Re-read: The Vang: The Battlemaster

Re-read: 'The Vang: The Battlemaster' by Christopher Rowley

5 / 5 Stars

 

Back in April of 2014 I posted my review of the third and final volume in the 'Vang' trilogy by Christopher Rowley: 'The Vang: The Battlemaster.' It was a title I bestowed with a 5 Star Rating.

This installment of the trilogy is set 2,000 years after the events of the second volume, 'The Vang: The Military Form.' 'Battlemaster' is set on the planet Wexel, an 'infamous eco-disaster' world beset with entropy.

 

Much as with third-world nations on Earth, on Wexel, there is widespread political violence between the ruling government and an assortment of 'liberation' fronts. This has triggered severe economic disruptions, with large sectors of the planet in disarray:

 

    The ATV moved out. Chang stared out at the terminal buildings as they went past. The paint was dull; there was a broken window on the ground floor.

 

    A rusting truck was set up on blocks in a cargo bay. They passed through an unmanned gatepost and turned onto a four-lane approach highway. Various ramps joined the road as it curved down to meet a six-lane highway. 

 

    The roads were in terrible shape, truly terrible, with potholes like craters, and broken railings, rusted and torn, projecting up like daggers in places.

 

    The highway was flanked by endless billboards.....there were many that amounted to enormous written demands for the execution of this or that specific person. These demands were written in stark headline black, charging so-and-so with subversion of the State of Potash-Do and demanding the death penalty on behalf of the Committee for the Preservation of Society. 

 

    Some of the other billboards featured enormous skulls, with a conspicuous bullet hole through the forehead. Beneath this was a slogan: "Get them first and they can't get you !"

 

    Soap, video, beer, and skulls with bullet holes. Chang winced.

 

Beyond the reach of the central government, in the outlands, aristocrats rule as independent lordlings. One such lordling is the malevolent Count Karvur, the despot of a bedraggled rural estate. Prospecting on the Count's lands has uncovered something very interesting: in a strata estimated to be nearly 80 million years old is the cocoon of an alien organism. 

 

The County orders the cocoon excavated, and assigns it to the care of university researcher Caroline Reese. Reese is alarmed by her molecular analysis of the life form, and urges caution. But Count Karvur badly needs money to fund his libertine lifestyle, and he sees the cocoon and its contents as a path to riches. But as the Count is about to find out, the alien inside the cocoon is none other than the most lethal form of the Vang.........

 

'Battlemaster' has as its heroine the dogged Colonel Luisa Chang. Author Rowley makes the military officials, bureaucrats, and politicians of the Wexel elite as much the villains of the novel as the Vang, for machinations of the ruling class constantly raise obstacles to Chang's increasingly desperate efforts to contain the spread of the Vang. 

'Battlemaster' doesn't shy from grue and gore, as the Vang converts one hapless Wexelian after another into its increasingly deadly militias.

 

Author Rowley never tips his hand as to whether Luisa Chang or the Battlemaster will in the end prevail, thus maintaining suspense until the last two pages of the novel. 

 

After the re-read I see no reason to change my initial review's Five Star Rating, a conclusion I also reached this past Spring with my re-read of the initial volume in the Vang trilogy, 'Starhammer.' These are among the best sci-fi novels of the 1980s and well are worth acquiring.