DOWN BELOW BEYOND

In Bruno’s SF tale of a future dominated by a for-profit system of teleportation portals, a scrounger stumbles upon outlaw technology that could change everything.

Space travel in the wild, wild future is conducted via the “Voyalten Web,” faster-than-light spaceship portals used by numerous civilized worlds who participate in an intergalactic socio-economic trading system. The resulting trans-species “Lodespace” has spawned a syndicate of ruthless, paramilitary thugs, controlled by the alien kingpin Gulna Kii Fessenog and his Fleet. The human Levort Aatra occupies the lowest social rung of Lodespace. He’s a “prospector,” scrounging for salvage on the abandoned planet Tayoxe (“The mask of desperation wore heavily on the prospectors who had taken multiple trips down to Tayoxe and found nothing. There were more of these cases on every trip”). Levort’s one advantage is a lifelong friendship with fellow human Bayfo Niall, an armed “enforcer” who uphold the Fleet’s self-serving regulations at ground level. An unfamiliar, four-armed alien informs Levort that a collective of civilizations has generated an alternative to the Voyalten Web: portable devices that generate their own teleportation gates outside of Fessenog’s control and tariffs. Proponents of this taboo network are known as the Beyond, and Fleet policy is to eradicate any trace of them. Bayfo, indoctrinated in Fleet dogma, believes that the Beyond are a “cult” devoted to anarchy and war; Levort’s involvement with them marks him as an enemy, and the conflict between the two former best friends is joined by a variety of creatures on both sides of the fight. The author constructs a gallery of exotic aliens (even if most of them talk like claim-jumpers in old westerns), depicted in cartoon-like inserts in the chapter headings, saving a lot of descriptive verbiage. The action never flags, and no love interests intrude to slow the thrills (perhaps a bromance does, as the two leads bemoan their fellowship lost to ideology and mistrust). Any gravitas reliably yields to a quick teleport to the next exciting caper.

Light-year-leaping space-opera fun, pure and simple.