Staff Sergeant Reverent (Rev) Pelletier is still with the Home Guard and for the most part, he and his fellow Guardsmen have been doing nothing! His time with the Home Guard was kind of dragging on him in that he wasn’t getting the leadership time he felt he needed. With a top heavy company of the “best of the best”, there wasn’t much room for movement upward into a Team leader or even a Squad leader position and due to him being an IBHU Marine, he was being used differently for different missions.
Now one of his best friends, 2nd Lt. Aristotle Bundy, also a Perseus Union Marine, had just pick another guy to become the squad leader. While Rev was disappointed, he knew Lt Bundy had his reason and it wasn’t because Rev wasn’t ready. In fact, he got a chance to talk to the Lt. in private and the Lt. brought up the subject himself. It was just the fact that with Rev being an IBHU Marine, his use was going to be somewhat different than other Marines. There was even some talk of moving all the IBHU Marines into the same company so as to maximize their firepower. Rev didn’t agree with this idea, but the decision wasn’t going to be his and he wasn’t going to be asked his opinion.
In this book, they have a mission on Tian-X4 that starts out pretty badly. They hadn’t exactly expected anyone to be shooting at them on their decent onto the planet, but that’s exactly what happened. Their drop shuttle was hit and went in hard. This mission was going to be hard on the Congress of Home (CoH) troopers because of their strict rules of engagement (ROEs) and also, because they had Marines acting like cops! But, they got the job done and Rev was happy to leave the place. The CoH didn’t exactly come out of this mission looking very good, but that was due to a lot of politics and not due to the Marines involved.
In-between different Home Guard missions, they trained and trained some more. It was good training for missions that might never happen, but if anything, Rev wanted to be ready since who knows who they would be fighting. Then they would get the word to form up and be prepared to depart for another hostile mission. Apparently, a couple of big corporations with their own military were becoming hostile and the CoH was called in to mediate. So, Rev and other cooled their heals waiting for the final work to deploy. This time it never came! They stood down after a very long period of doing nothing but waiting.
Then something strange happened to their IBHUs. Yes, when not actively engaged in warfighting activities, Rev and his other IBHU Marines don’t wear their “weapon prosthetist”. They are stored in a central warehouse and maintenance shack for easy maintaining. Only that made the easy to steal! Not all the IBHUs were stolen, only about 5, but one of those belonged to Rev. And, the thieves weren’t gentle in their attacked because the senior tech, Mr. Daryll Begay, wound up in the hospital. Now, how long would it take to get the IBHUs back and what would have been done to them was the biggest questions.
They still had more missions to complete, but somethings were changing after the stolen IBHU incident. One of the Congress of Humanity nations will decide to withdraw and go their own way. That way will come into direct conflict very soon. It could be the start of a very long war or maybe not. But, it could also be the end of Rev’s participation in the Home Guard. That would be an interesting development.
There’s more book in the series. Book 6, “An Alliance Reforged” will be out on 24 November 2021 and is available for pre-order on Amazon now.