I went into Catherine Wells's 'Aztec Eagle' series thinking that it was a trilogy. I don't know why. It may be that Wells told me that when I bought them from her at TusCon last year. I certainly don't see anything on the Jumpmaster Press website or anywhere else to confirm that. Having finished this third and potentially final book, there are still plot strands open that I'd like to see closed, so I'm hoping that there will be more to come. If I can't find anything firm before this year's TusCon, I'll ask her in person then.

Whatever its length, the series is all about Enrique Aguilar and each book recounts a pretty well-defined phase in his life. 'Aztec Eagle' covered his earliest years in Mexico as a child and a young man, ending at the point he left the planet Earth to embrace what he believes will be his future on a planet named Alpha. 'Crystal Desert' started out that way but found a natural, if fairly surprising, ending when he walks away from the rebellion on Alpha, still believing in its cause but not so much  how it's being run any more. 'Eagle Unbound' brings him back to Earth without a real purpose but then presents him one in an offer of employment by former colleague, Mike Harley.

However, for most of its page count, this feels less like a phase of his life and more a mission. He's not going to Beta with the expectation of staying there. He simply goes as a bodyguard and pilot for Caspia Philos and he does his job to the very best of his ability. When that job ends and Caspia and her party return to Earth, he returns with them. However, by that point, certain things have been said and done that change a great deal, so it really does end up as a phase in his life, merely one he didn't expect going in. Then again, he wouldn't have been able to predict the end of either prior book at the beginning.

Caspia Philos is a Peacekeeper, high enough up their chain of command to be a board member. He takes the job because she's also pro-Alfian and he believes that maybe she can make a difference on that planet that he and most of the rebels would approve of. She's also a quadraplegic after a serious car accident decades earlier; even the advanced medical science in this future is unable to return her to full health, so she's stuck in a wheelchair so advanced that the term is meaningless. It's really an exoskeleton managed through a neural implant. It augments her breathing, handles body waste and even amplifies her voice.

Right now, Caspia's focus isn't on Alpha but Beta which, as you might imagine, is a further planet we've discovered and plan to terraform for colonisation. At least initially, the mindset here is to do the same job that was done on Alpha but to do it differently enough that a rebellion wouldn't spark a few generations in. It makes sense to learn from prior mistakes. However, what she plans isn't what everyone else plans and other people in this fact-finding mission have wildly different ideas about how things should go on Beta. Of course, she realises that, which is precisely why she hires Enrique as a bodyguard. In a sense, his skills as a pilot are a bonus.

I liked this approach, but found it odd. I appreciated the new focus on Beta because it continues a personal story but expands the universe in which it unfolds. It also doesn't forget how Enrique got to this point. There are plenty of nods back to 'Crystal Desert' because Wells keeps us updated on what's going on with the rebellion on Alpha but others to 'Aztec Eagle', not just the epilogue with a return for Inéz but with the memory that, whether she remembers or not, the Gateship pilot to Beta, Major Lisl Daczek, is someone Enrique has met before, albeit fifteen years earlier when he was a child talking to a Peacekeeper captain on a Mexican beach.

What surprised me most is that it shifts its active genre, though I wonder why that felt surprising. The bedrock is science fiction, from the moment that young Enrique meets Capt Hunter Robinson and learns about his natural psionic talent. This is satisfying as a science fiction series, with all its terraforming detail and advanced technology and interstellar conflict. However, the first book is ultimately a coming-of-age story and the second transforms that into action-adventure. Here, the active genre is mystery, because someone is clearly trying to kill Caspia and we have no idea who it is. Even though Wells never forgets the science fiction aspect of terraforming a new planet, she wants us to be armchair detectives and figure out the wannabe killer before Enrique does.

There's still coming-of-age because, as far as he's come, Enrique remains a developing character. There's still action-adventure, not least through how he ultimately takes out the villain, which I'm pretty sure I've never read or seen before. And there's still character development, because one of Wells's best aspects is that she applies that to everyone, not just the lead. With any whodunit, there need to be plenty of people around that we can believably suspect and she provides enough to work, each of whom receives at least some development and some of which receive plenty. I'm not sure we'll see any of them again, beyond perhaps Caspia and her aide, Katya Tolin, one of the few women to have no problem resisting Enrique's advances because she's a lesbian, but they do their job.

Talking of Enrique's advances, there aren't as many of those here as previous because he's got to a pretty serious point with Miriam back on Alpha and, while she's still there and he's on Earth and then Beta, there are points where their psionic connection appears to reach across that distance. That said, it does seem like he avoids the temptations of many willing ladies more because of the job than because of Miriam. It's both, don't get me wrong, but that's never a good sign. We leave this book wondering if they're going to get back together or whether they're each going to move forward with other people.

We also leave this book at a pretty crucial point for the rebellion on Alpha. While Enrique remains elsewhere, Wells keeps us updated at least somewhat with how things are going under the crystal desert and they aren't going well. Karma hasn't just lost Enrique, she's losing closer loyalists than him and that's not good at all. However, the situation there continues to evolve and doesn't find a natural ending, any which way. That, more than anything, tells me that there ought to be at least one more book and potentially more than that. It wouldn't be good to end the series here with us on tenterhooks about the fate of the Alfians and the Alphans.

I'll wrap up with an observation. Oddly, for a book that jumps so many genres, the cover seems to suggest one not actually here. I really don't expect that the Peacekeeper pteranodon looks much like the jet aircraft we see here and that landscape is well-terraformed already. This cover shouts thriller and that's a little misleading. I like what Jumpmaster Press do because, for a small press, they handle layout very well indeed. I like their font choices and they don't make any of the usual mistakes, a slip in capitalisation in the header aside. However, this book and, to a lesser degree, the previous two, deserved far more representative covers. Painted covers akin to the paperback originals of the eighties or nineties would have worked much better. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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