In order to remain safe, the colony is intended to maintain a low level of technology until the Gbaba have passed it over, so as to avoid attracting attention - no radio emissions or other higher tech indications of life.
The colony is expressly targeted at an area some hundreds or thousands of years past the Gbaba's current frontier at their known rate of expansion. A colony mission, sent far, far beyond the reach of the furthest human or Gbaba travels to date. Well, almost, because if that were wholly true, there wouldn't be a book, would there? No, one forlorn hope survives. In the first chapter of the first book, Humanity dies, along with all of their planetary environments and colonies. The young Terran Federation goes willingly to war, only to realize that their opponents, while perhaps not their technological masters, definitely possess the resources to bury them under the sheer weight of numbers. A race of inscrutable aliens so xenophobic that their only reaction to humanity is a determined attempt to eradicate it. In this series, humanity has gone to the stars - and found something terrible waiting for them. I suppose it's really not possible to discuss the book without at least briefly describing the setup, and I think I can do so without spoilers because that's precisely what Weber sets out to do as quickly as possible in the preface to the first book. His grasp of the mythos and social structure of some military organizations is tight as well, allowing him to create perfectly believable navies, armies, marine corps, and even barbarian hordes when necessary. It renders some of his less endearing writing habits less problematic when they are read from within a cluster of exploding starships or screaming spatial weaponry. In the Honor Harrington series, as well as Path of the Fury, these technology systems are set in the distant future. That's okay he's a sci-fi author, after all, so as long as those parts of his works support their own weight, we can enjoy the sci-fi bits for their own particular flair. The first one is the most important most of his political and social systems are thinly-disguised versions of historical Earth polities and societies - and sometimes not even disguised at all.
As I described in a writeup on the writer, he has a marvelous ability to construct, populate and most importantly describe fairly complex systems of fictional technology, politics and social systems. Hopefully I can offer a description of this dichotomy without providing any egregious spoilers. This book, and its successor, are notable for displaying some of the best of David Weber's writing tendencies as well as some of the worst, side by side. It's his latest creation, and as of now (mid-2009) has two sequels. Off Armageddon Reef is the first book of a science fiction series written by David Weber.
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