Too short. Or maybe too heavily edited, such that a few interesting themes were not picked up on later in the story. It might be the start of a series, but I'm not sure it quite has the legs for that. It's an interesting take on the normal military SF story where the hero is in the inept Lt, who doesn't know how to lead a team, and never really learns, making all the obvious errors that junior officers are stereotyped to make - but usually portrayed from the beleaguered crew.

To be slightly fair to the officer Jeff in question, he wasn't expected to be in command so soon. The story opens with him graduating from Officer training, enduring racism from his fellow cadets, before the coveted First Assignments are issued. Jeff is the only one of his cohort to be given command - of an 8man picket boat. It turns out that a coup is brewing, and the heroism of his father in the last one has made him a target with potential insurgents, and so a deep space mission for 6 months will keep him out of harm's way. As you can imagine it doesn't go smoothly.

During his training a big deal is made of his race - being chinese and the first wave of space exploration is though to have given him favoured status, his cohort mates not knowing of his father's history. But This never comes up again. Likewise he very secretly writes a letter to an ex-boyfriend, but there's no other mention of intimacy with any other people at all. There's very brief interludes of friendship with one of cadet. Apparently none of his crew or any other other officers he meets ever sparks an interest. Likewise the whole coup plot doesn't get much attention.

It's fun fast paced, seems technologically consistent, a good balance of pace without tedious exposition but still making sense. It just needs more depth - physically in terms of words count, in order to allow metaphorical depth of characters and worlds.

Interesting, I may read others in the universe if there are any. ( )