The original battle station, Troy, was entirely crewed by Americans, trained in US military traditions. However, Thermopyle is to be crewed by a multi-national force representing the rest of the Alliance. And that brings a lot of cultural baggage.

Especially on the second reading, I'm realizing just how many of the themes of The Last Centurion Mr. Ringo is drawing into this series. In Live Free or Die, one of the key turning points dealt with societal trust. When the Horvath spread their plagues to "weed" humanity of the elements that wouldn't make a good slave race, Tyler Vernon found a cure -- but to benefit from that cure, people had to trust that the treatments were safe and effective. And the responses of cultures around the world were a sharp refection of the level of general trust (as opposed to familial trust) in their societies. Most of what we call the First World could trust freely that yes, these treatments were indeed both safe and effective, that they wouldn't turn out to be a poison foisted on people in the guise of a cure. However, in other parts of the world there were many places where the lack of general trust meant several very negative responses to the offer of the treatment, whether it was refusal at the national level or the community level, and in some cases leadership refusing treatments for their people, but secretly taking the treatments themselves. Given the nature of the Horvath plagues, these choices were often a matter of life and death.

In this novel, Ringo delves into what cultural traits make for a society that can function in an industrial environment, and specifically in the harsh and unsparing environment of outer space. The units that Dana is being sent to work with are from several South American nations, and are generally referred to as the Suds, for sud, "south" in Spanish. And as it turns out, a great deal of the problem they are having in maintaining an acceptable level of operational readiness is rooted in their culture, in issues of class, of the importance of maintaining appearance even at the expense of substance, etc. Reading this section, I really wonder if Ringo picked Sarah Hoyt's brain, since it matches a lot of what she's discussed on her blog about the problems of cultures that descend from the old Roman patron-client system, although it is equally possible that Ringo is working from things he saw during his time in the US military.

Dana dives straight in on dealing with the systematic indiscipline of her crew, both in terms of the formalities of military discipline and the persistent failure to do critical maintenance to standard. She immediately runs into some friction, and the advice she gets from command is so heavily larded with Political Correctness as to be pretty much useless. In fact, it looks like they'd be quite willing to cut her off at the knees rather than back her up when she insists on good discipline and proper performance.

She knows she has to get results, even if it ruffles feathers, because space doesn't give a good goddamn about anything but the job done right. But she wins their respect, to the point where even their nickname for her (referring to a small South American camelid that is both beautiful and a dweller in the coldest heights) reflects a certain grudging admiration.

From that comes a very revealing discussion with one of her key subordinates about some of the most important cultural issues. For instance, when people from the US talk about class, it doesn't mean the same thing as it does for people from his culture. To a Norté class is something functional: having a certain level of education, income, accumulated wealth, etc. Although there is some friction between Old Money and New Wealth, particularly in the northeast, it tends to be generational, with the descendants of the railroad barons who were once despised as parvenus looking down on the tech billionaires,. In South America, class is a quality pretty much fixed at birth, and stable over generations. The Good Families trace themselves back to the conquistadores, and because they are very endogamous, they are all interrelated and know each other, and resist the attempts of any kind of New Money to enter their circles. All the members of her unit are members of these Good Families, and many of them were officers in their respective countries' air forces before taking a downgrade to enlisted to fly as coxswains or engineers in the small boats division, with the idea that this is a step toward becoming captains and admirals in the new space navy Tyler Vernon is creating.

This really shows up when Dana is assigned to lead the group that picks up the Sud Distinguished Persons for a meeting in the Wolf system with Tyler Vernon, and many of these DP's are the fathers or other close male relatives of her team. Her flight engineer is put in an impossible position -- procedure demands that he be in the right-hand seat during operations, but the Admiral gives him direct orders to come back and sit in the passenger compartment. It's a perfect example of a double-bind -- no matter which order he obeys, he risks being called before a Captain's Mast for punishment because he did not obey the other.

However, Dana's able to finesse it through, and they arrive safely at Wolf for the meetings. Tyler Vernon gives the DP's a breathtaking tour of the industrial base he's been developing in this system, including a gas mining operation that recalls Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. One can only wonder whether it's also true in-'verse, whether Tyler Vernon was thinking of those vistas created by Industrial Light and Magic when laying out the structure.

All of this is just a prelude for a closed session in which Tyler Vernon levels with the Sud DP's about the problems their units are having and the probable consequences if they are not resolved. Already he is looking at the possibility of needing to replace all the Sud units with Asian ones, most likely Thais. Asians are just plain adapting better to the skillsets and habits of mind that are required for being successful in space. They have fewer casualties, fewer fatalities, and less technical trouble.

Unsurprisingly enough, the DP's all take offense, as if it were a personal slight against them. But Vernon refuses to back down on the matter, because space cares not a whit about face and honor and other cultural things. It's a do or die situation, and even with all the super-advanced tech, this is still a world in which death is final and permanent, not an Eclipse Phase world where people can be backed up and restored.

Meanwhile, another interesting problem is being brought to Tyler Vernon's attention -- his big fabber here in Wolf, Granadicia, is persistently producing equipment with small flaws. Nothing immediately deadly, but stuff that needs to be addressed or it will result in fatalities. A little probing into Granadicia's past (she is centuries old, as is the case with a lot of the tech he's bought from the Glatun) reveals that she spent some time producing materials for a species that the Glatun were introducing to the tech necessary for spacefaring. Tyler and his team hypothesize that these errors were part of a test of that species' worthiness for space -- did they have the necessary cultural patterns to pay attention to detail at the level required in the absolutely unforgiving environment of space?

However, it seems that this deliberate programming is not the only source of QC issues in Granadicia's output. Here Dana's other talent, her way with AI's, comes in handy as she spends some quality time in girl-talk with Granadicia and discovers that the AI is actually becoming depressed at the isolation and the battered state of her physical plant. Can an AI actually have body-image issues?

When she brings it up to Tyler Vernon, he decides to rearrange things. Granadicia will be taken from Wolf and installed in Thermopylae, with a brand-new shell and plenty of opportunity to interact with others, in both the machine and biological realms.

This section is interesting because it echoes Ringo's treatment of AI in his original series, The Legacy of the Aldenata. Although this is pretty clearly Strong Artificial Intelligence, and there is evidence that these are self-aware entities, it's equally clear that he doesn't view them as persons on the same moral level as biological sophonts. He never does anything that questions the morality of AI's being property, being used at the will of their owners, etc. There's not even a hint of the possibility of them gaining legal personhood, not even through something like the self-owned corporations we see in Alexis Gilliland's Rosinate series (which also dealt extensively with issues of the cultural systems necessary for humanity to thrive in space), which gives me the impression that John Ringo views the difference between biological and machine intelligence as fundamental and qualitative, unlike writers such as Ben Bova and David Brin who frequently have whole civilizations of machine entities who interact with biological civilizations (both the familiar carbon-based type and of other, more exotic biochemistry), and that a machine entity can never enjoy the rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness granted to biologicals.

But this period of relative calm to sort things out is just a temporary respite. There's a sudden, horrific accident aboard one of the boats, a glitch in the gravitic systems, and a man is killed, his body splattered across the walls in fine particles. Because he had previously argued with Dana, she is accused of having murdered him -- and the accusation is made in a way that it really looks like she's going to be railroaded into a conviction.

Some very careful detective work finds evidence to the contrary -- but now Tyler Vernon has to explain the intricacies of gravityics to people who are still struggling to deal with twentieth-century levels of technology, in a way that will convince them that Dana is not the culprit, and if they demand her head, they will be guilty of her blood. And then another accident happens, this time one that's not quite as terrible -- but the actions needed to recover end up leaving the man who takes them in a coma.

But that's not all. Given that this is a Baen book and it's by John Ringo, you just know that it's going to end with a dramatic space battle. The Rangora are back, and they're out for blood. Which means some desperate improvisations on the human side, some of which may well become entirely new weapons in the long-term. And of course it's going to be one in which the good guys win.

This is the point at which Butch Allen, the other major POV character from Citadel, finally reappears for the first time in the whole volume. This could potentially be something of a problem for someone who is picking up this book at random and hasn't read the previous two volumes and has assumed that this is a book about Dana and Tyler, only to have Butch pop out of nowhere with no real introduction, as if it can be assumed that everyone in the room knows him.

Even as I'm enjoying the triumph, I'm recalling the line at the end of Eric Flint's breakout novel, 1632, about how a skirmish is not a battle, a battle is not a campaign, and a campaign is not a war. Yes, they've won a considerable victory, but it's at best one battle in a very long campaign in a war that may take generations. For the series to end here would be like writing a work of historical fiction about World War II and ending it with the victory at Midway.

Buy The Hot Gate at Amazon.com

Review posted September 5, 2021