This note contains spoilers for the book.

I'm still in the process of reading this book.

Short stories, in a collection resurrected by Singularity & Co AKA Save The Scifi.

Judgment Night

The Amazon-trained daughter of the Emperor of the Lyonese gets some life experience. Ericon has always been the heart of the empire, across generations of dynasties. She feels they need to strike back more aggressively, her father wants to try to make peace. The remnants of previous generations, and the restless barbarians from the fringes, don't want to wait for either of them.

Much of the book seems to be about the tension in Juille (that's the daughter referred to above) between human emotion and Amazon training. And she's clearly not really sure what she is, and is a bit of a narcissist.

We must be close to the end, and the invaders seem to be pretty much winning. The pat answer is for their leader to marry Juille; I hope something a bit less pat than that happens.

Well, they do, kind of; but not to the salvation of the empire or even the human race, so maybe that's okay. The mysterious clever "pet" has been selected by the Ancients to be the next species to get a chance.

There's kind of a confusion between "race" and "species", and I wasn't quite sure for a while if the H'vani were human or not. The envoy from Dunnar was also confusing—but he turns out to be an avatar of the Ancients, so I guess that's okay.

Paradise Street

Frontiersmen vs. settlers. The storekeeper in town has been around almost as long as Morgan the frontiersman, and they have history from before the storekeep settled down (he'd been the assay agent for buying sehft earlier, and had hunted it before that).

And the price of sehft has just been controlled down two orders of magnitude. Morgan can't survive that, and he may not be smart enough to get out intact. I guess we'll see.

The planet is called Loki, and the population that so bothers Morgan live mainly in Ancibel Settlement with a single main street.

(I'm being bothered by echoes in these stories. Lyonese in the first one reminds me of Jack Vance's Lyoness, and Ancibel reminds me of the ansible.)