The novel “Onslaught” by D. Rebbitt was published for the first time in 2018. It’s the third book in The Globur Incursion series and follows “Contact”.
Rear Admiral Shin is tasked with managing the rescue of the Marines who survived the disastrous first contact with the aliens they call Globur. The information they collected could be crucial to understanding the Globurs’ intentions. The Marines must survive on a planet where they can only hide from aliens.
A small fleet is hastily sent on the rescue mission, also to try to establish communications with the Globurs in the hope of avoiding an open war to break out with the humans. Rear Admiral Shin is determined to follow the fleet’s traditions and rules even if they were established generations before.
“Onslaught” picks up the story where “Contact” ended and explores the aftermath of first contact with an alien species called the Globur due to the globular shape of their spaceships, as information about them is very limited. They showed remarkable aggressive tendencies and warfare capabilities even though their technology is not necessarily superior to that of humans.
After centuries of peace in which the fleet had to manage limited dangers such as asteroids and pirates, humanity encounters an alien species for the first time that immediately proves to be aggressive. The threat concerns the frontier worlds, so very few politicians are willing to talk about war. For almost all of them, the priority is to avoid the danger of panic spreading among their voters.
For humanity, it’s supposed to be a rude awakening from centuries of complacency. However, the people far from the front pretend nothing happened and ignore the threat. Even many of the people involved in military operations on the border struggle to leave behind the mentality of the people who have only known peace.
Even among the fleet’s officers, not all are prepared to face the Globur threat. Rear Admiral Shin comes from a family that served in the fleet for generations but is basically an idiot who puts tradition and rules written by people who had no way of knowing the technologies and strategies of an alien species before everything else. For this reason, he tries to dismiss with annoyance any suggestion coming from Captain Jones, who instead tries to employ strategies and tactical variations specifically designed to deal with the various types of attacks conducted by the Globurs.
All this creates a military science fiction story in which the consequences of a first contact are developed that turned out to be negative because the reaction of the aliens was totally aggressive. From this point of view, it’s a very classic type of story but it’s very modern in the development of the characters and their reactions. In a story of constant tension, the reader is led to wonder if the characters will survive the fights with the Globurs because there’s a clear perception that they truly represent a mortal risk.
Like “Contact”, “Onslaught” also has an open ending because it’s the second chapter of a larger story that D. Rebbitt has already partially told in the first book of the series, set decades later, and of which he tells other chapters in subsequent books. I recommend reading it in particular to fans of space opera and military science fiction. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
