Storyline: 3/5 
 Characters: 4/5 
 Writing Style: 2/5 
 World: 4/5 
 The first chapter was a good one. This was Cherryh at her best. It skipped through a dramatic interstellar history and was written with insightful observations aplenty. This book then opens onto a myriad of avenues promising further discovery and insight. With more than five hundred pages left, there seemed to be so much more to come. Then chapter two came, and Cherryh does what she seems to do with every story. 
 She zooms inward on a tangle of characters and locations, contracting the broad universe and immense diversity into confined environments and repeated interactions. She takes big ideas and makes them small; large casts of characters, and puts them through the same experiences; awesome technologies of spaceflight and describes them all as metallic or glittering with lights. The thoughtful turns of phrase with musings on humanity's reaction to progress turn into guttural fragments conveying visceral reactions. Long-arc history is swapped out for incoherent snippets and visual flashes. From the foundations of a solar-system spanning soap opera comes a claustrophobic tale of sterile, uniform environments revisited again and again and again. 
 This is my third Cherryh series, and they all share strong similarities. The overlap between this and her other space-battles-around-a-space-station tale, published in the exact same year, 1981, (view spoiler)[Pride of Chanur (hide spoiler)] are too much. It was as if she had a template that filled in the story arc, the character motivations, the dramas and twists. The environments are near identical and the dialogue could have been shifted interchangeably between books with no harm. All that was left to add were some racial or individual attributes and the particular details of each agonizing wait or double-cross. 
 Cherryh is worth reading. Every roundly-read science fan should read at least one Cherryh book. The problem is that once you've read one book, you've read 60-80% of all of the others. Perhaps as I keep reading on, I'll find that she grows into something else, and I'll have to come back and update this review. I keep reading because she is highly recognized and often awarded science fiction author that has been influential in the genre for more than a decade. She also has got a handle on the mechanics of space station life that I find both interesting and realistic. She is just so difficult to read (please, please just give me complete sentences!) and monotonous. I'll try another Company Wars book, but I fully expect the same basic story and environments with a similar set of characters.