Well, we're back. I just finished a video review of Mass Effect 2 that's over an hour long, so now it's time to relax with some more of The Honor of the Queen! What will this chapter hold? Will Theisman finally get the respect he deserves? Will Honor get into fisticuffs with any more men of straw? Let's find out!
Chapter 25 opens with an introduction to "Captain of the Faithful" Williams, whom the book immediately lets us know is a bad person:
Captain of the Faithful Williams paced back and forth across the command room and gnawed his lower lip. He'd been picked for this post in no small part for his piety—now that very piety fanned his fury at the disaster wreaked by a woman. And violently though he tried to deny it, there was fear in his fury. Fear for himself and for God's Work. The Apostate admiral whoring for the Manticoran bitch had stopped demanding his surrender; that could only mean they were prepared to try something more direct.
But what? Williams didn't know, and ignorance shuddered in his blood like another layer of anger. That bitch! If she hadn't come back—back to a star system neither she nor her whore of a queen had any business in—Masada would have completed God's Work. But she had come back, she and her accursed ships, and smashed the entire remaining Navy except Virtue and Thunder in two short days. She'd set herself against God's Work and Will, just as women always had, and Williams cursed her with silent ferocity as he paced.
Hearing him refer to the Grayson people as "apostates" is giving me unpleasant flashbacks to
Dragon Age. I also like his constant referring to Honor as a "whore" and a "bitch," just so we know that this person is, in fact, an incredibly complex and nuanced individual. We then cut to a scene of the marines preparing for the drop, which means...you guessed it:
We then briefly cut back to Captain Williams, who suddenly picks up the incoming dropships, with two pinnaces leading the way:
Quad-mounted fifty-centimeter rockets ripple-fired like brief-lived, flame-tailed meteors. Twelve of them blasted ahead of each pinnace—twenty-four one-thousand-kilo warheads with a yield man once could have gotten only from atomic weapons—and the pinnaces charged onward down their wakes.
Good thing Weber mentioned the exact diamter of the rockets and their warhead yields, otherwise my suspension of disbelief would have been
shattered.
The final rockets smashed home, and the pinnaces' bow-mounted pulsers opened fire. Thirty thousand thirty-millimeter shells per second ripped into the smoke and dust billowing in Blackbird's thin atmosphere, and then they flashed directly over their targeting points and the plasma bombs dropped.
'
30,000 rounds per minute? That's equal to 500 rounds
per second, which seems just a
tad implausible, even given FUTURE TECH. I'm reminded of the first time I played
Jane's F/A-18, when I had no idea of just how high the M61's rate of fire was. "400 rounds of ammo?" I thought to myself. "That sounds like plenty!" Then, after a few seconds if firing, I was all like, "Hey, where did all my ammo go?" It turns out that, at 6,000 rounds per minutes, 400 rounds only gives you four seconds of firing time!
Oh, and the constant switches of perspective every other paragraph (or in instance, ONE SENTENCE) in this chapter are extremely annoying. Is it REALLY necessary to show every instance of the enemy commander soiling himself in terror at our heroes' assault? It also has the effect of making the battle scenes harder to follow.
Decoy Flight screamed upward, then pushed over and came in again. The remaining Masadan surface arrays saw them coming, but even as Colonel Harris screamed a warning to his troops, the anti-radiation missiles blasted off the racks. Six seconds later, they put out Blackbird Base's eyes, and then the pinnaces rolled back onto their original attack headings and bored straight in.
The Masadan defenders went flat, rolling off into side passages wherever possible, and then the entire base leapt and convulsed again. This time each pinnace fired only a single missile, but those missiles' onboard radar took them straight into the airlocks their predecessors had blown open and down the passages inside them at eight thousand MPS. They carried no explosives, but their super-dense "warheads" struck the first sets of internal blast doors with the force of twenty-three and a half tons of old-style TNT apiece, and another two hundred odd Masadans died as the doors disintegrated in white-hot gas and murderous shrapnel.
"Anti-radiation missiles"...MORE reminders of playing
Jane's F/A-18. It always annoyed me when I'd launch an AGM-88 HARM at an S-300 SAM site, and then they'd shut down their radars, causing my missile to target some worthless anti-aircraft radar instead.
The SPESS MEHREENS kick ass, with their powered armour allowing them to shrug-off small arms fire.
The Marines' belt-fed tri-barrels pumped out a hundred four-millimeter explosive darts per second, with a muzzle velocity of two thousand MPS. That kind of firepower could chew through armored bulkheads like a hyper-velocity band saw; what it did to unarmored vac suits was indescribable.
Again, it sure is good that the book specified the exactl calibre, rate of fire, and muzzle velocity of this weapons, or MUH IMMERSION would be just COMPLETELT obliterated! Like one time I was reading this Tom Clancy novel and there was a scene where someone shot some guy WITHOUT the book describing the the gun's rifling (left-hand twist or right-hand twist?), the cartridge's maximum chamber pressure, and whether or not the shooter was using hollow points or full metal jacket rounds. I immediately threw the book in the trash and sent Mr. Clancy a VERY strongly-worded letter, which is something that totally happened that I did not just make up right now.
Colonel Harris is leading the defence of Blackbird, and his CO Williams is hysterically screaming prayers for God to punish "Satan's whores," which sounds like a good name for an all-female thrash metal band. As if we didn't already know that Williams is a bad person, he closes the doors to the control room and shoot someone who tries to flee. And he doesn't just shoot him once. No, he empties the
entire magazine into him.
"This is Captain Susan Hibson of the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps," the cold, flat voice said. "We are now in possession of your central control room. We now control your blast doors, sensors, and life support. Lay down your arms immediately or face the consequences."
"Oh, God," someone whimpered, and Harris swallowed hard.
"W-what do we do, Sir?" His exec was trapped on the far side of the blast door behind the colonel. Harris could almost feel the man's struggle to suppress his own terror, and he sighed.
"There's only one thing we can do," he said heavily. "Lay down your weapons, boys. It's over."
I must say, as I fight scene this is a bit...underwhelming. The constant changes in perspective were jarring, and Weber has a tendency to describe action in rather clinical terms at times, in a "X used weapon Y to kill Z" after-action report sort of way. I guess that's to be expected from a book series that's largely focused on
space battles, not ground battles.
