Degrees of Freedom

I let too long a time pass between reading the first two books in this trilogy and finally getting around to this final volume. Each novel is self-contained, they do not end in cliffhangers that make all three one long story. But I had forgotten certain fine points of this post-Armegeddon world, for instance, just what "Armegeddon" occurred, how to differentiate between Armageddon, the New Machine Jihad, and the Long Night. I was just accepting the fact that one character was named Tabletop until something clicked to remind me that was her CIA operative name. So maybe it was the amount of mental catch-up I was having to play that made this third outing with Samuil Petrovitch drag somewhat. Also, since this supposedly concludes a trilogy, there is a lot of wrapping up to do for the final fifty or so pages.

The action is not as relentless nor as outrageously inventive as in the first two novels, but it is still fun. Here's an exchange between Petrovitch and Maddy, the ex-nun who is now his estranged wife.

"We've really fucked this up, haven't we?"

"That depends," said Petrovitch. "We're fifteen meters below a collapsed building, crouching in a small tunnel cut through unstable, quaternary alluvial deposits using miniature black holes, looking for a concrete pipe that might be blocked by fallen masonry, at the bottom of which could be a crushed computer, while above ground, someone wants us to believe they have a live nuclear weapon ready to re-enact the attack on Paris." He watched her face fall then added, "But we're here together. Where would I rather be?"

"Martinique?"

Turns out Petrovitch doesn't feel safe around volcanoes, so Martinique is not a temptation.