New series and a new author to me which is kind of good. I like reading new stuff especially if it’s this good. Well, we’ve got some young Marines who are going to be getting very old quickly or they’re going to be dead! This book starts out with a very young Marine Private going to his first unit right out of the Combat Center Training Directorate (CCTD). He’s about as green as you can be, but his leadership is going to do him real dirty. He just got on station and his company/platoon/squad/fire team has been engaging a bunch of Patricians who are nothing but terrorist. They’ve captured a portion of the space station Pvt. Marco Morelli has just reported to and wiped out most all of the squad he was supposed to belong to! Yet, some dumb-sh*t Major has ordered Pvt. Morelli to go down to the reactor room and find out what has happened to his squad and get rid of the terrorist!
The terrorist are holding a bunch of civilian technicians making their demands be met or they’ll set the fusion reactor to go into melt-down. It’s almost impossible for a fusion reactor to do that, but apparently these terrorist are the stupid kind. As Pvt. Morelli heads towards the reactor room, he starts seeing bodies, dead bodies of Marines, terrorist and civilians. There has been a lot of killing and Marco doesn’t know what the heck he’s doing down here right now. He’s never seen a dead body much less shoot one. Still, the Major keeps asking if he’s at the reactor room yet!
He’s also not sending anyone else to support Pvt. Morelli and that’s borderline idiotic! Still, Morelli does approach the reactor room only to find the terrorist holding civilians by their neck with a gun pointed that their heads. Morelli reports this back to the Major and he tells this Pvt. to handle the situation! So Pvt. Marco Morelli does what he’s been trained to do and that is shoot the bad guys. Unfortunately, they also begin shooting the hostages. But Morelli, to his credit, is wasting a lot of terrorist. He’s killed about a dozen now and finally realizes that the shooting has stopped. There’s no one left alive in the reactor room. It didn’t go into meltdown, but everyone including the civilian technicians are all dead!
So, how’s that for your first action right out of boot! I don’t think many present day boots could handle that. I know I probably couldn’t considering how young and naive I was at about eighteen years of age. That’s about the age of Marco Morelli. He had vision of coming in the military and making something of a hero of himself. He had a girl back home that he was newly engaged to. They had even picked out a house they wanted after their marriage. But, now Pvt. Morelli is finding out that the apparent failure of this whole operation has to be blamed on someone and he’s the guy at the end of the pointing finger! Yeah, the MEC (Merged Earth Colonies) Navy doesn’t want responsibility for the death of so many civilians. So, Pvt. Marco Morelli is told that while he did a good job killing a lot of terrorist, he’s going to be held accountable for all the civilian deaths! He could, in fact, be facing a courts-martial and dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps! How’s that for a crappy start to your short career!
Well, not all is as it seems for Pvt. Morelli. He’s eventually summoned to the office of Colonel Okoro where he suspects he’ll hear his sentence read. Yet, he’s surprised when she is actually very cordial to him. She dismissed the MP escort and tells Marco to have a seat. She begins by telling him that his situation is quite dire, but she has an offer that he should really accept. He can’t imagine what it might be but she’s going to tell him of his future life. Instead of being dishonorably discharged he’s going to be reassigned to the Cygni Corps.
It seems that there are far worst enemies of the Earth than just the few terrorist that Morelli has recently encountered. Those really bad enemies need some really bad Marines to engage them and kill them with prejudice. Col. Okoro now knows that Morelli can kill, he killed 11 terrorist by himself already, so she’s telling him he’s going to be sent to the Cygni Corps for the duration of his enlistment or until he dies! One could come a lot sooner than the other.
It turns out the Cygni Corps contains a lot of “bad” Marines. These people have broken some kind of rule that could have gotten them dishonorably discharged, but the MEC needs all the warm bodies they can get, so the Cygni Corps fits that need. Pvt. Marco Morelli soon finds out that his new squad is comprised of some very uniques people, most of which he would not want to meet alone in a dark alley! Yet, once he gets to know his new squad mates, they aren’t much different from him. But he also finds out that he’s going to be taking some kind of experimental injection called Proteus. This is to help him control his emotions, but it’s not working quite the way it’s supposed to or is it.
Ok, this is something of a long book. These Marines are going on one mission after another with not much recovery in-between. I don’t think anyone could actually survive this kind of intense, continuous combat, and some don’t include a Lieutenant. More will come for Macro Morelli in book 2, “Task Force Altair”. I’m looking forward to reading it and all the books in this series.
==[Note: As of 12/03/2023, this will not be published on Amazon since I have been banned from posting reviews for some unknown reason. Once the ban is lifted, assuming it does get lifted, I’ll go back and post this to Amazon.]==