It’s time for Van Tudor and his crew to go on the offensive against the Equal Grasp. As you know, the Equal Grasp has been operating on Earth for some time now and their plans are coming to light. Advertising that humans can now be working in outspace after undergoing a simple procedure, the Equal Grasp is enticing a lot of humans to sign up for the trip. Unfortunately, this people are going to get chipped and then be nothing more than computer zombies for whoever will eventually buy them. Of course this later part of the deal isn’t something that is known but Van Tudor has become aware of the Equal Grasp’s overall plan and he’s determined to stop it.
His first problem is how to get the Guild to leave the Solar System. Some how, Yotov has gotten her hooks into the Peacemaker Guild and they are now protecting Earth and the Solar System from everyone except the Equal Grasp. So, Van has to find a way to get them out of the picture. He called upon a Faalaxi Matriarch for whom Van had saved from some very embarrasing family business. She isn’t the goverment for her world but the Faalaxi are Charter Signatories so Van convinces her to invoke a little know article, Section Three of the Charter’s Article Five. This required the Guild to leave the Solar System while an investigation had to take place to proof they need to be there. With this done, Van had to act and he had to do so in a big way.
It wasn’t going to be easy. While the Guild might have left, the Equal Grasp still had assets of their own and they were determined to stop Van his ship, the Fafnir from landing any where on Earth. Well, that worked until it didn’t. Van started calling in some of his well armed friends to include his Mother and Grandmother. Both had very capable ships and knew others who could come along if needed. Icky’s Father showed up with his battleship so that just about settled Van’s access requirements to Earth. Cantullin Station was also well armed and could be used as a stagin site for any actions in the future.
After several attacks by the Equal Grasp and with the ever increasing bounty they were placing on Van, his ships and crew, it was time to start protecting themselves. They also needed a permanent presence on Earth. So Van comes up with a plan. He’s going to build his own spaceport and commerce building right there on the farm in Iowa. It’ll be called “the Nexus” and it will be the beginning of the end of the Equal Grasp. Van had a vision of providing Earth with a slow trickle of new technology to include medical advances, but not so much to overwhelm Earth’s current efforts in these areas. His Nexus was definitely NOT going to introduce some highly lethal alien weapons and start a war on Earth. That was exactly what the Equal Grasp was working on. They wanted humanity to get itself intangled with war so as to not pay much attention to the every larger reduction to the human population. The Equal Grasp was already taking remote and isolated village by force, chipping the people and selling them to the highest bidder. That had to stop.
Van also needs to protect not only the Earth at large, but also this new operation on the farm. He go to the Quiet Room and talks to Dayna Jaskin about a loan to finance his huge plans. She surprisingly says that the bank is open to his ventures and practically gives him a blank check. The funds recover from the elimination of Dohlennz and Helem Gauss resulted in a substantial windfall of monies from their illegal business. Even after paying back those who were harmed, there was still a substantial amount of bonds sitting around that the Quiet Room really didn’t want to deal with. So, using those bonds, Van could buy whatever he wanted. Surprisinly, Van found that a lot of the things he needed, while expensive, were going to be given to him out of respect for what he had done in the past. They also knew that Van Tudor was going to do much, much more in the future and they were going to be with him all the way.
Yet, Van had one large and getting larger problem he had to deal with. Tornia, his wife, was with child/children and she was starting to show quite obviously. Her activities were also slowing down and quite frankly, the Fafnir wasn’t a place to have a baby or babies. So, they both agreed she needed to go back to Helso for a while, at least until the birth of their child/children. That was good until Helso came under attack by the Equal Grasp and their hired mercenaries! Van calls for everyone he knows to help in this fight and he’s going to be there to defend his family even if it kills him.
While all this activity, Earth and Helso, are taking a lot of Van’s time and efforts. He’s also come to the conclusion that he’s going to have to do something about the Peacemaker Guild. It is becoming more and more corrupt and not what it was supposed to be. How he was going to fix that problem will be some thing covered in the next few books, I hope.
Very fast paced action and lots of it. Easy to read and understand what’s going on even thought there are a lot of characters in these books. The next book, “Killing Stroke”, should be just as exciting and is available now on Amazon.