Everything Is Better With Dragons

After forty years of wreaking havoc across the galaxy, the outlaw Nine Lives – AKA Former General Gabriella Ortiz – has finally run out of lives. Shot down into a backwater at the system’s edge, she is rescued by Deputy Air Marshall Havemercy Grey.

Hav is a true soul, trying to uphold what is right in the heedless wastes. Hav is determined to see justice done. And Hav could sure use that 20-million bounty…

But escorting the most dangerous fugitive in the system across the stars is no easy task, especially when decades of fire and destruction are catching up with her, and every gutspill with a pistol wants that payday. So when Ortiz offers a deal – to keep them both alive, as long as Hav listens to the stories of her lives – Hav can’t refuse.

There’s just one catch: everywhere they go, during every brawl and gunfight and explosive escape, people say the same thing – don’t let her talk…

My Review

Fabulous final instalment of the Factus trilogy, following Gabi, the former General, and Factan faction leader. We read of Gabi’s, now known as Nine Lives, deaths from before she crashed on Factus (see Hel’s Eight) to her final adventure with Hel, originally Ten ‘Doc’ Low (see Ten Low), as told by Hav and a future archivist, Idrisi Blake, who has been tasked with chronicling the life of Gabrielle Ortiz.

A riveting adventure through space, full of action and tension. The narrative moves between Blake’s increasingly disordered search for information and Hav’s recollections of their adventures with Gabi and the tale Gabi told Hav, supplemented by information Blake manages to retrieve from Accord sources to include in his report, such as interview transcripts and newspaper reports. It’s layered and each layer builds on the readers’ knowledge.

If you’ve read the other books in this series, then this will be a satisfying end to the trilogy, but if you haven’t it might be a bit confusing. The entire series covers a century of life on and off Factus, as the little community on the dessert moon fights for something resembling independence from the Accord and the greed of industrial tycoon, Xoon, while living with the Edge and the Ifs. The Seekers and the G’hals make an appearance, fighting their way across the Dead Line to keep the Factans supplied and take their tithe of the living and the dead.

These books are delightfully reminiscent of Westerns and pulp fiction. The characters are a mix of sandblasted marshals, scavenging frontiers people, pirates in neon ships and tie-dyed overalls, and death incarnate. The world of Factan, the mining asteroid of JP-V and the many other planets, moons, space stations and ships visited are each unique and quite, quite terrifying in their own ways.

The ideas explored in the series are fascinating; this is a literary exploration of Schrodinger’s Cat, but with life and death, the potential of events, choices made and paths not taken. The Seekers have an interesting philosophy. If people are going to die anyway, they may as well be useful in death, by saving lives. It’s very pragmatic and practical, but in these novels the basic principle of organ donation is elevated to a religion, led by a medic named after the Goddess of Death. From the outside the Ifs and The Seekers appear to be a terrifying death cult, but for those on the inside, they are life savers. The interplay of these ideas builds a complex world that I found riveting, while the story is brutal and gripping. I couldn’t put it down.

Extra kudos for the continued introduction of non-binary and Queer characters with complex lives and interests.