This is a great start to a story, really setting a hard atmosphere and bigging-up a hard, dangerous, imposing man. I'm really looking forward to the next chapter.
Another chapter dedicated to the introduction of another extraordinary main character, imbued with history, lifelong scars, and an impossible mission.
The tone of the work is perfectly captured as, 'Their laughter, fueled by cheap liquor, echoed in the night, a fleeting moment of warmth in a galaxy gone cold.'
I found the meeting with the character's overlords a little too curt; they were remotely present in a room utterly devoid of any ornamentation, but camouflaged to such an extent that the speaker could not be discerned from the group, let alone identified; while the intercourse was telling-- ...
... 'Dissent was not tolerated at his level of the PTSC'--the simple outcome that he had no choice but to extract a dangerous prisoner could have been put across with a little more panache, and perhaps could have given some indication of the reasons--even if misdirected for the sake of the story--for the mission in the first place.
But the development of these main characters is thrilling, and I'm really looking forward to the adventures they are going to have!
This chapter brings another dimension to the emerging plot, telling us straight that the protagonist is a double agent (or at least aspires to be one). The sense of danger he is putting himself in is, once again, palpable, latching the trigger on a potentially explosive tale.
I am engrossed.
The fourth chapter establishes the protagonistʼs team of jailbreakers, and strengthens the hand of the plotʼs back-seat driver. There are some overworked clichés: “His silence was loudest,” and, “To chaos… to the fall of empires…” given as a speech, for examples.
“Undetected in the digital shadows behind the systemʼs firewalls, Westfield watched,” is a strange sentence, given the overlord is observing a physical meeting, but imbues the universe in which the story is unfolding with a mystical quality, as if it were infused by a strange technology of the future; it certainly plays hard with the emerging theme of the work: shadows. It will be interesting to see if this plays into the storyline.
Iʼm waiting for this to appear (2025-01-11).