Don’t expect the title of this book to mean anything. I think it’s just something that came up at the end and sounded like a good title. It could have been a lot of other things that tied more into the story, but it’s not.
Ok, so we’re back with First Lieutenant Cullen Bright who you should know from the first book is an exceptional human with exceptional abilities. As a former Olympic gold medal athlete many times over, he has now transitioned into a Unity Marine. And because of his extraordinary physical and mental abilities he was placed in a very special operating unit going against the current enemy of humanity, the Hardshells or Turts (again, these aliens looked like turtles).
Now he’s a season veteran, more or less, in the Reactive Armor Insertion and Demolition (RAID) teams. In fact, he’s now the team leader having replaced a previous Lieutenant that died from an unsuccessful mission. These RAID teams were supposed to breach very tough Hardshell ships, kill the crew, take everything not nailed down inside and then bring the hull back to Earth so it could be outfitted for human use. The Hardshells have built some very powerful and tough starships and humanity was having a very hard time fighting against them. Without the efforts of the RAID teams, humanity was going to lose this war.
But, Lt. Bright was leading the only RAID team in existence and that was a problem. They were becoming worn out and soon going to make a fatal mistake. That means someone on his team would get killed. Fortunately, Colonel Thomas Hightower, who was in charge of the RAID Battalion knew that he needed more teams. So he tasked Captain Vibbert and Lt. Bright to come up with a training program to train and build more RAID teams.
That was fine and something that needed to be done, but that also meant the current RAID team would be involved in training and not out fighting the enemy. But, this job had to be done. So, a very intensive screening process was put into place to determine what Marines would be suitable for further training as RAID Marines. Because of the standards set by Lt. Bright and his existing team, there were going to be very few regular Marines capable of doing the things they did. But, the did find a starting group that looked on paper to be suitable. These were all qualified Marines in their current MOS, they met current physical fitness standards required of Unity Marines, but that didn’t mean they were going to become RAID Marines.
Since Cullen Bright was in charge of the training program, it was definitely going to be hard. He was not ever going to accept second best and coming in last, in this job, would mean you were dead! He had already calculated that the initial RAID teams that came before him had not set a fast enough pace to survive their breaching attempts. That’s the reason none of them were successful and most of those Marines died being unsuccessful. The hull of a Hardshell ship was a very dangerous place. In fact, you had 13 seconds to get off that hull and inside the airlock or you were going to be dead!
So, with that background, Lt. Bright and his current team began training sixty Marines to the bone. These were going to be easy times for the sixty. They had to make the grade or they were out. They could definitely DOR (drop on request) or fail to pass a level. Out of that sixty, only twenty-nine made it to week six, the third and final training block. Out of that twenty-nine, Lt. Bright figured none would make it the full course. So, how’s this going to work if he can’t get any other Marines trained up?
Well, that’s going to be covered in the rest of the book. Lt. Bright and his team will definitely get back out to breaking through Hardshell hulls and they’ll even be given a very significant mission that would kind of parallel the famous Col. Jimmy Doolittle raid on Tokyo during the Second World War. So there’s a lot of exciting fighting going to take place and people will be killed.
I’m looking forward to book 3, “Covenant of Claws”, now available on Amazon.
[Note 1 (12/23/2025): I’m no longer associated with Amazon and will no longer provide any links to books from that website. You can usually find books that you like at your usual source.]
[Note 2: As of 12/03/2023, this will not be posted on Amazon since I have been banned from posting reviews for some unknown reason. ]