| THE FALL OF YQUATINE by Nick Walters |
| Story 31 Synopsis: The Doctor goes to Yquatine where he meets an old ally, Lou Lombardo, who provides him with a Randomiser which he forces into Compassion. She is furious. The planet is soon attacked. Compassion takes Fitz back 2 months in time, and then heads out to try and overcome the Randomiser. The Doctor is taken to Aloysius Station, in orbit with other refugees. Joining the President of the System, Stefan Vargeld, on a mission, he communes with the invading force, Omnethoth. He decides he can turn it to good effect, but Vargeld is angry that there would be no retribution. Fitz tries to escape, but meets Arielle, the President's girlfriend, who objects to Vargeld's attentions. She unwittingly provides a conduit for the Omnethoth. Vargeld puts Fitz into prison, unwilling to believe Arielle had dumped him. She heads off to a nearby moon, Muath, where she incubates the Omnethoth. Fitz gets out of prison by volunteering to work on Muath, unaware that Arielle is there. Compassion finds him there, and they decide to head for Aloysius Station. Having been over-ruled by Vargeld, the Doctor accepts an Anthaurk offer to attempt to retrain the Omnethoth, but the Anthaurk merely want to use it as a weapon. Compassion kidnaps Vargeld, and impersonates him during negotiations with the Anthaurk, whose regime is changed away from death n glory towards peace. The Doctor succeeds in changing the Omnethoth, but Vargeld destroys it anyway. Compassion leads Fitz and the Doctor away. She asks for the Randomiser to be removed, but the Doctor says it's too late. |
| Review:- And so on with a voyage of discovery, into a disastrous tragedy the Doctor cannot escape... Having lost the TARDIS and taken a replacement in the preceding book, the Doctor reacts to the threat of the Time Lords by over-ruling Compassion. But that inadvertently leads to disaster, and the catastrophic death of millions... The Minerva System has a cosmopolitan feel as typified by Walters' usual efforts, but of the many races we're introduced to, it boils down to the humans on Yquatine, and the Anthaurk. Perhaps disappointingly, their 100-year-old truce has been abused by the Anthaurk, who merely want to fight again. This rather low politics is a letdown from a range which claimed to aspire to better things. The baddies are baddies. Big deal. Thankfully, the story itself moves quite well, with the three regulars following their own paths. With Compassion struggling to escape a fate she objects to, Fitz unwittingly causes the whole Omnethoth disaster, by being in the right place at the wrong time. His brief romance with Arielle feels like a means to an end, rather than a serious affair. When the 3rd leg of the triangle is the President of the System, then things are going to get silly. As for the Doctor, he struggles in the present, working with the amusing pieman Lou Lombardo, and trying to find a peaceful solution in a System where peace is just a word, and when it comes to the crunch, revenge is the key. So, quite a run-of-the-mill tale, but it manages to use its themes fairly well, and if some of the elements are too convenient to be true, and the ending feels rather flat, especially with the Doctor well away from centre-stage, then the ideas are enough to sustain a friendly concern. Though annoying enough that it should have been much better, it isn't really all that bad. Though the cover's a bit poor. |
| Disclaimer: I own a copy. |