About this ebook
Major Johnny Rico arrives on Hesperus Prime with a regiment and a single mission: hold the planet. Twenty thousand Arachnid warriors are entrenched in the cave systems below — and they are moving with a precision that no warrior-class colony has any right to possess. Decoy colony signatures. Staged ambushes kilometres underground. A relentless, directional push toward a classified research facility the Federation calls Site Seventeen.
What's inside Site Seventeen could change the war. The Marauder Project — powered exoskeleton combat suits that make one trooper the equal of twelve — is weeks from operational deployment. The bugs know it's there. And something intelligent, nine kilometres beneath the surface, is running a campaign to destroy it.
Rico has his regiment. He has Lieutenant Marcus Thorn, a man still carrying the weight of the eight soldiers he left in the dark on Kerrigan's World, now fighting to prove he can still be what the situation demands. He has Dr. Helena Voss, the scientist who built the Marauder suits and refuses to leave them — or the planet — without a fight.
What he doesn't have is time. Because the bugs aren't the only enemy. Somewhere in the Federation's command structure, a general with the right friends and the wrong priorities has decided Hesperus Prime should fall — and he's using his rank to make certain it does.
Blood and Iron is a relentless military science fiction thriller: tunnel warfare, political conspiracy, powered armour against impossible odds, and the question at the heart of every war — how much are you willing to pay for the thing worth saving?
Service guarantees citizenship. The bill comes due on Hesperus Prime.
