We start off with our special forces operators conducting some strange rescues mission. This doesn’t seem to fit in their mission parameters, but it’s the mission they’re assigned so they do it. This civilian freighter seems to have a reactor problem and doesn’t have the personnel or the expertise to stabilize it. Bossman and his team, to include Jimmy or Nomad, his assigned call sign, are going to board the freighter and escort some Army engineers from the *Forestall* to do the inspection and repair if possible. This civilian freighter does seem to be any kind of threat to anyone so it’s kind of surprising that Bossman and his team are even involved.
What they do find out is this freighter is registered to the Chartean Empire. The Chartean Empire had a section of its capital planet, Chartea, set aside for humans that didn’t like the way the Common Wealth did things. One of those things allowed in this human sector was slavery. Even the Chartean Emperor didn’t approve of slavery, but if these humans wanted to enslave each other then he allowed it. That’s where Captain Ramus and his pirates, previously located on Sanctuary, ran his slave processing operations. We already read where the operation was stopped by the capture of Captain Ramus who now aided Bossman and his team with vital intelligence about the slave trade on Chartea.
It just so happened that while aboard the freighter, Nomad, had come across a technician that was wearing a compliance collar denoting that she was a slave. Milton, the units almost sentient AI, had devised a device that could query these compliance collars and identify any military personnel that were taken captive and placed into slavery. That device had been part of Nomad’s kit when he went aboard the freighter. He queried her compliance collar and it came back to confirm that she had a military-grade SNA neural interface which meant she was part of the same military as Nomad. Nomad had immediately taken her back to the dropship he and the other operators came in on. She was stunned that she was actually going to be freed from her slavery.
So, that got everyone to talking about the fact that it was known that a number of military personnel had gone missing in the slave trade ran by Ramus. He wasn’t very discerning when it came to capturing people and turning them over to the human slave market on Chartea. A mission was soon laid in to go to Chartea and just find out how many of their military personnel were in slavery on the planet. The human Prefect that governed the humans for the Chartean Emperor swore that while his people allowed slavery, none of the slaves on Chartea were former military personnel. That was going to be challenged in a very serious way with this mission. The team was going to do it discreetly at first until they did in fact find any military person wearing compliance collars.
It is going to be very apparent that a lot of former military personnel are used as slaves on Chartea. As soon as the team entered the Prefect’s home, they were getting pings from military-grade SNA neural interfaces. A plan was put into motion to go back to the capital city and rescue all of these military personnel. Some of the plans worked out fine, others did not. The fact that SNA military personnel were running around the capital taking slaves back to their ship definitely go the attention of the local police force. They attempted to stop this action at the direction of the Prefect. They even manage to capture Nomad and placed him in a holding cell telling him that he had a long sentence in the minds once his trial was over.
Obviously, Major Hawthorne isn’t going to let one of his operators sit in jail for very long. They do extract Nomad from the jail and also find out that there are a lot of captured SNA military personnel being used as slaves on one of the mines operated by the Prefect’s people. They also find out that the Prefect has another operating mine going on that could very well end his life if anything was found out about it.
And find out about all of this was the next mission of these special forces operators. There’s going to be a lot of fighting but it will result in liberating a lot of former slaves who can possibly go back to their military careers if they haven’t been too terribly mistreated as slaves. As for the humans who have been mistreating these slaves, well, that’s not going to be a very happy ending for most of them.
It seems with the end of this mission, the 29th Unconventional Military Detachment, will once again be disbanded with all the personnel going to new assignments. And that seems to be the end of this series. I might just check into some other books by Will Crudge.
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[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. ]