When Duty Calls: A Novel of the Legion of the Damned

When Duty Calls is another Legion of the Damned novel and it’s one of the better ones I’ve read. In fact, Dietz writes our heroes into some crazy situations that I swore were impossible to get out of – I knew they were dead – but somehow, someway, they survived, or at least some of them did. Written wizardry. Captain Santana is back, kicking ass with his company of biobods and cyborgs, fighting the Ramanthians on Planet Gamma-014 in the Clone Hegemony, a government and people that play a huge role in forming an alliance with The Confederacy of Sentient Beings. Santana’s love interest, Christine, is back in this book as well, although this time she falls for a clone, so there’s some tension here and she has to make a show more decision. Pretty unfair to Santana, if you ask me, out there getting pounded with his men, risking his life just about every minute. Speaking of risking lives, the fighting on this planet is so fierce and so bloody, it’s just a slaughterhouse, mostly of humans. The bugs are slaughtering humans and it’s mostly because there’s an idiot clone general in control of the invasion and he doesn’t know what he’s doing, first of all, and second, he’s only sending in human troops to do the fighting and he’s holding back all of the clone troops to do administrative work, which pisses the humans off and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it. So, they’re dying by the tens of thousands for nothing. Things get really tense, over and over, as they have to fight mutineers, bug ambushes, while hoping to get rescued by civilian spacecraft, which is dangerous to both the civilians and the soldiers, and the climax of the book is, well … climactic! There’s a ton of nonstop action in this book. You don’t really have time to stop and think, but then this isn’t a philosophical tome. It’s a shoot ‘em up military sci fi action novel. If that’s what you’re looking for, this is the book for you. Four stars and recommended. show less