Well, well, 5 stars.
When I started this Company Wars re-read I was fairly sure that only Downbelow Station and Cyteen were going to get 5 stars. My fuzzy recollection of 90's reads of these books certainly seemed to support that. So, either my memory is not as sharp as I would like to think or 90's me missed quite a lot in the books he was reading.
This is a book about survival I would say. Survival of 2 traumas. In the micro, a rape and all around failing of trust 20 years earlier. In the macro of the world Cherryh has built, the war itself which ended around 10 - 15 years previous in the timeline.
The story is all about how two ships on different 'sides' of that war came together calamitously back then and how the aftershocks of that impact a meeting in the present.
I absolutely hoovered this down. Compelling. Brutal. Unflinching. However, there is redemption and paths to a possible better future because the traumas of the past are confronted and moved past.
A point I noted this time (and didn't before) was the little details of ship board life and how they inform the political economy of the setting. These little details are how Cherryh, masterfully, builds the setting and makes you think about the natural implications of things. This neat trick then lets you use this as a lens to examine our own modern day.
For a novel published in 1994, this is still pretty spot on when used as a lens for consideration of today. More importantly, on top of all that, its just a damn good read.
As recommended as any Company Wars book has been.