CALL ME ARES

Ares, a highly decorated, all-business soldier in Earth’s space-traveling future, leads his small, heavily armed, and wildly outnumbered team against enemy forces in Martelle’s SF novel.

Espenar Four is a rocky planet that has become a battleground for the military of the Human Force for Peace and a shadowy rival horde of aliens called the Scutigera, “A race of multi-legged bugs that crawled along the ground, with the ability to network their minds and coordinate.” The meter-long creatures carry beam weapons and are enigmatic, non-communicative, and implacably hostile. Humankind covets Espenar Four for its mining potential and fears the Scutigera will eventually spread their annihilating war to Earth. But politics and cultures do not concern the legendary Earth commando known only as Ares, nicknamed after the mythical god of war. Ares exists only to fight, carry out orders, protect his squad, achieve mission success, and defeat the enemy (honorably, not with sadism or vengeance). Ares and his team wear powered armor—each member wields the devasting strength of an army. But the bugs number in the millions and keep attacking, ignoring their own immense casualties. Ares must determine their true origin and weaknesses in the face of a looming, decisive bug assault on the HFP. Even casual SF readers will be reminded of the conflict concocted by Robert A. Heinlein in the iconic military SF classic Starship Troopers (1959). The premise is amplified here; while Heinlein used lengthy academy-instruction interludes to expound on warrior philosophy and military values, Martelle employs practically nonstop scenes of combat as his classroom. The fatalistic, punchy, and apothegm-rich prose (“The logic was irrefutable. As long as you lived, you had a chance to keep living. Once dead, it was too late”) should provide gamer-minded readers with plenty of diversion. It is only acknowledged in a scant way that Ares’ crew’s epic sacrifices are largely meaningless; if the humans win, they will likely just ravage Espenar Four for its resources and proceed to another world. The author, a retired Marine Corps officer, has positioned this yarn as the opener for a multivolume series.

Hard-charging, hard-combat SF for fans who thought Starship Troopers was too pacifistic.