4.5 stars. I'm not quite sure how to review this book, so I'll write down some observations.

I loved Gideon. She has a fuck it, fuck them, and when it comes to Harrowhark, fuck you in particular attitude. Both girls hate each other with the power of a thousand suns, but there's also some camaraderie between the two. I really liked the interaction between the two.

This book has about 400 pages, and while I consider myself quite good at English, there were on average two words per page I had to look up. That means I learned about 800 new words (well, I've forgotten most of them already). There were even one or two words even dictionary.com never heard of. Most of them were just archaic English.

The only thing that bothered me was the worldbuilding. There is space travel, spacestations, and an Cohort that does battle on remote worlds, but everyone is dicking around with swords. I saw one memntion of a firearm (but that was a very old one) and artillery shells. So I didn't quite get why swords were the main weapons.

Speaking of old: the author does a wonderful job describing how everything is old, decrepit, dillapidated, rotten, crumbling and falling apart. Everything is on its last legs, but there's still tenthousand year old machines doing their job.

This was a weird book, but I really enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to the sequel.
Did anyone catch how the dead girl in the Lost Tomb had some similarities to Gideon? I'm sure we haven't seen the last of her.