Orders of Battle, book seven of the Frontlines series, is my first book of 2021. The series is my favorite military sci-fi series. The writing style and characters are portrayed… openly, easy to understand but not simplistic or boring. The story is not super original, but it doesn’t matter because it isn’t what makes it good. It is how the story is portrayed that is different from any other series I’ve read. It is a captivating story.
Andrew, the main character, grew up in the poorest human district type, basically where humans are crammed as much as possible into a small space. He joins the military as a way out and goes through basic training where he meets his later-to-be wife, Halley, before setting out to a faraway colony with her, by chance. During the trip, they are attacked by an alien ship and barely escape. Quickly, the aliens named Lankies because of their long, lazy-looking strides, destroy all of humanity’s colonies on their way to earth.
When one of the Lanky “Seed Ships” finally reached earth, the only way it was destroyed, the first one ever destroyed, was by a captain taking his ship on a slingshot around earth’s gravity pull and crashing into the ship. After that, the military got the idea of attaching rockets to asteroids and launching them into the seed ships, since it appeared the aliens couldn’t identify them in time. Another effective weapon was gigantic rail guns on two new warships, although they had the drawback of requiring incredible amounts of energy that would momentary shut down the warship or sometimes cripple it.
Using these rail guns and many rocket-propelled asteroids, the fleet was able to take back control of Mars, the nearest colony. By the time of this book, number seven, the military is sending a task force to explore the place of the first contact to get a sense of what the Lankies are up to and to learn more about them. After Earth destroyed the Lanky presence on Mars, the Lankies stopped engaging with humanity for four years. The military, then, wanted to take the initiative before the aliens showed up with something new they couldn’t handle.
