Rating:

SunKiller

A book and a new series written by two of my favorite authors has a great chance of being great and this book is just that. I really liked the story-line and the character build up is also very good. In this book, you’ll meet former Chase Weston, a former Army Ranger, now turned to being a PMC or Private Military Contractor. And no matter how you want to word it, that to me says Mercenary. Not anything wrong with being a mercenary, but Chase Weston doesn’t like that term for some reason.

Chase has teamed up with some of his former associates in the Army. One is a pilot by the name of Priyanka Ambedkar who flies the Tamar. That’s an old gunship that Chief Aguilar keeps patched together any way he can and it has Adrain Hill, who’s a weapons & comms specialist. You’ll also meet some of Weston’s other former Army associates, but their relationship doesn’t last long after he leads them into a trap! Was it one he should have figured out before hand or was it just the way things went. Either way, that’s done and over and now his list of live associates is a lot shorter with his list of former, now dead, associates getting a lot longer.

Weston, Ambedkar, Hil and Chief Aguilar managed to throw their money in to buy the Tamar when it became available as war surplus. Now the Tamar is a space-capable gunship with an S-T engine which means it can travel the solar system or anywhere else faster than the speed of light. When the Soon-Tierney was invented and dumped on humanity, it immediately opened up space that before had been only fondly thought of. Now planets were being found and settled by usually huge corporations looking to make money on new sources of precious minerals or anything else in abundance. The need for security was always going to be something people needed so Weston’s team formed their Private Military Contractor gig that attempted to pay the bills. He had just managed to sign a new contract for some university that was sending an archaeologist team to look at a dig site.

The specifics of the contract stated that Weston would transport Dr. Evangeline Cortez and a Victor Lee to a planet called Vishnu. A Dr.Daniel Stephenson, Archaeologist, was already at the dig site on Vishnu, but he had found something and wanted Dr. Cortez to come see it and get her impressions of what he’d found. She was going to take the only graduate assistant that would travel with her and that was Victor Lee. So, she arranged to meet Chase Weston at his choice of places which happened to be Little Sammy’s bar on Gateway Station. Gateway Station was a privately owned space station between Earth and the moon. It didn’t care about police or government rules and regulations so this was an ideal meeting place for people wanting to do business. And, the university was going to empty their treasury on this trip without knowing what they were going to find at the end. So, Dr. Cortez and Victor Lee were hiring a PMC by the name of Chase Weston to get them to Vishnu and provide protection while there.

You’ll soon find out that whatever they are paying Weston and his team isn’t nearly enough. To say there are gangs running around trying to find out what’s going on everywhere would be an understatement. Most of the gangs were hired by large corporations to make sure the little guy didn’t get too big a piece of something, no matter what it might be. Even an archaeological find on a remote planet might be something of value, so Dr. Cortez’s journey wasn’t going to go unnoticed. What she does find at the site on Vishnu is something that everyone needs to know, but it won’t help if she and her grad student get killed. And that’s just about what happens right after they get there. Dr. Stephenson had found something alright and Victor Lee was now carrying it around. It might just be the most important find in all of history, that is if anyone can understand what it is.

So, this turns out to be a very exciting story. There’s someone chasing or trying to kill our main characters in almost every chapter. Just when you think they are done for, someone or something changes in their favor. Where this all leads isn’t detailed in this book so there will be lots more to follow. They have to collect something or many things and that’s going to lead to many, many more stories. Great reading.



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