Victory Conditions is the final volume of the Vatta's War series. We come into it with a whole series of plot threads waiting to be resolved: the struggle against interstellar piracy, the rebuilding of Vatta Transport as a commercial enterprise, the cleaning up of corruption, incompetence, and malinvestment in InterStellar Communications, the growth of Kylara Vatta's abilities as a fleet commander, her cousin Stella's guardianship of their orphaned younger relative Toby, and Kylara's own unresolved (indeed unacknowledged) romantic tension with Rafe Dunbarger, now the head of InterStellar. Moon manages to resolve all of these, and even to introduce and resolve some new threads, including notably Toby's romantic involvement with a classmate whose family proves a source of further complications, and Kylara's accumulated emotional stress from her many losses and life changes.

That last story leads to Kylara's undergoing a short mental health intervention, at the urging of Master Sergeant Pitt from the Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation, who has played the role of Kylara's “voice of experience” since the first volume. In this case, Pitt's speech to her discusses the ethics of force in a way that will make sense to libertarians:

“Most of us…were brought up to be good, decent citizens of wherever we grew up. Religious, some of us. We had all sorts of social rules for how to behave, among them not killing other people, and not letting friends get hurt if we could help it…And now you kill people for a living…But the thing is, if you didn't, the people who do nothin' but kill for a living would win. If you hadn't come in to Boxtop and shot up some enemy ships, I'd be dead, for one.”

Jane Jacobs' theory of ethics, which I've mentioned before in reviewing these books, asserts that a basic principle of sound ethics is the functional separation of force from economics; citing Plato, she argues that mixing the two leads to injustice. Moon's story shows the harmful effects of this mixture, including the erosion of defensive strength under the cost-cutting measures necessary to private firms, dramatized through both Rafe's and Kylara's difficulties in combating the pirates. Whether this is a libertarian idea is debatable; a constitutionalist such as Ayn Rand would likely support it, whereas an anarchocapitalist would likely believe that private firms could solve it. In economic terms, though, what Moon shows us is that the various defensive forces have been invading their own capital, boosting their short-term profit at the expense of long-term assets—a temptation to which both private investors and democratic governments are subject.

One of the ironies of this story is that Kylara, whose true role is to be a warrior, is characteristically a straight arrow, playing by the rules, while Rafe, who emerges in this volume as an entrepreneur and manager, is happiest at the edge of legitimacy, or a little beyond it. Moon shows them dealing with all the complications that result from this personality difference, as well as the external complications caused by the fixed conviction of Rafe's Board of Directors that the Vattas are criminals allied with the corrupt manager who nearly destroyed their corporation. By the end of the novel, they have reached, if not a resolution, at least a modus vivendi.

As in nearly all of Moon's fiction, the surface plot of adventure is supported by some sophisticated worldbuilding in the background. In particular, a theme running through this series is the genetic or technological modification of the human form and the political tensions over its legitimacy. Moon shows us religious beliefs that condemn such “unnatural” changes, political régimes that discriminate against the modified (and against racial outgroups in general), and the primary villains' manipulation of this bias to gain support for his campaign of mass murder and plunder. On the other hand, this volume shows a few adherents of a religion that restricts modifications coming to the defense of their own world against the pirate fleet, and themselves being protected by their upgraded friends and neighbors. The emphasis in this series is on individual responsibility, not on collective guilt.

This is a well-told and entertaining story, whose heroes are good people by libertarian standards. Anyone who's a fan of military science fiction should take a look at this series.