Humans are under attack from an invading alien race. The book begins right at the start of the alien invasion with two massive fleets facing off in a colony solar system. The human fleet is destroyed along with a nearby colony planet. It’s clear that the alien technology is not superior to human technology. The aliens simply overwhelm and destroy with their one powerful weapon, the ‘total conversion beam’. The aliens appearance and purpose is approached early on in the story so there is no time wasted finding out what the alien race is about.

The battle scenes are very descriptive. Space battles in the book play out in what seems like minutes to hours. There are plenty of weapons used: fusion and antimatter warheads, kinetic rounds, gigawatt and terawatt laser beams, proton and particle beams, hyperlight torpedoes and a total conversion beam which seems to be the alien races ultimate weapon. With all these magnificently sci-fi super weapons it seems that what finally wins the battle is the smallest of weapons, the nanite. The nanite is a nano robot that can be programmed to do a multitude of things.  In the book it is used for everything from healing human bodies to repairing ships and, in the end, eventually used a weapon.

The aliens are a death cult. They look like a cross between a T-Rex and Velociraptor, with their tails constantly swinging behind them and their hulking bodies its funny to imagine these things controlling a space ship. They’re not the brightest of creatures and seem to be purely driven by rage and a desire to kill for their god. Their religion is based on the idea that life is an infestation that ruined the emptiness of the Universe.  They seek to rectify this by killing every living creature in the universe. This allows for some interesting ideas to form because their main goal is the eradication of all life in the universe, but they themselves are living creatures. Their technology is crude as it is salvaged from civilizations they destroyed and they don’t invent or improve any of it.

There are several main characters in the story, but the only ones I found myself caring about were Bennie and Darcy. Bennie is a computer hacker that gets caught early on in the book and is forced to serve in the marine corp. Darcy was captured during the initial alien invasion and has been forced to work for the aliens aboard their ship since she was young. The other characters seem a little bland and didn’t have anything that stuck out for me to remember though they do contribute to the ending of the book.

The book is essentially a high science fiction space opera with plenty of hard hitting space battles, but the pacing suffers throughout the book as you get bogged down by unnecessary details and characters thoughts that don’t seem to contribute a lot to the story. The dialogue and interactions between the characters were a bit awkward, but even with that I found myself voraciously reading the last twenty pages of the book. If you like books like Orphanage or The Lost Fleet you would probably like this book.

Quote: “Cower, rodents. Cower in your holes. The Universe looks upon you in disgust. We are the cleaners of the Universe, come to sweep you from your systems. Cower, because we are death, and we have come for you.”

FileSize:524KB                                                                                                                  ASIN: B00CD8LFNI