This is book 2 of the "Emergence" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

 

Candidia Smith-Foster, girl super-hero, is back! (Back from 1984's Emergence (#2).)

And sounds just like herself. Given that this is a long-delayed sequel, and that I found the author's second novel pretty dire (and so did nearly everyone else), I was a bit cautious about approaching this. But it seems to me to continue the virtues of the first book (and the flaws, to be fair). But I liked the first book, so that's okay.

Candy learns that the bad guys have her father and sets out to rescue him. Meaning she steals an airplane from the homo post hominem enclave she's living and working with in California, flies it over to Russia, and starts tracking down where he's being kept.

This time she actually makes a commitment to guns; and remember my complaining about her thinking an M-16 might stop a rhino before? Well, this time she takes an actual Barrett; jumping to the opposite extreme. Also an M1 carbine and a glock, but not any M-16 or modern sporting rifles this time. Still weird choices (and while she does shoot a truck first thing with the Barrett, after that it's used against personnel, which is overkill; at least she doesn't have to worry about the conventional prohibition against using such a big slug against people!). Oh, and the Glock and the M1 are very well suppressed, better than anything I have happened to encounter myself.

Her first problem is discovering a collection of post-hominem children being kept as test subject for biological warfare work (the bad guys are continuing to try to wipe out the post-hominem; in fact her father is there because they're making him work on the project, apparently not realizing that he's so much smarter than them that they can't tell if he's really working or not). They do become valuable allies, but they also give her a second goal; she can't just leave them there.

Then she discovers that the bad guys are planning to carpet-bomb the enclave she came from with nukes.

Meanwhile her comrades have come after her in force (two C-17 planes, loaded, including helicopters). They can tell what she's up to from her telepathic link with her Macaw, but she can't get anything the other way.

Then, after they've set the timers on the bombs, the boss bad-guy comes, with troops, and captures her father again and takes him away. She manages then to escape from the smaller force left (and the relief force arrives about then, as does her dog and the children).

They do manage to escape, with seconds to spare, but only by flying the wrong direction and hiding under a cliff until the bombs go off (no time to get far enough away), and then quickly moving the plane when the cliff starts to collapse from the shockwave.

And then they head home. So, after all this adventure, the problem stated as the starting point is...unresolved. They know less than they did before, even.

Have I mentioned that these books are a bit melodramatic? Over-blown? Fun though.