The front cover labels this "a Firebreak story", meaning that it's part of a universe that the author has created for her novel 'Firebreak', but which doesn't fit into the flow of the series I presume it'll soon become. I'm taking it as a standalone story that explores a particular moment in the lives of a couple of the characters in that series to be, whether they're primary characters there or not. Even if they turn out to be peripheral support in the series, what they do here clearly represents a chink in the armour of the pivotal group in the broader story.

That group are supersoldiers in the Stellaxis program, but this isn't military science fiction. At least I don't think it is as a series and it certainly isn't in this short novel. It feels like a dystopian vision of our corporate overlords, where the abilities of these soldiers isn't close to as important as whether they're still human or not and whether they still feel that they retain a level of humanity. I caught a lot of 'Murderbot' vibes here, sans any of its sassiness, because of a combination of unsurspassable power and blissful naïveté, but these particular soldiers started as human beings, refugee children in fact, but were enhanced within the program.

That's a key discovery in 'Firebreak', one that's included in the Goodreads synopsis so I presume it's not a spoiler, but it's a given here because 06 and 22 fundamentally appear as the children they still are. They've escaped from the program, into which they were kidnapped, and they fashioned vague plans to do something about it, but they are what they are and the title has meaning, so they shack up in an abandoned shipping container and try to figure out their next move.

Now, even though they look like children, they're still supersoldiers, so incredibly dangerous that it would be a catastrophic mistake to mess with them. And that goes just as much for the Director of the program they've escaped as for any random member of the public who might see an easy score. She needs to bring them back home and, even though they've removed their lenses so aren't quite as easy to track, she knows exactly where they are and has some very cool future tech to help her to retrieve them. In fact, one example of that advanced tech is a character in itself, a sentient swarm of nanobots called Sabrina (Semi-Autonomous Bio-Reconnoitering Intelligent Nanobot Array) and I found "her" fascinating.

So, even though we have a feeling this isn't going to be the grand adventure that it initially seems, eventually turning into the closed loop that the title suggests, it's actually rather tense. It's a cat and mouse game between two fugitives who don't really go anywhere and their handler who can't do any of the usual things that might come to mind to bring them back. Force isn't going to work; it may even backfire horribly. She can't do it against their will, or it would affect morale in the others. And so she has to figure out a way to manipulate them into finding the realisation that they might want to come back on their own. And that means a serious game of chess.

I liked this and it works as a standalone, but it also feels like it would have worked much better if I'd read 'Firebreak' first. I didn't need to know anything specific from it to understand what happens in this side story, but I missed the depth in worldbuilding that I assume would come from reading that novel. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel for these supersoldiers, who are intriguingly both the victims of their story and the celebrities in their world, but I presume sympathy is a big part of it, a big enough part of it that I have a feeling I'd bring it with me to this book and I just didn't have it.

Clearly, we're supposed to be on the side of 06 and 22, their impersonal names underlining it; but, the longer the book ran on, the more I found myself fascinated by the Director. I wouldn't say that she's a particularly deep character here, because she's not given the opportunity to be in a story clearly intended to be all about her opponents, but she's not a one-note villain and the ramifications of her position and situation kept growing. Oddly, that means that while this gave me an impression that I should have read 'Firebreak' first, it's also a pretty solid advert for it. I want to know more and it's pretty obvious that that book is where I'll find it.

What's also telling is that the synopsis for 'Firebreak' suggests that the Stellaxis supersoldiers are not the leads there but the background. I get the impression that the story is all about them, but it unfolds through the perspective of someone else, an orphaned child of the corporate war who was not kidnapped into the program and encounters it from the outside. I wonder how much we get to see of the Director in that book. I'm increasingly eager to find out, as well to discover what event is going to happen eight years down the road, something repeatedly hinted at here that consistently went over my head. ~~ Hal C F Astell