Gemina

[sawyl]

I've managed to get my hands on Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff's Gemina, the sequel to their innovative Illuminae. Set on Jump Station Heimdall, the destination of the evacuation fleet in the first book, the story follows BeiTech's attempts to cover up their attack on the mining colony on Kerenza IV. Once again, we have two star-crossed lead characters in the forms of Hanna Donnelly, the Station Commander's daughter, and Nik Malikov, a lieutenant in the House of Knives crime syndicate who also happens to be Hanner's drug dealer. And once again the action is told through a series of found documents, this time including Hanna's journal, with the added entertainment of being able, post-Illuminae, of being able to make a pretty good guess at which of the characters is responsible for narrating the sections composed of surveillance footage.

We begin with the calm before the storm, with everyone on Jump Station Heimdall preparing to celebrate Terra Day. For Hanna Donnelly, this involves wheedling a designer outfit out of her father and negotiating with Nik for a bumper supply of dust to keep her friends happy through the celebrations. For Nik and the other members of the House of Knives, Terra Day means raising a new batch of lanima, a parasitic lamprey-like alien species which feed on brainwaves, using a herd of cattle concealed beneath the station's reactor. Why would anyone want to raise such Lovecraftian horrors? Because the psycho-active secretions lanima give off provide the raw materials for dust, everyone's favourite party favour.

With the setting established, we know an awful lot about our principal characters and what we can expect from them. Nik is obviously keen on Hanna, Hanna is a bit less keen; she may have broken Nik's arm in an earlier encounter — something Nik insists on calling a sprain — and she's obviously not entirely indifferent to his bad-boy charms, but Hanna isn't about to throw over her current boyfriend for Nik's flirtatious banter. We also know that, despite his prison tattoos, Nik isn't half the criminal he's inked out to be and his badinage with his cousin Ella, an elite hacker who isn't quite as mobile as she used to be, is very nicely done.

We also get a chance to see some of the more minor characters, including Hanna Donnelly's father and Chief Engineer Isaac Grant, Kady's father from Illuminae. Grant and Donnelly provide some useful exposition, with Grant explaining the need to take the wormhole junction down for a week over the holidays to carry out some delicate adjustments and Donnelly trying to chivvy him along. Refusing to be rushed, Grant explains that screwing up the maintenance could result in horrible damage to spacetime and the disappearance of the entire station. Thanks for that cheery bit of info-dumpage Chief!

On Terra Day Nik, whose decision to supply Hanna on sly leaves him open to blackmail, reluctantly agrees to smuggle a large biotainer aboard the station. Leaving a key moment to go and meet Hanna, Nik misses the moment when the 'tainer opens to reveal a group of BeiTech mercenaries who promptly wipe out the rest of Heimdall's branch of the House of Knives. For the same reason Hanna, who is supposed to be present at her father's Terra Day party in the station's atrium, escapes the moment when the mercs kill a few key members of the station's skeleton staff before placing the atrium in lockdown. After hunting down the remaining crew, who can be tracked through their implanted transponders, the invaders start bringing up the wormhole to allow a fleet of warships to travel to Kerenza to wipe out survivors of the Illuminae attack.

All of this sounds pretty serious for our heroes. Thankfully, they've got a couple of aces up their sleeves: Hanna, who has spent many a happy hour bonding with her father over warfare simulations and games, is a skilled strategist and an accomplished martial artist; while Nik is a crack shot who, with the help of his cousin Ella, a brilliant hacker, knows how to reach the parts of the station others don't even know exist — like lanima breeding bay, where, even now, the nasty little brain suckers are in the process of erupting out of their oblivious bovine hosts.

While some of the mercenaries don't get to be much more than codenames and horrible fates, the major antagonists are pretty clearly drawn. The team commander, Travis "Cerberus" Falk, is clearly a ruthless force to be reckoned with; a man whose quite voice and controlled manners bely a vast capacity for violence. His deputy, Fleur "Kali" Russo is a bit more obvious: a classic psychopathic warrior who is so unhinged that she even unsettles her colleagues, but whose skills are extremely well suited to tracking down a handful of missing station personel and woe betide anyone who crosses her.

Gemina is every bit as a fun as its predecessor. Although it's plot isn't particularly innovative, the narrative is well executed and the found-footage method of telling the story works extremely well — the mix of third person descriptions with transcripts and snarky comments from the analyst is particularly effective. There are a couple of plot twists but they're solidly foreshadowed — although I have to admit that one of them completely blindsided me! — so they don't feel like too much like cheating!

The characters are well drawn and enjoyable — I particularly like Ella's sharp sarcasm and her acute awareness of the objective unpleasantness of the House of Knives versus her own experiences of her father's patience and kindness towards her — although their trajectories are pretty clear from early on. The book deals with the characters' experience realistically — Nik's dubious past, Hanna's drug taking, Ella Malikova's health — but without allowing these to define them.

From the framing narrative, it is clear that the stakes have risen for BeiTech Executive Director Leanne Frobisher. Where, in Illuminae, she was the one who'd commissioned the after action report on the Kerenza IV incident, Gemina opens with Frobisher facing a United Terran Authority tribunal where the Illuminae Group's transcripts appear to form the basis of the evidence against her. And I'm looking forward to the third book in the series, which, I'm sure, will find Director Frobisher fighting with everything she can to escape the closing trap set for her by the Illuminaes...