Pretty interesting cover, to start off with. If you don’t know anything about the story, then you’re definitely can tell you’ll be doing something with aliens just by the cover. They looked like ants, and I guess the Q are sorta insects that can walk on two legs. But, first you got to read the beginning of this story. Practically none of these books only deal with one mission. Each one covers at least two significant missions or actions and that keeps them going far longer than most books. We’ll start this one by doing a deadfall insertion onto a planet to capture a bad guy. This jump would be from a hundred clicks. Peace of cake right?
Well, Sergeant Kel Turner would be leading Kill Team Three on this jump; his sixty-sixth jump and he prepared for this one just like he had for all the others. As it turns out, he’s done his calculations exactly right and the entire team hits right on the spot they intended. Now the hard part of their mission is about to begin. In this first mission, they are looking for a very, very wealthy guy who has some how gotten sideways with the Republic House of Reason. It seems he knows too much about a few things and he happens blurt-out what he knows to Kel and some of the team, but they don’t know if he’s wacko or not. He’s on about stolen alien tech and their laser comms as being second-rate. It really doesn’t matter to Kel and Kill Team Three anyway. They are to deliver this guy to the some justice agents and that’s that.
The second mission in this book is quite a bit different. Here they are on a Republic world that has a wealth of minerals just in reach of orbiting mining stations. This world is and will make a lot of people very rich including the Solar Wind Mining Consortium. This mega corporation had just made a deal with the, ah, let’s call her the head warlord of the eastern continent, to establish human settlements and fabrication businesses on the continent. This planet also supported the growth of human plants so they could grow large amounts of human food to sustain the growing number of corporate civilians that were currently on and coming to this world. All was well since the current warlord had a firm control of the army. That is, until she didn’t.
One of the Army’s three battalions had recently decided they didn’t like what was going on and one of their leaders decided to take a huge jump in rank and pay and declared herself the new warlord for the region. Now, Kill Team Three and Kill Team Seven has already been on the ground. They had been training the primary warlords army in the use of weapons and modern military tactics. They have even known that there was some resentment to humans involvement in this civilization, but they didn’t think it was serious until the Third Battalion took off with all their tanks and quite a few soldiers to form their own base. Anyway, you’ll have to fight these “rebels” and then all heck breaks lose after that. Those who you were training are now your enemy, well, not all of them, but it comes down to a pretty big battle. Sgt Turner has a big, big role in winning this battle and is getting a name for himself even though he certainly doesn’t want that to happen.
Again, a very well written book. It gets kind of bogged down in the middle because you’ll have to learn about the orbital mining operation. It becomes important later on in the story, but is pretty dry when you have to read through all the details of how they actually capture and mine asteroids. I’m looking forward to more books in the Dark Ops series even though I did jump the gun and got book 5 read and reviewed before I realized I had jumped ahead in the series. Next one up is book 3, “No Fail”. I got it on my list.