Search Worlds Without End

Earth had won its war with the Troft because of the Cobras, a guerilla force whose weapons were surgically implanted, invisible to the unsuspecting eye, yet undeniably deadly. The Moreau family were the most famous of the Cobra warriors, but their descendent, Jasmine “Jin” Moreau Broom, is worried about the current attitudes of the Cobra worlds and their leaders. Generations after the planets were settled, not everyone on the Cobra worlds thinks that the Cobras are worth their high cost, and favor cutting their funding.

Then a new factor is thrown into the mix. Jin receives a message, sender unknown, delivered by a Troft messenger:

To the Demon Warrior Jasmine Jin Moreau:

Urgent you return at once to Qasama. Crisis situation requires your personal attention.

Years ago, a Cobra team, including Jin, had gone to Qasama at the urging of the Troft to counter a threat to other planets, both human and Troft. Jin and her family cannot think of a reason why any Qasaman would want Jin or any other Cobra to return to their planet. Moreover, the Cobra worlds have prohibited any of their citizens from traveling to Qasama, and backed up the prohibition with stiff prison sentences.

But the possibility of danger to the Cobra worlds is too important for Jin to ignore the message. She and her son Merrick, also a Cobra, book passage on a Troft ship to Qasama. But are they really going where their help is needed—or are they walking into a trap?

When the colony worlds Adirondack and Silvern fell to the Troft forces almost without a struggle. Outnumbered and on the defensive, Earth made a desperate decision. It would attack the aliens not from space, but on the ground—with forces the Trofts did not even suspect. Thus were created the Cobras, a guerilla force whose weapons were surgically implanted, invisible to the unsuspecting eye, yet undeniably deadly. And the Moreau family were the most famous of the Cobra warriors. Long after victory over the Troft was achieved, the Cobras made common cause against their former adversaries against a new enemy. Their reward was three planets that would be a home for the Cobras, who deadly powers made them too dangerous to feel at home on Earth.

Now, years had passed and not everyone on the Cobra worlds thought that the Cobras were worth the cost of maintaining their existing built-in weaponry, let alone supporting research to improve the Cobra weapons, and possibly even put an end to the negative effects of that built-in weaponry, which caused Cobras to die much too young. Many who had never known interplanetary war were convinced that the Cobras were not needed at all.

That was a grave miscalculation, because a Troft faction has decided to invade the Cobra planets in force, using a new strategy that even the formidable Cobra warriors may not be able to defeat . . .

Cobras warriors, genetically enhanced and implanted with an arsenal of covert weaponry, are the most dangerous guerilla fighters humanity has ever produced. For Jin Moreau Broom, the war is the culmination of a lifetime of Cobra service. But it is also the height of danger for herself and her family as they struggle to survive a war that none of them ever expected to see.

The Troft invasions of Qasama and the Cobra Worlds has had at least one result: it has turned long-time antagonists into uneasy and unwilling allies. As the aliens battle to consolidate their conquered territories, a small group of Cobras and Qasaman Djinn work together to create a victory that will rock the invaders to the core, a victory designed to bring other Troft demesnes into the conflict on the humans' side.

Now one young Cobra must forge a new political order as a devastating alien enemy strikes—an enemy more deadly than any humanity has ever faced.