Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Terminal Alliance

By Jim C. Hines

Something terrible happened to humankind. People lost their higher intellectual abilities and became like wild beasts. Millions died. Only a few thousand survived, degraded and vicious. Then came the Krakau. 
The Krakau gave humankind back its humanity. Now humans serve the Krakau as soldiers and workers in gratitude for being lifted out of mindlessness and brutality.
"Mops" and her small crew of humans work as janitors on the Krakau spaceship Pufferfish. She and her people are content in their positions, happy to be lifted up and restored to self-awareness and intelligence. 
They are not the only humans on the ship. There are several hundred human members of the crew. On a routine rescue mission, something causes all the humans to revert back to their "feral" state. The Krakau officers on board all die. But Mops and her crew are safe as they were wearing hazmat suits while dealing with a messy and dangerous cleaning problem. 
As the only senior officer on board the ship who hasn't reverted to unreasoning savageness, Mops is now in charge. And with the help of her small cleaning crew, she will figure out what went wrong with the rescue mission and expose the lies behind the disaster that afflicted humankind,

This was an OK story. The revelation that the Krakau were behind humanity's downfall was pretty apparent from the very beginning of the story, so no big surprise there. There are a lot of battle scenes, which I find tremendously boring to read. Towards the end of the book, I got tired of wading through the battle scenes and just started skipping those parts.
I enjoyed the story, for the most part. I do like stories with weird aliens and this book has plenty of those! But I would like this one better if it had a lot less combat and battle descriptions.

Review by Publishers Weekly.


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