The Machine Awakes

[sawyl]

I've been enjoying a chance to return to Adam Christopher's Spider Wars universe with The Machine Awakes. This takes place a little while after the events of The Burning Dark and there are a couple of side remarks early on about the Shadow Protocol mission — some of which give away the nature of the mission — but by and large there aren't too many connections between the two novels; they certainly aren't direct sequels and each strikes a different tone, but they are both equally excellent and enjoyable.

After opening with a short prologue set on a mining station in orbit around Jupiter, which principally serves to set up some mysterious coordinates, the book drops us straight into the head of Caitlin Smith, one of the two principal protagonists. Formerly an outstandingly talented psi-marine cadet, Caitlin dropped out of her training program following the death of her twin brother Tyler, a psi-marine sergeant, in a Spider attack on a distant world. Having had intermittent telepathic communications with her brother since his death, Caitlin has come to believe that he is still alive and, consequently, has allowed herself to be drawn into a conspiracy which promises to unmask the Fleet's greatest secrets in exchange for the small matter of a political assassination.

But given what we know about the Spiders universe, Caitlin's belief in her brother's continued existence can't be taken at face value. From The Burning Dark we know that the universe possesses a subspace dimension filled with things beyond imagining, creating the chance that Tyler might be some sort of horror risen from the depths to torment his sister. Equally from the short story Cold War we know that some Spiders seem to be able to mimic the psi abilities of marines, opening up the possibility that Caitlin's brother was absorbed by the creature who killed him and his psi echo used to deceive his sister into carrying out a murder intended to weaken all of humanity.

Our second protagonist, Von Kodiak, is deep undercover on an a space station run by a notorious crime lord when his old partner, Mike Braben, appears with orders to drag him back to Earth. Arriving home, Kodiak finds the Fleet Bureau of Investigation in a state of frenzied activity. Fortunately Commander Laurel Avalon, Bureau Chief and Kodiak's boss, is there to bring him up to speed: Admiral Sebela, ostensible head of the Fleet, was assassinated during a memorial service, mere days after being stripped of actual power in a bloodless coup by Admiral Zworykin; a move Zworykin justified on the grounds of the almighty screw-up that was Operation Shadow, the mission at the heart of The Burning Dark. Needless to say, practically everyone in the Bureau believes the Admiral's murder to have been an inside job.

Unable to work under his own identity, intentionally tarnished to give him a way into his previous mission, Kodiak is assigned a cover as a junior analyst and given the sort of off-books work that neither Braben nor Avalon can be seen to be doing. Thus, when Avalon is unable to access a key database showing the movements of Fleet personel on the day of the murder, it is Kodiak who sneaks in to download the data and who generates the analysis that indicates the involvement of Marine Smith. When Caitlin's tracker triggers for the first time in the months since she left the Fleet, Braben and Kodiak raid a warehouse in Salt City, a slum that has grown up around the city of New Orem, where the find the apparently impossible: Caitlin's impossible-to-remove transponder has been removed and has fallen into the hands of a creature how simply shouldn't exist.

Where The Burning Dark was a haunted house story in the middle of a space opera, The Machine Awakes is more of a classic techno-thriller; and while the eventual solution may be very clearly telegraphed by the title, it is the journey to the solution and the discovery of the identity of the titular machine that matters more than the awakening itself.

The double stranded narrative works well, with Kodiak and Caitlin well placed to view the same story from different ends. Caitlin, a pawn in the conspirator's game, gets to see the low level details of the plan and to observe the fault lines that run through the group, coming to realise that each of the factions has a different reason for her involvement. Kodiak, meanwhile, provides a law enforcement perspective from the viewpoint of an outsider — his cover identity means his actions come under less scrutiny than Avalon's or Braben's, allowing him to bend the rules, while his recent period in the wilderness in apparent disgrace makes him unlikely to be a conspiracy mole.

Set in New Orem — Utah having become the Fleet's capital following the destruction of much of the southern hemisphere in a devastating Spider attack earlier in the war — The Machine Awakes gives a much clear idea of what life outside the Fleet looks like for a polity at war. The slums of Salt City are filled with a combination of refugees and Fleet rejects, left to their own anarchic devices by the police except whether they directly impinge on the world's security. Through the involvement of the Jovian Mining Corporation we get to see that uber-capitalism with all its amoral excesses also seems to be alive and well at the heart of the military industrial complex — something that, even from the prologue, hints the eternal willingness to sacrifice a humanity for a quick buck.