[Begin Montage]
Close up on female scientist looking in a microscope gives way to visuals of DNA splicing. A sterile looking hospital newborn nursery filled with baby girls with large eyes and shimmering skin. Newspaper headline: "Scientists Achieve Success with Human / Alien Program"... another newspaper headline: "Alloys - Alien Infiltrators or Human Menace?!" Scenes depicting rising Xenophobic sentiments and increasing civil unrest... Cut to propaganda film touting the need for the "Spear of Humanity" to cleanse the Earth of the Alien contamination... by destroying it. Cut to hideous attacks, leading up to... Jun 12, 2180... and the utter destruction of the Earth... somehow throwing Lieutenant Selene Genji of the Universal Fleet into the distant past, giving her a chance to try to change events that lead up to the end of everything as she knows it. She finds an ally in Lieutenant Kayl Owen of the Earth Guard and fast friends lead to strange bedfellows of a sort as they make their escape to Earth via Mars and the moon, while being hunted down by the Earth Guard; Genji for having alien DNA and Kayl for knowing about it. It's our dynamic duo of heroes against the world and in a fight against time and knowing that for Genji, success could very well mean never having existed.
[End Montage]
Destiny's Way find our heroes finally arriving on Earth, which does not go unnoticed by the Earth Guard, who have orders to shoot Genji on sight, the official story being that she's a threat to humanity, itself, despite that quite often, Genji proves to be the most human person in the room. Our heroes will make several narrow escapes, some knee-slapping tactical moves as they outwit the Earth Guard and even, perhaps, win a few hearts and minds as they trek across the United States trying to figure out how to prevent the horrible future that Genji witnessed. Along the way, they will make a few hard-won allies and learn (hopefully in time) who they can - and can't - depend on...
Jack Campbell wrote The Doomed Earth as a Duology, which means that this, the second book, is also the last. When I saw that Destiny's Way is a duology, I feared that wrapping the story up in a second book was a bit ambitious, especially considering the complexities of time travel paradoxes, butterfly effects of disrupting political structures and public opinion, but, all in all, I found the second book quite delightful and liked how Jack Campbell handled the effects of changing the future from within the past. In general, I found the pacing to be handled well. There was a point near the end where things seemed to move a bit fast, but I wouldn't say rushed... and it wasn't at the very end, so it didn't leave a bitter taste in my mouth or anything.
While I know that this is a duology, I found these characters to be quite nice and hope that Jack Campbell finds some way to do something more with them in some future book. But, then again, the future is so unpredictable, am I right?
