A smidge too far

Read: January 2009
Title: Strength and Honor (Book 4 in the Voyage of the Merrimack series)
Author: R.M. Meluch
ISBN: 0756405270
Binding: Hardcover

This is the fourth book in a series. Here's the background as laid out in book one, The Myriad. In the not too far future, shortly after humanity begins colonizing the galaxy, the first colony to be founded declares independence and extends an invitation to all true children of Rome. Thousands of scientists, priests, doctors, and lawyers (but not indian chiefs, to my knowledge) drop what they're doing and emigrate. Rome never truly fell, you see. It just went underground, keeping itself clandestinely alive in those vocations and professions where Latin is spoken. A state of war develops between the United States and the rogue colony and things are spiraling downward until the discovery of a hive-like alien lifeform that eats anything organic forces the warring parties into an uneasy truce.

Over the first three books, we follow Captain John Faragut (of the Kentucky Faraguts) and the crew of the U.S. space battleship Merrimack as they fight the Romans, fight the Hive, fight (by which I mean outwit) the bureaucratic nitwits of the United Nations, fight the Hive some more, and in some cases fight their attraction to fellow servicemembers of the opposite sex. We also meet Augustus, a Roman patterner (think Frankenstein's monster with an implanted supercomputer) given to Faragut by Caesar to help (or possibly spy on) the Merrimack in its alien-fighting tasks. All in all, it's great brain-candy, full of little details (like hand-to-tentacle fighting against the hive gorgons by marines wielding swords because the gorgons emit a field that causes most technology to fail) that make the story a rip-roaring space opera of the highest caliber. There's even a giant pulsating temporal reset button in the first book that the author gets to press.

Then we get to book four. Since the end of the third book, it looks like it's pretty much all over but the shouting. The Hive appears to be vanquished, and little remains but for Merrimack to make the long journey home from the back end of beyond. Then (new) Caesar declares that since the threat is gone, the war is back on and simultaneously launches a bunch of sneak attacks. Augustus, still loyal to old Caesar (both because of programming and his own natural inclination), escapes and disappears. Merrimack heads for Earth at full speed. Treachery, subterfuge, fighting, insanity, yadda yadda yadda. Book ends.

Can you tell this one left me flat? Without the hive fighting from the previous books, the human-on-human ship battles were kinda cartoonish (in the old G.I. Joe fire a million laser rifles but nobody dies sense) because all the fighters and larger ships have such absurdly overpowered forcefields that they survive anything short of being plunged into the heart of the sun. The villains lack only pencil-thin mustaches to twirl and the heroes in at least a few cases actually do get to wear shining armor. The melodrama dial that was set to a nicely bubbling 7 or 8 in previous books gets cranked up to 11 in this one. The good guys win and get laid, the bad guys lose in horrific ways. It just felt to me that the author was tired of this series and wanted to tie off all the loose plot threads so she could bronze the whole ball of yarn and put it on her mantel.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. I don't know. However, I would have been happier if I'd either stopped when this was still a trilogy or if a much of the plot points in this book had been integrated earlier in the series. I recommend the first three books to those wanting a fun romp. However, I don't recommend Strength and Honor unless you really want to know what happens next or you've run out of other things to read. If you're craving some SFnal Romans, read Jim Butcher's Codex Alera books instead.