The Light Brigade is stylish military scifi, which I think is mostly cynical cladding over a sentimental core. Dietz wanted to be a hero, be a paladin, avenge the 2 million dead of Sao Paulo, taken in the Blink. He signs up for a corporate army, pulse-rifle wielding shock troopers fighting anarchists, liberals, and above all else Martian socialists, for an opaque chain of command.

What distinguishes Dietz is his method of tactical deployment, beamed from place to place as light. Sometimes it leads to strategic surprise, sometimes it leads to ugly teleporter accidents. More worryingly, Dietz has become unstuck in time. Every deployment has him fighting a battle different from the briefing, and returning to a squad Dietz only partially remembers. The corporate overlords are a censorious bunch, banning calendars and external references. It seems that most soldiers deploy properly, only a few like Dietz are part of the atemporal Light Brigade of the title.

It's a riff on a lot of things, mostly The Forever War, and the sentence to sentence styling is quite good, even if at longer structural scales the novel is soliphistic and kind of trite. The circular ouroborus ending is both a neat bit of sleight of hand, and ultimately unsatisfying. The effect is its own cause is it's own effect ad infinitum. The Light Brigade is well crafted, but not very weighty.