James McGill, our hero and all-round goof-ball, Centurion of the mercenary Legion Varus, is enjoying some downtime back in Georgia and on his parents farm. He lives in a shack in the back and usually enjoys the peace and quiet. His daughter Etta has been around the farm and shows up on his porch one night with something she didn’t want to show her Dad. He convinces her to reveal her little treasure and finds out it’s an ancient old gun and web holster. The gun used bullets projected by gunpowder which hadn’t been used for centuries. McGill asks Etta where she got this stuff and at first she doesn’t want to tell him, but she eventually does. She leads James out into the swamp and to a dirt cover bunker. James have never seen this bunker in all the time he’s wandered around in this swamp, so his curiosity is definitely up.
It turns out that Etta had already been exploring this underground bunker. She had no idea for what it was used for or why it was even there. She found other ancient equipment in the bunker, most of it rusted and very usable but now she was sharing her find with her Dad. They both managed to rummage around and then found a trap door that lead even further down in this bunker. While Etta thought this had something to do with aliens, McGill was certain this bunker was part of the old Unification Wars. The Unification Wars was something that wasn’t talked about in the open any more. It was basically an uprising against the government and this bunker was apparently a hiding place for some of those rebels. James McGill didn’t know a lot about that war, but he did know someone who did and that was Tribune Graves, his immediate superior in the Legion. So he mad arrangements to contact him although his unit wasn’t active right now.
While McGill didn’t tell Graves exactly what he wanted to talk to him about, Graves already knew! That, in itself was kind of surprising if not down right strange. So, McGill and Graves met at a usual drinking hole near Central HQ. Graves told McGill that whatever he had found needed to stay lost and that he should never, ever, go near that bunker again. In fact, he told McGill that he shouldn’t even be talking about the Unification Wars and their meeting never took place.
Well, that meeting certainly didn’t satisfy McGill’s curiosity, so he starts using his tapper to do some searches to see if the can find more information on the Unification Wars and why it’s not talked about. Right after doing that he receives a summons on his tapper to report to Imperator Galina Turov. Now you know the relationship between these two so I won’t go into details here, but she does direct McGill to report to her office immediately. Come to find out Imperator Turov has been informed by the Department of Internal Security that one James McGill has been looking for highly classified information. She has tried to clear his name, but hasn’t had much success so when he reports to her office, he’s arrested by Hogs and taken down to detention.
Things don’t look good for McGill. In fact this is the worse situation he’s been in in a long time. He’s charged with Treason just because of the information he was attempting to access. Anyone that wants information about the Unification Wars is automatically considered a subversive and subsequently arrested. His appeals to his superior officers go unanswered since they want nothing to do with this. Surprisingly, James’ arrest results in him being tried before a computerized Judge and since he had killed three of his arresting Hogs, he was sentenced to be Permed for a total of ten years! Seven years for high-treason do to his unauthorized for disinformation and one year each for killing each of the three Hog guards! James McGill was totally stunned. He couldn’t believe this was happening, but it did.
Of course this story doesn’t stop here. There’s a lot, lot more to come. James manages to complete about nine months of his sentenced and then is revived. He’s given his old uniform back and then marched up to none other than Praetor Drusus’ office. Come to find out, the Praetor had commuted his sentence. This leads to why which is because the Rigel bears are sending a delegation to Earth to witness the testing of the Earth’s new defense shield. They have specifically requested Centurion McGills presence for some reason. Now this is where things get strange and started.
The test of the defense shield is to be witnessed by almost all of the Legion and Hegemony leadership. Everyone is there including McGill although he has no reason why. The test is to be conducted by firing a test dummy missile at the shield. Well, the missile was fired and it blew up everything, including McGill. He gets revived later but now the Legion and Hegemony has to find a traitor in their midst who seems to be working for Rigel. War with Rigel is now on the horizon. It’s going to be one heck of a war. Read more to find out.