As I said in my previous review of book six, this series is science fiction horror. Yeah, it has a military aspect to it, except this book isn’t so military in that there isn’t much fighting this time. Everyone is just getting ready for the next big fight, even if they don’t know it.
Marco and Addy have settled in Greece on an island where they built the house that all five of the main characters wished for while fighting for their lives. It has a house built just like they wanted, big enough for everybody, but things don’t always work out the way you planned. Lailani has gone back to the Philippines where she built a number of schools for the children using money from the sale of some azoth crystals. She had enough to build five such school and now she was busy delivering books to said schools. It allowed her to visit with the children while giving her something constructive to do. She is still plagued by her wartime memories. Those memories go way back to her basic training time and through every war that she fought. She’s also reminded that she is an alien/human hybrid, controlling the alien side by having a chip implanted in her brain.
Lately, that chip doesn’t seem to be working all that well. She has an episode in one of the schools in front of the children and has to flee to a military hospital to have the chip examined. At first, the doctors thought she was just nuts until she got Marco and Addy on the phone and they convinced the doctors that this wasn’t just a routine patient they had in their care. They convinced them to call the, now President of the Alliance of Nations James Petty, and get his approval to fix and improve her chip. It was wearing out and the consequences of it totally failing wasn’t even a good idea. Marco and Addy fly out to the Philippines to stay with Lailani while she is recovering. She now has an on/off switch with which she can control the release of her alien side. She is cautioned to do so only in dire circumstances.
Meanwhile, Marco has found the woman of his dreams and it’s not Addy, well, it is, but not now. She’s Tomiko, which just happens to be the name of the girl in Marco’s book. Her and Marko have a whirlwind romance ending in them getting married. They are living in the house on the beach with Addy and Steve. The latter two have been hooked up since the end of the Marauder’s War, mostly because Steve can’t find work and Addy, well, she’s deserving of a long, long rest. Things seem to be going perfectly for the two couples. Almost too well.
Then there’s Captain Einav Ben-Ari. She’s now a Captain of the HSS Lodestar, the flagship of Humanity, on a scientific mission to meet new aliens and make friends. She is just about the only military person on the entire ship. It has a small crew and about five-hundred or more scientist of all disciplines. Einav kind of feels out of place. She’s not a scientist so when one of the “egg-heads” ask her some kind of technical question, she’s hard-pressed not to look totally dumb. Still, she is the Ship’s Captain and her command is the rule of law aboard this ship.
Everything appears to be going just peachy with all our four main characters. That’s usually when trouble starts. And trouble does start. People on Earth seem to be disappearing for no good reason. It is strange that Earth, which was supposedly devastated by the Marauders and their “meat factories” has some how recovered to the point everything seems normal. Still, there’s no mention of an Human Defense Force other than Captain Einav Ben-Ari and she has left Earth. Lailani, a war hero, did get some schools built, but there doesn’t appear to be food shortages or anything else bad left over from the Marauder’s War. Even Marco and Addy have an ideal life on a tropical island. That was sure some fast recovery, but I don’t think Earth learned anything from the two previous alien wars.
So, be prepared for some bad stuff to happen. Terribly, terribly, bad stuff. The author gets quite graphic in several scenes so if you’re into horror stuff, you’ll like this book. I’m usually not, but I’ve read this far so I’m not stopping now. I just don’t really know how this will end. It appears that their are two more books in this series. I’m not so sure I want to read them. At the end of this book, things are turning out pretty good for Marco and Addy, as they should. But, I have a bad feeling about what might happen in the next books. If this ends the way I think it might end, I’m going to be really, really angry.