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Alone on a Sentient Ship in an Uncertain Future: Megan O’Keefe’s Velocity Weapon
Having suffered a grievous injury, you awaken on a spaceship 200 years in the future.
Disabled as a result of the explosion that got you into this mess, your only companion is the ship’s helpful, but slightly neurotic artificial intelligence.
Oh, and the ship you’re onboard? It’s an enemy vessel that might have had a hand in destroying everything you’ve ever cared about.
Ships in 1-2 days.
That’s the gripping situation facing Sandra Greeve, a soldier confronting a very uncertain future in Velocity Weapon, the first space opera by award-winning author Megan O’Keefe, whose Scorched Continent trilogy conjured an impressive steampunk fantasy world.
Back in the day, Sanda was a gunnery sergeant for the technologically advanced Ada Prime, a conglomerate of worlds in control of advanced space travel technology. Thanks to innovations of the distant past, Ada Prime is able to manufacture gates that can instantly transport ships from one system to another. The neighboring civilization of Icarion has been allowed the use of the gates, but not the technology, and only for a price. Without the gates, travel, trade, and communications between worlds become matters of centuries rather than weeks.
That disparity lead to a long-time cold war that had grown very hot by the time Sanda joined up with the Ada Prime military—Icarion made up for a lack of travel tech by developing in other ways, including military might. It was as a soldier fighting the Icarion that Sanda was injured and stuffed into a cryogenic pod to await rescue—a rescue that never came. Not for 230 years, anyway—well past the typical life of one of the pods. Even still, she awakens in the care of The Light of Berossus, a thinking, feeling ship that’s been alone in space since the conflict that took Sanda’s leg. Bero (as the ship prefers to be called) also happens to have been a part of the Icarion fleet, a research vessel dedicated to uncovering the secrets of the Keepers, the select few individuals with knowledge of the gates’ functions—one of whom was Sanda’s brother, Biran.
There’s more bad news in store for Sanda: a game-changing threat developed by Icarion (the titular velocity weapon) has wiped out not just her own homeworld, but the nearest Icarion world as well, leaving nothing but rubble for 200 light years around. But, amongst some of that rubble, she and the ship make a discovery: Sanda’s not the only one who survived. There’s another pod out there, holding additional secrets that might indicate that even after 200 years, the war isn’t quite over.
Ships in 1-2 days.
There are similarities in the premise of this novel to the recent movie Passengers, in which Chris Pratt’s character, having become smitten with the idea of a woman, awakens Jennifer Lawrence from cryogenic sleep against her wishes and then lies about it. Fortunately, O’Keefe avoids any of that flavor of icky subtext, focusing instead on the idea of a lone individual and her space ship pal surviving together the endless void of space (a notion alternately terrifying and oddly appealing), and what happens when their cozy solitude is interrupted by an outsider. There’s more going on than just the events onboard, as we learn about those two intervening centuries through the journey of Sanda’s brother, a principled young Keeper-in-training who rises meteorically during the war, helped and hindered along his way by the search for his missing sister. A third, seemingly unrelated story of a heist involving a character named Jules predictably eventually dovetails with the other two, but in unexpected ways.
The worldbuilding here is impressive, more so for the ways O’Keefe chooses to guide us through her universe. Sanda, Biran, and Jules each confront radical shifts in their lives and worlds, in part because of the direct impact of a massively destructive war, and in part because of secrets their roles in that war make plain. Though soldier Sanda is our dominant point of view character, the novel doesn’t seem interested in establishing clear heroes and villains—each of the war’s major factions had a share in the devastation. And Sanda is a great character—smart and witty, and learning to live with a new disability. That missing leg, and her evolving mobility aids, become key parts of the story and the character’s journey, a notable example of well-executed representation. The intelligent Icarion ship, meanwhile, is equally engaging: Bero is as human as anyone in the book, dealing with guilt and post-traumatic stress alongside Sanda.
With a clever premise, a bit of action, and a compelling overarching mystery (what exactly did happen during Sanda’s long sleep?), Velocity Weapon is an engaging, fast-paced space opera. If that’s all it were, it’d still be a great read. But the book also deals with big, and very human, issues: the lies that lead to war, the true costs of conflict, and the roles of victims who were once victimizers. It’s a thoughtful page-turner.
Velocity Weapon is available now.