Ky's age continues to tell against her as Victory Conditions opens; the fledgling admiral is looking for additional ships, personnel and resources to combat the next attack by the power-hungry Turek, but at every step she must deal with politicians and corporate lackeys who cannot help but equate her youth with inexperience. The grudging trust extended to her even affects someone who should be a key ally: Rafe Dunbarger, who now runs the all-important InterStellar Communications corporation. To assist the war effort, Rafe must hold onto his position at InterStellar, but his board of directors suspects that Ky is a corrupt mercenary and that Rafe is besotted with her. They are half right, of course, and so Rafe must hide his feelings for Ky, lest the board jettison him at the first hint of romance.

Getting the cold shoulder from Rafe is yet another hard blow for Ky, and it is ill-timed. Months of warfare have taken their toll on her psyche, and as she continues to lose friends in bloody clashes with Turek, combat fatigue sets in. Now the two fleets are moving ever closer to their inevitable final showdown, and the question becomes whether Ky Vatta can pull herself together in time to lead the armada in the most important battle of all.

Winner-take-all slugfest in space

Military SF tends to rely on a complicated web of storylines that together show the scope of a battlefield too vast to imagine otherwise, ranging as it does through multiple star systems. Moon has done a beautiful job of creating this particular war-torn galaxy, conducting readers from nasty backroom intrigues to the cut and thrust of front-line skirmishes with verve and grace. The suspense never lets up as Victory Conditions ties up the various storylines its author has been nursing since introducing the Vatta family in her 2003 novel Trading in Danger. Spies are unmasked, romances resolved and heroism rewarded. By the novel's end there is a satisfactory settling of accounts with villains both petty and large.

Moon's gift for creating riveting personal clashes is undiminished. Every scene—every line of dialogue—crackles with tension. A master of military SF, the author paints a convincing portrait of warfare both on the battlefield and off. Ky's reaction to losing her troops is particularly well drawn, and her cybernetic implants tie into this storyline in intriguing ways, enhancing both the trauma and its treatment.

This heroine's journey is very much a coming-of-age tale, the story of a young woman who rises to great heights in a short time, not so much out of ambition as out of necessity. It may be, though, that watching Ky grow into her admiral's boots is more fun than seeing her wear them ... even shell-shocked, her ability to prevail never seems in doubt, and readers may feel that the earlier installments in this series, particularly Marque and Reprisal, had more edge. That said, it is enormously entertaining to finally see Ky realize her destiny, and to learn the fates of the other characters in this series: Rafe, Stella Vatta and the thoroughly delightful old lady spy, Grace.

Victory Conditions is a fine capper to a solid SF series—in other words, one that leaves the Vatta family in good order and readers looking forward to Moon's next new universe.