Wanted by their enemies for exposing the Black Sword cabal and faced with the difficult task of rebuilding the Special Operations Division while treason remains rampant, Major Zack Decker and Commander Hera Talyn are stuck in desk jobs. Until, that is, the Coalition and its minions decide to make things very personal. Forced back into the role of field operatives, they discover a plot to destabilize an entire sector and bring it under the iron-fisted control of a Commonwealth government eager to abandon democracy in favor of imperial dreams. Racing against time, and soulless foes, they have one chance to prevent a civil war and rescue someone more precious to Zack Decker than any other living thing in the entire universe: the daughter he hasn't seen for twenty years. Not even the threat of disgrace and imminent death are enough to deter Decker because, as his foes will find out once again, he's still one of the Few…
Covert missions are failing, Fleet officers are vanishing, and Naval Intelligence is losing its eyes, ears, and the ability to strike at its foes. After Zack Decker and Hera Talyn, the Special Operations Section's deadliest agents, narrowly escape betrayal for the third time in a row, the Marine suspects something more than bad luck is in play. For years, the Fleet has been fighting a shadowy cold war against factions in the Commonwealth determined to strangle democracy and give birth to an empire. Has that war turned hot without warning? In a quest for answers, Zack Decker volunteers to undertake his riskiest mission yet. With treason rampant at the heart of the Fleet, perhaps even within Naval Intelligence itself, he and Talyn must disappear until they discover the identity of their unseen enemies.
Along the way, Decker will come face to face with humanity's worst impulses and its noblest spirits. And though he can't trust his colleagues and superiors, other than his partner Hera, he knows he can always trust his Pathfinder comrades to stand tall against disloyalty. The Marine Corps' elite will gladly join him in teaching traitors the real meaning of unrestrained covert warfare. After all, spy or not, Zack Decker is still one of the Few...
All good things must end, and a reluctant Siobhan Dunmoore trades command of her battle group for a staff job ashore.
Yet her appointment to the headquarters of the 3rd Fleet, responsible for humanity's most restive frontier, is no accident. Things aren't quite right in what was once the most ferocious and effective formation in the Navy, and its control over the Rim Sector's outer edges is failing.
When Dunmoore investigates, she finds herself adrift on stormy seas with few allies and all too many foes, facing treachery, backstabbing, and corruption instead of guns and missiles. Will the Commonwealth's once victorious Navy revert to what it was before the Shrehari invasion, a politicized, ineffective force commanded by venal admirals? Or will Dunmoore and her friends arrest the decline as they fight for the honor of the Fleet and a future without war?
Life hasn't been easy for Siobhan Dunmoore and many of her fellow veterans since the Shrehari War ended.
The Fleet's quick return to a mundane peacetime footing left them unmoored and incapable of fully readapting after years engulfed in an existential struggle. Meanwhile, the memories of all those hard-won lessons, paid for with humanity's dearest blood, are fading as careerists, bureaucrats, and politicians in uniform replace the leaders who brought about the war's end.
Yet an increasing number of senior officers understand true peace is illusory. Without an external threat to unify them as a species, humans have resumed their favorite activity — fighting each other in dark and dirty wars for power, profit, or glory. And this despite the risk of eroding the Commonwealth's delicate social and political balance and triggering violent unrest. Ironically, those best suited for stopping nasty, albeit minor conflicts before they escalate, are the very veterans on which the Fleet turned its back.
Will Siobhan Dunmoore and her comrades find a new role in halting what could become fatal to human unity, or will they fade away, unwanted, while the Commonwealth begins a long slide into civil discord?
Captain Siobhan Dunmoore no longer enjoys the freedom to fight the Shrehari Empire on her own terms aboard the Q-ship Iolanthe. Special Operations Command has assigned her to Task Force Luckner, whose mission is replicating Iolanthe's success on a larger scale. Unfortunately, neither her new superior, Rear Admiral Kell Petras, nor any other captain in the task force understands successful commerce raiding requires a different mindset. Instead of sheepdogs, they must become wolves in sheep's clothing, and Dunmoore is just the right officer to teach them. Yet Petras and his flag captain are not interested.
But when an unauthorized raid on a Shrehari forward operations base produces surprising results, Dunmoore triggers a cascade of events which could forever change the course of the war. As the old saying goes, fortune favors the bold. Will Dunmoore prove once again that she and Iolanthe's crew are the most daring of them all?
What is the value of one life in an interstellar war that has already claimed millions? And if that single life doesn't matter, are any others worth saving?
A distress signal draws Siobhan Dunmoore's Q-ship Iolanthe, a battlecruiser disguised as a bulk freighter, away from her devastatingly successful hunt through Shrehari occupied space and plunges Dunmoore into a dark, merciless universe of competing government organizations, undercover warfare, and organized crime on a galactic scale. Along the way, she crosses paths with an old foe and an uncertain ally as she and her crew race against time and determined opposition to rescue innocent civilians condemned merely because they were in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Powerful forces within the Commonwealth would call a handful of lives collateral damage in humanity's existential struggle against the Shrehari Empire. But Dunmoore won't accept that they aren't worth saving even if it puts her at cross-purposes with her new commanding officer and the Commonwealth's fearsome security bureau. After all, her oath to serve and defend has no limitations and no expiry date.
Captain Siobhan Dunmoore wanted to believe the long war against the invading Shrehari Empire had finally banished the ghosts of her past. But when her ship Iolanthe, a heavily armed man-of-war masked as a bulk freighter, finds itself in need of replenishment after a long patrol spent stalking human and alien foes, she is confronted with events eerily reminiscent of a past she thought buried. When evidence of treason and marauders bold enough to strike a Navy outpost leave her no choice, Dunmoore knows she must finish the cleanup job Fleet Headquarters ordered her to abandon years ago.
Fortunately, Iolanthe and her crew are the perfect instruments with which to dispense much-needed retribution, despite General Orders and the Fleet's bureaucracy doing their best to tie a captain's hands. With her ship taking on the guise of a privateer, she sets out on a merciless hunt to eliminate a band of soulless soldiers of fortune and teach the ghosts of her past a lesson they will never forget.
Every Marine has a story about someone he couldn't save, a face that would haunt him forever. When Command Sergeant Hal Tarra, one of Decker's oldest friends, vanishes on the Commonwealth frontier shortly after taking early retirement from the Corps, Zack knows what memories are driving the former Pathfinder, because he sees the same face in his worst nightmares. Naval intelligence isn't interested in resurrecting ancient history, especially the tale of a failed rescue after it had been consigned to the memory hole. So Decker does the only thing he can, out of friendship and loyalty, and the hope that he might finally redeem the one they'd thought lost long ago: he orders himself on an unsanctioned mission, beyond Fleet support, risking everything for a friend. His intelligence colleagues never could understand the Marine promise, 'No One Left Behind' but as he keeps reminding them, he's still one of the Few…
Someone was setting fire to the Commonwealth Rim, nurturing a storm to drag humanity through the horrors of colonial warfare and thereby hasten the rise of Empire. Their plan had just one fatal flaw: it didn't count on an ex-Marine pathfinder with a grudge, a dagger and a deadly partner. Zack Decker had seen enough of war to know this one had to be stopped before it turned into an all-out bloodbath, even if that meant ignoring orders and risking his mission as well as his life. After all, he was still one of the Few…
Some people never learn that it’s a really bad idea to mess with a Marine Pathfinder, even one who has been forced into early retirement. Zack Decker just wanted to be left alone so he could live a quiet life with the woman he loved and make up for lost time, but his enemies simply couldn’t resist the temptation to pursue their vendetta. One moment, he was hauling cargo across the depths of interstellar space, the next he was in the hands of pirates and headed for the barbaric worlds beyond the Coalsack nebula, to be sold into captivity. Marines don’t make good slaves and Zack was more than happy to show everyone why he should have been killed straight away, because he was coming back, looking for blood. Revenge might be cold comfort, but he would remind them once again that he was still one of the Few…
Zack Decker wanted only one thing in life: to fight as a Marine Pathfinder. But his temper and his loathing for careerist officers cost him dearly. Forced into early retirement, with a wife who left him long ago, no job, no friends and no future, the former sergeant crawled into a bottle and stayed there, moving from planet to planet, looking for some reason to keep on living. Until, that is, he wandered into a bar owned by an old Marine buddy who offered to help. On the run after killing a corrupt cop, and nowhere to hide, he accepted.
Decker would have done better to head for the hills, or surrender to the militia, however old friends could be persuasive and he soon found himself signing on as security officer of a starship with dubious owners and a dubious crew, doing things for his new employer that tested the old saying 'Once a Marine, always a Marine.' Curiosity was Decker's other major failing and in short order he was on the run, hunted by a shadowy government organisation, and in possession of a secret that could destroy the Commonwealth. It was a secret to die for, and the people on his trail wanted to make sure he did. Along the way, they forgot that he could still fight like one of the Few...
This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.
My name is Caelin Morrow, and I run the internal affairs bureau for the entire Commonwealth Rim Sector. It means I hunt down corrupt federal officials of all stripes — police, military, political or bureaucratic — in the most fractious and nowadays most dangerous part of human space.
I also examine the private and professional lives of Constabulary officials destined for senior positions, to make sure they're not hiding a habit of taking bribes, abusing their powers, or worse. Assistant Commissioner Elden Braband, newly appointed as chief of police on Mission Colony, is one of the latter, and I had declared him squeaky clean. When the colony's governor complains about Braband a few months after his arrival, Deputy Chief Constable Maras, who commands the Rim Sector Constabulary Group, smells a rat. She asks me to investigate because honest cops don't go bad within a few months.
But hours after my team and I land on Mission Colony, a senior official is found dead in her office, leaving Assistant Commissioner Braband in a bind. The subsequent investigation will propel us into the heart of colonial darkness where corruption, organized crime, and corporate malfeasance combine in a deadly brew.
