Citadel by John Ringo
Cover art by Kurt Miller
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
At the end of Live Free or Die, Tyler Vernon had kicked the Horvath out of the Sol system in a dramatic space battle. Although it was a spectacular victory after humanity had been humiliated for so long by having to pay tribute to the Horvath, it was not a decisive defeat. Much as the people of Grantville were warned at the end of Eric Flint's 1632, it was important that they not mistake a skirmish for a battle, or a battle for a campaign, or a campaign for a war. The Horvath had already shown more than once that they were sore losers, so there was every reason to expect them to retreat long enough to regroup before returning to take their revenge.
So when I picked up this book, which is billed as a sequel to Live Free or Die, I was expecting it to continue Tyler Vernon's story. Instead, I'm surprised to be introduced to a completely new character, Dana Parker, who's arriving on Troy, the giant battlestation that Tyler Vernon created in the last part of Live Free or Die. She's a survivor of the Horvath destruction of Los Angeles, and lost the rest of her family, either directly to the attack, or to subsequent despair. Those losses have filled her with a burning determination to get revenge against the Horvath, which has led her to join the Navy, and specifically its spacegoing element, which is increasingly overtaking the old seagoing Navy.
There was one little wrinkle: as a blonde, she had Johannsen's Syndrome, one of the nasty little presents the Horvath gave humanity as part of their eugenics program via germ warfare. It rewrites the genetic code of its victims to give them a heat cycle like other mammals, such that during their most fertile period they become incredibly horny, and most contraceptives don't work on them -- part of the Horvath's plan to ensure a growing population of serfs after the massive casualties humanity had taken from the KEW bombardments. As a result, Dana had a major challenge getting through her teens and to the point where she could join the Navy and get her genes scrubbed, but by grit and determination she managed to avoid getting pregnant, which would've pretty much foreclosed any option but motherhood, which she's manifestly not suited for (this being Baen Books, abortion isn't on the table unless it were something non-viable like a hyaline mole, and apparently drugs to dial back the sex drive are also a non-option for one or another reason).
Now she's finally reporting to the battlestation Troy as an engineering apprentice with the Myrmidons, combat spacecraft which are classed as "boats," and thus piloted by enlisted personnel. This is a very definite break from the wet-navy aviation tradition, in which the aircraft were flown by officers, a tradition which was then carried into the old astronaut corps because NASA recruited pilot-astronauts only from the military aviation community. It's pretty clear that Tyler Vernon and his top military leaders are thinking in terms of creating a space navy in the tradition of space opera sf.
Given the massive population loss plus the wide dispersal of the Johannsen's gene sequence, there aren't that many women in the military any more. So Dana's had to prove herself not just sufficiently capable, but supremely capable of taking on this role, the way the early pioneer military women had to. And that starts when she has to deal with a guy who thinks he can drum her out by showing off his crass humor. Once she's made it clear that no, dirty jokes aren't going to shock her, he then gives her the story of the demise of the man she's here to replace, as an example of just how dangerous things can be up here, and a reminder that a moment's carelessness can leave one very permanently dead. For all the cool transhumanist things one can do with Glatun technology, restoring the dead from records in their implants isn't one of them. Death remans obstinately final.
We've no more than met Dana that we start the second chapter and meet Butch, a young man who's just graduated from high school and gotten the Talk from his dad. Not the one about sex, but the one about how he's a man now and it's time for him to move out. As you see, his mom's got Johannsen's, and his dad doesn't much like condoms, so they're pretty much cranking out babies one after another. Which means there's no room for kids to linger after their parents are no longer legally obligated to support them, and Butch needs to move out, pronto.
He's already pretty well figured out he'd be a disaster in the Navy, which means that, as a male, he's got to find work that's regarded as essential to the war effort. However, he doesn't want to be stuck in low-pay drudge work either. So when he hears that one of Tyler Vernon's new companies is looking for welders, he decides to give it a shot.
The tests for admission for training are grueling, to say the least. They don't just test some pretty tricky competencies, including the ability to think and function in three dimensions, but also the ability to deal with an enormous amount of obnoxious crap. It seems that the crews in this business are a crude and vulgar bunch who think it the height of hilarity to Photoshop the face of the new guy's kid sister on a pornographic image (presumably either digitally constructed with something like Poser or of a model that is actually above the age of consent, given that genuine child pornography is illegal throughout the US, and there's no evidence that particular legislation has been relaxed). These are guys who are going to test every new guy, find his weaknesses and just keep picking and digging at them until either the new guy cracks or he shows to their satisfaction that he can be a sport about it. And given both the harshness of the environment in which they work and the enormous amount of money spent on their training, the company wants to weed out the ones who are apt to crack (especially the ones who are apt to lash out) before they get into the program.
It's interesting to speculate on why they also insist on formal address so stringently, when it's pretty well disappearing from workplaces all over the country. Is it just another of the author's preferences, where he thinks society has made a mistake in moving away from the habits and usages of his childhood and youth? Is it a way of making both character and reader very aware that "you're not in Kansas any more"? Or is it based on an idea that requiring formal modes of address have a positive effect on discipline and attention to detail? It's never explained, but it's most adamantly required.
Once Butch is actually accepted for the necessary training, he has to sign a contract which stipulates that, should he fail to complete his contracted period of work after having received his training, he will owe the company the entire price of his training. Given that the training for this job includes being given a galactic-technology implant, the figure is pretty much beyond what anybody's ever going to be able to make at an ordinary job. In a later scene, after one of Butch's co-workers has been taken off the team, one of the supervisors even acknowledges that they have no real expectation of actually collecting the debt from the people who have either bailed or been drummed out for various technical or character failings. Presumably it just ensures that his person will never touch a nice thing again in their life, although there's a good likelihood that it will simply ensure that person has no incentive to accept any job that pays more than the minimum the courts require a person be left when under a garnishment order, although it might well become an inducement for the person to "disappear" and work under the table, depending how well individuals can be tracked on an Earth that's been badly wracked by multiple orbital bombardments.
Given the structure of these early chapters, I'd assumed the rest of the novel would alternate between Dana and Butch's POV's. Instead, it turns out that the bulk of the book focuses on Dana and her struggles to become a competent and then excellent Myrmidion pilot. First, she has to learn the ins and outs of working in space -- and yes, even the central bay of Troy is vacuum. This is a place where meticulous attention to detail is a minimum competency, and more than a few people have met with horrific ends because of some momentary lapse that would've just made them the butt of mocking humor back on Earth.
And then comes the day when Dana makes a spectacular hard landing, indistinguishable from a crash only because the crew and passengers were alive rather than smeared to jelly, and earns the nickname of Comet. It's a near-run thing, but it's what gives the confidence to rescue the passengers of an incoming shuttle when the Horvath are making another crack at Earth -- and this time they're using equipment from their buddies the Rangora.
Humanity scores another point against those who believe the universe should run by the law of "the strong take what they want and the weak suffer as they must." With the Horvath fleet decisively defeated, it is time to take the surrenders of the survivors and bring them in as POW's. However, that leads to an unpleasant surprise that could be regarded as very much a clash of cultures. Dana and her coxswain bring in a Horvath POW who's been floating in space for some time after the destruction of its spacecraft, and has undergone a mental breakdown as a result. When a Horvath officer POW offers to administer care and it is authorized, the officer instead euthanizes the mentally broken one. Now someone's going to have to take the fall for failing to protect a POW, never mind that no one aboard the Troy was a xenoanthropologist specializing in Horvath culture, and therefore there was no way for them to anticipate that "administer care" should be a euphemism for euthanasia. This space navy follows the old military tradition that one's responsibilities are absolute, and lack of knowledge is no excuse for failure to fulfill them.
And no sooner than our heroes start to breathe a sigh of relief, bad news comes in. The Rangora, the Horvath allies who've been supplying their squiddy buddies with tech, have attacked the Glatun worlds. Suddenly humanity's main ally is being knocked out of the running. And the Rangora are cutting off communications via Epsilon Eridani, one of the most important systems for the gate network. This situation also produces an energy crisis, since they're now cut off from the refined helium-3 that galactic-tech power plants use for fusion.
It's a situation that looks hopeless, to the point that a lot of people are giving in to despair. And that takes the outward form of blamestorming on the international front, as multiple nations start blaming their casualties not on the aggressiveness of the Horvath, but on the US refusing to appease them. That if those cowboys would've just kept their heads down, and had taken measures to bring those uppity Granite Staters to heel, none of these horrific human and cultural losses would've needed to have happened.
Given Mr. Ringo's political leanings, it's possible that this segment was intended as a direct commentary on the persistent reluctance of certain European nations to participate enthusiastically in the Global War on Terror, instead preferring to appease the major state-level supporters of Islamist terrorism. However, it may also be intended as applicable to any sort of "peace in our time" appeasement of tyrants and aggressors, along the lines of the old saying about Danegeld and Danes.
So things are looking increasingly worse for humanity and for the USA. But Tyler Vernon's worked out some boltholes, including that uninhabited star system with the big gas giant that's so rich in H3. His biggest problem is going to be getting those resources back to the Sol System and to Troy before the Rangora make their big rush.
And he's learned the wisdom of "make no small plans." He's also beginning the process of building a second battle station, to be named Thermopylae, after the famous battle in the wars between the Greeks and Persians. Although it isn't nearly ready to fight when the Rangora fleet proper arrives, it's yet one more thing to make clear that no, he and those who believe in individual freedom are not going to back down. Of course it doesn't help the Rangora that they are coming with a hefty dose of overconfidence, so certain they're going to a walkover that they miss one after another warning signal that they're not dealing with an old and complacent species.
Suddenly the Space Navy's biggest problem is taking care of enormous numbers of POW's whose nutritional requirements are different at a biochemical level. But there can be no shirking the responsibility to the honorably surrendered, even when suitable foods are hard to come by. On the other hand, there could very well be a benefit to allowing the repatriation of some prisoners: not only would it reduce the problem of synthesizing enough food for aliens with a fundamentally different biochemistry; it will also let the former POW's let it be known just what they had to face.
And the novel's not finished yet. Given this is a Baen book, there'll be one last big fight, and even with Thermopylae not yet ready, it'll join in the fight as well. The first fight in which humanity is not on the defensive, but is actually taking the fight to the Rangora.
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Review posted July 17, 2021.
