The novel “Redoubt” by D. Rebbitt was published for the first time in 2019. It’s the fourth book in The Globur Incursion series and follows “Onslaught“.
The Imperial fleet’s Task Force 13 (TF13) reaches the Alsace system and the priority is to try to verify if anyone survived the previous battle against the Globurs. The aliens are lurking and the rescue is very complex and dangerous despite the improvements applied to the weaponry and various on-board systems.
At a political level, the war keeps on being downplayed, especially in systems far from the frontier. There are people who end up thinking that the fights with the Globurs are the result of a misunderstanding or even that the humans are the aggressors. An organization formed by these people intends to carry out a peace mission with starships that are absolutely not capable of resisting an attack by the Globurs.
“Redoubt” continues the military science fiction series by picking up the story where it left off in “Onslaught” following the war that broke out between the humans and an alien species known as the Globurs after a first contact went very badly. D. Rebbitt tells the initial stages of this war in some interconnected books that require reading all of them to get the full story.
The author explicitly explained that he doesn’t want to write a story with aliens that seem invincible until humans find a way to easily defeat them. The Globurs are aggressive and strategically cunning, factors that determine advantages in their battles against humans, who pay dearly for the complacency developed in centuries of peace.
In the first battles against the Globurs, each alien starship that got destroyed represented a victory but in most cases, survival was already a good result. The death of officers tied to traditions that suddenly became useless and even harmful, new starships and augmented crews offer hope for better outcomes but each clash with the Globurs remains very tough. The points of view of various characters show very strongly how each contact with the aliens represents a mortal risk for them, and at the beginning of each book, you don’t know who will survive and who will die.
This is a military science fiction series with some classic space opera features but D. Rebbitt also includes some political ramifications connected to the war. To avoid panic, the real war situation is kept secret, and this leads to the spread of many uncontrolled rumors that sometimes degenerate into conspiracy theories.
In a series where the characters are central, the author devotes no room to any of the pacifists who want to lead a peace mission. In the various parts that involve them, he just tells the actions of entire groups and always from the point of view of members of the imperial fleet. For this reason, their motivations remain vague but probably many of them are in good faith and got confused by the fragmentary and ambiguous information regarding the war. They certainly try to put themselves in a situation that’s dangerous, to say the least, because they have no idea what really awaits them.
In expanding his fictional universe, D. Rebbitt includes the Ming principality, a system that is technically not part of the empire and is located on a possible Globur route. The principality is equipped only with a few old starships that can be made to appear larger through a holographic system. When a small imperial fleet reaches the principality offering assistance, the empress treats the officers as her subjects and displays condescension towards the alien threat.
“Redoubt” is another novel with an open ending because it’s the third 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 the following books. I recommend reading it especially to fans of space opera and military science fiction. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
