This is book 7 of the "Honorverse" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

 

By David Weber and Eric Flint. Flint was one of our losses on 2022.

Getting past Mesa, we track down the first but not the second bolthole the Allignment, now one of 2 or perhaps 3 things carrying that name (this one being the "malign Alignment" in the book) and clean them out without an Eridani Edict violation (despite the defenders working hard to provoke one).

Thousands of military casualties under Honor's command, which she could have avoided by taking a relatively slight risk of killing civilian platforms, but even after a faked surrender she doesn'tlose control, and neither do her officers.

That woman is going to need decades of therapy, at this rate.

Even with Eric Flint as a co-author, nobody has taken Weber's program for calcuating missile swarm survival at each stage of defense away from him, darn it.

Zach MacBride, the brother of the guy who actually blew up the nuke on Mesa, is still around, and being set up for maybe being important (on Darius, the secondary escape planet).

Audrey O'Hanrahan, the Solarian news reporter who is an Alignment asset (but at this point we're not sure which Alignment), is also being set up for future use.

I have to say, I'm unhappy with how many groups are trying to finish the real work of Leonard Detweiler.

The Solarian League has gotten a new constitution out of committee and it seems likely to be adopted. We have heard nothing particularly interesting or new about what is in it. Is that no importnat? (Or, more likely I think, the authors simply don't have a revolutionary new idea for constitutions that they want to tie themselves to.)

For that matter Mesa has a new constitution, too. Two provisional government.