4/5 Rancors - Karen Traviss follows her excellent first Star Wars novel, Republic Commando: Hard Contact, with another winning entry in Republic Commando: Triple Zero. Omega Squad returns, along with a motley cast of a few favorites from the prior book and brand-new folks as well. Being a fan of the videogame this series was based on, I was pleased to see Delta Squad joining our heroes for the duration of this mission, and the inter-squad dynamics make for fascinating reading.
The most important and dominate character this book brings us is Kal Skirata, one of the Mandolorian mercenaries originally hired by Jango Fett to help instruct the young clones. Kal is a terrifically entertaining personality and I would have loved to see someone with his humor and mood swings in the prequel films themselves. Learning about what Kal found when he first arrived on Kamino and the strange turn his life took from there shed new light on the clone army concept, just like Traviss managed to do in her first book via Darman and his squad mates.
If I have any qualms about Kal, it's that he is practically omnipotent, sometimes stretching realism a bit. The other characters around him largely worship the ground he walks on, with the exception of Walon Vau, another mercenary hired to train clones. Largely I bought into the whole Kal-as-father concept, but at times I wanted to see people stand up to him more, especially Etain Tur-Mukan, the flawed Jedi we met in the last book. By the end of the story she feels so subservient to Kal, particularly in their last interaction, that I started to find it a bit frustrating. Surely a lifetime of Jedi training gives one a little more backbone than this! However, overall the good of reading about Kal far outweighs my quibbles and I certainly hope he appears in the next commando novel.
The story verges on being a character study rather than an action novel. Most of the book is occupied with watching the clones and Jedi interact as they go about getting to know each other and investigating a Separatist terror plot. Some might find the pace slow, but the large and engaging cast of characters kept it flowing for me. The Null ARC troopers further differentiate the faceless crew of clones presented in Episode II and increase the feel of the Grand Army of the Republic being a realistic and living army rather than a briefly-presented idea on a movie screen. Ordo enlivens every scene he's in, and Traviss masterfully portrays his intelligence and extreme unpredictability. Her dialogue is strong and tonally closer to the original trilogy vs. the more formal styles of the prequel trilogy.
This novel sets up a story arc about the clones' desire to hunt down Ko Sai, the Kaminoan scientist chiefly responsible for their creation, and squeeze her for information about their genetically accelerated life-spans. It also starts laying the foundations for the eventual depiction of Order 66 in the fourth book in the series. I remain amazed and pleased that books based on a videogame have turned out this well.
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