#5 C J Cherryh: Defender

[bellinghman]

C J Cherryh: Defender

Paperback 452 pages (November 2002)
Publisher: Daw Books
Language: English
ISBN: 0756400201
Category(ies): Science Fiction & Fantasy

This is the fifth book in the ongoing Foreigner sequence. After the previous volume, which saw Bren Cameron finally getting aboard the station, this starts with him back, but only briefly, on the planet. But then, after that curiously inconclusive visit, he's back on the station, balancing the three-sided politics yet again. He's now more settled in, and it all looks to be going pretty smoothly (absent his family problems, most especially revolving round his mother back in Mospheira). The Phoenix has even been refuelled. But Captain Ramirez is ill, and dies. On his deathbed, he says something which overturns a whole mess of assumptions and makes it now impossible for the ship not to return to the Reunion station from which they had been chased away by an alien attack.

And, by the end of an eventful novel, Bren Cameron is on the starship at it leaves for the year's voyage to Reunion. Much more active than its predecessor, and building towards the climax of this second trilogy.