When the Tide Rises by David Drake
Cover art by Stephen Hickman
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
The Republic of Cinnabar Navy series is David Drake's answer to David Weber's highly successful Honor Harrington series. Although the RCN series may not have been quite as wildly successful as the Honorverse, it has enjoyed sufficient commercial success that Baen has been buying new volumes on a regular basis. It's a more contained series than the Honorverse, focusing tightly on the central protagonists rather than sprawling out into multiple side-branch sub-series and a series of anthologies, but it shouldn't be considered a lightweight in the space opera subgenre.
Daniel Leary was born the son of wealth and power, a scion of the Learys of Bantry, one of the leading families of the Republic. But when Daniel's father Corder Leary married his mistress only days after his wife, Daniel's mother, died, the two men had words. Daniel stormed out of his father's house and from that day on the RCN was his home, his family.
It was a rough break, because Daniel had never learned how to manage his money, never needing to. When we first met him in With the Lightnings, he was struggling just to keep his head above water financially, dependent upon advances agains his pay. But in subsequent volumes his aggressive temperament and skill with astrogation through the Matrix have enabled him to take enough valuable prizes that he is in comfortable circumstances. Although he is still officially estranged from his family, his sister Dierdre is quite happy to be his financial manager, and even his father has developed a certain grudging respect for him.
Daniel has also won the respect of Adele Mundy, the last surviving Mundy of Chatsworth, and considering the history between their families, that's no small feat. The Mundys were Populists, who believed that the common people of Cinnabar should have a greater say in their governance and society. It is uncertain whether the allegations about the Three Circles Conspiracy were true and the various Populist leaders were indeed conspiring with the hated Alliance of Free States (whose name is as ironic as those of various "democratic" republics of the old Warsaw Pact), or whether it was simply a convenient lie that enabled Corder Leary to eliminate some rivals, but the results are not. Adele alone of her family survived, and only because she was on a spaceship when it hit, en route to Bryce to study at the library there. In one stroke she went from scion of a wealthy family to penniless refugee, dependent upon the kindness of a mentor who recognized her extraordinary talent.
When Adele and Daniel first met, they came close to a duel. But circumstances forced them to throw their lot together, and they came out of it realizing that each had unexpected depths. Daniel was able to get Adele a position as a warrant officer handling signals aboard his ship, the Princess Cecile, and in time she has come to view its crew, and the Republic of Cinnabar Navy, as a new family.
As this volume begins, Daniel is back home on Cinnabar, mixing with the political elite that is his birthright. However, given that the current Chief of the Navy Board is the sort who bears a grudge against anyone with close ties to his predecessor, that is not necessarily a good place to be. On the other hand, given the situation in the Jewel System, one of the many that owe allegiance to the Republic of Cinnabar, it is unlikely that Daniel will remain idle and planetbound for long.
Meanwhile, Adele has some troubles of her own, in the form of one Rene Cazelet. He's a refugee from the Alliance, his parents having been arrested for treason by Guarantor Porra's Fifth Bureau, the secret police. And he's the grandson of Adele's old mentor, to whom she owes a life-debt. When he comes to Adele as she once did to his grandmother, Adele views it as a sacred obligation, a matter of her honor as Mundy of Chatsworth.
And that raises a major problem now that Daniel is preparing the Princess Cecile for a mission to the Jewel System. Adele can't very well leave young Cazelet behind in Xenos while she's gone for an indefinite period of time. On the other hand, spymaster Bernis Sand considers it unacceptable for him to accompany her on an RCN mission when there's even the slightest possibility that he might have ratted his parents out, might even be a covert agent for the infamous Fifth Bureau. But Adele insists that neither she nor Daniel will budge on the matter, and when the Princess Cecile lifts, Cazelet is aboard.
In this first section there's also a little aside, hardly even a subplot, regarding a grossly inaccurate and romanticized docudrama about the battle of Dunbar's World. It contains actual video from the battle, and Adele wants to know whether they have a mole in their midst. However, when Adele discovers that the young midshipman who sold the information did it out of love and loyalty to his commanding officer, to make sure the story got out when his superiors are against him, and kept not a florin of the money from it, giving it to a wounded former Sissie and the families of two who died in that battle, Adele's opinion of the matter undergoes a complete reversal. After all, sometimes the best defense of your reputation has to come from someone else.
An alert reader may notice a few humorous Tuckerizations among the names of the bit characters on Diamondia, mostly people Daniel only hears about from Admiral James, the commander of the squadron there. But it doesn't obtrude or take away from the focus of the discussion on the precarious situation of the RCN forces there. It's a situation reminiscent of the banana republics of Central and South America, where the government is a bunch of corrupt cronies who give themselves fancy decorations to bejewel their uniforms, but generally don't have any genuine intestinal fortitude to back their presumption of heroism. However, it's not a simplistic mapping of South America into space opera to the point that it starts reading like political satire.
On the other hand, there is a name that is so obtrusive that it's clearly a Tuckerization, and not a friendly one. In an earlier novel of the RCN series there had been an unpleasant character by the name of Charles Platt who came to a nasty end. And in this novel we have a character by the same name who is clearly a completely different individual, but who is just as nasty and obnoxious. It really leaves a reader wondering just what happened between Mr. Drake and the Mr Platt of the Primary World that would create such an extreme level of animosity.
As usual, Daniel has to improvise a lot, including ways to make rickety old spaceships work. Here in a back of beyond system, there really isn't all that much space hardware available, and a lot of it is hand-me-downs from one or the other of the galaxy's two superpowers (shades of the Cold War, when the US and USSR sold or outright gave outdated military equipment to their various client states to fight proxy wars, when an actual clash between the two giants would be catastrophic).
There's one nice thing about the RCN series being so compact -- each novel really is self-contained. Unlike some of David Weber's latest Honorverse novels, you don't have to be up on all the other novels in the series to be able to appreciate this one. You won't come to scenes where it's clear that the characters are referring to events in another book and you are left trying to work out the relationship of the two books within the greater timeline of the series.
On the other hand, it means the individual volumes can become rather predictable. Daniel is out of favor with his superiors, so he gets sent off to some unpleasant mission on a backwater planet, up against impossible odds that almost seem like the bosses are trying to set him up to fail. But with the brilliance of Adele and the loyalty of his doughty crew, he manages to improvise a series of solutions that usually involve dealing with and studying the local wildlife. And there'll be a series of fights, ranging from gunfights in close quarters to space battles, culminating in a massive confrontation with Alliance forces who've been masterminding the conflict all along. And he'll do the right thing just in the nick of time to bring about the enemy's defeat and come out triumphant to the accolades of his star-nation (until the sequel, when he's back in the doghouse with someone in the high command again).
In this one, the youngster Cazalet gets to play a surprising and innovative role in the final battle, which leaves me wondering how naval tactics will be changing in future books. And the efforts to rescue him afterward are almost as interesting as the battle itself, and remind us of the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. Because in Cinnabar, the RCN is family, and while it's understood that people of all ranks may pay the ultimate price in battle and sometimes an accident in the Matrix may leave someone drifting off in a bubble universe beyond reach or rescue, nobody is abandoned simply because it is inconvenient to retrieve them.
Review posted June 20, 2018.
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