The Scourge Between Stars (Ness Brown)

The Scourge Between Stars
Ness Brown
Tor Nightfire
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Generations ago, colonists left an exhausted Earth to establish a new home in the Proxima star system... and failed. Now, their descendants are coaxing the worn-out generation ships back to the cradle of humanity, though whether anyone will still be alive when the ships get there is anyone's guess. Food supplies are dwindling, equipment is aging beyond repair, citizens are growing discouraged and mutinous, and periodically they find themselves battered by "engagements", random explosive byproducts of what appears to be an interstellar war on a scale that makes the humans seem like insects. Over the years, communication between the ships in their ragtag flotilla has deteriorated, until the Calypso might as well be traversing the black alone. Perhaps that's why the ship's official captain has gone into hiding in his cabin, leaving his daughter, Jacklyn Albright, the acting commander of a vessel and crew on the edge of collapse.
And things are about to get worse.
When people and supplies start disappearing, Jacklyn at first thinks it might be faulty sensors, or maybe one of the more rebellious factions acting out. When she hears the ominous bangs and thumps in the walls, it might easily be the Calypso's aging conduits. But when she finds the dismembered body, she can't rationalize it any longer. Something very dangerous is aboard the Calypso, something that may not have originated on Earth.. and that "something" has decided humans are its new favorite prey...

REVIEW: A quick glance at the description likely brings to mind a popular sci-fi franchise or two, where an exhausted crew isolated in deep space has to cope with an entity that seems, against biological probability, to have evolved solely to stalk and consume bipedal mammalians from an entirely different star system. Though The Scourge Between Stars tries to dress it up with some interpersonal conflicts and a subplot about a scientist abusing an android with emotions, ultimately it doesn't bring too much new to a very familiar table.
Jacklyn is a middling at best commander, saddled by numerous personal problems and insecurities yet forced into the position because she's the captain's daughter and because, even in an emergency, nobody really puts much effort into actually trying to get the real captain out of his self-imposed exile - not even when an alien monster is known to be picking off people in isolated places. She has a sometimes-girlfriend on the bridge and a crew that's mostly loyal to her, though to be honest characterizations aren't generally that deep or memorable, mostly filling roles in an expected storyline. It takes far too long for Jacklyn to put two and two together and arrive at the obvious four of "something very bad is happening on this ship", and when she does things go as they almost always go in these stories: small groups with guns stalking dark corridors while shadowy things jump out at them (along with the requisite false starts). Some of these incidents do a decent job building tension, but there's a sameness that settles in, and a sense of stretching once the premise is clear. Other subplots - the mutiny, the breakdown of various vital systems on the ship, some personal frictions, and more - become story clutter once the invasion takes center stage, never developed enough to care about or resolve in a satisfactory manner. The climax and resolution feel forced, and the wrap-up feels far too convenient and neat given the state of the ship and crew after the incidents involved. There are also some logic holes and hiccups, and more than one instance where revelations are drawn out too long. I wound up dropping it below a flat Okay rating for a sense of irritation that settled in by the halfway point, and also because the fact that it felt compelled to shoehorn in a sexual abuse subplot involving an intentionally feminized android as a helpless victim really felt manipulative.

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