01
Specialist One:
The Price of Victory
Book One of the Proteus Chronicles
It is 2436, Earth is a supposed wasteland, and an authoritarian regime—the Union of Sovereign Realms—is master of Andromeda. For disgraced marine Sara Hart, that means a prison sentence in the 227th penal battalion.
Her only out? Being kidnapped and enlisting into a disreputable covert security group committed to the protection of life by any means necessary. She’s got a conflicted chain of command and a new team of untested genetically augmented and technically gifted experts.
But war calls from the depths of space: aliens reborn from the ashes of atrocity whose cries for justice demand the satisfaction of the sword, and they’re willing to use all the forgotten weapons at their disposal. The price of victory is always high, but the real questions is how high is acceptable when the cost is the life of all humanity?
02
THE MISSION
The singular unimpeded defence of human and humanoid security by any means necessary ...
The Unified Security Group known colloquially as “The Taskforce” was founded with a mission: the singular unimpeded defence of human and humanoid security by any means necessary. This contradictory ethos has been the driving force behind the Taskforce’s covert political intrigues, military interventions, and peacekeeping actions for over 400 years. But that ethos has made a lot of enemies, and The Taskforce has been forced to resort to covert means.
How do you fight a covert war against a public and alien foe?
How do you fight a foe to defeat who stands on the axiom Victory or Death?
And how do you keep yourself when the mission always comes first?