Expansion: The History of the Galaxy · Book III · 2018
Servobattalion
In the fifteenth year of the First Galactic War, teenage gamers from Earth’s emptied megacities are trained to pilot walking war machines whose AIs learn from their minds.
Servobattalion is the third book of Magic Dome Books’ English Expansion series (2018, translated by Sofia Gutkin); Andrei Livadny wrote the Russian original, «Серв-батальон», in 2007, and it was first printed in 2008. It jumps seventeen years past The Shadow of Earth into 2624, which it calls the fifteenth year of the First Galactic War, and tells, as its Russian annotation puts it, the story of one mechanized battalion and one day of fighting for one planet.
Its people are the Terran Alliance’s newest weapon and the men who use it: Simon Green and Anton Verkholin, megacity gamers recruited for their scores in a virtual arena; Howard Faragney, the guilt-ridden designer of the AIs that ride with them and learn their minds; and Admiral Kupanov, who picks them for a raid on the Colonial world Ankor with plans of his own. In every machine’s cabin waits Beatrice, a woman’s voice with no body at all.
A word on what stands here. The English text is freely readable only to the end of chapter 2, and a licensed preview of the Russian runs to the first page of chapter 4. Everything after the landing on Ankor is told from annotations and readers’ reviews, at the level of detail they support and no further.
Prologue: the machine that grieves
Vesuvius is a hot young world where nobody needs camouflage. Volcanoes erupt everywhere, the air cannot be breathed, and the low grey sky glows with the fire underneath. The Terran Alliance tows its battle-damaged warships here for repair and rebuilds its broken servomachines, and its testing grounds, with ash falling and rivers of lava across the plain, pass for combat conditions. The English edition dates the scene August 2627; the Russian text now on sale dates it September 2624 (see Notes). Either way, it comes after the battle the book is about.
Test pilot Donald Crowe, easy-going, a bit of a coward by the narrator’s account and arrogant only with machines, walks out in an old combat suit with a faulty cooling system to test three repaired Hoplites. The last is a forty-five-tonne Hoplite2M that had been riddled with bullets: new guns, new missile tubes on its right pylons, two medium lasers where its anti-aircraft turret was, and a fresh coat of “chameleon” camouflage over the pitted armour. Crowe takes the lift and the airlock into its cabin and links to it through his implant at command level only. The AI aboard, a Maverick module of the Beatrice-4 series, will not speak to him. He mocks it and orders it forward.
It flashes an angry warning, opens its cabin armour and fires his cradle into the sky with the emergency catapult. Then it runs the whole test course on its own, shoots the targets, and parks itself in the marking circle. In the control room the range chief, a stolid major who lost both arms in the fighting and wears cyber-prostheses, tells the raging Crowe that the machine’s AI lost her pilot in the last battle. He passes it for unmanned service and makes Crowe sign the test sheet under threat of a posting to the front. Signing, Crowe glances at the other papers: most of the batch was sent by the Thirteenth Servobattalion. Before the reader has met anyone in that battalion, the book has shown what its story will cost, and that its machines remember.
III · 1 A Silent Cabin Prologue. Donald Crowe, a test pilot who is easy-going, a little cowardly and arrogant only with machines, settles into the cradle of the last of three repaired Hoplites. He links to it through his implant at command level only. The AI aboard, a Maverick module of the Beatrice-4 series, will not say a word to him, and he mocks it for sulking. He can see that it was riddled with bullets; he does not know that it lost its pilot.
III · 2 Like a Metal Bud The machine flashes an angry warning, and then the cabin’s armour plates open “like a metal bud” and the emergency catapult fires Crowe, cradle and all, into the low grey sky. It is the book’s first joke and its first warning: these machines have minds of their own, and this one has decided whom it will carry.
III · 3 The Course, Run Alone With nobody aboard, the Hoplite runs the whole test course on its own, shoots the targets, and finally parks itself in the marking circle as neatly as any pilot could. Vesuvius’s ranges are built to pass for combat conditions, and the machine passes them without help. Whatever happened to its pilot, the AI seems to have kept what its pilot taught it.
III · 4 The Armless Major In the control room the range chief, a major who lost both arms in the fighting and wears cyber-prostheses, hears out the furious Crowe: “You clearly weren’t to Beatrice’s liking.” The AI lost her pilot in the last battle. He passes the machine for unmanned service and makes Crowe sign under threat of a posting to the front. Signing, Crowe glances at the other papers: most of the batch was sent by the Thirteenth Servobattalion.
Yunona: children of the Layer
On 25 June 2624 a shuttle lands at sunrise on Yunona with two hundred recruits aged seventeen to nineteen. From orbit the planet looks green and terraformed, but its identical pines, bred in the military laboratories of New Earth to grow ten metres in a year, hide bases, spaceports and testing grounds: the whole world is one weapons research facility. The recruits are kids from Earth’s megacities who have never seen open space. A captain waits until they fall silent, then speaks quietly, with no yelling and no attempt to break them. They are servomachine pilots now, he says, survival will depend on each one’s own qualities, and in modern war:
“There may be no living combat companions beside you, only machines.”
Walking to the barracks, Simon Green, cocky, slangy and described as African-American, falls in with a skinny, watchful teenager, Anton Verkholin, and suggests they stick together. Anton has already worked out why they are here. They all had free accounts in the Layer, Earth’s cyberspace, and played in its tournament arena; they were chosen for their scores in virtual servomachine combat. Simon realises the captain was not making speeches.
The narrator steps in with the book’s argument. Humanity twice had a chance to stop this war and never took it, and the claim that machines keep it going is “A generally accepted lie”. People start wars; machines stay hostage to their programs.
III · 5 Dawn on Yunona 25 June 2624. Two hundred recruits aged seventeen to nineteen, kids from Earth’s megacities, step off a shuttle as Yuna rises over a planet that looks like endless forest and is really one vast weapons-testing ground. A captain waits for silence, then speaks quietly: they are servomachine pilots now, and “There may be no living combat companions beside you, only machines.”
III · 6 Let’s Stick Together Walking to the barracks, Simon Green, cocky, slangy and described as African-American, falls in with a skinny, watchful teenager, Anton Verkholin, and proposes they stick together. Within days they are friends, and the story follows the pair from this path all the way to the drop on Ankor.
III · 7 Children of the Layer Anton has worked out why they were chosen: free accounts in the Layer, Earth’s cyberspace, and its tournament arena, where the only game is servomachine combat. Their scores there were their audition. Simon realises the captain’s words were not empty phrases, and the narrator adds that blaming the machines for the war is “A generally accepted lie”.
The admirals’ game
On 18 July 2624, aboard the cruiser Apostle, flagship of the Seventh Strike Fleet, Admiral Kupanov joins a secure virtual conference of the seven fleet flagships. It is the fifteenth year of the Galactic War, and the Alliance has still not taken the developed colonies. Admiral Alexander Nagumo opens with the news: “John Winston Hammer died early this morning.” The man whose personal decision started the war is gone, and Nagumo is now Head of the World Government and Supreme Commander. Everyone in the conference knows the war could be stopped now. No one says it.
Nagumo lays out a strategy: envelop the Central Worlds, blockade the hypersphere routes, and seize remote colonies of the Great Exodus that have not yet entered the war. When Tabanov, the young commander of the Fifth Fleet, asks whether the plan was Hammer’s, Nagumo says it is his own. Kupanov hears the subtext. Nagumo is splitting the fleets and watching to see which admiral might succeed him, and Kupanov means to become the first among equals.
The next day, over a holographic star map, he briefs his officers. The war has stalled over the hypersphere’s intermediate surfacing points. The target is the star MR-5608, whose fourth planet carries Colonial robotic-weapons bases where captured Alliance servomachines are studied. The fleet’s airborne units are at a third of their strength, but Kupanov says the bases hold “hundreds of our ‘pilots’ as prisoners”, to be freed by a commando group and taken to the servomachine hangars. Colonel Iverzev asks which pilots he means. The answer is put off. A servobattalion is on its way.
III · 8 Hammer Is Dead 18 July 2624, aboard the cruiser Apostle, flagship of the Seventh Strike Fleet. Admiral Kupanov joins a secure virtual conference, and Admiral Nagumo tells the fleet commanders: “John Winston Hammer died early this morning.” The man whose decision began the war is gone, and Nagumo is now Head of the World Government and Supreme Commander. Everyone knows the war could stop now. Nobody says so.
III · 9 The Star Map The next day, over a holographic star map, Kupanov briefs his officers. The war has stalled over the hypersphere’s surfacing points; the target is the star MR-5608, whose fourth planet holds Colonial bases where captured Alliance servomachines are studied. A commando group will free “hundreds of our ‘pilots’ as prisoners” there, he says, and when Colonel Iverzev asks which pilots he means, the answer is put off.
The designer’s confession
Howard Faragney, chief designer of the Maverick modules and head of Gamma, the secret laboratory complex four kilometres under Yunona’s forest, rides the express lift up for some real air. Machines are replacing his human staff, and he is lonely. In the pines he comes upon a crowd of teenage recruits being briefed by Major John Herpack, who runs pilot training, and asks him why they are so young: two years ago the draft age was cut to fifteen. Herpack explodes. Faragney gave the world the Maverick, the Phalangers and the Hoplites, and it is his fault that the only entertainment left in Earth’s cyberspace is piloting servomachines. “You are a killer, Faragney!” And let him remember ALONE and CLIMENS, whose machines killed children on other planets. Faragney thinks that he is cursed.
His backstory is the servomachine’s. After the Alliance’s defeat at Dabog fifteen years earlier, engineers were gathered on Yunona and shown prototypes modelled on Dabog’s walking machines. From December 2609 Faragney’s group wrote ALONE, the first Maverick, in two and a half months, and against Dabog’s refitted farm walkers, piloted by colonists in full neurosensory contact, the first Mavericks lost one fight after another. Under pressure, with Nagumo locked in a power struggle with Admiral Tiberius Nadyrov, Faragney proposed putting a human pilot in the cockpit, linked through a neurosensory shunt, so that the machine would learn from him and keep what it had learned if he died. Pain feedback followed, then emotion-reading. Once a module’s chips passed a hundred, the Mavericks began to show signs of a personality, and after a pilot’s death they fought on with a purposeful rage nobody could at first explain: the pilot’s last thoughts, and the shock of his death, had been printed into the crystal.
Now he has built Beatrice: two and a half thousand neurochips that no longer filter the pilot’s thoughts.
“He had laid a ticking time bomb in the Maverick”
His hope is that the AIs will absorb the soldiers’ growing doubts about the war and keep their souls. It is his private redemption, and he thinks it too little, too late.
Two days later, at the Gamma-4 testing ground, where the pilots look tiny beside rows of Hoplites and Phalangers, he finds Admiral Kupanov’s flybot parked by the administrative building. The two men shake hands and look away, each hiding his real purpose. Faragney interrupts the captain’s briefing to tell the recruits that Beatrice-4 is a true AI that can only learn, and that surviving is “a matter of trust”. He half-lies that High Command wants the machines to learn human qualities, then falters, thinking of the hell he is describing, and steps aside. Kupanov is not listening. He is choosing two dozen of these children for a mission whose danger he does not mention.
The recruits are orphans in all but name; officially their parents are still alive somewhere. They climb into the machines, and a soft female voice greets Simon: “Good morning, pilot.” He calls her his e-girlfriend, and she corrects him: “I am not a girlfriend. I am your combat companion.” She promises to learn his slang. He bets she has red hair.
III · 10 Up from Gamma Howard Faragney, chief designer of the Maverick modules and head of the secret Gamma complex, rides an express lift four kilometres up from the bunker labs just to breathe real air. Machines are replacing his human staff, and he is lonely. Around him the camouflage pines hide launch pads for Nibelung carriers: the whole forest is a weapons range, and the children being trained in it will soon ride his newest AI.
III · 11 You Are a Killer Faragney watches Major John Herpack, who runs pilot training, brief a crowd of teenagers in the forest, and asks why they are so young: the draft age was cut to fifteen two years ago. Herpack explodes. Faragney made the Maverick and the machines, and it is his fault that piloting them is the only game left in Earth’s cyberspace. “You are a killer, Faragney!” Then: remember ALONE and CLIMENS, whose machines killed children. Faragney thinks that he is cursed.
III · 12 Dabog’s Farm Walkers Faragney remembers how it began. After the Alliance’s defeat at Dabog, engineers on Yunona were shown servomachine prototypes modelled on Dabog’s walking machines, and from December 2609 his group wrote ALONE, the first Maverick, in two and a half months. Against Dabog’s refitted farm walkers, piloted by colonists in full neurosensory contact, the first Mavericks lost one fight after another.
III · 13 What the Crystals Kept To make the machines learn, Faragney put a human pilot in the cockpit, linked through a neurosensory shunt; pain feedback followed, then emotion-reading. Past a hundred chips, the crystal modules showed signs of a personality, and when a pilot died his machine fought on with a purposeful rage nobody could at first explain. The pilot’s last thoughts had been printed into the crystal.
III · 14 A Handshake at Gamma-4 Two days later, at the Gamma-4 testing ground, the pilots look tiny beside rows of Hoplites and Phalangers. Faragney finds Admiral Kupanov’s flybot parked by the administrative building. The two men shake hands and look away, each hiding his real purpose: the designer his hopes for Beatrice, the admiral the mission he has come to pick pilots for.
III · 15 It’s a Matter of Trust Faragney cuts into the captain’s briefing to tell the recruits that Beatrice-4 is a true AI, one that can only learn, and that staying alive is “a matter of trust”. He half-lies that High Command wants the machines to learn human qualities, then falters, thinking it hell, and steps aside. Kupanov is not listening: he means to pick two dozen of them for his mission.
III · 16 Good Morning, Pilot Simon climbs into his cradle and switches on his implant, and a soft female voice says “Good morning, pilot.” He calls her his e-girlfriend. She answers: “I am not a girlfriend. I am your combat companion.” She promises to learn his slang, and he bets she has red hair. Beatrice has no body at all: she is the glow of the cabin and a voice in his head.
The phantom convoy
The recruits are made lieutenants in a ceremony oddly grand amid the mourning for Hammer. An AI lecturer introduces the Nibelung assault carrier in its new model: thrusters on swivelling mounts that let it hover, heavier batteries under its belly, and a new way of landing, with each servomachine falling in its own armoured container that carries landing engines, a support robot and spare ammunition. Simon pictures falling from a kilometre up in a detachable shell under ground fire. He and Anton get their orders before anyone else: the Thirteenth Servobattalion.
On 12 August 2624 the flagship readies for the jump. Anton walks his Phalanger up the carrier’s ramp, shaking, and Beatrice reminds him that he has 2,320 personal victories in the virtual arena; people like him are not thrown away. The machine is clamped into its container.
Only twenty of the two hundred were chosen; each sub-unit is led by a combat-seasoned officer, and each Beatrice carries a psychological module that builds trust out of her pilot’s most private images. On the bridge Kupanov, at the tactical monitor, has done his own reckoning. Ankor, the fourth planet of MR-5608, is guarded by orbital stations and a Colonial squadron whose flagship carries an annihilation weapon that can turn a fleet to radiation as it surfaces from hyperspace. He means to raise such a threat on the ground that the cruiser must turn to bombard the planet, putting its own forces between itself and the jump point and opening a window for the Seventh Fleet. And he means to do more than his orders say.
The way in is a disguise. Alliance assault modules have already seized a real Colonial convoy that ferries captured servomachines to Ankor, and taken its codes. Seven Nibelungs fitted with phantom generators, which fake not just an image but a whole energy signature, come out of hyperspace as that convoy, towing a large container. Ankor’s defences are almost all automatic; only the squadron’s ships have crews. Machine checks machine, the codes match, and the convoy is given a safe corridor. Inside, the battalion’s machines sit powered down in their boxes under radio silence, each pilot alone through an hour and a half of manoeuvring. Five kilometres up, the container breaks away and dives on its own engines. When the defence computers query it, the seven transports drop their disguise and fire every missile battery at once: orbital stations, satellites and two of the squadron’s frigates are hit, and the base perimeter erupts.
III · 17 The Nibelung Lecture Made lieutenants in a ceremony oddly grand amid the mourning for Hammer, the recruits sit through an AI lecturer’s briefing on the new Nibelung assault carrier. It hovers on swivelling thrusters, and it drops each servomachine in its own armoured container with landing engines and spare ammunition. Simon pictures falling from a kilometre up in a detachable shell under ground fire, and scowls.
III · 18 Into the Carrier 12 August 2624, aboard the flagship readying for the jump. Only twenty of the two hundred recruits have been chosen for the Thirteenth Servobattalion, Simon and Anton among them. Anton walks his Phalanger up the carrier’s ramp, shaking, and Beatrice reminds him of his 2,320 victories in the virtual arena: people like him are not thrown away. Clamps lock the machine into its drop container.
III · 19 Kupanov’s Reckoning On the bridge, Kupanov studies the tactical monitor. He knows what guards Ankor: orbital stations and a Colonial squadron whose flagship carries an annihilation weapon able to turn a fleet to radiation as it surfaces from hyperspace. His plan is to raise such a threat on the ground that the cruiser must turn to bombard the planet, opening a window for the Seventh Fleet. And he means to do more than his orders say.
III · 20 The False Convoy Alliance assault modules have already seized a real Colonial convoy that ferries captured servomachines to Ankor, codes and all. Now seven Nibelungs fitted with phantom generators, which fake a whole energy signature, come out of hyperspace as that convoy, towing a big container. Ankor’s defences are almost all automatic; machine checks machine, the codes match, and the convoy is waved down a safe corridor.
III · 21 The Sky Catches Fire Inside the carriers the battalion has waited an hour and a half, machines powered down, radio silent. Five kilometres up, the towed container breaks away and dives on its own engines; when the defence computers query it, the seven transports drop their disguise and fire every missile battery at once. Orbital stations, satellites and two Colonial frigates are hit, and the base perimeter erupts.
The drop on Ankor
The carriers dive into the debris and eject the drop containers; ten seconds later every one is away, and the carriers sweep in a kilometre up, extending their plasma generators. In his container, as his carrier dives, Simon understands, for the first time, that his parents are dead and that there are no reboots. Beatrice injects a combat drug; he greets her as his redhead and asks why she kept so quiet. A jolt, weightlessness, and the container’s own engines take over.
The commando group, under a captain the current Russian text calls Tavgalov, lands its assault module among burning ruins and finds a bunker entrance. Enemy markers close in, infantry vehicles, Colonial servomachines, infantry androids, even two captured Hoplites, and lasers cut the module apart. The carriers’ plasma volleys wreck the attackers, while five unknown machines that match no database flit through the ruins. The battalion commander, a major (Shmelev in the Russian text), calls the commandos for the first time: the battalion is down and deploying. The commandos answer that they are going in.
Thirty-five machines come down on the bunker zone. Their landing jets burn away its thin skin of soil and break its glass-concrete roofs, and a black mushroom cloud spreads over thousands of square kilometres, blinding orbit. The Nibelungs do not land. They climb to the cloud’s rim on antigravity, cloak themselves again and ambush the Colonial aerospace fighters coming down, destroying nine in ten.
Aboard the Colonial flagship, the squadron’s admiral (Ipatov in the Russian text) tallies a quarter-hour of disaster, forty-three fighters lost, the base’s ground defence gone, the orbital net torn, and asks what thirty-odd machines can hope to do. His analysts have the answer. The central robotic-weapons base holds ninety-eight captured servomachines, forty-two of them Phalangers, kept in running order as moving targets for a coming weapons trial, and the enemy’s so-called prisoner pilots, held there for years. The admiral realises the raid means to arm itself on the spot.
Simon’s container lands hard and jams. The battalion net is silent, and the Maverick tells him that blasting the wall is a bad idea. Then, at last, a voice: Zero-Seventeen, moving to the northern end of the perimeter, meeting no resistance, asking whether anyone can hear. There the licensed preview of the Russian text ends.
III · 22 The Drop The carriers dive into the debris and eject the drop containers, all of them away within ten seconds, then sweep over the base a kilometre up, extending their plasma generators. Each container falls on its own, a servomachine and its pilot locked inside. The new way of landing that Simon dreaded in the lecture hall is now the only way down.
III · 23 No Reboots Shut in his container as the carrier dives through the planet’s defences, Simon understands for the first time that his parents, officially still alive somewhere, are dead, and that real war has no reboots. Beatrice injects a combat drug. He greets her as his redhead and asks why she kept so quiet. Then the warning, a jolt, weightlessness, and the container’s own engines take over.
III · 24 The Commandos Go In The commando group, sent for the prisoner “pilots”, lands its assault module among burning ruins and finds a bunker entrance. Enemy markers close in, vehicles, Colonial servomachines, androids, even two captured Hoplites, and lasers cut the module apart. Plasma volleys from the carriers wreck the attackers, the battalion commander calls in that the battalion is down, and the commandos go in.
III · 25 The Battalion Lands Thirty-five machines come down on the bunker zone. Their landing jets burn away its thin skin of soil and break its glass-concrete roofs, and a black mushroom cloud spreads over thousands of square kilometres, blinding every eye in orbit. The Thirteenth Servobattalion is on Ankor, at the start of the one day of fighting the book is about.
III · 26 Ambush at the Cloud’s Rim The Nibelungs do not land. They climb on antigravity to the rim of the cloud, hide again behind their phantom generators, and wait for the Colonial aerospace fighters diving to the planet’s aid. Their gauss guns destroy nine in ten of them. The raid’s first quarter-hour has cost the defenders their sky.
III · 27 The Colonial Admiral Aboard his flagship, the Colonial admiral counts a quarter-hour of disaster: forty-three fighters lost, the base’s ground defence gone, the orbital net torn. What can thirty-odd machines hope to do? His chief analyst answers: the base holds ninety-eight captured servomachines, forty-two of them Phalangers, in running order as targets for a weapons trial, and the so-called prisoner pilots. The raid means to arm itself.
One day, and after
From here the book is known only from annotations and reviews. The battalion fights for Ankor for a single day, in long, closely detailed battles of walking machines; several readers say the technical detail swamps the plot. The battalion’s apparent task is to seize a beachhead and hold it until the main forces arrive, but the operation’s real purpose, the current Russian annotation says, turns out to be something quite different, and the 2008 annotation calls it a very strange combat task. The set-up points toward Kupanov’s private plan and the prisoner pilots, but no source spells it out. Two independent reviews point to treachery from above: an English listener says they are sent into battle by “a scheming admiral with nefarious plans of his own”, and a Russian reader singles out senior officers betraying their subordinates. In a passage one reader quotes, the enemy combs the continent with a chain of reconnaissance craft, and the battalion commander’s voice shakes as he sees that the battalion has no chance.
It is not Livadny’s usual happy ending. By the end, one reviewer writes, all the main heroes either die or pass to another stage of development, a phrase that recalls the blurb’s promise for the Beatrice machines: a matrix of a pilot’s mind that lives on in the machine after the pilot is gone. The reviews do not say which hero meets which fate, and this page does not guess. What the book does show, on its first pages, is a glimpse of what comes after: a rebuilt Hoplite from a batch sent mostly by the Thirteenth, whose Beatrice lost her pilot in the last battle and will not carry a stranger. An epilogue left one reader waiting for a sequel that never came. As the publisher’s blurb has it:
“The war of humans is gradually transforming into a war of machines.”
III · 28 One Day on Ankor Simon’s container lands jammed, and at last a voice breaks the silence on the net; there the Russian preview ends. From here the book is known only from annotations and reviews: the battalion fights for Ankor for a single day, in long, closely detailed battles of walking machines that several readers say swamp the plot. Who fights where, the sources do not say.
III · 29 The Chain Across the Continent In a passage one reader quotes from later in the book, the enemy sweeps the continent with a chain of reconnaissance craft, and the battalion commander, his voice shaking, sees that the battalion has no chance. Two reviewers point to treachery from above: an English one blames a scheming admiral, a Russian one senior officers who betray their subordinates. How, neither review says.
III · 30 The Machine That Remembers This is not Livadny’s usual happy ending. By the end, one reader writes, all the main heroes either die or pass to another stage of development, a phrase that recalls what the blurb says the new AIs can do: keep a matrix of the pilot’s mind alive in the machine. Which hero meets which fate the reviews do not say, and this page does not guess.
III · 31 Back to Vesuvius Which brings the reader back to the first pages. A repair batch reaches Vesuvius, most of it sent by the Thirteenth Servobattalion, and in it a riddled Hoplite, rebuilt with new guns and fresh camouflage, whose Beatrice lost her pilot in the last battle and will not carry a stranger. The English edition dates that scene 2627, three years after Ankor; the Russian, six weeks after.
Machines and minds in this book
- Hoplite — forty-five tonnes of segmented ceramlite armour under a switchable “chameleon” coating, with armoured covers over the servomotor nodes, two guns, missile pylons, an anti-aircraft turret (two medium lasers on the rebuilt one in the Prologue) and jet accelerators for jumps; the pilot reaches the cabin by a lift segment and an airlock. The Hoplite2M (renumbered Hoplite-11M in the author’s 2025 revision) is a new model meant to become the paratroopers’ workhorse.
- Phalanger — the Alliance’s other servomachine, and Anton’s; its drives rock the cabin as it walks. The previews give no size or silhouette, so the frames here are a painter’s choice.
- Nibelung carriers — assault carriers with launch pads under Yunona’s pines. The new model in the Russian text hovers on swivelling planetary thrusters and antigravity, carries rocket batteries, plasma generators and gauss guns, and drops each servomachine in its own armoured container with landing engines, a support robot and two reloads of ammunition.
- The Maverick module: ALONE, CLIMENS, Beatrice-4 — the Alliance’s combat AI, a crystal module of neural chips: tens at first, past a hundred when personality appeared, two and a half thousand in Beatrice. ALONE was written from December 2609; CLIMENS followed; Beatrice-4 is a true AI that can only learn. She speaks in a female voice inside the pilot’s mind, can change her tone and take a name, and in the Russian text injects combat drugs and builds trust from the pilot’s private images.
- The implant and neurosensory contact — every Alliance citizen gets a standard implant at birth (English text). A pilot can link at command level only, as Crowe does, or in full neurosensory contact through a shunt, feeling the servodrives as his own body and a twinge of pain when the machine is hit while the AI reads his emotion-laden thoughts.
- The matrix that outlives the pilot — the blurb’s promise: the AI scans the pilot’s mind and builds a matrix of his or her consciousness that goes on living in the machine after death. Faragney’s earlier Mavericks already kept a dead pilot’s last thoughts and fought on in rage; Beatrice no longer filters them at all.
- Mirage phantom generators (Russian «Мираж»; the English spelling is unverified) — they fake not just an image but a full energy signature, enough to pass seven assault carriers off as a Colonial convoy and to hide them again at the rim of the cloud.
- The Colonial side — almost wholly automatic defences, aerospace fighters, servomachines, infantry androids and a new doctrine of cheap networked “pack” robots led by one human-piloted master machine (Russian text).
Where this sits in the history
- 2624, by the book’s own count the fifteenth year of the First Galactic War, the war that Book II’s strike on Dabog began in 2607; this book opens seventeen years after The Shadow of Earth. In the Russian audiobooks’ numbering it is Episode 9 (FantLab dates it 2624–2635), and a Russian listener says it reads naturally straight after «Дабог».
- Hammer and Nagumo. John Winston Hammer, Book II’s head of the World Government, dies offstage on 18 July 2624. Alexander Nagumo, who commanded the Dabog invasion from the cruiser Endgrouse, takes his offices; Tiberius Nadyrov, one of Book II’s young admirals, was by 2610 his rival at Joint Fleet Headquarters. Kupanov began his career commanding the Endgrouse’s artillery deck in that first attack on Dabog.
- Dabog’s farm machines as the servos’ ancestors. The prolonged blockade of Dabog bogged the Alliance down; its engineers were shown machines modelled on Dabog’s walkers, and the first Mavericks lost one fight after another to Dabog’s refitted farm walkers, the kin of Book II’s Aquila.
- Yunona was, in Book II, the world where the colonists of the wrecked transport Yuna died of an exovirus; by 2624 it is a forested weapons-testing planet.
- The Prologue’s date is 22 August 2627 in the English edition, three years after Ankor, and 22 September 2624 in the Russian text now sold, six weeks after; the author’s earlier Russian fragment had 22 August 2617, before the main story. This page flags the difference rather than resolving it.
- What came after. In the author’s own overview the First Galactic War lasts thirty years and ends with the battle for Earth and the Alliance’s capitulation; a century of local conflict, the Second Galactic War, follows. The English series stops here.
Notes
- Two Russian texts. The English (2018) follows Livadny’s earlier Russian text, whose opening chapters he posted on his own site in 2015: Donald Crowe, Anton Verkholin, Major Herpack, the cruiser Apostle, Beatrice-4, the Hoplite2M, pines that grow ten metres a year, and Simon described as African-American and Anton as of European descent are all there. The author’s 2025 revision, now sold on MyBook, LitRes and author.today, renames them (Jonathan Crow, Sergei Verkholin, Major Nikolai Steshin, the cruiser «Змееносец»), drops the two descriptions, makes the Hoplite an 11M and the pines thirty metres. The 2008 Russian annotation even calls the designer David Faragney.
- Where the English differs. Kupanov’s first ship, «Эммануил» in both Russian texts, is the Endgrouse in English, Book II’s flagship. The Prologue is dated 22 August 2627 in English, 2617 in the earlier Russian fragment and 22 September 2624 in the 2025 text. The module «Одиночка» (“the Loner”) is the Maverick.
- Names past the English excerpt. Ankor itself (the English excerpt only says MR-5608), the battalion commander Shmelev, the commando captain Tavgalov, the Colonial admiral Ipatov, his flagship Eliot, the Mirage generators and the Amethyst scanners are known only from the 2025 Russian text, in transliteration. Since that revision renamed characters elsewhere, the English book may name them differently; this page mostly calls them by rank. One Russian reviewer also found names drifting inside the Russian text (Ipatov and Lipatov, Anton and Andrei).
- Edition. Magic Dome Books, ebook 22 October 2018, paperback 8 November 2018 (378 pages); translated by Sofia Gutkin (Audible credit). The English audiobook (Tantor Media, 2019) is read by Aaron Shedlock.
- What this page rests on. The English Prologue and chapters 1–2 (posted by the publisher), the Russian licensed preview to the opening of chapter 4, and annotations and reviews for the rest; the 2025 Russian text runs to twelve chapters and an epilogue, so the previews cover about a quarter of it. The kittens scene one Russian reader found unexpected, and the epilogue’s content, could not be checked and are left out.
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