Dragons Nine Son's by Chris Robeson

This is February's book group selection and may contain spoliers...

In this alternate history, China and the Aztec Nation have become the predominant countries. They have been fighting on Earth for a long time and now they have taken this war to the Fire Star (aka, Mars). Here in space around the semi populated planet, where nine Chinese military criminals destined for death are brought together for a suicide mission to a secret hidden Aztec asteroid base.

The two main characters are Yao and Zhaun, a bannerman soldier and a captain of the naval fleet. Each betrayed direct orders which have landed them in this current predicament. The other seven are a motley crew of murders and petty thieves - the "red shirts" if one is to reference Star Trek. The mission is simple: to destroy the asteroid by sneaking in a very large bomb on a stolen Aztec ship while pretending to be Aztecs.

I unfortunately found this book lacking. The premise of the alternate reality was promising but it fell short from the beginning. It was little things that kept jarring me out of the story; here we have two terraforming, space adapted nationalities, but yet in a briefing the agent used a telescoping pointer. The Aztecs are still a blood-thirsty race that use human sacrifices to start their space ships - they had alters on the bridge with hemoglobin sensors and would slash their victims. Both races still used cudgels, truncheons and swords in combat, along with your standard projectile weapons.

The plot also trudged along; once the mission was spaceborne, each of the nine slowly (and I do mean slowly) revealed why they were on this suicide mission. Two disobeyed direct orders. Three were in for murder. One in for petty theft. One was a dope smuggler and I forget what the last two were incarcerated for - it wasn't interesting. I found Robeson's foreshadowing glaringly obvious and that also detracted from the overall story.

I was looking forward to reading this one as it's come to the bookgroup table more than once but never made it through our convoluted voting process. The last time it came to the table we begged and pleaded with Tess to not boot it out. She kindly agreed and it was a disappointment.