Description
Two years after the war against the Dar'y, Brit and Len live a life between adaptation and self-realization. The colony was able to stabilize once more. But drug trafficking, energy theft, and radical clerics of the Aristo cult of the Dar'y cause ever new problems in their capital and provinces, which Brit Darburg, who is now working for the Propaganda Unit of the Ministry of Interior, and the young militia officer Len Kakaia are trying to get under control.
Their friend Dars Poole has been missing since the war, as well as the Dary'an Warlord Sard Mamarter. New political anger threatens as the Dar'y claim that the colony deprives them of contractually guaranteed energy supplies. At the same time, resistance is forming in the colony: Former war hero and dissident Thom Domjuk is suspected of supporting resistance groups who are attacking government institutions. Governor Adam remains inactive, but he entrusts important responsibilities to Vas Kandiris, the commander of his elite troops.
"Blood and Steel" unites, separates and guides the figures now established in their reality of life with their abysses and intentions back together to the different places of an intercultural crime thriller.
Almost forty years after the last contact with the Mother Planet Earth, the human colony on Tranthal, under the leadership of Governor Seth Adam, is holding fast to the colonial treaties that were signed two hundred years ago. These treaties insure the residents protection and technology transfer, in return for which raw materials, energy and rare chemical compounds for the earth are mined, produced and stored. Despite the broken contact and no support, Governor Adam refuses to suspend the contracts. While the standard of living declines and the colony is more despised than respected by the other peoples of the planet even after two hundred years of existence, societal and economic development is stagnant. The decades-long promised democracy would have taken place if the peoples of Dar'y, Isaris or Sin-Dar'y were kept at a distance, but instead it degraded into a gentle form of totalitarianism.
In order to fulfill the old colonial obligations, raw materials are stored near the spaceport, which are missing everywhere in the colony itself. While even their own space program must be stopped due to lack of energy and raw materials, the huge warehouses are expanded and equipped with goods that have not been collected by earth for a long time.
In a climate of stagnation, domestic pressure and a new war with the neighboring Dar'y, three young recruits are finishing their training at the prestigious military academy of the colonial capital Hallwa: Brit Darburg, daughter of the influential colonial officer Frid Darburg and a student at the Propaganda Department , Dars Poole, a dissident and extremely talented young astrophysicist, and Len Kakaia, scion of a dynasty of farmers who studies criminology and longs for the city's street canyons. Both of them love Brit, in their own unique ways. However, Brit, who has a direct lineage back to the Earth on her mother's side, loves the state and the colony, and she firmly believes in Governor Adam.
Together, they start their journey into the world after graduation. A world that is not only determined by politics and religion, but also marked by a powerful military-political complex and sacrosanct hierarchies, intercultural conflicts and economic disputes, at the end of which not only life, as they know, but also their very personal Ideals, hopes and fears are put to the test. A world where politicians, religious leaders and serious criminals are pulling the strings and many will lose far more than their faith in the colony.
