I was expecting some entertainment with moderately good story telling. I ended up forcing myself to finish it to see if there was a payoff. There wasn’t.
The premise has the potential to deliver good action, and some interesting sci-fi. The problem is in the execution. The dialog is terrible. Rather than give any narration, or preface to set the stage, the characters speak in long speeches to provide context, often after the relevant event is over. Why is France firing on US spacecraft? Well after it is over, a character will recount the geopolitical history needed to understand why it just happened. Scientists do not actually spend their time recounting lengthy theories to their peers who are already familiar with them while facing imminent death.
There is also a lot of convenient plot armor insertions. We’ve been with a character for over 30 chapters when they are suddenly bailed out by an equipment feature that we are told they have had strong opinions about for the entire story. That feature and those opinions were never mentioned once before it saves their life. Once would be a slip, but this reads like the author ran into repeated continuity issues, and rather than fix the narrative earlier in the story, just keeps applying lazy fixes on the spot.
The narration is good, and certainly provides nice vocal variation for different characters.
There is an outline for a solid book in here, but this militsry space adventure detonated on the launch pad.