Kloos advances the setting up five years from the last book. Grayson is now a combat controller, part of the fleet elite responsible for fighting the Lankies. Humanity is totally outclassed, and they best that they can do is drop Grayson and a few of his buddies on Lanky worlds to designate targets for orbital nuclear strikes. Otherwise, humanity has lost over 40 colony worlds and innumerable fleet actions, without a single tactical victory.

We get one of those missions, and then he goes into action against the Sino-Russian Alliance, because stabbing the other bloc in the back won't wait for little things like human extinction. The raid on a colony goes off great, until a Lanky seedship shows up and wipes out the NAC fleet without stopping. Grayson evacuates back to Earth, and is assigned to a Territorial Army unit with his old sergeant that is sent to a frozen colony world around Fomalhaut right before the FTL network is shut down. When the one-star general in charge of the fleet decides to seize the colonist's food supplies, Grayson and his friends lead a mutiny. This ends when Lankies show up again and the fleet bolts. The local scientist comes up with a brilliant plan to destroy the Lanky seedship by crashing a freighter into it at full burn. This works, Grayson and his team mark up the first human kill of a Lanky, and then a combined NAC-SRA fleet shows up with the bad news that the Lankies have found and occupied Sol. They're cut off from Earth.

This book avoids some of the war crimes of Terms of Enlistment, but skips over a lot of things that matter, like five years of combat against an implacable foe, or anything really about the nature of the Lankies. I don't at all buy the depiction of the Fleet. This isn't just a force that is losing. This is a military that has become entirely ineffective, and there's little panic or real innovation. Eric Nyland's Halo tie-in novel The Fall of Reach covers these themes with more coherence and elegance.