New author to me and the start of a new series. It’s a pretty simple concept for a book, not completely a military science fiction book, but pretty close. You’ll pretty quickly also notice that the story revolves around two main characters, Commander Predaxes and Inmate Malik. Yes, I said “Inmate”. See Predaxes is in command of a military prison. The key point here is it’s a military prison where most of these guys were on the wrong side of a recent invasion. A lot of them belong to Colonial militia and were only defending their colonies when the Lenzaab’s attacked. Commander Benjamin Predaxes was a Lenzaaban Marine, but the war was over so he was given a new assignment. That new assignment was Prison Station 12 (PS-12) also known as Purgatory!
PS-12 was unique, though. It sat right out side of a giant wormhole that put it some 50-light years from the Centridium and home. Not much came through that wormhole except regularly scheduled supply runs and an occasional prisoner drop-off. Since the war had been over for a while, there hadn’t been a lot of new prisoners coming in. But, the ones that had were trouble enough. Most of the trouble was because the Lenzaaban Marine guards didn’t have much use for their prisoners. They did work details and other stuff which on PS-12 was a lot of sustainment and maintenance. This used to be a space station comprising of four habitation rings. It was to say the least, huge. Each ring was almost a small planet on its own. The prisoners raised crops and tended to animals which fed them during their stay. Problems arose when the Marines didn’t appreciate the attitudes of these ex-military type and refused to follow some orders. Commander Predaxes and his Executive Office Lieutenant Commander Martin Garza were seemingly running to some kind of riot or another disaster almost every day.
These problems were really the fault of one Lieutenant Volina and several hard-nosed Sergeants. They wanted to run this prison by the book with no slacking by the prisoners. Yet, Predaxes recognized that his prisoners were not any different than him or his charges, they had just lost the war. He tended to be a lot more lenient than any of his underlings. His reasoning was that with the situation with the prison, these prisoners had no where to run. They had to be almost self-reliant or they would all die. So most of them did their jobs and caused no trouble, but when goaded by bull-headed guards, they became a little unruly. Additionally, somethings on the prison station had started going haywire! His usually competent AI called ARA, was having problems and he didn’t know why.
Then again, he had no time to investigate when a huge ship just came through the wormhole. It wasn’t scheduled and only had one prisoner, a Samea Malik, the son of the Lenzaaban Minister of Justice! Turns out this guy was wanted by a still active rebel contingent. He was being moved from prison to prison since these rebels had a habit of attacking every place he goes trying to get him back. When Commander Predaxes first met Malik, he didn’t see anything surprisingly different in this prisoner than any others. But that was soon going to change. Malik was more than he appeared in several different ways.
But, as had happened, the rebels came for him and tore up PS-12 before their ship had been forced to retreat. PS-12 was just slightly able to defend itself, it was very capable, but after this last attack it was becoming almost inhabitable by so many prisoners and their guards. Then the wormhole just went away! So, no help coming, no resupplies, and no going home for anyone. Not good.
What Commander Predaxes decided to do from this point on will change the entire lives of everyone still living. They have to find some place, some where they can build a new life knowing that the Lenzaabs in the Centridium aren’t going to be in any hurry to rescue a bunch of prisoners they didn’t want anyway. I suppose more will be forthcoming in Book 2, “Divine Intervention” now available on Amazon.