With the shocking suicide of the Typhoon I, the most powerful military spaceship ever built, the four Commer brothers are reduced to two. After the horrors of the Final War, the evacuation of Earth, and an unexpected conflict with native Martian terrorists, is eldest brother Jack really fit to lead the United System Space Force? Yet despite stress bordering on hysteria he always seems to come up with the proper solution. Shy with women but easy with command as opposed to his passionate, guilt-ridden brother Joe, when promoted to Supreme Commander Jack passes over numerous ambitious admirals and holds onto power for decades with the newest rejuvenation technology. But has he ever really recovered from the responsibility of overseeing forty years of futile time war with the Alpha Centaurians?
from Book One, The Martian Marauders:
“Did you find all that in the Martians’ minds as well?” Jack snapped.
“Yeah, Jack, I had to look, after all …”
“Yeah, you had to look.” Of course his brother would have taken the opportunity to explore all the back corridors of the Martian mind while Jack hung at the vent and contemplated the complexities of Martian language and Amplified Thought. In fact, it was probably because Joe was so intent on Martian sexual practice that he’d knocked the stupid grating onto the Council floor in the first place. Damn it all! It was just like Joe.
His younger brother dated scores of girls in all the colonies, on the barren asteroids and the surviving moons of the major planets. Joe knew all about girls, and women, and the difference between them. And he’d sit in the copilot seat on those Typhoon missions and crack insipid off-color jokes for hours. The old adage, “Those who talk about it, don’t do it,” apparently didn’t apply to Joe. He talked and did, and talked and did. Occasionally he’d get semi-seriously caught up in an affair at some outpost–Lucia from Ganymede was the last big one Jack recalled–and be moody and silent for a few weeks, but soon he’d shrug it off, contact one of his numerous girlfriends, and the putrid sex jokes would crank up again.
Was Joe one hundred percent devoted to duty? It wasn’t just the sex talk that bothered him–every once in a while Joe would burst out with some enormous emotion that embarrassed every crewman on board, like declaring the Earth was a death trip and he was glad to have left it behind. Sure, sometimes it turned out that Joe had broken a lot of buried tension with that sort of wild remark–McNarri once said Joe was the unofficial spokesman for the group’s emotions. But what the hell did that mean? In any case, how could Joe indulge in all these emotions and sexual escapades and still focus on the job of copiloting the most deadly spaceship ever made?
Sure, men had feelings. But wallowing in them like that? All that talk about women’s breasts and asses and clitorises, those crude jibes about every female body he saw?
Jack didn’t talk. And he didn’t do. He never had. Well, at least he wasn’t a virgin anymore–that curse had followed him up through last year, at age twenty-nine. The cleaning lady at USSF HQ on Titan … blowsy, big-boobed, and drunk, she’d followed him to his room, asking what he might need …