What price valour?

[bibliogramma]

The Heart of Valor, Tanya Huff

This is the third novel in Huff’s series about Marine Sergeant Torin Kerr. The series takes place in a future in which several younger and more aggressive species (humans among them) have been granted membership in a Confederation of many species, most both non-violent and much older, on the understanding that their peoples will staff the Confederation’s military forces in the ongoing war against mysterious invader known only as the Others.

Sgt Kerr (recently promoted to Gunnery sergeant) serves, with great skill and efficiency, in this future military. Up to this point, she has been a perfect soldier – carrying out her mission, doing her best (and her best is pretty damn good) to keep her senior officers from doing something foolish and the Marines under their command alive. But something is changing.

In her last adventure, Sgt. Kerr was involved in a first contact situation with an apparently sentient space ship, and now Kerr discovers that she and a handful of those who were with her on the alien ship have memories that no one else involved in the mission have. And no one seems willing to listen to her when she tries to tell the brass that something is wrong.

Heart of Valor is, like the earlier Confederation novels, a rousing action story in the tradition of the great milsf writers, but it is also, I think, something more – the beginnings of an exploration into the level of trust required between civilian leadership and the military, and into what are the responsibilities of a soldier when she suspects that trust has been breached.

I was loving this series already, because Torin Kerr is an interesting and well-developed character, and because of the solid portrayal of a women in the military. But now I think I’m liking it even more, as Huff seems to be setting the stage for a broader consideration of the relationship between the military and its civilian overseers. Already, one begins to wonder about the implications of how and why the younger races were admitted into the Confederation – to do the fighting for those who will not, while having at the same time no input into the highest levels of decisions about military goals and attempts to enter into negotiations with the enemy – and it’s going to be interesting to see what happens if Kerr’s intelligence and insight keep bringing up questions that her devotion to duty and to the Marines might make her reluctant to think about.