Toshi Hunter and the ragtag crew of the spaceship Pandora already have a lot on their plates by the time they first encounter a dead ship full of metamorphic monstrosities tumbling through space. Players of the classic 2008 Dead Space video game will no doubt instantly recognize the kind of gruesome scene Toshi and company find. It would be a galaxy-class understatement to say that it’s the last thing the beleaguered crew needs at this point. They’re tired of being on the run, because the Imperium has branded them, as members of the Free the Galaxy organization, as terrorists. Years of tossing intergalactic monkey wrenches into the Imperium’s never-ending plans to terraform the universe have taken a serious toll on them all, and Toshi himself is pondering retirement. The Imperium’s version of Manifest Destiny, however, is just as mean and genocidal as the 19th-century variety, because it, too, is lethal to indigenous communities, and despite the trials and sacrifices, the Pandora’s crew remains determined to fight it: “Every planet the humans had colonized had been terraformed, its ecosystem destroyed and brought to Earth standards,” notes the third-person narration. “Humanity was like a plague, burning through the galaxy.” It’s true that the politics of Gurgu’s novel couldn’t be more overt. That said, the galloping, guns-blazing nature of the power-packed prose makes this space opera seem more pulpy than political. The text has a tendency toward gruesomeness in places: “Its upper body looked human, but its legs were insectlike and its head was shredded, as though something with huge mandibles had chewed on it.” Overall, the author has a keen knack for mixing and melding SF and the supernatural in all kinds of intriguing ways. Clear allusions to vampirism would be too obvious; Gurgu opts instead for more obscure archetypes: When was the last time one read about a wendigo in outer space?