![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Most of Earth’s humans have been turned feral by a Krakau plague, though the Krakau have generously managed to cure some of them to be used as cannon-fodder in the Alliance Prodryan war in space. Cured human, Marion Adamopolous, Mops for short, and her multi-species crew of janitors have become so much more than cleaners and plumbers. They are now officially in charge of the spaceship Pufferfish and are the leader of Earth’s space force of one. In this book they make a dangerous trip to see why the Jynx, inhabitants of the planet Tuxatl, have been able to drive off the dangerous alien Prodryans. Might there be something that Earth and the Alliance can use against the vicious conquerors? Mops herself is running out of time as she seems to be reverting to her previous feral state, leaving crew members to step up. Good job she’s trained them well.
Marion “Mops” Adamopoulos and her alien/human crew of ship-board janitors and sanitation specialists are more used to cleaning up plumbing disasters, but when a freak occurrence killed all the crew but the janitorial team, it put them in charge of a space-ship, the EMCS Pufferfish (i.e. they stole it). Humans are very much second-class citizens after all humans on Earth turned feral following a terrible plague, but some (like Mops) have been ‘cured’ and allowed to take up menial positions in the Krakau space fleets, or have become cannon-fodder in the ongoing hostilities between the Ktakau and the Prodryans. Mops and her crew have to go to Earth to see if they can discover the source of the plague, and discover a team of librarians made up of plague resistant humans. Perhaps humanity isn’t quite dead yet. This is the middle book of a trilogy (I have the last one lined up already) and Mr Hines doesn’t ease you into it gently by backtracking on the story in the first book. You need to be up-to-speed with the characters. I wouldn’t recommend reading this one before the first (Terminal Alliance), but it’s well paced and has some startling revelation.
