| STARS' END Volume 3 of the Starfisher Trilogy Glen Cook New York: Warner Books, 1982 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-446-30156-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-446-30156-6 | 351pp. | SC | $2.95 | |
Glen Cook is an American SF/fantasy writer best known for his twelve-volume series The Black Company (two remain unpublished.) He has also written a series of mystery novels whose titles suggest an homage to John D. Macdonald.
Stars' End is the third volume in his Starfishers trilogy. This concerns an empire of humans, the Confederation, interstellar war with various aliens including the Ulantonid (now allies) and the Sangaree (still enemies.) The Starfishers are another group of humans who follow tenuous creatures of space, the starfish. Starfish are intelligent and millions of years old. Certain humans can mind-link with them; in addition to knowledge of their vast domain, otherwise inaccessible, starfish offer "ambergris", a stonelike product of their strange metabolism that goes into the core of instantaneous communicators. This commands a fabulous price, and the starfishers do well by collecting it.
There is another fabulous prize in Glen Cook's universe: Stars' End itself. This prize, however, is not so easily taken. Built by a long-vanished race, it is a planet full of weapons of incomparable power. Ships that approach, die. Yet the starfishers think they have a way to capture the prize. That would be useful, for a new enemy has arisen: a savagely genocidal race from nearer galactic center that descends on living worlds like a swarm of locusts and wipes out everything above the level of a cockroach.
Meanwhile...
On a cold and distant world, in great secrecy, Confederation scientists had built a new, fearsome weapon for the Navy. Ion Marescu had helped them. Now, naval officer Bupp von Drachau had arrived to collect the product.
Käthe Adler had called von Drachau a crypto-pacifist, and Marescu had seen red. Literally. The dome and people went raggedly, liquid, and red. Then it was all clear. All perfectly clear. He had to go see Melanie and explain. He was walking down a passageway. Time seemed to have passed. He had the distinct feeling that his head was on sideways. That mercenary von Drachau. . . . the man had kicked the foundations out from under him. A flexible morality? How could there be such a thing? A thing was either right, or it wasn't. The nova bomb was the most evil thing yet conceived by the military mind. and he had helped midwife that evil into the universe. He had allowed himself to be seduced. . . . He had whored himself. . . . There had to be a way to show them what they were doing. He shook his head violently. Things were foggy. A band seemed to be tightening around his temples. There was something wrong. He could not force his thoughts into a straight line. For an instant he considered finding a Psych officer. He was an alien, a passenger in a body under another's control. He was a slightly panicky observer of actions being carried out by another creature. A clumsy puppeteer jerked him around, dragged him out the door and down the passageway with jerky, meandering, drunken steps. When next the Ion rider surfaced it found its steed in the arsenal, bent over the computer keyboard in the heavily shielded test control kiosk. The clock claimed that hours had vanished from his life. His hands and fingers were flying, a pair of pale white dancing spiders. An image here, an image there, surged into his mind, playing back fragments of the missing hours. Ion Marescu crawled over a long black needle. Ion Marescu crouched beneath the needle, connecting the heavy cables that ran to the test station. Ion Marescu squeezed through the cramped interior of the black ship, removing safety chips. . . . When Ion next glanced up, the vast arsenal floor was acrawl with Marines. His right hand depressed the big black palm switch that opened the arsenal's huge exit doors. People flung in all directions as the arsenal's air burst into Hel's eternal night. Baffled, Marescu watched their broken doll figures tumble and bloat. His left hand danced, initiating the test sequences. The black needle, its tail a stinger of white-hot light, lanced into the night, dwindled. The little star of it drifted to one side and downward as its homing systems turned its nose toward the target. The eye of the black needle fixed itself on Hel's sun. It accelerated at 100 g. – Pages 120-124 (excerpts) |
By now you should understand that Marescu did essential work on that new weapon: the nova bomb. (It almost seems like it should be capitalized.) You can guess that he launched one into the sun of the place where it was built. What you don't know is that, of the four working bombs, two had already been installed aboard von Drachau's battleship, which hastily departed. This is an elegant solution to an age-old dilemma: build a superweapon, deploy just enough copies to defeat your implacable enemy, and destroy the rest along with the secret of making them.
This is an elegant piece of writing, too; it is one of the most chilling evocations of incipient madness I have read.1 (The fragments I reproduce here don't convey its full impact.) And the last bit is the best: Marescu's last coherent thought, as the air leaks from his cubicle, is to write a memo recommending safety interlocks that would prevent anyone doing what he did in the hastily assembled Hel weapons factory.
Glen Cook gets top marks for this one. The tale has plenty of action, both outright combat and the subtler deployments of counterintelligence and political maneuvering. But he weaves a satisfying amount of character and culture development into his rapidly paced plot of military conflict and intergroup intrigue. His characters have depth and complexity; they interact in human ways. The novel stands very well on its own. But, for maximum enjoyment, you should start with the first volume of the trilogy.
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