The first book of this series, “Latent Prowess (really strange word)”, gave a good forerunner to the things that were really going to happen in this book. Mitch Murphy, if you’ll recall, was a down and out loser. He was a weakling in everything he did including his marriage. He lost his job which he hadn’t done anything really to keep it, and then lost his wife to another man. Instead of facing these challenges, he crawled away thinking everything was his fault. Well, it was because he had no self-respect, nor any ambition to amount to anything.
Just by chance, he got selected for the Latent Enhancement Program (LEP) and became a Colonial Marine, a very large and strong Colonial Marine. The LEP serum also improved his mental acuity in that they made him the first LEP Marine Officer. Now he was known as 2nd Lieutenant Mitch Murphy. And he was joining his platoon of other like-enhanced Marines that formed the Latent Enhancement Operators (LEO) Platoon. They never previously had a LEP officer so this was something new and they were eager to make it work.
Fortunately, Lt Murphy was very adapt at learning new things. He had learned well at his Officer Training, as short as it was, and now he was learning from some highly motivated and intelligent NCOs. They in-turn were pleased to have an officer to lead them that was like them and also seemed know what he was doing. That was proven when they were deployed to New Terra to help stop the aliens from taking over this Earth colony.
While the fighting was fierce, there were just too many of the Lymies (spider-like aliens) to defeat although the fleet and the Marines tried. They finally realized that it was best to evacuate the planet taking as many colonist as could be loaded up in the shuttles available. Except there weren’t enough shuttles. Some colonist were going to be left behind. Lt. Murphy and his platoon were loading on the last shuttle to leave when a father with his young daughter run up just as the shuttle door was closing. He pleaded to Murphy to at least take his daughter. Murphy, acting on impulse, jump from the shuttle and picked the man and his daughter up and threw them on in his place. The shuttle door closed and took off. No one was coming back for Lt. Mitch Murphy and he knew that.
He set about setting up a defensive position as best he could but the Lymies were coming in force. At the very last, a larger alien landed in a strange spaceship near Murphy and was looking for a fight. He wanted to kill the last human on this planet and claim it for his species. Yet, another strange craft also landed and two other aliens defended wearing robes. They told the large alien to leave or suffer the consequences. It did not so the three aliens started to battle with what appeared to Murphy as swords.
This fight didn’t last long with the two aliens finally getting the better of the larger one. After its death, they turned to Murphy and asked if he wanted to go with them. They said it would be important to his civilization if he would join them now. Since Murphy was tired and had no hope of being rescued anytime soon. He decided to go with these new, strange aliens. Little did he know his life was again about to change.
Lt. Murphy was chosen to become a member of the Order of Scion. That involved a lengthy indoctrination period of training and learning. He would soon be able to do things that no other human could or would have thought to have been possible. Yet, one of the stipulations of joining the Oder of Scion was that he couldn’t return to Earth anytime in the near future, someday by not soon. What Murphy really wanted to do was go back to New Terra and save his friends. Will he get the chance to do so?
A good series with a human finally getting portrayed as something other than a weakling. Book three, “Gravity Storm”, is available for pre-order on Amazon and should be avialable by 7 May 2024.