Marko Kloos is a military science fiction author, and only about half of the characters are in any kind of space navy. His series The Palladium Wars started with Aftershocks, which I find an odd title for a first book, and continues with BALLISTIC.

A planetary war has concluded five years previously, probably the reason for the aftershocks, and everyone is getting on with the uneasy peace, resentment from the conquered, and adjustments by ships’ crews settling back into peacetime. It’s a standard trope that an experienced captain is about to retire when a new war breaks out and all leave and severances are cancelled. From the moment someone started talking that way, I knew what was coming down the line. 

Aden Jansen is an ordinary civilian crew engineer on space yacht Zephyr, a sleek, fast, merchant ship delivering, or make that smuggling, across open space. He’s got an ID that is nearly accurate, and only the captain knows his real name. With her boots on the planet Gretia, Idina, putting in months before retirement from the Gretian police, is looking for rioters, rebels and arms dealers. She’s sure to find some. We also meet Solvieg, an interplanetary businesswoman, who needs to close a contract for shipments of graphene which is used for constructing light, strong, flexible materials. Her estranged brother is the real version of Aden Jansen, but she hasn’t seen him in over a decade, since their controlling father threw him out with disastrous consequences.

Dunstan, the ship’s captain, and his crew aboard the Minotaur, a space behemoth, go to battle stations when they find a drifting hulk with fragments of hull twirling in the void. That was a battleship like their cruiser, and something obliterated its defences. They don’t know who could do that, but the last war may have reawoken. Dunstan has a few more stops to make before heading back to the planet Acheron to leave his ship for the last time. He’s tired of service. 

Some of Marko Kloos’ books deal with wars against alien life forms, but this series populated the planets with humans, who eat foods originating from Earth. People are handed almonds, grapes or peppers. The familiarity in the face of such strange circumstances makes us reassess what we might bring to other worlds and reminds us that people are still going to be people – bullies, smugglers, rebels, retirees and all. BALLISTIC is slow to reach for warfare but strong when it arrives.