Always Ready. Always There.
It was only a motto for Lieutenant Paul Reiter. A way to pay for college and earn some money on the side while studying and teaching history at a small college on Mars. When rising tensions force him into a tedious cycle of mobilize and stand down, Reiter considers it all just a speed bump to the rest of his life.
Then enemy planes cross the border, dropping panzerter mechs in their wake…
Within days, he loses his platoon sergeant and his commander. His battered company’s aging panzerters are no match for the new machines coming out of the Union and to make matters worse, a panicking government forces a bunch of teen conscripts on him to put his numbers back up.
The enemy advances rapidly, with new weapons and clone super-soldiers giving them an edge, and Reiter find his small hometown on the border getting further and further away.
Just as things look at their worst, Reiter finds himself in a new panzerter: the state-of-the-art Löwe.
Class is in session, the lesson: A cornered beast still has teeth.
It’s Gundam meets Band of Brothers in this novel by Afghanistan veteran T.E. Butcher.