And so ends the “Dog” trilogy by Ashley R. Pollard.

I just finished reading the third installment in the “Gate Walkers” trilogy, Ghost Dog: Military Science Fiction Across A Holographic Multiverse. I should say I bought all three novels for my Kindle just over two years ago so this is the completion of my reading and reviewing saga.

Just as I said in my reviews of Bad Dog and Strike Dog before it, “Ghost Dog” is faithful to military procedure and culture and at least what we imagine might be the inevitable conflicts between the military and civilian scientists on a joint mission to another planet.

In this book, the protagonist Lara Tachikoma has been promoted to Captain and is charged with leading yet another team of mixed military personnel and various scientific experts through the “pillars,” this time to a moon in orbit around a gas giant whose sun in a red giant. The site is an advanced alien civilization that seems to now be extinct. The mission is to locate and retrieve as much of their advanced technology as possible.

There are two hiccups.

The first one is a foreign agent who has infiltrated the scientific team.

The second is that, unknown to the team, an alien intelligence has survived on the planet and is observing them.

The book begins with the reader following Lara through the various mundane events of Lara’s personal and professional life including her continuing romance with CIA operative Glen Anderson.

We move into assembling the team and transitioning through the pillars. On this mission though, the pillars won’t cycle again allowing them to return to Earth for about a year. That means they have to carry everything with them they’ll need to survive for that long. It also means if they miss the next transition, they’ll probably die on the moon with no hope of rescue.

The atmosphere is thinner, so that takes a toll on our crew. Some relationships flourish and others become tense. There are various explorations once they find a way to breach the doors to the chamber where the alien pillars are located on this moon.

Frankly, for most of the novel, it was pretty much moving along from one event to another. Some lower life forms are discovered but they aren’t spectacular. Technology is found, but it’s incredibly old and fragile. We get very few insights into the spy on the team and the alien intelligence.

At one point, the group travels for weeks on end to an alien city (they think it’s a city). That’s when things start to get interesting, but even then, not at first.

A surge in exterior radiation forces everyone and their equipment into a tower in the city and down ramps that remind them and the reader of a parking garage. They finally see something compelling moving through a central shaft, but only for a moment. Our group ends up in a chamber with 24 crypt-like devices matching the number of people in the team.

Then the action abruptly shifts into a memory of Lara when she was thirteen and studying Japanese swordplay with her father in their family dojo in the backyard of their home in San Diego.

I actually appreciated this since it was the first really interesting thing that happened to Lara since her “time loop” sequences in “Bad Dog.” We go through two chapters of this before a Dr. Hamilton, one of the scientists, comes to visit teenage Lara in her illusion. At first she thinks she’s in trouble at school until she realizes that everything she’s experiencing is a virtual reality.

The entire expedition has been captured by the alien intelligence and moved into the crypts for examination and eventual merging with the DNA of the creators of this city, which was their long-term plan for survival. However, Hamilton during his transformation, retains enough of his humanity to still feel compassion. The trigger is the fact that, in spite of all the necessary safeguards, Lara is pregnant with twins.

Lara revives four months after she entered the crypt and weeks late for the expedition to leave the city if they expect to make it back to the pillars and return to Earth.

However, it’s been revealed that one of the scientists has been researching an alternate route home by taking multiple jumps through various pillars to differing worlds that would lead back to home. The problem is that some of the destinations are deadly environments and the stays may be prohibitively long.

The team starts on the return journey in their trucks with a margin of error of only twelve hours assuming nothing goes wrong.

Oddly enough, almost nothing does except at the end when a single airship attacks as they’re about to enter the underground leading to the pillars.

Now we have military action in earnest with Lara, who has only told their medical corpsman that she’s pregnant (I guess no one else noticed her weight gain) and Master Sergeant Ferretti in their Dogs provide cover so the rest of the team can get to the pillars and get home.

What bugged me most of all was the novel’s pacing. For most of it we plodded (sorry) along doing this, that, and the other thing. Then suddenly, we spend two chapters on Lara’s memories which turn out to be an ideal life generated for her by the alien intelligence. All of the group go through something similar, which is very Matrix-like.

Then everyone’s revived in various degrees of health except Hamilton who has sacrificed himself so the others can go home.

Then they ready their trucks and equipment and leave on a journey that will take months.

This would have been an opportunity to ramp up the tension by causing all kinds of delays, but in that case, I would have provided a wider margin of error and then chopped it down bit by bit until the time remaining was only hours and then minutes.

It also kind of bugged me with only a twelve-hour margin of safety, that they didn’t make everyone pee in coffee cans instead of taking regular bathroom breaks.

Instead, the narrative jumped over a few months to where they now have hours when they are attacked.

It’s mentioned that an alternate route to Earth has been plotted by one of the scientists in the event they miss the primary jump, but it was unclear if this was transmitted to Lara and Ferretti before the battle with the alien ship and the small army of “pepper shakers.”

At one point, we have weeks until the jump and then abruptly we have hours and then minutes. Like I said, the pacing was pretty uneven and I kept having to make mental shifts to keep up.

It wasn’t clear to me at first that when Ferretti and the Lara made the jump that it was the alternate route.

Another opportunity to wind up the tension was missed by not covering what they had to progress through in all the various worlds so they could get back to Earth.

In fact, if the truck journey from the city back to the pillars had been expanded, then it could have ended here on this cliffhanger and another book featuring just the pregnant Lara and Ferretti could have been written with all of that.

Instead, we’re back on Earth with only the knowledge that they made it back safely, that Lara gave birth to her babies, and was now on the firing range teaching Allison, one of the scientists, how to shoot.

It was a mirror to Lara’s “memories” of her Dad teaching her how to use her sword. I should say that it was poignant because the events in the virtual reality took place after her Dad died in real life. It would have been more poignant if Lara had a flashback of that while on the range with Allison.

There’s absolutely no mention of the trials she and Ferretti had to go through to return to Earth and I guess it’s assumed that they arrived at the same set of pillars they used to depart and not another pair somewhere else on Earth.

I guess it’s also assumed that for every hour you’re on another world, an hour passes here on our world. Going through multiple gates and coming out (if the author had crafted it this way) back on Earth through different gates might well result in their emerging either in Earth’s past or future. This again could have been another adventure (that one would have required a scientist to be with them to figure out how to use the gates to return to their time) and another book.

As far as the spy goes, their identity is revealed after the fact (although the person’s fantasy life in virtual reality gave us a clue). The spy didn’t do anything nefarious or otherwise impacted the mission except for being rude so I don’t see why this element was included. You could removed Dr. Smith being a spy and absolutely nothing would have changed (Lost in Space reference?).

There were a lot of missed opportunities to really punch up the story and even lead into other tales in the Gate Walkers series and I’m sorry those routes weren’t taken.

Besides the pacing, there were times when I thought the characters, especially Lara, were too rational at the same moment they were experiencing extreme emotion. For example:

“Have some of this!” I screamed in fury. As one does when the adrenaline hits and more stressed than a very stressed thing.

Besides those sentences needing editing, it was so odd seeing Lara freak out and then having the logical part of her explaining to the reader what she was doing and why. I get it. Just show her as a panicked military rage monster blowing up the bad guys.

Oh, during the final combat, Lara said something to herself that made me laugh:

“Don’t worry. It’s just Mommy firing her autocannon.”

Good luck to Lara and her new family. Maybe they’ll get a break for a while.