Cobra Strike, by Timothy Zahn

This is reviewed from The Cobra Trilogy collection of the Cobra books.

Cobra Strike is the second of the Cobra books, and covers how the Cobra worlds handle being cutoff from the Dominion. They've done well, trading with the alien Trofts, until the Trofts offer to give them five new worlds, in exchange for the Cobras dealing with a potentially threatening world.

Never ones to leap before looking, the Cobras send a ship to scout the situation, and find a lost human colony that has somehow conquered their own natural conflicts and united against the universe. Luckily they've lost the stardrive, but between the Trofts and the Cobras, they're being given plenty of incentive to rediscover it quickly.

While the original Cobra novel was about the way that a government might deal with super soldiers once the war was over, this novel is a more straightforward sort of military adventure as the Cobras try to discover what it is that makes this lost human colony such a threat to the Trofts, and to decide if they want to take the Trofts up on their offer of the new worlds.

We get to see Jonny Moreau's children, one of whom goes into politics, and another who becomes a Cobra on the mission to the lost colony. Overall, it's an enjoyable sequel to Cobra, if a different sort of story.