About this ebook
The Federation is humanity's greatest achievement. But humanity may not be enough.
Eighteen months after the events of Marauder, General Johnny Rico has seen too many graves. He's fought the Bugs across a dozen worlds, buried hundreds of troopers, and learned to trust nothing in the dark between the stars. But nothing has prepared him for what's waiting in Z-Band Seven.
When Task Force Meridian vanishes inside the Zegema asteroid belt, the survivors who return aren't quite right. Uninjured. Compliant. Alive. But their eyes hold something no weapon can quantify — a listening stillness that looks almost like devotion.
Rico is sent in with thirty-two Marauder suits, two companies of Mobile Infantry, and a Fleet Intelligence officer with a classified file that's both brilliant and alarming. What they find deep in the belt is a Bug hive-ship unlike anything in the xenobiological record — a vast, organic intelligence parked in the dark, broadcasting something just below the threshold of sound. Something that reaches into human minds and rewrites them from the inside.
And back on Earth, the Church of the Ark is petitioning the Federal Council not to destroy it — but to speak to it.
With the Annihilator Protocol — a planet-killing weapon of terrifying precision — twelve days from deployment approval, Rico must untangle military conspiracy, religious fanaticism, and the possibility that the Bugs have stopped evolving bodies and started evolving minds.
Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more?
A high-octane military science fiction thriller set in the world of Starship Troopers — for fans of Robert A. Heinlein, John Scalzi's Old Man's War, and the visceral action of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War.
