Sanda and Biran Greeve were siblings destined for greatness. A high-flying sergeant, Sanda has the skills to take down any enemy combatant. Biran is a savvy politician who aims to use his new political position to prevent conflict from escalating to total destruction.

However, on a routine maneuver, Sanda loses consciousness when her gunship is blown out of the sky. Instead of finding herself in friendly hands, she awakens 230 years later on a deserted enemy warship controlled by an AI who calls himself Bero. The war is lost. The star system is dead. Ada Prime and its rival Icarion have wiped each other from the universe.

Now, separated by time and space, Sanda and Biran must fight to put things right.

There’s an imminent change coming for me (and many others) in terms of reading/a particular fandom, as much as I may not be actually prepared for it. Ok…I may actually be in complete denial of it. What I’m talking about is the end of The Expanse series. There’s only one more book scheduled for publication and then it’s just…over? Oof.

Lucky for all of us, there seems to be no shortage of badass new space opera coming our way! And while I don’t know if Megan E. O’Keefe’s new series, The Protectorate, is going to be a trilogy or more of a longer, ongoing series, I do know this: you’re gonna want to add this one to your TBR, because Velocity Weapon was a fucking blast!

The book opens with a comfortingly familiar sci-fi trope: Our main character, Sergeant Sanda Greeve, wakes up in a medical pod, on an unfamiliar spaceship. She has no clue where she is, how she got there, how long she’s been asleep, or how she lost most of one leg.

Enter The Light of Berossus, better known as Bero. Bero is the smartship Sanda finds herself aboard. He claims to have picked Sanda up after she was left floating adrift in a rescue pod, after a battle. Sanda is a gunship commander from Ada Prime, and her world is locked in battle with the Icarions. The same Icarions who made Bero.

DUN DUN DUNNNNN!!!!

So she finds herself alone (basically), on board a sentient spaceship built by her mortal enemies. That’s some shit, no? It only gets crazier.

This is one of those books where the less I say about the plot, the better. At the heart of this story is Sanda trying to find her way home, while her brother Birin tries to find her. Biran has recently become a Keeper, part of The Protectorate. Keepers are powerful government figures, so Biran has plenty of resources at hand to try & locate his sister.

There’s also a third POV character in Velocity Weapon, Jules. Her story takes place planet side, and has a sort of grimy/cyberpunk/heist movie vibe which I loved. Jules’s story seems a bit disconnected from the plot, and that can feel a little frustrating at times, given the length of the book. But the payoff is there when you need it to be, and Jules wound up being a standout character for me.

Velocity Weapon is twisty & turny, and contains more than a few “NO FUCKING WAY” moments. It’s an incredibly diverse book, and has a main character who is learning to live with a disability (and that features the whole way through, it’s not something that gets glossed over at all). There’s a gravity to the events in this first book, some of which are quite catastrophic. The book also asks some serious questions about artificial intelligence, and the related consequences & complications that arise when a machine is designed to think for itself. But O’Keefe balances that nicely with plenty of humor & profanity & drunken hijinks. All in all, Velocity Weapon is a great start to a new sci-fi series. Highly recommended!

Massive thanks to Orbit Books for sending me a copy!! Velocity Weapon releases tomorrow, 6.11.19!