Review:
A couple hundred or so years ago, desperate colony ships left Earth in search of a new home. The place they found, Proxima b, turned out to be to dangerous to settle, so their descendants are heading back to Earth. Things don't look good. They can't go back to Proxima b, they likely don't have enough food, oxygen, and fuel to make it back to Earth (which may not even be habitable, anyway), and they keep getting caught in the crossfire of what seems to be some kind of enormous alien war.
Jacklyn Albright is the acting captain of the Calypso, barely holding herself together, much less the ship. Her mother committed suicide, her sister is dead, and her father, the ship's captain, hasn't left his quarters or spoken to anyone in over a week. Then things go from bad to worse. There are glitches in the ship's systems, something keeps making banging noises inside the ship's walls, and a crew member is found horribly mutilated.
I was reminded of the Alien franchise (with a tinge of Event Horizon), as Jacklyn and her crew members tried to track down whatever was moving around on the ship and somehow deal with it as it kept picking off more people. People were sleep-deprived, and things just kept getting worse on pretty much every front. Meanwhile, Jacklyn was also emotionally unbalanced by all the recent deaths in her family, her father's apparent decision to completely check out of all of his responsibilities, and the fact that the unnervingly human-like android who kept following her around looked a lot like her dead sister.
Even as I was hoping the crew could somehow figure out how to deal with whatever it was that was actively killing them, there was still the dark cloud of the future hanging over everything. Things were bleak - even if they could survive this, they might all die of starvation later. I liked how the author worked that into the overall horror, but the way things wrapped up was a tad too convenient for my tastes.
No comments:
Post a Comment