have his father's steadfast bodyguard Exemplar Lockhart at his side - but there's something different about this print of Lockhart, and he starts developing feelings he knows he shouldn't have.
Naira, meanwhile, finds herself unexpectedly resurrected, presumably through the intervention of her rebel compatriots, and printed in a new body and identity, flung into a danger and a mystery that challenges everything she thought she knew about the blight that destroyed her world and countless others... and stuck with the very man whose courtroom testimony landed her in the cruel clutches of Acaelus Mercator, who was ruthless enough as an employer and absolutely brutal as a captor. She, too, finds her feelings toward Tarquin shifting in ways she didn't expect, a chemistry sparking between the two under extraordinary circumstances... and here I struggled to buy the budding romance. Too often, I wanted to shake them to get them back to matter of survival and the problem of the shroud and an invisible enemy that seems to be actively trying to kill them on a supposedly uninhabited planet. Their flirtations and feelings could shift back and forth at a moment's notice, to a distracting degree. It was only much, much later on, toward the end, that I started believing the attraction... when they'd actually invested enough time and energy into figuring out the bigger problems.
Back at Mercator Station, Acaelus Mercator is dealing with the mess that Sixth Cradle has become. Sacrificing the print aboard the doomed Amaranth means he lost memories - there are ties between printed bodies and memories that are not completely understood even by the originators of the tech, particularly how exceptionally traumatic deaths can permanently "crack" a neural map, but are occasionally exploited in the plot in interesting ways - but he knows something isn't right, even beyond the bizarre behavior of the Amaranth's sister ship Einkhorn. He is not the flat rich and powerful villain that one might expect, but has his own suspicions about what's going on, and his own incentive to figure things out; he just goes about his own investigations in a brutal and ruthless way, in keeping with his personality.
Eventually, the various threads come together in a decently powerful climax that resolves many mysteries, unmasks the real danger behind the threat, and sets up the next book in the series with some nice new twists. It was the strength of the final chapters that ultimately lifted the rating back up to four stars; the earlier parts, while never lacking in danger and twists and turns, sometimes felt like they were running frenetically in circles to give the impression of forward motion rather than actually moving anything ahead.
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