Ok, well, this is kind of crazy. I read book 1, “Last Stand of the Legion: Rift”, by Rod Carstens way back in August 2014! I don’t know what happened to the series since I normally get the next book right after writing the review. Now 10 years later I’m reading the second book in the series. Still the name changed somewhat. I don’t believe the first book was called the “Marine Raiders” series, but as far as story continuity goes, this is the follow-on to that first book. This one is just as exciting as that first book and really hard to put down at the last.
We used to know Dasan Daniel Sand as a young starfighter pilot, a Lieutenant then. Now we’ve gone forward in history and Sand has done very, very good for himself. He’s now General Dasan Daniel Sand and is in command of the 1st Marine Division which also contains the 1st Marine Raider Battalion. This organization has come a long, long way since the first book. In fact, it didn’t even exist during the first book and that was a problem then Lieutenant Sand went about fixing. He convinced the powers that be that humanity needed a ground force to counter the hybrid ground troops employed by the Xotoli during there invasions of Ceti and Rift.
For twenty-five years he and others, including Major Axec Aijuba, had trained up what were former Legionnaires into Marines, the first of their kind for humanity in a long, long, long time. Major Aijuba had personally gone further and had hand picked and trained her Marine Raider Battalion which was just about to be put to use for the first time.
The Confederation has slowly been losing planets to the Xotoli for the last twenty-five years because it wasn’t configured to fight this kind of war. The Xotoli didn’t fight themselves. No they would capture humans and then turn them into nightmare hybrids pumped up with all sorts of drugs and technology that made them almost like super humans. Then they sent these hybrid soldiers against human facilities in mass waves. They didn’t care how many got killed as long as their objective was overran. Until the Marines were formed, the Confederation had no ground troops to fight this kind of war. Now they did and this was going to be their first offensive action against the Xotoli.
It was believed that the Xotoli needed specific resources to make their hybrid humans. One source of those resources came from a small planetoid name Von Fleet 703. The Confederation was going to go and destroy this mining operation as a first step in fighting back on the ground. Intelligence had said the facility, while very large, was lightly guarded with on security troops. They didn’t see any orbiting installations guarding the planetoid nor were there any Xotoli ships usually in the vicinity. This seemed to be a perfect target for the 1st Marine Raider Battalion. They would get in, obtain all the intelligence data about the Xotoli using these minerals, destroy as much as possible, leave and then let the small flotilla bombarded the entire facility into dust.
This would be a great test for the training, tactics and procedures for the 1st Raider Battalion. General Sand was going along and he would reside in his Command Center about one of the ship. He wanted to see how his Marines would execute this mission and hoped to conduct others in the future. Except, the intelligence he had received about the facility was totally wrong! Additionally, there were spies inside the Confederation political structure and they had told the Xotoli what was coming. This is not going to be a walk in the part mission! Far from it.
Ok, now the book is well written for the most part, but I have to comment on one particular thing. I do not understand how the author comes up with the name of his characters. They are very, very strange and hard to pronounce for an English speaking reader. I don’t think this is necessary. You should be able to write a book using common names which make it for easy reading. Some examples of the names you’ll find are: Dasan, Axec Aijuba, Mala Nani, Istas, Usiche, and many others that I just don’t know how to pronounce. And these characters are written about throughout the book. For this reason, and it may be why I let 10 years go by before reading this second book, I probably won’t be reading the third book. I just don’t like the interruption of my reading just trying to pronounce or figure out characters names. I think the author could and should have done better.
Still, for those interested in continuing the series, book 3, “The Conscripts: Fight or Die”, is available on Amazon now.