Angry Robot Blog Tour Review: The Armageddon Protocol, by Dan Moren

Description

On the heels of the terrorist attacks on the planet Nova’s capital, the Special Projects Team finds itself targeted by the ambitious new head of the Commonwealth Intelligence Directorate, Aidan Kester. When Kovalic and General Adaj are arrested on charges of treason, Tapper, Brody, Sayers, and Taylor are forced to go on the run. While Kovalic and the general attempt to uncover an Illyrican mole within the Commonwealth’s intelligence apparatus, it’s up to the rest of the team to clear their friends’ names, even if that means making a deal with an old enemy to carry out a daring heist that might just get them all killed.

My Review

Thanks to the team at Angry Robot for sending me this book. I always appreciate it when an Indie press can send me physical copies, what with my eBook reading limitations.

I haven’t read the other novels in this series but the book description suggested space intrigues and action, so I agreed to the blog tour. Having now read the book, I would definitely say familiarity with earlier volumes, the plots at least, would be beneficial, but I still made sense of the references to enjoy it. At one point a character arrives out of the blue who I think readers of previous novels would instantly go “Oh! It’s…” and grin happily knowing mayhem was on the horizon.

I would describe this book as a cross between a Cold War era spy thriller, and one of those 90s Desert Storm special ops novels, in space. The characters are fun and memorable, and obviously the author has been living with them for a long time, because they have well-developed characteristics and backstories.

The Special Projects Team:

Tapper is your archetypal explosives expert, old sergeant, knows what he’s doing, got a rough sense of humour and a soft heart.

Adie – young, specialist, loose cannon learning to tie it down and wait for the moment to explode. Falls is love unexpectedly.

Nat – Intelligent, torn between work and family, works with her husband, overshadowed by him until she leads on her own. Realises her skills and abilities are equal to the task.

Eli – another youngster (relatively speaking) who fell into piloting for the dopamine, has a complex past and needs to face it.

Kovalic – veteran soldier and intelligence officer, leader, Boss, detached from his team by events needs to find his focus again and save them all.

There are others: General Adaj, Koster, the surprisingly competent Rance, at the Commonwealth Intelligence Directorate; and the general’s old friend/enemy Yevgeniy, running a tea shop in retirement, but still keeping up with the spying; and, Gwen from CalSec, who appears unexpectedly to help round up criminals when the team get to Caledonia.

We start in a tense office meeting as CID acting commander arrests General Adaj and Kovalic for treason after receiving a report appearing to show the general channelling funds to a terrorist organisation. Kovalic knows, because he’s received the same evidence. Deciding they won’t be arrested today, Kovalic, Adaj and Rance, escape.

Meanwhile, the SPT crew are sent an alert to get out of Nova. Chased by CID officers, they get to the Cavalier, their ship, barely repaired after their last adventure, and head out into space to hide.

Things get a bit difficult when they land on a mining rock and are taken captive by an old enemy, who wants them to help with a heist on Caledonia.

On Nova, the fugitives visit an old frenemy of the General’s, spy on their accusers and develop a hypothesis – there’s an Illyrican mole in the CID. Who?

The novel follows events as the two separate groups deal with their enemies and discover the name of the mole, bringing down major criminal gangs in the process and uncovering a plot by Isabella, Princess of the Illyrican Empire, and former protégé of the General. Assumed to be a pretty stand in for her ailing father, no one has realised that the princess leads the Illyrican Intelligence Service and is building up her strength to take over the empire when her father dies.

The ‘Cold War’ of the series title refers to the war between the Commonwealth, a group of planets and systems that work together, and the Illyrican Empire, which has spent thirty years spreading through the human galaxy, taking Earth in the process. There are some small unaligned groups with trade with both sides. There hasn’t been any fighting for some time, but things heat up as each side engages in special operations against each other. I can see where the author has drawn his inspiration from.

I found this novel a little slow going at first. The action ramps up in the middle and the tension in the final third kept me turning the page to find out what happened next. I enjoyed the tense relationships in the group remaining on Nova as trust is broken and rebuilt, as well as the neat way the ending came together for both teams. #

The desperation of the mole was quite elegantly written. As was the defeat of the criminals on the train. That was a vey original bomb.

The individual characters are quite memorable, especially as we get events from multiple points of view and read some of their thoughts and feelings during the action. The description of Adie’s climb along the roof of the gravtrain on Caledonia in a sandstorm, and her feelings while she did it, was quite visceral. There was a filmic quality to the whole novel; I could very easily see this as a ‘Mission Impossible’ style sci-fi spy thriller movie.

I have a feeling there will be more novels with some of the same characters later on. If you enjoy spy thrillers and sci fi, I recommend this novel.