Against All Odds is science fiction during the lead up to war. The main character serves in the United Systems Alliance (USA) space navy. The author of this series has written readable fiction with a military theme and managed to convey the horror of warfare, space flight, service to a cause, and made the characters more important than the ships and equipment.
One of the reasons I read very little military science fiction is that too many authors make the inanimate more important than the people or their conflicts. I prefer books – stories – about people where the fighting and the ships and weapons are backdrops, props for the people to interact with each other. Kudos to Haskell for doing this with his Grimm’s War series.
Plot Synopsis – Click to Avoid Spoilers
Jacob Grimm is an officer on a routine mission checking star systems for suitability for training exercises when his ship is fired on by ambushing gunboats, destroying one of the other USA ships. Jacob warns the other ships and shoots down the gunboats, exploding all but one. Unfortunately the gunboats had children onboard. The opposing government, The Caliphate, exploited the children’s death with the USA media, causing Jacob to be a pariah to his navy and his family and friends. Apparently no one thought the true evil was putting kids on poorly shielded gunboats in an ambush, or at least no one with any media clout. The powers that be painted Jacob as the sole person responsible for killing kids and painted him as irresponsible, a cowboy, too aggressive, The Butcher of Pascal.
Jacob refused to resign and spent several years in obscurity on a ship repair base, his career dead. When the story begins he knows that the navy will kick him out in the next year. Fleet Admiral Noelle Villanueva needs someone for a special mission, someone aggressive and someone expendable. She picks Jacob.
Navy intelligence, Admiral Wit DeBeck, knows something is going on or going to start going on in a remote system, Zuckabar, which is loosely aligned to but not part of the USA. The USA has a small fleet operating several star systems away, but one ship, the Interceptor, is missing a captain and the Wit and Noell think if they send Jacob, perhaps he can prod something just by being there.
Jacob travels on the ship Dagger, captained by Nadia, an independent small trader, and the two become close friends. He believes he will report to Commander Zin on the small fleet, but when they arrive at Zuckabar the fleet is not there. He gets new orders, assigning him temporarily to captain the Interceptor as a temporary lieutenant commander.
Nadia is former navy on the intelligence side. She resigned after a very difficult mission getting an ambassador to safety, and although she misses the game, she is glad to captain her own ship. After Nadia lets Jacob off she takes two new passengers, Professor Bellaits and his former student and helper Daisy. Professor Bellaits is searching for something but won’t say what. Daisy is actually a deep undercover Caliphate agent who realizes the professor is looking for a wormhole. She alerted her controller earlier and now some Caliphate ships are in the system waiting for her to signal if/when he finds the wormhole when they will swoop in and take over.
Zuckabar is extremely cold, way below zero, and is that warmth due to 300 years of terraforming. The planet has the usual motley mix of miners, adventurers, grifters, ship support people, and the enormous orbiting station has all the same, minus miners. The Interceptor’s grav coil has been on station getting repaired for months and the crew has gotten negligent. No one has followed up on the repairs including the executive officer, Kimiko Yuki.
When Jacob arrives he makes it clear that he’s not going to hold anything that happened prior to his arrival against the crew or officers, but they need to get back to work. He does several training and action tests with them to get everyone back working and eventually the crew and officers trust him and each other.
He takes a couple marines with him to investigate the grav coil. The repair people are superb at giving the runaround and Interceptor is going nowhere nor is mission capable without the coil.
The station people have been stealing and grifting, are almost ready to pack up and leave, and realize that the coil is not on the station and the navy will have a fit if they realize the situation. They attack Jacob and his marines, gravely wounding one.
Finding no coil in the warehouse the Interceptor’s crew combs through the seized warehouse records and figure it is likely on the merchant ship Madrigal, in system waiting for the final load. The thieves had planned to have their pirate friends attack the Madrigal, kill the crew, sell the ship and its cargo, including the stolen navy grav coil.
Jacob sends a team to board the Madrigal by force and retrieve the coil. The mission is successful but they discover the cargo includes several thousand ladies in cyro suspension, meant for the Caliphate slavers. Slavery is strictly against USA law and the crew could be executed – if the Interceptor is able to get the Madrigal intact to USA space without running afoul of the pirates who obviously intend to take the ship.
At this point there are three conflicting factions plus four others that play in later books. The USA and Caliphate are multi-system governments that went to war about 20 years ago and have a sketchy peace now. The Consortium is a loosely aligned group located between the USA and Caliphate that plays little role in this book and is closest to Zuckabar. The last group is pirates, and the Zuckabar station leadership works with them. The pirates are ruthless, vicious, completely immoral. The Caliphate runs off slave labor, including sex slaves, and the pirates love to strip goods from ships and enslave the crews and passengers for sale. Not nice people, hmm?
The next three things happen simultaneously.
1. Nadia and the Dagger. Daisy realizes that Nadia suspects her. She isn’t sure Dr. Bellaits found the wormhole but knows he is close. She alerts the hidden Caliphate spy ship which attacks, kills all the crew, slaps an obedience collar on Nadia to make her a sex slave. (The collars prevent higher brain function and enforce obedience, but do not stop awareness or pain. Nadia is well aware that they are abusing and raping her.)
They tiptoe around Dr. Bellaits, as they are not sure he found the wormhole and he’s old and absent minded, probably easy to fool. In fact he is not so oblivious as Daisy thinks and he realizes that Caliphate troops took over the Daggar and that Daisy must have alerted them. Bellaits found the wormhole and doesn’t want it to end up in Caliphate hands and even more he wants everyone to recognize that he found it. He slags his equipment, notes the coordinates on a tiny chip and goes off to see what’s going on in the rest of the ship. He gets into Nadia’s cabin, gets her gun, kills one Caliphate, gets the collar off Nadia who manages to kill the soldiers infesting her ship’s bridge and seal it off, then has Dr. Bellaits call for help.
2. Jacob and Interceptor. The Interceptor has its grav coil back and can resume patrol when they see another freighter, Bonaventure, flying out of control, nearly at the limit of their gravitational tolerance. They manage to board and get the nearly-dead crew out and find that pirates had attacked Bonaventure causing their damage. Oddly the captain was not on the bridge at the time his ship was attacked and no one, including him, has a good reason as to why. XO Yuki, suspicious, checks the route the Bonaventure had taken in the prior month, discovers it had coincided with Madrigal and had transferred all its cargo to Madrigal – including the slaves-to-be.
She further unravels the ownership of the two ships, Madrigal and Bonaventure, and discovers that the Zuckabar leader Rasputin owns both, via multiple shell companies. Jacob and she realize this means Rasputin and the Zuckabar government are complicit in the slave ring. Jacob knows he needs to arrest Rasputin but since he heads a foreign government it is dicey; he decides to talk to Nadia since she is familiar with Zuckabar. They cannot find Dagger. It has disappeared, at least there are no transponders. Since the Interceptor’s mission is to protect USA people and ships they find it and zoom towards it.
3. USA Navy leadership receive Jacob’s initial reports on the Caliphate spy ship and the huge pirate/slavery operation that is allied to the Zuckabar government. Admirals Noelle and Wit confer with the Alliance president and decide to send a task force. Meanwhile the president and a Senate ally will prepare the ground to announce annexation of Zuckabar instead of continuing the unstable protectorate arrangement.
Interceptor manages to take back Dagger and learns where the Caliphate spy base is.
The Caliphate has given a capable warship to one group of pirates, hoping to spur trouble. Jacob’s crew spots them coming, puts Nadia and the Bonaventure crew on Daggar and sends the smaller ship off to safety back in the USA. Jacob and the Interceptor crew realizes that the opposition is not the typical pirate ship, it is a frigate, stronger and better armed than Interceptor. However, Jacob has a trained, professional crew while the others are used to chasing unarmed civilians. The Interceptor manages to destroy the pirate ship.
Jacob sends marines to arrest Rasputin, but he suicides first,
Jacob is called to meet with Admirals Noelle and Wit when the Alliance battleship arrives. They present Jacob the highest Naval award and the highest ship award to the Interceptor. Plus promote Jacob and send him to the command school, meaning his career can continue. Nadia is back at the Alliance capital getting treated for severe injuries, physical and mental.
Against All Odds is a complete novel, does not end on a cliff hanger although set up for sequels.
Why Against All Odds Works
Pacing, Tight Plot. Against all Odds is FAST. This gives a great sense of immediacy and we feel like we are there. A lot happens and author Haskell is able pull off events happening in parallel without confusing us readers. I felt carried along, almost as if I were on a raft in a fast current, still able to look at the scenery, enjoy the personal interactions, but not questioning events.
Parallel Plots. Haskell uses plot events that happen simultaneously to create the fast pace and also by switching among main character groups he creates tension and a bit of suspense. We can be pretty sure Jacob will have a happy outcome, and probably Nadia and many others, but we don’t know how and by switching event lines Haskell slows the pace a bit and keeps us guessing “what happened??”
Characters. Against All Odds has good character development although be aware some of the people have some stock characteristics. The captain, Jacob, takes over a ship with demoralized crew that has basically given up. I got that far and thought ugh. One of those canned novels where the noble leader manages to get the rag tag bunch to outperform. That is NOT what we have here. Jacob makes mistakes, the crew is demoralized but not down and out and there are many challenges that force them to perform well. It’s amazing how well someone can improve when the alternative is death!
Haskell has many characters in this story but wisely focuses on just five or so, Captain Jacob Grimm, executive officer Yuki, marine Alison Jennings, crewman/cook Mendez, and Nadia the ex spy who captains her own small cargo ship. Other characters play roles as needed and are surprisingly convincing as people.
We get the points of view of several main characters, including their inner thoughts. This helps develop the characters, get us invested in the story and keeps the plot pacing to a manageable speed.
The characters are realistic too. We can recognize bits and pieces of people we might know and no one is so perfect that it is a turn off. Jacob is noble, but that in part is because he was raised to value duty and because he suffered being blamed unfairly. (He mentions that the debrief after the ambush quickly turned into an inquisition where the investigators tried to get him to admit he knew the ambushing gunboats had kids onboard.) Never mind that is ridiculous, it happened to him and he’s been keeping his head down and doing his job. His commanding officer at the maintenance base commends him for not ever having to kick discipline problems up to her; Jacob concentrated on people since he couldn’t concentrate on a ship. He takes that learned skill to his next assignment on Interceptor.
World Building. Haskell creates a complex world that in many ways reflects our own, with goodness and evil, freedom and slavery, indepence and tyranny. He does spend more word count describing weapons and such than I prefer but he doesn’t go overboard with it and probably could not have left much out. We do need to know that the ships travel faster than light only by using starlanes, defined corridors between systems, and we also need some awareness that his ship’s weapons have limits.
Decency. Against All Odds has a happy surprise with language. There is zero blasphemy, no swearing and very little vulgarity. Huge kudos and thanks to the author.
Overall
I was impressed with Against All Odds. I didn’t have much expectation going in since so very many of this genre are very bad, but I quickly got engrossed in the story and read this and the next four sequels over a weekend. It is well-written with good characters, a plot that moves and is a lot of fun. I’ll keep buying future sequels.
4 Stars
I got my Kindle copy on Amazon where you can choose hardcover or paperback instead. I did not see any of Haskell’s books on Barnes and Noble.
All Amazon links are paid ads.
A Note on the Political Situation in the Series
The Caliphate seems almost too barbaric, too brutal, too savage to be real. I believe Haskell based the regime on ISIS and similar groups.
Note that the USA is shown to have internal weakness and corruption, it is imperfect. The governance is similar to our United States with an elected president and senators from each system in the alliance. The number of senators relates to the population. The economy is free market and there is apparently freedom of speech, religion, so on.
The Consortium is allied to the USA but both have strict laws restricting ownership of companies to their own citizens. Asian groups settled most of the Consortium systems originally; while many speak English that is not the predominate language. Consortium is known for its technological innovation.
The Corridor includes some quasi-independent systems such as Zuckabar. Several of these are under the protection of the USA, the Protectorate. (Think Micronesia after WW2.)
The other groups get almost no mention:
Terran Republic was allied to the USA in the war and is disintegrating.
Iron Empire apparently was allied to the Caliphate in the earlier war.
The Terraforming Guild is a vastly powerful, multi-system corporation that in this first book plays no role.
That was a well written review. Thank you for your thoughtful comments.