Back again with Hank Spears, Bounty Hunter. Except he’s not actually hunting any bounties lately and that’s going to get him in trouble. But last we left him, the Inquisition had just appeared over Emortium, the capital of the Consortium. Inquisitor John Gregory has somehow reappeared as the Hand of Truth declaring all the politicians as enemies of the state and were to eradicated. John Gregory should be dead, very dead because Imogen had severed his head back aboard the *High Cloister* and even that ship should have blown up. Now both were here with a number of other Inquisitors and their Acolytes systematically killing all the people in the government building which Hank Spears had been visiting.
Hank had come to see Governor Vince Delfina, Imogen’s Uncle, who was now one of the three Triumvir of the Consortium. He had been trying to convince his fellow politicians that the true threat to the Consortium was Twain, the evil AI. That entity was building an army of lobotomized people. This incursion by the supposed Inquisition and John Gregory was a direct result for Twain’s involvement. This version of the Inquisition was absolutely false, yet most of the politicians were now running for their lives and didn’t have time to listen to anyone. Hank Spears, along with Alek, his Kyrogi friend and body guard for Governor Delfina, plus Imogen, and Clynt were fighting their way towards to *Buzzard* in hopes of saving as many people as possible.
They finally made their way through that battle but had a lot of people on-board the *Buzzard* that couldn’t be taken back to their secret lair, so they decided to take the Governor and his people to his home planet of Pram. There Alek called in a large number of his friends and hired them to protect the Governor and his compound against all enemies.
A few months after this action, Hank, Imogen and Clynt are out rounding up all those criminals that had escaped from the prison that Hank and General Ammo’s troops had opened for six of the General’s people. They hadn’t meant to let loose all those other prisoners so Hank felt an obligation to go after them. They were just rounding the last one up when he got a call from Zenobia, his Falconer. She had another job for him but without Lara Shen, a.k.a., Kilara Vex, Hank wasn’t a high enough rank to go after this next bounty. That was fine with him, Lara was still gone sorting her family out, and Hank wanted to go back to Pram to she how the Governor and Alek were doing.
Well, the Governor’s compound now looked like an army camp. He had security every where and there wasn’t anyone going to attack him and live to tell about it. But, there had been an attack and it wasn’t against the Governor. It was against Alek and he almost lost his head! Alek told Hank that with the Governor now secured in his compound, Alek would like to join up with Hank and maybe they could go after whomever had tried to kill Alex.
So, off with go on this adventure which, again has nothing to do with fighting Twain. These books really do get off mission more than any I have read. No only are they now looking for a guy/gal trying to kill Alek, but Lara is still out doing something totally not going after Twain! This adventure will take us a long way off their main mission, but they do eventually get a lead on Twain, but they don’t follow it in this book. Lara does eventually rejoin the group, but then Imogen gets shot while working on the bad guy that tried to kill Alek. So she’s going to be laid up recovering for some time.
What is actually happening is that Alex, through all these side jobs is creating an army that can and will respond when he gets around to actually doing something about Twain. The problem though is that Twain is also building an army. Given enough time, he might have way too much for just Hank and his people to handle, maybe not. This story does have a lot of exciting fights and we learn a lot more about Kryogies and Alek.
Obviously more will follow in book 9, “Machine Learning”, now available on Amazon.
==[Note: As of 12/03/2023, this will not be published on Amazon since I have been banned from posting reviews for some unknown reason. Once the ban is lifted, assuming it does get lifted, I’ll go back and post this to Amazon.]==