The Fourth Consort

She held out her hand. "My name is Neera Agarwal. I'm here to change the course of your life. How would you like to leave this shit town and that bitch of a bartender behind you forever? Tell me, my sad sack friend—how would you like to be a spaceman?"

Dalton Greaves is an Earth man and a humble, all-around action hero. He’s nine months into his job for “the Unity”—a job that, he’s been told, may make him f-u money back on Earth. The “job” is to be the soldier-diplomat on an expedition to recruit sentient-inhabited planets to join the Unity, with the “lucky” species thereby gaining the benefits of intergalactic civilization and trade.

The expedition has brought Dalton to a planet ruled by an insectoid apex predator species called the Minarchs. Their preindustrial civilization runs on violent, honor-based, feudal hive politics dominated by females, with a queen acting as “first among equals.” Unfortunately, a rival empire known as “the Assembly” is also trying to recruit the planet. After a brief but catastrophic conflict between the two expeditions, only a few survivors remain: Dalton, his crewmate Neera, and an Assembly “stickman” diplomat (called stickman because, I assume, they resemble human-sized walking stick insects). Dalton and the intimidating—yet unfailingly polite—stickman are invited into the planet’s central hive to plead their cases, while Neera stays behind in the heavily armed lander, monitoring the situation and standing ready to avenge him if things go bad.

The two competing diplomats are separately interviewed by the queen and after two days Dalton is informed that he is the queen’s new “Fourth Consort”, a title with unclear implications—possibly sexual, possibly ceremonial, possibly both. Due to shaky translation, it’s confusing, maybe a little horrifying, and definitely kind of funny. Why would the queen pick the horrifically ugly evolved primate when the stickman seems to everyone, a much more appropriate consort? And it turns out the next morning someone attempts to assassinate Dalton. The rest of the story is about court intrigue between factions supporting or attacking the queen’s leadership, with Dalton, now a consort, caught as the queen’s symbolic pawn in the middle of the struggle. Dalton is in extreme danger with several life-or-death decisions to make in the hopes of surviving and succeeding at his job. And during all of the in-hive hijinx there is a drip, drip, drip of Neera sending unsympathetic, unhelpful support and advice.

There are a couple of good twists to the story and a great deal of deadpan dialog between the different races being translated by AI (Dalton’s fussy translation AI is another character). I actually enjoyed this a little more than I enjoyed Mickey 7 (Ashton’s previous book, now movie). While Mickey 7 milks the gag of Mickey repeatedly being resurrected (which the movie played on to great effect) this book is more about the consistently enjoyable sarcastic and/or deadpan dialog. Dalton starts out as a naive, idealistic, and ridiculously over-qualified protagonist. But over time, he wises up about his job in the Unity and the Unity’s priorities. And for bonus points, along the way he makes a new and surprising friend, which I found to be affecting. I finished this in under a day: it was an amusing, suspenseful, escape-from-the-world-of-woe book and I wish I wasn’t done with it.