I don’t want to discourage potential readers, but they should know this is lightweight scifi, and only moderate “military” fiction. Its a decent first attempt or minimalist short set of novellas, but I found it jarringly weak on the science.
Several times the book says ships came to a “halt” in the middle of orbital and battle maneuvers. The “lightning” weapon is very hard to square with even a single semester of electromagnetism.
The “black hole” weapon kept getting applied as if any black hole must have an ultra-strong gravitational field, seemingly oblivious to the fact that “small” black holes are completely possible (and would be much more practical to create, assuming you have to create them with energy or mass “on-hand’ as opposed to borrowed from…. somewhere). But a black hole with a mass of 100 kg would require 90 million Gj to create (if a 100% efficient mechanism is assumed), yet the event horizon would be smaller than a proton, and its gravitational field would be minuscule at radiuses larger than a proton! As a weapon, such a black hole would be lucky to collapse a couple atomic nuclei, not spaghettify whole ships or function as a navigational slingshot tool. Such an object would probably be more deadly by just having a nicely charged accretion disk, relativistic jet, or maybe an unnaturally high spin rate. The weapon that creates these BH’s is summarily described as “interdimensional,” but no further attempt is made to lend credibility to how such a device could exist – nor how a device could create and “fire” a concentration of energy capable of collapsing into a BH without it immediately wreaking havoc on the very device that just “fired” it. And speaking of “spaghettification”, the radius of a BH event horizon hugely impacts the difference in tidal forces, such that a “practical” BH weapon would just tear materials apart, while solar-mass BH’s would be able to tug on near and far parts of a falling object enough to say it might “spaghettify’ something, while a supermassive BH would just gently tug an object crossing its EH.
I also had trouble continuing to suspend my disbelief when mutual AI-hacking was represented as a medieval battle inside a VR stage.
So, for some light entertainment, its all right, but I personally think there are more entertaining books to read that don’t short-change the science so much. In fact, I dont think getting the science right(-enough) would weaken the story or make a novel unapproachable. It definately is better than feeding the scientifically-illiterate more illiterate-punch.