12/04/15
These books are a little hard to understand. It’s got a lot of moving parts that sometime don’t seem to fit together. If you remember, we have a bunch of humans who, as children, were turned over to an alien race, the White Knights, in order for them not to destroy Earth. These children were taken to another world, Tranquility, and put in the care of the Hardits and Jotuns for the purpose of being trained as Marines. These human Marines were then expected to be the warrior class for the White Knights and fight their battles.
So, from an early age, a bunch of human kids have grown up together, trained together, and now are fighting together, but in a different way than planned. One Marine, Arun McEwan, has been gifted with a different brain than the others in that he doesn’t feel compelled to follow the orders of the Hardits, Jotuns, or White Knights. He has befriended another alien race and in particular, an Alien he calls Pedro, whom together they devise a plan to free the human Marines from their Hardit, Jotun masters. They are now the Human Legion with a starship of their own and are out to fight against the White Knights to win their total freedom not only for themselves, but all humanity.
They have tried to capture Tranquility, but were unsuccessful due to the number of Marines with McEwan is so small in number. But, they do find out that there is a cache of millions of human warriors kept in cryogenic stasis deep below the major city of Detroit on Tranquility. McEwan decides he needs to find some allies in his war so they approach a alien planet to see if they can convince the inhabitants to join the Legion. It turns out that the aliens on this planet are closely related to fish, but can and do remain out of water for extended periods of time. And, just like humans, these aliens have some political in-fighting with the High Priest (Listener Prime) intent on overthrowing the Queen. He intends to blame a massacre of his people’s children on the humans and make the Queen look bad in inviting them to come to her planet.
McEwan’s forces figure out the plan and manage to defeat the aliens who were about to kill a bunch of alien kids. They also let the Queen know what was going on and she kind of believes what they were saying until she sees Commodore Indiya and her flaming purple hair. Apparently, these Littoranes have some prophecy that says a “purple warrior” will deliver them from their slavery under the White Knights. So, now they decide they must become allies with McEwan and his Human Legion.
So, with the help of these new Allies, McEwan sends a Task Force back to Tranquility to rescue the remaining sleeping human warriors. At the same time, he needs to find a base of operations on a planet. The Khallini System seems to be the perfect location. The fourth planet is the perfect location for his forward base. Now come some big battles. Not only does he and his forces have to capture this planet, they must do so without destroying all of its facilities. And, during the fighting for the planet, he gets some Intel that says a large Imperial Flotilla is headed his way. This flotilla appears to be way too large for McEwan’s forces to oppose, so he has a decision to make; stay and fight for what they need or keep running.
Read the book to find out what the Human Legion does. There is a lot of fighting, a lot of different characters and several different plots going on all at the same time. It’s interesting, but kind of hard to keep track of most of the time. Still, I like this book and this series. It certainly isn’t over yet. The White Knights haven’t been touched, but I think their time is coming.