For centuries, interstellar prospectors had searched for the fabled worlds of the Three Kings, the lost El Dorado of the galaxy. But none had succeeded. Only the mad cyborg Prophet, Ishmael Hand, had ever seen the mysterious system, and he had refused to reveal its location before vanishing forever into history. Then, with the help of his flock, a starfaring evangelist -- Doctor Karl Woodward, preacher and leader of the starship "The Mountain" -- found it, only to disappear in turn.
Now a new group of explorers must follow the trail that Woodward blazed. A spacegoing salvage team, desperately in debt after a violent alien menace ruins a lucrative assignment and decimates the group, is hired to follow the clues Woodward left behind. But the team's shady creditors won't want to wait...and they won't much care how they get their investments back.
Fearing pursuit by their former backers, the group heads off for the ultimate salvage operation. By hook or by crook, they will find the Three Kings -- if the galactic underworld's repo men don't get them first!
From Publishers Weekly
This serviceable action-SF novel of far-future starfaring opens with a useful prologue, bringing the reader up to speed on the planets called the Three Kings Balshazzar, Melchior and Kaspar, satellites of a gas giant and the source of incredibly valuable alien artifacts and the events of the first book in the series, Balshazzar's Serpent (2000). To set up the journey to volcanic, overheated and alien-inhabited Melchior, the author spends nearly half the novel driving his characters, a piratical interstellar salvage crew, to the verge of bankruptcy or worse. They suffer this fate on a deserted colony planet, through the agency of an alien entity who has ingested the previous colonists and is considerably more interesting than anything they later encounter. Thanks to a media mogul, the salvagers embark on a perilous journey through "wild wormholes" to the Three Kings. Once in the system, they discover that Balshazzar holds colonies from several races under a benign but total alien despotism. Reaching Melchior, the spacefarers find it positively swarming with alien races at which point the action slams to a cliffhanger ending as the crew barely survives a telepathic attack. The author has apparently tried to cram two comparatively self-contained tales into a book so short that neither story is really developed adequately. One can only hope Chalker will devote more attention to narrative technique in the inevitable saga of ice-bound Kaspar, last of the Three Kings.
Description:
ON THE RUN FROM THE INTERSTELLAR MOB!
For centuries, interstellar prospectors had searched for the fabled worlds of the Three Kings, the lost El Dorado of the galaxy. But none had succeeded. Only the mad cyborg Prophet, Ishmael Hand, had ever seen the mysterious system, and he had refused to reveal its location before vanishing forever into history. Then, with the help of his flock, a starfaring evangelist -- Doctor Karl Woodward, preacher and leader of the starship "The Mountain" -- found it, only to disappear in turn.
Now a new group of explorers must follow the trail that Woodward blazed. A spacegoing salvage team, desperately in debt after a violent alien menace ruins a lucrative assignment and decimates the group, is hired to follow the clues Woodward left behind. But the team's shady creditors won't want to wait...and they won't much care how they get their investments back.
Fearing pursuit by their former backers, the group heads off for the ultimate salvage operation. By hook or by crook, they will find the Three Kings -- if the galactic underworld's repo men don't get them first!
From Publishers Weekly
This serviceable action-SF novel of far-future starfaring opens with a useful prologue, bringing the reader up to speed on the planets called the Three Kings Balshazzar, Melchior and Kaspar, satellites of a gas giant and the source of incredibly valuable alien artifacts and the events of the first book in the series, Balshazzar's Serpent (2000). To set up the journey to volcanic, overheated and alien-inhabited Melchior, the author spends nearly half the novel driving his characters, a piratical interstellar salvage crew, to the verge of bankruptcy or worse. They suffer this fate on a deserted colony planet, through the agency of an alien entity who has ingested the previous colonists and is considerably more interesting than anything they later encounter. Thanks to a media mogul, the salvagers embark on a perilous journey through "wild wormholes" to the Three Kings. Once in the system, they discover that Balshazzar holds colonies from several races under a benign but total alien despotism. Reaching Melchior, the spacefarers find it positively swarming with alien races at which point the action slams to a cliffhanger ending as the crew barely survives a telepathic attack. The author has apparently tried to cram two comparatively self-contained tales into a book so short that neither story is really developed adequately. One can only hope Chalker will devote more attention to narrative technique in the inevitable saga of ice-bound Kaspar, last of the Three Kings.
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