Ok, stay with me on this one, it has a couple of interesting story lines. There’s the Board like in Corporate Board with Directors that make all the executive decisions for any large and vast company. Only this company happens to be the Imperial Human Empire. The Empire has a King and Queen and a whole bevy of royalty. They do their royal things, hob-knob with the rich and famous and generally have fun and give the appearance that all is well within the Empire.
It’s not! The Board knows this but aren’t necessarily in a hurry to fix things or even change much. The Board knows that it makes all the real decisions for humanity and they like it that way. Individual Board members have lots of responsibility, but they make lots of money also. They do by and large try to keep the King, Queen and the royalty happy and informed of things the Board thinks they should know about.
Samuel Levine isn’t any where close to being royalty nor is he anything of interest to the Board. He knows how the system works because he’s had several jobs within the system, one of which was with the Security Corps and then with a private firm doing similar security related jobs. Neither worked out for Sam so now he’s already spent his last dollar, can’t pay his rent so he turns to the only thing that might get him out of his predicament.
Sam is going to do a job for the Constance Family. That’s like working for the mob only this Mob controls an entire planet name Constance. They control almost all the crime on every human occupied planet and you usually have to work for them if you’re going the criminal route. Sam doesn’t have a choice. He thinks he can score a big pay-off if he can just do this one more job. He believes he’ll earn enough money to get off the planet and go live somewhere else, any place else.
Sam has a technical partner that goes by the name of Shep. She’s usually tied to him by earbud comms when he’s doing a job. She is the computer expert that can break into just about any system and shut-down alarms and especially security cameras. Sam has convinced one of the Constance mob bosses that he can break-in the Security Corps HQ and steal a codex. That codex contains all the code required to allow a person or persons to travel freely throughout the Empire. There are not very many of them on Mars so having one is worth a whole bunch of money. But, breaking into the Security Corps HQ is just sort of insane, but Sam believes he can do it.
Then we start following a small squad of military out on a colony planet that has been hit by the Gorlans. These are very angry aliens that consider every planet theirs and don’t want humans on any of them. Oh, they don’t actually want the planets themselves, they just want the humans to be gone. Their usual attack is one of total destruction. They bomb the planet to rubble and then land their troops to kill every last living human, and then they leave. Sergeant Jeff Culver (Cully) has only a few troops left at his outpost on Calliope. The Gorlans have already decimated the major colony city and now they are systematically stomping out all the military bases and post. Sgt. Cully has to get his remaining troops to an evacuation point if they are going to live. He has to fight some idiot civilians who believe this is a perfect time to raid an army outpost even though they are going to die since they aren’t part of the last evacuation airlift. You will meet up with Sgt. Cully and his troops on another mission later in the book.
Lastly, Caden Raines is the Justiciar who gets assigned to find out who broke into Security Corps. HQ. Will this lead him to Sam Levine and how does the names of Rodrigo Knowles and Aldo Cassidy fit into this story. Well, it’s going to be a surprise for sure. Very scientific and a lot is going to change for a number of people especially Sam and Aldo.
This story doesn’t end here although it could. I’m not sure if we follow everyone into the next book, but I think Aldo has a big part. Book 2, “Losing Ground”, is avialbe on Amazon right now.