his is the second volume in the open-ended "The Secantis Sequence," following on the heels of Compass Reach (2001). And next year will see the publication of a third volume, Peace and Memory. But as the author is careful to explain, all the entries in this sequence stand alone, featuring entirely new characters and shifting foci of action from book to book.
We open directly after the events of the first book, circa 2200. At the climax of that volume we witnessed the death of Chairman Tai Chin, head of the Pan Humana, a league of some hundred settled worlds, the frontiers of which abut an alien empire, the Seven Reaches. In the power vacuum that follows the Chairman's death, the far-flung Distal Worlds decide to secede. A tiny, obsolescent wing of the Pan's vast Armada is sent to deal with the supposedly minuscule rebellion on a world called Finders. Two soldiers—fighter pilots—occupy our attention. Cira Kalinge has abandoned her ancestral farm life on the planet Homestead for a military career, while Alex Cambion has been pushed into the military by his domineering father, Maxwell—who also happens to be a powerful industrialist on Finders. As lovers, the two soldiers prepare with both hope and fear for the upcoming battle.
But the forces of Finders have unsuspected alien help, from the mysterious Vohec. The Armada assault is easily thwarted, with Cira crash-landing behind enemy lines while Alex is captured. From this point, the two follow vastly different paths. Cira becomes caught up in the deadly chaos on Finders, while Alex meets his father and discovers that all his life to this point has been a bizarre lie. Cira falls in with a double agent named Hil Venner, and is instrumental in turning him into a loose cannon who threatens all sides equally. And Alex undergoes a ruthless neural treatment at the hands of his "father" before the Pan can rescue him.
By novel's midpoint, both Cira and Alex have been taken safely offplanet. Cira spends some R&R on Homestead, while Alex is given therapy for his mental wounds. Neither is aware of the survival of the other. Meanwhile, a reporter named Tory Shirabe, earlier assigned to the Finders theater of operations, begins to fit together some pieces of a disturbing puzzle relating to the Pan's real intentions and goals and methods in waging this war. Eventually, Cira and Tory find themselves again on Finders, reinserted back into the Secessionist struggle, a struggle complicated by the maniacal Venner.
Grounded in the grunts' point of view
Mark Tiedemann is to be congratulated for choosing a mosaic approach to his future history, rather than endlessly milking the same cast of characters and situations. The first book in this sequence concerned "freeriders," interstellar hoboes who hitched rides from world to world. Naturally then, the book shifted across many different exotic venues and represented the underbelly of the Pax Humana. This new novel steps up the socioeconomic ladder, dealing as it does with career soldiers. And its action is mainly focused on the sparsely populated, harsh mining world of Finders. This change of narrative concentration serves as a spotlight illuminating previously unseen aspects of Tiedemann's cosmos.
It's a very lived-in future, full of battered, obsolete ships and colonial towns that never quite succeeded and family farms where tradition rules and abandoned alien monuments. Tiedemann succeeds in making us believe that this show has been up and running for generations, not just some stage set constructed minutes ago. And his characters inhabit this landscape authentically. Cira's conflicts about the clash between her family's expectations and her own desires is a genuine result of all the factors Tiedemann establishes. Maxwell Cambion's ambitions for himself and his real son, Nicolan, also spring from the soil of Finders in organic fashion.
Tiedemann also deserves credit for his unconventional attitude toward space war. As introducer Jack McDevitt mentions, the author is not one to glorify or dwell on crashing space battles. The initial assault on Finders lasts five minutes and ends ingloriously for the Armada. On the planet, the civilian social turbulence and firefights are presented as brutal, confusing incidents where all Cira and her new friends can do is scramble to stay alive. (A graduate of Clarion, having studied under Chip Delany, among others, Tiedemann's portrayal of civilization's breakdown resembles early Delany work such as The Fall of the Towers [originally 1963-65].) All in all, Tiedemann captures the futility and wastefulness of war more in the manner of Joseph Heller than of David Drake and others. Given this, there are still affinities with the work of, say, C.J. Cherryh and William Barton.
Despite being a little dragged-out and laborious in a couple of spots, Metal of Night succeeds in proving that the rigors and follies of interstellar war would look familiar to such "ancient" commentators as Stephen Crane or Jerzy Kosinski.
