More fighting, more politics, Admiral Santiago dealing with Alwa. Shepherd seems to be channeling David Weber in some of these battles - precise(ish) accelerations and vectors for each missile, almost. And I deal with it the same way, by skimming. We learn a (very) little more about the genocidal aliens, and the characters jump to a lot of conclusions - the effects of extra DNA acids on personality and language (and grudge) retention seems to be the biggest. They may be right (they probably are, since it's the author writing all this) but there's very little evidence of the link. Correlation is not causation, writ large. Not bad for a read-once. ( )