Ingrid, Charles

THE SAND WARS: SOLAR KILL
Charles Ingrid
DAW 1987
Pb 301 pages
ISBN# 0-88677-391-1
 
Ooo, this is a fun set of books to read!  Six in all, THE SAND WARS is set in our distant future on various distant planets against a backdrop of insectoid enemies that nearly can't be beat.  Our hero is Jack Storm, the last survivor of a war that closed twenty years ago.  As a Dominion Knight, he has been trained in the "Pure War", meaning, war against enemy fighters but not against planetary ecologies that support life.  But his companion knights had been abandoned to their deaths on the planet Milos by their own emperor!  Now Jack seeks revenge.  Yet after seventeen years of coldsleep on a broken down space freighter and several more years trying to put his life back together again, it takes Jack some time to figure out how to exact his revenge.  And at the same time, his true enemies (betrayers within the empire) seek to destroy the one man who can unseat them from their powerful positions in the government.
 
The really cool part of Mr. Ingrid's SAND WARS story is Jack Storm's battle armor.  Not only is this armor fully loaded with sensors and weapons, but something happened to it on Milos.  Now it contains a parasitical sentience!  And it is a dangerous sentience that threatens to absorb Jack's body and transform him into a reptilian berserker! 
 
In SOLAR KILL (first in the series), Jack meets a street urchin by the name of Amber who can kill with psychic powers.  She teams up with Jack as they need each other for survival, but her enemy becomes his and his become hers . . . they're on the run as Jack searches for answers.  He signs up with mercenaries and honor becomes an issue of conscience.  Danger is never more than a page away in this high action adventure that turns its own pages!

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