In the year 2056, the war between humans and the yucky aliens known as Slugs—a war that killed billions and devastated the Earth in so many ways—seems to be over definitively. At least within the precincts of our solar system. Humanity is rebuilding, even focusing on old intraspecies rivalries again. So where does that leave a veteran soldier like our hero, Jason Wander, nominally a general, though at heart always a grunt? Busy in Tibet, covertly helping a native rebellion against the Chinese. But that mission crashes and burns, and so he and his boon companion, Sergeant Major Ord, are reassigned to an orbiting military facility.

There, safely isolated in space, is the lone Slug interstellar vessel ever captured intact. Eccentric genius Howard Hibble is in charge of deciphering the ship's mysterious mechanisms and getting it to work again. At the heart of the process is a 16-year-old savant, Jude Mushara-Metzger, who happens to be Jason's godson and is the only human seemingly capable of piloting the vessel. Jason and Ord are tasked with helping Jude and Hibble.

It's boring work for a fighting man—until, on a trial run, the Slug ship breaks free of the station, accelerates to light speed and homes in on an automatic destination halfway across the galaxy!

Our quartet of accidental explorers crash-land and find a world of surprises.

Tame dinosaurs, three warring clans of primitive humans and a Slug base that uses the humans to harvest antigravity "stones" add up to a new front in the war to rid the universe of these nasty tyrants.

A former Heinlein mixes it up

Robert Buettner's dyad of novels, serving almost as one single long tale, faced at its climax a crisis in its own success. It had replicated (through a unique Buettner filter) the virtues and modalities of Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959)—that Ur forefather of all current military SF—-to perfection. Tough-minded military realities, despicable aliens, humanity as underdog, believable tech, platoon bonding, camaraderie and loss—the whole Big Enchillada.

But victory over the Slugs brought that precisely engineered scenario to a total halt. What could possibly come next?

The answer, in the form of this third installment (a fourth, Orphan's Alliance, is in the wings), bears more than a little resemblance to first-generation Star Trek, a blend of Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper and L. Sprague de Camp. It's a yeasty and attractive mix in and of itself, but the stark allure of the original seed novel is getting more and more distant and diluted.

From Norton we borrow a powerful trope: the humans helpless aboard a runaway alien spaceship. She might not have done it first, but in Galactic Derelict (1959) she did it so superbly that in my mind she owns the conceit. (Buettner might also be making a sly allusion to Poul Anderson's The High Crusade [1960].) The alien warfare calls to mind various Piper novels. And the mix of odd life forms and tribal ways on the planet of Bren evokes for me de Camp's Krishna stories. Put it all together and you get a hybrid of planetary romance and the kind of first-contact intervention that the aforementioned cohorts of Capt. Kirk always faced.

Buettner maintains his previous record of excellent action sequences. Jason continues his arc of maturation—the book's title refers to the heavy weight of command—but Jude and Hibble and Ord are pretty static and underutilized. The new native characters are zesty enough, particularly Bassin the engineer. But the climactic victory over the Slugs (is it really a spoiler to reveal this likelihood?) seems a bit rushed, and the celebratory coda chapter a bit unearned.

Nonetheless, I'll bet that readers of the first two volumes will find plenty of rewards here, and they can rest assured that the fourth book will expand into even stranger territory.